I admit the term ‘First Blitz’ is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don’t really like it, and I’m avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?
You might think that the first Blitz was the Blitz, i.e. the German bombing of British cities in 1940-1941, at the time was understood as a form of blitzkrieg, which was then shortened to ‘blitz’ or ‘Blitz’. Of course, that doesn’t mean a blitz couldn’t be retrospectively recognised, and indeed it was soon applied, for
The above facsimile letter was published in the Ramsgate Thanet Advertiser on 29 April 1916. It reads: April 7th. The writer of the first ‘German messages’ has been absent from Ramsgate some time now, so the ‘Alien’s post-card’ is by another hand. If I did not fear prosecution for “failing to register an alien,” I
This is a reproduction made by the Bioscope of a rather cheeky poster which appeared in Newtownards in June 1915, just a week or two after the first air raid on London.
I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored
‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch
One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot.
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the
Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen ‘an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,
It’s been a while since I’ve done a mystery aircraft post, so here are a few Australian ones I’ve been saving up for a rainy day (or days):
