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A long time ago I wrote about the idea that the advance of technology had annihilated Britain's traditional maritime defences. This claim was famously -- supposedly -- made by Lord Northcliffe, founder and owner of the Daily Mail, after seeing Alberto Santos-Dumont fly in France in 1906: 'England is no longer an island'.1 It's so apposite that Alfred Gollin used it as the title of a book and an article about Edwardian aviation politics.2 As I showed, the same sentiment long predated the 20th century and the coming of flight: I found that it could be traced to as early as 1845, when Lord Palmerston, a former foreign secretary, supposed that

the Channel is no longer a barrier. Steam navigation has rendered that which was before impassable by a military force nothing more than a river passable by a steam bridge. France has steamers capable of transporting 30,000 men, and she has harbours, inacessible to any attack, in which these steamers may collect, and around which, on the land side, large bodies of men are constantly quartered. These harbours are directly opposite to our coast, and within a few hours' voyage of the different landing-places on the coast of England.3

Northcliffe's statement, which was made privately to his editor, is surprisingly hard to trace back to a primary source; I don't think I've ever seen one cited. 'England is no longer an island' doesn't appear in the Daily Mail itself, for example, before 1911, and even then it's not even attributed to him, or anyone other than 'When Blériot flew the Channel it was said'.4 The earliest I can find the phrase associated with Northcliffe in the major historical press archives is in 1940:

Our Channel is our Maginot Line, but since Bleriot flew across thirty years ago, Lord Northcliffe was right when he said: 'England is no longer an island.'5

And there's not much after that either.
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  1. Quoted in Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902–1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 193. [↩]
  2. Ibid; Alfred Gollin, 'England is no longer an island: the phantom airship scare of 1909', Albion 13, no. 1 (1981): 43–57, doi:10.2307/4049113. [↩]
  3. HC Deb 30 July 1845 vol 82 c1224. I originally found the first part of the quote in I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3749 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20. [↩]
  4. Daily Mail (London), 28 July 1911, 4. [↩]
  5. Cornishman (Penzance), 4 July 1940, 4. [↩]

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Popular Mechanics, October 1922

John Ptak asks of this cover from the October 1922 issue Popular Mechanics: 'why?' It's a good question. The accompanying article doesn't really help:

Consider yourself aboard a giant airplane whose whirring propellers rapidly drive from view faint objects on the earth far below. As towns and hamlets recede in the distance you realize that you are fast approaching the one that is your destination, for the captain is giving orders to make ready for the discharge of passengers at one of the intermediate points along the route of the great air liner. The crew unfold from the capacious hold a small air boat, and lower it dangling from the huge hull by its special tackle. You and several fellow passengers climb down into the seats behind the pilot and buckle yourselves in as the big ship slows its engines to enable the little wings to catch the air. With a quick movement of a lever your steersman unleashes the small craft, which begins its motorless flight and gracefully glides downward to a safe landing, while the mother plane speeds out of sight.

It turns out that this was an idea which cropped up repeatedly in the first few decades of flight. But such 'aerial trains' never quite came to commercial fruition. Which suggests that yes, you could indeed consider yourself leaving an airliner in mid-air; but you probably wouldn't want to.
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[Cross-posted at Airplay.]

Australia is a long way from anywhere, even from itself. It nearly always takes a long time to get to where you want to go. Historian Geoffrey Blainey famously popularised the idea that this remoteness has shaped Australian history and culture in the title of his 1966 book, The Tyranny of Distance. The longing of European Australians, especially, for closer connections to Europe and America found an expression in an interest in technological solutions, as in a speech given by J. L. Rentoul in 1918:

We are now living in a day when fast ocean greyhounds have broken the tyranny of distance; when the wireless has annihilated space.

A couple of years later, Rentoul might have mentioned the aeroplane: the first flight from England to Australia was completed by Keith and Ross Smith in their Vickers Vimy in December 1919. They took 28 days in total, which admittedly may not seem impressive to Australians today, when we can get to London in under 24 hours. But when compared with 45 days by steamship (Rentoul's 'fast ocean greyhounds'), that was a huge leap forward. And it was only the start. In the 1920s and 1930s, the England-Australia route became the ultimate venture for pioneers who wanted to test themselves and their machines against one of the longest air routes in the world: Alan Cobham, Bert Hinkler, Amy Johnson. In 1938, you could board a Qantas airliner in Sydney and be in England 10 days later; another fifteen years on, that was down to 3.5 days. The introduction of jets in 1965 brought the travel time down even further.
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As of the previous post, 1,000,695 is the number of words I've written on Airminded (including 1518 posts and 29 pages, but excluding 2342 comments) since the first post back in July 2005. It sounds like a lot, but it's only 6150 words per month. Okay, that still sounds like a lot!

