Thesis

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart:

The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven aircraft were accordingly fitted with desert equipment, large tyres and extra fuel; they flew with three Indian squadrons until 1939. Their high performance was particularly values on the Frontier as they were the only aircraft which could meet the Afghan air menace on equal terms, especially after 1937 when the Afghans began to employ the Hind, itself a high-speed derivative of the Hart. Others served in Egypt and Palestine.¹

Afghanistan established an independent air force as early as 1924, though it was easy enough for the British to dismiss as the only Afghan who could fly an aeroplane was made its Chief of Air Staff! But though small in European terms, with mainly Soviet assistance and aircraft the Afghan Air Force became quite efficient within a few years, and was used in several air control operations of its own, against rebellious tribes in outlying areas. Britain eventually felt it had to edge the Soviets out in order to gain some influence over it, hence the supply of Hinds (8 in 1937, another 20 ordered in 1939).

Although Omissi’s subject — air control, the use of airpower in Imperial policing, or in other words, the British air menace — is ostensibly quite some distance from strategic bombing, I found that reading his book illuminated aspects of my own work (and sadly, this means I’ve broken my New Year’s resolution already). Partly this is because he has chosen less jarring terms than I have (’mitigation’? what was I thinking?) but it’s more because he provides a typology of indigenous responses (in practice) to being bombed which transfers pretty well to ideas being worked out, at the same time, in Britain (in theory) about how it would or should respond to being bombing. Although Omissi doesn’t describe it as such, it’s almost a spectrum of responses, varying with the capacity of the society under attack to resist, which in turn is going to depend largely on the resources available, but also on other factors such geography and climate. (That doesn’t quite work, though, because the responses aren’t mutually exclusive.)
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1. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 142; emphasis added.

I’ve just spent two months at various libraries and archives in the UK. As I’ve noted previously, I now have a huge amount of extra primary source material to go through. Sure, in the abstract, more is better, but in concrete terms, how will this help make my thesis better than it would otherwise have been?

The most immediate benefit is for the chapter I’m currently working on, on defence panics. The primary sources for this are newspapers and other periodicals, a few of which I can get here, but not the single most important one: the right-wing and populist Daily Mail, a major advocate of aerial armaments over my period. I was able to survey the relevant dates (covering periods between 1913 and 1940) of the Daily Mail for all of the panics I’m interested in. (I also looked at a couple of months’ worth of the Evening News, another Rothermere paper, from 1935; and the aviation magazine, the Aeroplane.) Ideally I would have examined other important conservative newspapers such the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph as well, but realistically I was never going to have enough time for that: scanning page after page of microfilmed newspapers for the occasional article of interest is very time-consuming, and it took me almost a month as it was! But now I know how the most influential press scaremonger in the British press portrayed the aerial menace, and so my chapter will be that much better.

The second chapter with which my research will help is a projected one on the organisation of aerial advocacy: that is, which organisations promoted aerial armaments, who joined them, what did they argue, how were they financed? I’m now in a position to be able to talk about groups such as the Air League of the British Empire, the Navy League (oddly enough), and the National League of Airmen. I will partly be viewing these through the prisms of some of their key figures: P. R. C. Groves, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and Norman Macmillan, the personal archives of all of whom I was able to examine in London. I’ll supplement this with information about their activities from their journals and/or the press, and I also have the Air League’s minute books for 1909-1941 to draw upon. I guess with this chapter, the question I want to answer is: where were the leagues? Anyone familiar with navalism before the First World War will recall that the Navy League and Imperial Maritime League were very active in trying to alert public opinion to the need for more battleships to counter the growing German fleet. I expected something similar would be the case with airmindedness, yet the Air League has been almost invisible in my research so far. And it turns out that this was actually a criticism the Air League had to face several times in its early history. Once I’ve sifted through all the data I should be better able to explain why this was.

