Periodicals

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Herald (Melbourne), 12 January 1924, 24

After its early showing in the 1909 mystery airship wave, Australia was rarely visited by phantom airships proper. Maybe that's because real airships were even rarer, with none that I know of between 1914 and the late twentieth century: they just weren't a very plausible thing to think you saw. But they did turn up sometimes.

There was one in Western Australia in 1910, another in 1918, and a relatively famous one on 10 June 1931 between Lord Howe Island to Jervis Bay. That last one was seen by Sir Francis Chichester while making the first east-west solo flight from New Zealand to Australia -- though he seems to have only reported it decades later, and even then stopped of short of claiming it actually was an airship. In 1925, another phantom airship was seen, more definitely but equally incongruously, at Myall, near the Murray River in northern Victoria.

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Articles with 'air raid' per issue, 1913-1946 (BNA)

The time has finally come to address the claim I've made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often 'air raid' (and related phrases) appeared per issue in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in each month across the First World War. The above plot, now, is how often 'air raid' appeared per issue in each year from the start of the First World War (when 'air raid' was first used) until the end of the Second. Now you can see that the first peak in 'air raid''s popularity came in 1917, at an average of 0.8 mentions in every newspaper issue in BNA; and that this was followed by a second, much bigger peak in 1940 of 5.2 mentions in every newspaper issue in BNA. All of which makes sense.

What's more surprising is what happened in between. From 1921 to 1934, the phrase 'air raid' almost completely disappears from BNA. At the lowest point, 1929, the average number of mentions per issue was just 0.026, or one in about 38. In other words, if you read 38 issues you might expect to read the phrase 'air raid' once, which is more than six weeks of reading a daily. If you want some absolute figures, 'air raid' appears 609 times in the 23054 issues contained in BNA for 1929. So 'air raid' was not a phrase you were at all likely to see in a newspaper in the 1920s and early 1930s.

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Articles with 'air raid' per issue, 1914-1918 (BNA)

In my previous post I looked at the first appearances of the phrase 'air raid' and related words in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA). Of course, just because these phrases had been coined by somebody, or even used in a newspaper, it doesn't mean they were widely understood -- they might have taken a long time to catch on, or even be reinvented independently. So, in order to get a truer sense of how widespread these phrases were, we need to look at some n-grams.

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Sphere, 3 April 1915, 8

The term 'air raid' has been around a long time. Not since the first air raid, or even the first air raid of the twentieth century, but from not long after that. The first definite use in the British Newspaper Archive is in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, during the 1913 phantom airship panic, as it happens (bold emphases are mine throughout):

The War Office were about to offer a substantial prize for the best aeroplane engine. They had already obtained an anti-airship gun of wonderful efficiency, and progress had been made in solving the problem of defending this country against foreign air raids.1

It was still vanishingly rare, though, and only became popular during the First World War. This happened very quickly. The Dundee Courier (quoting the Daily Express) used 'air raid' on 12 August 1914, though clearly more with a sense of reconnaissance rather than bombing:

Daring air raids have revealed all the German positions and movements.2

More obviously in the familiar sense is the next appearance in BNA, in a Western Gazette headline on 28 August 1914 for an attempted Zeppelin attack on Antwerp:

ANOTHER AIR RAID ON ANTWERP
ZEPPELIN REPULSED.
August 26th. IT is officially stated that the Zeppelin airship attempted last night to repeat its raid upon the city. Measures were taken to defeat the attempt, which the Zeppelin then abandoned.3

After this point 'air raid' began to be used very widely. (The image above is from the Sphere and shows 'Shells bursting round a Zeppelin during the air raid on Paris on March 20'.)4

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  1. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 20 March 1913, 7. [↩]
  2. Courier (Dundee), 12 August 1914, 1. [↩]
  3. Western Gazette (Yeovil), 28 August 1914, 4. [↩]
  4. Sphere, 4 April 1915, 8. [↩]

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The Bystander, 31 May 1911, p. 13

