Rumours

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I hadn't come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and 'Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time'. Including this:

At the end of the Meeting there was a reference to a scare which had started through a red balloon floating about in the Eastern Counties. This balloon had been sent up for meteorological purposes, but it had apparently given rise to a scare that gas balloons were being let loose by the Germans. The London Passenger Transport Board had told their employees to be ready to put on their gas-masks!

It seems they weren't particularly concerned by this incident, despite what it might have said about the fragility of morale. The scare wasn't kept secret; the Manchester Guardian had already reported it that morning (p. 7), with some extra details:

"ENEMY GAS"
Harmless Balloons Start Rumours

Extraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas.

At King's Lynn (Norfolk) these stories led to the police issuing the following statement:--

The enemy has dropped balloon toys which may contain gas, highly inflammable, and explode on being touched or handled by lines attached. Police and observer corps should be informed if any are found.

The balloons are used for testing atmospheric conditions and occasionally they sink to the ground without bursting. They are harmless except that they contain hydrogen, and are therefore likely to explode if brought into contact with a naked flame.

So the story is that British meteorologists launched some weather balloons which came down in the eastern parts of England and Scotland. Passers-by found them, thought them suspicious, and reported them to authorities, which in turn made public statements that they were dangerous German weapons -- either incendiary devices or actual poison gas bombs. In more normal times, it's unlikely that a stray weather balloon would be interpreted as something dangerous, just something curious. Now, with the war strangely calm and the expected bombers nowhere to be seen, it's more understandable that people would be jittery and overreact to mundane (if rare) sights (it had happened before and would happen again). And it certainly had to be considered that the Germans might try to use some sort of secret weapon against Britain. But the fact that the scare seems to have happened simultaneously in widely separated places -- London, Norfolk, Scotland -- suggests that there was something else going on too. Was the Met Office trying out a new balloon design? Perhaps it was the red colour mentioned in the War Cabinet discussion which made the balloons look especially sinister? Anyway, it's another scare to add to my list.

PS I think I should get credit for not mentioning Nena. Until now.

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Here's an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough -- it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car:

Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.1

A 'special correspondent' wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples -- two 'London ladies' staying at 'the Hut' near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at 'the Cottage' also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods' bedroom was then illuminated by the car's headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.

But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):

Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.2

This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town's medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King's Lynn.3
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  1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10. [↩]

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THE AIRSHIP IN NORFOLK. SUGGESTED SOLUTION OF THE MYSTERY / Norfolk News, 22 May 1909, p. 13

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 carries accounts (p. 13) from three witnesses who independently saw the airship on Wednesday night. The first is a 'well-known gentleman' (unfortunately unnamed) from Wroxham, who had interrupted his motorcycle journey at 11.30pm to look at his headlight, which had gone out. He was dazzled by a 'flashlight' shone on him from above. This lasted about half a minute; he could not see the source of the light nor did he hear anything. Nonetheless 'That it was an airship he has no doubt whatever'. The second witness is Mrs. Turner, of 1 Traverse-street, Catton. Coming home from the theatre at about 11.30pm, 'a flash of light came on me all of a sudden and made the street look like day'. She heard a 'noise like the whizzing of wheels'. It was then that she looked up, seeing 'a big star of light in front and a big searchlight behind'. She did not see the body of the airship, but in her opinion it was flying so low that it would have clipped the top of a nearby school, had it been directly overhead. Two young people nearby also saw it (one said 'What's that?'). The third witness is a 21 year from Tharston named Chatten, assistant to J. A. Lammas, a local grocer and draper. He was cycling home when he was dazzled by a light from above: 'The trees and hedges were lit up brilliantly'. Unlike the other two witnesses, he did see something besides the light, a shape outlined against the night sky:

[...] I saw a long cigar-shaped object, a little thicker at the blunt end than a cigar, come three or four hundred feet above me. It was soaring upwards, the tapering end going foremost, and was moving rapidly in the direction of Norwich. On the under side was what I should call an iron bar, supporting a sort of framework, a yellow light shining at each end. I could not see any men upon the framework, not could I hear any buzzing sound such as a motor would cause [...]

The Norfolk News places great stress on the independence of these witnesses:

The Catton observer, who gives her name and address, would not be in the least degree likely to know the Wroxham observer, who bears a well-known name, and who has probably never been in Traverse Street or Waterlook Road in his life.

