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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!

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

… 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.)

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.

New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what’s interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There’s a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

Frederick Lanchester was a clever British engineer. He was one of the pioneers of the British automotive industry, but his main interest was in aviation, particularly aerodynamic theory. In my opinion, he has a good claim to be the first person to elucidate the knock-out blow concept, in his book Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm (London: Constable & Co., 1916) — which also happens to be a very early example of what was later termed operations or operational research. And as I’ve found out recently, he’s also a business guru in Japan!
Read the rest of this entry »

Scott W. Palmer, an associate professor at Western Illinois University, has a new book due out this month entitled Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. In 10 words or less, it’s about Russian airmindedness up to the end of 1945. This in itself is a good thing, but what makes it even better is that Scott has set up a website to promote the book (including excerpts in PDF format), as well as a blog, The Avia-Corner. In his first post, he explains that Dictatorship of the Air is not just a book, but

is meant to be the beginning of a conversation about the relationship between culture and technology and how this relationship has contributed to the development of the modern world. The “Avia-Corner” weblog is intended to further the discussion begun by [Dictatorship of the Air].

He also highlights a gallery of Soviet posters promoting airmindedness, which he has put online and plans to expand.

So, I welcome Scott into the tiny fraternity of aviation history bloggers, and look forward to more from him in the future!

If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States — 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can’t help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren … though I suppose the Defeat Siren (”If you can hear this, you’re already dead”) might not have sold so well!¹

1. Of course, nuclear war looked somewhat more winnable in the 1950s, and civil defence correspondingly less pointless, than was later the case. But still.

I was extremely flattered to be asked, along with a number of very fine history bloggers, by Cliopatria’s Ralph Luker to participate in a new group blog at the History News Network. We’ve called it Revise and Dissent and it’s been up and running for nearly a week now! Unfortunately, its launch has coincided with a lull in my blogging activity as I madly prepare for my talk on Wednesday, so I haven’t posted at R&D yet, but of course the nice thing about a group blog is that nobody will notice :)

Meanwhile, here are a few interesting blogs I’ve come across recently. I’m Too Sexy for My Master’s Thesis is a sentiment that most academic bloggers can relate to, I’m sure; but Rachel’s thesis topic sounds pretty sexy too, on the British Army’s Jewish Legion in the First World War. It’s very much a research blog, which is good to see. Cas Stavert of Only Two Rs is writing a novel set in the First World War, and also reading lots of early twentieth century British novels — which I’m finding very educational! (Via Great War Fiction.) Finally, Modern Mechanix extracts weird and wonderful articles and advertisements from old science magazines. Sadly they are all American, not British, but there is still much of interest to me. For example, check out this Italian gas mask for typists, or these early German and American radar devices. (Via Boing Boing.)

Air University Press, the publishing arm of the USAF’s Air University, has most of its books available in PDF format for free download. As one might expect, the subject matter is mostly American and recent, but some are on-topic for me, including Williamson Murray’s Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945, George K. Williams’ Biplanes and Bombsights: British Bombing in World War I, William Edward Fischer’s The Development of Military Night Aviation to 1919, and Philip S. Meilinger’s The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory and Airmen and Air Theory: A Review of the Sources.

New blog alert! Great War Fiction is the blog of George Simmers, a PhD student at Oxford Brookes. He’s working on fiction written during and after the First World War, particularly the representations of soldiers and ex-soldiers therein. He has only been blogging a couple of days, but already has four posts up, including the obligatory introduction. As I am reading a lot of war fiction from the period myself, I will be reading George’s blog with interest. (Via Break of Day in the Trenches.)

The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn’t recorded (as many early programmes were not), then it’s not in there.¹ But still, this is a most excellent resource for researchers. They’ve done it in a quite sophisticated way, too, all very Web 2.0 with RSS, RDF and tag clouds, and they have also done the right thing by allowing re-use of the data for non-commercial purposes (there must be some interesting possibilities for scraping). My only regret is that there is so little from my period; the archive evidently doesn’t start thickening out until the 1950s.

Some notes on getting around: searching could be easier, from an historian’s point of view. You can search by description, or contributor, which are useful, but there is no way to search a range of dates, nor is it set up for browsing dates. If you have a specific day in mind, then you can go straight to it by using a URI of the form http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd. For example to see what the archive has for 30 January 1965, the URI is http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/1965/01/30. To see what the catalogue has for a particular year, the best way would seem to be to go to the advanced search page and enter the desired year in the description field; the vast majority of results will actually be from later programmes, but the older ones will be at the bottom of the page. I’m sure searching will improve in future, after all it is a prototype, in the BBC’s very non-Web 2.0 language.

