Press coverage of the phantom airships has so far been somewhat scattershot, with articles in only two or three newspapers on any given day. Today, however, at least eight newspapers report on an airship seen at Cardiff, five of them London dailies (all politically conservative, as it happens) — though admittedly it is not given […]
The Daily Express today features, p. 6, an article with the title ‘Air ships and scare ships’, written by C. G. Grey, editor of The Aeroplane. Grey has been given a full column immediately following the leading articles to make his case that whatever else they may be, the phantom airships are good news. He
The Dublin Irish Times has a report (p. 9; above) of a ‘mysterious airship’ seen on last Wednesday, 8 January 1913, at Newport, Co. Mayo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. It was first seen at 6.40pm to the southwest, and looked ‘at first’ like ‘a very large, bright star’. It shortly ‘was seen to
A number of newspapers print articles of varying length about the Dover airship mystery today, including the Yeovil Western Gazette, the Exeter Western Times, and the Lichfield Mercury. None of these add any new information about this incident, one being a reprint of an article already published in another newspaper and the other two simply
Alluding to the airship supposedly seen at Dover (assuming Saturday is meant, rather than Sunday as written), the Devon and Exeter Gazette notes (p. 4; above) that ‘similar lights have been seen on the Somerset coast line of the Bristol Channel during the last three or four weeks’ (so going back to mid-December 1912, at
The Times (p. 6; above) has two paragraphs about the reported visit of an unknown flying machine to Dover at about 5am on Saturday morning, 4 January 1913, evidently coming from the direction of the Continent and heading north-east. It was seen by John Hobbs, a corporation employee (i.e. a council worker), though he heard
With war comes confusion, and with confusion comes a need for clarity. So it was with simple, determined messages like this that the National Office of Information kept the undersieged civilians of Britain in a robust frame of mind during the teething pains of the Second World War. The language may be arcane, but the
I may be the only person now living to have read all three of Hamish Blair’s novels, published in 1930 and 1931 — I’m certainly the only person on LibraryThing to own any at all.1 I wish I could say that the rest of you are missing out, but you’re really not: they are tedious
An update on the whole Millwall thing. Well, a teaser, anyway. I’ve had an email from Chris Going letting me know how his research into the Luftwaffe’s photoreconnaissance flights over Britain on the first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940. Can’t say too much, but he did authorise me to say that ‘interesting things
J. M. Spaight was a lawyer by training and a civil servant by profession, and as was such not generally prone to flights of fancy. His prewar books are scholarly and judicious compilations of various opinions and precedents regarding aerial warfare. But his wartime writing, such as The Sky’s the Limit (1940) and Bombing Vindicated