So, since they move in very different circles -- the gentleman motorcyclist is clearly well-to-do, Mrs. Turner is probably working class -- there's no likelihood of collusion. Which is important, because there is a striking similarity between their accounts: in particular, a dazzling flash from above, which is what drew their attention to the 'airship' in the first place. Although as a leading article on the same page points out, given that it's so bright it's surprising that more people didn't see it.
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PHANTOM AIRSHIP. PROBABLE SOLUTION OF THE MYSTERY / Standard, 21 May 1909, 21

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 wife and two passengers were driving from Tregarog late on Sunday night when they saw an airship.

"I can believe my own eyes and ears. It was about eight miles from Monmouth when I first saw it. It came from the direction of Raglan, and seemed to go towards Chepstow. It then turned right round and came back towards Raglan and over the mountain. I continued to drive slowly on, and watched it for about half an hour. I was driving eight or ten miles an hour, but the airship seemed to go faster than that. I could see the cigar shape quite distinctly, and noticed the perfect control the occupants had over the airship."

The other report is sketchy: it seems that 'for several nights people living in Small Heath, a suburb of Birmingham, have seen what is stated to be an airship passing over the district'. Interestingly, it is described as cigar-shaped although no lights were seen. Local opinion is that it belongs to 'a local inventor [...] making trial trips'.
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MYSTERY OF THE SKY. AIRSHIP SEEN AT CARDIFF TO-DAY / Globe, 19 May 1909, 4

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 were willing to have their names included in this 'official' statement by signalman Robert Westlake:

At 1.15 this morning (19 May), while attending to my duty signalling trains at the King's Junction, Queen Alexandra Dock, I was startled by a weird object flying in the air. In appearance it represented a boat of cigar shape, making a whizzing noise. It was lit up by two lights, which could be plainly seen. It was travelling at a great rate, and was elevated at a distance of half a mile, making for the eastward. There were many men working at the time loading the s.s. Arndale, and the airship was seen by most of them. Messrs. W. Morrison (pointsman), C. Harwood (traffic foreman), W. John, C. Hayman, J. Rogers, and C. Bray (coal tippers), and the third mate of the Arndale all testified to the facts recorded above.

The airship came from the direction of Newport, took a curve over the docks, and passed over the Channel towards Weston, being clearly in view for a minute or two. It could, it is stated, have been seen longer, but that the lights on board were suddenly extinguished.

Other workmen confirmed Westlake's account. One said that 'The night was clear, though there was no moon, and the airship could be distinctly seen, and the whizzing of its motor was heard by us all'.

The second story is not from Britain at all, but from Norway. The Norwegian Shipping Gazette has published an account by Captain Egenes of the steamer St. Olaf. On the night of 14 May, in the eastern part of the North Sea (i.e. not close to Britain), 'an airship, sailing at low altitude, approached his vessel and directed a searchlight upon the decks'. It then moved off and did the same to another, unnamed steamer. The Shipping Gazette suggests that the airship is carried by day on board one of the German warships conducting maneuvers in the North Sea.

So yesterday's trend of sightings outside the original focus in East Anglia has continued. Both of these new incidents seem very well attested; both are widely separated geographically (although, of course, widely separated in time, too). A searchlight shone onto a ship's deck seems fairly unambiguous; the number of witnesses at Cardiff is impressive. Do Norwegian sea captains worry about the Zeppelin menace? Do Welsh dock workers often have collective delusions?
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The Standard again has an article (p. 8) on the 'mysterious airship', though this time the information is taken from today's Daily Express. The Berlin correspondent of that paper has been making inquiries there, and reports that

German expert opinion is unanimous in believing that the airship ascends from some German warship in the North Sea, upon which it lands again after each of its flights.

The German navy is, as it happens, conducting exercises in the North Sea, and relatively small airships of the Gross or Parseval types could possibly be inflated and launched from a warship. But although the German navy is known to have ordered these smaller airships, it's unclear whether it actually has any yet.

