A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn’t spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It’s interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren’t necessarily seen as more ‘modern’ than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren’t: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There’s only one other which has an aviation theme:

This one takes a bit more explaining. It’s from 1909 or 1910, and would be for the general election held in January-February 1910 (there was another in December). Airship pilot ‘Herr von Lloyd George’ exclaims, in his best music-hall German, that he although he was trying hit the very stately home with his ‘budget bombs’, he has in fact some factories (including a ‘tobacco factory’, ‘motor car works’ and a ‘malthouse’). So, it’s obviously attacking the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’, which Lloyd George masterminded as Chancellor. He’s portrayed as a German because some of the social reforms he introduced, such as sickness benefits, were pioneered in Germany (which he had visited in 1908). Much of the controversy caused by the People’s Budget was due to the raft of new taxes needed to pay for the reforms (and dreadnoughts), one of which was a land tax — which is why LG was trying to bomb the mansion. I think the factories being hit instead is a reference to tariff reform: the Conservatives wanted to tax imports to protect British industries, whereas the governing Liberals believed in free trade. The airship is called ‘The Revenge’ because it was redistributionist in intent — taking from the rich through taxes and giving to the poor through welfare.

It’s only incidentally about airships, then, though perhaps the bomb-dropping German airship is also a swipe at government inaction in creating an air force (the first airship scare took place earlier in 1909; the RFC wasn’t created until 1912). And at the very least, it shows that the idea of Zeppelins being used as bombers was common currency in 1910 — even if it’s only being used for comedic effect. At any rate it’s a nice illustration of the popular idea of what an airship looked like, with a huge propeller at the back, a lantern in front, and an anchor dragging below.

While trawling through newspapers I keep an eye out for interesting aircraft-related advertisements. These are not uncommon, most obviously in relation to industries which could claim some relationship with aviation (after any record-breaking flight, there was usually at least one ad pointing out how much the triumphant pilot owed to some petroleum product or other). Other companies had to try a bit harder to make some aerial connection (Lyon’s swiss rolls, for example). But this magnificent example goes way beyond most! Actually, aviation is only one element of its vision of the future, designed to sell Field-day, a shaving lotion made from olive oil.

Here’s the text which appears below the image:

What of the future? What shall we wear? Eat? Drink? Shall we live in glass houses? Travel in Gyroplanes and wear Television on our wrists? Who knows? But we do know how we shall shave — for “Field-day” is one of the ‘Things to Come’ that’s here already! Revolutionary! Incomparably better! Different — not only from lather but from other ‘brushless’ creams. Fast — for the age of speed. Blades last longer. Simple and safe, too! Safe because you can see through “Field-day” as you shave instead of blindly guessing! Made with pure Olive Oil .. free from Caustic Alkali (an essential part of lather!) Made for the Future. On sale NOW. Are you going to wait — or be one of the ‘Moderns’? For the sake of your skin and your razor-blades do step out of that rut.¹

So how is the future invoked here in the pursuit of higher sales figures for Field-day? Most obviously, the city of the future has giant skyscrapers, with aeroplanes (and giant tubes of shaving lotion, ridden by a man who is clearly accustomed to boldly taking charge of his destiny in his dressing-gown) flying in between them. In fact, one of the skyscrapers is also an airport: there’s an aeroplane just taking off from it, and at the top of the tower is a windsock. Aside from the odd heliport or two, downtown airports have failed to materialise, but they remained a possibility in the 1930s.² The text mentions such wondrous technological possibilities as glass houses, autogiros, and wrist televisions.³

Then there is the rhetorical, almost ritual, use of the names of those two great novels about the future to come out of Britain in the 1930s, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (or rather, the 1936 film-of-the-book, Things to Come). Neither of these can be said to look forwards to the future without any misgivings, however; the one is a dystopia (albeit one masquerading as a utopia), and the other might as well be, at least for the hundreds of millions of people killed along the road to a technologically-sophisticated, tunic-wearing paradise. So they might seem an odd choice for a straightforwardly optimistic (if not entirely straightfaced, perhaps) depiction of the future. But that’s par for the course: the titles of both books very quickly became a shorthand for the unknown future, often with little relation to anything in Huxley or Wells.⁴

Finally, there are all the key words defining the attributes which are to be associated with the future, and with Field-day: it will be revolutionary, incomparably better, different, faster, longer lasting, simple and safe. What man could resist a shaving lotion so laden with futurity? It is indeed the shave of the future, NOW. I do so want to be one of the Moderns, and I’d buy it myself, for sure — except that judging by Google, it looks like neither Field-day nor J. C. and J. Field, Ltd., its manufacturer, actually made it into this future. O brave new world, that doesn’t have such things in it!

1. Daily Mail, 8 May 1937, p. 14.
2. For example, in 1935 the Corporation of London was reported to be considering buying up land for a city airport along the south bank of the Thames, possibly near (or between?) London Bridge and Tower Bridge. Another possibility was to actually build a landing platform over the Thames itself. Daily Mail, 2 February 1935, p. 5. Even more extraordinary was the proposal made in 1931 by Charles Glover, an architect, for an elevated airport above the railway siding yards at King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. This would have taken the form of a wheel half a mile across, with the spokes acting as runways. There is a drawing and a bit more detail in Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, London As It Might Have Been (London: John Murray, 1995 [1982]), 212.
3. So we’re still not in “the future” yet, although an increasing number of people effectively have a television in their pockets or hand bags, combined with telephone, still camera, movie camera, gramophone …
4. Yes, “brave new world” is itself lifted from Shakespeare, where it’s used differently; but The Times could only find occasion to quote the phrase twice in the almost-century-and-a-half before the publication of Huxley’s novel, and then used it at least 11 times in the rest of the 1930s (not including direct references to the book or to The Tempest).

WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names.

This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be a South Australian recruiting poster, showing how the map of Australia might be redrawn if Germany won. Australia itself becomes “New-Germany”; Perth becomes Tirpitzburg; Adelaide, Hindenburg; Brisbane, Bernhardiburg; Sydney, Nietscheburg [sic]; Tasmania (not Hobart), Kaisermania; and, most appropriately from my point of view, Melbourne would be renamed Zeppelinburg!

I don’t think much has been written on German plans for Australia in the event of victory in the First World War, probably because the Germans themselves gave very little thought to the place. However, it seems unlikely that Germany would have wanted to take over Australia lock, stock and barrel; better to turn us into some sort of client state instead. They’d probably have wanted to take a few of Britain’s colonial possessions in the area, and perhaps would have insisted upon reparations or favourable trade terms. And our battlecruiser HMAS Australia — which caused von Spee such headaches in 1914 — would no doubt have had to go. No independent foreign policy, perhaps (not that we had much of one as it was!) But we probably wouldn’t have had to go so far as to need to translate such phrases as “don’t come the raw prawn with me, mate” into German — fortunately!

This idea that we had to fight Germany in France in order to prevent the Kaiser’s victory parade down Swanston St had obvious potential as a motivational device, and was used in stories and films as well. Did people really believe it? The Daily Mail said that the poster had ‘great success’, so perhaps they did.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)

The caption also says that the game itself was similar to Battleship. But as you can see above, each player can see their opponent’s pieces, which is kind of exactly unlike Battleship (where the point is to guess where the enemy ships are). I’d suggest that since the pieces are blank on one side, it’s more like Stratego, where you can see where the opposing pieces are, but not what they are. The pieces in Stratego have number values, and so do those in Aviation:

• Scout: 1
• Bomber: 2
• Bristol Fighter: 3
• Battle Plane: 4
• Troop Carrier: 4.5
• Airship: 5
• Three Battleplanes: 7
• Commodore’s Squadron: 8
• Vice-Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 9
• Air Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 10

There are also some pieces which don’t have any assigned values: Observation Balloon, Searchlight, and Anti-Aircraft Gun (3, 4 or 5 Miles). Presumably these correspond to some combination of the bombs, spies and flags in Stratego — guns for bombs, searchlight for spies and balloon for flag might make sense, although there is also a double-square labelled “Aerodrome” on each player’s side which doesn’t seem to have any obvious correlate in Stratego (they are too far back to be choke points, maybe they are actually the flags?)

It turns out I could have saved myself the trouble with a bit of Googling: the third message on this Stratego website confirms that Aviation is a Stratego variant; or rather that both are derived from a common French ancestor patented in 1909, L’Attaque! Aviation came well before the American game, and its maker, H. P. Gibson, also published L’Attaque in Britain, along with a naval version (Dover Patrol) and an air-land-sea version (Tri-Tactics). In fact, Gibson’s games were very popular and went through several editions into the 1960s. BoardGameGeeks has pages on all four of them, including photos of the components and even scans of some of the rules (for the later editions, though). So now it becomes clear that the enemy Aerodrome in Aviation is indeed the objective; you have to land one of your Troop Carriers on it to capture it. Interesting, but not exactly orthodox air strategy in 1920!

The Imperial War Museum had even more war-themed games on display. This one is called From the Ranks to Field Marshal, and is clearly basically Snakes and Ladders: you start out as a private, trooper, gunner or sapper, roll a die, move your piece along, and follow any instructions on the square.

Sometimes this is good (’Rescues a comrade under heavy fire. Promoted 1 rank, and receives Distinguished Service Order’), sometimes bad (’Court Martial. Tried for incompetence’ — 1 in 6 chance of being reduced 4 ranks). The first to land on 100 exactly becomes a Field Marshal and wins; though the game can end in other ways and then it’s the highest ranked player who wins. The IWM’s captions don’t say much other than repeat the game’s name, so I don’t know when exactly it was published. It was in a case on “The military and naval origins of the [First World] War” but it was clearly actually made during the war itself, between 1914 and the end of 1915, as French is one of the field marshals shown in the centre, alongside Kitchener; presumably Haig would have been shown after 1915. Not that either French or Kitchener rose through the ranks to field marshal (who had by then? Wully Robertson didn’t until after the war) of course, but it’s interesting that the game does make you start at the bottom, instead of giving you a plum commission in the Hussars. So it seems like it’s designed to appeal across the classes, and perhaps encourage young working-class lads to think they could make it to the top through hard work and straight shooting. (Though presumably the war would be over before the Snakes and Ladders-playing cohort reached military age!)

Moving on a world war, it seems that card games had become popular. It’s harder to work out what the rules for these might be, but presumably they again were adapted from already existing games. The above is an advertisement aimed at retailers for a game called Who’s Who or Food for Thought, ‘for delivery during October, 1939’, so quite likely was rushed into production just after the declaration of war.

OK, I think I’ve partly worked this one out: it looks like you have to try and collect triplets, where one card has an important figure’s name, another has an incomplete sentence describing that person, and the last one has an illustration and word which completes the sentence, which cleverly rhymes with the word in bold on the second card. So for example: ‘Winston Churchill’/'Shows he is the true fighting type, ignoring all Nazis [sic] scandalous’/'Tripe’ (and there’s a picture of some tripe — I assume). Sounds pretty trivial — I think I’d rather be playing From The Ranks To Field Marshal, to be honest!

This one is called Evacuation, I would guess from the first evacuation at the start of the war rather than the one during the Blitz, but can’t really be sure. There are at least three types of cards: Householder, Evacuee and (I think) Teacher — though the Evacuee cards seem to be subdivided with the red letter in the corner: B, G, M and perhaps A). Each has a comic figure — Mona Mudd is one of the evacuee children, for example, who has fallen into a puddle. Possibly, then, the game is depicting in light-hearted fashion the difficulties everyone involved had in adjusting to the new living arrangements.

