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The mystery car of Maldon

7 November 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | No 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

We know now that there were no German spies motoring about East Anglia at night giving directions to incoming Zeppelins. It’s an operationally pretty absurd idea, for one thing; it was hardly possible to accurately navigate a Zeppelin to a given area of coastline for a night-time rendezvous. And I doubt the church at Snettisham was very high up on German target lists, for example. Instead I’d go with the explanation offered by one anonymous ‘official’, that the cars ‘were driven by persons who followed the course of the airship out of curiosity’.4 Or perhaps by military or police keeping watch on the raider.

Rumours about signalling didn’t always involve motorists: they could just consist of a light showing from a house. After an airship raid the Kentish coast on 17 June 1917, The Times reported:

There is an ugly rumour going round to-day that signalling was reported to the authorities to have taken place half an hour before the attack began. It is widely stated that such an incident occurred and that the Zeppelin was most deliberate in its attack. Its engines could be distinctly heard as it went round the coast, and, after going a few hundred yards, the engines were stopped while the commander took his bearings. Then it would pass along another few hundred yards, and it is believed by many that during one of these stops signals were given from the western side of the town.5

The occasional claims of signals to enemy aircraft I’ve come across from the Second World War are more like this, such as the case of Emil and Alma Wirth I’ve discussed previously.

So why were these types of claims made about motorists? And why did they stop? It’s all clearly bound up with the pre-war spy and phantom airship scares, which indeed carried over into the early war years. More generally, I can imagine a certain type of person (curtain-twitchers, wowsers, what-have-you) disapproving of these newfangled, noisy, expensive cars and wondering if their owners really do need to be driving about at all hours, and no doubt they’re up to no good anyway. So when Zeppelins came along and start dropping bombs, and cars were seen on the roads beneath, it was a good excuse to condemn an annoying member of society: the leisure motorist. As for why these suspicions faded, petrol rationing came into effect from August 1916, after which there were far fewer private cars on the roads. (And Zeppelin-chasing may have become passé by then anyway.) So busybodies had to turn to other targets. In the Second World War, car-ownership was much higher (for the middle and upper classes, at least), so driving was now longer such a minority activity, not so easily stigmatised (as the relative complacency over the horrific road toll in the 1930s perhaps suggests). But also petrol rationing came into effect straight away, so there were fewer cars on the roads during air raids, and less enthusiasm for pleasure driving. Moreover, blackout restrictions meant that cars had very little light to show. By the time heavy air raids started in August-September 1940, there would probably have been very few cars in private ownership capable of carrying on the tradition of the mystery car of Maldon …

  1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10.
  4. Ibid., 23 January 1915, 10.
  5. Ibid., 18 June 1917, 10.

The great air race

23 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Blogging, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

It’s the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it’s the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you’ve been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you’ll know it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that’s pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 — an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Biggles gets a website

6 October 2009 in Links, Quotes, Thesis by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Shirley Jacobs writes to inform me that the W E Johns Appreciation Society now has a website. It’s clearly quite an active group — there’s a magazine, Biggles Flies Again, published twice a year, and regular meetings with the next in Derby on 24 October. Via the site, one can keep up with W. E. Johns, Biggles, Worrals et al in the press, or explore the wider world of Bigglesiana on the web. (Which introduced me to a site devoted to Popular Flying, a magazine edited by Johns which featured articles by a number of airpower writers familar to me, such as J. M. Spaight, E. Colston Shepherd, Arch Whitehouse and Nigel Tangye.)

At one point I had managed to work in a brief reference to Biggles in my thesis, but sadly had to cut it for reasons of space. So here’s what I was going to say!

And even Biggles, the flying adventurer whose popularity with boys dates from this period, got into the act [of popularising the knock-out blow theory] in Biggles and the Black Peril (published 1935), foiling German plans to set up navigational beacons on the English coast in preparation for a sudden and massive air attack.1

  1. W. E. Johns, Biggles and the Black Peril (London: Red Fox, 2004 [1935]).

The balloon goes up

3 September 2009 in 1930s, Civil defence, Quotes, Radio, Sounds by Brett Holman | 3 comments

It’s seventy years today since Britain and France declared war on Germany. At 11.15am on Sunday 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation via the BBC. At 11.28am, less than a quarter of an hour later, air raid sirens went off in London and (at differing times) across much of the country. This was in fact only a false alarm, caused by an unscheduled civilian flight from France. But as far as civilians were concerned, this looked like precisely what they had been told to expect when the knock-out blow came: mass air raids simultaneous with the outbreak of war. So their reactions to the alarms give us a little insight into their fear of bombing at the end of the scaremongering 1930s.
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Zeroth World Wars

