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Biggles gets a website

6 October 2009 in Links, Thesis by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Shirley Jacobs writes to inform me that the W E Johns Appreciation Society now has a website. It's clearly quite an active group -- there's a magazine, Biggles Flies Again, published twice a year, and regular meetings with the next in Derby on 24 October. Via the site, one can keep up with W. E. Johns, Biggles, Worrals et al in the press, or explore the wider world of Bigglesiana on the web. (Which introduced me to a site devoted to Popular Flying, a magazine edited by Johns which featured articles by a number of airpower writers familar to me, such as J. M. Spaight, E. Colston Shepherd, Arch Whitehouse and Nigel Tangye.)

At one point I had managed to work in a brief reference to Biggles in my thesis, but sadly had to cut it for reasons of space. So here's what I was going to say!

And even Biggles, the flying adventurer whose popularity with boys dates from this period, got into the act [of popularising the knock-out blow theory] in Biggles and the Black Peril (published 1935), foiling German plans to set up navigational beacons on the English coast in preparation for a sudden and massive air attack.

Planes, trains and police control rooms

7 July 2009 in Conferences and talks, Links by Brett Holman | 1 comment

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!

Speaking of phantom airships ...

30 May 2009 in Interviews, Links, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | 1 comment

Last year I was interviewed by Dan Vergano, science reporter for USA Today, for an article he was writing for Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine on the 1909 phantom airship wave. It's finally been published, in the July 2009 issue, and can also be read online. It's a lively and engaging overview of the episode, and features quotes from such experts on airships (both real and imaginary) as Robert Bartholomew, David Clarke and Guillaume de Syon. Go have a read!

There were giants in the earth in those days

31 March 2009 in Links, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | 14 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Recently, I followed Gavin Robinson's lead and tried out the British Library's EThOS beta. EThOS stands for Electronic Theses (dissertations) Online Service, and it's just what you'd expect from that -- an electronic thesis delivery service. There's not too much new about that, but EThOS does have some very impressive features. First is the scope: nearly all British Universities are participating (with two very major exceptions, unfortunately: Cambridge and Oxford). What's more, any thesis ever accepted in Britain is eligible for inclusion in the database, possibly going back to the 1600s, according to the FAQ. This could become a rich vein of primary source material for intellectual historians. Second is the fact that the theses have been OCRed, not just scanned. This means that you can do keyword searches on the PDFs, for example. Third is the fact that they are free! Mostly, anyway. If you only want an electronic copy, it's free (hardcopy costs, obviously). If the thesis you want hasn't been scanned yet, then you may be asked to contribute towards the cost of that, but in most cases, not. And it doesn't appear to matter whether you are in the UK or not (which is good, because I'm not).

As for the cryptic title above, one of the theses I downloaded was one I've long wanted to read but have never seen until now: Howard Roy Moon, The Invasion of the United Kingdom: Public Controversy and Official Planning 1888-1918 (London University, 1968). It's quite widely cited and I wondered why it hadn't been published. Now I know why: it's 735 pages long! I am suddenly feeling rather inadequate. Clearly, historians back then possessed superhuman powers. Or at least very strong arms, and hands adapted for furious typing and scribbling.

Getting away from it all

21 August 2008 in After 1950, Blogging and tweeting, Civil defence, Cold War, Links, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | 1 comment

It seems like forever since the last one, but it's only been two months. The (16th) Military History Carnival has been posted at the Osprey Blog. A few present-day items seem to have snuck in, but there's still plenty of history in there. My selection this time is about Burlington, at Underground, a rather beautiful photoblog about things underground. Burlington was a nuclear bunker in Wiltshire, built in the late 1950s to preserve continuity of government, should London fall to a knock-out blow nuclear strike. So there was room for the Prime Minister, some of the more important ministers and enough support staff to keep them and the country running for months. Underground links to another website with more information, including a fascinating internal phone directory from 1968, which shows just who was needed and who was not. The presence of 23 shipping officers and 12 for oil transport suggests that some semblance of national or even international economic transactions was anticipated. 50 fire control personnel, more than double those assigned to domestic and laundry duties, possibly seems excessive -- unless such time as they were actually needed, I suppose! On the other hand, a platoon of guards doesn't seem like much to defend the government with, but I guess it was more for internal security, and maybe there were more up top. 16 diplomatic staff -- maybe from the other 14 NATO members at the time, plus South Africa and Australia? And the biggest single contingent is for communications: a whopping 158 people. Which is a reminder of just how important it was to be able to talk to the outside world -- not much of a government if you can't tell anyone what to do -- and just how the technology has changed: you could probably run such a bunker with less than a tenth as many IT staff today ...

The Blitz on the web

11 August 2008 in 1940s, Links by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Recently I've come across a number of really good websites about the Blitz. Oddly, none of them are about London, but instead are about the experience of some of Britain's other blitzed cities. Maybe London is just too big a subject, and the smaller scale of the regional blitzes is more congenial to thorough exploration.

So here's the list:

I'd be grateful for any additions.

