Nearly at the end of these posts! During my two weeks in London researching, I also managed to fit in some sightseeing (it helped that none of my archives were open on Sundays). Mostly this meant the British Museum, but there were also a couple of other favourite haunts plus a museum I'd never managed to make it to before.
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After Liverpool, Conwy. Via Bangor, very briefly. (All I'll say is that if you tell people you're going on holiday to X and their response is 'X? Really?', that should probably be taken as an opportunity to rethink your travel plans.)
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After Glasgow, York. This was a place we had both previously visited and loved, but not for well over a decade and not together. So we were curious to see if we would enjoy it as much now. Folly? Yes, but that's not important right now.
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The first instalment of some much-belated travel photo blogging from our UK trip in May-June 2024. Above, the Sérilly Cabinet, a private room built for the lady of a Parisian town house around 1778, and now relocated in its entirety to the V&A.
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There aren't a great many sites of memory left to evoke the first bombing war, so during my recent UK trip I thought I'd make the effort to track a couple of them down. (One, Cleopatra's Needle, I did see on my first UK trip, but have never managed to make it back.)
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So, I'm back from my long-overdue and much-needed research trip to the UK. Was it worth it? Yes!
In raw numbers, I took over 11,000 photos across 13 days at 8 archives in 5 cities.1 Obviously, since I'm not a Bomber Command AOC I'm not going to prioritise quantity over quality. But I did pretty much, er, hit all my high priority targets and look at everything I really wanted to see. I struck archival gold nearly every day; there were only one or two places where the findings were meagre, and those visits were always a bit speculative anyway. I would like to have to visited the Tfl Corporate Archives (though check out the Underground posters I did find, above and below, from 1917-18 and 1917 respectively), or one or two other Home Counties archives. But you can't see everything; and what I did see will make Home Fires Burning a much better book.
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That's right...
... I'm going on a research trip...
... to the UK!
(I suppose this post should technically be called Archivwochen, but that's a little too pedantic even for me.)
It's been nearly a decade since my last visit, and that was long before I started working on Home Fires Burning. So I've built up a large pile of research questions which can only be answered in the archives. Airminded will therefore be in hiatus until July, while I holiday in England, Scotland, and Wales, and (more importantly for the purposes of this blog) research in the following archives:
I'm hoping to have some sort of Airminded meetup or meetups, so if you're in or near any of these places in late June, drop me a line!
In my previous post, I discussed my concerns with the way sources are used in Neil Hanson's First Blitz.1 Here I turn to the problem of strategy, which goes more to the argument of the book. Again there are two parts to this, one broad and one narrow. I'll start with the broad.
Hanson's argument is that Germany, across almost the entire duration of the war, hoped, planned and attempted to destroy London through bombing, specifically by burning it out:
Air-dropped incendiary bombs would create firestorms engulfing entire districts of London, creating mass panic and popular unrest that would 'render it doubtful that the war can continue' and force the British Government to sue for peace.2
In other words, Germany was attempting to carry out a knock-out blow from the air against Britain – in 1915 or 1918 rather than 1940.
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This is a continuation, of sorts, of my series of posts critiquing the recent trend of describing the air raids on Britain in the First World War as the 'First Blitz'. I've separated it out because, although it is about the best-known book to use that phrase in its title – Neil Hanson's First Blitz (2008) – my concerns aren't about that usage, but are about the book itself.1 To be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad book; in fact I am broadly in sympathy with his account and I really like some aspects of it (the chapter entitled 'Londoners unnerved' is a terrific account of what I call the Gotha shock). But it is a book that should be used carefully. And as I'm seeing it cited fairly widely (including by academic historians, not excluding me!) I think it's worth putting those concerns out there, particularly since it was not reviewed in any academic publication, as far as I can see.
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In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the 'First Blitz'. I don't think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by saying I had another concern, and this one I think carries more weight. However, it's not really about the First World War at all, but the Second. And it's this: the Blitz is too British.
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