1900s

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Today, it's a hundred years since voting began in the 1906 general election, in which the ruling Conservatives lost in a landslide to the Liberal Party. The new government, with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as PM (followed in 1908 by H.A. Asquith), had 400 seats; the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists managed only 156 between them.As a percentage of the national vote, however, it was much closer: 49% to 44%. This ushered in a most interesting time in British history: this parliament saw the dreadnought, spy and airship panics of 1909, the beginnings of British airpower and indeed the start of airpower politics. The general public first became generally aware of powered flight in this period, and the first signs of concern over air attack appeared; Blériot became the first to fly across the English channel. Outside of my parochial concerns, there were the beginnings of the welfare state, the People's Budget and the confrontation with the House of Lords. And two giants of British politics were introduced to the national - indeed, the world - stage: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The fun didn't end with the 1910 election(s) either - but that's another story.

Anyway, congratulations to the Liberal Party! I haven't finished reading my British History for Dummies yet, so I don't know what they've been up to in the century since then, but with a start like that I'm sure they've gone from strength to strength :D

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Rudyard Kipling, that poet of empire, also wrote two very airminded science fiction stories: "With the night mail" (1905) and a sequel, "As easy as A.B.C." (1912). Both were set in the then-remote 21st century, and revolved around the Aerial Board of Control - the ABC of the second story's title. This is effectively a world government, composed of elite aviators, which had grown out of the necessity to regulate air transport:

Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control-- the A.B.C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes, controls this planet. 'Transportation is Civilization,' our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.

The globalising effects of air transport (more airships than airplanes) has helped the world to outgrow war; and more and more countries are becoming tired of messy politics, and place themselves in the ABC's hands:

The story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the A.B.C. Monthly Report, is not without humour. Till 25th October Crete, as all the planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of 'autonomous institutions,' 'local self-government,' and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards, Municipal Councils, etc. etc. Last summer the islanders grew wearied, as their premier explained, of 'playing at being savages for pennies,' and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication till such time as the A.B.C. should annex them. For side-splitting comedy we would refer our readers to the correspondence between the Board of Control and the Cretan premier during the 'war.' However, all's well that ends well. The A.B.C. have taken over the administration of Crete on normal lines; and tourists must go elsewhere to witness the 'debates,' 'resolutions,' and 'popular movements' of the old days. The only people who suffer will be the Board of Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy enough to condemn the Cretans for their laziness; but when one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities which during the last few years have deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the A.B.C., one cannot be too hard upon St. Paul's old friends.

In "As easy as A.B.C.", this theme is expanded upon, with the ABC being called in to Chicago to put down social unrest; as Michael Paris notes, this story shows that as peaceful as Kipling makes the ABC out to be, ultimately its authority rests on the use of its aircraft as weapons.Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859-1917 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 39. Though they do have the power to immobilise people as well as kill.

This is a very early instance of an idea which was to enjoy some currency in the 1930s, of an aviation-based technocratic alternative to democracy - in particular H.G. Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come (1933).Ibid, 29. Paris also suggests that as Kipling and Frederick Sykes (head of the RAF in 1918) were friends, the ABC stories may have had some influence on the latter's airpower ideas, particularly air control.Ibid, 39-40.

Although I think I've read "With the night mail" before, I'd never seen the faux ads for dirigibles and (air)shipping news reports which (according to Bleiler, Science-fiction: The Early Years) accompanied the 1909 New York edition, obviously to add to the verisimilitude.Kind of like the "Would you like to know more?" hyperlinks in the propaganda inserts in Starship Troopers ... oh, I feel so unclean now that I've mentioned that film. These are so fun! Not that newspapers have Edwardian-style "answers to correspondents" sections any more, but perhaps they should:

PLANISTON -- (1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland) was won last year by L. V. Rautsch, R. M. Rautsch, his brother, in the same week pulling off the Ten Thousand (oversea). R. M.'s average worked out at a fraction over 500 kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2) Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as the most manageable.

PATERFAMILIAS -- None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience and mental anguish may be included, but the average courts are not, as a rule, swayed by sentiment. If you can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your roof, you had better rest your case on decoverture of domicile (See Parkins v. Duboulay). We sympathize with your position, but the night of the 14th was stormy and confused, and - you may have to anchor on a stranger's chimney yourself some night. Verbum sap!

Oh, and if anyone is looking for a job:

FAMILY DIRIGIBLE. A Competent, steady man wanted for slow speed, low level Tangye dirigible. No night work, no sea trips. Must be member of the Church of England, and make himself useful in the garden.

M. R., The Rectory, Gray's Barton, Wilts.

But mind where you drop your grapnel.

(Thanks to Peter Farrell-Vinay for the pointer, and also for noting the similarity to Wells.)

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Chronomedia is a very nicely done chronology of developments in just about all forms of audio-visual mass media, covering a wide span but inevitably concentrating on Britain and America in the 20th century. Lots of interesting little tit-bits: the first film shot from an aircraft in flight was in September 1908; while in September 1939, British cinemas were closed to prevent mass casualties in the event of air raids - after a couple of weeks, they were open again, which I guess shows just how long it took people to realise that the knock-out blow wasn't actually imminent!

