A snippet from David Hall’s Worktown, on the Mass-Observation project in Bolton, a textile town near Manchester: At 2.40 [pm] the most interesting event of the day took place. Eight aeroplanes flew over — a rare sight in Worktown, which is nowhere near a military airport and some distance from a civil one. ‘Two men […]
The State Library of Queensland identifies this image as ‘R.A.A.F. Mosquito bombers, ca. 1945′; I suspect it’s from a RAAF march and flypast put on for the Third Victory Loan in the centre of Brisbane on 6 April 1945. On that occasion, according to the Courier-Mail, The veteran Lancaster bomber ‘G. for George,’ will lead
In my previous post I looked at who was behind the leaflet drop drop on striking workers at Coventry in December 1917. The official answer was that it was an obscure MP and military administrator, Major H. K. Newton; I suggested that it was actually an RAF officer and Ministry of Munitions propagandist, Captain Ernest
So, who was behind the drop of propaganda leaflets on the striking workers at Coventry in December 1917? Most of the press accounts in fact avoid identifying the aeroplanes involved or who was flying them. At least one, however, says they were ‘military pilots’ and this seems likely. While civilian flying didn’t stop entirely during
This photo purportedly shows a British military aeroplane dropping leaflets on the streets of Coventry in early December 1917. I suspect it’s a fake, a composite, or else it’s a bit odd that nobody seems to have noticed all that horsepower roaring just overhead.1 But the event it shows did happen. According to the Daily
As I discussed in a previous post, the arrival of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 suddenly made the Aerial League of the British Empire’s foray into wartime propaganda films irrelevant. Yet the bizarre coincidence that the film happened to give a prominent place to the time and date of the Armistice suggested the possibility
This summary of an unreleased and untitled film is from the ‘Grave and Gay’ column of the Preston Herald for 7 December 1918: In this film a man dreams that England is under German rule, and various scenes are shown depicting the organised brutality of the Boche. But, in the dream, there is a movement
Jon Cooksey. The Vest Pocket Kodak & The First World War. Lewes: Ammonite Press, 2017. A small book on an interesting topic. The utility and portability of the Vest Pocket Kodak camera made it incredibly popular with soldiers in the front lines and behind them, mostly British here (though the French and Germans are not
Things have been a bit quiet here lately, which I hope will change soon. But I haven’t been entirely inactive in blogging terms: I’ve written a guest post on the construction of authority in early British aviation for the German Historical Institute’s History of Knowledge blog. The history of knowledge is a newish historiographical endeavour,
I’m very pleased to announce that I have been awarded an Australian Bicentennial Fellowship by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College London. This is a travel grant which I will use to come to the UK to continue research for my next book, a history of Britain under the German air raids
