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Houdini over Australia

18 March 2010 in 1900s, 1910s, Aircraft, Australia, Periodicals, Videos by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Harry Houdini is still famous as a magician and escapologist, but he was also a pioneer aviator. One hundred years ago today, on 18 March 1910, he carried out the first powered, controlled flight in Australia, at Diggers Rest, near Melbourne. This testimonial from witnesses appeared in the Melbourne Argus, 19 March 1910, 18:

To Whom It May Concern.

Diggers’ Rest,
near Melbourne,
18/3/1910.

We, the undersigned, do hereby testify to the fact that on the above date, about 8 o’clock a.m., we witnessed Harry Houdini in a Voisin biplane (a French heavier than air machine) make three successful flights of from 1min. to 3½min., the last flight being of the lastmentioned duration. In his various flights he reached an altitude of 100ft., and in his longest flight traversed a distance of more than two miles.

(Signed)
HAROLD J. JAGELMAN, Kogarah, N.S.W.
ROBERT HOWIE, Diggers’ Rest.
A. BRASSAC, Paris.
WALTER P. SMITH, 4 Blackwood-street, North Melbourne.
F. ENFIELD SMITHELLS, care of Union Bank, Melbourne.
RALPH C. BANKS, Melbourne, motor garage.
FRANZ KUKOL, Vienna.
V. L. VICKERY, Highgate, England.
JOHN H. JORDAN, 11 Francis-street, Ascot-vale.

Houdini was on a tour of Australia, and the flight was undertaken to generate publicity for him. But it wasn’t undertaken on a whim: he bought and flew the Voisin in Germany the previous year, and had it crated up and shipped out to Australia.

This film shows Houdini on a later flight over Sydney, probably from Rosehill Racecourse. (My first YouTube upload; I took it from Hargrave.) After leaving Australia, he never flew again.

As with any aviation first, there are other claimants for the title of first to fly in Australia. Colin Defries, for example, demonstrated powered flight, but not controlled flight, in Sydney on 9 December 1909: he got up into the air but crashed it. Defries was British; the first Australian to fly (and in an Australian-built aeroplane too) was John Robertson Duigan, later in 1910. David Crotty, a curator at Museum Victoria, discusses some of these issues here; Scienceworks has just opened a new exhibition featuring some artifacts from Defries’ aeroplane (its engine was dumped into Port Phillip Bay to avoid import duty!)

I tend to favour Houdini’s claims, but that may be because Diggers Rest was my first hometown :) Celebrations are being held there this week — the Festival of Flight — including flying displays and (appropriately) magic shows.

Self-help in an air raid

15 March 2010 in 1910s, 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 11 comments

The following letter appeared in the Evening News, 13 March 1935, 6:

On the brick wall at the side of our street door can still be seen faintly two large letters, “P. P.,” which stood for Poplar Patrol. Every Friday night it was my job to collect 3d. from each house-hold that belonged to the “P.P.” This paid for rent, fire and refreshments for our small front room, where three men, each in his turn, used to sit up every night.

In the event of a raid, as soon as they got the first warning they used to run and knock on every door where there was “P.P.”

– From Mrs. G. Stillwell, 9, Finnymore-road, Dagenham, Essex

Air-raid alerts in the First World War were highly variable in both form and usefulness: depending on the time and the place, they might include Boy Scout buglers, police cyclists wearing signs saying ‘TAKE COVER’, or maroons which sounded something like bombs going off. Government authorities dithered over whether it was even advisable to give warnings, since they could lead to unnecessary anxiety and (perhaps more importantly) lost sleep. So it was possible for civilians to not know there was an air-raid alert on at all, particularly if they were already asleep. I assume this was the reason for the Poplar Patrol: any family concerned about caught in their beds when the Zeppelins or Gothas came could subscribe their 3d. a week and be assured of a loud knock on the door, whatever the government was or wasn’t doing that week.

I think Samuel Smiles would have approved of this form of community self-help. On the other hand, it might be hard luck for those who didn’t (or couldn’t) pay up, if a bomb fell in their street. I wonder if voluntary civil defence schemes like this created local schisms between the ins and the outs, as the more inclusive (but still mostly voluntary) air-raid precautions of the 1930s and 1940s did to a degree.