Finally, my (already-written) chapters on the origin and evolution of the knock-out blow will need to be updated somewhat in light of some of the books and archival sources I looked at. Nothing major — just refining and clarifying the narrative in places. For example, I now know a bit more about when and why F. W. Lanchester wrote Aircraft in Warfare (1916), a key text in the creation of the knock-out blow paradigm. Actually, now that I think of it, the main advantage here is probably an increased confidence that I’ve got the the story largely right: although I obviously can’t be sure that something startling might turn up, I’ve at least now filled in the more glaring gaps in my review of the literature.

Of course I picked up a lot of other things of interest here and there along the way, and there are the intangible benefits of meeting other researchers working on related topics as well. Overall, my thesis will certainly be much the better for the time I spent in the UK; it was two months very well spent!

The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School’s Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though — at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! — which is good because it was the first real outing for my current chapter on defence panics. The deadly-dull paper title was “Moral panics, defence panics and the British air panic of 1934-5″, and here’s the abstract:

The sociological concept of moral panic was developed to describe and explain how societies react to internal threats to their values and interests, such as crime or deviant behaviour, with particular emphasis on the roles played by the media and expert opinion. In this paper I will argue that the reactions of a society to external, military threats — “defence panics” — can develop in essentially the same way as moral panics, and can be analysed using a similar framework. My main example will be drawn from the British air panic of 1934-5 over the threat of illegal German aerial rearmament.

For the record, these are the main defence panic candidates I’m interested in, some of which I’ve discussed here before:

• phantom airship scare, 1913
• Gotha raids on London, 1917
• “French” air menace, 1922
• Hamburg gas disaster, 1928
• German germ warfare experiments, 1934
• German air menace, 1934-5
• Guernica, 1937; Barcelona, 1938; Canton, 1938; Munich crisis, 1938
• the Blitz, 1940

I had a slide up with Airminded’s URL but stupidly forgot to actually mention it. So if anyone who heard my talk has managed to find their way here despite this, hello and well done! Amazingly, there was actually one student there who already reads Airminded — I was very chuffed to learn that reading it is less boring than working :) — but I quite rudely forgot to ask their name. If they or anyone else from the session would like to drop me a line, they can drop me a line here in the comments, or via the contact form. I’d like to hear from you!

I haven’t written for a while on where I’m up to in terms of the PhD thesis (you know — the reason why, ultimately, this blog exists!) I’m nearly at the (nominal) half-way point, and I think it’s coming along ok. Last month I finally completed a draft of chapter 2 (the evolution of the knock-out blow, 1932-1941), which along with chapter 1 (the origins of the knock-out blow, 1893-1931) and the (very preliminary) introduction, adds up to 29500 words. It took me much longer to write chapter 2 than I expected, partly because I was tutoring in 2nd semester, but also because there are just so many sources: it’s twice the length of chapter 1, despite covering only a quarter as many years.

So now I am working on chapter 3, logically enough. This is on defence panics and high technology. By “defence panic” I mean something very much like a moral panic, except that the focus of anxiety is an external threat to society, instead of an internal one — phantom airships (for example) rather than mods and rockers. It seems to me that in the early 20th century, (largely) media-driven defence panics were a prime means by which public opinion on the threat of bombing was influenced, transmitting and amplifying for a wider audience the warnings of the airpower experts I’ve examined in chapters 1 and 2. The connection with high technology is that very often defence panics hinged upon the predicted impact of some new technology — gas being the prime example.

Other objectives for this year include getting a couple of papers out (one probably based on chapter 2), attending a conference or two, and getting over to the UK — by hook or by crook!

I successfully passed the one-year confirmation stage of my PhD yesterday. It was never really in question: I would have to have been in serious trouble to be given my marching orders at this stage. (On the other hand — been there, done that, got the MSc instead.) But it’s nice to get it out of the way, so I can get back to my research. Well, when I’m not preparing for tutes that is!

I’m preparing for my PhD confirmation, which means I’m nearly a year in. (Eeep!) This means giving a paper (done), writing a report justifying what I’ve done and plan to do, and appearing before a committee to discuss my report and progress. A cynical viewpoint would be that this is just a hoop-jumping-through exercise which is just something to get out of the way, but it’s actually very useful to be made to step back, consider the bigger picture of the overall thesis, and have to explain to somebody else what it is that I’m actually doing, and what I plan to do in future.