But to return to the First World War period, and to board games, the most intriguing game out of all of these is War Tactics or Can Great Britain be Invaded? This time I’ve manage to find it in the IWM Collections database, as EPH 2701 and EPH 2702, and there it is dated to c. 1911. My initial thought was that it was from during the war, but on balance, I’d probably agree with the comment there that it reflects ‘the production and widespread popularity of anti-German ‘war scare’ literature of the period’.¹

The pieces here are Dread Nought (3 dots), Cruiser (2 dots), Torpedo Boat (1 dot), Sub, an unnamed piece which is obviously a monoplane, and one which has 16 dots on it and no picture — I’m guessing this is meant to be a ground unit. But what is most intriguing is the map:

The thing about Aviation and the other Stratego-style games, along with other stylised representations of warfare like chess, is that they are almost completely symmetrical. No matter which side you’re playing, the board is the same, the forces are the same and the objective is the same. About the only asymmetry is that somebody has to go first. This does make such games very evenly-balanced, and so the result will on balance come down to skill. But as a representation of warfare, it’s not in the least realistic (except in certain circumstances, particularly the more tactical you go, I guess). Each side in a battle or war has very different forces at its disposal, in terms of numbers, equipment, training and morale. And each side will be constrained by the geography it has to fight from or in, and each side will likely have different objectives in the war. Abstract games like chess or Stratego don’t have asymmetry, which is why they might be war games, but aren’t really wargames as currently understood.

But the map for War Tactics is clearly very asymmetric, as it’s based on the actual geography of the North Sea. Naval bases are placed not to make a “good” or “fair” game, but because that’s where they really were. The eastern coast of England does look inviting for the Germans because of the lack of bases, but then the British cities are spread out both north and south: which way to go? It also looks like the British can try to invade Germany, but good luck getting in close to the German coast. I’m not saying this is a particularly accurate depiction of the North Sea strategic situation ca. 1911 — for one thing it does look like the German and British forces might be symmetric in number and capability, which is rather unhistorical; and anyway I don’t know what the rules are — but it is at least a partial recognition that not all is fair in war, just as in love. So some props are due Lowe and Carr of Belvoir Street, Leicester, for creating an early ancestor of the strategic wargame.

I was going to leave it there, but I came across a couple of things on the net that I have to mention. One is from a Time article published on 14 December 1942, about the current vogue for military games. It talks about Gibson and the French origins of L’Attaque, but says he independently came up with Dover Patrol. It also mentions that the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes — who also rather liked very big aeroplanes — invented his own Little Wars-style wargame played on a huge table with 14 (!) players a side. Games could last for years — if you had the right stuff, that is:

The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried.

Such are the burdens of command.

The other interesting thing I came across was that Dennis Wheatley, the best-selling author of thrillers in the 1930s who went on to write strategic appreciations for the Joint Planning Staff during the war (his Times obit claims it was his idea to remove all the signposts in Britain!), invented several strategy games which appear to be at least geographically asymmetric. One, called Invasion, was published in 1938, and was popular enough to go through a few editions. The publisher’s description is as follows:

ATTACK & DEFENCE
by Land, Sea and Air
A thrilling battle of wits in which 2, 3 or 4 players have as their playing pieces the armed forces of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
The Battlefield is a Map in the size of approximately 24 inches square, PRINTED IN SIX COLOURS with Capitals, Principal Towns and Forts named and a full Fighting Force of 160 Pieces with dice, shaker, etc.
You have to be ready to resist an invasion and at the same time send Expeditionary Forces to Allies.
A Game in which Young and Old can use their strategy to overcome the luck of the dice.

There’s a picture of the map here; it appears to be a Ruritanian representation of north-west Europe (the country off the coast is called Angleland, I think). It’s interesting that this came out in 1938; I can’t say I’m aware of much discussion of the possibility of an invasion of Britain at the time. But since Wheatley was helping plan anti-invasion strategies a couple of years later, Invasion perhaps should be considered as serious speculation, and not just a game.

Finally, just for completeness’ sake, I’ll mention two other war games I came across. From 1916 or so, there’s Trencho, ‘The Famous Australian War Game As Played in the Camps and Trenches’, which is apparently just Nine Men’s Morris. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but “Trencho” does sound very Australian! As does Spotto!, for that matter (second from the bottom), and indeed judging from the web it was originally a Bingo-like Australian car journey game (make lists of things to watch out for, cross them off when you see them, then shout “spotto!” when you’ve got them all). But again, I’ve never heard of it. This one is an aircraft recognition version, ‘OF INSTRUCTIVE VALUE TO: SPOTTERS, A.T.C.[,] R.O.C.[,] HOME GUARDS, SCOUTS, A.R.P., POLICE, SAILORS, SOLDIERS, AIRMEN, Etc.’ so obviously it’s British, ca. 1940, and not Australian — anyway, we didn’t get many Heinkels down our way!

