The fourth RAF Pageant took place on Saturday, 30 June 1923. The ‘turn of the afternoon’, as in the previous year, was ‘another little Eastern drama, based on actual happenings during the War’.1 Once more the Wottnotts were the enemy, and once more the co-operation of air and ground forces was the theme. The main […]
I recently said that I’ve been meaning to write about the spectacular and dramatic set pieces which usually marked the climax of the RAF Pageants, held at Hendon aerodrome every summer from 1920 to 1937. So here goes! The themes chosen for these set-pieces tell us something about what ideas about airpower the RAF wished
MRS. MARY COUCHMAN, twenty-four-year-old warden in a small Kentish village, sat smoking a cigarette in the wardens’ post. She was resting between warnings. Suddenly the sirens sounded again. She saw her little boy, with two friends, playing some distance away. The cigarette still in her hand, Mrs. Couchman ran out of the post. Bombs began
Nominations for the 2011 Cliopatria Awards are now open! This year, there are some very important changes. The usual categories will still be awarded for the best in history blogging: best group blog, best individual blog, best new blog, best post, best series of posts and best writer. But there are two new categories for
Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the first use of an aeroplane for aerial bombardment. I’ve already written about the longer context of Libya’s history of bombing (to which can be added NATO’s air campaign, which coincidentally enough has just ended), but here’s where it all began, at Ain Zara on 1 November 1911: A
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I have a favour to ask of you. Would you mind please having a look at this and telling me what’s wrong with it? Thank you. To be somewhat less cryptic, it’s an article for peer-review which I am having no luck getting accepted anywhere, and I don’t really know why. I’ve
Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine 1945-1961 (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). Argues that Eisenhower worked to normalise nuclear weapons in both the American arsenal and the American consciousness. This early period of the Cold War, when the bomb took over from the bomber as the threat to
This is the programme for an air display called ‘London Defended’ which was part of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (in Wembley Stadium, in fact, before it became Wembley Stadium). I must admit to having missed this one (and its predecessor in 1924), but it sounds like it was comparable to the longer-lived
In the venerable tradition of lazyblogging, here is a storified version of an exchange of tweets today between myself and @TroveAustralia, concerning an apparently forgotten Australian aviation pioneer, W. T. Carter of Williamstown, formerly a member of the Victorian colonial legislature. In the mid-1890s, Carter dabbled in electric motors (with help from A. U. Alcock,
I’m sure everybody has a favourite story about Sir Kingsley Wood. Mine is the one from when he was Air Minister at the start of the Second World War, and he refused to bomb Germany on the grounds that it would damage private property. As A. J. P. Taylor tells it: Kingsley Wood, secretary for