On to the next million...

See also: July 2008 (250,664), July 2010 (395,000); July 2015 (873,000).

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Big Ben

As part of a discussion about the worldwide syncronisation of time, Yuval Noah Harari writes:

During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour -- the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs. This information offered invaluable help to the Luftwaffe. When the British Secret Service discovered this, they replaced the live broadcast with a set recording of the famous clock.1

I'd never heard this story before. Harari doesn't provide any sources. Is it true?
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  1. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015), 354. [↩]

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Pearson's, April 1901, 475

It is sometimes1 claimed that ballooning was an event at the 1900 Paris Olympics. I don't think it can have been. But it's genuinely a bit murky, because this was only the second modern Olympics and the planning process evidently was not as formalised as it later became. The Olympics were held that year as a minor part of the Exposition Universelle running from April to November 1900, and a number of Exposition events were only retrospectively judged to have been Olympic events too (which is how cricket gets to be an Olympic sport).
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  1. Most notably, at a trivia event at the otherwise brilliant Aviation Cultures Mk IV conference, and no, I'm definitely not bitter for being judged wrong, why would you even think that. [↩]

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George D. Warren, 18 November 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 416 is a report from Lieutenant Commander George D. Warren RANR, commanding officer, HMAS Coogee, a civilian coastal steamship requistioned by the Navy for use as a minesweeper. Warren is reporting on the results of his investigation of an aeroplane seen from a naval lookout on the northern end of King Island, a large island in Bass Strait, between Victoria and Tasmania. This was seen back on 1 November, first one (NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 426):

Aeroplane sighted 3 50pm to day Victorian time steering south easterly direction skying [sic] very low distance away unc[e]rtain about 7 miles fairly strong wind blowing.

A second report gives a different time (NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 424):

aeroplane sighted 4.50 p.m. north east flying south east lost in clouds 4.58 p.m.

In fact this was originally interpreted as a second aeroplane, but the near-identical descriptions combined with the difference of an hour exactly suggests that this confusion resulted from the new institution of daylight savings time, in force on this date in Tasmana, to which King Island belongs, but not in Victoria, for some reason used as the time reference in the first report.
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The lost Gotha of New Farm Park is lost in two senses. Firstly, because I'm fairly sure that it no longer exists. Secondly, because I'm quite sure that it never existed.

Chris O'Regan pointed out on Twitter that 'there used to be a captured German plane in New Farm Park' in Brisbane. This was easy to confirm in Trove; it was offered to Brisbane as a war trophy in 1921:

The Brisbane City Council yesterday agreed to accept a captured German aeroplane offered by the Australian War Museum. Authority was given for the erection of a shelter at a cost of £50, in New Farm Park, on a site to be fixed by the chairman of the Parks Committee and the superintendent of parks.1

But the shelter evidently didn't offer much protection from the elements, because by March 1930 the aeroplane was in poor condition and 'badly in need of reconditioning':

The chairman (Alderman E. Lanham) stated that no financial provision had been made for the work, and while there was some sentiment attached to the capture of the machine it was not a proposal upon which the council was prepared to spend a big sum at present. The committee had agreed to defer the question of repairs until an inspection had been made by the parks superintendent (Mr. H. Moore) and himself.2

The aeroplane was offered to the Queensland Museum -- home to another, unique, war trophy, A7V Mephisto -- which unfortunately had 'no accomodation' for the machine.3 Dismantling began the following January, at which point the Queensland branch of the Australian Flying Corps Association offered to maintain it. The council agreed, but on condition that it was moved elsewhere.4 In June, it was announced that the association had 'offered to recondition the machine and place it in a conspicuous position on the Archerfield Aerodrome', then Brisbane's major (and very new) airport.5 In May 1932 it was said to be 'at present being reconditioned by the [Queensland] Aero Club' -- so not the Australian Flying Corps Association -- 'preparatory to its being mounted at Archerfield aerodrome'.6 I can't find any trace of the aeroplane after that. I suspect it was never placed into any 'conspicuous position' but instead the reconditioning stretched out until it was eventually scrapped, perhaps in 1939 when the RAAF moved in.
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  1. Telegraph (Brisbane), 21 December 1921, 8. [↩]
  2. Brisbane Courier, 26 March 1930, 14. [↩]
  3. Brisbane Courier, 1 October 1930, 14. [↩]
  4. Telegraph (Brisbane), 21 January 1931, 8. [↩]
  5. Telegraph (Brisbane), 6 June 1931, 9. [↩]
  6. Brisbane Courier, 26 May 1932, 14. [↩]

