[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Just a brief note on a conference I attended earlier this week at Monash University, 'The Pacific War 1941-45: Heritage, Legacies & Culture'. I wasn't presenting, just listening; in fact I only decided to go at the very last minute, mainly on the basis that it seemed silly not to given that it was held in my own town!

And I'm glad I did go. Although the area is just outside my own (same war, different theatre) there were plenty of interesting comparisons and contrasts to be made. For example, there was a paper by Jan McLeod (Newcastle) analysing one air raid, the Japanese bombing of an Australian army hospital at Soputa in Papua in 1942. The following year the incident was studied by a retired judge to see if it should be referred to the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. Despite understandably heated emotions, it was decided not to since the hospital was situated right next to a valid target, 7th Division HQ, and a road carrying supplies to forward areas went straight past it. Now I want to know if anyone in Britain debated referring the Blitz or portions thereof to the Commission. (Goering was tried at Nuremberg, of course, but the tribunal's judgement makes no reference to aerial bombardment at all, save his threat to Hacha in May 1939 to bomb Prague if Czechoslovakia resisted German occupation.) Richard Waterhouse (Sydney) gave an overview of his research into the mood in Australia in the months following the start of the Japanese offensive. Initially it was fairly complacent thanks to the confidence in Fortress Singapore, but as the Japanese advance began to seem irresistible and the prospect of bombing and invasion opened up, signs panic began to appear. In fact, what he described reminded me very much of the Sudeten crisis in Britain a few years before: people fleeing the cities, trenches being dug in public spaces. Maybe somebody needs to look at such panics from a transnational perspective...

As always, one of the best things about going to conferences is being able to put faces to names, such as Ken Inglis and Joan Beaumont (ANU): big names in Australian military history. (I found Joan's talk, on Thai memorialisation of the Thai-Burma railway, one of the most interesting of the conference.) I'd already met Jay Winter (Yale) -- not that he'd remember me! -- at Exeter; he was very kind about my book news. And of course it's good to meet other 'early career researchers', as the official jargon goes here in Australia (shout out to Elizabeth Roberts, Lachlan Grant, and Adrian Threlfall goes here). It's starting to feel a bit odd though, turning up to conferences and having to explain to everyone I talk to that I'm an independent historian (and looking for work... slightly hysterical laugh goes here); I always seem to be the only one doing that, except for people at the other end of their careers, who have retired but are still researching and writing. It's just me, nobody made me feel in the slightest unwelcome, but I worry about it.

To get back to the history: the conference wasn't only about memory, but that seemed to me to be the largest thread running through it. My sense is that Australian historians are as interested in the memory of war as their British counterparts, but have perhaps been more interested in official forms of memory such as war memorials. (Aside from Jay's keynote, for example, there wasn't anything on films; though I was pleased to hear Paula Hamilton (UTS) in her own keynote mention the importance now of computer games in forming ideas about war.) And of course we remember different things here: POW means Changi not Colditz; Janet Watson's (Connecticut) keynote showed that V-J day commemorations in Britain in 1985 and 1995 were very much tacked on to V-E day ones, and in fact barely discussed at all due to the difficult issues involved; in Australia we tend to ignore our role in the war against Germany and Italy and focus on the one against Japan, meaning that Kokoda comes to rival Gallipoli and subjects like Australian participation in area bombing are completely ignored (as Bruce Scates (Monash) noted in passing -- it's not just me!) The upcoming series of 70th anniversaries will be very interesting to watch.

