Conferences and talks

• 2 Comments

•
Horse-drawn carriage with people seated and standing children in front.

Next July, the Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) conference is being held at the University of Auckland. My abstract having been accepted, it looks like I'll be going to New Zealand! My presentation is entitled 'Civil defence from below: street patrols and air raid risk in Britain, 1915-1918' and here's what it's about:

As a marker of total war, civil defence is usually seen as a large-scale activity organised by the state which mobilised civilians in defence of the nation against attack from above, with the development of British air raid precautions before and during the Blitz of 1940-41 as a classic exemplar. However, in Britain's first experience of air raids between 1914 and 1918, the state was often curiously absent from civil defence. To a large extent, it was the demands of local communities which drove civil defence policy and practice. I examine here the development of street patrols, which provided warnings of impending air raids in highly localised urban areas so that inhabitants could take measures for their own protection. These patrols were self-organised, often without official sanction, and so represent a form of civil defence from below. While generally justified by a stated need to protect women, children and the elderly from unnecessary anxiety, they were also presented as a form of working-class mutual aid which was necessitated by the lack of state action in providing public raid warnings. Joining a patrol also enabled the construction of a useful masculinity by allowing men who were too young, too old or otherwise unable to join the fighting forces to perform the defence of their communities. I will focus on three such examples of bottom-up patrols with varying success - Hull in 1915, Burton in 1916, and London in 1917 - as well as an example of top-down patrols - Gloucester in 1916 - to show what they reveal about the changing geography and emotions of air raid risk across Britain in the first bombing war.

This will be a great opportunity (read: will force me!) to draw together some of the topics and themes which are emerging in Home Fires Burning. Street patrols are an understudied topic – Mike Reeve has analysed Hull's in depth; see his Bombardment, Public Safety and Resilience in English Coastal Communities During the First World War (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 216–226, as well as his post on the Coastal History Blog – and they've cropped up here on Airminded once or twice. But they were more interesting than I'd realised. The photo above, for example, is from Hull in 1919, and doesn't show a street patrol itself; rather, it's children from around Church-street in Drypool, where 'one of the best systems of night patrols was organized', who were being treated to a 'waggonette outing to Beverley Westwood' out of the 'good sum of money obtained' from over three years' (presumably) worth of the 'weekly collection taken in the district' to cover the cost of the patrols.1 This kind of unofficial, community-based civil defence was clearly very different to the patrols carried out by special constables who are usually associated with air raid patrols in the First World War, but also to the even more familiar air raid wardens of the Second World War. So I want to have a closer look.

It's also an great opportunity to see Auckland (my only previous visit to NZ was to Wellington in 2013, also for the AAEH). It was an unfortunate coincidence that my abstract was accepted on the same day that the NZ government announced that from 2025, its Marsden Fund will no longer be funding humanities and social science research (which means, as far as I can tell, no funding in these areas at all), while 50% everything else will need to show an economic benefit to New Zealand. It doesn't seem like there is any recourse or relief in prospect, so it's going to get grim. (Presciently, the AAEH's theme next year is 'Dark Horizons? New Directions in European History'.) But I'm still looking forward to catching up with my historian colleagues across the Ditch next July!

  1. Daily Mail (Hull), 12 August 1919, 3. [↩]

•
Aviation Cultures Mk.VI call for papers

CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED
New Deadline: 13th March 2022
Aviation Cultures Mk.VI: Connecting the Regions

Didn't have time to get your proposal in? Don't worry! We are excited by the submissions we have received and invite others – experts, professionals, academics, and practitioners – to discuss the impact aviation has had throughout the regions at the local and global level.

The Aviation Cultures Mk.VI Conference will be held from the 15th to the 17th of July 2022, both at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba and online. Prizes for best papers will be awarded, and further details will be released closer to the conference date. We are keen to see wide participation from early career researchers and people with expertise rarely shared to a wider audience, as well as experienced specialists.

Submit an Abstract

...continue reading →

•

[Edited version of an oral summary of 'Mutual aid in an air-raid? Community civil defence in Britain, 1914-18’, International Society for First World War Studies Virtual Conference 2021: Technology, online, 16-18 September 2021.]

