1900s

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A question about the phantom airship scares which has bothered me for a while is, how accurate are the press reports of people seeing something strange in the sky? That is, did people actually see something strange in the sky, or were the press reports made up or otherwise distorted? There is some evidence from other countries that this happened. One case in New Zealand in July 1909 involved a teacher and 23 schoolchildren, who gave their accounts to a journalist and even drew pictures of what they saw. In the late 1960s, three of the now-elderly witnesses were re-interviewed. But although they could remember the fuss at the time, they could not remember having seen anything out of the ordinary. Then there are the American mystery airships of 1896 and 1897, which were sometimes just completely fabricated. For example, the supposed crash of an airship at Aurora, Texas, in April 1897, which was almost certainly a hoax by a town-boosting journalist.

But there are also reasons to think that in the British case, at least, most press reports were accurate enough. Unlike the United States or New Zealand at this time, Britain had many competing national (or at least London) newspapers. I don't think it was usually in a newspaper's interests to just make up a story, because a rival could easily enough check it out (through its own reporters or a local stringer -- both were done) and cry foul. It might then be argued that all the newspapers were in on the lark, that they were all selling too many newspapers to spoil the fun. But newspapers were divided politically too. Liberal-supporting newspapers were generally much more sceptical than Conservative-supporting ones, and were quick to accuse the latter of credulous scaremongering -- but not lying. And the sceptics often reported the same stories bought into the phantom airships, albeit only briefly. This doesn't seem to fit with widespread fabrication (though of course, it could have happened sometimes).

There are other arguments I could make, but won't because I want to finish this post sometime. But they basically are enough that I feel I can trust that the phantom airship scares did actually have a reality outside of the press. Now comes the verify bit. Recently, the National Archives released the 1911 census data two years early. Unfortunately, you have to pay to see the full returns (I guess there aren't too many taxpayers left from 1911 to complain about having to pay again for something they had already paid for a century ago!) That's a pity, but you can still get some useful information for free: name, age, sex, location. As it happens, 1911 is right between the two phantom airships scares in 1909 and 1913. So there must be a good chance that any witnesses were living in the same place in 1911 as they were when they saw the phantom airship. Hopefully, then, I can take names from the press accounts, feed them into the census search engine and find somebody in the right location. This would at least verify that somebody of that name did exist in that place, and presumably did see something strange in the sky (or else they'd complain when their names were used in vain).
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XVIII Military History Carnival is up at Chronologi Cogitationes. This month I'm picking a post from a new blog, Wacht Am Tyne, on the centenary of the first flight (powered, controlled, heavier-than-air) in Britain, which was achieved by Samuel Franklin Cody on 16 October 1908. (I had a photo of British Army Aeroplane No. 1a in an earlier post.) Three reasons: firstly, because I was going to write about this myself but completely forgot; secondly, because it's an interesting post even though (or because) it's not at all the one I would have written; thirdly because, according to the blog's About page, it's intended for:

anyone who enjoys reading about military history, has ever gone to the IWM on their own, or has ever re-enacted the Battle of Waterloo using condiment packets and empty glasses at their local

Check (obviously), check, and check ... well, actually I can't remember doing Waterloo -- Cannae was always my favourite, and more recently Trafalgar, but I think that's close enough for me to be in the target demographic!

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Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells' novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that

I stand by my other point, however, which was that Things to Come is actually very singular, at least in British feature films: there are very few depictions of a city being turned to rubble by air attack

Now I have to retract that too, as since then I've compiled an -- admittedly short -- list of interwar British films which do depict cities being destroyed by bombing, or at least coming under the threat of air attack.

Some of these I did know about, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909). It's now available on YouTube, under an alternate title, Battle in the Clouds. In it, an airship bombs a city, which is last seen in flames. I'm not sure if either of the sequels, The Aerial Anarchists and Pirates of 1920 (both 1911) had anything comparable.

