This week, I was looking at the service records of some other family members who served in the world wars — those that have been digitised anyway — and as today is ‘Straya Day,1 it seems appropriate to write a little about them. Tags: bonza; strewth; grouse; sorry, ocker, the Fokker’s chocker. [↩]
New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It’s a bit like
On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’1 of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar
Frederick Lanchester was a clever British engineer. He was one of the pioneers of the British automotive industry, but his main interest was in aviation, particularly aerodynamic theory. In my opinion, he has a good claim to be the first person to elucidate the knock-out blow concept, in his book Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn
Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would
Some recent airship sightings: An airship is currently gracing Melbourne skies, thanks to Holden. I’ve seen it but not with a camera handy, so this picture by Dr Snafu will have to serve. It’s nice to see it floating around, but at only 54 metres in length, I’m forced to say: that’s not an airship.
Airfix Spitfire Mk 21, a work in progress. Image source: Airfix gallery, user HawkerTempest5. It looks like Airfix, Britain’s oldest and most famous manufacter of plastic model aeroplanes (among other things), might be going under. It will probably not surprise readers of this site to learn that I had a collection of model aeroplanes as
It’s exactly 40 years since the Battle of Long Tan, a notable feat of Australian arms during the Vietnam War. But I have a more personal anniversary in mind — yesterday was 90 years to the day since my great-grand uncle John Joseph Mulqueeney was killed by an artillery round during the Somme campaign, on
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The British contingent of the historioblogosphere has swung into action upon hearing that their government is planning to pardon over 300 soldiers executed during the First World War. I have little to add to what everyone is saying (broadly, that such a blanket pardon rides roughshod over a complex situation
As promised, here’s a revamped version of the speed plot I did the other day, this time distinguishing between biplanes (and triplanes), monoplanes and jets (just the one — the Meteor). It’s now a bit harder to read, though — it’s still red for fighters and blue for bombers, but now biplanes are represented by
