In June 1936, Flight published a short story entitled ‘If, 193–? A conjectural story’. It’s interesting as an example of an air force view of the next war. That is, for the RAF it goes pretty much according to plan: the enemy’s attempt at a knock-out blow against Britain fails, whereas the RAF plays a […]
My main interest in this series about the RAF Displays at Hendon has been in the set pieces with which they ended. But as this is the last post it’s worth looking a bit at the organisation of the Display itself. Flight had some useful articles for this in its preview of the 15th Display,
The week before the 1932 RAF Display, Flight‘s editor commented on the rationale behind the theme chosen for the finale: Sometimes the story composed for the set piece has been framed with some object, such as to obviate the criticisms of pacifists. Thus at one Display the enemy were called Pirates, so that nobody could
I may or may not have been right in guessing that the Soviet Union was the pretend enemy in the 1928 RAF Display set-piece, but as we shall see I think I’m on safer ground with the next year’s edition (for some reason held slightly later in the summer than usual, on Saturday, 13 July
The seventh RAF Display was held on Saturday, 3 July 1926. By now it was, as Flight noted, ‘amongst the foremost of the functions of the London social season’.1 Their Majesties the King and Queen were in attendance, along with representatives of three other royal houses (including the King, Queen, Infante and Infanta of Spain,
The fourth RAF Pageant took place on Saturday, 30 June 1923. The ‘turn of the afternoon’, as in the previous year, was ‘another little Eastern drama, based on actual happenings during the War’.1 Once more the Wottnotts were the enemy, and once more the co-operation of air and ground forces was the theme. The main
I recently said that I’ve been meaning to write about the spectacular and dramatic set pieces which usually marked the climax of the RAF Pageants, held at Hendon aerodrome every summer from 1920 to 1937. So here goes! The themes chosen for these set-pieces tell us something about what ideas about airpower the RAF wished
MRS. MARY COUCHMAN, twenty-four-year-old warden in a small Kentish village, sat smoking a cigarette in the wardens’ post. She was resting between warnings. Suddenly the sirens sounded again. She saw her little boy, with two friends, playing some distance away. The cigarette still in her hand, Mrs. Couchman ran out of the post. Bombs began
This is the programme for an air display called ‘London Defended’ which was part of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (in Wembley Stadium, in fact, before it became Wembley Stadium). I must admit to having missed this one (and its predecessor in 1924), but it sounds like it was comparable to the longer-lived
I’m sure everybody has a favourite story about Sir Kingsley Wood. Mine is the one from when he was Air Minister at the start of the Second World War, and he refused to bomb Germany on the grounds that it would damage private property. As A. J. P. Taylor tells it: Kingsley Wood, secretary for
