This week’s issue of Flight carries a short piece about ‘Phantom airships and scare headlines’ (p. 318). It’s scornful of the credulity of ‘a certain section of the Press’, since ‘it was evident from the very first that either a practical joke was being played or that a bold advertising scheme was on foot’. The […]
The mighty Punch weighs in on the phantom airships today. Above is a rather wonderful full-page cartoon by Bernard Partridge, playing on the notion that the stories are part of the annual ‘silly season’ (usually in summer, still a month away): The sea-serpent: “Well, if this sort of thing keeps on, it’ll mean a dull
The reaction against the airship stories which started on Friday continues. For the first time in over a week, there’s nothing about any phantom airships themselves. Instead, both the Manchester Guardian and The Times have summaries from their Berlin correspondents of German press reaction to the outbreak of British nerves. (This is in fact the
Today is Saturday, when a number of the weeklies in my sample are published. Two of them are clearly sceptical, and don’t devote much space to the mystery airships; one, from the heart of scareship country, is much more open-minded and has half a page of reports and analysis. This is the Norfolk News, which
After yesterday’s excitement, today is something of an anticlimax as far as scareships are concerned. In fact, it’s more like a backlash. There are some new sighting reports, from Wales again and from Birmingham. The Manchester Guardian reports (p. 7) that Oliver L. Jones, a Monmouth auctioneer (of Messrs. Nelmes, Poole, Jackson and Jones), his
The Globe has a slew of new reports from last night (p. 7), from Norwich, Wroxham, Sprowston, Catton and Tesburgh in East Anglia, Pontypool in Wales (by workers at a forge, an architect and two postal workers), and Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in Ireland. Some saw searchlights, some heard a ‘whizzing’ sound, some saw a
Only the Globe carries (p. 4) phantom airship stories today (out of my sample, at least), but it has two, and they head the column rather being buried down the page. The first is from Cardiff in Wales, where a number of dock workers saw an airship in the early hours of this morning, and
For the first time, the Standard heads a column with the ‘midnight airship’ story today (p. 9). The story contains a brief summary of the sightings to date, along with a map of their locations. The first sighting was back on 23 March, made by a Peterborough police constable named Kettle. He saw a ‘strange,
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Airminded is hosting the next edition of the History Carnival on 1 June. Please send me suggestions for the best history blogging since 1 May, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by del.ici.ous (tagged historycarnival). Thanks! Image source: Weapons on the Wall.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn’t ‘get’ Guernica, and thought that direct representations — photographs — of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso’s masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but