This is the programme for an air display called 'London Defended' which was part of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (in Wembley Stadium, in fact, before it became Wembley Stadium). I must admit to having missed this one (and its predecessor in 1924), but it sounds like it was comparable to the longer-lived Hendon pageant. Here's the description from Wikipedia, which is based partly on the above programme (original research much?):

From May 9 to June 1, 1925 No. 32 Squadron RAF flew an air display six nights a week entitled "London Defended" Similar to the display they had done the previous year when the aircraft were painted black it consisted of a night time air display over the Wembley Exhibition flying RAF Sopwith Snipes which were painted red for the display and fitted with white lights on the wings tail and fueselage. The display involved firing blank ammunition into the stadium crowds and dropping pyrotechnics from the aeroplanes to simulate shrapnel from guns on the ground, Explosions on the ground also produced the effect of bombs being dropped into the stadium by the Aeroplanes. One of the Pilots in the display was Flying officer C. W. A. Scott who later became famous for breaking three England Australia solo flight records and winning the MacRobertson Air Race with co-pilot Tom Campbell Black in 1934.

Firing blanks into the crowds -- those were the days!

And the crowds apparently did appreciate the spectacle: the stadium was at capacity on more than one occasion. The Observer's special representative reported on -- gushed about, in fact -- the opening performance (10 May 1925, 13):

[...] "London Defended," which is to be acted from 8.15 to 10 p.m. every week-day evening till May 30, is whole-hearted a spectacle as could well be imagined. We have seen nothing like it before in the open air and on such a scale it could only shown in the open air. It has all the ingredients of exciting drama, with some stately pageantry -- as the musical ride of the Metropolitan Police -- super-added. Some few of its features were seen last year, notably the very lovely eddying and curvetting of aeroplanes studded from wing-tip to wing-tip with coloured lights, "shifted anew" with every move of the pilot. But the bulk of the drama is new and originally and unblushingly full of thrills.

London is attacked by hostile planes, incendiary bombs are dropped, and conveniently set fire to a tall building up which the fire escapes elongate themselves with breathless speed. Anti-aircraft guns punctuate with a glorious din the general cries and explosions, and the rattle of the fire-engines tearing around the track.

This was followed by a re-enactment of the Great Fire of London, whether to emphasise the danger of incendiaries or just to pile on more spectacle I'm not sure. (Though to read that 'The drama ends with the Phœnix-like appearance of Wren's St. Paul's in the place of the fire [...]' is actually a little chilling.) As there was also a mounted display by the Metropolitan Police, I suppose the 'London defended' theme can't be interpreted solely in military terms.

The Manchester Guardian's reporter also enjoyed the opening night's 'air raid spectacle' (11 May 1925, 9), though perhaps not as unrestrainedly as the Observer's had:

The vigour and vividness of the presentation of the spectacle of "London Defended," at the Stadium at night, well merited the applause of the great gathering in the auditorium.

All the thrills of a night air attack were accorded in one of the main spectacles. Warning of an invasion was sounded, and, as searchlights swept the sky, a squadron of aeroplanes, with fairy lights under their wings, soared overhead. Through the fire of anti-aircraft guns the raiders reached their objective, and a building at the west end of the Stadium was set alight by incendiary bombs, and a large tower at the east end also burst into flames. The conquest of the flames by the fire brigade, after a display of rescues by fire escapes, was an equally exciting spectacle.

The emphasis in both press accounts is very much on the entertainment, the spectacle of the show. But there must have been a propaganda element to it as well: employing a squadron in this way six nights out seven for the better part of a month would have been no small matter. And certainly that's what the Hendon pageant was about, impressing the public (and the politicians and the press) with the power and hence the value of the RAF. But the defensive focus at Wembley is interesting. At Hendon, the climactic setpieces (which I've long been meaning to write a post about...) were offensive in nature, showing British bombers blowing up a corner of some foreign field. Wembley, on the other hand, was about Britain being attacked and, apparently -- despite the squadron in question being equipped with fighters -- not being defended in the air, only from the ground. This is more reminiscent of the much more serious (but also well-publicised) annual air defence exercises held in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in which the bomber usually got through. And the Home Office's Committee of Imperial Defence's ARP sub-committee first met in 1924, shortly before the first British Empire Exhibition, so I wonder if it's only a coincidence to see city bombing and civil defence put on such prominent display at this point in time. I'd be very interested to know what the official rationale for 'London Defended' was.

