In August 1940, the letter columns of the Stoke-on-Trent Evening Sentinel raged with an intense (if brief) controversy over the existence of unofficial civil defence groups known as ‘street patrols’. These were nothing to do with the national Air Raid Precautions (ARP) organisation, which among other things recruited air raid wardens to monitor and coordinate […]
![German propaganda poster with a vibrant and striking image depicting swarms of British aircraft bombing an industrial site to illustrate the following quote, by British Labour Leader Johnston Hicks [sic], which appeared in the 'Daily Telegraph' on January 3rd 1918: 'One must bomb the Rhineland industrial regions with one hundred aircraft day after day, until the treatment has had its effect!’](https://airminded.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/artv05099.jpg)
In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the ‘First Blitz’. I don’t think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by
I admit the term ‘First Blitz’ is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don’t really like it, and I’m avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?
You might think that the first Blitz was the Blitz, i.e. the German bombing of British cities in 1940-1941, at the time was understood as a form of blitzkrieg, which was then shortened to ‘blitz’ or ‘Blitz’. Of course, that doesn’t mean a blitz couldn’t be retrospectively recognised, and indeed it was soon applied, for
John Llewelyn Rhys, The Flying Shadow (Bath: Handheld Press, 2022). John Llewelyn Rhys, England Is My Village and The World Owes Me a Living (Bath: Handheld Press, 2022). John Llewelyn Rees was born on 7 May 1911, got his pilot’s license on 4 July 1934, and was killed in a flying accident on 5 August
When is an mystery aeroplane panic not a mystery aeroplane panic? When it’s a mystery sampan panic, obviously.
If you’ve ever read anything about the last great British rigid airships, built between 1924 and 1930 as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme, you will almost certainly have come across a statement to the effect that R.100 was known as the ‘capitalist’ airship and R.101 as the ‘socialist’ airship. This was because the former
I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored
One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot.
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the