So this is essentially the chapter plan. The basic idea is to explain and analyse the knock-out blow paradigm, and then the proposed responses to it — what ought to be done about it. I’ve mostly been working on chapter 2, the research for which is largely complete, and has been written up for the period up to 1931. (It’s a big chapter; it may need to be split into two.) Next, I will probably move on to chapter 3.

1. Airpower advocates and sceptics. Who addressed the British public on the subject of airpower, how they were organised, and what their affiliations and ideologies were. This will include individuals and groups such as the Air League of the British Empire and the National League of Airmen.
2. The knock-out blow. The construction and evolution of theories of aerial bombardment in the public sphere. The two main types of knock-out blow: attacks against infrastructure, and attacks against morale. From the pre-history of the knock-out blow before the First World War, to the 1930s when it became something more than an abstract possibility.
3. High technology. The role of new (and sometimes non-existent) technologies in modifying the perceived threat of aerial bombardment. This includes, most importantly, chemical weapons, but also robotic aircraft, stealth technology, atomic weapons, and the conversion of civil aircraft to military use, all of which promised to make air attack more difficult to defend against. However, sound location and death rays provided some hope for the defence.
4. Mitigation and prevention. How the threat of the knockout blow was mobilised in support of air defence, air raid precautions, disarmament, the limitation of bombing, or appeasement.
5. Deterrence and the new order. How the threat of the knockout blow was mobilised in support of a stronger bomber force, an international air police, or a world state with airpower as its foundation. Turned inwards instead of outward, airpower threatened to undermine democracy.

This covers most of the things I want to talk about. I’m not completely happy with the last chapter — I don’t know if it will be strong enough to finish on. Appeasement would be a safer option, but perhaps less interesting. The other problem is that I haven’t quite worked out how to fit in the connection between fascism and aviation. I’ve put it in chapter 5 here (as part of a “new order”), but it feels a little forced. A logical place for it may become clearer later on, or I may just have to ditch it. Of course, much of the thesis plan may change in future, but for the moment it shows where I intend to head.

[I posted this last Wednesday, but somehow, it was marked as “private” rather than “published”, so nobody saw it but me! So I’m fixing that and bumping it to the top.]

The talk went off pretty well, I think — at least I didn’t hear any snoring and got some good questions at the end. The best part, though, was that “Four” Meaher (whose own paper on the political uses of the myth of the “great betrayal” — ie of Australia, by Britain, in 1941-2 — was one of the highlights of the day for me) put me on to this most amusing song called “The Deepest Shelter in Town”, the lyrics of which are below. Googling, it turns out that it was sung by an English comedienne, Florence Desmond (whose first husband, incidentally, was one of the winners of the 1934 London to Melbourne Centenary Air Race, Tom Campbell Black). The reference to Herbert Morrison dates it to his early days at the Home Office (where he was responsible for air raid precautions), ie from October 1940, when he took over from John Anderson — the height of the Blitz, which fits (though otherwise, the late 1930s might be an even better fit, when the left were attacking the government over the lack of deep air raid shelters).

Don’t run away, mister,
Oh stay and play, mister.
Don’t worry if you hear the siren go.
Though I’m not a lady of the highest virtue,
I wouldn’t dream of letting anything hurt you.
And so before you go,
I think you ought to know
I got a cozy flat,
There’s a place for your hat.
I’ll wear a pink chiffon negligee gown.
And do I know my stuff?
But if that’s not enough,
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.
I’ve got a room for two,
A radio that’s new,
An alarm clock that won’t let you down.
And I’ve got central heat,
But to make it complete,
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.
Ev’ry modern comfort
I can just guarantee.
If you hear the siren call,
Then it’s probably me.
And sweetie, to revert,
I’ll keep you on the alert.
I won’t even be wearing a frown.
So you can hang around here
Until the “all clear,”
In the deepest shelter in town.
Now, honey, I don’t sing
Of an Anderson thing,
Climbing in one, you look like a clown.
But if you came here to see
Why Sir John would agree
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.
Now Mr. Morrison
Says he’s getting things done,
And he’s a man of the greatest renown.
But before it gets wrecked,
I hope he’ll come and inspect
The deepest shelter in town.
Now, I was one of the first
To clear my attic of junk.
But when it comes to shelters,
Now-a-days, it’s all bunk.
So, honey, don’t get scared,
It’s there to be shared!
And you’ll feel like a king with a crown.
So please don’t be mean,
Better men than you have been
In the deepest shelter in town.