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My article, 'The militarisation of aerial theatre: air displays and airmindedness in Britain and Australia between the World Wars', is available on Contempory British History's website. It seems like only yesterday that I uploaded the self-archived version -- in fact it was only 5 weeks ago! While the formal and final version of the article won't be available until 2020, thanks to the modern marvel of the internet it's as good as published; the only difference is that this version lacks the volume information and page numbers (referring to a print edition which fewer and fewer people will ever read). For reference, here's the abstract again:

Aerial theatre, the use of aviation spectacle to project images of future warfare, national power and technological prowess, was a key method for creating an airminded public in the early 20th century. The most significant and influential form of aerial theatre in interwar Britain was the Royal Air Force (RAF) Display at Hendon, in which military aircraft put on impressive flying performances before large crowds, including an elaborate set-piece acting out a battle scenario with an imaginary enemy. Hendon was emulated by other air displays in Britain and in Australia, even civilian ones. Indeed, the inability of the much smaller Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) to regularly project spectacle on the scale of Hendon across a much larger nation created a gap which civilian aviation organisations then tried to fill. Hendon thus helped to propagate a militarised civilian aerial theatre, and hence airmindedness, in both Britain and Australia.

I presented the initial version of this research at a symposium at Flinders University in honour of Eric Richards, the eminent historian of migration. Sadly, he passed away last week. I only met him briefly, but I know from the responses of his former colleagues and students that he will be missed. Vale.

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The first real air raid on Australia was against Darwin on 19 February 1942. I don't know when the first fake air raid on Australia was, but there was one against Melbourne on 14 October 1929:

An aerial attack was made on Melbourne to-day by a group of seagull [sic] machines, which had been sent up from the aircraft carrier, Albatross. Overcoming opposition from a fleet of land 'planes, the raiders dropped several bombs, scoring vital hits, according to the attackers. The attack was part of air force exercises. The Albatross was outside the Heads, when the Seagull machines were depatched [sic], and three of these machines managed to reach the city, in spite of the efforts of 'planes from Point Cook aerodrome.1

A more detailed (but harder to read) account reveals that that Albatross, representing a 'hostile seaplane carrier' outside Port Phillip Heads, launched a force of six Supermarine Seagulls and one Wackett Widgeon, which was sighted by a defending Supermarine Southampton off Brighton. The attackers were intercepted by aircraft from Point Cook, but

three broke through and flew over Melbourne from the direction of Port Melbourne, circling over Victoria Barracks and turning back to sea from a point presumably above Princes Bridge.2

A later newspaper report suggested that 'Under war conditions, the city would have suffered many casualties'.3 The official result of the exercise does not seem to have been published in the press, but it seems like it might have been fudged in favour of the defenders:

Bringing 1929 to a close, Albatross took part in a combined RAN-RAAF exercise in Port Phillip Bay in October. The point of this exercise was to test the carrier in making an air raid, along with assessing the efficiency of RAAF cooperation with Navy in repelling a seaborne air attack. According to reports on the exercise, the defence against the carrier attack was only successful because scouting Southamptons set off from Point Cook, without orders, some time before warning was actually received of approaching enemy aircraft. In fact, as noted by the CO of No. 1 FTS, aerial patrols had failed to sight the approaching naval force. Strikes had then been mounted against these ships off Frankston, involving Moths (representing single-seat fighters) and Wapitis. One RAAF pilot whose part in the scheme entailed simply flying over the Melbourne dock area probably summed up the feelings of many of those involved when he noted in his log-book that the exercise was 'A farce—nothing done or to see'.4.

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  1. Townsville Daily Bulletin, 16 October 1929, 4. [↩]
  2. Herald (Melbourne), 14 October 1929, 1. [↩]
  3. The Call (Perth), 25 October 1929, 1. [↩]
  4. C. D. Coulthard-Clark, The Third Brother: the Royal Australian Air Force 1921-39 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 218. [↩]