The Aviation Cultures Mk.V online conference is just a week away! A lot of activity is going on behind the scenes, but all you need to know is that the extended program (including a list of presenters and presentations) is here, and that you can buy tickets (25 AUD, or 10 AUD unwaged/student/COVID-affected) from here. Oh, and that it's going to be amazing. See you there!
The previous post ended with this photo, and another very similar one, which Getty Images dates to 17 October 1917 with the caption 'Moses Shackman, centre, with members of the Jewish East End Shelter Corps. Their hats are labelled in Yiddish and English':
As I noted, the hatbands actually say (in English, at least), 'RAID SHELTER CORPS'. This turns out to be a somewhat mysterious organisation, but I think I've managed to track it down.
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Recently, Alexandra Churchill tweeted a photo of an air raid shelter in London in 1917:
She's absolutely right, and I'll eventually come back to this, sort of; but Rob Langham made a slightly different point which I want to follow up first:
That’s an incredible photo for many reasons. @IanCastleRaids @ZeppRaider and @StowAero will likely all marvel at the air raid shelter as I am!
— Rob Langham (@RailRamblings) February 4, 2021
Indeed, in my experience it is very rare indeed to find images of any raid shelters from the First World War. This, of course, is largely because they were far less common than in the Second World War, when the expected scale of attack was much larger and the time of preparation much longer, leading to many shelters being built in streets, schools and private homes from the late 1930s onwards -- and that's even before you get to the millions of backyard Anderson shelters. Quite a number of these still survive, just through sheer prevalance. By contrast, there's one First World War survivor at Woodbridge in Suffolk (c. 1915), and not much else.1 So it is useful to have some photographic evidence, too.
...continue readingYesterday @TroveUFOBot found an obviously satirical and wholly invented account of a mystery airship seen at Dobroyd in Sydney in 1910. This is interesting enough in itself, but what got me searching was the inspiration for the article:
Everywhere just now the air is full of mystery -- of airship mystery. This is connected not so much with what is known to be accomplished in the way of aviation but rather what is suspected to have been accomplished, and to be kept secret for use in war time by some one or other of the great nations of the earth. A few days ago there came a rumour from the Pacific (which, by the way is a good wide place to start a rumour from) of traces of the visit of an airship having been discovered on what the late Mr Daniel O'Rourke would have called 'a dissolute' island.1
I soon found this 'rumour from the Pacific', which turned out to be an account of (perhaps) two mystery airships seen in the Lau islands of Fiji, then a British colony on 17 March 1910.
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Truth was a British political newspaper first published in 1877, founded by Henry Labouchère, a sometime Liberal MP. By the 1930s it was infamous as a scurrilous and often libellous pro-appeasement and often anti-semitic rag; in the Edwardian period it was still Liberal in inclination. At the end of May 1909 it issued no. 1581 of its many reader 'puzzles' on the topic of the recent phantom airship panic -- actually a satirical poetry competition:
One of the most engrossing topics of the past week has been the nocturnal manoeuvrings of the mysterious, but now happily exploded, German airship -- or, as it has been happily christened, 'Scare ship' -- which has been so vigorously exploited by a certain class of imaginative journalists that any number of people's legs seem to have been effectively pulled thereby. The topic is certainly one that lends itself to humorous treatment in verse, and I now present it to my numerous poets to see what they can make of it. That is to say, I offer herewith the usual Prize of Two Guineas for THE BEST ORIGINAL POEM, OF A HUMOROUS, BURLESQUE, OR MOCK-HEROIC CHARACTER, DEALING WITH THE MYSTERIOUS GERMAN BOGEY-AIRSHIP WHICH CAUSED SUCH A PANIC, LAST WEEK, IN THE BOSOMS OF OUR NERVOUS PATRIOTS.1
DUE DATE: FRIDAY 15 JANUARY 2021
Aviation Cultures Mk.V is an online conference for researchers, practitioners and curators to come together to share their knowledge of and ideas about aviation, and its place in history and society. The conference will take place online between 25 and 28 March 2021 and will align with the centenaries of the Royal Australian Air Force and Australian civil aviation, though we welcome papers relating to any place or period. For more information, see aviationcultures.org.