Now, what she meant by ‘I’ve got the deepest shelter in town’ I’m sure I don’t know, but I imagine she looked something like this when she was singing it!

Image source: Virtual History Film.

I’m giving a talk next Wednesday as part of the History Department’s Work In Progress Day, and that’s the title I would have given it, had I been the least bit imaginative the day I wrote the abstract. Instead I have a nothing title (”Airpower and British society: plans and progress”), and to go along with it, a nothing abstract:

My thesis is on the impact of airpower propaganda on the British people between 1908 and 1941. During this period, air panics — most importantly the fear of the ‘knock-out blow’ of civilisation by bombing and gas attacks — replaced naval and invasion panics as the most characteristic and significant expression of public concern about the defence of Britain. More positively, some looked to aviation to promote peace through deterrence or collective security. The ways in which these hopes and fears were articulated and manipulated have been little studied and provide insights into some perhaps surprising aspects of British society.

Of course, I am merely following the time-honoured academic tradition of writing the abstract long before the paper is written, or even thought about, which explains the nothingness! I will actually just be giving a general overview of what my PhD is about, what themes I hope to explore, what the sources are, and so on. I’m in the second-last slot of the day, so most people will probably be dozing off by then and I can slip my talk in without getting noticed :D 20 minutes plus 10 for discussion, a little razzle, a little dazzle, some laughs, some tears, and that’s all there is to it.

Actually, it will be good to get it out of the way, because it will satisfy one of the conditions for the confirmation of my PhD candidature, which means I can get funding for overseas travel. It’s the first talk I’ll have given for my PhD, which probably should be confronting, but WIPD is apparently a very relaxed environment (59 other students from the department will be giving papers — cleverly, they all chose interesting titles like “Sexing the belly: the cultural politics of Britney Spears’ pregnant body”), and anyway I have given a couple of papers at big international conferences before, so I am not without experience. Mind you, I gave them very badly, but perhaps I have matured with age …

The department is also revamping its website, and now has a list of its postgraduate students, including yours truly. This proves what I have suspected for a while, namely that as a British historian (historian of Britain, whatever) I am in a distinct minority in my department! What’s with all this Australian history, sheesh.

I have been finishing off a long-ish post that I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but now I don’t think I will post it. This is because I came to realise that it’s actually stuff I want to write about more formally at some stage, in my thesis or in a paper. Generally speaking, the things I write about on this blog are more closely related to my actual research than many other academic history blogs, which is how I wanted it to be, but it does seem that I’ve reached a limit here! I guess it’s because blogs have no particular academic standing, so it’s like I’m giving away something (my research, my ideas) for nothing. Somebody else could take those references and ideas¹ and publish them before I get a chance to, or maybe I’ll say something careless and wrong that will reflect badly on me; a journal article at least passes before several more sets of eyeballs before it gets to the outside world. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that presenting research on a blog or other non-peer reviewed forum is career suicide, but it may not be particularly wise either. Now, I don’t mind posting snippets of interesting or curious information which I don’t have any particular use for, and which I may or may not use some day. That can be a helpful form of thinking aloud, for one thing, and it may lead to something more formal. But it seems to be different when it comes to my core research. Posting about that makes me nervous, I find, so I tend to talk about somewhat peripheral (but hopefully still interesting) subjects. That may be safer, but it probably also reduces the potential benefits of having a research blog.

So, I might re-work the post not posted into a shorter, more general piece. And it’s not like there’s a lack of interesting but non-threatening things to blog about — the trouble is finding the time to do it! I suspect, too, that my more central research concerns will be easier to write about on here when I am also writing them up for publication or presentation. But I don’t know. Am I being too paranoid? Not paranoid enough?

