I have a new publication out — at least, it’s out electronically, I haven’t seen a physical copy yet! It’s a chapter in a collection published by Melbourne University Press and edited by Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava, Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology. My chapter is entitled ‘The enemy […]
In my previous post on the possible airship panic of 1915, I used n-grams for ‘Zeppelin’ and ‘rumour’ derived from the British Newspaper Archive to try to work out when exactly it was. The answer was that it began in late December 1914 and finished in early February 1915. But is the answer right? Is
My peer-reviewed article ‘The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War’ has now been published in the Journal of British Studies, and can be found here (or here, for the free, self-archived version). This is the abstract: In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported
In order to start characterising the possible airship panic of 1915, let’s generate some n-grams and do some distant reading to get a basic overview of press interest in Zeppelins during the early part of the war. Here are the number of articles per month in the British Newspaper Archive for 1914 and 1915 mentioning
In the middle of January 1915, days before the first, fairly ineffectual Zeppelin raids on Norfolk, the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes visited some relations of Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary. There she was told that Mr. Gatty [a London historian] had heard from the Duke of Westminster that Winston Churchill says he expects a fleet
An early contribution to the list of strange things dropped from the air in wartime was made by the crew of L13, a German naval Zeppelin under the command of Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy. During a raid on London on the night of 8 September 1915, they dropped bombs from Bloomsbury to the City which killed
In the last decade or so, it seems to have become a thing to refer to the German air raids on Britain during the First World War as the ‘First Blitz’. There are now at least three books on the topic with that title or variations thereof: Andrew Hyde’s The First Blitz: The German Bomber
The novelist William Le Queux is famous, or rather infamous, for beating the drum of the German invasion and spy threat before the Great War. But what did he do during the war? Unsurprisingly, he did much the same thing. On 28 February 1915, for example, The People published an article by Le Queux entitled
This could be the lurid cover of an Edwardian novel about the dangers of aerial bombardment, with an aeroplane, an airship and Death himself hovering over a great city, watching the terrified populace streaming outwards in panic: the first knock-out blow from the air. But it’s not. Instead it’s the lurid cover of an Edwardian
In December I’ll be giving a talk at the Aviation Cultures Mk. II: Technology, Culture, Heritage conference at the University of Sydney, entitled ‘Comparing Hendon: aerial theatre in context’. Here’s the abstract: The RAF Pageants held between 1920 and 1937 at Hendon in north London were an annual series of air shows, in which military