The first thing to note is that the German air raids on Britain of the First World War were much smaller in scale than those of the Second World War: they killed 1100 people compared with 43000. They are significant, however, precisely because they were the British people’s first war from the air, and so informed expectations, and preparations, for the next one. And in terms of civil defence, nearly every major aspect of the air raids on Britain in the Second World War was first encountered in the First World War.

But the air raids of the First World War are also important because of their emotional effects, the way that people responded to the entirely novel experiences, and spectacles, of air raids: fear, terror, even panic, but also anger, calm, excitement, boredom, curiosity, complacency. Again these emotions informed behaviour in air raids. These emotional responses could themselves, it was thought, be dangerous. Panic could be contagious. Curiosity might lead people to endanger themselves. Anger might result in the diversion of military resources from the front or even endanger the government politically. So these air raid emotions had to be managed.

Graphic, 5 February 1916, 8

It was largely left up to the press and other moral actors to define 'corrrect' emotional behaviour during air raids. An emotional regime centred on the idea of ‘British pluck’ or stoicism valorised the mastery of emotions during air raids as a particularly British trait. This prefiguring of the 'Blitz spirit' was opposed, of course, to the Germans, who were thought to be cowardly, both as bombers and bombed. Fear and panic, when it did occur in Britain, was at first excused, but increasingly as the war went on, excised from 'Britishness' altogether, through transference onto the Jewish or 'alien' minority.

...continue reading →

•
Victory Through Air Power

A few weeks back I previewed my cohosting of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power for History at the Movies Australia and Aviation Cultures Mk.V. Both the conference and the livetweeting went splendidly (I think!), but I didn't get around to lazyblogging the latter... until now.

The evening began with the half-hour short documentary Flight Plan, made in 1950 by the Australian Department of Civil Aviation, which you can watch here.

[tweet id="1375357664641773573" conversation=false]Conference jokes and airline jokes -- together at last. Yes, this is going to be a good night in...

...continue reading →

•
Victory Through Air Power (1943)

Back in the depths of last winter (and the great Melbourne pandemic lockdown of 2020) I had great fun as the co-host for the Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus) livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to be doing it again, this time along with James Kightly and Daniel J. Leahy as a special #HATMAus-Aviation Cultures co-presentation of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power, based on Alexander de Seversky's book of the same name. It's a wonderful example of both wartime and airpower propaganda, and I hope you'll join me for it. If you need more convincing, just before the main feature we'll be giving the 1950 Australian short Flight Plan the same treatment. If you need even more convincing, it's all free (you don't need to buy a conference ticket -- though please feel free to do so! -- and the movies are publicly available.) It starts at 7pm, Friday, 26 March 2021, on Twitter; the details and links are all here. See you there!

Image source: Victory Through Air Power (1943).

•

Aviation Cultures Mk.V conference

DUE DATE: FRIDAY 15 JANUARY 2021

Aviation Cultures Mk.V is an online conference for researchers, practitioners and curators to come together to share their knowledge of and ideas about aviation, and its place in history and society. The conference will take place online between 25 and 28 March 2021 and will align with the centenaries of the Royal Australian Air Force and Australian civil aviation, though we welcome papers relating to any place or period. For more information, see aviationcultures.org.

We are now asking for submission of abstracts for papers from participants from academia, the aviation industry and the wider community on the following themes:

• Commemorating the centenaries of the RAAF and civil aviation in Australia: International & local perspectives on the civil & military aviation symbiosis
• Aviation Identities: Finding diversity; cultures; mentalities
• Help from Above: Search & rescue; aerial fire-fighting; aeromedical evacuation and
disaster response
• Launching Places: Airports and airplaces
• Aviation Pop Culture: Air displays; art and advertising; music; film
• Aviation Collections: Aeronautical heritage; museums; restoration and artefacts; vintage aircraft operation

Papers can be delivered as videos, slides, or text. Videos should not be longer than 20 minutes; papers should consist of not more than 25 PowerPoint slides, or 2,500 words. Panel members need to be able to present their work and interact with the conference and audience live over the Internet, in Australian daylight hours. A fast stable connection, web camera and audio are minimum requirements. Technical advice and support for presenters will be available closer to the conference. There will also be a ‘Blitz’ talks session, and an ‘Object in 5 Minutes’ session. These talks will allow speakers to rapidly highlight new ideas, current research or local collections. They will be 5 minutes long with no more than 5 slides, and no question time.

