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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
The last few hours of daylight of my last day in Rome were upon me. So, sadly, I couldn’t linger in the forum — there was still so much to see!
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After my first day in Rome, I collapsed onto my bed in my little hotel room, watched Italian TV, and got a good night’s sleep. Which was just as well, as I still had a lot to see on my last day …
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This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.)
Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it’s Paris, not London — so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own, incidentally.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
So. After leaving the Vatican, I headed south.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
It’s time again for my six-monthly look at that portion of the blogosphere devoted to military history, as defined by the ‘Wars and Warriors’ section of Cliopatria’s blogroll. So, let’s begin.
Not a lot has changed since September, actually, and this plot shows why: the number of military history blogs has grown by only 13%, whereas between March and September 2007, it grew by more than 50%. Does this mean that fewer military history blogs are being started than before, or that instead Cliopatria is missing a significant portion of them? I’d be tempted to say the latter — the Cliopatricians are only human, after all, and can only add those blogs which come to their attention — but I can’t think of any they’ve missed. Also, the rate of growth of the blogosphere may be slowing — it’s hard to say, as Technorati seem to have stopped publishing their quarterly state of the blogosphere reports.
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This has been all over the news here today, though I suspect interest is somewhat less outside Australia: the wreck of HMAS Sydney has been found. On 19 November 1941, Sydney was returning to Fremantle, Western Australia, after escorting a troopship north to Sunda Strait. It encountered the German commerce raider Kormoran somewhere out in the Indian Ocean, and a battle ensued. When the engagement broke off, both ships were mortally wounded. (Kormoran’s wreck was itself found only a few days ago.) About 320 out of Kormoran’s crew of nearly 400 were eventually rescued, but there were no survivors at all from Sydney. Its 645 dead represent the Royal Australian Navy’s greatest wartime loss.
The press reports seem to follow the same line — a 66-year old mystery solved. The location of the Sydney’s wreck was unknown because no radio signal was ever received from her during or after the battle, and the Kormoran’s lifeboats had drifted a long way before rescue. But that’s actually only part of the mystery. The real mystery — or at least the one which is the real reason for the long-standing interest in finding the wreck, and for the accompanying conspiracy theories — is how did a modern warship like Sydney come to be sunk by Kormoran, a converted merchantman?
This does seem strange, on the face of it. Sydney was a modern Leander-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1935. It was much faster than Kormoran (32 knots to 19), more heavily armoured, and more powerfully armed. Kormoran was on its first (and only) cruise: in nearly a year’s sail from Germany it had encountered nothing more fearsome than defenceless merchantmen. Sydney, by contrast, had previously had a successful career in the Mediterranean. In particular, in the Battle of Cape Spada in July 1940 she led a British destroyer squadron (correction: flotilla) into action against a pair of Italian light cruisers, which fled before her. Sydney’s accurate gunnery disabled the Bartolomeo Colleoni, which was then despatched by torpedoes from the destroyers. It doesn’t seem credible that the proud victor of Cape Spada could be sunk by a lowly commerce raider.
Except, that is, if you look a bit more closely:
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Rome, beautiful Rome! Is there anything I can say about the Eternal City that hasn’t been said before? No, but I won’t let that stop me trying. It was fantastic both in the sense of great and in the sense of unbelievable — it’s almost hard to believe I really was there. But I have the photos to prove to myself that I didn’t just imagine it all.
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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):
Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.1
The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.
The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?
Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.
What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.
But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
My second (and last) day in Edinburgh was unfortunately pretty much overcast the whole day, so my pictures are a bit dull. But as I spent most of the time indoors, this didn’t matter too much. (Above, Edinburgh Castle from the Princes Street Gardens.)
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I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the influential ‘nerve centre’ theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war:
an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.1
Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country giving speeches criticising the government for its failure to expand aircraft production sufficiently, and to call for the formation of an independent air force, the Imperial Air Service. He was a Conservative MP, then a Conservative peer, and all the time very wealthy (if you call 10,000 acres wealthy, anyway).
But today I’m going to talk about Montagu’s personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’, the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce — every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu’s own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there’s an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After wandering around Edinburgh Castle, I thought: castles are really cool! I wanted to see more, and since I probably should be a confident user of the British transport system by now, I decided that I’d do a day trip out somewhere to see one. A bit of googling led me to Stirling Castle, a mostly-15th/16th century edifice less than an hour away by train. (I see now that I overlooked Craigmillar Castle, which was closer and looks even more castley. But aside from the castle it seems there wouldn’t have been so much to see there.) So I hopped on a little inter-urban train and headed for Stirling, getting a glimpse along the way of the Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
A historic building which once played a key role in saving the free world is about to be lost to posterity, with barely a whimper of protest.