31 August 2009 in 1900s, Before 1900, Blogging, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It’s often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) — the Seven Years’ War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I’m not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn’t the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn’t enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale — of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg’s formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that’s the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It’s also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war’s origins, for Russia’s defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

The first air bomb: Venice, 15 July 1849

22 August 2009 in Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

On 22 August 1849, the Republic of San Marco surrendered to Austria. The Republic was formed after a revolt in Venice against Austrian rule in March 1848. The Austrians eventually besieged Venice, leading to starvation and outbreaks of cholera in the city. During this siege, they launched the first air raids in history, by unmanned balloons which floated over Venice carrying bombs. The British press didn’t take any notice of this at the time, but the following account appeared in the Morning Chronicle a week after the surrender:

The Soldaten Freund publishes a letter from the artillery officer Uchatius, who first proposed to subdue Venice by ballooning. From this it appears that the operations were suspended for want of a proper vessel exclusively adapted for this mode of warfare, as it became evident, after a few experiments had been made, that, as the wind blows nine times out of ten from the sea, the balloon inflation must be conducted on board ship; and this was the case on July the 15th, the occasion alluded to in a former letter, when two balloons armed with shrapnels ascended from the deck of the Volcano war steamer, and attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms in the direction of Venice; and exactly at the moment calculated upon, i. e., at the expiration of twenty-three minutes, the explosion took place. The captain of the English brig Frolic, and other persons then at Venice, testify to the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants.

A stop was put to further exhibitions of this kind by the necessity of the Vulcan going into docks to undergo repairs, which the writer regrets the more, as the currents of wind were for a long time favourable to his schemes. One thing is established beyond all doubt (he adds), viz., that bombs and other projectiles can be thrown from balloons at a distance of 5,000 fathoms, always provided the wind be favourable. 1

Some comments. It’s hard to find reliable information on these attacks. The best account I’ve seen is by Lee Kennett and he’s not sure how many balloons were released, saying that the largest number he has seen is two hundred.2 This doesn’t fit well with the Morning Chronicle article, which seems to suggest that only two balloon bombs were ever launched. This is supposedly based on a letter written by the inventor of the balloon bombs, Franz von Uchatius, so if it’s accurate should be preferred over secondary sources.3

But whether the number was two or two hundred, it doesn’t seem like the balloon bombs had much effect on the course of the siege, which went on for another five weeks — despite the reference made in the Morning Chronicle to ‘the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants’. That was clearly what was intended, as the bombs were released (or maybe detonated) by a timer, and couldn’t possibly hit specified targets from a balloon drifting above the city.4 More importantly, the bombs used were filled with shrapnel, which isn’t much use for anything but killing and maiming people. So there were few qualms on the part of the Austrians about targeting and killing civilians. Which they went on to do with presumably much greater efficiency when they later bombarded the city with more conventional artillery, averaging a thousand shells a day.5

Finally, the air raids of 1849 seem to have had as little impact on the wider world (at least the English-speaking part of it) as they did on Venice. As noted above, there was very little notice taken in the British press, and I’ve come across only one meager reference to Venice in books published before 1914 (and that in a book translated from the German, written by the German military balloonist Hermann Moedebeck). So it doesn’t seem like they inspired anyone to find a better way to bomb cities from the air; that was an idea which had to be invented all over again. Which it was, of course, and Venice’s next air raid was on 24 May 1915.

  1. Morning Chronicle, 29 August 1849, 5.
  2. Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), 6.
  3. Kennett does state that two bombs were used in the first armed test, but that this was carried out on 12 July, with another ’series’ of tests on 15 July.
  4. Which is not to say they were just released at random; the balloon-bombardiers had to take windspeed into account when calculating how long to set the timer for, so that it would go off over Venice — though the wind could then change direction after launch, of course.
  5. Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), 47.

The fire in Llŷn, 1936

17 August 2009 in 1930s, Books, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 1 comment

The fire at Penyberth, in the Llŷn peninsula, is an important part of the history of the Welsh nationalist movement. In the early hours of 8 September 1936, three men, Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams, entered an aerodrome which was being built for the RAF as a bombing school and deliberately set fire to it. They then went to a nearby police station and just as deliberately turned themselves in. It was a political act: all three men were founding members of Plaid Cymru in 1925, and Lewis was then its president (with Valentine his predecessor). However, Plaid Cymru (as far as I can tell) had no direct involvement with the arson. A jury at Caernarfon failed to reach a verdict, and the case was moved to London (which act itself inflamed Welsh opinion), where the three men were sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment.

Obviously what interests me here is the RAF bombing school (which, despite the arsonists’ efforts, became operational in February 1937 as RAF Penrhos). Why set fire to a bombing school? Why in 1936? This was precisely the time when the RAF was starting to rearm, building up its bomber forces to fight the next war. Which of course was why the RAF needed a new bombing school, to train the airmen who would be flying those bombers. Was the fire a militant anti-militarist act, so to speak, the work of violent pacifists?1 Was that why they chose their target?