Here’s a few random things I’ve found:

• A Mr Adolf Hitler has appeared in 602 productions since the 1930s, most often alongside Hermann Goering, Franklin Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill. I imagine they were some sort of British Rat Pack or perhaps a troupe of comedians.
• The earliest recording in the catalogue looks to be The End of Savoy Hill, broadcast on 14 May 1932, a retrospective of the BBC’s first decade. Precisely because of the lack of recordings, it featured people like John Reith, Vita Sackville-West and Dick Sheppard re-reading things they’d said on the radio years before!
• Britain’s greatest gift to the world?

More here and here. Via Boing Boing.

1. Although, oddly enough, some future programmes seem to be listed.

A useful site about digitising your trip to the archives: Electronic Researcher. It was mentioned in a H-ALBION thread about which digital cameras are best for use in archives, and which archives allow them (British Library no, National Archives yes). I wish I’d found this earlier, as I have already bought a camera for this purpose, but I think it will be OK.

A most interesting query and ensuing discussion over on the H-War mailing list, about the so-called “Cuzaux effect”, which I haven’t heard of before:

In short, [the Cuzaux effect] is the side ways deviation of
a projectile trajectory when fired from a weapon in motion. In the late 1930’s, according to the article, it was discovered that this effect became so strong when a the bomber achieved the speed of 320 km/t and over, that its defensive armaments would have great difficulties when trying to hit an attacking fighter which came in with an angle larger than 30 degrees to the bomber’s own course. This was supposed to be one of the major blows to the so-called bomber-paradigm, formulated among others by British politician Stanley Baldwin in his words the bomber will always get through (1932). According to this, the speed, climbing rate and operational ceiling of bomber relative to fighter preformance were developing in favor of the former. Combined with heavy defensive weaponry, the bomber would be virtually invulnerable to fighter attack. In the Spanish civil war, it was discovered that even slower but more maneuverable biplanes were able to down faster bombers, and even fighters.

The above was written by Frode Lindgjerdet, who is writing a thesis on airpower theory in Norway in the interwar period, and came across the Cuzaux effect in an article from 1939 (no reference given).

Erik Lund provided the most informative reply: it’s probably spurious (it has to do with conservation of angular momentum, and the gyroscope equations — that takes me back!). Though I’m not sure about his remark that ‘it certainly did not refute the bomber orthodoxy, since it is a myth’. Myths can be influential too, so I don’t think it necessarily follows that the putative Cuzaux effect could not have ended the belief that the bomber will always get through. It may have done, for some people, whether erroneously or not, or at least caused them to reconsider the bomber paradigm (the dominance of which anyway can be overstated; see, eg, John Ferris, “Fighter defence before Fighter Command: the rise of strategic air defence in Great Britain, 1917-1934″, Journal of Military History 63 (1999), 845-84). It may not have filtered down to the public, though — a keyword search of The Times yields no hits for “Cuzaux”. Something to file away for future reference.

Update: the perils of liveblogging a mailing list. Firstly, it looks like the correct spelling is Cazaux, as there is a French military test airfield with that name, as Jonathan Beard pointed out (there are hits for this spelling in The Times now, though none relating to any Cazaux effect). And two posters (Ed Rudnicki and Will O’Neill) have pretty convincingly argued that the effect was not in fact mythical, but was already known of (it was called “jump”, at least by the Americans) and could be corrected for to a large extent by the more sophisticated gunsights.

Update 2: Further informative posts from Will O’Neill and Erik Lund.

A new addition to the historioblogosphere — and one very close to my own interests! It’s called The Blogger will always get through… and is the work of the indefatigable Peter Hibbs, who runs the amazingly exhaustive and informative NBCD (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence) site, primarily (but not exclusively) covering Britain in the era of the world wars. As Peter relates, the blog

records my thoughts on odd subjects related to the development of this website, Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare, Air Raid Precautions/Civil Defence and anything else that happens to grab my interest.

He’s actually been blogging since the start of the year, so there’s already a goodly number of posts to go through: highlights for me so far include the things people leave in their gas masks, beating air raid sirens into washing machines and a possible public air raid shelter in Norbury. Anyone who is interested in Airminded’s subject matter will likely find it worth their while to read The Blogger will always get through… too, so do yourself a favour and check it out!

PS Bonus points for the blog’s name … very punny indeed.

David Edgerton wrote in to let me know that he has made his 1991 book England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation available online as a resource for students and scholars (though it may go back into print at some stage). It can be found through his publications page, or the direct link is here.¹

This is good to see; it’s an important book for my area of study (though I already have a copy of my own, natch!) and one of the few to try to step back and see the bigger picture of how the aeroplane fits into English society, culture, politics, industry and, of course, the warfare state. I re-read it at the start of working on my thesis (and summarised it in a previous post), and bits like ‘English airmindedness has not been treated in detail, but the best sources are …’ (pp. 126-7) set me to thinking. And the rest, as they say, is a history PhD. Or will be.

1. They clearly don’t like static, human-readable URIs at Imperial College, so if the above links don’t work, try going through the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine home page.

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.

Among other things, the Fathom Archive has an online seminar on Early Contributions to Aviation. Of most interest to me is this 1960 oral history interview with Sir Thomas Sopwith (of Sopwith Camel fame, among other things): he highlights the role of the First World War in forcing aviation technology. Whoever transcribed the interview clearly didn’t know much about the history of British aviation, as there are all sorts of strange goofs in it (most obviously, “1 1/2 Strutta” instead of “1 1/2 Strutter“; the others are left as an exercise for the reader!) But that just shows the value of providing the actual source - as Fathom does here, in the form of an audio recording of the interview in RealPlayer format. (Via Early Modern Notes.)

Oh yes he does.

Actually this is from a great site, www.biggles.info, which has the front covers and illustrations from all 98 (!) Biggles books, along with plot summaries if you can’t be bothered reading them all. (The covers are on the main page.) The main site, www.wejohns.com, gives the same treatment to all the other creations of Captain W.E. Johns,¹ not excluding Biggles’ feminine counterpart Worrals of the WAAF. I had no idea he wrote so many - he even tried his hand at science fiction. Perhaps I’m being unkind, but I’m picturing some overly-jovial chap going on a jaunt through space to give the bally Martians what-for. Eh?

1. It turns out he wasn’t a captain after all, but only a lowly flying officer. Must all one’s childhood illusions be shattered?

Tips on how to complete a PhD, at Crooked Timber.

Chronomedia is a very nicely done chronology of developments in just about all forms of audio-visual mass media, covering a wide span but inevitably concentrating on Britain and America in the 20th century. Lots of interesting little tit-bits: the first film shot from an aircraft in flight was in September 1908; while in September 1939, British cinemas were closed to prevent mass casualties in the event of air raids - after a couple of weeks, they were open again, which I guess shows just how long it took people to realise that the knock-out blow wasn’t actually imminent!

One thing I find fascinating is how rapidly television was developing in Britain (as well as in Germany and the United States) before the war: John Logie Baird’s London studio broadcast a television play as early as 1930, entitled The man with a flower in his mouth (about which, see The World’s Earliest Television Recordings Restored); while the BBC’s first female television presenter was a Miss Elizabeth Cowell in August 1936. Of course, many of these transmissions were just experiments, but a regularly scheduled service from the Alexandra Palace began later in 1936, which continued until 1 September 1939.

There are some reminiscences of these pioneering broadcasts at Television Heaven, culled from a book by television critic Kenneth Baily, Here’s Television (1950). There was no nightly news, but the latest Gaumont and Movietone newsreels were shown several times a week. Other than that, current events and concerns were addressed, after a fashion. The programme for Armistice Day 1936 was described in the Evening News:

From the London Television Station last night was broadcast the most deeply-moving Armistice Day programme I have ever heard from the BBC. It took the form of scenes from the German film ‘West Front 1918,’ followed by scenes in England in peace-time, and it ended on that note of dedication for the prevention of another catastrophe which most people have felt so strongly this Armistice anniversary. These vivid, and at times terrible pictures, were accompanied by an admirable commentary spoken by Cecil Lewis . . .

As that page also notes, one of the first outside broadcasts featured a very small-scale air raid defence exercise!

Within ten weeks of the start of television, Cecil Lewis had taken cameras outside, at night. He provided an actuality programme about anti-aircraft defence. The 61st (11th London)AA Brigade RA demonstrated two ack-ack guns; and the 36th AA Battalion RE handled three searchlights, while RAF planes were specially flown over the Palace.

This co-operative “exercise” staged “a short action repelling the attack of hostile aircraft.” The very wording of that programme announcement breathed something of the oddity which most of us found in an exploit that seemed far from reality in 1936. Four years later the flash and crackle of a much mightier barrage surrounded the Alexandra Palace, and echoed through television studios emptied by a real war.

One would like to know why this subject was chosen … was it just because the sounds and images were dramatic, or was it intended as a reassurance that all was well (since the bombers were repelled)? Maybe both.

Finally, an indication of just who was watching these shows can be found from a BBC viewer survey in mid-1939 (by which time the total audience was an estimated 20,000):

The returns surprised the BBC in showing that television viewing was not confined to any one income group. Taking a sample of 1,200 of the questionnaires, it was found that 28 had been filled in by labourers; and scores were returned by shopkeepers, salesmen and school teachers.

There were more working- and lower middle-class viewers than expected (though still a minority), which is interesting given the expense involved (eg 48 guineas for a 15-inch 1939 Cossor - though it also doubled as a radio! See Television History - The First 75 Years for more.) Still, 20,000 is a tiny number of viewers, especially when you consider that in 1939 there were 990 million cinema admissions! That’s a whole lotta Clark Gable.

This logically should have gone into the previous post about archives, but I got carried away working out what that air mail poster was about! But I had intended to mention two online archives of British newsreels: British Pathe and Movietone (slogan: “It speaks for itself”). These are great. You can search the descriptions for key words - Hendon, say, or “air raid” (or even something not aviation-related, if you are so inclined!) - and turn up all sorts of gems, like a 1923 reel showing off ‘London’s air defences’,¹ or many items about air raids during the Spanish civil war. Or one from 1938 about a ’seventy-shilling air raid shelter’, which a Mr Matthews built in his backyard: it could be made gas-proof, and doubled as a playshed for the kids.² My favourite is from 1929, about a French air defence technique: covering an entire town in clouds of smoke, to hide it from the enemy bombers!³

The best part is that you can view (and often hear) the newsreels for free! If you wanted to use stills or clips in a documentary or publication, you’d have to pay. However, the online previews should be fine for most research purposes (and you can even save the British Pathe ones onto your hard drive). The search engines and the video playback can be cranky sometimes, but if you start again it will probably work better.

There’s a good overview of the history of the British newsreel at the British Universities Film & Video Council, including summaries of the different series that were made, what has survived and where they can be found. There are still several major newsreel titles that don’t appear to have been digitised yet (eg Gaumont, Paramount); hopefully that’s only a matter of time. Newsreels were an important news medium until well after the Second World War. They had a weekly audience of millions and had an immediacy that radio and newspapers could not match (on the flipside, though, they lacked the timeliness of the former and most importantly the depth of the latter). These digitised archives make it that much easier for the historian to understand just what was being presented to the public in the many thousands of newsreels that were produced up to 1979.

1. British Pathe 314.17.
2. Movietone 33260.
3. British Pathe 892.09.

Check out Rosebud’s WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive for thousands of wonderful contemporary images of pre-1920 aircraft. Here are a couple, particularly relevant to my interests.

According to the caption, these are the Zeppelins “L 13, L 12, and L 10 on a bombing mission” - clearly taken from a fourth Zeppelin. If this was a raid on Britain, it would have to be that of the night of 9/10 August 1915, according to Cole and Cheeseman the only time when all three airships were on the same mission (and there were two other airships along on the same raid, L9 and L11). It would have to be near the start of the mission, as it’s still light enough for the photo to be taken, and anyway the airships would have separated as they neared the English coast.

Again according to the caption, a “Gotha G.IV of KG3 in flight over London”. Whether true or not, it’s how a Gotha would have looked to frightened Londoners in the summer of 1917 … if it was flying particularly low, anyway! The original source for the photo is evidently here, also well worth a look.

A couple of extremely informative websites I’ve just come across: Airshipsonline, home of the Airship Heritage Trust, dealing with most British airships since 1900 (wot, no Willows airships?); and Imperial Airways, home of the HP 42 project, which aims to build a flying replica of the British Handley Page 42 “Hannibal” biplane airliner of the 1920s and 1930s. If it were my project, I’d recreate one of Imperial’s Empire-class flying boats instead, way cooler than the HP 42 which, apparently, people were embarrased to be seen flying in at the time. They did not compare favourably to all those sleek European and American monoplanes. (On the other hand, Le Corbusier did include a photo of a HP 42 in his 1935 book Aircraft, on aeroplanes as expressions of modernity.) But it’s not my project, and a good thing too, because I haven’t got a hundreth of the energy these guys have - their previous triumph being the Vimy replica I’ve posted about previously. Seriously, I’d love to see this fly. Best of luck to them!