Image source: Wikipedia, though I originally noticed it on the background of the website for the upcoming Shock and Awe conference!

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

So the XXII Biennial Australasian Association for European History Conference is over, and I must say it's the best conference I've been to, for a number of reasons. It was well-organised, despite some added difficulties such as being jointly hosted by and held at two universities, the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University. That's easy to gloss over but some conferences don't manage to rise to the occasion. The locations were pretty, both the campuses and the city (though it was rainy on the first day, it would probably be unfair to blame the organisers for that). And the food provided at the session breaks was scrumptious.

Oh yes, the history! Two parallel sessions running over four days, so there was a lot of history to be had. The talks were excellent, and the conference theme -- 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires' -- came through strongly. Because I rather shamefully didn't livetweet the conference, I'll note here some of the papers which interested me for one reason or another. (Any errors are my own.)

Giuseppe Finaldi's (UWA) paper was entitled 'The Italian conquest of Libya one hundred years on', and by way of introduction he discussed Italy's pioneering use of bombing in 1911! That was a nice way for an aviation to slip into the first session of a conference. But there were other aviation links too. Lee Kersten (Adelaide) delved into the University of Adelaide's archives and one of the gems she came up with was a 1916 letter from Sir Douglas Mawson, the Antarctic explorer, to Adelaide's Registrar. It included Mawson's thoughts after experiencing a Zeppelin raid:

I was in London for the two big air raids when Zepellins [sic] were destroyed. There was really very little damage at all and the German stories were ludicrously untrue. It is certain that that class of craft will never compete with the aeroplane.

Can't argue with him there, really. James Curry (UWA) examined the Wehrmacht's legacy in the US Army (at least up until the 1990s), in the form of air-land battle doctrine (a blitzkrieg by any other name...). Anne Matters (Flinders) didn't mention airpower, but I found her discussion of Britain's Mesopotamia policy in 1915-21 illuminating: as War Minister, Churchill wanted to withdraw the Army from outlying regions of Iraq (but was vetoed by the Foreign Office for reasons of prestige) well before Trenchard came along with his air control idea. Reto Hofmann's (Columbia) talk on Japanese views of the Abyssinian War (at first sympathising with Abyssinia due to a shared status as non-European empires, then swinging towards Italy for reasons of realpolitik) was most interesting to me for the concern shown by the Japanese public over the Italian use of gas against Abyssinians. And finally, I'm not even sure if Andrew Webster (Murdoch) spoke about aviation in his talk entitled 'Towards a new history of the League of Nations', as I sadly decided to go to the other session; but as he's written on France and the international air force idea, he deserves a shout-out here!

To other topics. Omer Bartov's (Brown) paper used the experiences of a small town in Galicia during the First World War as a way to examine the role of violence in ethnically-mixed communities; hopefully the prelude to a book. Iva Glisic (UWA) was fascinating on Futurists in the Russian Civil War: unlike in their Italian homeland where they were associated with Fascism, in Russia Futurists were committed to the Bolsheviks. Robert Gerwarth (University College, Dublin) gave an overview of a big project project he's running examining paramilitary violence in Europe after the First World War (it's not just the Freikorps!). Elizabeth Roberts (Western Sydney) examined Second World War debates within the British psychiatric and medical professions about the effects of war on military personnel, still a surprisingly under-researched topic compared with the First World War. And John Dickie (University College, London) offered an entertaining examination of 'the origins of the ‘ndrangheta, the mafia of Calabria', in his view influenced by revolutionary freemasons in Italian prisons.

Some of the papers addressed big questions. William Mulligan (University College, Dublin) asked if the traditional view of a militarised Europe permanently on the brink of war needs revising. Jan Rueger (Birkbeck) asked if the revision of the traditional view of an Anglo-German antagonism needs revising. And Maartje Abbenhuis (Auckland) proposed that 19th century neutrality needs to be recognised as a great-power tactic and a normal one, rather than the outlier it seems to be from the perspective of the 20th century.

