Maps

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61-67 Warrington Crescent, 8 March 1918

7 March 2010 in 1910s, 1930s, Maps, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

61-67 Warrington Crescent

This is Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, on the morning of 8 March 1918, after it had been hit by a 1-ton bomb dropped by a Giant bomber the night before — one of the largest to fall on London during the First World War and the most materially destructive. Twelve people were killed (including Lena Ford, who wrote the words to the song “Keep the home fires burning”). It was the first air raid to come in the dark of the moon and, fortunately, the second-last of the war.
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The invasion of The Invasion of 1910

4 October 2009 in 1900s, Books, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 7 comments

The Invasion of 1910

William le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 is today one of the best-remembered of the Edwardian invasion novels (at least to anyone interested in the topic). Not because of any literary value — very few people read it today, and I can’t blame them — but because of its contemporary success. It was commissioned by the press magnate Lord Northcliffe and serialised in his Daily Mail in 1906. And heavily promoted in all his papers, as we can see here — this is a full page ad from The Times (13 March 1906, 11). The Invasion of 1910 was a huge hit, selling many newspapers and over a million books in a couple of dozen languages, making it the most successful future war story since The Battle of Dorking back in 1871. Northcliffe being Northcliffe, there was also a political objective: the scuppering of the government’s proposed Territorial Force, which was widely derided by Conservatives as an ineffective substitute for conscription (sorry, ‘national service’). The ad and the book both feature a personal recommendation by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, president of the National Service League.
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Why we fought?

22 June 2009 in 1940s, Art, Australia, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

KEEP IT WHITE / Argus, 9 December 1941, p. 4

The editorial cartoon from the Melbourne Argus of 9 December 1941, the issue which reported the Japanese landings in Malaya and air raid on Pearl Harbor. I guess it’s nice to know I can still be surprised, though, of course, there’s really no reason why I should have been.

PB and C3I

5 May 2009 in 1910s, Books, Civil defence, Maps, Pictures by Brett Holman | 16 comments

Air War and How to Wage It

Noel Pemberton Billing has received a bit of criticism around here, and mostly for good reason. He couldn’t design a decent aeroplane for toffee, he peddled lurid conspiracy theories, he was a relentless self-promoter. But I don’t think he was a complete fool. He clearly had a fertile imagination (overly so, Maud Allen would have said) and sometimes he was on the money. Take his ideas for Britain’s air defence, as expounded in his 1916 pamphlet Air War: How to Wage It.

There were two major problems at the time. The first was that Zeppelins were raiding British cities and weren’t being intercepted, despite the existence of a substantial home defence establishment. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be intercepted, but that they couldn’t be intercepted consistently. (Shooting them down was another a problem, of course.) The problem was one of command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I, though you can add letters to taste). Information about incoming Zeppelins and their locations usually wasn’t timely or accurate, making it hard for fighters to find them in the dark. And most squadrons were based near the coast, meaning that the enemy was usually past the defences by the time the alarm was raised.

The second problem was that because the targets of the raiders were difficult to determine — and for that matter, the Zeppelin crews themselves often didn’t know where they were and dropped their bombs almost at random — as a precaution alerts had to be sounded and lights blacked-out over large areas of the country. This disrupted sleep and production far more than was necessary.

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The canals of Mars, 1962

15 March 2009 in 1900s, 1920s, After 1950, Before 1900, Maps, Pictures, Space, Tools by Brett Holman | 10 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell’s maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi’s more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick’s brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I’ve seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor’s old observations to compile MEC-1. So it’s no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn’t live to witness Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

Down under up over

26 January 2009 in 1910s, Art, Australia, Maps by Brett Holman | 5 comments


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It’s Australia Day today, so here’s a map of the land down under, appropriately enough upside down. But the map itself is on a hillside in a land up over — near Compton Chamberlayne in Wiltshire to be precise. It was carved from the chalk downs in 1916 or 1917 by Australian troops who were billeted nearby. A reminder of home, or a great big (60 metres across) ‘we were here’? More the latter, I’d say, since it’s not the only chalk figure carved in the area during the war, and the other ones (at nearby Fovant) are all regimental or other military badges. One of them is the Australian Army Badge, the ‘Rising Sun’ (zoom out to see the rest):
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Where the rockets fell

17 January 2009 in 1940s, Maps by Brett Holman | 8 comments


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Via Northwest History, Londonist has started plotting London’s V2 strikes in Google Maps. Where available, the pop-up has the date, casualties, photos and links. It’s incomplete, but updates are promised. See also the Flickr set of LCC bomb damage maps on which it is based, and a tool to find the five closest impact sites to a given address. All very cool. I see that a V2 hit a St Pancras church on 9 February 1945, killing 34 — a spot I walked past often when I was staying in Bloomsbury (yet another thing I missed). Though I suppose I’m not particularly enlightened by knowing that the closest a V2 came to hitting Melbourne was Romford …

Two barrages

9 December 2008 in 1910s, Books, Maps, Pictures, Words by Brett Holman | 6 comments

One of the things I love about the official history of the RFC and RAF in the First World War is all the maps — multi-panel fold-out jobs showing where bombs fell in London during the Gotha raids, or the Allied front in Macedonia. That’s not to mention the accompanying slip-cases stuffed full of more maps of the paths taken by Zeppelin raiders and the like. I could pore over these for hours …

Here are a couple of the maps (or parts thereof) showing two different kinds of barrages associated with the air defence of Britain.

Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.

The first one is entitled ‘Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.’ It’s too big to show effectively, so I’ve just reproduced a portion showing the coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The red squares show home defence squadron HQs: 33 Squadron at Gainsborough and 76 Squadron at Ripon. The red triangles are flight stations, the red stars flight stations with searchlights, the blue circles are searchlight stations under squadron control (‘aeroplane lights’) and the black circles are warning control centres (Hull).

As I’ve discussed before, artillery barrages weren’t the only kinds of barrages. Originally they seem to have just been barriers or walls of some kind (barrage originally referred to a dam). Here the barrage is composed of aeroplanes and searchlights, a wall erected to hopefully bar Zeppelins coming in over the North Sea from reaching the industrial cities behind the line. And it does look like a barrier: on the full map it stretches from Suttons Farm (later renamed Hornchurch) near London all the way up to Innerwick, east of Edinburgh (with extensions in Norfolk and Kent). But it’s not a physical barrage, for the most part — it’s aerodromes and searchlights. Previously, home defence squadrons had been placed close to target areas, because of doubts about night navigation and interception. Experience had shown that these problems weren’t as great as previously thought:

Now that it was clear the aeroplane patrols could be extended, it was suggested that the Flights situated near Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds should be moved farther east as a step towards the ultimate establishment of a barrage-line of aeroplanes and searchlights parallel with the east coast of England.1

This system worked very well against Zeppelins (as one indication, note the steep drop in casualties due to airship raids from 1917 on). But not so well against Gothas.
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  1. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 166. The map faces 170.

Friday, 30 September 1938

1 October 2008 in 1930s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

AGREEMENT SIGNED AT MUNICH / Full Text of Terms / GERMAN OCCUPATION TO BEGIN TO-MORROW / New Czech State 'Guaranteed' / Manchester Guardian, 30 September 1938, p. 11

The hopes which were raised yesterday by the announcement of a four-power conference at Munich appear to have been justified (Manchester Guardian, p. 11). An agreement has been reached between Britain, Germany, France and Italy that the Sudetenland will be transferred in stages to Germany between tomorrow and 10 October. The installations in these areas are to remain intact. An international commission will decide if any other areas should hold plebsicites to decide whether they should also be transferred to Germany, to be held by the end of November. France and Britain guarantee the new Czech borders; Germany and Italy will do so once the Polish and Hungarian claims on Czech territory have been resolved. War has been averted!

Maybe. The Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent thinks (p. 11) that the agreement is only provisional, and whereas Germany was about to take all of Czechoslovakia, ‘it will now take her the whole winter and perhaps the spring to get all she wants’. Moreover, ‘many hold that a “next time” is now inevitable’. The leading article in The Times (p. 13), while generally positive, further notes that Czechoslovakia has not yet given its consent. And the outcome is hardly a discouraging precedent for the use of force in international affairs, since the threat of it has been present all along. Still, crowds at public gatherings across London cheered and clapped (Manchester Guardian, p. 11) and it’s not hard to understand why. What is hard to understand, at least for the leader-writer for the Daily Mail (p. 10), is how anyone could be less than pleased with the Munich agreement:

The Council of Munich has aroused angry protests from that professedly peace-loving body, the League of Nations Union. They cry shrilly of “menace” and “betrayal” in a resolution filled with malice against the Four-Power meeting. Cannot these fire-eaters give the statesmen a chance? Or are they determined on war at any price?

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Wednesday, 7 September 1938

7 September 2008 in 1930s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis by Brett Holman | 10 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

TERMS OF CZECH OFFER / Nine Points Conceding Most Sudeten Demands / EXTENSIVE SELF-GOVERNMENT / Proposals Would be Put in Force as Soon as Possible / Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1938, p. 9

At last, after all the endless reports of meetings to seemingly no end: actual details! As the above — from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) — shows, the Czech autonomy proposals (first reported yesterday) were pretty generous. The Sudetens (and presumably other minorities) would get self-government, language equality, their own civil servants and police. I’m not sure what the ‘Protection for citizens against denationalization’ means — more likely something about the right to a passport than maintaining state ownership of industry!

The proposals also include ‘Guarantees for the integrity of the frontier and the unity of the State’, which seems reasonable enough. But a (later to become infamous) leading article in The Times suggests an alternative (p. 13):

In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race. In any case the wishes of the population concerned would seem to be a decisively important element in any solution that can hope to be regarded as permanent, and the advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German districts of the borderland.

There it is: the first time (at least in my sources) that the idea of the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany — the solution eventually adopted at Munich — was raised in the British press. The Times was often thought, somewhat unfairly, to be especially close to the British government, so a suggestion like this will make people sit up and take notice.
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