...d in a much cheaper (if not quite cheap) paperpack edition. To backtrack a bit, in July 2015 Ashgate, my publisher, was acquired by Taylor & Francis. This caused a bit of angst at the time, not least because some good publishing people were going to lose their jobs, but also because nobody was sure what was going to happen to the various books and series published by Ashgate, now and in the future. The dust has cleared a bit since then. Ashgate se...
...y but a lot louder. The beautifully-polished rear fuselage (and unfortunately only the fuselage remains) of a Southampton I flying boat. These entered production in 1925 and were made by Supermarine, which for most of its life was a flying boat specialist -- despite being largely remembered today for just one land-based interceptor. (See above.) The Beaufort torpedo bomber, which was descended from the Blenheim bomber and from which the Beaufighte...
...f course' it was rejected is that it's pretty clear that my proposal was a bit speculative, a bit thin -- that I didn't quite have the evidence I wanted. And the existence of Beowulf almost renders the whole idea pointless. But still, I do think there's a good circumstantial case to be made that Tolkien was influenced by contemporary ideas about airpower; good enough for a few blog posts anyway! Image source: 'Death of Smaug' by J. R. R. Tolkien....
...ticle in the Aircrew series in Aeroplane magazine: "It was apparently ‘lovely to fly’ – relatively viceless and with easy controls. While not officially aerobatic, the Heyford could be thrown about with some abandon, and was even looped, in public, at the 1935 Hendon RAF Display. A number were fitted with an autopilot (‘George’ enabled ‘pilotless’ Heyfords to trick unsuspecting Gauntlet pilots) – and the pilot could pass control of the Heyford to...
...e not thought of as aircraft at all, or even as airborne in any way. But only a bit: the mystery aeroplanes almost always outnumbered the mystery signals, usually very greatly when there was a scare on (with the exception of the October 1917 scare, which is revealed to be all signals, no aircraft); and when there was a mystery aeroplane scare on there was a rise in mystery signal reports too. So this suggests they are related phenomena, which make...
...G. Grey in The Aeroplane. Interesting that it took until the 1980s to finally debunk them. Rik Shepherd Until I actually bothered to check the dust jacket, I'd assumed the picture had been produced just for the Janes book - I really had no idea that anyone had claimed they were genuine. On the other hand, photos in interwar magazines sometimes to look fairly unconvincing. Interesting that the Time article describes people assuming the pictures gen...
...away from them for some reason, possibly very quickly. If so, 1937 is fairly early for such disillusionment, Griffiths' book indicates that generally such fellow travellers needed the events of 1938 or even March 1939 to push them away from philo-Nazism. In that sense it would be to Campbell's credit. But what troubles me about all this is that there is one lot of sources saying he was 100% fascist and another lot completely ignoring the question...
...was actually illegal for women to enter many Australian pubs until relatively recently? Brett Holman No, I don't think it was ever illegal, just a (near?) universal custom. And they could actually enter pubs, but only one part of it, the saloon bar (a bit pricier but noicer for the ladies). The so-called public bar was the bigger part of the pub, rougher and rowdier and men-only. Seems that this distinction only began to break down in the 1970s. A...
...shells reach the required altitude, and keep firing at that area, preferably with multiple guns, and thereby create a wall of flak for the bombers to fly through. And as for artillery barrages, they too are walls, walls of artillery fire. Because of the spatially linear nature of trench warfare, any bombardment of an opposing section of the front is going to be spread out along a line, and so the continuous pouring of shells along that line creat...
...hat the Me 109 fighter was inferior to British fighters: not just a little bit, but greatly; not just to the Spitfire, but to the Hurricane as well.1 So for example, the Manchester Guardian's air correspondent confidently reported that That Göring's air force has had no single-seat fighter that could compare with the Spitfire or the Hurricane is a fact that has been obvious since the very start of the war in the air against Britain and the replace...