My own paper (sandwiched between James Curry's, noted above, and Patrick Major (Reading), who looked at the representation of German, particularly soldiers, in the Second World War) passed off okay, I think. I didn't have a chance at a run-through beforehand, which I needed. But on the other hand I largely spoke off the cuff, which I'm not much chop at, and yet it seems that the audience understood me -- or at least so I gather from the questions after the talk and discussions later in the conference. Now to write it up for publication.

And so, to the future. There was some disquiet about the prospects for European history in Australia (and those of us hailing from Melbourne did not help). Our host, the renowned Italian historian Richard Bosworth, marked his retirement from UWA with this conference (attendees Dick Geary from Nottingham and John MacKenzie from Lancaster, both AAEH stalwarts, also retired recently). But on the strength of the papers presented here -- with more than a little help from our overseas friends! -- I think we'll do okay. The breadth of intellectual endeavour on display was inspiring, and reminded me of all the good things academia still has to offer. Roll on AAEH XXIII, Wellington 2013!

Since my AAEH talk is in four days, I'd better start actually putting the pieces I've scattered over this blog together into something (ideally) coherent which can be presented in 20 minutes (with 10 for questions). So here's a stab at a plan:

1. First thing is to explain what I'm talking about: the public debate about reprisal bombing of German cities during (and for) the Blitz, especially September and October 1940. A definition of reprisals would be useful here; here's a contemporary one from A. L. Goodhart, What Acts of War are Justifiable? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 25:
   

   The essence of reprisals is that if one belligerent deliberately violates the accepted rules of warfare then the other belligerent, for the sake of protecting himself, may resort by way of retaliation to measures which, in ordinary circumstances, would be illegal.

   That's a legal definition; it excludes the desire for mere revenge as illegitimate, but of course this was an important motivation for many.

2. Next comes the problem: I will discuss the existing historiography on the reprisals debate, showing that the consensus is that the British people did not demand reprisals, and those who did weren't the ones who were bombed. (Only Mark Connelly differs on this point to any substantial degree.) I think this is wrong; in fact the desire for reprisals predominated at least among those who cared enough to voice their opinion, and possibly among the population as a whole, if only slightly.
3. Now on to the first of the important bits: the shape of the reprisals debate. I'll discuss the two major axes of opinion: morality and effectiveness, and give some examples. I'll also point to an important subset of the reprisals demand, reprisals after notice. And I will show that the near-universal assumption was that Bomber Command was capable of carrying out precise and devastating air raids.
4. The second of the important bits: assessing how popular the demand for reprisals actually was. Here I will discuss the BIPO opinion poll data, letters to the editor, and hearsay, setting these in the context of the editorial positions of the newspapers concerned. These lines of evidence all point towards public opinion being in favour of reprisals.
5. Now to explain it all, largely in terms of pre-war ideas (which wartime reporting had done little to change by this point), with reference to the previous war, the knock-out blow theory, the bomber will always get through and air control. Essentially, the pre-war belief in the power of the bomber was the reason why there was a debate about reprisals at all; if it had been realised just how weak Bomber Command really was the question would not have arisen.
6. Finally, to sum up: overall the British people, I believe, did want reprisal bombing during the Blitz. Any questions?

I'm giving a talk at the XXII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History, being held in Perth this July. It's a big conference with some big names (e.g. Omer Bartov, Richard Bosworth, John MacKenzie), and there's an appropriately big theme: 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires'. My talk will be about the reprisals debate in Britain during the Blitz. Here's the original title and abstract:

'Bomb back and bomb hard': A myth of the Blitz

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. This 'Blitz spirit' is still called to mind during times of national crisis, for example in response to the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London.

