Post-blogging the 1913 scareships

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Dover Express and East Kent News, 10 January 1913

A number of newspapers print articles of varying length about the Dover airship mystery today, including the Yeovil Western Gazette, the Exeter Western Times, and the Lichfield Mercury. None of these add any new information about this incident, one being a reprint of an article already published in another newspaper and the other two simply terse summaries. However, the Dover Express and East Kent News (p. 2; above) has a local, and very sceptical, slant, saying the story has caused 'great amusement locally' where the true cause is known:

The noise which one or two people thought was due to an airship's engines was due to the exhaust of Mr. Walker's new motor boat, 'The Sappho.' The engines of this boat at the present time have no silencer, and made a great deal of noise, although no one acquainted with an airship's engine would confuse the two. On Saturday morning, at 5 o'clock, this boat was coming in harbour, and the noise was undoubtedly caused by it.

So that would appear to be that.

The Mercury also has a paragraph about the lights seen lately over the Bristol Channel -- though from the Welsh side this time, not the English one: 'from Dinas Powis between ten and eleven o'clock one evening recently' (p. 7). They were seen 'above Nell's Point, Barry, and Lavernock, two of the most important in the chain of forts which form the Bristol Channel defences'. Two lights were seen, which reminded the (unnamed) observers of 'aceytlene' [sic]:

They were watched for a long time, moving to and fro in the sky above the coast near Lavernock, and after about an hour they moved off in a westerly direction. They are believed to have come from a dirigible airship or an aeroplane, but most probably from the former as they did not appear to move quickly.

The Mercury points out that 'the Bristol Channel forts are of the utmost strategic importance', because 'in the event of an outbreak of war, the chief coal shipping ports must rely [upon them] for defence against a sudden raid from a foreign Power'. Ominous.

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Devon and Exeter Gazette, 9 January 1913, 4

Alluding to the airship supposedly seen at Dover (assuming Saturday is meant, rather than Sunday as written), the Devon and Exeter Gazette notes (p. 4; above) that 'similar lights have been seen on the Somerset coast line of the Bristol Channel during the last three or four weeks' (so going back to mid-December 1912, at least). This activity is viewed with suspicion:

Throughout this period the low dull clouds which have prevailed would be the best screen or cover for aerial prospectors or scouts. It is to be hoped that the proper Government department has been duly apprised, but somehow the authorities seem to be the last to get knowledge which for a considerable time has been common property.

There is a (ground-based) precedent for this. Citing the Bristol Times and Mirror (possibly the source for the whole story, which provides no names or other verifiable details), the Gazette says that 'Three years ago a series of coast observations were made along the banks of the Severn, and quite openly'.

Getting into conversation with one of these men at Pilning Railway Station, a Bristolian was astonished to hear the German accent. This aroused his curiosity, and on attempting to ask the local military person in question what mission he was engaged on, the latter turned the conversation and terminated it.

The Gazette hopes that the 'authorities are alive to the danger of espionage', but sourly asks what can be expected 'from a Government which disbanded five Regiments of Infantry and Batteries of Field Artillery, and at the same times [sic] poses as encouraging to the full the Territorials'?

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The Times, 6 January 1913, 6

The Times (p. 6; above) has two paragraphs about the reported visit of an unknown flying machine to Dover at about 5am on Saturday morning, 4 January 1913, evidently coming from the direction of the Continent and heading north-east. It was seen by John Hobbs, a corporation employee (i.e. a council worker), though he heard it first:

His attention was first attracted by the noise of the motors, which is well known at Dover, and on looking in the direction from which the sound came he saw a light moving at a great speed from the direction of the sea. The throb of the engines as the machine passed over the town was very distinct.

