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The great air race

23 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Blogging, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

It’s the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it’s the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you’ve been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you’ll know it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that’s pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 — an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Zeroth World Wars

31 August 2009 in 1900s, Before 1900, Blogging, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It’s often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) — the Seven Years’ War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I’m not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn’t the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn’t enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale — of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg’s formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that’s the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It’s also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war’s origins, for Russia’s defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

Your target for tonight …

30 August 2009 in Blogging by Brett Holman | 3 comments

… is a new blog written by Jakob, a frequent commenter around these parts. He’s just finishing up a Master’s on engine development at the interwar RAE, and then will roll into a PhD on Metrovicks and the gas turbine. This is pleasing for a number of reasons, not least because I’ve finally got enough blogs to make up an aviation section my sidebar. So go over and give Thrust Vector a recce!

And, speaking of ending Master’s degrees and beginning PhDs, I would be remiss in not mentioning Ross Mahoney, who has handed in his MPhil on air support for the Dieppe raid and will be moving on to doing a PhD on the career of Leigh-Mallory. Well done, Ross!

I, twit

14 August 2009 in Blogging by Brett Holman | No comments

Twitter is the most jumped-upon bandwagon on the net right now. And so I’ve jumped on too. You can follow me there or by way of the sidebar.

Post-blogging the British demobilisation experience

18 June 2009 in Blogging by Brett Holman | No comments

Alan Allport has a new website, which has information about his forthcoming book, Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two. (Very spiffy cover too, I must say.) As a companion to the book, he will also be post-blogging the British demobilisation experience from June 1945 to June 1946. That’s right — a whole year’s worth of post-blogging! I am awestruck (though not envious! :) The first entry is up, for 18 June 1945, the first day of demobilisation — even though British forces are still fighting in the Far East. I will be following the return of millions of ex-servicemen and -women to Civvy Street with interest!

Post-blogging the 1909 scareships: thoughts and conclusions

11 June 2009 in 1900s, Blogging, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Post-blogging the 1909 scareships, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the scareship wave of May-June 1909. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

That’s it for the phantom airship scare of 1909. It’s been interesting for me, as I haven’t looked closely at this material since I did my 4th year thesis some time ago (the 1913 scare made it into the PhD, but not 1909). It didn’t last very long, only a couple of weeks. At first, the stories were presented as a curiosity, localised to East Anglia. It seems to have been the Conservative press which took most interest at this stage, though it seems to have been divided as to whether a British aeronaut was responsible or an airship flying off a German warship. It was only when two separate sightings of the airship took place in South Wales — by dock workers at Cardiff and the Punch and Judy showman on Caerphilly Mountain — that Liberal papers such as the Manchester Guardian started reporting it.1 It seemed that something was going on.

But almost as soon as the phantom airships became ’serious’ news, scepticism set in. Percival Spencer announced that his family’s firm had recently sold several small airships for the purpose of advertising. Even though he gave no actual evidence of any connection between these and the scareships, it seems to have been good enough for all the newspapers examined here (bar the Norfolk News): there are far fewer stories about the ‘fly-by-nights’ thereafter, and those that do appear are sceptical or humorous. And, to be fair, real evidence of a hoax did turn up, in the form of a crashed airship and a claim that Jarrott and Letts, purveyors of fine motorcars from the Continent, had been towing it around the Eastern Counties at night as some sort of advertising stunt (which I still don’t understand, but never mind).

That doesn’t explain the Cardiff sightings, of course, nor the Irish ones nor the North Sea ones nor the (possible) Belgian ones. I don’t believe that there were actual airships involved in these cases, except perhaps the last two. No archival evidence has ever emerged of anyone flying airships over Britain at this time, whether homegrown or foreign, other than those which were well-known at the time — Willows, Spencer, the Army. Maybe meteors, maybe fire balloons, maybe luminous owls. It doesn’t much matter to me. What’s more important is why various explanations were offered and why they were accepted (or rejected).
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  1. Though perhaps, seeing as the staid old Times barely took any notice of the whole affair, the real divide was between the quality press and the tabloids: my best sources are definitely of the latter type (Globe, Standard) and it would appear they took much of their reportage from other tabloids (Daily Mail, Daily Express, which I unfortunately haven’t looked at for this period).

History Carnival 77

1 June 2009 in Blogging by Brett Holman | 11 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

It’s just short of three years since I last hosted a History Carnival, so it’s about time I did another. And here it is! Herein you will find such diverse topics as:
The Maltese dragon of 1608.
Anti-vaccinators of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The lives of disabled British children around the turn of the 20th century.
An innovation in plumbing from 1963 which never caught on.

Firstly, though, can you help these history bloggers?
Can you add any 19th century female utilitarians to this list?
Do you know any examples of medieval stained glass windows in film?
What Great War gesture is that?
When did violence in war become ‘kinetic’?

Technology. We all use it, but maybe we could be using it more?
Why you should use Flickr.
Why you should not be scared of using Wikipedia.
Mashing up Google Maps and the British Library’s sound recordings.
A heartwarming story of digital collaboration between archives in five countries.
An equally heartwarming story of digital aggregation within one country.
Medievalists and the early internet: a reminiscence.

Ideas. We all have them … no, I’m not going to keep doing this!
How to get from Vietnam to Dungeons & Dragons.
When dinosaurs roamed the Earth alongside humans.
A freethinking biology textbook from the 1970s.
Interwar eastern Europe and speed.
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Your nominations will bring us a History Carnival

16 May 2009 in Blogging, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Your Courage Your Cheerfulness Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory

Airminded is hosting the next edition of the History Carnival on 1 June. Please send me suggestions for the best history blogging since 1 May, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by del.ici.ous (tagged historycarnival). Thanks!

Image source: Weapons on the Wall.

Post-blogging the 1909 scareships

13 May 2009 in 1900s, Blogging, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Post-blogging the 1909 scareships by Brett Holman | 10 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the scareship wave of May-June 1909. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to try some more post-blogging. It’s 100 years since the phantom airship wave of 1909, when mysterious aerial visitors appeared in the night skies over Britain. Or at least, stories about mysterious aerial visitors filled the newspapers of Britain. It’s hard to tell from this distance: the only evidence we have about the scareships are the press reports, which could be a problem if you are interested in a possible underlying reality. But then again, since the number of (alleged) phantom airship witnesses is relatively small, the press was the only way most people would have learned that their sky was being invaded by Zeppelins every night. So for them as for us, the stories are the event itself. (The phantom airship scare did not take place, perhaps?)

My sources are a variety of print periodicals: The Times, the Liberal Manchester Guardian (much more Radical than it was later), the Globe and Traveller and the Standard (both from London and both Conservative, or Unionist if you prefer), Saturday Review (Conservative, but not as reactionary as under Lady Houston), Fortnightly Review, Punch, the local weeklies Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal, and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette (which I’ll refer to as the Norfolk News!) and Southampton Times and Hampshire Express, and the specialist weekly Flight. At this time there was no radio and film was a novelty.

Compared with the Sudeten crisis twenty-nine years later, the 1909 airship scare was not as intense nor was it as protracted. It was not a major defence or political crisis. But it was about the first time that the possibility of an aerial threat to Britain was given an extended run in the press, even if that threat was not yet the knock-out blow …

Further reading: Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); David Clarke, ‘Scareships over Britain: the airship wave of 1909′, Fortean Studies 6 (1999), 39-63; Nigel Watson, ‘Airships and invaders. Background to a social panic’, Magonia 3 (Spring 1980).

Bigger, not better

30 March 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, Aircraft, Blogging, Pictures by Brett Holman | 12 comments

Tarrant Tabor

The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:
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