A minor question: why ‘Poplar’? Poplar and Dagenham are both in east London, but aren’t particularly close to each other. In fact, Dagenham wasn’t considered part of London until 1926. My guess is that it is a reference to the shocking tragedy of the Upper North Street School in Poplar, which was hit by a Gotha’s bomb on 13 June 1917. Eighteen children were killed, including sixteen 5- and 6-year olds. For a long time, the Poplar infants school symbolised the horrors of the new warfare, just as Guernica did after 1937.

War games: deja vu edition

19 February 2010 in 1930s, 1940s, Games and simulations, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 10 comments

Compare and contrast. The Daily Mail in 2007:

During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set.

But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent.

In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as young as four were encouraged to blow up settlements by firing a spring-driven ball on to a board featuring a map of Britain and the tip of Northern Europe.

Players were awarded a maximum 100 points for landing on London, while Liverpool was worth 40.

And the Daily Mail in 2010:

British children of the time were playing marbles and hidding [sic] in air raid shelters.

But for youngsters under the Third Reich, this board game was invented to teach them the tactics of warfare – against a British foe.

The war time amusement, Adlers Luftverteidigungs spiel, which translates as the Eagle Air Defence Game, involves two or more players attacking enemy positions on a geographically illustrated board while defending friendly territory.

The supposed contrast between pacifist British kids and militarist German kids is as silly now as it was then. Apparently the Daily Mail hasn’t learned anything in the interim. (I checked to see if the same person was responsible for both, but the new article is credited to the improbably-named “DAILY MAIL REPORTER”.) The only difference is in the quality of the comments: last time they took the writer to task for his foolishness, now they’re almost spEak You’re bRanes-worthy.

No doubt there were differences between British and German games of the period — it’s hard to imagine any British equivalent of the 1936 game Juden Raus, where the aim is to force the Jews in your town to emigrate to Palestine — but simplistic dichotomies (as the Daily Mail seems to be fond of) are not going to help us understand what they were.

The red balloon scare of 1940

12 February 2010 in 1940s, Archives, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 7 comments

I hadn’t come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and ‘Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time’. Including this:

At the end of the Meeting there was a reference to a scare which had started through a red balloon floating about in the Eastern Counties. This balloon had been sent up for meteorological purposes, but it had apparently given rise to a scare that gas balloons were being let loose by the Germans. The London Passenger Transport Board had told their employees to be ready to put on their gas-masks!

It seems they weren’t particularly concerned by this incident, despite what it might have said about the fragility of morale. The scare wasn’t kept secret; the Manchester Guardian had already reported it that morning (p. 7), with some extra details:

“ENEMY GAS”
Harmless Balloons Start Rumours

Extraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas.

At King’s Lynn (Norfolk) these stories led to the police issuing the following statement:–

The enemy has dropped balloon toys which may contain gas, highly inflammable, and explode on being touched or handled by lines attached. Police and observer corps should be informed if any are found.

The balloons are used for testing atmospheric conditions and occasionally they sink to the ground without bursting. They are harmless except that they contain hydrogen, and are therefore likely to explode if brought into contact with a naked flame.

So the story is that British meteorologists launched some weather balloons which came down in the eastern parts of England and Scotland. Passers-by found them, thought them suspicious, and reported them to authorities, which in turn made public statements that they were dangerous German weapons — either incendiary devices or actual poison gas bombs. In more normal times, it’s unlikely that a stray weather balloon would be interpreted as something dangerous, just something curious. Now, with the war strangely calm and the expected bombers nowhere to be seen, it’s more understandable that people would be jittery and overreact to mundane (if rare) sights (it had happened before and would happen again). And it certainly had to be considered that the Germans might try to use some sort of secret weapon against Britain. But the fact that the scare seems to have happened simultaneously in widely separated places — London, Norfolk, Scotland — suggests that there was something else going on too. Was the Met Office trying out a new balloon design? Perhaps it was the red colour mentioned in the War Cabinet discussion which made the balloons look especially sinister? Anyway, it’s another scare to add to my list.

