Things seem to be looking up, judging from today’s headlines in the Manchester Guardian (p. 9). The plan proposed by the Czechs yesterday is said to have ‘impressed’ the Sudetens. The plan itself is still a mystery to the public, but The Times has a few details (p. 12): In many ways — in particular […]
Not a lot of news today — at least, not a lot of new news. As the above headlines from The Times, p. 10, show, the meetings which were announced on Monday and which took place on Tuesday have, er, taken place, but no public statements have been made about what transpired in them, other
There is some hopeful news today, resulting from the flurry of activity of yesterday. From The Times, p. 10: It became known in London late last night that, as the result of Lord Runciman’s intervention, Dr. Benesh, the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, will receive to-day Herr Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans. It
The Sudeten crisis (or Czech crisis, or Czech-German crisis as it is called here) wasn’t front-page news in the Manchester Guardian on 29 August — it was on page 9. But that was actually where most newspapers put the most important news. Compared with those of today, British newspapers of the 1930s and before seem
Tomorrow I’m starting a bit of an experiment, an idea I had after doing a post on Human Smoke a few months back. We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of the Sudeten crisis, which, as I noted recently, was a crisis long before Munich had anything to do with it. Long before. The Munich
Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that I stand
Here’s a question of terminology which has been bugging me for some time. The Munich crisis in September and October 1938 is a well-known historical event. But the name ‘Munich crisis’ is misleading, because the crisis was building long before the word Munich was ever associated with it. Munich had nothing to do with the
A bomb plunges through the floors of an office building: its denizens look on in astonishment, cower in terror or fall through the holes left in its wake. This is an illustration from a book published in March 1939 by the Tecton group of architects, Planned A.R.P., which described their plan for bomb-proofing the London
Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week: This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in
