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 […]
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
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
In an earlier series of posts I discussed Australia’s first airship, the White Australia, which flew in 1914. It turns out that there was an earlier Australian airship, of a sort: the Airem Scarem. Indeed, according to a 1907 newspaper advertisement it was the ‘First Airship below the line’ (equator, presumably). From the above photo,
I recently learned that Adelaide has a suburb called Hendon. Naturally, I wondered if there was a connection to the Hendon, the most important site for aerial theatre in Britain both before and after the First World War. And the answer is: yes!
The latest issue of the British Journal for Military History is out, and with it my peer-reviewed article ‘Constructing the enemy within: rumours of secret gun platforms and Zeppelin bases in Britain, August-October 1914’: This article explores the false rumours of secret German gun platforms and Zeppelin bases which swept Britain in the early months
Exactly three years ago I was visiting the National Aerospace Library at Farnborough, the historic home of British military aviation going back to 1904 through the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Cody’s first flight, and the Army’s Balloon Factory. The site now seems to consist largely of a series of business parks — though the famous air
On Remembrance Day, 11 November 2016, I was privileged to be part of a joint seminar with Dr Richard Scully and Dr Nathan Wise, highlighting the teaching and research we do around the topic of the First World War (Richard is the author of British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914, Nathan of
The previous post in this series was supposed to be the last. But in the course of taking two months to write it, I managed to forget about another, earlier association between a White Australia and an Australian airship. This one wasn’t a real airship; it was a fictional one which appeared in Randolph Bedford’s
I ended the previous post in this series with the tease: In a final post, I will discuss what [Alban] Roberts called his airship, and what it might mean. That was over two months ago! I think it’s time to finally reveal the answer to this question. Errol Martyn, who has written what must be
