Monthly Archives: April 2008

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I stumbled across this by accident: a pilot digitisation of Hansard, funded and operated by Parliament. What an excellent thing! It's functional, but based only on a subset of 20th-century Hansard material:

What's on this site? This site is generated from a sample of information from Hansard, the Official Report of Parliament. It is not a complete nor an official record. Material from this site should not be used as a reference to or cited as Hansard. The material on this site cannot be held to be authoritative.

This warning should be heeded -- it's only a prototype and should not be relied upon for any purpose. It's easy to find omissions, such as Baldwin's 'the bomber will always get through' speech, even though there's quite a number of entries for the day in question. The text itself appears remarkably uncorrupt, given the volume of data that's been OCRed: I've only found a few errors (most amusing one: the Marquees of Londonderry -- I guess it must rain there a lot). There are certainly a few minor problems -- for example, once I managed to get the search engine to tell me that a debate in 1958 happened earlier than one in 1944. At present there's no disambiguation between different people with the same name -- so the earliest utterance recorded for Mr. Winston Churchill is on 19 March 1941, and the latest on 11 March 1997 -- nor combinations between (possibly) the same person with different names -- such as Churchill, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill (by private notice), Mr. Churchill (Stretford) and so on. It's all experimental at this stage, so these issues will presumably be addressed in future. (LibraryThing lets its users do a lot of the work for similar problems, but I doubt a HansardThing would ever reach the critical mass needed for that to work.)
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A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there's the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard's analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders 'squeal' first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick's works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had 'all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette' and referred to her as a 'sentimentalist'.1

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and "conscience" impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.2

Read: don't you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter's Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great "Neon" Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?3
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  1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6. []
  2. Ibid., 3. []
  3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, "The future of aerial transport", Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein. []

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I'll be giving a talk entitled “From Darfur to London: P. R. C. Groves and the construction of aerial apocalypse, 1916-1922”, at the Australian Historical Association's Biennial Conference, Locating History, 7-10 July 2008, which is conveniently being held at the University of Melbourne. Here's the abstract:

The idea that cities could be shattered and wars won by aerial bombardment in a so-called 'knock-out blow' was embryonic before the Great War. After the war, such exaggerated theories became an orthodoxy among airpower theorists and, by the 1930s, among the wider British public -- an important factor underlying support for pacifism, appeasement and collective security up to the Munich crisis. But the war itself was crucial to both the formulation and the propagation of the theory of the knock-out blow.

Most responsible for promoting this idea of the knock-out blow to a wider audience was General P. R. C. Groves, a veteran of both aerial and bureaucratic warfare: the British equivalent of Douhet and Mitchell. Convinced that Britain's air defences were being dangerously neglected, he retired from the RAF in 1922 and waged a highly-visible press campaign on the issue. In so doing, Groves relied upon and popularised the theory of the knock-out blow, drawing on his experiences in using airpower against rebellion in Darfur, in trying to win the war in France, and in trying to suppress a German resurgence after 1918 -- and thereby, ironically, complicated the task of dealing with Germany after 1933.

I wrote that a few months ago, and some of it strikes me as a bit strange now, but I doubt that anyone is going to be tracking how rigorously I adhere to my abstract!

I'm currently slated to talk just after lunch on the first day. I've never been before, but it must be Australia's biggest history conference, with twelve parallel streams. One of these is a war and society-type stream, so I should be right -- although the title that's intriguing me the most is from one of the others: Erin Ihde's "Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and 'the Imagination of Disaster'"! I see that fellow bloggers Megan Sheehy and Melissa Bellanta will be giving papers too.

Should be fun.

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In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in 'a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room'1 -- that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began by noting that 'A gas-proof room is not a desert island, at least from a literary point of view', because desert island books are meant to be aids in survival, whereas those in a shelter are intended to divert the mind from dwelling on the danger of poison gas. So,

The competitor from Ulverston who suggested Bacon's "Novum Organum," "The Last Days of Pompeii," "The City of Dreadful Night," "Paradise Lost," "Sighs from Hell," by Bunyan, and Blair's "Grave" presumably knows his own mind better than anyone else does, but most people would say that the furniture of such a room would only be complete with a revolver to be used in case the gas and bombs and literature all failed to do their work.

Despite this admonishment, many of the entries displayed a rather dark humour:

Talking about once-obtainable foods will obviously be THE diversion in the War to end Civilisation. No better guide, then, to the menu of one's dreams than "Mrs. Beeton."

To the common suggestion of Who's Who, the Guardian responded by saying that this 'would easily, in an air raid, take on the appearance of an anthology of brief obituaries'.

Other submissions were more practical:

The books must steady jittery nerves by distracting the mind from business overhead. Whilst entertainment is required, purely light literature is useless, since it does not demand sufficient concentration. Humour only irritates in moments of strain. Books giving something to do are, therefore, best.