The Norfolk News has a report on the activity of the phantom airship, or as the headline on page 15 has it, the 'phanton airship'. Disappointingly, although the Norfolk News is bang in the middle of scareship territory, it seems to be relying on the reports of London newspapers (again, the Daily Express). Accounts from three eyewitnesses are given. The first is the brother-in-law of Herbert Neaverson, a 'prominent Peterborough tradesman', who has made a statement to the War Office in London. He heard 'a swishing sound overhead and the throbbing of a motor' early in the morning at his home in Peakirk. He looked up and saw a 'peculiar light' coming from the direction of the sea. At Kingscliff, Great Clacton, one Mr Egerton Free saw 'an oblong machine hovering quite near my home' at dusk, ten days ago. It was 'stationary' for a few minutes and then disappeared in the direction of Frinton. Finally, Miss H. M. Bonville of Southend-on-Sea saw the 'fly by night' last Sunday, at about 11.20pm. Her description is similar to that of Free: it was 'a large, black object, oblong in shape'. Initially stationary, it suddenly rose in the air and headed in the direction of London, briefly showing 'a couple of very brilliant lights'.

The Norfolk News also adds that

A search for the airship's home is being undertaken by motorists and others in all parts of East Anglia.

If the warship theory is correct, then they won't find anything, of course. But this amateur sleuthing connects the phantom airship scare with the spy mania also prevalent at this time. Indeed, The Times carries several letters relating to the Legion of Frontiersmen, an unofficial patriotic organisation which at times indulges in the sport of spyhunting. More intriguingly, immediately following its 'mysterious airship' article, the Standard has a report of 'several suspicious movements of strangers' near an Admiralty telegraph station at Humberstone, near Grimsby (and so also on the east coast), leading to 'elaborate precautions'.

One of the staff of the station, it is stated [by a correspondent], was recently attacked and rendered unconscious by two men who sprang on him from behind and afterwards escaped [...] locally there appears to be the impression that the outrage was the work of foreign spies bent on obtaining an entrance to the room where the code-book is kept.

The current success of Major Guy du Maurier's play An Englishman's Home, about an invasion of England by 'Nearland', probably doesn't do much to sooth fears. Today's Southampton Times and Hampshire Express has a puff piece (p. 9) about its upcoming Southampton run ('It should be seen by all -- men and women -- not only for the great and valuable lesson it teaches, but also because it is a powerful, real, and interesting play'): on the first night's performance recruiting officers will be present for the Territorial Army. The Norfolk News also mentions (p. 8) the play: a speaker at a Norwich meeting of the Peace Society objecting to the military's use of 'every means to entrap the young fellows of our country' notes that:

Even whilst we are at this meeting a play is being introduced at our local theatre, the object of which is to show by a very much overdrawn production how needful it is to be prepared against an enemy that does not exist.

On the other hand, the Globe relates (p. 2) an amusing anecdote given by Major Baden Baden-Powell (brother of B-P, and an expert in military ballooning, as it happens) at the annual dinner of the Iron and Steel Institute. Baden-Powell referred to the 'stories of certain nations being ready to invade these shores, how they had plans laid down, and spies swarming in this country watching details'. He himself asked an officer from a 'certain army' [i.e. Germany's] whether this was true:

The officer told him that that was so, and that they had details of the Eastern counties, every village was marked, the principal landowners and officials were known, and even the postmasters of the villages were recorded. "How did you get it?" he asked, and the officer replied, "We spent 10s. 6d. and bought a Kelly's County Directory" (loud laughter). So much for spies (hear, hear, and laughter).

This shows that not everyone bought into the spy scare. But that the anecdote was worthy of telling and got such a big reaction also suggests that there were plenty who did.

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Here's an explanation for phantom airships which I haven't come across before: whales!

The way in which rumours start and grow is shown by the following incident recorded by the Daily Telegraph correspondent at Harwich:—

"It was rumoured in Harwich this evening that a Zeppelin had been seen flying on the North Sea to-day, surrounded by British destroyers. The story was brought into this port by members of the crew of the Great Eastern Railway Company's steamer Colchester, which arrived late in the afternoon from Rotterdam. On enquiry I have ascertained that when within twenty-five miles of Harwich the crew of the Colchester saw a large object of a yellowish tint afloat on the water, with two destroyers near by. The weather was hazy, and it was difficult at a distance to determine precisely what the object was. One of the destroyers fired at it; the other steamed away. The true explanation of the incident is now stated in naval circles to be that the supposed Zeppelin was merely a dead whale, and that the carcase was fired at with the object of sinking it.
"'Did it look like a whale?' I asked a member of the steamer's crew.
"'Oh, yes, it might have been,' he answered."

