So, to conclude my survey of the career of Stanley Baldwin’s phrase ‘the bomber will always get through’ in the British press (or at least in the British Newspaper Archive), here’s how it fared during the Second World War.
I showed in an earlier post that scepticism of Baldwin’s dictum that ‘the bomber will always get through’ begins to appear in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1937, if only in a very small way. In 1938, the majority opinion still takes it to be axiomatic. For example, town alderman W. A. Miller, attacked
After the drama of 1934, ‘the bomber will always get through’ appears less frequently in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1935 (though still at about twice the level than in 1932 or 1933). But it is still mostly being used in a very political way. This is not surprising, with the general election contested
Michael Molkentin. Anzac and Aviator: The Remarkable Story of Sir Ross Smith and the 1919 England to Australia Air Race. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2019. [Disclaimer: Michael is a friend of mine. But I wouldn’t have agreed to review his book if I wasn’t confident, based on everything else that he has published, that
The man: Stanley Baldwin. The place: the House of Commons. The date: 10 November 1932. The quote: I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get
Swastika Night was written by Katharine Burdekin under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. It’s a dystopian novel in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have conquered the world and divided it between them. Nothing so original in that, you might think — except that Swastika Night was published in June 1937, before the invasion of Poland
So if there were no mystery aeroplanes over Berlin on 23 June 1933, and nobody who even saw any mystery aeroplanes, why did the German government and press say otherwise? There are three-ish reasons, that I can see. The first is the most obvious. It was strongly implied in the original English-language reports that the
According to David Oliver’s Hendon Aerodrome, International tension remained high during the Whitsun weekend [30-31 May] of 1914, when the country was plunged into a Zeppelin scare that resulted in severe civil flying restrictions.1 As I’ve never come across this mystery aircraft panic before — a not unknown occurrence! — I naturally got very excited,
A quick followup to my previous posts about the origins of the phrase ‘England is no longer an island’, supposedly uttered by Lord Northcliffe in 1906 in reference to Alberto Santos-Dumont taking to the air (above). I’ve tried to run down a primary source for this, but haven’t quite managed it. Here’s what I have
A long time ago I wrote about the idea that the advance of technology had annihilated Britain’s traditional maritime defences. This claim was famously — supposedly — made by Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the Daily Mail, after seeing Alberto Santos-Dumont fly in France in 1906: ‘England is no longer an island’.1 It’s so
