1910s

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A few years back I published an article, 'The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935', in Twentieth Century British History. At that time I was given a link for free downloads which I provided for those without instiutional access. But it turns out that (1) I wasn't really supposed to do that and (2) it no longer works anyway. But TCBH's open access policy allows self-archiving after 24 months, which period has long since elapsed, so I've uploaded the accepted version of 'The shadow of the airliner' as a free download. Here again is the abstract:

Aerial bombardment was widely believed to pose an existential threat to Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. An important but neglected reason for this was the danger from civilian airliners converted into makeshift bombers, the so-called 'commercial bomber': an idea which arose in Britain late in the First World War. If true, this meant that even a disarmed Germany could potentially attack Britain with a large bomber force thanks to its successful civil aviation industry. By the early 1930s the commercial bomber concept appeared widely in British airpower discourse. Proponents of both disarmament and rearmament used, in different ways and with varying success, the threat of the commercial bomber to advance their respective causes. Despite the technical weakness of the arguments for convertibility, rhetoric about the commercial bomber subsided only after rearmament had begun in earnest in 1935 and they became irrelevant next to the growth in numbers of purpose-built bombers. While the commercial bomber was in fact a mirage, its effects on the disarmament and rearmament debates were real.

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Morris, 3 April 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 1011 is a police report from Sergeant W. Morris of Gosford, north of Sydney in the NSW Central Coast region. It's an account of a mystery aeroplane sighting made by Lily Moir, a 23 year old woman living with her mother on a farm 1.5 miles east of Gosford. Shortly after 4am on the night of 23 March, Moir 'saw a light up high above the horizon, apparently a little north of Terrigal Haven over the sea border'. It 'appeared like a star travelling towards her, and seemed to swerve up and down like sea waves for an instant, and then disappear downwards'; yet (rather contradictorially) 'the light was unlike a star', and could not have been a meteor because it 'travelled horizontally towards her in waves'. Though Morris sought confirmation, there are no other reports from other witnesses.
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Memo, E. L. Piesse, 5 May 1917

When casting about for some way to mark the centenary of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic, an obvious idea was to post-blog it, especially since it's something I haven't done in a while. For new readers, post-blogging is my term for taking a historical event spanning weeks or months and posting about how it was represented in the press at the time, day by day but exactly one hundred (or whatever) years later. So the Sudeten Crisis seventy years later, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz seventy years later, the phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1913 seventy years later. This is great for restoring a sense of what people (via the press) thought was happening and the pace in which it happened, rather than the highly foreshortened hindsight we tend to get from conventional historical narratives. But I've mined Trove on this topic pretty thoroughly in the past, both for the blog and for publication, and a quick check suggests there's not too much new information there. Besides which, the newspapers tell only part of the story: there's a wealth of material in the National Archives of Australia which shed light on what the Australian military thought was happening and what they did about it.

Fortuitously, since I carried out my original research the main archival file I used, MP1049/1, 1918/066, 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights, etc', has been digitised and is available for free online -- all 1113 pages of it! This gave me the idea to post-blog the panic, but a bit differently: by focusing on the evolution of the archival record, rather than the press one. It will still be in real time, that is I will post about events exactly a century after they happened, but instead of the 'events' being the publication of a newspaper article, it will be the creation of an archived document. How (or whether) this will work exactly remains to be seen; I will probably still do a little bit of Troving, for example, because (I argue) the events of the war in Europe supply the crucial context for understanding the way the mystery aeroplane panic evolved here in Australia.

Post-blogging is very time intensive, however, and I do have to earn a living. So, rather than going through all 1113 pages, blog-post by blog-post, I've decided to add another twist, by posting about only those individual documents I cited in my peer-reviewed article on the panic, about 30 or so, a far more manageable number. My ex post facto justification for this is that I can then talk about how and why I used each document, what work it did for me in my writing and my argument.
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In 2016 I contributed a chapter on the 1918 mystery aeroplane panic to Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, an edited collection published by Melbourne University Press. While I'd already published a peer-reviewed article on the same topic, this was broader in scope as it attempted to provide a transnational narrative and analysis of the panic as it unfolded in both Australia and New Zealand -- my one and only contribution to the history of the latter, and for that matter the only published account of these events on that side of the Tasman (that I know of). Since I believe in the virtues of open access, both for the wider public and for my own self-promotion, I like to make whatever versions of my publications I'm allowed to under the agreements I sign with the publisher available as free downloads. But while this is usually possible with journal articles, books (and book chapters) are a different matter: authors do not usually have any re-use rights until the work goes out of print. With my first book, I was able to get around this by uploading my PhD thesis, since they are similar but not the same. In this case, the copyright to my chapter's text is owned by the collection editors, Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava, and I am very grateful to both of them for giving me permission to make it available it here, so it can reach a wider audience.

