Rudyard Kipling, that poet of empire, also wrote two very airminded science fiction stories: “With the night mail” (1905) and a sequel, “As easy as A.B.C.” (1912). Both were set in the then-remote 21st century, and revolved around the Aerial Board of Control – the ABC of the second story’s title. This is effectively a […]
Tate Online has a series of wonderfully melancholy lithographs by James Boswell, showing a collapse in law and order in London – mobs in the streets, bodies hanging from lampposts, looters in museums and so on. Collectively entitled The Fall of London, they were drawn in 1933 and it is suggested that they were intended
From the just-because-I-can department. As an ex-physicist, I like to see numerical data plotted in a graph, as well as in tabular form – it’s much easier to visualise what’s going on. I don’t have any particular need for this right now, but I’ve been playing around with a few plotting packages anyway. The figure
As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo’c’sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by
While looking at the American journalist William Shirer’s Berlin Diary for my earlier post on the wooden bomb tale, I was intrigued to see that immediately after the start of war in September 1939 he simultaneously expected, hoped and feared that there would be an immediate, large-scale air attack on Berlin, by either Poland or
On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though … Best quotes a 1953
Thanks to Chris Williams for pointing me in the direction of Patrick Wright’s article at openDemocracy about the Anti-Air War Memorial at Woodford Green, Essex. I hadn’t heard of this before. It was made by sculptor Eric Benfield in the form of a bomb falling through the air, and in June 1936 it was put
Chronomedia is a very nicely done chronology of developments in just about all forms of audio-visual mass media, covering a wide span but inevitably concentrating on Britain and America in the 20th century. Lots of interesting little tit-bits: the first film shot from an aircraft in flight was in September 1908; while in September 1939,
This logically should have gone into the previous post about archives, but I got carried away working out what that air mail poster was about! But I had intended to mention two online archives of British newsreels: British Pathe and Movietone (slogan: “It speaks for itself”). These are great. You can search the descriptions for
‘R101 RIDING AT HER HOME MAST. Set in a frame of typical English countryside beauty, R101, product of modern engineering and cornerstone of Britain’s hopes of commercial air supremacy, rides at her mast at Cardington, in Bedfordshire. This mooring mast was specially built to facilitate the handling of Britain’s largest airships, R100 and R101, which
