1900s

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The Invasion of 1910

I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge -- predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank -- which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city's landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) -- as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers -- is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.1 No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren't all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I've been trying to think of the first time this happened. It's easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies' After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city's swampy remains), or Macaulay's New Zealander (1840).2 But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.3 Or H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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  1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven't seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though. [↩]
  2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time 'when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.' But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, "Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire", Cercles 17, 93-119. [↩]
  3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out. [↩]

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Here's a treat for (some of) you: the very first aerial warfare movie ever made, in its entirety! Most commonly known as The Airship Destroyer (but sometimes called Battle in the Clouds or The Aerial Torpedo), it's less than 10 minutes long and was produced in 1909 by Charles Urban, an American pioneer of cinematic special effects working in Britain. It's pretty prophetic stuff: airships bombing cities and railways, fighters intercepting them, radio-guided SAMs, even an armoured car thrown in for good measure. I would guess it was inspired in part by the phantom airship scare which took place earlier that year. Here's a contemporary description taken from an American trade journal, Motion Picture World (date unknown, taken from here, slightly emended):

BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS. - Section 1. - preparation. The Aero camp - Loading supplies - Start of the airships - The inventor of the airship destroyer - His love story - The parting - The alarm - The aero fleet in full flight - The aerial torpedo and its inventor.

Section 2. Attack. In the clouds - Dropping like shells from the firing deck of an airship - the chase - High angle firing from a gun on an armored motor car - Total destruction of the car - Railway wrecked by the aerial fleet - Shelling the signal box - The heroic operator meets death at this post - The fight in the air - Airship versus aeroplane - Wreck of the aeroplane - The burning of a town by the aerial fleet - Thrilling rescue of his sweetheart by the inventor.

Section 3. Defense. The inventor with the assistance of his sweetheart sends his airship destroyer on its mission of vengeance. The torpedo, steered through the air by wireless telegraphy - One flash and the airship is doomed - It falls, a mass of scorching fire, into the waters of a lake.

Urban produced a couple of other films along similar lines (The Aerial Anarchists, The Pirates of 1920, both 1911) and had some imitators -- possibly including D. W. Griffith, who made a film in 1916 called The Flying Torpedo.

The link can be found on this page at BFI's screenonline, if the above direct link doesn't work. Unfortunately it's only viewable by people in .uk educational establishments. Which sadly doesn't include me, but that's ok, I've seen it before, in a 16mm copy at what I think is now part of ACMI. So no need to feel guilty on my account :)

A good account of early aviation films can be found in Michael Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 10-22.

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Australian Ex-Prisoner of War Memorial

And marble, and granite, and wood ...

I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don't they?
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New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It's a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what's interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There's a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

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Aerial Warfare

On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: 'a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city'1 of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar two nights later. In fact, these incidents were only the prelude to a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly from East Anglia and South Wales. As the London Standard noted in May, there seemed to be common features to the various eyewitness accounts:

With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.2

So, what was torpedo-shaped and capable of flight in 1909? An airship, of course. The press (metropolitan and provincial) certainly assumed that the most likely explanation for these 'fly-by-nights' was an airship or airships, generally terming them 'phantom airships', 'mystery airships', 'scareships' or something similar.
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  1. Standard (London), 17 May 1909, p. 9. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I've been reading Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950, a classic study of airminded culture in the United States -- which was very different to that in Britain. The "winged gospel" is the term used by Corn to describe an intense complex of hopes and expectations associated with the coming of flight:

Faith in that mission, in flight as a veritable religious cause, energized not only fliers but also millions of other Americans during the first half of this century. Airminded men and women embraced what was often called the "gospel of aviation" or the "winged gospel." Like the Christian gospels, the gospel of aviation held out a glorious promise, that of a great new day in human affairs once airplanes brought about a true air age. Lindbergh offered one version of this gospel, prophesying a future in which air travel would be commonplace and large transport planes shuttle from city to city, unhampered by the weather. Other enthusiasts voiced even grander prophecies, looking to aircraft as a means of achieving perfection on earth or even immortality, promises usually identified with more traditional religion.1

Corn offers many examples of this faith, some of it verging on the ludicrous -- such as the expectant mother who rushed to a nearby airfield so that her child could be air-born, or the doctor who claimed that pilots must be descended from birds, whereas the rest of humanity hailed from the unfortunately non-aerial fish lineage (!). Only somewhat less quixotic were the predictions that flying would erase gender or racial discrimination, or the idea that every American family would one day own their own airplane, freeing them from the need to huddle in densely-populated cities.
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  1. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 26-7. [↩]

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A. Just about all the time, it seems, if it's Britain:

Lord Palmerston in 1845, on the coming of the steam ship:

... the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge.Quoted in I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20.

