Another bit from the Earl of Halsbury's 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), this time from p. 217. It's a couple of weeks after a massive Russo-German air strike on London, Paris, and in fact most of the bigger cities of western Europe. Two members of a group making its way to the southern coast of Cornwall wonder just how much further British society has to sink after the enormous dislocation caused by the knock-out blow:
More
Acquisitions
Sebastian Ritchie. Industry and Air Power: The Expansion of British Aircraft Production, 1935-41. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1997. Just what it says in the title, really. Not, I think, from the declinist school of British historiography.
Flies and cockroaches
As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion. Well, I think I've found the pre-atomic, chemical equivalent! It's from a novel published in 1926:
Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London it's quite another. Suppose you dropped enough to make a lethal atmosphere all over London to a depth of forty feet, not a single living thing could survive, not one — except flies. Curiously enough, they are immune.
Source: the Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 25.
This is a new one on me, I wonder if this idea became as popular as the cockroach version later did?
It also has grave implications for the future of life on this planet, because chemical weapons are easier to develop than nuclear ones and so that will give the flies an advantage over the cockroaches in the eternal struggle for supremacy …
Acquisitions
David Oliver. Hendon Aerodrome: A History. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994. Hendon was probably THE most important site for the cultivation of airmindedness in Britain up to the Second World War — first as the home base of pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White and friends, then from the 1920s as the location of the annual RAF Pageant, always attracting huge crowds. Today it's the location of the RAF Museum. This well-illustrated little book covers all of Hendon's aerial history, but of course gives pride of place to the Grahame-White and RAF Pageant days.
Malcolm Smith. Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Looks like another interesting entry in the burgeoning field of — what do you call it? Mythologisation of war? Memorialisation? Studies of that stuff, anyway. By the author of British Air Strategy Between the Wars. The second chapter, entitled "The projection of war, 1918-1939" most closely relates to my own research.
John W. R. Taylor. Combat Aircraft of the World From 1909 to the Present. New York: Paragon, 1979. This was recommended to me by members of a mailing list — I wanted a fairly comprehensive guide to combat aircraft that didn't just focus on the well-known ones from the World Wars, so that it would have the obscure French bombers and Polish fighters (or whatever!) of the 1920s and 1930s that never saw action. And this book is pretty much exactly what I was looking for (and more besides), and it's very well-illustrated too.
Orwell and the gramophone needle conspiracy
Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever heard of it.
That's Big Grammo for you, I guess. (Or maybe not …)
Source: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989 [1937]), 192.
Orwell and the knock-out blow
I've been reading George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989), which was originally published in 1937. Not because it has anything to do with my thesis, but just to broaden my horizons, and because, well, it's Orwell, ya know? I certainly didn't expect to read about the possible effects of bombing in a book about socialism and unemployment. But then what do I read on pp. 203-4, in the context of a discussion of whether a return to a pre-industrial society is possible?
For some time past it has been fashionable to say that war is presently going to 'wreck civilisation' altogether; but, though the next full-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all previous ones seem a joke, it is immensely unlikely that it will put a stop to mechanical progress. It is true that a very vulnerable country like England, and perhaps the whole of western Europe, could be reduced to chaos by a few thousand well-placed bombs, but no war is at present thinkable which could wipe out industrialism in all countries simultaneously. We may take it that the return to a simpler, freer, less mechanised way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going to happen.
So at this point in time, Orwell accepted some version of the knock-out blow theory. In fact, he went pretty far, only stopping short of the idea that civilisation itself could be entirely bombed back to the Stone Age. But 'very vulnerable' Britain and perhaps western Europe could be 'reduced to chaos' by bombing, which is pretty much the standard knock-out blow scenario.
I guess this is an example of what Martin Ceadel meant when he wrote that 'literature-and-society' types should 'look for the many indicators of concern about air power, for example, to be found in the literature of the twenties and thirties which is not directly about fear of war'. So the lesson here is obviously that I have to read every single word written in Britain in the three decades or so before the Second World War, so that I can catch everything written about the knock-out blow!
Acquisitions
Andrew Boyle. Trenchard. London: Collins, 1962. Finally got around to buying a copy of the standard biography of a crucial figure in the early RAF.
L. E. O. Charlton. Charlton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. Charlton's autobiography, originally published in 1931 — so after his almost-resignation from the RAF over bombing in Iraq, but before he became a well-known airpower pundit. A nice blue Penguin paperback, still in the original dust-jacket.
Constantine FitzGibbon. London's Burning. London: MacDonald & Co., 1970. This popular account of the Blitz was recommended to me as a source on pre-war fears of bombing. I'm not sure how useful it will be, but it was very cheap — though still about 6 times the original $1.65 cover price!
Christopher Frayling. Things to Come. London: BFI Publishing, 1995. A little book about the big film of the even bigger book — how it came to be, Wells' intimate involvement in the whole production, and why everyone in the future wears tunics with those giant triangular things over the shoulders. (Well, that's what I want to know, anyway …)
Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. Air Power: Naval, Military, Commercial. London: Chapman & Hall, 1917. On the lessons of the Great War for the future of airpower, and how after the war Britain can and must exercise control over the air as it has over the sea.
F. W. Hirst. The Six Panics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1913. Hirst was the editor of the Economist. This is the only contemporary book I know of which discusses the airship panics (and then only in a single brief chapter). I've been looking for my own copy for years!
John Langdon-Davies. Air Raid: The Technique of Silent Approach, High Explosive, Panic. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938. A journalist who had witnessed the air raids on Barcelona applies his first-hand knowledge to the British case. He seems quite critical of the government's ARP literature.
Save the trees
A useful site about digitising your trip to the archives: Electronic Researcher. It was mentioned in a H-ALBION thread about which digital cameras are best for use in archives, and which archives allow them (British Library no, National Archives yes). I wish I'd found this earlier, as I have already bought a camera for this purpose, but I think it will be OK.
Q. When is an island not an island?
A. Just about all the time, it seems, if it's Britain:
Lord Palmerston in 1845, on the coming of the steam ship:
… the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge.
Georges Valbert in 1883, on the proposed Channel Tunnel:
It will be a prodigious event in the life of an insular people, when they find that they are islanders no more. Nothing is more likely to excite and alarm them, or to affect and upset their preconceived ideas.
Lord Northcliffe in 1906, on Alberto Santos-Dumont's flight:
England is no longer an island … It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes.
Acquisitions
Lee Kennett. A History of Strategic Bombing. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982. Looks like a very good short introduction to the subject. Balanced international coverage and the cultural side of things is not neglected.