PS I think I should get credit for not mentioning Nena. Until now.

Air men of The Times

16 December 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Periodicals by Brett Holman | No comments

I’ve just had a go at working out who held the influential position of aeronautical correspondent (or air correspondent, in later years) for The Times for its first third of a century or so. No names were used in the articles themselves, so the easiest way to find them seems to be through the obituary columns of The Times. Here’s what I’ve managed to come up with, along with their years of service and the date of their obituary:

  • Harry Delacombe, 1907-1910. Obituary: 21 January 1959.
  • Hubert Walter, at least 1915-1916, perhaps 1914-1917. Obituary: 22 December 1933.
  • Colin Cooper, 1919? Obituary: 30 March 1938.
  • Ronald Carton, c.1919-1923. Obituary: 11 July 1960.
  • C.G. Colebrook, 1923-1930. Obituary: 30 August 1930.
  • E. Colston Shepherd, 1929-1939. Obituary: 2 August 1976.
  • [Edit: Oliver Stewart, 1939-1940. Obituary: 23 December 1976. See below.]
  • Arthur Narracott, 1940-1967. Obituary: 17 May 1967.

There are some gaps and contradictions here. There could be a gap between Shepherd and Narracott of a year or two, enough for somebody else to do the job. Colebrook was air correspondent until 1930, but Shepherd started in 1929. That may be because Colebrook was ill towards the end and died in harness, so perhaps Shepherd started to take over some of the workload before then. Cooper seems to have been air correspondent for only a short time, as he resigned from the RAF in 1919, when Northcliffe gave him the job, but Ronald Carton (better known as the crossword compiler!) did the job for four years from 1919 (he covered Alcock and Brown). The job was said to be vacant when Colebrook started, so there may be another short gap there. All I know of Walter (a scion of the family which founded The Times) is that he there in 1915-6. He was in Berlin until (perhaps) 1914 and went overseas again in 1917, so presumably those years represent the endpoints of his occupancy. And I don’t know who held the job in the crucial years between 1910 and 1914. Oddly, according to their obituaries, three men had the honour of being the first aeronautical correspondent of The Times: Walter, Cooper and Carton. Which is odd, since Delacombe predated all of them!

My main reason for doing this to work out whether P. R. C. Groves was ever The Times’s aeronautical correspondent, as both Barry Powers and Uri Bialer have written (without giving any more information). As far as I can tell, he was not. There’s no mention of this in his personal archive or publications, and as the above shows, no gap for him to fit into. He didn’t retire from the RAF until 1922, and there was no vacancy until 1923. Groves did write some articles for The Times in 1922 and 1923, but they appeared under his own name – except for one article early in 1922, which used a phrase which was highly characteristic of Groves and appeared only days before the first of his official articles. But it wasn’t bylined ‘Our aeronautical correspondent’ as would be usual, but ‘An aeronautical correspondent’. It was an anonymous, freelance contribution, not from somebody on staff. So I can’t see how Groves could have been the aeronautical correspondent for The Times.

Edit: thanks to Rose Wild of the Times Archive Blog, who picked up my post on Twitter, I can now fill in one of the gaps: Oliver Stewart, previously a long-serving air correspondent for the Morning Post, helped out at The Times in 1939-1940.

The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — III

29 November 2009 in 1910s, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 13 comments

Electrical Experimenter, July 1917

The Electrical Experimenter was an American science magazine, founded and edited by Hugo Gernsback. These covers were published during the First World War, and illustrate ways in which science could be used to create new weapons and new defences. Many of them are just a little far-fetched, such as the land ironclad shown above.
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The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — II

20 November 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 10 comments

In June 1935, the Daily Express ran a story about three ’secret British air devices’. The source was a story in the Chicago Tribune by that paper’s London correspondent, John Steele:

The devices are declared to be a new “mirage” smoke screen, a new seventeen-foot long anti-aircraft rifle, and a robot airplane which, controlled by wireless, can charge an enemy formation.1.