The story is of course more complex than that. When I say ‘lost to posterity’, that’s what I might say if I was writing an eye-catching lede for a newspaper article. The building itself is not in danger. It’s currently owned by the Ministry of Defence, but is being sold to private developers. The current plan is that it will be turned into luxury flats. Even this, in itself, is not what has attracted criticism. Rather it’s the failure of the current plan to acknowledge the building’s history and its role in Britain’s past.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
I’m now covering my last few days in the UK, which I mostly spent in Edinburgh. It’s a lovely city, but I’m sorry to say that I didn’t warm to it as much as I thought I would. That may have had something to do with inflated expectations (everybody I know who’s been there raves about the place), and it may have had something to do with the fact that my summer wardrobe was no longer adequate in this more northerly clime, in early autumn. But I think it was mostly because, having come direct from Hadrian’s Wall, I was now really impatient to get to Rome and see it for myself. Once I managed to put Edinburgh’s position in my itinerary to one side, I did really enjoy it for itself.
Above: the Scottish National War Memorial (see below). Yet again I go for the easy silhouette effect.
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I’ve recently come across what appears to be a new biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Montague Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard, 1st and 3rd Chief of the Air Staff, etc: Sylvia Andrew, Lord Trenchard’s Choice (Richmond: Mills and Boon, 2002). I say ‘appears to be’ because there are serious discrepancies with the received historical account of his life, which must call into question the accuracy of the author’s research.
Here’s an extract from the book, followed by a blurb (both from here, though I’ve nabbed the cover from here):
“You leave him alone, do you hear?” The voice rang out, high and clear. Ivo winced as the sound sent his head throbbing again, and slowly turned. The next moment headache, heartache, everything was forgotten as he stared into the muzzle of a pistol, which was pointing directly at his head, not ten paces away. It was in the hands of a boy that couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve. Ivo shivered as a chill ran down his spine. Guns in the hands of children could be fatal, and this boy looked angry enough to shoot him.
“You scum!” the boy went on without moving. “I suppose you mean to sell Star at Taunton, along with the others you have stolen.”
If it didn’t rile the mind of Ivo Trenchard, of the 7th Hussars and the most polished man in Europe, to be mistaken for a simple horse thief, finding that the urchin pulling a gun on him was a teenage girl certainly did! Joscelin Morley both dressed and lived her life as a boy in a futile attempt to please her father. Her future was clear: Marriage to her neighbor Peter was to join the two estates and they would settled down to care for the land they both loved. So where did the worldly Ivo, her godmother’s nephew and a terrible flirt, fit into the equation?
I admit that I’m assuming that ‘Lord Trenchard’ here refers to the 1st Viscount Trenchard (the title was created for him), and not to either his son or grandson — though they’ve both had worthy careers in their own right, and meaning no disrespect to them, neither seems to merit a biography. The 1st Viscount has already had one written about him (I’m reading it at the moment, as it happens) and is probably overdue for another interpretation. But I don’t think Lord Trenchard’s Choice can be it. I mean, he wasn’t called Ivo (unless that’s a nickname); he was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, not the 7th Hussars; and as for ‘the most polished man in Europe’ and ‘a terrible flirt’ — well, that’s not any Boom Trenchard I’ve ever read about. That cover art is terrible, it looks nothing like him (and what’s with the Jane Austen getup?)
Still, don’t judge a book by its cover and all that — I should at least flip through its bibliography and endnotes first. (And Trenchard was in fact born in Taunton, so that reference looks right.) So who knows, perhaps there’s room for a feisty cross-dressing pistol-wielding Somerset lass in the Father of the RAF’s life.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Day two on the Roman frontier. This took some careful poring over the tourist bus timetable (route AD122, of course) to try and maximise the number of sites I visited while spending enough time at each one. This turned out to be be a non-trivial problem — the gap between buses varied considerably, and sometimes the buses stopped in Haltwhistle instead of going beyond, so I was having to make calculations like, ‘well, I can go to A in the morning and be there at opening time, but then the bus to B is either 45 minutes later or 3 hours 45 minutes later, which is either too short or possibly too long, but if I want to take in C as well I really need to take the earlier bus because there’s no other way to get there. Or I can go to C first, then come back to B but I’d only have an hour there …’ And so on: it did my head in! It turned out that there was really no sensible way to do more than 2 places, so I crossed the Roman Army Museum off my list and settled on Vindolanda and Housesteads. I didn’t have cause to regret this, as they were both even more absorbing than Chesters had been.