There's a long gap after that. The Flight Commander (1927) climaxes with Sir Alan Cobham bombing a Chinese village, which was filmed at the RAF Pageant, but that's more air control than strategic bombing. In High Treason (1928), written by Noel Pemberton Billing, an aerial war is threatened, but averted. There were a few American films set during the First World War which showed Zeppelin raids on London, including The Sky Hawk (1929) and Hell's Angels (1930), but they're, well, American.1

Things to Come (1936) was actually, I think, the first proper (i.e. scary) depiction in a British film of the effects of a truly devastating air raid. But there were others over the next few years. A pair of short instructional films, The Gap (1937) and The Warning (1939), have long piqued my interest, but unfortunately I didn't get to see them while in London. The Gap was a recruiting film for the Territorial Army, which manned Britain's anti-aircraft guns. London is hit by a surprise air raid, and because there are not enough AA gunners it is devastated. The Warning was aimed at drawing in volunteers for air raid precautions, and portrays the terrible aftermath of an air attack on Nottingham. Air defences swing into action, but do little to prevent the carnage.
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  1. I think one or the other of these was the source of a similar scene in a British film from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps it was from the Korda documentary Conquest of the Air (1936, but not released until 1938). I can't for the life of me remember what film I saw it in, but the scene was too short and too lavish to have been made specially. [↩]

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The short answer is, almost certainly not, but more of that in a moment. One of the nice things about blogging is that people send me emails on topics which they think may interest me. Recently I received scans of a photograph from Peter Edwards, who has the original glass plates. They're from a box dated 1907, which belonged to the Londesborough family, which was elevated to the peerage in the Victorian period. They owned a country house called Londesborough Hall, near Londesborough in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which is where the majority of the photos appear to have been taken. Peter noticed something unusual in this photo, hiding behind a flagpole:

Londesborough airship?

See it? Here's a close-up, after a little playing with the contrast:
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1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved that controlled heavier than air flight was too.1 At home, H. G. Wells' The War in the Air was published in January and the first controlled heavier than air flight took place in October.2

In amongst all these, culminating a century ago today, was Britain's first (very minor) air panic.3 (Well, the first since the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps, but I'm not sure what impact that plan had in Britain.) On 11 July 1908, the Daily Mail published an interview with Rudolf Martin, a civil servant who had recently been dismissed from his position in the German Imperial Statistical Bureau for publicly predicting the imminent collapse of the Russian Empire.4 In 1907 Martin had written a novel called Berlin-Bagdad, which foresaw a German empire of the air, which tolerated and even helped Britain in its own imperial difficulties. However, in 1908 he was less friendly: he predicted that Germany could conquer Britain by airlanding troops in waves of 350,000, delivered by thousands of Zeppelins.

In my judgment it would take two years for us to build motor-airships enough simultaneously to throw 350,000 men into Dover via Calais. During the same night, of course, a second transport of 350,000 men could follow. The newest Zeppelin airship can comfortably carry fifty persons from Calais to Dover.5

I'm not sure that France would be altogether pleased at having 700,000 German soldiers assemble at Calais, but then Martin seems to have thought that one way or another, Germany's aerial power harnessed to its mighty army would make everyone else fall in line behind it:

The development of motor-airship navigation will lead to a perpetual alliance between England and Germany. The British fleet will continue to rule the waves, while Germany's airships and land armies will represent the mightiest Power on the Continent of Europe.

This interview was paired with comments from a British aviation expert, Major Baden Baden-Powell, on the recent flight of LZ4:

What this great revelation means is this, so far as we are concerned, although the fact is insufficiently realised. In time of war we should no longer be an island, and our mighty fleet would cease to be our first line of defence. A dozen great Dreadnoughts would be helpless when faced with the task of repelling a swift fleet of foreign airships sailing high above the earth.

He demanded that the government spend at least £100,000 on British airships, at least as fast as the German ones, if not faster, for

Of two opposing airships the faster will be able to outmanœuvre the adversary and hold it at its mercy.

The leading article in the same issue said that both Martin and, to a lesser degree, Baden-Powell were guilty of allowing their 'imagination to run a little too fast'.6 However, it too considered it wise 'to appropriate money to enable us at least to keep abreast of Continental enterprise.'7

What's interesting about Martin's proposal, and the reaction to it in Britain, is the obvious link with more traditional invasion panics. His enormous fleet of Zeppelins is not used to rain death and destruction upon London, but to enable a large army to be landed on British shores without having to face the Royal Navy first. The airships are just another way to effect the bolt from the blue, like a Channel tunnel or a secret weapon. Martin apparently didn't even think of landing the invaders anywhere other than Dover, where every second fictional enemy of Britain had landed in the past generation.

