It must be about to time to start posting photos from my trip (blame Alan!) My first destination was in Wiltshire, and is best introduced by Nigel Tufnel: In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people: the Druids. No one knows who they were, or what […]
William le Queux‘s The Invasion of 1910 is today one of the best-remembered of the Edwardian invasion novels (at least to anyone interested in the topic). Not because of any literary value — very few people read it today, and I can’t blame them — but because of its contemporary success. It was commissioned by
I recently attended a function in the Gryphon Gallery of the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne, where there’s a local war memorial I missed out on when I last wrote on the topic. It was dedicated in 1920 in what was then the Teachers’ College, and takes the form of three stained glass
While walking home tonight I saw something unexpected.
The first bombers didn’t fly but sailed: they were warships known as bomb vessels, which mounted heavy mortars firing explosive shells. These could be used in naval battles, but weren’t very accurate and so were usually used to attack targets on land, including cities. The French navy used bomb vessels to bombard Genoa in 1684,
When did people wearing monocles stop being taken seriously in public life? Noel Pemberton Billing, independent candidate for Hertford, in 1916. From N. Pemberton-Billing, Air War: How to Wage It (London: Gale & Polden, 1916).
The editorial cartoon from the Melbourne Argus of 9 December 1941, the issue which reported the Japanese landings in Malaya and air raid on Pearl Harbor. I guess it’s nice to know I can still be surprised, though, of course, there’s really no reason why I should have been.
I’ve said before that Giulio Douhet’s influence on British ideas about airpower has been greatly overestimated. Nobody was talking about him before the mid-1930s, by which time the knock-out blow paradigm was firmly established. Much the same could be said of Billy Mitchell (although the sinking of the Ostfriesland was certainly noticed, and at least
Nobody commented on the Wokingham Whale. Above is a photograph of this unlikely beast, dating from 1910 or so. All I know about it is from the Globe and this site, which has several other photos as well. The Whale was not an airship, although that word was used to describe it. Despite the shape,
