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 […]
Since I’ll be undertaking a research trip to the UK this November or so, I need to think about exactly what I’m going to do there. Giving a paper at the AHA is part of that process. That will hopefully help me formulate my approach or at least identify potential approaches to comparing airship, spy
I’ve just submitted an article for peer review, ‘The airship panic of 1913: the birth of aerial theatre and the British fear of Germany on the eve of the Great War’. I’m not going to say where, since it will likely be rejected and I don’t need to have a public record of my failures!
This cartoon appeared in Flight in 1913.1 It’s entitled ‘In 1950’ with the caption ‘Flitting — by the light of the Easter moon’. Now, ‘flitting’ is a term used in Scotland and the north of England to mean moving house. It is, or at least was, a practice which happened much more often there than
Getty Images has just announced an embed function, which makes it possible to very easily use images from their collections in blogs and other social media, while simultaneously maintaining Getty Images’ rights and — this is the really nice bit — avoiding the use of unsightly watermarks. This is rightly being greeted with enthusiasm (though
Under the terms of an agreement made in 1909 between the three main British aviation bodies, the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain concentrated on ‘the scientific phases of the movement’, the Aero Club of the United Kingdom was responsible for ‘sporting and social aspects’, and the Aerial League of the British Empire, the one I’m
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] On 15 February 1915, the Winnipeg Evening Tribune‘s daily astrology column noted the unfavourable positions of Mars and Uranus: The affliction of Mars this month is ominous of outrages against persons in power. A disaster that will shock the people living in cities is threatened. Uranus foreshadows peril
As we all1 know, the Aerial League of the British Empire (later the Air League of the British Empire, now just the Air League) was founded in 1909. Less well-known is that the Aerial League also sponsored the formation of the Women’s Aerial League (they are often described as being affiliated, or as the latter
This is the poster produced by the Navy League in 1913 as a key part of its campaign to force the government to increase the amount it spent on military and naval aviation — or as the poster itself puts it, rather more succinctly: THE NAVY LEAGUE DEMANDS £1,000,000. FOR AERIAL DEFENCE BRITONS WAKE UP!
This must be about the strangest image to have ever appeared on this blog. How to explain it? First of all, it was published in Review of Reviews, May 1913, 457, accompanying the second part of a two-part article by Count Zeppelin on ‘The conquest of the air’. However, apart from the obvious aviation theme