1. Not that I am claiming to have had any brilliant ones …

This is my reading list for the next month or so, all from the period 1932-1941. After that, I’ll be back at the State Library to read some more. There’s about twice as many books as there were for the preceding period (1917-1931), though not all of these will turn out to be of great interest.

Well, it’s enough to be going on with, anyway!

So far in my PhD, I’ve mainly being reading the available secondary sources pertaining to my topic. There’s still so much to go … but I’m going to take a break from that for a few months, or at least put it on the back burner, in order to start writing a chapter of my thesis! This (along with the lit review) is something I need to have done as part of the first year PhD confirmation process. The deadline is still over 8 months away, but the sooner I can get it out of the way, the sooner I can apply for funds for travel to the UK. But aside from that, it will be exciting to finally start researching and writing of my own, rather than reading what everyone else has done.

The chapter I’ve decided to write will probably end up being the second or third chapter of the final thesis. It’s on the “knock-out blow” - the long-feared, much-discussed but never-actually-happened massive aerial blow which many people assumed would start (and end) the next war. So I need to piece together how contemporary writers (novelists and public intellectuals, mostly) conceived of the knock-out blow, and how these ideas originated and changed over time. A sub-theme of the chapter will be about how ideas of the knock-out blow were, explicitly or implicitly, critiques of British society. Also, previously I was unsure whether I would be stopping at 3 September 1939 or continuing into the war. Well, I will now be taking the story up to August 1940, at least (when the first heavy Luftwaffe attacks on the British mainland took place - if the knock-out blow was ever going to be delivered, this was the time), but still am not sure if I should go as far as May 1941, the end of the Blitz, by which time everyone could be sure that the knock-out blow wasn’t actually coming after all.

The other piece of thesis-related news is VERY good indeed: I have been awarded a scholarship, and so won’t starve or freeze to death over the next three years! This is a huge relief; now all I have to worry about is the travel, and the research, and the writing …

Tips on how to complete a PhD, at Crooked Timber.

As befits a self-respecting Unix geek, I’ve pretty much finally decided that I will write my thesis in LaTeX, and not in Word (which is what I have been using for the last few years). I am a bit nervous about this. Most historians, I’m sure, have never heard of it, and indeed the typical LaTeX user would be working in the sciences (which is where I first learned to use it, many moons ago; among other things, it’s great for equations). There’s not a lot of support for using LaTeX in the humanities.¹ The Astrophysical Journal may prefer papers to be submitted in LaTeX format, but the Journal of British Studies probably wouldn’t have any idea as to what to do with such a beast.² Since none of my colleagues will know how to use LaTeX, it’s next to useless for any collaborative work. But all that is get-around-able, because I can switch back to Word if need be. The big problem, though, is bibliographical management. EndNote can’t work with LaTeX in the same way as it does with Word. That means I either enter and format all citations by hand (urk), or use BibTeX-oriented software. Which is fine … except if I ever decide I want to go back to Word/EndNote, either temporarily or permanently, then my bibliography will be in BibTeX, which of course Word can’t handle. It is possible to convert from EndNote to BibTeX and vice versa, in theory, but in my experience this isn’t very unreliable. EndNote can export directly to BibTeX, but the resulting file isn’t readable; I had better luck exporting to RefMan (RIS) format instead. Unfortunately, for some reason this abbreviates authors’ first names to just their initial, so I will have to key those in by hand.

So much for the pain. What’s the pleasure? Well, for one thing, the result looks so much better than Word. It is very easy to produce a beautiful document in LaTeX. It’s the kerning … the justification … it’s just the vibe. More importantly, LaTeX separates form from content. When writing in Word, I find that I get hung up on how the thing looks, and distracted by trying to massage its appearance. In LaTeX, you just write, and worry about that stuff later. And when producing large and complex documents (like a PhD thesis!), LaTeX comes into its own: when you do need it, you have the power to specify exactly where to place that table on the page - whereas Word will put it wherever it thinks best and you have little say in the matter. In fact, LaTeX can be (and is) used to typeset entire books. The other main advantage as I see it is that LaTeX files are just plain text files, where Word uses a binary format. Which is stupidly easy to corrupt.³ This is the safest and most portable format around, and it helps that LaTeX is available for Windows, OS X and your various Unices and Unix-work-alikes. (For more comparisons, see here (with pictures!) and here.)