The bare descriptions perhaps don’t sound so improbable, but the details … well, judge for yourself. ‘Mirage’ was composed of different coloured smokes which created a decoy townscape:

“Brick red, yellow, grey, brown, and black smoke fumes, spreading across the landscape horizontally at different heights from the ground, or, as in the case of the black smoke, rising vertically in columns, create a complete illusion of houses, factory chimney stacks, streets, rivers, and gardens.2

This level of detail and control over smoke seems improbable to me. But supposedly Mirage had been tested in exercises, and had completely fooled some RAF bombers which had been ordered to ‘bomb’ Croydon; instead they dropped their bombs twenty miles away on open fields!

How about the AA rifle? According to Steele, it was 17 feet long, had a range of 20,000 feet and fired cartridges weighing 39 ounces (2.4 pounds). Again, this isn’t too implausible, on the face of it. But wait:

It is precisely like a giant Lee-Enfield with similar sighting apparatus.

“There is an artificial shoulder for the rifle made of rubber, while the rifleman lies on a small platform above the weapon and takes sight. No human frame could support the recoil.3

It doesn’t sound like any AA gun I’ve heard of, but I suppose it could be a garbled description of some predecessor to the 3.75 inch QF. It’s a bizarre mental image though; and iron sights wouldn’t be much use at 20,000 feet.

As for the robotic Drake:

This airplane, rising above a bombing squadron flying in formation, can keep up a perpetual hail of machine-gun fire, the firing being done automatically under remote control.

“The robot can be heavily loaded with high explosive and from below made to charge like a bull into a formation, and then be exploded by wireless.

“The explosives, projecting inflammable bullets, would fire the [fuel] tanks of the enemy, or even, if close enough, turn the enemy turtle.4

No robot fighter aircraft like this existed in 1935 (although the the DH.82B Queen Bee, a radio-controlled variant of the Tiger Moth, was in use by then as a target tug, and became public around then). It does sound something like Ram, a project under development by the Air Ministry in the late 1920s but which was cancelled in 1930. Ram was briefly under reconsideration in 1935, due to advances in radio technology, but nothing came of it.5

My point here is not so much that these secret weapons didn’t exist (though clearly that’s what I do think), but that the British press was not interested in the possibility that they did: the Express was the only national daily which relayed the Tribune report (well, nearly all: there are a couple I haven’t been able to check). This was only a few months after the existence of the German air force was revealed and the government announced a trebling of the RAF’s strength at home in order to maintain air parity. Why was there so little interest in claims that British ingenuity was coming up with clever responses to the bomber threat?

  1. Daily Express, 14 June 1935, 8
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. See John Farquharson, ‘Britain and the flying bomb: the research programme between the two World Wars’, War in History 13 (2006), 363-79.

The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — I

17 November 2009 in 1940s, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 9 comments

Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say “no”, but that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it.)

Evening Independent, 14 August 1940, 1

The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads:

This picture taken Aug. 11 shows, according to British censor-approved caption, a German raider plane “caught amidst an anti-aircraft barrage of bursting shells” — somewhere over the British coast. The balloon-shaped object in lower left-hand corner was not identified, but London caption emphasized it was not a balloon. Whether it was a “mystery weapon” of any nature could not be ascertained. Picture was sent from London by cable as swarms of German raiders continued to batter the British coast.

The same photo, rotated 180 degrees and cropped somewhat differently, appeared on the front page of the Spokane Daily Chronicle the previous day:
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The mystery car of Maldon

7 November 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Here’s an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough — it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car:

Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.1

A ’special correspondent’ wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples — two ‘London ladies’ staying at ‘the Hut’ near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at ‘the Cottage’ also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods’ bedroom was then illuminated by the car’s headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.

But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):

Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.2

This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town’s medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King’s Lynn.3
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  1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10.

Runs on the board

2 November 2009 in International air force, Periodicals, Publications by Brett Holman | 10 comments

I’m pleased to announce that my first paper has been accepted for publication, by War in History. It’s about the international air force idea and is entitled ‘World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945′. It won’t actually appear for some time, but under the terms of the publishing agreement I’m allowed to make the originally-submitted version (i.e. before peer review) available for download. It can be found from my publications page.

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