My brain is fried after all that, but one last thought. Some of these games are evidently intended to be simulations of war, not just representations in some abstract way: War Tactics asks in its title, “can Great Britain be invaded?” and presumably players are invited to think that the game does provide an answer to that question. Did they in fact think so? And if so, did their game-playing affect their fears about the future one way or the other? If the German player in War Tactics won 7 times out of 10, did the players (presumably children) take that as a warning of what may come? Or did they just treat it as a harmless bit of fun? No doubt some did see it as just a game, but possibly not all. As a teenaged wargamer, one of my favourite games was GDW’s The Third World War, about the potential land and air war in Germany between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, ca. 1985. It was considerably more sophisticated than the proto-wargames discussed here, but not necessarily more accurate. I certainly thought it was, to some degree, accurate, however. Playing such games was one way in which I tried to understand the Cold War and what might happen in the future, and I do remember getting anxious when the Warsaw Pact won. I wanted NATO to win, because I would want NATO to win in a real war if it ever happened. In fact, I must admit I would sometimes cheat a bit in solitaire games, re-rolling die rolls in important battles to get a “fair” result. Pretty silly, any way you look at it; but I could understand some overly-sensitive boy in 1911, probably already immersed in le Queux and An Englishman’s Home, playing War Tactics and thinking that perhaps “Der Tag” was nearly upon him …

1. For example, looking at the map, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland are marked as neutrals, whereas France and Belgium seem to be British allies; this suggests a WWI setting. Except that Luxembourg is also neutral, and most of Belgium’s territory should be marked as a German conquest. Perhaps more tellingly, there’s no naval base at Scapa Flow — the closest is Cromarty (ie Invergordon). Given the great importance of Scapa Flow as the harbour for the Grand Fleet throughout the war, it’s hard to imagine that it would have been left out.

This post is an exercise in — well, I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, but I found some medium-resolution images on eBay of a pamphlet printed by the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League in 1934. (The seller says 1933, but all other evidence I have on this group is from 1934; the first meeting was held in June 1934.) Some examples may exist in archives, but certainly it’s a very rare item, which might explain the US$899.00 asking price. Dedicated scholar though I am, that’s somewhat above what I’m willing to pay! Luckily, I don’t have to, because I can reconstruct nearly all the text by zooming in, zooming out, and some judicious squinting.

The tone is set by the front of the pamphlet:

‘England awake!’, he demands angrily/defiantly. I don’t know if he’s anybody in particular, or was just some guy chosen because he resembled the target demographic.

The threat of air attack is outlined on the outside of the pamphlet. (The battleship is the German dreadnought Ostfriesland, an American war prize, which was sunk by Billy Mitchell and co. in 1921 in order to demonstrate that the age of seapower was over.) It’s fairly extreme knock-out blow stuff, claiming that London can be wiped out in a matter of hours.

Why Wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o’clock and wipe out London at 8?

One of the world’s largest battleships sinking in 6 seconds after being bombed. [...]

The result of ONE bomb dropped on a house near London during the War.

ENGLAND AWAKE!

Inside is a more detailed explanation of how bombing has come along since 1918 and some more slogans, including the proposed solution: to build a big fleet of bombers to ’smash the foreign hornets in their nests’.

The Peril is Yours!

LONDON CAN BE BOMBED, BATTERED AND BROKEN WITHIN A FEW HOURS

• England was in no real peril during the war. Our sea power counted then and we had the biggest fleet afloat.
• Today what matters most is mastery of the air. We have lost that mastery.
• The latest battleship cost £4,500,000. The bigger the ship, the bigger the target. The great German ship Ostfriesland, thought to be unsinkable, was sunk in six seconds by a bomb from the air.
• In the war no single ship escorted by aircraft was sunk by submarine.
• Mr. Baldwin says: “The bomber will get through any defence you can visualise today.” Sir Philip Sassoon says: “There is no effective defence against air attack.”
• Remember: no single German aeroplane, which dropped bombs near London, was shot down during the War.
• Recollect: that the biggest bomb dropped on London during the War weighed only 500 lb. and killed 12 people.
• Bombs are being manufactured weighing 4,000 lb.
• In the last war a rifle carried three miles and and a gun under thirty. The range of projectiles now is the distance an airman can travel with bombs.
• A bomber can leave the Continent with two tons of explosives and drop bombs 1,500 miles away from his base.
• He can leave Berlin at 4 o’clock, reach London at 8 and wipe out the heart of the Empire in a few moments.
• Our main aircraft factories are clustered around London and all our depots along the Southern coast.
• Germany has 10,000 gliding pilots; England only 78. England has only 78 aerodromes against 1,000 planned by France.

CREATE A NEW WINGED ARMY of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests.

Join the “Hands Off Britain” Air Defence League
St. Stephen’s House, Westminster, S.W.1

HANDS OFF BRITAIN AIR DEFENCE LEAGUE

Conducted by
COMMANDER O. LOCKER-LAMPSON, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P.
Treasurer:
SIR GEORGE COLTHURST, BART.
Campaign Secretary:
MR. C. COOLEY, ST. STEPHEN’S HOUSE, WESTMINSTER, S.W.1.

I DESIRE to associate myself with this movement
and enclose herewith £
as a donation towards the funds.

*Name
Address

*[...]

Hands Off Britain Air Defence League,
St. Stephen’s House, Westminster,
London, S.W.1.
(Telephone: WHITEHALL [...])

I must admit I had some help from Nowell (Charles) Smith, formerly an Oxford classics don, latterly the headmaster of Sherborne and co-author (with James Clerk Maxwell Garnett) of The Dawn of World-order: An Introduction to the Study of the League of Nations. In July 1934, he received what is clearly the same pamphlet in the post, and was moved to write a letter about it to the Spectator (20 July 1934, p. 88). Nowell Smith helpfully lists the names of the people involved in the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League — otherwise I’d have had no hope of working them out!

The “Conductor”, Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, was an interesting chap: a long-serving Conservative MP, a commander of RNAS armoured cars during the First World War and, if Time is to be believed, a philo-Semitic fascist! He founded a blue-shirted group called the Sentinels of Empire, vehemently anti-Communist. I suspect Time over-estimated the degree of his fascism, or else his significance: he supposedly addressed a meeting of 20,000 of his Blueshirts in 1931, and in 1934 he was said to rival Oswald Mosley as an ‘organizer of British fascists’, yet he barely figures in histories of British fascism. It seems that in 1926, Locker-Lampson did hold some joint public meetings with the British Fascists, and in 1931 he met Alfred Rosenberg when the latter visited London. But in 1934 he supported a bill to prohibit the wearing of political uniforms, and later helped to put Arnold Leese in the dock. It seems likely that Locker-Lampson did flirt with fascism, but the increasingly anti-Semitic tendencies of fascism in Britain repelled him. Or perhaps the Sentinels of Empire were just a conservative group which emulated the style of fascism, all the rage at the time.

