Robert Bollard. In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War I. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013. Focuses on the Australian home front, in particular the growth of dissent which culminated in 1917 with the Great Strike and the second anti-conscription campaign. The final chapter looks at industrial and military unrest as […]
Judging from the report in the Western Gazette, Captain Faber, Conservative MP for Andover, evidently is not convinced by the letter he received from the Prime Minister downplaying the mystery airship visits, for in a speech to his constituents at Weyhill in Hampshire he invoked them as a counterargument to the War Minister’s downplaying of
The art of Charles Dellschau has been receiving some attention lately, thanks to the recent publication of a book about his work. Dellschau, who produced thousands of strange and wonderful watercolours, drawings and collages in Houston, Texas, between about 1899 and 1922, is significant as an early outsider artist, but he is mainly of interest
Here’s a rarity these days: an actual phantom airship report, from the Aberdeen Daily Journal (p. 5): About a quarter past nine o’clock on Thursday night [20 March 1913] a ‘phantom airship’ was seen hovering above Glasgow. To a eye-witness, it appeared at first to be a star of unusual magnitude and brilliance. After watching
Debate on the Army Estimates continued in the House of Commons yesterday. The Conservatives recovered their composure after Seely’s unsettling openness, and set about undermining his reassurances that Britain’s aerial defences are in safe hands. Taking the lead was Arthur Lee, a former Army officer and later Civil Lord of the Admiralty. The Times reports
Seely’s statement of the Army estimates will have done little to assuage the doubts of Bonar Law and Massy regarding the Government’s unsoundness on aviation, since he announced no new expenditure beyond that already announced. However, in its fullness and its frankness it appears to have disarmed the Opposition, at least for now. The part
History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association, has accepted my article ‘Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918’ for publication in the August 2013 issue. This is the second time my blogging to conference paper to peer-reviewed article workflow has borne fruit. I stumbled across the scare nearly two
Only one or maybe two references to phantom airships appear in today’s papers, both more or less in passing. The Manchester Guardian reports on a speech made by Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservatives, at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall last night, and in so doing made the following sardonic comment (p. 7): It
The Liberal Daily Chronicle‘s parliamentary correspondent, as reported in today’s Liverpool Echo (above; p. 3), has used the phantom airship scare to attack the Conservative press in the harshest terms, on the basis that they have made the British people look ridiculous in the eyes of Europe: A distinguished private member [of Parliament], who has
The Observer‘s aeronautical correspondent, Charles C. Turner, C. Av., appears to be unpersuaded that the phantom airships aren’t real (p. 15): While the rumours of airship visits were discredited and unsupported, it was amusing to follow the elaborate arguments put forward to show how impossible it was for airships to cross the North Sea to