To mark May Day, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, @FleetAirArmMus, tweeted about the Royal Navy's first rigid airship, which was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1911 in an attempt to match Germany's Zeppelins:

I was surprised by the comment about the airship's name. Probably because of its brief, non-flying existence, it's known by a variety of designations, including R1, HMA (His Majesty's Airship) 1, and HMA Hermione (since HMS Hermione acted as its tender). But it's perhaps best known by an unofficial name, Mayfly, given because, @FleetAirArmMus said, 'it was laid down on water & then took to the air', just like a mayfly. That's the part that surprised me, because I had always understood it to be much more ironic: it may fly, but it might not. And of course Mayfly didn't: it broke its back in September 1911 as it was being taken out of its hangar for its first flight.

But I don't actually know why I think that. Every secondary source I've checked just says it was 'popularly' or 'unofficially' called Mayfly, without providing a source or even an explanation. I'd also assumed that it was a name given by a sceptical press during the two years it took to build the airship, but Wikipedia, citing Philip Jarrett, says it was bestowed by the 'lower deck', i.e. the sailors. So I decided to look for some primary sources.

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The previous post ended with this photo, and another very similar one, which Getty Images dates to 17 October 1917 with the caption 'Moses Shackman, centre, with members of the Jewish East End Shelter Corps. Their hats are labelled in Yiddish and English':

Raid Shelter Corps, 1917

As I noted, the hatbands actually say (in English, at least), 'RAID SHELTER CORPS'. This turns out to be a somewhat mysterious organisation, but I think I've managed to track it down.

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Hither Green air raid shelter, September 1917

Recently, Alexandra Churchill tweeted a photo of an air raid shelter in London in 1917:

She's absolutely right, and I'll eventually come back to this, sort of; but Rob Langham made a slightly different point which I want to follow up first:

Indeed, in my experience it is very rare indeed to find images of any raid shelters from the First World War. This, of course, is largely because they were far less common than in the Second World War, when the expected scale of attack was much larger and the time of preparation much longer, leading to many shelters being built in streets, schools and private homes from the late 1930s onwards -- and that's even before you get to the millions of backyard Anderson shelters. Quite a number of these still survive, just through sheer prevalance. By contrast, there's one First World War survivor at Woodbridge in Suffolk (c. 1915), and not much else.1 So it is useful to have some photographic evidence, too.

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  1. The Historic England page for the Woodbridge shelter says it is 'one of only two purpose-built First World War air raid shelters known to survive in England', but rather unhelpfully doesn't actually say where the other one is. It might be at the Great Wakering Old School in Essex, according to a site which is currently offline. Update: Ian Castle pointed out that the 'other' surviving shelter is probably the one at Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire (built in 1916). [↩]

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Yesterday @TroveUFOBot found an obviously satirical and wholly invented account of a mystery airship seen at Dobroyd in Sydney in 1910. This is interesting enough in itself, but what got me searching was the inspiration for the article:

Everywhere just now the air is full of mystery -- of airship mystery. This is connected not so much with what is known to be accomplished in the way of aviation but rather what is suspected to have been accomplished, and to be kept secret for use in war time by some one or other of the great nations of the earth. A few days ago there came a rumour from the Pacific (which, by the way is a good wide place to start a rumour from) of traces of the visit of an airship having been discovered on what the late Mr Daniel O'Rourke would have called 'a dissolute' island.1

I soon found this 'rumour from the Pacific', which turned out to be an account of (perhaps) two mystery airships seen in the Lau islands of Fiji, then a British colony on 17 March 1910.
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  1. St George Call (Kogorah, NSW), 30 April 1910, 6. [↩]

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Truth was a British political newspaper first published in 1877, founded by Henry Labouchère, a sometime Liberal MP. By the 1930s it was infamous as a scurrilous and often libellous pro-appeasement and often anti-semitic rag; in the Edwardian period it was still Liberal in inclination. At the end of May 1909 it issued no. 1581 of its many reader 'puzzles' on the topic of the recent phantom airship panic -- actually a satirical poetry competition:

