1910s

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Sea, Land and Air (Melbourne), February 1920, 765

Although the war had been over for more than a year by this point, in 1920 the editor of Sea, Land and Air issued a rather hysterical warning of the danger of foreign pilots being allowed to fly in Australia.1

The passenger-'plane of to-day may be the bomber of to-morrow. It depends on the man who owns the machine, and the one who flies it, upon whom she will drop her bombs. If he be an Australian it is pretty certain that he will not let them fall on his own countrymen. At present there is nothing to say that the man who is learning to fly here, or the man who is going to own the machine for him to fly, shall be even a British subject. In certain parts of Australia it is reasonably probable that he will be a German, for instance.

Australia is quite big enough to offer concealment while the alien airmen replaces passenger seats by bomb-racks. Unless there is control of flying, every possible enemy of Australia can be an aircraft-owner here.2

Hence the need for 'Regulations that insist that no aliens may either fly or own aircraft in Australia'.3 What's going on here?
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  1. Sea, Land and Air has been digitised in its (near?-)entirety and is freely available from American Radio History, which credits the National Library of Australia for the scans although they're evidently not in Trove. [↩]
  2. Sea, Land and Air (Melbourne), February 1920, 732. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

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Eric Thake, Vimy flight stamp, 1969

Michael Molkentin. Anzac and Aviator: The Remarkable Story of Sir Ross Smith and the 1919 England to Australia Air Race. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2019.

[Disclaimer: Michael is a friend of mine. But I wouldn't have agreed to review his book if I wasn't confident, based on everything else that he has published, that it was going to be excellent. And I was right.]

Anzac and Aviator is a new biography of Ross Smith, the first Australian aviation pioneer to find global fame.1 This fame rested largely on just one flight in 1919, but it was a truly epic one: the first flight from Britain to Australia. At around 18,000 km, it was the longest to date (albeit carried out in stages, unavoidably). Despite being accompanied by his older brother (and fellow pilot), Keith, Ross -- it's hard to avoid using first names in this review! -- was the driving force behind the flight. With the centenary of the flight this December almost upon us, this biography is timely.
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  1. With the possible exception of Harry Hawker. [↩]

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Spectators watching an aircraft's arrival

Tim Sherratt pointed out this remarkable image, PRG 280/1/24/108 in the State Library of South Australia's collection. The description reads:

A large crowd of spectators packed into stands around a show ring looking up into the sky as they watch for the arrival of the local aviator Harry Butler's aircraft.

The date is given as 1919; there's no location other than it's in South Australia.
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Australian Air Squadrons Fund leaflet

This is the cover of a leaflet produced in 1916 by the Australian Air Squadrons Fund, the Australian arm of the Imperial Air Flotilla which raised funds around the British Empire for presentation 'battle-planes' for the Royal Flying Corps. My interest in it is not so much for its own sake, though I am struck by the slightly confusing promise that this aircraft 'will carry your name and message of sympathy and support over the heads of our troops into the enemy capitals', as well as the sadly forlorn hope that 'This is, please God, the only war in which we will be able to take part'. Rather, it's here as an example of the aviation records to be found in the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), which is being digitised and made freely available through Trove.
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Sunday News, 30 July 1944, 4

Since this thread received absolutely no love over on Twitter, some lazyblogging of a 1944 article entitled 'Jargon of the skies' by James E. Wellard on RAF and US Army slang, published in the Toronto Star Weekly (via the Perth Sunday Times):


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Brindejonc des Moulinais, Hendon, May 1913

According to David Oliver's Hendon Aerodrome,

International tension remained high during the Whitsun weekend [30-31 May] of 1914, when the country was plunged into a Zeppelin scare that resulted in severe civil flying restrictions.1

As I've never come across this mystery aircraft panic before -- a not unknown occurrence! -- I naturally got very excited, wrote down a note to myself to look into it, and just as naturally forgot all about it. Now that I've rediscovered my note and tried to find out more, I've worked out why I've not heard of it before: because it didn't happen -- or rather, it had already happened.
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  1. David Oliver, Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994), 25-26. [↩]

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Longmont Daily Times, 4 December 1926, p. 4

Proselytisers are famously early adopters of communications technology (see: the Gutenberg Bible). It shouldn't be surprising that missionaries were intrigued by the development of aviation: a Baptist minister, Reverend F. W. Boreham, even claimed that

It was with a view to winging the Gospel to the uttermost ends of the eaxth that the first airman looked wistfully skywards.1

