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
These bots are getting nicher and nicher! @TroveWW1AirRaidBot is a Bluesky and Mastodon bot. Just like @TroveAirRaidBot, it posts Trove newspaper articles containing the phrase “air raid” – with the difference that it only posts those published between 1914 and 1918. The reason for this is because I’ve noticed that @TroveAirRaidBot now posts much more
In August 1940, the letter columns of the Stoke-on-Trent Evening Sentinel raged with an intense (if brief) controversy over the existence of unofficial civil defence groups known as ‘street patrols’. These were nothing to do with the national Air Raid Precautions (ARP) organisation, which among other things recruited air raid wardens to monitor and coordinate
Airminded is 20 years old today. That’s a long time in blog years. Airminded at 0 I was an almost-young almost-PhD student. Airminded was going to be a place for me to talk about things I’d found during my research. Airminded at 5 I was a recent PhD graduate, trying to get an academic job.
One of the fun things about historical research is finding something when you’re not looking for it. Alan Murdie, in his regular ‘Ghostwatch’ column in a recent Fortean Times, wrote the following: At Folkstone [sic], in 1917, candles in an air-raid shelter were mysteriously extinguished amid other poltergeist events. Natural gas from strata was blamed.1
