Back to back Roads to War! This week’s topic is the most airminded yet: the first German air raids on Britain. I had to cheat slightly to fit them in, as technically I’m supposed to talk about the centenary events in the week leading up to the broadcast date, i.e 23 December, but the first […]
I’m shocked to see that it’s already nearly two weeks since I got back from my UK research trip — it seems like it was just a couple of days ago. It was a fairly long trip: five weeks in total, essentially all of them spent in archives in London (National Archives, British Library, Imperial
After a break of a few weeks, today I recorded another Road to War episode for ABC New England, covering the period 10–16 December 1914. I focused on the German naval bombardment of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, which caused the greatest loss of civilian loss of life due to enemy action in Britain for the
Yesterday was the last research day proper of my big trip. Actually, I was supposed to be having a holiday, but instead I spent it in Aylesbury at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, trying to see if I could get to the bottom of the Great Missenden affair of 18 October 1914, when villagers decided
While looking for other things in the National Archives today, I came across a proposed ‘aerial attack on Germany’s next grain crop’ in a War Council meeting held at 10 Downing Street on 24 February 1915.1 It was actually two proposed attacks. Mervyn O’Gorman, a civilian engineer who was in charge of the Royal Aircraft
Today, I received the news that not one but two conference abstracts I’d submitted have been accepted. Which means I’ll be going to some interesting conferences and listening to some interesting talks, but it also means that I’ve made a lot of extra work for myself in just one day. Well done, me! The first
My fifth contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online, covering the period 8-14 October 1914. Today I looked at two major events. The first was the Maritz Rebellion in South Africa, a military mutiny by disaffected Boers who resented British influence and saw the botched invasion of German South-West
Last Friday, 3 October 2014, I gave the Humanities Research Seminar at the University of New England on the topic of ‘Staging the aerial theatre: Britishness and airmindedness in the 20th century’ (kindly introduced by Nathan Wise), in which I expanded upon my ideas for a research project involving aviation spectacle. You can watch the
So, in the previous post in this series, I explained why (at least to a proximate cause) in 1914 people around Britain started worrying that German spies had gone around the country building concrete platforms for heavy artillery, as supposedly had been done before the war near Maubeuge and Antwerp. But what I didn’t do
After looking at rumoured secret Zeppelin bases in Britain in the first few months of the First World War, I asked what the source of these rumours were. In particular, why did people even think that Zeppelins would need to have a base in Britain, given that the reason why they were so threatening was