But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 and 1941 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or even harder. As the Blitz mounted in intensity, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns featured calls for heavier reprisals against German cities. Propaganda, official and unofficial, responded by skirting a fine distinction between reporting the supposedly heavy bombardment of strictly military targets in urban areas and gloating over the imagined suffering of German civilians. That the RAF's bombing efforts over Germany at this time were in fact wildly inaccurate and largely ineffective is beside the point: nobody in Britain was aware of this yet.

In this paper I will try to restore a sense of these forgotten aspects of the 'Blitz spirit', and attempt to locate their origins in pre-war attitudes to police bombing in British colonies and mandates, and in reactions the predicted knock-out blow from the air which dominated popular perceptions of the next war in the 1920s and 1930s.

A more recent and abbreviated version:

'Bomb back and bomb hard': the reprisals debate during the Blitz

It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War. There was in fact a serious contemporary debate about whether enemy civilians could or should be targets of bombing, which I will show derived from the prewar and wartime public understanding of the potential and proper use of airpower.

As these perhaps show, my thinking on the reprisals question is changing a bit, which is not surprising since I'm still researching it. What I plan to do over the next few weeks is to do some of my thinking out loud by way of blogging -- appropriately, since I became interested in this topic while post-blogging the Blitz. So watch this space!

So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I'm not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day. If I get the time.

One came out of the unofficial API Tim Sherratt reverse-engineered for Trove Newspapers. (Why the National Library of Australia won't release an official API is a bit mysterious.) He uses that to scrape Trove to do searches and display results which aren't possible with the interface offered by the NLA, such as plotting the frequency of Australian vs British/Briton. Are there any publicly accessible datasets which I use which could benefit from the same treatment? Yes, there are. The first one I thought of was the Flight archive, which is a great resource burdened with a limited interface. (But it's fantastic that it exists at all: Flightglobal is a commercial operation and they didn't need to open up their back issues like this at all, if they didn't want to.) I think this is easily doable. A second one is much more ambitious: The National Archives catalogue. It's frustrating that you can't do keyword search across their digitised collections; all you can do is search the descriptions in the catalogue, and these are by their nature limited. A scraper would help here. But the problem there is that you can't download documents directly, even when they are free; you have to add to a 'shopping cart', pay £0.00 for it and wait for an email to arrive. Possibly this could be automated; possibly not.

The other idea I had was to use SahulTime (or its eventual successor, possibly called TemporalEarth) to display the British scareship waves. SahulTime is something like Google Earth, but it allows you to map events/documents/people/objects in time as well as space. Matthew Coller, the developer, originally devised it to represent archaeological data on migration into Australia across the ice-age land bridge, but it is just as useful for historical data. So I could use this to show when and where the scareships were seen, showing how the waves started and evolved, with links to the primary sources. SahulTime is also good at displaying uncertainty in time, which is helpful where I have only vague information about when a sighting happened. The same could be done for uncertainty in space, though that's a bit trickier conceptually.

One day... if I get the time...

Later this week I'm going to THATCamp Melbourne. What's THATCamp, you ask? THATCamp stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It's an unconference devoted to exploring the ways in which the humanities and digital technology can work together. It is informal and collegial: attendees vote on the programme on the first morning. It's practical and hands-on: digital projects are often started during the camp, or tools written, or software installed. The first THATCamp was held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia in 2008; last year there were 17 held around the world, including one in Canberra. Melbourne's is being held at the University of Melbourne, where I work and near where I live, so it would be hard to justify not going!

But the truth is that I did have qualms, because I don't consider myself a digital historian. Sure, there's the blog. But that's about communication, not research; and research comes first. And apart from using digitised sources where possible, my research methods are quite traditional. I find sources, I read them, I compare them, I draw conclusions, and so on. I imagine Gibbon did much the same.

