Liz Millward. Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922-1937. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. A pioneering gender history of aviatrices in the British Empire, including Lady Heath, Amy Johnson, and above all the New Zealander Jean Batten. Not only is this potentially relevant to my aerial spectacle project, but Millward has more recently been looking at […]
On ABC New England last week I briefly mentioned rumours of secret Zeppelin bases in Britain in the early months of the First World War. So far as I have been able to determine, the stories, which peaked in October 1914, centred on three locations: the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands and the Chiltern Hills.
The 1955 novel Biggles in Australia is the subject of an interesting article in Inside Story by Adam Nicol, ‘Uncivil aviation: Biggles down under’ (I like the line ‘The common term “civil aviation” — that is, flight for leisure — suggests that aviation is intrinsically warlike’), which could be usefully read alongside my UNE colleague
Kristen Alexander. Australia’s Few and the Battle of Britain. Sydney: NewSouth, 2014. As an Australian, every time I watch Battle of Britain I notice the mention of the 21 Australian pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, and the 14 who were killed (these numbers are actually undercounts). This is the story of eight
Alison Bashford. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. This was launched at the Australian Historical Association conference this week and looked like fun — an intellectual history of eugenics, birth control, food supply and, of course, world population, from the 1920s to the 1960s — so I
Free books! The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Full Circle. London: Cassell, 1960. I already have the volume of Eden’s memoirs covering his life up until 1938, so it’s nice to complete the set. This one covers his postwar career; it’s interesting to note that it was actually published first, out of chronological order,
So my book is a thing that now exists. But although it was formally published on 18 June, many online bookstores have waited until today to actually ship it. (I recommend using Booko to find the cheapest prices, or you can get a 10% discount by ordering directly from Ashgate.) To mark this auspicious day,
As of May 1916, the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla consisted of 91 machines purchased with funds donated by Britons overseas, 69 for the RFC and 22 for the RNAS. The RFC donations were organised through the Over-Seas Club — £1500 for a B.E.2c and £2250 for a Vickers F.B.5 — and were as follows.1 The Imperial
Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. :D
We are familiar enough with the Spitfire Funds of the Second World War, in which patriotic individuals and groups could buy aircraft for the nation. There was a fair amount of precedent for this. In the early 1930s, Lady Houston more than once offered the government hundreds of thousands of pounds for air defence, though
