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 […]
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
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,
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: Hugh Trenchard: Southern Nigeria Regiment, 1903-10 Frederick
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
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
