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 […]
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
A number of people suggested that the bleedthrough apparent in my book’s cover art could be removed easily enough, and so I went back and asked Ashgate if it could be fixed. And it can and it has been and here is the result. Perfect!
My book, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941, is getting closer to being real. In June, in just three months, it will be in the bookstores. Soon the indexing will be undertaken. Yesterday I made the final corrections to the text, and shortly I’ll receive the page proofs from
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
[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
Airminded was down for a couple of days recently, and it now has a new look. The reason for this is that it was hacked, and nuking the entire site from orbit was the only way to be sure. To be more specific, I noticed last week that Google searches for Airminded were throwing up
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
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History.] Above is a poster printed in Australia during the First World War. It very strikingly shows a Zeppelin caught in searchlights (with an aeroplane just visible at the top) over what looks like a town nestled in a valley beside a river. The text reads: ZEPPELINS OVER YOUR TOWN
