Recently, while editing the prewar chapter of Home Fires Burning, I made the decision to cut a few hundred words dealing with H.G. Wells’ ideas about aerial bombardment. And I feel good about it! Why is that? I’m not a Wells scholar by any means, but in the past I have had to engage with […]
A few years ago I took part in a very enjoyable Tales from Rat City podcast episode, hosted by David Waldron and centred around the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic from the perspective of Ballarat in the Victorian goldfields region. That had actors reading out primary source quotations, which was a great way to highlight
I’m not obsessed with ‘England is no longer an island‘, you are! OK, so maybe I am, a little, but mainly because ‘England is no longer an island’ (EINLAI) is one of those phrases that nearly every historian writing about early aviation in Britain cannot fail to quote, usually attributed to Lord Northcliffe, often in
My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 2026 conference, being held at Macquarie University from 29 June–3 July, has been accepted. My talk is entitled ‘The Underworld: Living and Dying in London’s Air Raid Shelters, 1917-1918’ and this is the abstract: London’s first significant experience of air raid shelters came not in the Blitz of
Content warning: descriptions of death and mutilation. The opening paragraph of the current draft of my next book, about one day over a century ago: And from the Guardian, about one day less than a week ago: The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday,
Registrations are now open for Print the Legend, the next Aviation Cultures Spotlight event, which will be held online across 27 and 28 February 2026 (Australian Eastern Daylight Time; correct for your own timezone). This is a free event, but you do need to register beforehand. Print the Legend promises to be both fun and
This appeared in the correspondence section1 of Fortean Times 464 (December 2025), relating a story told by the grandmother of the author, Robert Flood: During the First World War her husband was serving in the Royal Naval Air Service and Nan was living with her parents in Temple Mill Lane, Stratford (her father worked at
Like many people – out of the sort of people who know these sorts of things, that is – I knew of Jan Smuts’ key role in the origins of both the RAF and the Air Ministry. It was the so-called ‘Smuts report‘ to the War Cabinet, in August 1917, which set the whole process
Somehow I managed to miss – by exactly a year! – the publication of the third and final volume of Ian Castle’s history of the Zeppelin and Gotha raids: I included Zeppelin Onslaught on my 1914–1918 air raids reading list back in 2022. In the meantime I’ve read Zeppelin Inferno, and having just finished Gotha
Four days after the second great daylight Gotha raid on London, Lady Louise Maxwell (above) wrote a letter announcing the foundation of a new philanthropic fund, the Home Fires Fund. Believing that it was ‘childish to expect a huge city like London […] can escape these occasional air raids’, and accepting that ‘We have come