The above photo, incidentally shows Hadrian’s Wall itself, looking back towards Housesteads from the west (it’s past the big clump of trees on top of the cliffs).
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A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there were a couple of links to lists of other ugly aircraft, which are always fun to browse. The first one had some bizarre nominations (the Dragon Rapide should never be on such a list) but I thought I’d found what may be the single ugliest aeroplane ever made, the three-engine variant of the Farman Jabiru airliner (it’s French, naturellement). I was going to write this post about it. But then I clicked through to the second list.
That is where I first saw the Vedo Villi.
I can’t take my eyes off it. I honestly can’t decide whether it’s ugly or beautiful. But it is somehow deeply, fundamentally, disturbingly, horrifyingly wrong. It is eldritch. It’s like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up, if he’d been an aircraft designer and wanted just the thing for the airminded cultist to nip down from Arkham Aerodrome to the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh for the weekend.
There is a photo of the Villi below. Read on — if you dare.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Leaving York, I took the train north to Newcastle, where I took another train heading west to Hexham, a small town in Northumberland. As nice as Hexham was, I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t there during business hours and so didn’t see much of it. Which is a shame, because there’s a fine 12th century abbey and several other medieval buildings there (I did get to see the railway station, of course, apparently one of the oldest in the world). But that was ok, because I was only there to see Hadrian’s Wall, which runs just north of Hexham on its way from coast to coast.
On my first day, I only had time to see one site, so I chose Chesters. Between the 2nd (almost immediately after the Wall was built, in fact) and late 4th centuries it was a Roman cavalry fortress called Cilurnum, sited where the Wall crossed the North Tyne.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ’skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the chance for a closer look.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
My second (and last) day in York. Luckily, since I’d seen the two major attractions (for me) on my first day there, I was free to wander around with only a vague plan in mind. And there was a lot to see. One of the great things about York, I found, was the way in which nearly all periods of history are represented by some substantial survival or site, all within easy walking distance. It’s like a slice through Britain’s/England’s/Northumbria’s etc past. So, to illustrate this, I’ll write this post chronologically by site (rather than chronologically by time of day visted!) With the exception of the above: that’s Clifford’s Tower, which should come in the middle somewhere, but it’s too pretty a picture not to put up front.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Did you know that 87% of the UK’s population, and 99% of its land area, lies outside Greater London? Well you’d barely know it from reading this blog. After finishing my research in that fair city (and after dispensing with the foolish notion of detouring to Cambridge or Aberystwyth to do yet more research), it was time to see a little of the rest of the country, aside from the brief glimpses I’d had already on my trip to Newark and Cranwell. In fact, I was a bit disappointed to discover that I was taking the exact same train line as I had done then, so wasn’t seeing anything new for the first hour plus (though it was nice to see Peterborough Cathedral again, over which PC Kettle saw a phantom airship pass on one fateful night in March 1909 …) After that, it was pretty much power stations all the way to York, my first destination. I arrived mid-morning, found my way to my hotel, dumped my luggage and then set out to explore.
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I spotted this ironic fusion of a peace symbol and a B-52 in the city1 earlier in the year, and luckily it was still there when I went back with a camera this week.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Is it possible to love a city? Surely. Is it premature to declare such a love after only having lived in that city for only two months? I don’t think so: after all, you can fall in love with a person practically on first sight. Love doesn’t depend upon your knowing its object deeply, only upon thinking that you do. I only experienced one season, summer (I’m sure it’s a lot less hospitable now); I never cooked a meal the entire time I was there (no kitchen, or at least none I ever found); I mostly stuck to the inner bits where public transport mostly works. It was really a working holiday, and different to how most Londoners experience their city. If I had to live there properly, and experienced the worst of London as well as its best, I might well feel more ambivalent. But until such disillusionment sets in, I love London!
So, to round off more than two dozen posts I’ve written about my time in London, here’s one more, with some photos that didn’t fit in anywhere else. Above is Eros in Piccadilly Circus.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
I’ve nearly finished with my long series of London posts, but I’ve got a couple more before I recount my travels in the provinces. This one is about Bloomsbury, my home for two months in the (northern) summer of 2007; I really took to it. I’ve written about some of Bloomsbury’s sights before (Charles Fort’s house, Mecklenburgh Square, St Pancras Parish Church, and of course the British Museum). Here are a few more.
Above is Euterpe, the Muse of music. Between 1898 and 1961 she graced the facade of the Apollo Inn on Tottenham Court Road.
