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
A common complaint1 about this blog is that it doesn’t feature nearly enough pictures of airships. So here’s one, a 27-metre long non-rigid which belonged to Henry Spencer, scion of a remarkably airminded family (sixteen aeronauts across four generations). Indeed, he built it with his brothers. The photograph was taken on 16 February 1909 and
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported: NEARLY 400 Jewish refugees streamed into Croydon in a succession of air liners yesterday — the biggest influx the airport had ever experienced. They came from Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland
Breaking the morale of a civilian population by means of aerial bombardment is quite difficult. But it’s a lot easier if you only have to do it in graphical form. Here bombs of type ‘killed’, ‘wounded’, ‘evacuated’, ‘deprived of utilities’ and ‘homes destroyed’ come thundering down towards the edifice ‘will to resist’, which is formed
Last year Alun Salt pointed out to me a proposal for a collection of essays on the theme of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and history, and asked if I’d thought about sending in something on ideas about airpower and the dragon Smaug. I hadn’t, but immediately saw what he was on about! I