He was referring to Francesco Lana de Terzi, a Jesuit who proposed the idea of the vacuum airship in 1670, a technological impossibility at the time. Somewhat more realistically, in 1909 Reverend W. Kingscote Greenland, apparently a Methodist minister, argued in his journal The Young Man that 'the coming of the airship will materially affect the diffusion of the Gospel throughout the world':

He looks forward with confidence to the day when the first missionary airship will sail with a precious cargo of heroic hearts and copies of the Holy Scriptures. Already, he says, the airship can travel one hundred miles an hour. That would mean that the missionary could get to America in a day and a quarter; he could leave England on Tuesday, and preach in Calcutta or Hankow on the following Sunday. How this would almost do away with the tragedy of parting with wife and children and dear ones that now makes the missionary's lot so sadly heroic.2

Not only that but

in case of attack by natives, outbreak of fire, or flood, the ability to sail upward into serene air and safety will much lessen the trials of his life.3

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  1. Daily Herald (Adelaide), 10 January 1914, 3. [↩]
  2. Cornish Telegraph (Penzance), 3 June 1909, 4. Greenland's article seems to have been partly reproduced, without attribution, in Evening Journal (Adelaide), 22 May 1909, 5. [↩]
  3. Cornish Telegraph (Penzance), 3 June 1909, 4. [↩]

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A long time ago I wrote about the idea that the advance of technology had annihilated Britain's traditional maritime defences. This claim was famously -- supposedly -- made by Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the Daily Mail, after seeing Alberto Santos-Dumont fly in France in 1906: 'England is no longer an island'.1 It's so apposite that Alfred Gollin used it as the title of a book and an article about Edwardian aviation politics.2 As I showed, the same sentiment long predated the 20th century and the coming of flight: I found that it could be traced to as early as 1845, when Lord Palmerston, a former foreign secretary, supposed that

the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge. France has steamers capable of transporting 30,000 men, and she has harbours, inacessible to any attack, in which these steamers may collect, and around which, on the land side, large bodies of men are constantly quartered. These harbours are directly opposite to our coast, and within a few hours' voyage of the different landing-places on the coast of England.3

Northcliffe's statement, which was made privately to his editor, is surprisingly hard to trace back to a primary source; I don't think I've ever seen one cited. 'England is no longer an island' doesn't appear in the Daily Mail itself, for example, before 1911, and even then it's not even attributed to him, or anyone other than 'When Blériot flew the Channel it was said'.4 The earliest I can find the phrase associated with Northcliffe in the major historical press archives is in 1940:

Our Channel is our Maginot Line, but since Bleriot flew across thirty years ago, Lord Northcliffe was right when he said: 'England is no longer an island.'5

And there's not much after that either.
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  1. Quoted in Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902–1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 193. [↩]
  2. Ibid; Alfred Gollin, 'England is no longer an island: the phantom airship scare of 1909', Albion 13, no. 1 (1981): 43–57, doi:10.2307/4049113. [↩]
  3. HC Deb 30 July 1845 vol 82 c1224. I originally found the first part of the quote in I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20. [↩]
  4. Daily Mail (London), 28 July 1911, 4. [↩]
  5. Cornishman (Penzance), 4 July 1940, 4. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Airplay.]

Australia is a long way from anywhere, even from itself. It nearly always takes a long time to get to where you want to go. Historian Geoffrey Blainey famously popularised the idea that this remoteness has shaped Australian history and culture in the title of his 1966 book, The Tyranny of Distance. The longing of European Australians, especially, for closer connections to Europe and America found an expression in an interest in technological solutions, as in a speech given by J. L. Rentoul in 1918:

We are now living in a day when fast ocean greyhounds have broken the tyranny of distance; when the wireless has annihilated space.

A couple of years later, Rentoul might have mentioned the aeroplane: the first flight from England to Australia was completed by Keith and Ross Smith in their Vickers Vimy in December 1919. They took 28 days in total, which admittedly may not seem impressive to Australians today, when we can get to London in under 24 hours. But when compared with 45 days by steamship (Rentoul's 'fast ocean greyhounds'), that was a huge leap forward. And it was only the start. In the 1920s and 1930s, the England-Australia route became the ultimate venture for pioneers who wanted to test themselves and their machines against one of the longest air routes in the world: Alan Cobham, Bert Hinkler, Amy Johnson. In 1938, you could board a Qantas airliner in Sydney and be in England 10 days later; another fifteen years on, that was down to 3.5 days. The introduction of jets in 1965 brought the travel time down even further.
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