1940s

Stoke-on-Trent September 1940. A man, his wife and their nine children were in an Anderson shelter and escaped injury when their home was wrecked by a bomb.
1940s, Civil defence, Conferences and talks, Home Fires Burning, Periodicals, Pictures

Mutual aid in an air raid

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 […]

Postcard showing Zeppelin LVI bombing Leige, 6 August 1914
1900s, 1910s, 1940s, Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Interviews, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Sounds

Phantom airship tales from Rat City

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

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Before 1900, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods

Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — II

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.

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Civil aviation, Grants, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods

Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — I

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

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