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 1906 but sometimes 1909, either in the Daily Mail or as a verbal remark, but virtually always without a proper citation (‘As Lord Northcliffe famously said…’ with a footnote leading to a 1950s hagiography written off the top of the head of a journalist who got their first job from him).1 So much so that I tend to get a bit smug when I see another instance of it pop up: here we go again! But, despite having spent quite a bit of time digging into the origins and early uses of EINLAI I can still learn something – which is another way of saying I can be wrong!
The instance here is in James Pugh’s excellent The Royal Flying Corps, the Western Front and the Control of the Air, 1914–1918. Writing about British press interest in aviation, he says:
This included Louis Blériot’s flight across the channel, which led the Daily Mail‘s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, to declare that Britain was ‘no longer an island’.2
His given sources are:
- Daily Mail, 26 July 1909, 7.
- Daily Mail, 27 July 1909, no page number.
- Louise Owen, The Real Lord Northcliffe?: Some Personal Recollections of a Private Secretary, 1902-1922 (London, New York?: Cassell, 1922), 24.
Because James, unusually for this quote, gives some primary sources, I thought I’d look into them. I already knew about Owen’s memoir, which is the best evidence that Northcliffe ever uttered EINLAI, and in the context of Blériot’s flight, albeit over a decade after the fact. Page 7 of the 26 July 1909 issue of the Daily Mail appears to be general reportage of the flight, without any reference to ENLAI. But the 27 July issue has a number of close hits:
- H.G. Wells: ‘in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the military point of view, an inaccessible island’ (6).
- A Daily Express excerpt entitled ‘No Longer an Island’ (6).
- Frank Hedges-Butler: ‘It portends for the future that we are no longer an island nation and cannot depend upon the sea for protection’ (7).
And:
- An article German press reactions entitled ‘NO LONGER AN ISLAND’, which quotes the (Berlin) Lokal-Anziger as saying ‘England is no longer an island’ (7).
So there it is, the phrase itself. I was a little embarrassed to find it in the Daily Mail in 1909, because in my searches I hadn’t found that exact form in the Daily Mail until 1911. I still can’t find the 1909 use using a whole document text search for EINLAI, so it’s not just my poor search skills. Only when looking at the OCR text of the article does the reason become clear: it reads ‘England : longer an island’. So there’s my lesson: never trust a computer.
It’s interesting, though, that this first occurrence is credited to a German newspaper, because the earliest I have found of EINLAI in the context of aviation is in a German book by Rudolf Martin published in 1907. So that still seems to be the vector, rather than Northcliffe.
So, to sum up the history of EINLAI:
- first use: 1848.
- first use in the aviation context: 1907.
- first use in the Daily Mail: 1909 (above).
- first use by Northcliffe: 1909, maybe.
Come back in five years for more historical revisionism, probably!
Image source: Daily Mail, 26 July 1909, 7.
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