Two other men, a tradesman named Langley and Police Constable Pierce, also heard the engine sounds though apparently did not see anything. The Times's correspondent in Dover adds that the shape of the machine could not be made out, but that 'owing to the fact that it carried a light and the noise of the engines it is believed to have been an airship and not an aeroplane'. The London Dundee Evening Telegraph and Post, p. 5, has much the same story, but adds a few details: for example that Hobbs was out 'inspecting the roads as to whether they required gravelling for the safety of traffic', which isn't really useful, and that the reason why the 'noise of the motors [...] is a well-known sound at Dover' (as The Times also said) is because 'there has been so much flying' there (presumably referring to the cross-Channel traffic), which is. The Evening Telegraph also adds that 'The wind at the time was blowing nearly half a gale from the westward':

It could only have been a powerfully-engined aircraft to have flown in such a wind, and daring airmanship was also involved in the flight.

The Manchester Courier, p. 7, somewhat more precisely puts the windspeed at 'nearly thirty miles an hour'. It also says that 'police officers', plural, heard the engine whereas the Times and the Evening News mention only one, but that might just be a misinterpretation as it doesn't mention the tradesman. However, the Manchester Guardian, p. 7, also says 'police officers'. It suggests that 'the remarkable thing' is that despite the airship last being seen heading inland, 'no report of her passing or landing has been received from anywhere'.

In introducing its account of the Dover incident, the Liverpool Echo, p. 3, asks 'Are we in danger of another "phantom airship" scare?' Only time will tell.

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Starting tomorrow, I will be be post-blogging the 1913 British phantom airship scare as it appeared in the press, one hundred years earlier to the day. This scare was much longer than the 1909 one: that lasted for less than three weeks, but the 1913 took over three months to run its course. (Longer, if the Sheerness Incident, which took place in October 1912 but wasn't publicised until November, is taken as its beginning.) It was only sporadic at times, especially at the start, but still I'm unlikely to be blogging about much else until April sometime. In an effort to preserve my sanity, I'll try to adhere to a minimalist form of post-blogging, i.e. focusing very narrowly on the topic at hand and not, as has been the recent trend, getting distracted by trying to explain the context or noting interesting but not very related stories that I come across. But I suspect that won't last. In any case, it will all come in very handy when I come to prepare my Wellington talk in July.

Historians have taken little notice of the 1913 phantom airship scare, whereas it's reasonably common to come across references to the smaller and, I would argue, less consequential 1909 one.1 That's probably because the main historian to take an interest in scareships, Alfred Gollin, devoted only a few pages to 1913 whereas he spent a whole chapter talking about 1909.2 Still, George Dangerfield did discuss the 1913 sightings in The Strange Death of Liberal England, though perhaps his title is now better known than his book.3 Also noteworthy is that the 1913 produced the only substantial contemporary analysis of the whole Scareship Age to be published, a chapter in a book written by the editor of the Economist, Francis Hirst.4 Outside the mainstream historical literature I can recommend the relevant chapters in Robert Bartholomew and George Howard's UFOs & Alien Contact (sceptical, despite the title) and Nigel Watson's The Scareship Mystery.5 Along with David Clarke and Granville Oldroyd, Watson also compiled from local and national press reports a 500-page catalogue of scareship sightings, The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare -- a massive undertaking in the pre-Internet age, and in fact one that still couldn't be replicated without spending weeks in the fabled British Library Newspapers at Colindale.6 I'll be working largely independently of their gargantuan effort, as I want to see the primary sources for myself, but I will use it to identify incidents and find sources. Apart from the usual online sources, I will also be using the London newspapers the Daily Mail, the Standard, the Globe and Traveller, the Spectator (all Conservative), the Economist (Liberal) and the Daily Herald (Labour), and two local newspapers, the Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal, and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette and the Southampton Times and Hampshire Express. And maybe some other things.

Let the scare begin!

  1. E.g. A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 159. [↩]
  2. Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 238-40; cf. ibid., 49-63. [↩]
  3. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London: Serif, 1997 [1935]), 106-9. [↩]
  4. F. W. Hirst, The Six Panics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1913), 103-18. Actually, long ago I came across a reference to a whole book published on the phantom airship scares at around the same time -- but published in French! I'd be grateful if anyone knows what it is, because I've never been able to find it again. [↩]
  5. Robert E. Bartholomew and George S. Howard, UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), 125-37; Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra, 2000), 61-74. [↩]
  6. Nigel Watson, Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare (South Humberside: self published, 1987). [↩]