After thirty-six (!) months, ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’, my chapter in Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber, eds., Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, is now available for a free download under green open access (in this case, pre-copy editing). Here’s the abstract: You can […]
In September 1909, rather late in Invasion‘s run, an article appeared in Pearson’s Weekly explaining not only some of the pyrotechnical mechanics behind the spectacle, but also the underlying airpower theory. Because it was not merely an popular entertainment and a commercial one at that, but a response to the question ‘Invasion by aeroplane, is
This photo, according to the Illustrated London News, shows ‘THE FIRST SHELL DISCHARGED FROM AN AEROPLANE OVER ENGLAND’.((Illustrated London News, 12 June 1909, 7. Another version of the same photo appears in Daily Mirror (London), 5 June 1909, 4.)) But it doesn’t really, because the ‘aeroplane’ almost certaintly wasn’t real but a non-flying mock-up strung
The ostensible purpose of the Air Services Exhibition was to raise money for ‘the FLYING SERVICES HOSPITALS’ and ‘VISCOUNT FRENCH’S WAR CHARITIES’, as you can see in the poster above. But those laudable aims didn’t mean it wasn’t also propaganda (as you can also see in the poster above). And, despite the name of the
So if I had been able to go back in time and visit the Air Services Exhibition at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road in November 1917, what would I have seen? Well, there are some photos extant. The one above gives a general idea of the exhibition space.
This advertisement, which appeared in the East Ham and South Essex Mail on 2 November 1917, excited my curiosity. An exhibition of German aircraft… held in the East End of London… just after the Harvest Moon raids? I’m there! Or would be if time travel was a thing. As it’s not (yet…) I’ll have to
A cloud of smoke billows up from a building during a low level bombing attack carried out by biplanes. The First World War? Air control in the Middle East? Fascist bombers over Spain, or Japanese bombers over China? No, it’s an air raid carried out by the RAF against Nottingham on 15 May 1938. Of
I’ve got a chapter entitled ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’ in a new Palgrave Macmillan collection just out, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. Here’s the abstract: This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual
Here’s one for the mock air raid file. On the evening of 15 April 1916, a lone aeroplane circled over Washington, D.C., and — without warning — proceeded to (pretend to) attack it. It first flew over the White House, then the State, Army and Navy departments, and then, over the Washington Monument and the
Exactly six months ago today, I posted about some aerial theatre in the time of coronavirus. That was the first time I mentioned the pandemic on Airminded, and it is, of course, still here (Victoria is — hopefully — nearing the end of its second wave, with 42 new cases reported today, down from a
