Videos

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Catherine Warr, a Yorkshire-based historian, recently posted a video on the British phantom airship panic of 1909 which you can watch on YouTube, or right here:

This is terrific public history: engaging and fun while being informative and accurate. Catherine has dozens more videos on her channel, including a bunch of airminded ones (e.g. British airships; the Welles War of the Worlds panic/'panic'; the York Blitz), so it's well worth having a look.

Catherine cites Airminded as a source for the 1909 panic, along with David Clarke's key 1999 Fortean Studies article (which can currently be found online here); in fact she kindly wrote to thank me for making my research accessible. Which of course I'm very pleased about, as it's one of the reasons why I started Airminded... twenty years ago this July!? Surely that can't be right. But while I check the maths, I'd better start thinking about how to mark the anniversary…

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Sydney Mail, 8 June 1938, 9

A cloud of smoke billows up from a building during a low level bombing attack carried out by biplanes. The First World War? Air control in the Middle East? Fascist bombers over Spain, or Japanese bombers over China? No, it's an air raid carried out by the RAF against Nottingham on 15 May 1938.

Of course it wasn't a real air raid: it was a mock one, something I wrote about recently in the collection edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. The photos above and below were published in the British and Australian press, and I wish I'd known about them earlier because they're great illustrations of the topic and I might have been able to include them in my chapter.

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Victory Through Air Power

A few weeks back I previewed my cohosting of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power for History at the Movies Australia and Aviation Cultures Mk.V. Both the conference and the livetweeting went splendidly (I think!), but I didn't get around to lazyblogging the latter... until now.

The evening began with the half-hour short documentary Flight Plan, made in 1950 by the Australian Department of Civil Aviation, which you can watch here.

[tweet id="1375357664641773573" conversation=false]Conference jokes and airline jokes -- together at last. Yes, this is going to be a good night in...

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Duprée and Ashley, Britannia Must Rule the Air

This stirring scene is the cover for the sheet music for a song published in 1913, Britannia Must Rule the Air, written by Frank Duprée and composed by Charles Ashley. It shows a reasonable (if stubby) approximation of a Zeppelin in the process of being destroyed by gunfire from two aeroplanes, a Farman-type biplane and a monoplane.

The lyrics are a little more subtle:

When wooden walls and straining sails bore Britain's flag afar,
The Nation prospered well in peace and feared no foe in war,
For Britain's might was ev'rywhere and ruled the endless waves,
Proclaiming to the world at large 'we never shall be slaves.'

And when the ironclad replaced the ships that caught the breeze
Britannia still retained her throne up on the charted seas,
For frowning fleets and giant guns outnumbered two to one
The navies of all other lands beneath the sov'reign sun.

And now that ev'ry cloud conceals a lurking bird of prey,
Which threatens our supremacy in peace and war today,
Britainnia must be equal to the peril and prepare
To hold our Empire sacred from these dreadnaughts of the air.

CHORUS

Britannia must rule the air
As still she rules the sea,
To guard this realm beyond compare
And keep her people free.
Britannia, Britannia must like the eagle be;
Britannia, Britannia must rule both air and sea!
Britannia, Britannia must rule both air and sea.1

The message is clear enough: just as Britain's naval superiority has kept it safe from the Napoleonic Wars through the ironclad era to now, so must it have a superiory aerial superiority to safeguard its freedom in the new century. This was exactly the comparison and the message of the Navy League in response to German aerial superiority, as supposedly revealed by the phantom airships supposedly seen flying all over Britain.2
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  1. Frank Duprée and Charles Ashley, Britannia Must Rule the Air (London: Laurence Wright Music Co., 1913). [↩]
  2. Brett Holman, 'The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War', Journal of British Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 99–119 (free). [↩]

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COVID 1944

Since last I posted, COVID-19 has continued its spread: the Guardian is currently reporting 378,000 cases worldwide, 16,500 deaths, and 101,000 recoveries. (I post these figures not so much for the information of anyone reading at the present time, but more as context for future readers.) Like most people, I think, I'm coping: healthy, but anxious. Reading and writing history can be a distraction, but not always. In fact, given my historical line, it's hard not to draw comparisons between the present crisis and the world wars.
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[With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Wilkie.]

It's not that long ago that I was posting about the Australian bushfires; now it's the turn of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic, and it's worldwide. Social media is an essential tool in such times of crisis, but it also can be a misleading one. Here's a fairly trivial example relevant to my own interests.

Kathleen tweeted this on 13 March:

https://twitter.com/SisKathleen/status/1238395121663643648

The Italian airforce gives a big emotional lift to their nation with Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma (let no one sleep)and where lyrics say venceremos(we will overcome)they have their planes dramatically facing and overpowering the single plane (virus) with their National Flag!

As of 16 March, the attached video has been viewed 10.6 million times. And why not? The display is beautiful, the music inspirational, and it fits in with other videos we've all seen of quarantined Italians singing together from their balconies. Unity and culture will defeat the pandemic! Viva Italia!
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Last Friday I was privileged to be at the Airways Museum for the world premiere of Out of the Blue? How Aviation Accidents Shaped Safer Skies:

Centred on accidents in the vicinity of Sydney’s Mascot Aerodrome, this movie outlines developments in Australian aviation safety from the 1920s to the 1970s. It combines original research, interviews, archival footage and graphic simulations of civilian and military accidents. Presented by historian Dr Peter Hobbins and produced by Steven Pam, it features the collections of Melbourne's Airways Museum.

Peter is well known to airminded Australian historians as one of the driving forces behind the first four iterations of the Aviation Cultures series of workshops. He's also a Chief Investigator on ARC Linkage Project Heritage of the Air and until recently an ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney, both of which grants funded production. The film covers a lot of ground in just 18 minutes; it's a novel and accessible way of presenting Peter's academic research into the history of aircraft safety in Australia. The use of flight simulator-style graphics to portray and explain some of Australia's key aircraft accidents (including probably the most famous, the 1931 disappearance of Southern Cloud) and near-accidents (yikes), is especially effective; I'd love to do something similar with Hendon's set-pieces one day...

You can watch Out of the Blue above or on YouTube. Have a look!

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In two weeks from today I'll be leaving Armidale for good, and heading back to Melbourne, my hometown. It's mostly for excellent personal reasons, but in part it's also because of the usual early-career academic story of precarious employment. My colleagues at the University of New England have supported me as much they could, but work is drying up and it's clear that any kind of secure position is, at best, a long way off. In addition, with a faculty restructure and as a casual, access to research support is increasingly limited (unfortunately, I had to give up my KCL fellowship). So, after 5 years it's time to leave.

Not that there's a job waiting for me down south, but there are five or six times as many universities in Melbourne as there are in Armidale, so that must help my chances! In the short term I'll have to readjust to life as an independent historian again. I will continue to research and to write, including as part of the Heritage of the Air project, and attend conferences when I can (starting with the International Society for First World War Studies conference in Melbourne, as it happens). Airminded will likely see more activity than it has in the past few years, too.

I will miss my friends here in Armidale. But there's a lot to look forward to in Melbourne!

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What could be more American than football, cheerleaders, and country music? According to Hank Williams Jr in 1989 [edit: more like 1996 -- thanks, Robert Farley], only football, cheerleaders, country music, and air strikes on US national monuments (which magically transform them into symbols associated with football):


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