Of the others, Sir George Colthurst owned some 31000 acres and lived at Blarney Castle, so I suppose he was a good choice for treasurer. C. Cooley I have no information on. And Lord Waleran (to whom, according to Nowell Smith, the donations were to be sent; seems he was the chairman) seems to have had an undistinguished career up until this point (still, he was not yet 30). An advertisement in The Times of 29 June 1934, p. 12, lists the names of others who spoke at the inaugural meeting:¹ the Duchess of Atholl, MP, Admiral Sir Murray Sueter, MP, P. J. Hannon, MP, Everard Gates — and songs sung by Harold Williams and Flora Woodman!² The Duchess of Atholl later went to Spain to observe the effects of bombing on civilians; Sueter had played an important role in the early RNAS and the defence of London during the war, and was very outspoken on matters of air defence.³ Hannon was involved in all the big Edwardian patriotic leagues — Navy League, National Service League, Tariff Reform League — as well as the National Aerial Defence Association, which only lasted a few years. All of these were Tory MPs, or would be one day (Gates was elected in a 1940 by-election with a massive 97% majority, against a BUF candidate). Hands Off was clearly a rather right-wing group, then.⁴

What influence did the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League have? Not much, I suspect: they seem to have vanished after mid-1934. (They did claim to have pressured the government into supporting sport gliding.) But then, not many of the various leagues related to air warfare seem to have achieved much in the 1930s, at least not in public: the Air League, the National League of Airmen, the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League, the Air Raid Defence League. The British just weren’t joiners, so mass organisations were out; and the extremist political views of many of these groups probably didn’t endear them to the government — certainly not to Nowell Smith, who thought HOBADL’s leaflet ‘hysterical propaganda’. The ARDL might have been the most influential of all these groups: it was more high-powered than the others (founded by Sir Arthur Salter and Sir Ralph Wedgwood; see the impressive list of supporters in The Times, 7 February 1939, p. 16), more focused (ARP), less partisan; but it was formed only after Munich so didn’t have much time to gain traction. If I get time (ha!), I hope to do a spot of archival research into some of these organisations while I’m in the UK, which will help me to understand their activities both in public and in private.

Anyway, now you know all I do about the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League.

1. This ad is very interesting in itself — it’s clearly designed to look like an article reporting on the meeting. So it’s not an unbiased account, but does presumably accurately reflect the League’s concerns. Perhaps most intriguing is Locker Lampson’s suggestion that the future British air force be used to enforce world peace: ‘if the League of Nations lacked a police force, then let this new national striking force be accorded that international sanction. (Applause.)’
2. Locker-Lampson did like music: he wrote an anthem for the Sentinels of Empire, or rather set words to music composed for the film High Treason — which curiously enough was based on a play written by another airminded right-wing (former) MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing.
3. Sueter also gave a speech to the Sentinels of Empire, according to Time.
4. Philip Noel Baker — who also quotes this pamphlet — thought so, too, since he claimed it shared the politics of the Aeroplane, a reference to editor C. G. Grey’s notoriously far-right views, though I don’t think he was as quite as extreme, or at least as obvious, as he later became. Challenge to Death (London: Constable, 1934), 199.

The Australian International Airshow 2007 took place last week, at Avalon near Melbourne. All I saw of it was a C-17, a F-111 escorted by two Hawks, four F/A-18s in a diamond formation, and a few helicopters (Tigers?) — presumably all RAAF/ADF aircraft — which buzzed the City and inner suburbs earlier in the week. I did go to the 2003 air show — info and pics here and here — and got to see a variety of interesting aircraft — a B-1B, a Meteor, a Canberra, a Global Hawk, even a flying Blériot replica. And fell in love with Connie, like everyone else who saw her.

One of the highlights was the First World War display, involving a Fokker Triplane, a Sopwith Camel, an SE.5a and a Nieuport 11 (and several chronologically-challenged Tiger Moths and maybe some others). Naturally they put on a mock combat, something these old warbirds do best — yeah, seeing and hearing F-15s scream low over the runway is a thrill, but 2 seconds later and the plane is gone, or else up high in the sky and you have to reach for your binoculars. Biplanes fly low and slow — so everyone can follow the action — but are also very maneuverable — so are fun to watch. Plus there’s that whole “knights of the air” thing going on. Anyway, the climax of the display was an attack on a balloon — I think it was supposed to be an observation balloon, but my memory is fuzzy and I’m not sure if it was in the air or still on the ground. Of course the attack is successful and the hydrogen goes whoosh! and there’s a nice big explosion.

I haven’t been to many air shows, so I can’t say if these sorts of setpieces are common. But they do have a long pedigree — particularly when it comes to blowing up balloons! This is from a description of the finale of the 1934 RAF Pageant, at Hendon:

an imposing building on the far side of the aerodrome was a busy hive of industry — producing and storing high explosives [...] Suddenly it became ”hivier” than ever — syrens [sic] blew, anti-aircraft guns were manned, a balloon apron went up (one balloon was seen), and a squadron of fighter aeroplanes took off. The reason was soon apparent, for squadrons of enemy bombers could be seen approaching, to attack the magazine.

They were soon overhead, with anti-aircraft shells bursting all around, and the light bombers [...] dived on to their objective, a salvo of bombs causing some damage. The heavy bombers [...] followed this up with slightly severer punishment, while an attack on the balloon resulted in the latter being brought down in flames (Maj. Sandbags, who usually makes his escape on these occasions, had to take his holidays earlier this year, so was not present).

