‘Everybody’s Doing It’ was the name of a popular revue which opened in the West End in February 1912; the music and lyrics (including a near-eponymous song) were co-written by Irving Berlin. It was also the Manchester Guardian‘s stab at a contemporary pop cultural reference to describe just how widespread the phantom airship scare had […]
The planet Venus normally sticks close to the Sun and so can only be seen very shortly after sunset, to the west (or before sunrise, to the east, when it is a morning star). But every 584 days, when it reaches maximum elongation in its orbit, it is far enough from the Sun in apparent
View Scareships, 1913 in a larger map Here’s where the 1913 phantom airship sightings took place. Actually, there are a few from late 1912 (including the Sheerness incident), the blue ones. Red indicates sightings in January 1913, green February, cyan March, and yellow April. A quick visual inspection shows that the density of sightings was
Yesterday’s post was, thankfully, the last entry in my post-blogging of the 1913 phantom airship wave. I’ve searched the available (to me) primary sources up until the end of April 1913 and can find no further references; and Watson, Oldroyd and Clarke’s exhaustive compilation of phantom airship sightings has only 7 entries from May onwards.
A rather belated mystery airship report appears in today’s Aberdeen Daily Journal (p. 4): It was reported a few days ago that on the evening of the 9th April [1913] an airship, steering north-west, was seen from the island of Stronsay, Orkney. Doubt was felt at the time as to the reliability of the report,
The Economist follows up last week’s third leading article about the airship scare with the fourth leading article today (an extract from which also appears in the Manchester Guardian). This time around the subject is ‘THE “DAILY MAIL’S” MANSION HOUSE MEETING FOR AIRSHIPS’ (925), which is planned for 5 May and will feature speeches by
The Manchester Guardian reports today on Germany’s naval aviation plans, as revealed in an official memorandum recently released to the public, which it judges to be ‘important as marking the first step from tentative experiments to a period of ordered growth’ (9). An ‘explanatory statement’ is likened to ‘the famous Introduction to the Navy Bill
The third leading article in today’s Economist is entitled ‘Airship fiascos and preliminary puffs’ (p. 868). It begins by casting back to ‘A FEW weeks ago, just before and after the Army and Navy Estimates were introduced’, when ‘a section of the Press was filled with lurid accounts of the danger in which Great Britain
A prominent headline on the front page of the Daily Express today rather startlingly refers to the ‘BOMBARDMENT OF LONDON’, a ‘NIGHT VISIT FROM A DIRIGIBLE’, and a ‘WAR LESSON’ (p. 1). It turns out that the capital has not been destroyed by a sudden Zeppelin raid; rather, Londoners are promised that tomorrow night an
It’s been a while, but after three previous visits the mystery airship has returned to Cardiff. From the Manchester Guardian (p. 9; above): Our Cardiff correspondent sends a report that again last night [8 April 1913] an aircraft was seen at Cardiff, where one was reported to have been seen frequently at the beginning of