We are now asking for submission of abstracts for papers from participants from academia, the aviation industry and the wider community on the following themes:
• Commemorating the centenaries of the RAAF and civil aviation in Australia: International & local perspectives on the civil & military aviation symbiosis
• Aviation Identities: Finding diversity; cultures; mentalities
• Help from Above: Search & rescue; aerial fire-fighting; aeromedical evacuation and
disaster response
• Launching Places: Airports and airplaces
• Aviation Pop Culture: Air displays; art and advertising; music; film
• Aviation Collections: Aeronautical heritage; museums; restoration and artefacts; vintage aircraft operation
Papers can be delivered as videos, slides, or text. Videos should not be longer than 20 minutes; papers should consist of not more than 25 PowerPoint slides, or 2,500 words. Panel members need to be able to present their work and interact with the conference and audience live over the Internet, in Australian daylight hours. A fast stable connection, web camera and audio are minimum requirements. Technical advice and support for presenters will be available closer to the conference. There will also be a ‘Blitz’ talks session, and an ‘Object in 5 Minutes’ session. These talks will allow speakers to rapidly highlight new ideas, current research or local collections. They will be 5 minutes long with no more than 5 slides, and no question time.
Please nominate in your abstract whether you are applying for a standard, Blitz or Object talk. Abstracts should be no more than 200 words. Proposals for standard and Object in 5 Minutes sessions must address the conference themes, and abstracts for standard presentations should nominate the applicable session. Blitz abstracts do not need to address our themes. A 1-page presenter CV and, if desired, a photograph should accompany each abstract.
Please submit your abstract and CV to submissions@aviationcultures.org. Submissions are due by Friday 15 January 2021, with decisions notified by late January. Some abstracts for standard presentations may be accepted as Blitz talks only.
Brett Holman, on behalf of Aviation Cultures Mk.V Core Committee
aviationcultures.org
From Alan Allport's excellent new book, Britain at Bay 1938-1941, a couple of sentences about the IRA's 1939 bombing campaign which were guaranteed to catch my attention as imaginary air raids:
Some witnesses to the Broadgate bombing interviewed by the police were convinced that they had seen aircraft in the sky moments before the explosion, and that they had actually been attacked by the Luftwaffe. When, back in May, the IRA had set off a magnesium bomb in a Paramount cinema in Birmingham, there had been pandemonium inside the auditorium as members of the audience panicked, thinking that the long-dreaded German aerial Blitz had begun. 'Keep calm -- it's only the Irish again,' someone shouted to reassure the crowd (whether they added 'and carry on' is unknown).1
There's a little more detail available in the contemporary press about the first incident, which killed five people and injured seventy more in Broadgate, a major shopping street in Coventry, on 25 August 1939 (as shown above). The Birmingham Post reported that
There was chaos for a time after the Coventry explosion. A bomber aeroplane was passing over the centre of the city at the time, and the first thought of many people was that a surprise air attack had begun. This fear, indeed, led to an ugly scene. One of three men standing near a car was heard to say 'Let’s get away' or 'Let’s get out of this.' Some hearers jumped to the conclusion that the men were responsible for the explosion, and a threatening crowd began to collect. It was with difficulty that the police got the three men away to the police station, to be detained for a time for their own safety. The men’s credentials were found satisfactory, and they were afterwards released.2
The link between the three men and the belief that an air raid was under way is a bit cyrptic here, but is clearer in the Dundee Courier and Advertiser's account:
The men explained that they had been standing near their car when the explosion occurred. The eldest of the men, who was with his son and grandson, shouted, 'The war has started -- let's get away,' and ran to his car, whereupon the crowd shouted, 'Lynch them.'3
So the grandfather, at least, was one of those who believed that the knock-out blow from the air had arrived. This was just one week before the declaration of war on Germany. Britain was already beginning to move to a war footing -- the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act had received Royal Assent the day before -- and Coventry was an important heavy manufacturing centre, so you can see why the first thought might have been of a Luftwaffe bomb from the sky, rather than an IRA one on the ground. The surprise, perhaps, is that more people didn't make this assumption. At least some people seem to have understood that it was a terrorist attack, or else they wouldn't have made to grab the three men just for trying to flee the scene (this was in fact the seventh IRA bomb in Coventry since February, though by far the most damaging). Though it's also possible that the idea was the men were spies who had directed the supposed bomber to its target somehow. Or both, or neither: mobs aren't really known for their cool logic.