Meanwhile the defending fighters [...] were worrying the attackers, and casualties occurred on both sides — including one of the heavy bombers. Again the bombers came over, this time causing considerable damage, the heavy bombers finally blowing up the complete volume of the magazine.¹

As the reference to Major Sandbags suggests, this was already a traditional spectacle. The 1922 Pageant included ‘the actual destruction of a kite “sausage” balloon by fire from a Sopwith Snipe machine, and the descent of a dummy observer by parachute’.² Much the same scene was featured on a poster for the very first Pageant, in 1920 (see above). Other bombing displays took place, usually involving the destruction of an ocean liner, a native village or other legitimate target. (The below is from either 1923, 1928 or 1934, probably the first two as the aircraft look like Victorias. But they could be Valentias too. Both of which were primarily transports, but could operate as bombers also.)

But mock combats in air shows go back even earlier than that, to before the First World War. Hendon was a RAF aerodrome in the 1920s and 1930s; but before that it was owned by the pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White. He founded Hendon in 1911 basically to cash in on the aerial craze, as a place where Londoners could come in the evenings or weekends and watch his airmen put their Farmans and Blériots through their paces. (The first loop-the-loop in Britain was performed here.) And it worked — Hendon regularly drew large crowds, up to 60,000 at times, and the Underground featured it on some of its posters as one of London’s major attractions. (Here’s an example.) And mock combats were part of the fun. Michael Paris says that ‘During 1912 aerial war-games became a regular attraction, featuring bombing, aerial fights, even night flying with the aid of huge searchlights’.³ The suggestion of air combat (if that’s what Paris means by ‘aerial fights’) is particularly intriguing, since the real thing hadn’t happened yet, and would not for another two years. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to verify this.⁴ But bombing competitions were certainly held regularly at Hendon. For example, on the Whit Monday bank holiday in 1913, a crowd of between twenty and thirty-five thousand people gathered at a wet and windy London Aerodrome (as it was formally called) to watch the fun:

The programme opened with bomb-dropping from a height of about 150ft. at a target representing the deck of a torpedo-boat destroyer. Five airmen competed, each having three shots. It is sufficient to say that the best bomb, which was dropped by Lewis Turner, fell 27ft. 6in. from the bull’s-eye, and the worst missed its mark by 178ft. The first prize, a silver cup and £20, was won by Turner (Caudron biplane, with 60 h.p. Anzani engine) with an average for his three shots of 36ft. 8in., and the second, £10, by L. Noel (Farman biplane, with 80 h.p. Gnome) with an average of 76ft. 4in.⁵

Rather incredibly, the author of these words — the aeronautical correspondent of The Times, who according to Paris was actually just the military correspondent, Charles à Court Repington — goes on to say:

This kind of thing, of course, is not serious aeronautics. I should have preferred to spend the time which it occupied at the fair opposite the Welsh Harp, which is Hendon way, or in talking to the bearded man who professed to be rolling a big globe mounted on hoops round the world for £4,000, and who in the course of the afternoon had covered a distance of approximately 1½ mile.⁶

Ah, but would the bearded man have wanted to talk to you, Colonel Repington? Sure, on one level it was just stunt flying to pull in the punters, but it’s not like the RFC was taking bombing any more seriously. The first British pilots to undertake bombing in wartime did so on an unofficial basis, and with equipment they improvised themselves. Indeed, the very first such pilot to do so with any success was Louis Strange (on 28 August 1914, near Mons) who had won a Hendon bombing competition just four months earlier.⁷ And Grahame-White and co. put on shows for Cabinet ministers as early as 1911, dropping bags of whiting (ie calcium carbonate or something like that) on a battleship-shaped target.⁸ So Repington’s sneers of derision seem unenlightened, shall we say.

So, across nearly a century (and on opposite sides of the globe), mock combats seem to have been a constant feature in air shows, and have themselves retained some fairely constant elements. And why not — they’re great spectacles, real crowd-pleasers. But, I’d tentatively like to suggest, the meaning of such displays has changed. Today, it seems they are about nostalgia for a bygone era, or perhaps a tribute to heroes of the past. The combat capabilities of modern aircraft are not demonstrated (unless you count high-speed passes on afterburners and the like) — it’s about the past. Before 1914, on the other hand, mock combats were about trying to convince viewers of the usefulness of aeroplanes in war — that is, the war-to-come. So they were then about the future. Finally, in the 1920s and 1930s, mock combats were ostensibly about the use of aircraft in the next war also, but they couldn’t help but be a reference to the role aircraft played in the Great War, which older spectators would have remembered and younger spectators read about in Biggles and the like. So they were about both the past and the future.

I wouldn’t read too much into this — of course flying displays were ‘about’ the future when aviation was in its infancy. Now that it’s not, there’s going to be relatively more looking backwards. And it’s not like modern aircraft aren’t crowd-pleasers, either, or aren’t demonstrating their combat effectiveness when they perform aerobatics for the crowd. But this line of argument does remind me of a previous discussion about how airmindedness is today often in essence nostalgic. So perhaps it’s not too silly.

Image sources: RAF Air Historical Branch; Red Lion Posters.

1. Flight, 8 July 1934, p. 674.
2. The Times, 26 June 1922, p. 5.
3. Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859-1917 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 72.
4. But if anyone practiced air combat before 1914, it would be Grahame-White: he was trying to sell a machine-gun armed aircraft to the War Office in 1913, and put on a successful strafing demonstration that same year. Ibid, 177-9.
5. The Times, 13 May 1913, p. 10.
6. Ibid.
7. The Times, 1 May 1914, p. 7.
8. The Times, 13 May 1911, p. 10.

A follow-on of sorts to a recent post.

Imperial Airways was Britain’s main international airline between 1924 and 1939. It enjoyed semi-official status, as it was subsidised by the British government, and had the contract to deliver air mail throughout the Empire. Another international airline was formed in 1935, British Airways,¹ which serviced European routes (and it was apparently subsidised as well, at least for the London-Paris route). Imperial did too, but only it flew the long-distance routes to South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Australia (with help from QANTAS) and points in between. I’m not sure if this was an official monopoly, or just because it was difficult to compete over such long distances without subsidies. I also wonder what would have happened if the Imperial Airship Scheme had gone into operation — would Imperial have run that too? Anyway, in November 1939, Imperial and British were merged into BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation.

Imperial had a reputation for flying slow, doddering old planes (the H.P.42 was its mainstay throughout the 1930s, scorching the skies at 120 mph). David Edgerton quotes an MP and pilot — the endnote says W. Perkin, but I think it was W. R. D. Perkins, a Tory and vice-president of BALPA²– as saying:

Imperial Airways services in Europe are the laughing stock of the world … when I am sitting in some distant aerodrome in Europe in the summer and a kind of Heath Robinson machine descends from the skies and everyone begins to laugh, I feel thoroughly ashamed.³

Perkins seems to have been a real thorn in the side of Imperial — shortly afterwards he introduced a private member’s bill alleging gross mismanagement by the airline and the Air Ministry, producing a ‘really thrilling debate’⁴ according to The Times’s parliamentary correspondent and leading, it seems, to the Cadman commission into civil aviation. British Airways had a more up-to-date image, but was often forced to look to American and German manufacturers for its aircraft. (When Neville Chamberlain arrived back at Heston with ‘peace in our time’, it was in one of British Airways’ Lockheed Super Electras.) Rearmament was partly to blame, as the main suppliers of the Imperial fleet turned to producing Hampdens and Sunderlands instead of airliners. Imperial was finally re-equipping with modern aircraft (Empires, Ensigns and Atalantas) when the war broke out.

Imperial had some defenders in the letters columns of The Times, including Alan Cobham and Nigel Tangye. But it clearly also had a pretty classy advertising department to call upon. The image at the top of the post is from ca. 1930 (the Calcutta it depicts entered service in 1928). Flying boat soars majestically over idyllic tropical beach. Flying there is, it assures us, `The modern way’. The following poster is even more striking. It doesn’t even need to advertise the name of the airline (though I guess it may have put produced on behalf of the Egyptian Marketing Board or equivalent — still, it’s definitely an Imperial H.P.42).

This next one shows air travel as an elegant, refined travel experience, with well-off passengers being served apéritifs by a uniformed waiter, possibly after having seen their inflight movie — the first ever was The Lost World, on an Imperial service to Paris in 1925. According to Wikipedia, anyway. (Not shown: passengers regurgitating the contents of their stomachs due to the turbulence of flying through the lower atmosphere.)

It helpfully notes that Imperial is ‘The only British air-line’ (so before 1935). After all, who would want to trust their lives to foreigners, what?

Imperial’s newspaper ads were not quite as beautiful, but still had good arguments to make.

‘Fly to the Cape in 9 days’ doesn’t sound particularly fast, but it was at least a week faster than by sea. Even better, the waiters didn’t need to be tipped!

Reliability is ensured by the 4-engined air liners which are used exclusively on all Imperial Airways routes. Nights are spent quietly on land; each day’s flight is divided into easy stages and the air liners are so comfortable to fly in. ‘Extras’ do not occur as tips, meals and sleeping accomodation are all included in the fare. It’s faster and more luxurious by air — try it

This next ad also stresses the safety factor of having four engines. Indeed, the H.P.42s did have a good safety record — of the eight built, only one was lost before the war, and that to a hangar fire (amazingly, all the other seven were destroyed in 1939-40).

The last ad is for air mail, not air travel. Only sixpence for a letter to Malaya — seems quite reasonable, though it was then 1/3 to get to ‘Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania’:

It also claims that Imperial was ‘The greatest air service in the world’. The American News Week (I assume this is Newsweek) at least agreed that it was one of the greatest, praising its pilots and engineers as well as the British air mail service generally.⁵ The statistics for commercial flights in the first half of 1934⁶ seem to tell another story:

Well, OK, technically it was one of the world’s great air services, but fifth place, behind the Netherlands, does not seem very impressive. Still, who can think poorly of an airline which flew these magnficent machines?

Image sources, in order: AllPosters.com; AllPosters.com; AllPosters.com; The Times, 31 May 1935, p. 44; The Times, 4 June 1935, p. 15; The Times, 5 December 1934, p. 13.

1. Not the current BA, though they are related.
2. ObPythonRef.
3. House of Commons Debates, vol. 329, 1937/8, col. 431; quoted in David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991), 32. Looks like the debate took place on 29 October 1937.
4. The Times, 18 November 1937, p. 14.
5. Nigel Tangye, letter, The Times, 1 November 1937, p. 10.
6. ”Commercial aviation in Great Britain”, Round Table 25 (June 1935), 479.
7. Imperial Airways only.
8. Deutsche Lufthansa only.
9. Including Netherlands East Indies.

In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of action¹ of bombers from potential enemies. It turns out they were afraid of everybody’s, except for the country they were actually at war with (China). The brown circle shows the radius of action of American bombers from the Philippines; black, British bombers from Hong Kong; green, Russian bombers from Vladivostok; yellow, American bombers from Alaska; and blue is in the middle of the ocean — American carrier-borne bombers, most likely. The circles are marked with a number, probably a distance: 2000 km? That would make some sense, as it was very roughly the radius of action of the B-17s that were just entering service in the US Army in 1938 (though not in substantial numbers until 1941).