In some ways, this is surprising. In my day job I work in systems administration and IT support, so it's not like I don't know my way around computers. And before history, I studied astrophysics, which has long used digital technology as an integral part of its methods. Indeed, about the first thing you do when you start out learning how to do astrophysical research is to become familiar with the analysis software you'll be using. And my masters project was entirely computational: I wrote, tested and debugged code. (Written in Fortran 77, no less!) So I'm sure that, when I came to do my PhD, I could have handled a project which was much more digital and less traditional in its approach if I'd wanted to.

But that's the thing: I didn't want to. Why leave a career in IT for one in history (and I still hope that will happen) and do the same kind of thing, just for a different end? Fiddle around with Apache installs, write justifications for storage arrays, think about database structures. That's what I want to get away from. What I want to do is read old books, uncover forgotten ideas, meet interesting (albeit usually dead) people. (And tell the world about it, which is where blogging comes in.) I would guess that most historians have similar motivations. And that's the problem for digital history. The types of people who are attracted to doing history are not likely to be attracted to doing digital history. (I have similar reservations about Anthony Grafton's recent call for more collaboration between historians, in emulation of the sciences. We tend to play better alone.)

This is not because digital history has no value: it clearly has vast potential. But at the moment it still belongs to the hackers, those who enjoy creating visualisation tools and XML datasets. It won't realise its potential until every historian is a digital historian, and that won't happen until doing digital history is as natural and painless as... well, as natural and painless as doing traditional history is, anyway. The technology needs to adapt itself to the users, in other words, not the other way around. Well, in reality both will happen; but we aren't there yet.

That said, I'm still excited to be going to THATCamp, and to seeing all the cool ideas and smart people. And I do hope to get more involved in digital history myself, rather than maintaining my current watching brief. But you can understand why I haven't come up with a cool session idea of my own. Or perhaps you can't? Am I being too cautious, too reactionary, too -- dare I say it -- Luddite?

I'm giving a talk at the 2010 antiTHESIS interdisciplinary symposium, to be held on 9 July at the University of Melbourne's Graduate Centre. The theme of the symposium is 'futures', which immediately grabbed me -- as did last year's, 'fear', but I didn't get my act together in time for that -- so I thought I'd use the opportunity to play with some ideas I touched on in the conclusion to my thesis.

Here's my title and abstract:

Avoiding apocalypse: lessons from Britain before the Blitz

This is an age of anxiety. Our civilisation -- from a global scale down to the local level -- is faced by a bewildering range of possible catastrophes: climate change, nuclear terrorism, economic collapse, pandemics, and even asteroid impacts. How should we respond to these threats to our life as we know it? Are our political and cultural systems even capable of reacting effectively to such huge challenges? History provides some answers: this is by no means the first age of anxiety. One particularly interesting example comes from Britain in the 1930s and the almost universal dread of the next war: of annihilation from the air of cities and civilians, by gas and blast and flame. Many proposals were put forward for the prevention of this apocalypse, ranging from the construction of a British bomber fleet second to none, to a nation-wide system of deep air-raid shelters, to an international air force to maintain peace and punish aggression. The choices, in other words, were to resist, adapt or negotiate. In this paper, I will explore which approaches were attempted -- and which were not -- and why, and attempt to draw conclusions for us today, particularly with respect to the global response to climate change.

This also sheds some light on my previous post: perhaps it's not that I don't care about strategy per se, just military strategy?

Later the same day that I arrived at Heathrow and visited Salisbury, I was down in the southwest of England -- Exeter, to be precise. I was there for a conference but arrived a day early so I could have a poke around. There are indeed some things very worth seeing in Exeter, although the city centre was very heavily blitzed on 4 May 1942, destroying many fine historic buildings. Above is a stained glass window in Exeter Cathedral commemorating that night.

The cathedral itself was hit by a bomb which destroyed St James Chapel, two buttresses and several windows, and left scars which can still be seen today. (If memory serves, I think the damage seen on these interior columns was caused by secondary splinters from the chapel.)