Flight back issues online

12 July 2007 in Links, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 9 comments

Via the WWII mailing list comes the welcome news that Flight International is putting its entire run of back issues online, as one searchable PDF per magazine page. So far, the following years have been scanned: 1909-1932, 1935-1940, 1948, 1955-1961, 1964, 1966-1968, 1997-2004. The archive can either be browsed (note that you have to click the "Next page" link to move to the next group of four page listings, which wasn't immediately obvious to me) or searched by keyword.

The significance of this is that Flight was one of the two major British aviation magazines throughout most of my period, and the longest-running (though not, I think actually the first: Pemberton Billing's short-lived Aerocraft has that honour). I've actually already looked at Flight, which is available at the SLV, so if I would rather have had the harder-to-find Aeroplane put online instead; but Australian holdings of the early issues of Flight are fragmentary so this is good too.

There are no charges for access, at least for now, which is surprising (and welcome). No indications that this will change in future, but it would probably be wise to make the most of this while it's free!

Australian War Memorial blogs!

22 June 2007 in Australia, Blogging and tweeting, Links by Brett Holman | 11 comments

This is very cool: the Australian War Memorial, Australia's foremost military history museum, seems to be getting into blogging in a big way! Today, there was an announcement on H-War (and Victoria's cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia's participation in the big Western Front battles of 1917: To Flanders Fields, 1917. It's maintained by a group of AWM curators and historians: Peter Burness, Craig Tibbitts, Shaune Lakin and Anne-Marie Condé.

That's all I was going to mention, but I noticed that the AWM has set up a subdomain called blog.awm.gov.au, which suggested that there might be other AWM blogs out there. Now, that page is completely blank, so I used my Google-fu to see if I could find anything else using that domainname. And there are four more blogs! Focus: photography & war 1945-2006; Gallipoli Battlefield Tour 2007; George Lambert: Gallipoli & Palestine Landscapes; Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse. All of them accompany AWM exhibitions, except for the Gallipoli tour one, obviously. Presumably they won't be updated after their associated exhibition ends, but then there'll be other blogs to replace them.

The AWM is to be applauded for this. They all look very interesting and are already well-established, with posts on a variety of intriguing topics, with some fantastic illustrations to boot (drawing on one of the Memorial's strengths there). A lot of effort has been put into them and it shows. But I wonder why I haven't come across any of these blogs before? Partly it's because I don't visit the AWM homepage often enough -- they're all listed there quite prominently (so much for Google-fu!) But another part of the answer would seem to be that the AWM's bloggers haven't tried to hook into the rest of the historioblogosphere -- there are no links to other blogs in their sidebars or posts (that I could see anyway). Whether this is by design or by accident I can't say -- I can see why they'd want to focus on their own content -- but I think they're missing out on promotional opportunities by neglecting the social networking aspect of blogging. Hopefully a bit of linkage in their direction will show them what they are missing.

I don't want to end on even that slightly sour note, as I do think this is really exciting, so I'll point to one post by Anne-Marie Condé which caught my eye. It's about the Australian War Records Section, formed in London in May 1917, effectively the origins of the AWM itself, and features some photographs and artefacts associated with it, such as a 1918-pattern pair of anti-gas goggles and a stuffed carrier pigeon. There's also some more good news: the AWM is digitising the war diaries of Australian Army units involved in the various wars of the twentieth century. The project is only its early days, but this is going to be a tremendous resource for historians and genealogists. I was disappointed, though, to discover that war diary entries don't begin with sentences like 'Dear war diary, today we launched another futile assault against Turkish positions at Lone Pine ...' :D

Bally typical ...

20 May 2007 in Links, Other by Brett Holman | No comments

... all those years of habitually talking like a pilot to the consternation of all and sundry, then somebody goes along and organises The First International Talk Like A Pilot Day and I go and miss it! It was yesterday, 19 May 2007. Wizard idea though, what -- absolutely spiffing. Next year I'll be there with bells on, and top button carefully undone.

They also provide a link to The Aircrew Dictionary, which purportedly describes how real RAF aircrew speak. Well, maybe Douglas Bader and Guy Gibson used such foul language, but I'm sure Kenneth More and Richard Todd would never have!

(Thanks to Jeremy Boggs for the tip.)

Air Force Historical Studies Office titles online

16 April 2007 in Books, Links by Brett Holman | 1 comment

The US Air Force Historical Studies Office has put up several dozen monographs on the history of the USAF and its predecessors, PDFs available for free download. It seems to be more narrowly focused than the similar effort by Air University Press, as only a few titles look like they might discuss the RAF in any detail: D-Day 1944: Air Power Over the Normandy Beaches and Beyond by Richard P. Hallion (1994), Preemptive Defense: Allied Air Power Versus Hitler's V-Weapons, 1943-1945 by Adam L. Gruen (1998) and, rather oddly, Coningham: A Biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham by Vincent Orange (1992). The most interesting, however, given a recent post here, is The Command of the Air by Giulio Douhet (1927, translated 1942). Via WWII mailing list.

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