Here’s a minor curiosity. Many of the leading figures in the RFC/RAF (at least, many of the ones that interest me) had earlier served in West Africa. (They all served in the Boer War too, but that wouldn’t have been uncommon for their cohort.) This is the list: Hugh Trenchard: Southern Nigeria Regiment, 1903-10 Frederick […]
This logically should have gone into the previous post about archives, but I got carried away working out what that air mail poster was about! But I had intended to mention two online archives of British newsreels: British Pathe and Movietone (slogan: “It speaks for itself”). These are great. You can search the descriptions for
As mentioned at Early Modern Notes, it’s Archive Awareness … something … in the UK. Lots of events showcasing different archives and themes. There’s even a nice aviation-related image on their front page (though it’s not obvious what archive it’s from, the RAF Museum perhaps). It’s an advertisement for the first official British air mail
Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay – more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the
‘R101 RIDING AT HER HOME MAST. Set in a frame of typical English countryside beauty, R101, product of modern engineering and cornerstone of Britain’s hopes of commercial air supremacy, rides at her mast at Cardington, in Bedfordshire. This mooring mast was specially built to facilitate the handling of Britain’s largest airships, R100 and R101, which
Yes, I went a bit crazy with the credit card … Hugh Addison. The Battle of London. London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d. [1923]. The Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy attempts to start a revolution in London, aided by a surprise air raid from Germany. But they didn’t count on the RAF’s massive retaliatory response on Berlin … G. Cornwallis-West.
This is a real oddity, and I still can’t wrap my head around it. In 1910, a Romanian named Henri Coandă built and flew the world’s first jet aircraft. Yes, 1910! That’s two whole decades before Frank Whittle. And less than a decade after the Wright brothers!
Barry D. Powers. Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939. London: Croom Helm, 1976. NB. The subtitle is inaccurate; the period covered is really more like 1914-1931! Powers has two objects in mind: firstly, to show that air policy should be ‘seen as a complicated interaction of the factors involved — popular conceptions, press campaigns,
Richard Griffiths. Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. I love this book. So I bought it. A brilliantly readable study of who liked the Nazis and why, including a few pages specifically on ‘the world of aviation’ (137-41). Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael
