Maps

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Where again?

19 May 2012 in 1910s, Australia, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | 1 comment


View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I've used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is January and February; red, March; green, April; cyan, May; yellow, June; purple, July; magenta, August through November. There are too many for Google Maps to show at once in an embedded map (without me learning JavaScript) but the rest can be seen here. Each icon is named for the location and has an attached date, but no other information. I dithered over which map mode to use but in the end settled on good old satellite mode, as it gives an idea of the terrain but also has good social data such as roads and towns (even if these are from 2012, not 1918). Of course you can switch between them yourself.
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The last flight of the Patrie

19 April 2012 in 1900s, Aircraft, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Patrie

The Lebaudy-built Patrie, seen above, was France's first military airship. A descendent of the Jaune, in 1906 and 1907 it carried out a number of successful proving and publicity flights, including one where it carried the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, over Paris. Afterwards it was moved to its operational base near the fortress of Verdun. Due to a mechanical failure during a subsequent flight it had to ground in the open, far from the safety of its hangar. A gale blew up, and even one hundred and eighty soldiers were unable to hold the stricken airship down. At 8pm on 30 November 1907, the Patrie floated off into the distance, fortunately sans crew.
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Ending Hendon -- VI: 1935-1937

2 December 2011 in 1930s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Videos by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Flight, 27 June 1935, 725

My main interest in this series about the RAF Displays at Hendon has been in the set pieces with which they ended. But as this is the last post it's worth looking a bit at the organisation of the Display itself. Flight had some useful articles for this in its preview of the 15th Display, held on Saturday, 29 June 1935. Above is a map showing the aerodrome, the seating arrangements, car parks, access roads and Colindale tube, which opened in 1924 and was a major boon for visitors to the Display. (For those who have been to the area more recently -- say to the RAF Museum or British Library Newspapers -- it's interesting to compare how the area has changed.) We can see from the seating plans some of the groups the RAF was trying to impress: there are boxes for the House of Commons, the House of Lords and public schools -- presumably with an eye to future officer recruitment. Private boxes seating six could be booked for between £4 and £7 (depending on location?); at the other end of the spectrum the groundlings could buy tickets for the least exclusive enclosures on the day for 2s., or a spot on a hillside overlooking the aerodrome for 1s. Attendance peaked in 1931 at 169,000 (bringing in £27,585 6s. 11d.), though including onlookers sitting in places where they didn't have to pay the figure came up to around 500,000 (or so Flight reckoned). The organisation of the Display was a year-round affair, with the 'display office' being closed only for a couple of weeks in August. The programme is 'usually settled fairly exactly by the beginning of the year', but by whom is not clear. The whole thing is overseen by a 'Display Committee' headed by Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham; the 'Flying-Subcommittee' chaired by Air Vice-Marshal Joubert de la Ferté handles the exciting bits; and the 'General Purposes Committee', of which Air Commodore B. C. H. Drew is secretary, organises everything else -- ticketing, liaison with transport and police, construction, etc.
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History never repeats

16 June 2011 in 1910s, 1940s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Reprisals, Rumours by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Daily Mirror, 29 August 1940, 4

But sometimes, it rhymes.

The above map, accompanying an article entitled 'BOMB THESE TEN TOWNS!', was published on page 4 of the Daily Mirror on 29 August 1940. It rhymes with this map published in the Daily Mail twenty-three years before:
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Frightfulness for schrecklichkeit?

16 June 2011 in 1910s, Australia, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Reprisals, Rumours, Words by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Daily Mail, 15 June 1917, 6

Previously, I identified a comparison between the reprisals debate in the First World War and the reprisals debate during the Blitz as something I could do that previous writers have not (except in passing, or implicitly). I won't have time in my AAEH paper for a full-blown comparative approach, or for that matter time before then to do the research; though perhaps I could for a version for publication. But it's something I can do briefly, and it helps that I already covered this in my thesis, where I looked at the British press reactions to the Gotha summer in 1917.
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More THATCamp thoughts

26 March 2011 in Archives, Australia, Blogging and tweeting, Conferences and talks, Maps, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 1 comment

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

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

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

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

Monday, 7 October 1940

7 October 2010 in 1940s, Civil defence, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2, Radio, Reprisals by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Daily Mail, 7 October 1940, 1

'RAF PREPARING A GREAT NEW BOMBING OFFENSIVE', Daily Mail, page 1:

POWERFUL new R.A.F. bombers now being produced in great numbers and an amazing new long-range fighter are likely to be used, in the immediate future, for a greatly intensified bombing offensive over Germany.

Hitler's people can look forward to more than a taste of the medicine their Luftwaffe is administering over here.

'Shortest Raid. LONDON ALERT LASTS 20 MINS.':

LONDON had its usual air-raid warning half-an-hour than usual last night. It proved to be the shortest after-dark "Alert" since the blitzkrieg began, lasting barely 20 minutes.

And it was followed by the longest period of quiet.

'2-TONS OF BOMBS RAIN ON KRUPPS':

TWO tons of bombs were rained on the great Krupps arms works at Essen during a lightning high-altitude attack by the R.A.F. in Saturday night.

[...]

They started a trail of fire across Germany's oil plants and railway yards, blasting the docks in Holland, and set the French coast aflame from Dunkirk to Boulogne.

'Nazis Lose More Than They Kill':

LORD CROFT of Bournemouth, Under-Secretary for War, revealed yesterday:

"It is believed that ten days ago a single British submarine sent more German soldiers to their doom than all the British deaths caused by German airmen in the whole month of August.

[...]

"It is highly probable that far more German war factory workers have lost their lives than the total losses inflicted on our civilians from air attack."

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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

Wednesday, 18 September 1940

18 September 2010 in 1940s, Civil defence, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2 by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Manchester Guardian, 18 September 1940, 5

The Prime Minister gave a speech on the war situation to the House of Commons yesterday, which I'll come back to. The Manchester Guardian has a lot on the air war, of course (5). A big wave of enemy raiders, consisting of 'more than 200 Messerschmitt and Heinkel fighters' was broken up over Kent yesterday afternoon, getting no farther than Maidstone. Losses were small on both sides, however (possibly due to the heavy clouds and the '100-mile-an-hour gale' they fought in): seven German aeroplanes were shot down, and three British. Unusually, the defenders' record was nearly as good at night: anti-aircraft guns accounted for four enemy aircraft before midnight, and fighters one. The Luftwaffe dropped bombs central London, including the West End ('There was considerable aerial activity near Green Park'), and also on 'a South-East England village':

One dropped in a roadway, making a crater and causing considerable damage to houses and a number of casualties, some of them fatal. A couple and their four children had a remarkable escape when their house collapsed and they were buried in the wreckage.

So it's not just the big cities which are having to 'take it'.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

Sunday, 15 September 1940

15 September 2010 in 1940s, Ephemera, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2 by Brett Holman | 1 comment

Observer, 15 September 1940, 7

If it's Sunday, this must be the Observer. Here are all the headlines from the main news page, page 7.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

Sunday, 1 September 1940

1 September 2010 in 1940s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2 by Brett Holman | 12 comments

Observer, 1 September 1940, 7

The New Statesman was a little off in its belief that the Germans have given up 'blitzkrieg' tactics, as yesterday they renewed their heavy daylight assaults against RAF aerodromes. According to the Observer (above, 7) they also targeted 'women shoppers' in two places near or in London.

On page 8, there's a handy map to help readers keep track of the strategy of the 'Battle of Britain' -- the hatched areas are the 'principal industrial areas' in each country.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

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