Please nominate in your abstract whether you are applying for a standard, Blitz or Object talk. Abstracts should be no more than 200 words. Proposals for standard and Object in 5 Minutes sessions must address the conference themes, and abstracts for standard presentations should nominate the applicable session. Blitz abstracts do not need to address our themes. A 1-page presenter CV and, if desired, a photograph should accompany each abstract.

Please submit your abstract and CV to submissions@aviationcultures.org. Submissions are due by Friday 15 January 2021, with decisions notified by late January. Some abstracts for standard presentations may be accepted as Blitz talks only.

Brett Holman, on behalf of Aviation Cultures Mk.V Core Committee
aviationcultures.org

•

On Wednesday, 27 May 2020, I was privileged to give a seminar to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University on my aerial theatre research -- via Zoom, as is the current fashion. I really enjoyed giving it, and I think it was a great success (and thanks to everyone who listened in and especially those to took the time to ask questions). Because the seminar pulls together some of the different things I've been working on in some kind of coherent way, I wanted to make it available to a wider audience, and so yesterday I post-tweeted my own seminar. And to make it less (?) ephemeral, now I'm embedding the entire 51-tweet thread here in a blog post. It is of course very much a condensed version of what I said, but it's always surprising how much of the essence gets through in tweet form. (Well, I understand what I'm trying to say, but then I would, wouldn't I?)

The seminar title is 'History from below, looking up: aerial theatre, emotion and modernity'. The abstract is:

In the early 20th century, the aeroplane was the symbol of modernity par excellence. Technological change is an essential part of this sense of modernity, and few technological changes have been as dramatic or as unmistakable as the conquest of the air. For the first few decades of the twentieth century, flying was the object of intense popular fascination, and yet few people actually flew themselves, even as passengers, before the tremendous expansion of aviation during and after the Second World War. Even so, their experience of flight was often intensely exciting, since one of the most common ways to encounter flight was through seeing it, as an aviation spectacle in the form of aerial theatre such as air displays and air races. People flocked to aerodromes in their cumulative millions to watch aircraft in flight, performing aerobatics or fighting mock battles. This was a mass form of popular culture, which explicitly and implicitly made claims about the present and -- even more so -- future ability of technology to change the world, for better or for worse. In this talk I will sketch out an emotional history of aerial theatre, focusing on how it helped to construct popular ideas about modernity, primarily in Britain and Australia.

[tweet id="1265825214488707074" conversation=false]
...continue reading →

• 2 Comments

•

Pearson's, April 1901, 475

It is sometimes1 claimed that ballooning was an event at the 1900 Paris Olympics. I don't think it can have been. But it's genuinely a bit murky, because this was only the second modern Olympics and the planning process evidently was not as formalised as it later became. The Olympics were held that year as a minor part of the Exposition Universelle running from April to November 1900, and a number of Exposition events were only retrospectively judged to have been Olympic events too (which is how cricket gets to be an Olympic sport).
...continue reading →

  1. Most notably, at a trivia event at the otherwise brilliant Aviation Cultures Mk IV conference, and no, I'm definitely not bitter for being judged wrong, why would you even think that. [↩]

• 1 Comment

•

In two weeks from today I'll be leaving Armidale for good, and heading back to Melbourne, my hometown. It's mostly for excellent personal reasons, but in part it's also because of the usual early-career academic story of precarious employment. My colleagues at the University of New England have supported me as much they could, but work is drying up and it's clear that any kind of secure position is, at best, a long way off. In addition, with a faculty restructure and as a casual, access to research support is increasingly limited (unfortunately, I had to give up my KCL fellowship). So, after 5 years it's time to leave.

Not that there's a job waiting for me down south, but there are five or six times as many universities in Melbourne as there are in Armidale, so that must help my chances! In the short term I'll have to readjust to life as an independent historian again. I will continue to research and to write, including as part of the Heritage of the Air project, and attend conferences when I can (starting with the International Society for First World War Studies conference in Melbourne, as it happens). Airminded will likely see more activity than it has in the past few years, too.

I will miss my friends here in Armidale. But there's a lot to look forward to in Melbourne!