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On Friday, I went along to a talk on “Great War aerial photography: a source for battlefield survey and archaeology?”, given by Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University in Belgium. This brings the total number of in-any-way-related-to-early-20th-century-aviation talks given at the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidacy (as far as I know and excluding a couple I’ve given) to one (1). And even this was archaeological and not historical; but it kept me awake even at the quite indecent hour of 10am, so you know it must have been good!
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Right. My very last day off in London, the first Sunday in September. No longer could I put off the choice between the Tower of London (including Tower Bridge) and Greenwich (the National Maritime Museum, above, and the Royal Greenwich Observatory). As an ex-astrophysics type, I really couldn’t not go and see the observatory at Greenwich. So I decided to do one-and-a-half for the price of one and took a cruise down the Thames, from Westminster to Greenwich. That way I could at least see the Tower and the Bridge as we sailed past …
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
At the end of August, I spent a day and a half at the offices of the Air League, which very graciously had allowed me access to their archives. Their address on Tothill Street is not far from Buckingham Palace, which I hadn’t yet seen. And I hadn’t done Whitehall properly yet. So it was a good opportunity to do the tourist thing, camera in hand.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking tourist mode, I still had three major sites on my must-see list — Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, and Greenwich — but only two sight-seeing days left! The first of these was the summer bank holiday, which turned out to be a nice day, so I chose to head out to Hampton Court Palace, much of which dates to the 15th century. The present building was originally Cardinal Wolsey’s palace; Henry VIII acquired it through not-entirely-honourable circumstances, and it was a popular royal palace up until the Georgian period.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF’s officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.
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The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm.
I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
After six weeks in the UK, I finally got to see somewhere other than London when I attended a conference at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. To get to Cranwell, I took a GNER train from King’s Cross to Newark in Nottinghamshire, where a RAF courtesy bus took me the rest of the 20km or so to the air force base. Between when the train arrived and when the bus left, I had about 90 minutes to kill, and so I used that time for a quick whirl around the town to see what there was to see. Mainly that was two things: the magnificent ruins of a castle, and quite a large church.
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While trawling through newspapers I keep an eye out for interesting aircraft-related advertisements. These are not uncommon, most obviously in relation to industries which could claim some relationship with aviation (after any record-breaking flight, there was usually at least one ad pointing out how much the triumphant pilot owed to some petroleum product or other). Other companies had to try a bit harder to make some aerial connection (Lyon’s swiss rolls, for example). But this magnificent example goes way beyond most! Actually, aviation is only one element of its vision of the future, designed to sell Field-day, a shaving lotion made from olive oil.
Here’s the text which appears below the image:
What of the future? What shall we wear? Eat? Drink? Shall we live in glass houses? Travel in Gyroplanes and wear Television on our wrists? Who knows? But we do know how we shall shave — for “Field-day” is one of the ‘Things to Come’ that’s here already! Revolutionary! Incomparably better! Different — not only from lather but from other ‘brushless’ creams. Fast — for the age of speed. Blades last longer. Simple and safe, too! Safe because you can see through “Field-day” as you shave instead of blindly guessing! Made with pure Olive Oil .. free from Caustic Alkali (an essential part of lather!) Made for the Future. On sale NOW. Are you going to wait — or be one of the ‘Moderns’? For the sake of your skin and your razor-blades do step out of that rut.1
So how is the future invoked here in the pursuit of higher sales figures for Field-day? Most obviously, the city of the future has giant skyscrapers, with aeroplanes (and giant tubes of shaving lotion, ridden by a man who is clearly accustomed to boldly taking charge of his destiny in his dressing-gown) flying in between them. In fact, one of the skyscrapers is also an airport: there’s an aeroplane just taking off from it, and at the top of the tower is a windsock. Aside from the odd heliport or two, downtown airports have failed to materialise, but they remained a possibility in the 1930s.2 The text mentions such wondrous technological possibilities as glass houses, autogiros, and wrist televisions.3
Then there is the rhetorical, almost ritual, use of the names of those two great novels about the future to come out of Britain in the 1930s, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (or rather, the 1936 film-of-the-book, Things to Come). Neither of these can be said to look forwards to the future without any misgivings, however; the one is a dystopia (albeit one masquerading as a utopia), and the other might as well be, at least for the hundreds of millions of people killed along the road to a technologically-sophisticated, tunic-wearing paradise. So they might seem an odd choice for a straightforwardly optimistic (if not entirely straightfaced, perhaps) depiction of the future. But that’s par for the course: the titles of both books very quickly became a shorthand for the unknown future, often with little relation to anything in Huxley or Wells.4
Finally, there are all the key words defining the attributes which are to be associated with the future, and with Field-day: it will be revolutionary, incomparably better, different, faster, longer lasting, simple and safe. What man could resist a shaving lotion so laden with futurity? It is indeed the shave of the future, NOW. I do so want to be one of the Moderns, and I’d buy it myself, for sure — except that judging by Google, it looks like neither Field-day nor J. C. and J. Field, Ltd., its manufacturer, actually made it into this future. O brave new world, that doesn’t have such things in it!