Source: Flight, 23 October 1914, 1065 (link).

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Last month I touched on the Hidden Hand, an alleged German conspiracy during the First World War, supposedly undermining the British war effort from within. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) my sources don't include some of the more extreme publications pushing this conspiracy theory, but I have looked at the Daily Mail, which has published the occasional intemperate article over the years. Here are some examples of Germanophobic scaremongering from the summer of 1917.

On 13 June 1917, London was hit by the worst air raid of the war. 162 people were killed and 432 wounded when a handful of Gotha bombers attacked the city in broad daylight. There was no warning and little sign of any air defences, which was a bit of a shock given that London's first air raid took place more than two years earlier. Naturally people were angry, and looked for somebody to blame. On 21 June, the City of London's Common Council met (following a deputation to the Home Secretary) to discuss what should be done in response, or rather what they should request the government to do in response. One idea was to give warnings to the public when enemy aircraft approached London, so that they could take cover. Another was to intensively bomb German cities in reprisal. But the proposal to which the Daily Mail devoted the most space was that enemy aliens should be interned.

Cuthbert Wilkinson, one of the councillors, seemed to have the most to say. He brandished a letter before his peers, the contents of which would 'simply astonish you all' if he were to read them out; the government had been informed but was unable to act because of 'the difficulty of absolute substantiation'. But

There are dozens and dozens of cases of enemy aliens working, and no doubt plotting, among us. If we could only get one out of every dozen it would be something, but apparently we can't! And they laugh at us!

For example, he mentioned a large London hotel, which

was managed and run by men who once were Germans and now are British. It is frequented by a large number of soldiers returning from the front. Conversation is open and unrestricted here -- and you may be sure that the ears of the enemy alien are not closed!1

Just what the connection between enemy aliens and air raids was is not actually made clear, though a leading article in the same edition said something about 'the unrequited onslaught of the Huns upon the poor bodies of the little London children'. The Daily Mail thought the call for internment was 'quite in accord with the ancient spirit of the City', so often 'quicker to express the common sense of the people that their elected representatives in the House of Commons'.2
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  1. Daily Mail, 22 June 1917, p. 3. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 2. This was a reference to an incident in 1598 when Elizabeth I ejected German merchants from the London, at the Council's instigation. [↩]

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In contrast to the King's message to the RAF, Flight's reaction to the end of the war, in the same issue of 14 November 1918, seems rather grumpy. It's true that the editorial section is rounded off, on p. 1274 (source), by a short section which expresses a certain amount of glee at the news of the Armistice:

But the effect of the sudden end is too stunning for us to think coherently of anything but the one great glorious fact -- the WAR HAS ENDED.

But it's mostly preceded by a series of complaints and warnings to Lloyd George's coalition government, telling them what the country expects of them. (I'm not sure that an aviation trade magazine was the first place senior politicians turned to in order to take the pulse of the nation, but I guess if you've got a soapbox, you may as well use it!)

The main concern, on p. 1272 (source), was the nature of the forthcoming peace settlement.

We are in a state now of suspended hostilities -- not of final peace. True, we have imposed such terms on the enemy that render it utterly impossible for him to resume the War, but we must in nowise lose sight of the fact that the real position is this: The soldiers have done their part in reducing the enemy to a state of impotency in which he is prepared to be told what we will have him to do and to do it, but now comes the turn of the politicians and the diplomatists, who have it in their power to undo all that our arms have secured for us.

I've added the emphasis there, as it sets the tone for the rest of the piece: clearly there's little trust given to Britain's leaders. But what exactly does Flight want them to do? The leader continues:

Let it be said at once that we do not for a moment suppose that there is any likelihood of the extreme happening, but we are by no means so certain that the civilian representatives who will draw up the final terms are as determined to punish Germany to the utmost for her crimes as the country would have them.

OK, so maybe Flight did know the nation's mind, after all! More specifically, the question was: who is going to pay for the war? (A total cost, for all belligerents, is given as £60 billion.)
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Venus

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer's field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick's analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I'm aware of David Hufford's work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I've heard much about. Hufford's experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.1 According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick's suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire -- for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops -- and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand -- for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer's ill-tempered rejection of a workman's offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there's no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let's look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don't think we can make much at all.
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  1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4. [↩]