On Remembrance Day, 11 November 2016, I was privileged to be part of a joint seminar with Dr Richard Scully and Dr Nathan Wise, highlighting the teaching and research we do around the topic of the First World War (Richard is the author of British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914, Nathan of […]
People are nice. At the AHA today, I bumped into Bart Ziino, who gave me a present: the sheet music for a 1939 ballad called ‘Lords Of The Air’. I’d not heard of it before, though I’ve probably heard it before as it was played in several episodes of Dad’s Army. You can listen to
On Friday, 1 April 2016, I gave my second Humanities Research Seminar (again introduced by Nathan Wise) at the University of New England, under the title of ‘Constructing the enemy within: rumours of secret German forts and aerodromes in Britain, August-October 1914’. It was based on a (hopefully) forthcoming article, which in turn is based
Last Friday, 3 October 2014, I gave the Humanities Research Seminar at the University of New England on the topic of ‘Staging the aerial theatre: Britishness and airmindedness in the 20th century’ (kindly introduced by Nathan Wise), in which I expanded upon my ideas for a research project involving aviation spectacle. You can watch the
Airminded was down for a couple of days recently, and it now has a new look. The reason for this is that it was hacked, and nuking the entire site from orbit was the only way to be sure. To be more specific, I noticed last week that Google searches for Airminded were throwing up
Dr Beachcombing of Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog kindly dropped me a line to alert me to his post about Public Service Broadcasting, a British music duo who draw on old propaganda and information films for inspiration and samples. A number of these are from the Second World War period, including ‘Spitfire’, ‘London Can Take It’,
10 April 1940 has remained in history as “the great panic day”. The reason for this designation is the panic that spread through the population of Oslo, after the rumors of the British bombing of the capital had spread. Here you can see how the Oslo people rush out of town on foot, on bicycles,
I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses: Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes. In order to
My main interest in this series about the RAF Displays at Hendon has been in the set pieces with which they ended. But as this is the last post it’s worth looking a bit at the organisation of the Display itself. Flight had some useful articles for this in its preview of the 15th Display,
The week before the 1932 RAF Display, Flight‘s editor commented on the rationale behind the theme chosen for the finale: Sometimes the story composed for the set piece has been framed with some object, such as to obviate the criticisms of pacifists. Thus at one Display the enemy were called Pirates, so that nobody could