It's also worth noting that panics of this type, of invasion by air, were very rare; I can think of only one other in my period, the parachutist panic of 1940. I'm not really sure why, but I'd guess it's a matter of perceptions of relative threat. In 1908, there was no knock-out blow theory: the Mail's leader seems quite sanguine about its conclusion that dreadnoughts would be safe from bombing whereas 'a good deal of damage could be done to great industrial centres'.7 In mid-1940, the bomber threat had not materialised, for whatever reason,8 but the Germans were dropping paratroops all over the place. Momentarily, these dangers may have seemed more worrying than bombing. Or maybe they were just too silly to be believable.

Anyway: along with Wells, Martin is why I start in 1908 and not any other year.

  1. Admittedly, LZ4 was wrecked at Echterdingen in August, but the massive and spontaneous response of the German people, raising funds to fund a replacement Zeppelin, more than made up for this. [↩]
  2. Depending what you think of Horatio Phillips' multiplane hop in 1907. [↩]
  3. See Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 334-9. [↩]
  4. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 295. The Mail calls him a Privy Councillor, but that seems unlikely: he is described as 'low-ranking' by Wohl, 76. [↩]
  5. Daily Mail, 11 July 1908, p. 5. All quotations from this source unless otherwise specified. [↩]
  6. Ibid., p. 4. [↩]
  7. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
  8. Not over Britain, anyway, though it had over Warsaw and Rotterdam, of course. [↩]

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This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It's long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I've lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I've put in links to the Boswell drawings because they're under copyright, and I've replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.

Wright Flyer (1903)

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Venus

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer's field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick's analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I'm aware of David Hufford's work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I've heard much about. Hufford's experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.1 According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick's suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire -- for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops -- and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand -- for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer's ill-tempered rejection of a workman's offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there's no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let's look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don't think we can make much at all.
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  1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4. [↩]

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Vote National

A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn't spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It's interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren't necessarily seen as more 'modern' than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren't: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There's only one other which has an aviation theme:
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I was remiss in not mentioning the 12th Military History Carnival at Thoughts on Military History when it took place last month. My eye was drawn to ExecutedToday.com's post about Harry 'Breaker' Morant and Peter Handcock, the Australian soldiers executed in 1902 for killing Boer prisoners-of-war. There's still a debate about whether Kitchener issued an unwritten order to take no prisoners, meaning that the Australians were made scapegoats as a sop to either the Boer government (i.e. so it would consider peace) or to the British public. It seems unlikely to me, on the face of it, or at least unnecessary -- it's not like similar, illegal but tacitly accepted, acts were unknown in the later wars of the twentieth century.

By chance, I caught an episode of the excellent (but cancelled) Rewind the other night which dealt with the Breaker.1 The transcript is online, and is worth a read: it does poke some holes in the scapegoaters' arguments.

  1. Rewind dealt with various mysteries and puzzles from Australian history. I missed it when it originally aired, which is a shame. It was different to most other history programmes in that it wasn't afraid to present the viewer with primary source texts to support (or refute) an argument, or indeed to go digging around in archives for clues. I nearly stood up and applauded when, in a segment on the death of Billy Hughes's daughter, the reporter said 'So where to look for proof? Well, one obvious place is the National Library to look through Billy Hughes's private papers'! [↩]

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Spirit of Ecstasy

I've finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced 'Bewley', apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He's an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I've examined (those held at King's College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the influential 'nerve centre' theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war:

an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.1

Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country giving speeches criticising the government for its failure to expand aircraft production sufficiently, and to call for the formation of an independent air force, the Imperial Air Service. He was a Conservative MP, then a Conservative peer, and all the time very wealthy (if you call 10,000 acres wealthy, anyway).

But today I'm going to talk about Montagu's personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the 'Spirit of Ecstasy', the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce -- every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu's own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there's an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)
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  1. Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2. [↩]