The short answer is no, as a little reading shows. Penyberth was claimed as a site of some cultural significance for Wales, though exactly what that was is unclear to me. Wikipedia says a farmhouse there had been ‘home to generations of patrons of poets’, which is sufficiently vague to warrant a [citation needed]. Lewis told the Caernarfon jury that

It was the terrible knowledge that the English Government’s bombing range, once it was established in Lleyn, would endanger and in all likelihood destroy an essential focus of Welsh culture, the most aristocratic spiritual heritage of Wales, that made me think of my own career, the security even of my own family, things which must be sacrificed in order to prevent so appalling a calamity.

I hold that my action at Penrhos aerodrome on September 8 saved the honour of the University of Wales [where Lewis lectured], for the language and literature of Wales are the very raison d’être of this university.2

Kenneth O. Morgan says that ‘there had been much local protest at the proposal to build this school, with the physical and cultural damage that would result to a traditional Welsh farming community’.3 That seems consistent enough with Lewis’s statement. And fair enough: when Welsh nationalists undertake a political act, you’d expect to find Welsh nationalism as the underlying reason.
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  1. A contradiction in terms? Not always: consider the international air force championed at this time by another Welshman, David Davies.
  2. The Times, 14 October 1936, 11. See also the first draft of Lewis’s speech.
  3. Kenneth O. Morgan, The Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 (Oxford and Cardiff: Oxford University Press/University of Wales Press, 1981), 254.

Representing horrorism

7 August 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Air control, Books, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

At In the Middle, Karl Steel reviews Adriana Cavarero’s book Horrorism, which, as I understand it, seeks to reorient descriptions of violence from the perspective of its perpetrators to that of its victims. This part of the review seems like a good question to ask here:

I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: “Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry” (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it’s tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)).

Firstly, my petty criticism of the sentence quoted from the book would be that Germany didn’t inaugurate aerial bombardment at either Guernica or Coventry. As Steel notes, there were plenty of earlier instances; I would probably point the Bulgarian bombing of the Turkish city of Adrianople in late 1912 as the inauguration of aerial bombardment of civilians. I would also quibble with Steel, and point out that while Britain as a nation could defend itself against bombing during the First World War, on an individual level its citizens could not shoot back, send up fighters or retaliate through counterbombing. At the point in time when the bombs were actually falling, can we say that the horror experienced by Kurdish victims of British air control was greater than that of British victims of the Zeppelins and Gothas? Conversely, non-Western, non-state targets of bombing tried a surprisingly wide range of strategies, up to and including their own small air forces.

But then what would be the best example of horrorism in the case of aerial bombardment? I’d pick Dresden, February 1945. Not only was is it one of the most devastating episodes in the history of bombing in and of itself, but it was one of the few cases when the horror was so great that it was felt by the perpetrators (or at least the perpetrating culture) as well as the victims. But then that’s probably missing the point of horrorism altogether.

Of a cross-channel passage

25 July 2009 in 1900s, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 8 comments

It’s a hundred years today since Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an aeroplane across the English Channel. (He wasn’t the first person, period; Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries together crossed it by balloon in 1785.) As x planes has already post-blogged the flight itself, I’ll focus on one reaction to the flight, specifically that of H. G. Wells. He was asked to write about the meaning of the flight by the Daily Mail, which gave the £1000 prize won by Blériot.

Wells discerns a number of meanings, most trivially that he himself had ‘under-estimated the possible stability of aeroplanes’ in The War in the Air, written two years earlier. More important is the fact that ‘This thing from first to last was made abroad’.1 According to Wells, Britain has contributed virtually nothing to the epic of flight, its youths more interested in batting and bowling than gliding, for instance, in stark contrast to Europe:

Over there, where the prosperous classes have some regard for education and some freedom of imaginative play, where people discuss all sorts of things fearlessly and have a respect for science, this has been achieved.

He hammers this point home:

I do not see how one can go into the history of this development and arrive at any other conclusion. The French and Americans can laugh at our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor navigables [i.e. airships]. We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either we are a people essentially and incurably inferior or there is something wrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere and circumstances. That is the first and gravest intimation in M. Blériot’s feat.

Wells then turns to the implications for warfare, echoing Lord Northcliffe’s statement that ‘England is no longer an island’. Aeroplanes are, according to Wells, far more dangerous than Zeppelins (’little good for any purpose but scouting and espionage’).

Within a year we shall have — or rather they will have — aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais, let us say, circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon the printing machines of the Daily Mail and returning securely to Calais for another similar parcel.

