The time has finally come to address the claim I’ve made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often ‘air raid’ (and related phrases) appeared per issue […]
In my previous post I looked at the first appearances of the phrase ‘air raid’ and related words in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). Of course, just because these phrases had been coined by somebody, or even used in a newspaper, it doesn’t mean they were widely understood — they might have taken a long
The term ‘air raid’ has been around a long time. Not since the first air raid, or even the first air raid of the twentieth century, but from not long after that. The first definite use in the British Newspaper Archive is in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, during the 1913 phantom airship panic, as it
To mark May Day, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, @FleetAirArmMus, tweeted about the Royal Navy’s first rigid airship, which was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1911 in an attempt to match Germany’s Zeppelins: I was surprised by the comment about the airship’s name. Probably because of its brief, non-flying existence, it’s known by a
Yesterday marked the centenary of the founding of the Royal Australian Air Force on 31 March 1921. I celebrated in the usual way (buying books, talking about myself):[tweet id=”1377043532775493636″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044249552678913″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044649374715908″ conversation=false]But I also decided to use the occasion to talk about something that’s missing from the usual RAAF origin story, and that’s
The previous post ended with this photo, and another very similar one, which Getty Images dates to 17 October 1917 with the caption ‘Moses Shackman, centre, with members of the Jewish East End Shelter Corps. Their hats are labelled in Yiddish and English’: As I noted, the hatbands actually say (in English, at least), ‘RAID
Recently, Alexandra Churchill tweeted a photo of an air raid shelter in London in 1917: She’s absolutely right, and I’ll eventually come back to this, sort of; but Rob Langham made a slightly different point which I want to follow up first: That’s an incredible photo for many reasons. @IanCastleRaids @ZeppRaider and @StowAero will likely
Yesterday @TroveUFOBot found an obviously satirical and wholly invented account of a mystery airship seen at Dobroyd in Sydney in 1910. This is interesting enough in itself, but what got me searching was the inspiration for the article: Everywhere just now the air is full of mystery — of airship mystery. This is connected not
I’ve got a chapter entitled ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’ in a new Palgrave Macmillan collection just out, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. Here’s the abstract: This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual
Here’s one for the mock air raid file. On the evening of 15 April 1916, a lone aeroplane circled over Washington, D.C., and — without warning — proceeded to (pretend to) attack it. It first flew over the White House, then the State, Army and Navy departments, and then, over the Washington Monument and the