One thing I find fascinating is how rapidly television was developing in Britain (as well as in Germany and the United States) before the war: John Logie Baird's London studio broadcast a television play as early as 1930, entitled The man with a flower in his mouth (about which, see The World's Earliest Television Recordings Restored); while the BBC's first female television presenter was a Miss Elizabeth Cowell in August 1936. Of course, many of these transmissions were just experiments, but a regularly scheduled service from the Alexandra Palace began later in 1936, which continued until 1 September 1939.

There are some reminiscences of these pioneering broadcasts at Television Heaven, culled from a book by television critic Kenneth Baily, Here's Television (1950). There was no nightly news, but the latest Gaumont and Movietone newsreels were shown several times a week. Other than that, current events and concerns were addressed, after a fashion. The programme for Armistice Day 1936 was described in the Evening News:

From the London Television Station last night was broadcast the most deeply-moving Armistice Day programme I have ever heard from the BBC. It took the form of scenes from the German film 'West Front 1918,' followed by scenes in England in peace-time, and it ended on that note of dedication for the prevention of another catastrophe which most people have felt so strongly this Armistice anniversary. These vivid, and at times terrible pictures, were accompanied by an admirable commentary spoken by Cecil Lewis . . .

As that page also notes, one of the first outside broadcasts featured a very small-scale air raid defence exercise!

Within ten weeks of the start of television, Cecil Lewis had taken cameras outside, at night. He provided an actuality programme about anti-aircraft defence. The 61st (11th London)AA Brigade RA demonstrated two ack-ack guns; and the 36th AA Battalion RE handled three searchlights, while RAF planes were specially flown over the Palace.

This co-operative "exercise" staged "a short action repelling the attack of hostile aircraft." The very wording of that programme announcement breathed something of the oddity which most of us found in an exploit that seemed far from reality in 1936. Four years later the flash and crackle of a much mightier barrage surrounded the Alexandra Palace, and echoed through television studios emptied by a real war.

One would like to know why this subject was chosen ... was it just because the sounds and images were dramatic, or was it intended as a reassurance that all was well (since the bombers were repelled)? Maybe both.

Finally, an indication of just who was watching these shows can be found from a BBC viewer survey in mid-1939 (by which time the total audience was an estimated 20,000):

The returns surprised the BBC in showing that television viewing was not confined to any one income group. Taking a sample of 1,200 of the questionnaires, it was found that 28 had been filled in by labourers; and scores were returned by shopkeepers, salesmen and school teachers.

There were more working- and lower middle-class viewers than expected (though still a minority), which is interesting given the expense involved (eg 48 guineas for a 15-inch 1939 Cossor - though it also doubled as a radio! See Television History - The First 75 Years for more.) Still, 20,000 is a tiny number of viewers, especially when you consider that in 1939 there were 990 million cinema admissions! That's a whole lotta Clark Gable.

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Here's a minor curiosity. Many of the leading figures in the RFC/RAF (at least, many of the ones that interest me) had earlier served in West Africa. (They all served in the Boer War too, but that wouldn't have been uncommon for their cohort.) This is the list:

Too much shouldn't be made of this; it's probably just a coincidence. But I can imagine a couple of explanations. One is that adventurous spirits might be drawn to the challenges of serving on the frontiers of Empire as much as to slipping the surly bonds of Earth. (Certainly the biographies of Trenchard and Charlton show evidence of this kind of restlessness.) The other explanation might be that (what I imagine to be) the extreme logistical difficulties of soldiering in West Africa back then may have suggested the advantages of simply being able to fly over all obstacles!

  1. According to Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain, 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981 [1966]), 134, an officer whom Trenchard knew from Nigeria was undergoing flight training, and suggested that he take it up. [↩]

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I've (mostly) finished a big update to my other site, scareships, which is about the British phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1912-3 - essentially, Edwardian UFO waves. To my mind, the fact that people (including, for a time, newspaper editors) believed that German zeppelins were buzzing their country - when in fact they weren't - shows that fear of airpower (in this case, espionage rather than bombing) came early to Britain. But I've created the site so that anyone interested can learn about the sightings, read the primary sources and form their own opinions about what was going on.

Anyway, I have completed entering summaries of all the phantom airship sightings I found while researching my 4th year thesis, 135 in all, using WordPress as a simple content management system. There's a bit of tidying up to do first, and then the next step will be to finish scanning in and uploading all the primary sources (newspaper articles), which may take some time ...

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Leo Amery was a long-serving Conservative MP, minister, imperialist and close contemporary (though not, I think, a close friend) of Winston Churchill's - they were at Harrow together, where at their first meeting the future staunch foe of Nazi oppression pushed the smaller boy into the school pool. For some reason, he seems to pop up in many of my readings on diverse topics and here he is again, in 1904:

Sea power alone, if it is not based on great industry, and has not a great population behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle ... both the sea and the railway are going in the future ... to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that ... the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.

Comments on H. J. Mackinder, "The geographical pivot of history", Geographical Journal xxiii, no. 4 (April 1904); quoted in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1976]), 184 (emphasis in Kennedy).

This was quite farsighted of Amery. Not only was he quite right about the necessity for industrial power, and about the weakness of naval power (not likely to be a popular point of view during the twilight of the Pax Britannica), but he also pointed to the future importance of aviation as a form of transport a mere four months after Kitty Hawk (which in any case was barely reported in the British press). Some day I must read up on Amery.