Otherwise, the cathedral escaped the war relatively intact, which is just as well because it's a treasure. The tower above, was built in the Norman style and in the Norman period: it (and its near-twin on the other side) dates to the 12th century.

The rest of the cathedral was rebuilt in the following century in the Gothic style, which allowed for an airy vaulted ceiling and moreover was bang up-to-date.

A figure (St George?) over a doorway on the north side. It looks very well preserved so I suspect it's not actually very old or at least has been restored (unlike the statues guarding the Great West Door, which were carved over six hundred years ago but which, for some reason, I neglected to photograph).

The cathedral close -- well, the lawn bit of it anyway -- is evidently a popular place to sit and soak up the sunshine. This area also largely escaped the Blitz, and has some very pleasant little cafes and pubs.

As impressive as it is on the outside, only from the inside can you fully appreciate the beauty of Exeter Cathedral. Because, unlike most cathedrals (certainly most I've been to), there is no central tower, the rebuilding gave Exter the longest vaulted ceiling in England.

Another view of the ceiling, looking west.

A close-up of the most famous boss, which depicts the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. Doesn't look very big from way down here, but it weighs two tonnes. Its height enabled it to survive Henry VIII. It was repainted in 1975, but much of the original paint did survive at that time to guide conservators, so it would have looked something like this in the 13th century.

The view towards the Great East Window, installed in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Being highly vulnerable to blast from high explosive, it was removed for safekeeping during the war and thus is the only medieval window left.

The choir (or quire), which happens to be where the choir sits. The misericords (benches to lean against during long services, like you often see in public transport these days) in the stalls are the oldest complete set in England and date from as far back as 1220. Note also the organ rising above.

A priest raising his arms to heaven, from the end of one of the choir stalls.

A still-working astronomical clock from made in the late 15th century (except for the 18th century minute hand at the top). It shows the position of the Sun and the Moon and the phase of the latter. PEREUNT ET IMPUTANTUR is from Martial and means 'they [the hours] perish and are reckoned to our account', so my wiki Latin tells me. To the right is a late medieval painting depicting the resurrection of Christ.

This is part of a wonderful sculpture made in the Netherlands around 1500 (but arriving in Exeter much more recently), depicting the crucifixion (you can just make out the three crosses at the top of the photo). The two grieving Marys are there, the Blessed Virgin Mary being physically supported by her friends and Mary Magdalene (long golden hair, brazenly uncovered, ergo a prostitute) stretching out her arms as if to touch Jesus. A very humane scene.

British Army battle honours. The tradition is that these remain on display until they disintegrate. These are from the 20th Regiment of Foot (the East Devonshire Regiment, later the Lancashire Fusiliers), I think from the battle of Inkerman in 1854?

Of course, one thing any decent cathedral has is tombs and memorials, and Exeter is no exception. Here are Margaret de Bohun (died 1391) and her husband Hugh de Courtenay (died 1377), Earl of Devon. She was a granddaughter of Edward I and he was a veteran of Poitiers.

Remember, thou art mortal. Actually, I think that's the whole point of this: it doesn't seem to be a tomb at all.

Sacred to the Memory
of RACHEL CHARLOTTE O'BRIEN,
Wife of Capt.ⁿ E. J. O'BRIEN
of his Majesty's 24.^th Reg.^mt
and Daught of JOS. FROBISHER Esq.
of Montreal, Canada.
Her Death was occasioned
by her Clothes catching Fire;
seeing the Flames
communicating to her Infant,
All Regard to her own Safety,
was lost in the
more powerful Consideration
of saving her Child,
and rushing
out of the Room, she
preserved its Life, at the
Sacrifice of her own.
She expired on the 13.^th of Dec.
A.D.1800,
in the 19.^th Year of her Age.

If sense, good humour, and a taste refin'd,
With all that ever grac'd a female mind,
If the fond mother, and the faithful wife,
The purest happiest characters in life,
If these when summon'd to an early tomb,
Cloath'd in the pride of youth, and beauty's bloom,
May claim one tender sympathizing sigh,
Or draw a tear from melting pity's eye,
Here pause, and be the grateful tribute paid
In sad remembrance to O'BRIEN's shade!

