A few years ago I took part in a very enjoyable Tales from Rat City podcast episode, hosted by David Waldron and centred around the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic from the perspective of Ballarat in the Victorian goldfields region. That had actors reading out primary source quotations, which was a great way to highlight […]
My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 2026 conference, being held at Macquarie University from 29 June–3 July, has been accepted. My talk is entitled ‘The Underworld: Living and Dying in London’s Air Raid Shelters, 1917-1918’ and this is the abstract: London’s first significant experience of air raid shelters came not in the Blitz of
Content warning: descriptions of death and mutilation. The opening paragraph of the current draft of my next book, about one day over a century ago: And from the Guardian, about one day less than a week ago: The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday,
This appeared in the correspondence section1 of Fortean Times 464 (December 2025), relating a story told by the grandmother of the author, Robert Flood: During the First World War her husband was serving in the Royal Naval Air Service and Nan was living with her parents in Temple Mill Lane, Stratford (her father worked at
Like many people – out of the sort of people who know these sorts of things, that is – I knew of Jan Smuts’ key role in the origins of both the RAF and the Air Ministry. It was the so-called ‘Smuts report‘ to the War Cabinet, in August 1917, which set the whole process
Four days after the second great daylight Gotha raid on London, Lady Louise Maxwell (above) wrote a letter announcing the foundation of a new philanthropic fund, the Home Fires Fund. Believing that it was ‘childish to expect a huge city like London […] can escape these occasional air raids’, and accepting that ‘We have come
One of the fun things about historical research is finding something when you’re not looking for it. Alan Murdie, in his regular ‘Ghostwatch’ column in a recent Fortean Times, wrote the following: At Folkstone [sic], in 1917, candles in an air-raid shelter were mysteriously extinguished amid other poltergeist events. Natural gas from strata was blamed.1
It’s well known that in the Blitz, London’s Underground stations were used by civilians as ad hoc air raid shelters. Indeed, photos of platforms crowded with huddled people taking cover from the bombs on the surface are iconic and practically the first thing you likely think of when the Blitz is mentioned. (I’m sure you
1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that ‘I try to avoid buying wargames because I never
The current drone panic on the eastern US seaboard – which started out in New Jersey about a month ago, but has spread to Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and even US bases in the UK and Germany – is, of course, hardly unprecedented. Not only does it bear obvious similarities to the 2019