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
One week I’m looking out over London’s skyline from the top of St Paul’s, the next I’m exploring underneath its streets, at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. But this post is only about the latter, as no photography is allowed in the Museum. That’s OK: while the museum was most interesting and very well done (and seemingly a magnet for American tourists), the Cabinet War Rooms — the underground bunker complex from where, in large part, the British war effort was directed during the Second World War — were why I was there. Everything was closed down and mothballed after V-J day, and at least some areas remained as they were during the war, until it was opened up again in the early 1980s; others have been restored more heavily (or turned into cafes!)
Above is the entrance, in King Charles Street, just off Horse Guards Road (and just a block away from Downing Street). It’s next to HM Treasury, though during the war the building seems to have been the Office of Works. On the one hand, the sandbagged entrance with machine gun slit is nicely evocative of a wartime sentry pillbox. On the other, it’s all fake: the real wartime entrance to the bunker was through adjacent government buildings. Plus several of the “sandbags” have been torn by some malcontent and it’s looking a bit tatty!
Here’s something a bit different. It’s a paper model aeroplane which I made from a design published on 30 June 1934 in “Boys and Girls”, the weekly children’s supplement to the Daily Mail. The claim is made there that it glides, but sadly all mine does is stall and then enter a tailspin … but perhaps somebody taking greater care in making the model will have greater success! A PDF of the plan can be downloaded from here (size 1.4 Mb) and then printed out onto an A4-sized sheet of paper, if anyone wants to try it. The only other materials needed are a thin, stiff piece of card (for backing), glue, a match (for the wheel axle), a pin (for the propeller), tissue paper or something similar (to weight the nose, in the event that the model is actually airworthy). And scissors. The instructions are in the PDF; here are some tips based on my own experience:
I think the original was in colour, but the microfilm I printed it from was not, so unfortunately it’s a little drab. The colours could be worked out from the roundel and added with a paint program — or even just coloured in on the paper — but that would require more energy than I was prepared to expend :)
“Boys and Girls” would often include an aviation-related cartoon or story — in fact, one of the regular strips followed the adventures of Phil and Fifi, the “flying twins” — but this edition was chock-full of airminded goodness. The Whisker Pets see an aeroplane and decide to make their own (hilarity ensues); a stork-powered air show entertains the inhabitants of Treasure Island (’I like being an airwoman’, says Penelope the parrot); two panels list “Famous flyers’ great flights” (including some not so famous now, such as the non-stop flight of Codos and Rossi from New York to Syria in 1933); and on the Pet & Hobby Page, Teddy Tail provides some hints on how to make airworthy model aircraft — which I clearly should have read before making mine! This was obviously intended to coincide with the annual RAF Pageant held at Hendon on the very same day, a hugely popular air show: 200,000 attended that year, a record crowd — despite the best efforts of pacifist demonstrators outside the front gates.
This being the Daily Mail, there was probably another agenda besides getting plane-crazy youngsters to remind their parents to buy their favourite right-wing newspaper that Saturday: to make even more plane-crazy youngsters. The need to create an airminded youth was a common theme in the Rothermere press in the 1930s. For example, just two days earlier, Amy (Johnson) Mollison’s regular aviation column had been entitled “Don’t discourage the young idea in flying”,1 in reference to an Air Ministry ban on solo flying under the age of 17, after a 16-year old boy had been killed doing just that near Scarborough. And, near the end of the year, Lord Rothermere himself contributed an article called “Make the youth of England air-minded! Has Germany 10,000 aeroplanes?”2 — the question explaining and justifying the demand.
The RAF roundels on the model aeroplane mark it out as a machine of war, not a pleasure craft or commercial aeroplane. So while I had fun making and trying to fly it, I was also replaying (in a very small way) the mobilisation of youth for the next air war. I wonder how many of the adolescent boys and girls who made it before me joined the RAF or the ATA when the prospect of war became reality, just five years later?
This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.
One of the archives I visited during the second half of my time in London was the Archive Collection at the RAF Museum. Sadly the material I turned up, though interesting, was not overall of much relevance for my thesis. So I couldn’t justify spending a