J. KENDALL
Longbrook Street

A memorial to General John Simcoe, who died in 1806: a veteran of the American Revolutionary War (on the losing side, of course) who was later lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada (he founded Toronto).

The tomb of Lady Dorothy Dodderidge (died 1614), wife of Sir John Dodderidge and daughter of Sir Amias Bampfylde. No, really!

Look at the loving attention to detail in this skull, from another Tudor tomb. That's craftsmanship, that is. You wouldn't get that on a tomb these days.

The other big attraction in Exeter is the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, which sounds like the perfect rambly old museum. But sadly it's closed until 2010 or 2011 for a refurbishment. But there are other things to see. This is St Petrock's Church, which dates to no later than the 1190s. Certainly the lower parts are 12th century, but the tower is 15th century. The windows are blocked up because until 1905 it was stuck behind a row of houses.

The remains of the medieval bridge over the Exe, built around 1200. One of the oldest bridges in Britain, it had houses on it, and a church, St Edmunds. The tower at the far end belongs to St Edmunds: it's not a medieval ruin but was in the process of being demolished when the bridge was discovered!

A more modern bridge over the Exe, from the vantage point of the 16th century quay.

The Custom House, built in 1680-1 and the oldest custom-built customs house (heh) in Britain. The cannons were cast in 1789.

Looking back along the quay towards the sea (not that you can see it from here).

Also quayside, straight ahead are part of Exeter's extensive city walls, which are layered: Roman on the bottom, 17th century on the top, Anglo-Saxon and Norman in between.

My last few photos are from Exeter's war memorial, built in 1923.

It is surmounted by either Peace or Victory -- either way, she's standing on a slain dragon which presumably represents War.

A POW and a VAD, and behind them, Rougemont Castle (which I wandered into, though I'm not sure I was supposed to).

So that was the sightseeing done. Next was the conference at Exeter University (a very beautiful campus by the way), which formed part of the AHRC project 'Bombing, states and peoples in Western Europe, 1940-1945', where Western Europe means Britain, Germany, France and Italy. It's a very interesting project, and it was a very interesting conference. I got to meet and hear people like Jay Winter, Juliet Gardiner and Richard Overy (the principle investigator for the project) -- it's always nice to put faces to names on the bookshelf!

The experiences of France and Italy under bombing, in particular, are not very well represented in the English language, so I learned a lot from the talks by Elena Cortesi, Lindsey Dodd (one of two PhD students attached to the project), Marta Nezzi, Claudia Baldoli (particularly on the belief that Padre Pio would levitate and intercept RAF bombers!) and Michael Schmiedel. There were a number of papers on the British experience. Dietmar Süss spoke about shelter policy in Britain and Germany, and how they became sites of a struggle for power and authority, while Marc Wiggam (the other project PhD student) discussed the way the blackout helped form and deform communities in the same countries. In Britain these processes were more voluntarist and more freely debated, though the differences in outcomes were perhaps not as great as one might expect. Lara Feigel examined photographic imagery in British and German literary accounts of bombing, Vanessa Chambers explored ways in which Britons coped with bombing (including astrology), and Juliet Gardiner offered a preview of her forthcoming book on the Blitz. Richard Titmuss' name popped in a number of talks, even on non-British subjects; Problems of Social Policy is clearly still a touchstone for this area of historiography, even more than Angus Calder. Partly that's because the civilian experience of bombing hasn't received the attention it deserves. So I hope the promised conference proceedings will appear sooner rather than later! Certainly it was the best -- most informative and enjoyable -- conference I've been to thus far.

Chris Williams (AKA Chris A. Williams) has put online a recording of a lecture he gave last year about the evolution of the police C³I system, by way of train control and air defence. (See also here.) More like this, please!