Image source: Leitrim Observer.
The first air raid on Britain during the Second World War is usually held to have taken place on 16 October 1939, when a dozen Ju 88s struck at the Royal Navy base at Rosyth, on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth. But there was in fact an earlier attack, on 27 September, also in Scotland, at Bellochantuy (variously spelled Bellochanty, Ballachantuie or Ballachantuy):
MACHINE-GUN fire from the air sprayed the Ballachantuy Hotel, ten miles from Campbeltown, Argyllshire, yesterday [27 September 1939]. A window was broken and the roof of the garage belonging to the hotel was also struck. No one was hurt. An aeroplane was heard roaring high overhead, and there was a rattle of machine-gun fire.1
Some 'nickel-cased bullets' were found around the hotel. But no aeroplane was seen, even though a gamekeeper 'focussed a powerful telescope on the sky [and] the sun was brilliant and there were no clouds'.2 An aeroplane was heard again a quarter of an hour later, along with 'three rapid bursts of machine-gun fire', but again nothing was seen. Then peace returned.
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I've got a chapter entitled 'Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain' in a new Palgrave Macmillan collection just out, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. Here's the abstract:
This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual air displays at Hendon and on Empire Air Day, was used by the Royal Air Force (RAF) to generate a sensationally modern image of technological sublimity through violent spectacles of aerial warfare, including the performance of mock air raids. This was amplified by a second, incidental kind of aerial theatre, performed as part of Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) exercises and air raid precautions (ARP) drills in the form of mock air raids on British cities. These attracted curious and even excited audiences, conscious that they might be seeing previews of their own deaths. In combining spectre and spectacle, the RAF’s mock air raids underscore the ambivalent nature of airmindedness in interwar Britain.
It's my third article pushing the aerial theatre concept, and it builds on both of its predecessors ('The militarisation of aerial theatre' and 'The meaning of Hendon'). Here I narrow my focus specifically to mock battles, particularly those portraying air raids on civilian targets. But I also widen things out by drawing a distinction between what I call formal aerial theatre, meaning the sorts of air displays I usually write about such as the RAF Display (Hendon) and Empire Air Day, and incidental aerial theatre, in this case mainly meaning the annual ADGB exercises from 1927 onwards, as well as, beginning in 1936, ARP drills. 'Incidental', because while the point of these exercises was to determine the effectiveness of air and civil defences, they also involved RAF aircraft carrying out simulated attacks on actual urban targets in a very public and spectacular fashion. Those living in and around these targets were exposed to this aerial theatre whether they wanted to be or not. In fact, many people came out to watch these exercises as entertainment: in 1928, for example, 'omnibuses took parties of sightseers to the hills around London' to watch their city get theoretically pounded to rubble.1 Which I found quite fascinating, and so I wrote a chapter about it!
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Last year I tried to run to ground the phrase 'England is no longer an island', usually said to be uttered by Lord Northcliffe in 1906 after hearing of an early Santos-Dumont flight.1 But the earliest source I could find which claimed that Northcliffe said it dated to 1922, it only became common in an aviation context after Blériot's cross-channel flight in 1909, and it was anyway used in non-aviation contexts as early as 1846, positively as well as negatively. So I suggested that Northcliffe took a phrase that had been bouncing around in the British public sphere for decades and applied it to the coming of flight. But even so, there's no contemporary evidence that he was the first to do so, or even that he ever did so publicly or influentially. As he was a powerful press baron with a deep interest in aviation it just seems plausible that he must be the origin.
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