So, as the very first event in Nyang Week, I'm making 'The enemy at the gates: the 1918 mystery aeroplane panic in Australia and New Zealand' available to download and read for free!

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Torrita

One hundred years ago, less a few days, a police constable named Wright saw two aeroplanes flying over Nyang in the Mallee, in north-western Victoria. There is no longer any such place -- it, or at least its station, was renamed Torrita (above) in 1921 -- and nor were there any aeroplanes. Or at least, there couldn't have been any: they weren't from a military aerodrome, and there weren't any civilian aircraft which could account for the sightings. They were mystery aeroplanes, and Constable Wright's sighting was in effect the trigger for an Australasian mystery aeroplane panic between March and June 1918, just as the Great War was reaching its climax.

I've already written about this panic a fair bit (i.e. a lot) -- in a peer-reviewed article, a chapter in an edited collection, a popular article, and of course on this blog (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here -- but nevertheless I thought I should mark the centenary of the Nyang Incident, and indeed the panic as a whole, in some way. So, I've got a few things planned for the next few days and beyond. Welcome to Nyang Week!

Image source: Google Maps.

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In my previous post I looked at who was behind the leaflet drop drop on striking workers at Coventry in December 1917. The official answer was that it was an obscure MP and military administrator, Major H. K. Newton; I suggested that it was actually an RAF officer and Ministry of Munitions propagandist, Captain Ernest Andrew Ewart, alias Boyd Cable. And there is some more evidence to support the existence of a wider campaign by the Ministry of Munitions.
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So, who was behind the drop of propaganda leaflets on the striking workers at Coventry in December 1917? Most of the press accounts in fact avoid identifying the aeroplanes involved or who was flying them. At least one, however, says they were 'military pilots' and this seems likely. While civilian flying didn't stop entirely during the war, it was restricted and there were simply far more military aircraft around at this stage of the war. Radford aerodrome nearby was used for testing; it was originally owned by Daimler but at some point came under military control as No. 1 Aircraft Acceptance Park. So this could be where the leaflet-droppers came from, one way or another. But whoever the pilots were, presumably they were acting on somebody's orders. Whose?
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Coventry Graphic, 4? December 1917

This photo purportedly shows a British military aeroplane dropping leaflets on the streets of Coventry in early December 1917. I suspect it's a fake, a composite, or else it's a bit odd that nobody seems to have noticed all that horsepower roaring just overhead.1 But the event it shows did happen. According to the Daily Mirror,

A considerable number of aeroplanes flew over Coventry yesterday [2 December 1917] at low altitudes, distributing a quantity of literature pointing out the necessity for an increase in aeroplane production.2

A local paper, the Midland Daily Telegraph, provided more detail:

Throughout Sunday a fleet of aeroplanes hovered the city distributing profuse showers of handbills pointing out the vital need for an increase in aeroplane production [...] The doings of the aviators were watched with great interest, and there were frequently exciting scrambles amongst the crowds for the messages which came floating into the streets and gardens of the city.3

So, what was going on?
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  1. The 'spectators' include some Australian soldiers, judging from the slouch hats. [↩]
  2. Daily Mirror, 3 December 1917, 2. [↩]
  3. Midland Daily Telegraph, 3 December 1917, 3. [↩]

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As I discussed in a previous post, the arrival of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 suddenly made the Aerial League of the British Empire's foray into wartime propaganda films irrelevant. Yet the bizarre coincidence that the film happened to give a prominent place to the time and date of the Armistice suggested the possibility that the League's investment might be recouped by somehow marketing Eleven, Eleven, Eleven as a novelty. The sole mention of the film in the British press, in the Preston Herald in December 1918, was pretty clearly planted with a friendly journalist in an attempt to do just that.1
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  1. Possibly through the offices of E. Jerome Dyer, in effect the film's producer; his name turns up in the Preston press quite frequently in connection with the Vegetable Products Committee which was active there. [↩]

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This summary of an unreleased and untitled film is from the 'Grave and Gay' column of the Preston Herald for 7 December 1918:

In this film a man dreams that England is under German rule, and various scenes are shown depicting the organised brutality of the Boche. But, in the dream, there is a movement to throw off the German rule. The head of the movement is a chemist and inventor who has discovered a new force. Secret meetings are held in his underground laboratory, on the walls of which is a huge placard with the words, 'Eleven, Eleven, Eleven!' It is decided that the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is to be the hour of the successful uprising and of England's freedom.1

A couple of things make this interesting, or at least unusual. One is that 'These scenes had all been actually photographed long before the armistice', and so the prominence of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in the plot was both 'very remarkable and beyond the possibility of dispute'.2 The other is that the film was produced by the Aerial League of the British Empire, which seems hard to explain, given the apparent lack of any aerial theme at all. So what was going on here?
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  1. Preston Herald, 7 December 1918, 2. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]