The RAF Displays held at Hendon between 1920 and 1937 were unique, in that no other air force attempted to project a vision of itself, its capabilities and its responsibilities in so public a way, on such a large scale and over such a long period. Of course, that’s largely because there weren’t many air […]
This advertisement was placed by the Air League in The Times, 11 June 1940, on page 9 (it also appeared in the Daily Telegraph). The British Expeditionary Force had been ejected from France just a week before; Germany now occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. France was still fighting, but Paris had been declared an open
In June 1936, Flight published a short story entitled ‘If, 193–? A conjectural story’. It’s interesting as an example of an air force view of the next war. That is, for the RAF it goes pretty much according to plan: the enemy’s attempt at a knock-out blow against Britain fails, whereas the RAF plays a
My main interest in this series about the RAF Displays at Hendon has been in the set pieces with which they ended. But as this is the last post it’s worth looking a bit at the organisation of the Display itself. Flight had some useful articles for this in its preview of the 15th Display,
The week before the 1932 RAF Display, Flight‘s editor commented on the rationale behind the theme chosen for the finale: Sometimes the story composed for the set piece has been framed with some object, such as to obviate the criticisms of pacifists. Thus at one Display the enemy were called Pirates, so that nobody could
I may or may not have been right in guessing that the Soviet Union was the pretend enemy in the 1928 RAF Display set-piece, but as we shall see I think I’m on safer ground with the next year’s edition (for some reason held slightly later in the summer than usual, on Saturday, 13 July
The seventh RAF Display was held on Saturday, 3 July 1926. By now it was, as Flight noted, ‘amongst the foremost of the functions of the London social season’.1 Their Majesties the King and Queen were in attendance, along with representatives of three other royal houses (including the King, Queen, Infante and Infanta of Spain,
The fourth RAF Pageant took place on Saturday, 30 June 1923. The ‘turn of the afternoon’, as in the previous year, was ‘another little Eastern drama, based on actual happenings during the War’.1 Once more the Wottnotts were the enemy, and once more the co-operation of air and ground forces was the theme. The main
I recently said that I’ve been meaning to write about the spectacular and dramatic set pieces which usually marked the climax of the RAF Pageants, held at Hendon aerodrome every summer from 1920 to 1937. So here goes! The themes chosen for these set-pieces tell us something about what ideas about airpower the RAF wished
MRS. MARY COUCHMAN, twenty-four-year-old warden in a small Kentish village, sat smoking a cigarette in the wardens’ post. She was resting between warnings. Suddenly the sirens sounded again. She saw her little boy, with two friends, playing some distance away. The cigarette still in her hand, Mrs. Couchman ran out of the post. Bombs began