(I think Wells is suggesting that this would be a bad thing.) Hundreds of aeroplanes could be made for the cost of a Dreadnought, he notes, and they will be hard to shoot down. Certainly, a ‘large army of under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwilling conscripts’ (then a popular cause for Conservatives) wouldn’t be much use against aeroplanes. The problem is (again) education:

The foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially true of the middle and upper classes from which invention and enterprise come — or, in our own case, do not come. He makes a better class of man than we do. His science is better than ours. His training is better than ours. His imagination is livelier. His mind is more active. His requirements in a novel, for example, are not kindly, sedative pap; his uncensored plays deal with reality. His schools are places for vigorous education instead of genteel athleticism, and his home has books in it, and thought and conversation. Our homes and schools are relatively dull and uninspiring; there is no intellectual guide or stir in them; and to that we owe this new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising sons, who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians, Frenchmen, Americans, and Germans fly.

Perhaps. But in less than a decade Britain built probably the world’s most successful aviation industry, while waging a world war — its children can’t have been all that unenterprising, then.
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  1. H. G. Wells, ‘Of a cross-channel passage’, Daily Mail, 27 July 1909, 6. All quotes from this source.

The phantom balloon scare of 1892

11 July 2009 in Before 1900, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Perhaps the first mass outbreak of mystery aircraft sightings took place in 1892 in Russian-occupied Poland, near the German border. The Manchester Guardian reported on 26 March that a ‘large balloon coming from the German frontier appeared about the fortress of Kovno‘. The Russian defenders fired at it, but it returned safely over the border.1 On 7 March, something similar had been seen near Dombrowa:

The balloon was coming from the south-west, and following a north-easterly direction along the Ivangorod-Dombrowa Railway, and this in spite of the fact that a north-east wind was blowing. The balloon disappeared behind the clouds, but reappeared about forty-five minutes later with a light burning (it was then half-past six in the evening), and following a course directly opposed to the former one. It is presumed that the balloon must have been provided with a highly perfected steering apparatus.2

A few days later came further reports: sightings ‘German balloons’ are now said to be ‘becoming frequent’. On 22 March a balloon was seen over a railway station at Pronshk[ol?], near Warsaw; the fortress of Novogeorgievsk; and the town of Kelets. The following day, people in Warsaw saw ‘a balloon over the city casting rays of light from an electric apparatus’. It stayed visible in the same place until 1am, when it moved to the west. A balloon ‘projecting powerful electric search lights over a large extent of country’ was seen in areas (presumably) near the Silesian border, towards evening or at night, apparently remaining motionless at a ‘great height for as long as forty minutes’.3

Clearly the Russians believed they were seeing German balloons. The Russian military fired upon one; and the New York Times reported that the Russian government intended to make a formal protest to Germany about the supposed overflights, citing ‘a breach of the military laws’.4 The Manchester Guardian suggested (on what basis, I don’t know) that ‘both the French and German military authorities are in possession of some sort of apparatus for steering balloons’.5 But we know now that this was not true. All anybody had were the usual static observation balloons, which were certainly not capable of the movement seen over Russian Poland.

So what was going on here? This was early on in the Russo-German antagonism. The Reinsurance Treaty between the two empires lapsed in 1890, and Russia was drawing closer to France. (The Franco-Russian treaty was drafted in August 1892.) Russian troops were pouring into Poland, whether for the annual exercises or some other reason was not clear. (Germans reportedly feared an attack; the Russian foreign minister had to assure the German ambassador that the mobilisation was only precautionary.) Russia itself was still suffering from a terrible famine after a crop failure in 1891, which had claimed the lives of several hundred thousand people over the winter.

So the situation in Russia was unsettled. The phantom balloons were thought to be piloted by German spies, and there is evidence that Russian authorities were worried about espionage, just as in Britain in 1909. For example, a Russian commander is reported to have to demanded permission to expel civilians from the border areas, 90% of whom were Jews, ‘who are regarded by the Russian authorities as certain to be friendly to an invading force, and as already acting as spies for the Germans’.6 This while Jews were being ejected from St Petersburg for the Pale of Settlement. Russians felt threatened by enemies within and without.

So in my usual way I’m suggesting that fears of war, of a technologically advanced enemy and a treacherous civilian minority combined to cause a phantom balloon panic, an early episode in the Scareship Age. Russians projected their fears onto the night sky. As for what actually triggered the sightings, Venus seems a likely candidate, as it was very bright and highly visible low in the western sky after sunset at this time. That can’t explain all the sightings (it had set long before 1am, for example), but it’s undoubtedly responsible for some of them.

  1. Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1892, p. 8.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 31 March 1892, p. 8.
  4. New York Times, 30 March 1892, p. 5. See also ibid., 26 March 1892, p. 3.
  5. Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1892, p. 8.
  6. Ibid., 31 March 1892, p. 8.

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