OK, but just what is LaTeX? It’s actually not strictly comparable to Word, because it’s not a word processor: it’s essentially a markup language, like HTML. So for example, in HTML the first sentence in this paragraph would be written like this:

OK, but just what <b>is</b> LaTeX?

In LaTeX, the equivalent is:

OK, but just what \textbf{is} LaTeX?

And so on. Then you run ‘latex’ on the document in order to produce the output (these days, generally a PDF file) - just as a web brower parses a HTML page. There’s a handy cheat sheet here, and a useful collection of installation and usage links here.

Frankly, LaTeX is hard to get the hang of, especially coming from the WYSIWYG world, and typing out the various commands is a bit tedious. But there are tools which make the process a lot easier (and this is the biggest improvement from my days as an astrophysics postgrad, when I used vi exclusively). I’m on OS X, and my favourite LaTeX editor is TeXShop, but there are others. To manage my bibliography, I’m using BibDesk (and for the humanities, the jurabib bibliographic package is a must - specifically the Oxford style, jox.bst, as Chicago support is poor).⁴ I’m currently going through my ex-EndNote bibliography, fixing up the first names and adding keywords (PRImary/SECondary, OWNed/LIBrary/UNSeen) as I go. This will be a good thing to finish, because I had been deferring adding new entries until I made a decision to go to LaTeX/BibTeX or stick with Word/EndNote, and instead writing them down in little text files here and there, and it was all starting to get away from me!

So is this a good idea? Come back in three years and I’ll tell you …

Update: for some reason, I’ve re-edited this entry about 10 times since posting it. The most important thing I forgot to mention is that all of the LaTeX/BibTeX tools mentioned above are free - an important consideration for postgrads! LaTeX is open source software, and pretty much all the related tools are too, though I think there are some commercial LaTeX editors.

1. Though there are in fact some users in the humanities, as the comments to this Crooked Timber post show.
2. Though actually, it seems that most history journals only accept paper manuscripts. How quaint!
3. To be fair, this seems to happen much less often than it used to.
4. MAKEBST might be another way to go.

One of my current tasks is to define an hypothesis. This is the question that I will be seeking to answer in my thesis, and so it’s what my research will revolve around. It’s not an easy thing to do. I know what I’d like to research, but you don’t get a PhD for just reading a lot of books or whatever. There needs to be a point to your research: a why as well as a what. And I haven’t really been getting to grips with that. Until very recently, that is - oddly enough the night before I had a meeting with both my supervisors! Funny how that happens.

What I think the thesis is about is the political uses of catastrophe (a word my supervisor came up with, which I rather like) - how the commonly-held fear of air attack was used by different groups and individuals for different ends. Because what strikes me as interesting is the way that for example, pacifists used exactly the same apocalyptic imagery of the knock-out blow as their ideological opponents, but used it for completely different purposes. So, to take just one example, virtually everyone agreed that the next war would see London in flames and tens or hundreds of thousands dead from bombs and gas within days or weeks. If you were a pacifist, this “proved” that international disarmament was an urgent necessity. But if you were a militarist (not necessarily the word I want, but it will do), then this “proved” that instead Britain needed lots of bombers of its own to act as a deterrent and/or reprisal force.

It’s still not quite there. But this formulation allows me to talk about most of the things that interest me about my overall topic … the relationship between fascism and aviation … the strange hatred the Peace Pledge Union seems to have had for air-raid precautions … the idea that airpower might provide a basis for world government … all sorts of things. So I’m on the right track!

Now, if only I could finally settle on my exact chronological focus …

Today I officially began my candidature … I’m a PhD student! It must be nearly eight years since I was last a postgraduate research student (a masters degree in astrophysics). Oy vey.