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The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — I

17 November 2009 in 1940s, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 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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Tremayne and Crowan

12 November 2009 in Family history, Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | 9 comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

Between Tremayne and Crowan

On my third day in Cornwall I avoided the usual tourist traps entirely, because I was in search of my ancestors’ home: a tiny little place called Tremayne, which is towards Land’s End, in the hundred of Penwith. To get there I caught a train to Camborne, then a bus to Praze-an-Beeble (no, really!), and then walked along a winding country lane with no footpath and some very high hedgerows. Luckily I didn’t get run over, as that would rather have spoiled what was a beautiful day.
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Falmouth

1 November 2009 in Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

Falmouth

After my little misadventure at Camelford, I started the next day out of position, and had a long way to go just to get back to my real hotel in Truro for a change of clothes. So for my day’s excursion I didn’t want to go too far from Truro, and luckily Falmouth is only a short trip by train.
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Do not procrastinate

28 October 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The danger of gas bombs - Times, 26 May 1915, p. 5

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the ‘Life-Saving “CAVENDISH” Anti-Gas INHALER’ — in other words, a gas mask. It’s a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare — that is, ‘The Danger of GAS BOMBS’:

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy’s airships if you are provided with enough “CAVENDISH” INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly — and for a very short time — protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need — for yourself and your family — absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I’m not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, ‘quite long enough for absolute security from danger’ — a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It’s also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it’s three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) — most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met’s commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice — and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn’t obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men, but can’t find the precise reference.)

Tintagel Castle

23 October 2009 in Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | 6 comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

Tintagel Castle

After the Exeter conference my holiday proper began. I travelled by train down to Cornwall, to Truro where I made my base for the next few days. Truro is the county seat, though it’s not a big town by any means. (Nowhere in Cornwall is, which is part of its charm.) It does have the Royal Cornwall Museum, which I looked through on my first morning there. Among the Roman coins and old coaches is the so-called Arthur stone, which was found at Tintagel Castle — which is where I went in the afternoon.
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Imperial Airways: now with extra airmail

18 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Civil aviation, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 20 comments

Daily Telegraph

An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to ‘the East’ (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of effort went into selling the idea of air mail to the public, as this post at The British Postal Museum & Archive shows. Here, the modern lines of the Imperial A.W. 15 Atalanta is contrasted with the traditional garb of the imperial subjects in the background. The message is that technology will modernise the running of the Empire and help bind it together.

Exeter and a conference

14 October 2009 in Conferences and talks, Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | 7 comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

Exeter Cathedral

Later the same day that I arrived at Heathrow and visited Salisbury, I was down in the southwest of England — Exeter, to be precise. I was there for a conference but arrived a day early so I could have a poke around. There are indeed some things very worth seeing in Exeter, although the city centre was very heavily blitzed on 4 May 1942, destroying many fine historic buildings. Above is a stained glass window in Exeter Cathedral commemorating that night.
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The non-atrocity of Getafe

11 October 2009 in 1930s, Art, Books, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

While in Wales recently I chanced upon a copy of Robert Stradling’s Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). My description at the time was that this book ‘Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid’. Now that I’ve read Your Children Will Be Next, it’s clear that I seriously misrepresented Stradling’s argument in one crucial respect: he doesn’t believe the Getafe atrocity ever actually happened, or at least if it did, there’s no good evidence for it now. And that, nevertheless, this non-event had important consequences for the propaganda battle in Spain, for the subsequent memory of the Spanish Republic, and for our own reactions to the use of airpower against civilian targets. It’s such an interesting and important book that it’s worth correcting my mistake, and digging bit deeper into Stradling’s thesis.

Firstly, what was supposed to have happened at Getafe? I must admit to not having heard of the incident before. It was claimed (mainly in the foreign left-wing press) that on 30 October 1936, Nationalist (meaning German) bombers deliberately bombed civilians in Getafe, a small town near Madrid, flying low to mark their victims and killing dozens of children. Photographs of their bodies, with identification labels on their chests, were used in several Republican propaganda productions, the best-known of which is shown above: ‘If you tolerate this, your children will be next’, a combined appeal to humanity and self-interest. Stradling traces the propagation and influence of The Poster, as he calls it: it was used by both the Communists and the Labour Party in Britain for their pamphlets (below is the Imperial War Museum’s copy of the latter’s). It helped turn opinion in the democracies against the Nationalists in this crucial early part of the war, when a swift victory by Franco had seemed assured. Memoirs and poems from the period attest to the power of its imagery.
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Stonehenge and Old Sarum

6 October 2009 in Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | 7 comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

Stonehenge

It must be about to time to start posting photos from my trip (blame Alan!) My first destination was in Wiltshire, and is best introduced by Nigel Tufnel:

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people: the Druids. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing. But their legacy remains — hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge.

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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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