This sort of map is quite common these days, particularly in highlighting the danger from rogue states. For example, here’s one centred on North Korea, from a website criticising Clinton’s foreign policy:

The circles here are not the radii of action of bombers, of course, but the ranges of missiles.² But the principle is the same. There’s a subtle difference, though: the Japanese one projects a defensive outlook: it shows the circles encroaching on Japanese territory and so emphasizes how vulnerable Japan is. The North Korean map, on the other, does not highlight the threat to any particular country, but instead demonstrates how North Korean missiles threaten all of its neighbours — that is to say, just how rogueish a state it is.

Here’s another missile-era map, this time quite an historic one from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (looks like it was drawn up by the CIA). This is more like the Japanese map: though the threat is from Cuba, the centre of the map is shifted towards the United States, to show just how much of the country would fall under the shadow of Soviet missiles (but by the same token, de-emphasising the threat to South America).

I haven’t come across many other pre-Second World War examples, though I’m sure they exist. The only other one I currently know of is British, and is very early, dating from 1913:

This time it’s not bombers or missiles that are the threat, but Zeppelins. (Love that OTT title!) The map is centred on Heligoland, which another map in the same magazine claimed was the site of an airship station. The caption says that the outer circle (600 miles) represents the radius for Zeppelins; the 300 mile circle is for aeroplanes. It ’should bring home to every patriot the vital necessity of Britain putting her house in order forthwith, by the grant of adequate provision in the nation’s Estimates to enable us to make up the heavy leeway from which this country already suffers’. Indeed it should; those circles are very dark, aren’t they? Though that might just be the poor quality of my photocopy …

Image sources: National Archives of Japan; Clinton Foreign Policy Page; John F. Kennedy Library; Flight, 1 March 1913, 248.

1. No more than half the maximum range of an aircraft, assuming they return to the base from which they took off.
2. As missiles don’t return to base, their radius of action is equal to their range.

Boing Boing has a link to a very interesting and oddly beautiful set of Japanese air raid precautions posters at the National Archives of Japan. (Boing Boing says they are from the Second World War, but according to the page itself, they date from 1938.) I am myself somewhat ignorant of Japanese history, but as it happens my supervisor is a specialist in modern Japanese history,¹ and it seems that there are significant similarities between Britain and Japan when it comes to the fear of the bomber.

As early as the 1920s, Japanese cities were holding air raid drills, and according to George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1986), nobody tried harder than the Japanese to ban or limit aerial bombing by international treaty. Quester also suggests that the ongoing deployment of several hundred American B-17s to the Philippines was an important factor in Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States — to take them out before they could become a big enough force to deter Japanese actions at a later date, or indeed to attack Japan itself. (Though I don’t know whether this idea is sustained by more recent scholarship — Quester originally wrote in 1966.)

Anyway, I was surprised that there was such a fear of the bomber in Japan, as any potential aerial enemies were much further away than they were for Britain — so the fear seems that much more irrational. Some possible reasons might include: a similar psychological reaction to the negation of the ocean barrier which a naval power like Japan had relied upon for protection; the perception that as a relatively highly-industrialised country, it had more to lose by aerial bombing than did less-industrialised countries like China or other neighbours like the Soviet Union or the United States, whose main centres of population and industry were out of Japan’s reach; or the terrible example of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which potentially foreshadowed the scale of devastation that might be suffered in an aerial knock-out blow.²

I can’t read the writing, but this last poster is evidently about how to make your own gas-masks, and the image of (presumably) the mother leading her child enveloped in a home-made chemical protective suit is very poignant. Japan escaped the horror of gas attack, but it suffered the others depicted in these posters, and more besides.

1. I should add that he had nothing to do with writing this post, so all errors are mine alone!
2. All of these ideas have some parallel with the British case: the first one is actually identical; the second is similar to the British conception that unlike Berlin, say, London was a uniquely vulnerable target, due to its size, importance and proximity to potential enemies; and the third is similar to the British drawing upon, and exaggerating, their experience of bombing in the First World War, particularly in 1917. In this last case the devastation in Japan was far greater, of course.

Dan Todman has an interesting series of posts at Trench Fever on how the First World War prepared the British to fight the Second - here, here and here. The last post is about a newspaper ad from 1942, and although it’s only one element among several, of course it’s the Zeppelin that leaps out at me (I am Airminded after all!) Apropos of nothing much, here are a few examples of Zeppelins in British advertising from the First World War period - one newspaper advertisement, and two propaganda posters.

The first actually dates from before the war - it’s from The Times, 4 March 1913, p. 17. It was published during the airship panic of that year, and pokes gentle fun at the concerns about the Zeppelin menace. What people should REALLY be worried about is fire, burglary, old age … so buy North British & Mercantile’s insurance! (One wonders why they didn’t offer air raid insurance … they would have made a bundle.)

This recruiting poster would date to 1915 or 1916, as that’s when the Zeppelins were most feared. Joining the Army at the time wouldn’t have been the most direct way to prevent more air raids, as the Navy was actually responsible for British air defences at that time, but I suppose the suggestion is that you can be part of the Big Push that will end the war. (Image source: First World War.com.)

I may be cheating slightly here: although this is mentioned on a few websites as a British poster, the National Library of Australia claims it was a New South Wales recruiting poster from 1915. But it may well have been a copy of a British poster, and anyway, we were all British back then! This time the emphasis is on preventing German frightfulness being visited upon British women and children. (Image source: National Library of Australia.)

Well, I guess these show something of the early development of the Zeppelin-as-threat iconography that Lever Brothers was (in part) drawing upon. By 1942, that iconography seems almost nostalgic, and represented the normalisation and conquest of fears of air war - the Zeppelins were just one of the challenges that Mrs Allaker and Sunlight Soap successfully faced together in the 20th century …

OK, now I’m rambling, no doubt due to insomnia … so I think I’ll sign off!