Georges Valbert in 1883, on the proposed Channel Tunnel:

It will be a prodigious event in the life of an insular people, when they find that they are islanders no more. Nothing is more likely to excite and alarm them, or to affect and upset their preconceived ideas.Quoted in ibid., 95. Clarke gives the date as 1833, but 1883 makes a lot more sense, and is confirmed by this page.

Lord Northcliffe in 1906, on Alberto Santos-Dumont's flight:

England is no longer an island ... It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes.Quoted in Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 193.

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In his comment on my previous post, Alex mentions the "bolt from the blue" strategy as possibly related to the knock-out blow that is my current obsession (and he's right, in my opinion). My reply started to get long, so I decided to turn it into a post instead ...

In Edwardian debates about the defence of the UK, the "bolt from the blue" school of naval strategy believed that the German navy could temporarily gain local superiority and throw a few hundred thousand soldiers ashore in Norfolk or somewhere, and Britain's puny army would be no match for those efficient Prussians. (Read: we need conscription!) It was opposed by the "blue water" school who argued that a strong Royal Navy would be sufficient to stop the Germans from getting ashore in any numbers. (Read: we need more dreadnoughts!) Of course, the dramatic and frightening bolt from the blue was the one favoured by Edwardian war-scare novelists like le Queux and Childers.See A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.

There's certainly some similarity between the bolt from the blue and the knock-out blow, though how much the one influenced the other is difficult to say. Both were surprise attacks, and both evaded existing defences (the Royal Navy and the North Sea/English Channel). And both struck directly at the heart of Empire, rather than fighting the war at a safe distance, in Europe or the edges of empire. I think the major difference is that the bolt from the blue was still a military strategy: a way for Germany to bring its overwhelming military superiority to bear on the British army, defeat it and force Britain to surrender.I should emphasise that it wasn't the Germans themselves who thought this, by and large: these were basically unwarranted British fears about what Germany was planning or at least was capable of. But the knock-out blow was, generally speaking, aimed at civilians: it was a way of using British civilians themselves to force the government to surrender, directly or indirectly.In the pre-1914 period, there was some suggestion that strategic bombing would be best employed to disrupt enemy mobilisation, but that wasn't seen as a potentially war-winning strategy, merely a helpful one. (In that sense, the closest comparison might be a guerre de course like the U-boat campaigns in the World Wars.) After the First World War, the knock-out blow replaced the bolt from the blue as the scaremonger's nightmare of choice ...

But now I'm getting ahead of myself!

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  • A flying machine is an aeroplane (qv).
  • A dirigible balloon (or just dirigible) is an airship (qv).
  • An aeroplane is the wing of a flying machine (qv).
  • Airship collectively describes both flying machines and dirigible balloons (qqv).

Get it? (Got it.) Good!

Seriously, I'm glad the meanings of these words were rationalised within a few years: what a head-ache it would be to have constantly qualify them all through my thesis!

Sources: R.P. Hearne, Aerial Warfare (London and New York: John Lane,
1909); Fred T. Jane, ed, All the World's Air-ships (Flying Annual)
(London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1909).

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Zodiac III

Can any better sport or amusement be imagined that could be obtained with an airship of the Zodiac type, endowed with a speed of 40 miles an hour for four hours, or 20 miles an hour for eight times this period, and so on in cubic proportion?

Always able to reach a desired goal, but with the ever changing wind to add an element of interest to the journey; free from dust and the dangers of the road; always able to stop and enjoy the still air. An airship of this type would combine the delights of a motor car, a balloon, a sailing yacht, an aeroplane, with the dangers of none ...

It is perhaps worth while contrasting such a vessel with an aeroplane designed for the same purpose: condemned to be rushing through the air every moment of its time; never slowing, never pausing while its occupants look down on the mountain tops, or eat a quiet meal; unable to come down except where the ground has been specially prepared.

It would seem that it is to the dirigible that the ordinary family man must look for his aerial source of health and daily pleasure, and he will not be disappointed ...

Then in a few short years we shall be able to alter the question and ask ''Won't you come for a cruise over beautiful country in a staunch ship, with powerful pumps, with two reliable engines, at a speed as great as you could wish, and provided with a faithful anchor by means of which you can at all times pass a night in peace, or ride the fiercest storms?'' And the whole world will answer ''Yes.''

'Ripping Panel', ''The future of dirigibles''. In Fred T. Jane, ed., All the World's Air-ships (Flying Annual) (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1909), 325.

Image source: ibid, 171.