Though just how many people could be bothered with 'A Book of Mathematical Problems' or 'Any Chosen Work in Foreign Tongue, and a glossary for it' may be questioned!

While some suggestions were fairly optimistic -- 'Holiday Guide. -- To plan the next holidays' -- others, quite naturally, despaired of humanity:

Pope. -- For a reminder that men were once civilised.

Boswell's "Johnson." -- For a reminder that men were once sensible.

Urquhart's "Rabelais." -- For a reminder that there are better kinds of nonsense than dropping gas bombs.

So, who won? Douglas Rawson (or perhaps Hawson) of Malton in Yorkshire. His list had a bit of everything:

"Anatomy of Melancholy." -- For general reading.

Italian Phrase-book. -- In case of visitors.

German Phrase-book. -- Same reason.

Family Bible. -- Exhibiting Aryan descent.

Students' Song-book. -- For community singing.

Telephone Directory. -- To call doctors, &c., or locksmith if door combination forgotten.

It might be interesting to know what reading material people actually took with them into shelters during the Blitz. Some insight could no doubt be gleaned from diaries, especially Mass-Observation ones. Did people want to be amused while the bombs fell? Educated? Tested? Though amusing, the Manchester Guardian competition quoted here does not, I think, have much bearing on the question: the readership (middle class, left-Liberal, I suppose largely Mancunian) was small and not particularly representative. More importantly, people would have submitted lists which they thought would catch the judge's eye, in the hopes of winning the prize (two guineas), rather than the books they would really take into the refuge with them. Even more importantly, perhaps, when the air raids did eventually come, they were mostly at night, and shelterers (from HE and incendiaries rather than gas) were generally more concerned to get some sleep than to feed their heads.

Still, it's a fascinating little glimpse into the grim humour with which the British were facing up to the horrors they believed were coming:

But perhaps in the end we should all be pessimists enough to reach out automatically for Jeremy Taylor's little treatise on A.R.P. -- "Holy Living and Holy Dying." Its advantage is, of course, that, supposing the precautions did work after all, we could concentrate on the first half.

  1. Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1938, p. 5. All other quotes from "Literature and gas", Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1938, p. 6. []

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I've been meaning to update my sidebar for a while now, as there are a lot of good blogs (both new and old) which I like and which are worth bringing to people's attention. Some will already be known to readers of this site since they're written by readers of this site!

I've mostly kept my rather idiosyncratic categories, but have added a new category for digital history -- which I'm interested in but don't actually do. Reading these blogs helps me to keep feeling guilty about that fact. So, here there's academhack, Found History and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, which range from the practical to the theoretical in varying proportions.

On British history, there's Edwardian Promenade, which I was pleased to find as the Edwardian period seems under-represented in the historioblogosphere. Edwardian Promenade is mainly about the style, fashion and etiquette of the upper classes, which I'm finding unexpectedly interesting (possibly because of my boundless ignorance of such things). Mercurius Politicus is the blog of a student doing an MA on the early modern period. So it has quite a bit on the 17th century and its historiography, the odd travel post, and Carnivalesque 36.

There are a number of great Australian blogs appearing out there. I've been especially impressed by the host site of this month's History Carnival. The Vapour Trail investigates various forms of theatre in 19th century Australia and other English-speaking countries and how this illuminates broader aspects of society and culture. It's a good place to go if you want to know why the Sentimental Bloke was sentimental and whether Circassian beauties were Circassian. Humanities researcher is very close to home for me -- not because of the subject matter (medieval lit) but because the author is an academic at my own university! (Not from Historical Studies, alas, but Culture & Communication.) The title of the next one elicits some cognitive dissonance at first, but soon makes perfect sense: Space Age Archaeology. (Plus it has sputnik cakes.) And then there's The Cerebral Mum, somebody I've known (but haven't seen!) for a long time. It's not all that historical most of the time, but it's always an interesting read, and beside, she's also a history undergrad. Close enough for government work.

In the military history section, there's Zone of Influence, which isn't directly about military history, but rather about wargames (and their history), things which I sometimes post about but never have time to play myself anymore! The War Reading Room is the blog of an independent researcher and writer on various military history topics. And then there's the Australian War Memorial, which as I noted in the last state of the military historioblogosphere, has a new group (or group-of-groups) blog. Very airminded too -- the latest post is about the restoration of a German fighter from the First World War. And even more airminded is Spitfire Site News, which is all about a single type of aeroplane -- what else but the Supermarine Spitfire? One day, there'll be a blog devoted to the Yeoman Cropmaster, and then the blogosphere will be FINAL and COMPLETE and we can all uninstall our RSS readers and go outside and play.

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War in Space

This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.)

Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it's Paris, not London -- so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own, incidentally.