On Friday, I went along to a talk on “Great War aerial photography: a source for battlefield survey and archaeology?”, given by Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University in Belgium. This brings the total number of in-any-way-related-to-early-20th-century-aviation talks given at the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidacy (as far as I know and excluding a […]
Right. My very last day off in London, the first Sunday in September. No longer could I put off the choice between the Tower of London (including Tower Bridge) and Greenwich (the National Maritime Museum, above, and the Royal Greenwich Observatory). As an ex-astrophysics type, I really couldn’t not go and see the observatory at
At the end of August, I spent a day and a half at the offices of the Air League, which very graciously had allowed me access to their archives. Their address on Tothill Street is not far from Buckingham Palace, which I hadn’t yet seen. And I hadn’t done Whitehall properly yet. So it was
After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking
Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed,
The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm. I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.
After six weeks in the UK, I finally got to see somewhere other than London when I attended a conference at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. To get to Cranwell, I took a GNER train from King’s Cross to Newark in Nottinghamshire, where a RAF courtesy bus took me the rest of the 20km or so
While trawling through newspapers I keep an eye out for interesting aircraft-related advertisements. These are not uncommon, most obviously in relation to industries which could claim some relationship with aviation (after any record-breaking flight, there was usually at least one ad pointing out how much the triumphant pilot owed to some petroleum product or other).
One week I’m looking out over London’s skyline from the top of St Paul’s, the next I’m exploring underneath its streets, at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. But this post is only about the latter, as no photography is allowed in the Museum. That’s OK: while the museum was most interesting and very
Here’s something a bit different. It’s a paper model aeroplane which I made from a design published on 30 June 1934 in “Boys and Girls”, the weekly children’s supplement to the Daily Mail. The claim is made there that it glides, but sadly all mine does is stall and then enter a tailspin … but