One of the most engrossing topics of the past week has been the nocturnal manoeuvrings of the mysterious, but now happily exploded, German airship -- or, as it has been happily christened, 'Scare ship' -- which has been so vigorously exploited by a certain class of imaginative journalists that any number of people's legs seem to have been effectively pulled thereby. The topic is certainly one that lends itself to humorous treatment in verse, and I now present it to my numerous poets to see what they can make of it. That is to say, I offer herewith the usual Prize of Two Guineas for THE BEST ORIGINAL POEM, OF A HUMOROUS, BURLESQUE, OR MOCK-HEROIC CHARACTER, DEALING WITH THE MYSTERIOUS GERMAN BOGEY-AIRSHIP WHICH CAUSED SUCH A PANIC, LAST WEEK, IN THE BOSOMS OF OUR NERVOUS PATRIOTS.1

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  1. Truth (London), 26 May 1909, 1301. [↩]

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Broadgate, Coventry, 25 August 1939

From Alan Allport's excellent new book, Britain at Bay 1938-1941, a couple of sentences about the IRA's 1939 bombing campaign which were guaranteed to catch my attention as imaginary air raids:

Some witnesses to the Broadgate bombing interviewed by the police were convinced that they had seen aircraft in the sky moments before the explosion, and that they had actually been attacked by the Luftwaffe. When, back in May, the IRA had set off a magnesium bomb in a Paramount cinema in Birmingham, there had been pandemonium inside the auditorium as members of the audience panicked, thinking that the long-dreaded German aerial Blitz had begun. 'Keep calm -- it's only the Irish again,' someone shouted to reassure the crowd (whether they added 'and carry on' is unknown).1

There's a little more detail available in the contemporary press about the first incident, which killed five people and injured seventy more in Broadgate, a major shopping street in Coventry, on 25 August 1939 (as shown above). The Birmingham Post reported that

There was chaos for a time after the Coventry explosion. A bomber aeroplane was passing over the centre of the city at the time, and the first thought of many people was that a surprise air attack had begun. This fear, indeed, led to an ugly scene. One of three men standing near a car was heard to say 'Let’s get away' or 'Let’s get out of this.' Some hearers jumped to the conclusion that the men were responsible for the explosion, and a threatening crowd began to collect. It was with difficulty that the police got the three men away to the police station, to be detained for a time for their own safety. The men’s credentials were found satisfactory, and they were afterwards released.2

The link between the three men and the belief that an air raid was under way is a bit cyrptic here, but is clearer in the Dundee Courier and Advertiser's account:

The men explained that they had been standing near their car when the explosion occurred. The eldest of the men, who was with his son and grandson, shouted, 'The war has started -- let's get away,' and ran to his car, whereupon the crowd shouted, 'Lynch them.'3

So the grandfather, at least, was one of those who believed that the knock-out blow from the air had arrived. This was just one week before the declaration of war on Germany. Britain was already beginning to move to a war footing -- the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act had received Royal Assent the day before -- and Coventry was an important heavy manufacturing centre, so you can see why the first thought might have been of a Luftwaffe bomb from the sky, rather than an IRA one on the ground. The surprise, perhaps, is that more people didn't make this assumption. At least some people seem to have understood that it was a terrorist attack, or else they wouldn't have made to grab the three men just for trying to flee the scene (this was in fact the seventh IRA bomb in Coventry since February, though by far the most damaging). Though it's also possible that the idea was the men were spies who had directed the supposed bomber to its target somehow. Or both, or neither: mobs aren't really known for their cool logic.

Image source: Leitrim Observer.

  1. Alan Allport, Britain at Bay 1938-1941: The Epic Story of the Second World War (London: Profile Books, 2020), 13. [↩]
  2. Birmingham Post, 26 August 1939, 16. [↩]
  3. Courier and Advertiser (Dundee), 26 August 1939, 3. [↩]