Yesterday marked the centenary of the founding of the Royal Australian Air Force on 31 March 1921. I celebrated in the usual way (buying books, talking about myself):[tweet id=”1377043532775493636″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044249552678913″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044649374715908″ conversation=false]But I also decided to use the occasion to talk about something that’s missing from the usual RAAF origin story, and that’s […]
Back in the depths of last winter (and the great Melbourne pandemic lockdown of 2020) I had great fun as the co-host for the Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus) livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing it again, this time along with James Kightly and Daniel
The Aviation Cultures Mk.V online conference is just a week away! A lot of activity is going on behind the scenes, but all you need to know is that the extended program (including a list of presenters and presentations) is here, and that you can buy tickets (25 AUD, or 10 AUD unwaged/student/COVID-affected) from here.
The previous post ended with this photo, and another very similar one, which Getty Images dates to 17 October 1917 with the caption ‘Moses Shackman, centre, with members of the Jewish East End Shelter Corps. Their hats are labelled in Yiddish and English’: As I noted, the hatbands actually say (in English, at least), ‘RAID
Recently, Alexandra Churchill tweeted a photo of an air raid shelter in London in 1917: She’s absolutely right, and I’ll eventually come back to this, sort of; but Rob Langham made a slightly different point which I want to follow up first: That’s an incredible photo for many reasons. @IanCastleRaids @ZeppRaider and @StowAero will likely
Yesterday @TroveUFOBot found an obviously satirical and wholly invented account of a mystery airship seen at Dobroyd in Sydney in 1910. This is interesting enough in itself, but what got me searching was the inspiration for the article: Everywhere just now the air is full of mystery — of airship mystery. This is connected not
Truth was a British political newspaper first published in 1877, founded by Henry Labouchère, a sometime Liberal MP. By the 1930s it was infamous as a scurrilous and often libellous pro-appeasement and often anti-semitic rag; in the Edwardian period it was still Liberal in inclination. At the end of May 1909 it issued no. 1581
DUE DATE: FRIDAY 15 JANUARY 2021 Aviation Cultures Mk.V is an online conference for researchers, practitioners and curators to come together to share their knowledge of and ideas about aviation, and its place in history and society. The conference will take place online between 25 and 28 March 2021 and will align with the centenaries
From Alan Allport’s excellent new book, Britain at Bay 1938-1941, a couple of sentences about the IRA’s 1939 bombing campaign which were guaranteed to catch my attention as imaginary air raids: Some witnesses to the Broadgate bombing interviewed by the police were convinced that they had seen aircraft in the sky moments before the explosion,
The first air raid on Britain during the Second World War is usually held to have taken place on 16 October 1939, when a dozen Ju 88s struck at the Royal Navy base at Rosyth, on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth. But there was in fact an earlier attack, on 27 September,
