Some inconsistencies in the Daily Mirror‘s message today. Liverpool was bombed heavily last night in ‘One of the most severe raids in the air blitz’ (1): Fire bombs damaged a boys’ college and caused casualties; a secondary school was hit by an oil bomb and incendiaries; numbers of houses were destroyed; gas and water mains […]
The Daily Mirror likes its headlines big and bold. The one above takes up two-thirds of the width of today’s front page. The story is that Arthur Greenwood, Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet (and deputy leader of the Labour Party; interesting that he is not described as such in an ostensibly left-wing newspaper)
I have an embarrassment of Sunday papers now: the Observer, the Sunday Express, News of the World and The People. The last named (which has sales of more than 3 million per issue) has Coventry on the front page, but halfway down and underneath a photograph of a pig (I couldn’t say why). US-British cooperation,
News of Coventry’s tragedy — Hilde Marchant, writing on the front page of the Daily Express, above, says the city was ‘Guernicaed’ all Thursday night — has reached the morning press (though it was announced by the government yesterday and would have been reported on the BBC and in the evening papers). Initial reports are
It seems that Mussolini’s attempt to annex Greece may have been somewhat ill-judged. The Daily Express leads with news of a Greek counteroffensive against the Italian forces invading their country from Albania. A spokesman for the Greek government said that their ‘troops were advancing along the whole line’. The offensive opened with a savage attack
British and Allied forces have been having a good week, at Italy’s expense. The Italians lost Gallabat (in the Sudan), a division in the offensive against Greece and much of a convoy taking supplies to Albania. The greatest Allied success was the carrier strike against the Italian naval base at Taranto, which took place on
Phantom airships come and go, but sometimes they come again. According to the scattered accounts of the 1909 Australian wave I’ve seen (meaning Bill Chalker’s The Oz Files and random internet sites), there was a late airship sighting on 25 October 1909 at Minderoo station in Western Australia. But I couldn’t find that event in
What did the phantom airships mean to people at the time? One thing is clear. The press very early on referred to the mysterious lights as airships, and it does seem that this was probably the most popular theory among those who saw them. But it was very far from a universal view. The 5
The first Australian scareship to be reported was not described as an airship, but simply as ‘beautiful revolving lights’, albeit of a mechanical aspect. This was published in the Melbourne Argus of 9 August 1909. Reverend B. Cozens, of the Port Melbourne Seamen’s Mission, came into the newspaper’s office to make a statement about something
It’s a little-known fact that Australia had a phantom airship scare of its very own. That’s mostly due to phantom airships themselves being little-known, on the whole. But the Australian sightings of August-September 1909 were also less numerous and less spectacular than the other waves that preceded it that year, in Britain in May and
