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London defended. A stirring torchlight and searchlight spectacle

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 Hendon pageant. Here's the description from Wikipedia, which is based partly on the above programme (original research much?):

From May 9 to June 1, 1925 No. 32 Squadron RAF flew an air display six nights a week entitled "London Defended" Similar to the display they had done the previous year when the aircraft were painted black it consisted of a night time air display over the Wembley Exhibition flying RAF Sopwith Snipes which were painted red for the display and fitted with white lights on the wings tail and fueselage. The display involved firing blank ammunition into the stadium crowds and dropping pyrotechnics from the aeroplanes to simulate shrapnel from guns on the ground, Explosions on the ground also produced the effect of bombs being dropped into the stadium by the Aeroplanes. One of the Pilots in the display was Flying officer C. W. A. Scott who later became famous for breaking three England Australia solo flight records and winning the MacRobertson Air Race with co-pilot Tom Campbell Black in 1934.

Firing blanks into the crowds -- those were the days!
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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, who has been credited with inventing an ancestor of the hovercraft) and propellors (later patenting one in Britain), and seems in 1894 to have successfully demonstrated a flying model, a small drum-shaped object with two propellors at each end. Long after his death it was claimed that he had actually built and flown an aeroplane at Maidstone, a western suburb of Melbourne, again in the mid-1890s, but it's hard to believe this could have escaped the attention of the press (especially given his evident interest in self-promotion).
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Sir Kingsley Wood and a Blenheim Mk I

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 air, met a proposal to set fire to German forests with the agonized cry: 'Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next.'1

It's a great anecdote which perfectly sums up the dithering nature of Chamberlain's government during the Bore War, unable or unwilling to fight a total war (it took Churchill to do that), and it's understandable why it appears in so many books and websites. Piers Brendon includes it in a discussion of the weak men Chamberlain surrounded himself with; Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott in The Appeasers.2 And fair enough; Wood is one of Cato's Guilty Men, after all. The only problem is that it's not clear if it's actually true; or, even if it is true and Wood did say it, whether it accurately reflects British bombing policy before May 1940.
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  1. A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]), 459. [↩]
  2. Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 522; Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appeasers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), 319. [↩]

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Frank McDonough, ed. The Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). Choc-a-block: twenty-nine essays on the diplomacy of the interwar period (with a heavy emphasis on Europe, though I don't have a problem with that myself), from pretty much all the experts.

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VOTES FOR WOMEN

A common complaint1 about this blog is that it doesn't feature nearly enough pictures of airships. So here's one, a 27-metre long non-rigid which belonged to Henry Spencer, scion of a remarkably airminded family (sixteen aeronauts across four generations). Indeed, he built it with his brothers. The photograph was taken on 16 February 1909 and apparently shows the first ever powered flight from Hendon aerodrome, though neither Spencer nor his airship are mentioned in David Oliver's Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1994).

But much more interesting than the airship itself, it must be said, is what it was used for. The clue is the slogan emblazoned on the side of the envelope: 'VOTES FOR WOMEN'. Spencer had hired his airship out as a propaganda platform to Muriel Matters, an Australian-born suffragette who was very active in the Women's Freedom League (a non-violent breakaway from the better-known WPSU). Matters had won some publicity the previous year by chaining herself to the grille of the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons. Her airship flight was also designed to make Parliament take notice of the suffragist cause: the new session was opening that very day and it was her intention to fly over Westminster and drop Votes For Women leaflets on it. In the end Spencer and Matters didn't make it there, having been blown off course into a tree in Coulsden, well to the south. Three decades later, Matters herself gave a wonderful account of her flight to the BBC, which can be heard online here. (Ignore the photo there, which is of the Army airship Baby.)

The photograph above is from a scrapbook belonging to an American women's suffrage organisation, so the message did travel quite some distance, albeit to a receptive audience; I couldn't find any mention of Matters' flight in a quick search of the British press. It took nearly a decade for the WFL's demand to be partially fulfilled. And it's nice to see that the part Matters played in using airpower for progressive causes is still remembered in her native South Australia.

  1. From me. [↩]

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'The Hum' is a mysterious low-frequency sound just at the edge of hearing which seems to infect some places, but which only some people can detect. What causes it is unknown -- theories range from factories and air conditioners to gravitational waves -- and responsible authorities often deny that it exists at all. The most famous example from recent times is probably the Taos Hum from New Mexico, which seems to date to the 1990s, but the Bristol Hum in the UK was apparently around in the 1960s and featured in the national press in the 1970s. Before that, questions were asked in Parliament (one question, anyway) about a hum heard in East Kent; and there was the Manchester 'hummadruz' which was discussed in the local press in the 1870s but was heard in the 1820s; and Gilbert White heard something similar (though louder) at Selborne in the 18th century. I think there's enough evidence to suggest that something is going on, though whether the Hum is a real sound or just something human psychology tends to come up with time and again is debatable.

Here's an example I haven't been able to find a reference to: the London Hum during the Second World War. The following is from Philip Ziegler's London at War, from a chapter discussing the mid-war years so 1942 or 1943:

The absence of traffic, together with the rarity of raids, should have given Londoners some precious silence, but from all over the capital came complaints of a mystery noise which seemed to emanate from the same area but was curiously hard to track down. 'Not only is there almost incessant "hum",' complained Gwladys Cox, 'but a "shaking", for want of a better word; at night my very bed vibrates and I feel intermittent stiff "jerks".' One indignant victim pursued the matter with the police, the Home Office and the Ministry of Health, but got no satisfaction. Eventually he decided he had identified the culprit, a factory in west London, but was met with a bland assertion that, though they might be making a little too much noise, this was unavoidable in view of the essential war work on which they were engaged. So far as it could be established, the testing of aero-engines was responsible.1

Unfortunately, Ziegler doesn't provide citations (though Gwladys Cox was a civilian diarist living in West Hampstead; her diary is held at the Imperial War Museum). A quick search of wartime newspapers doesn't throw up any obvious references to a London hum, but Ziegler's account suggests it was a widely experienced phenomenon. Perhaps the unusual lack of traffic noises made other sounds more noticeable; perhaps the habit of listening for bombers made people more sensitive to sounds they'd usually block out. Either way, I wonder why it seems to have slipped through the cracks of memory.

  1. Philip Ziegler, London at War 1939-1945 (London: Pimlico, 2002), 244. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Jewish refugees arrested at Croydon, March 1939

On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported:

NEARLY 400 Jewish refugees streamed into Croydon in a succession of air liners yesterday -- the biggest influx the airport had ever experienced.

They came from Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland -- all over Europe.

Most of them were allowed to enter the country [...]1

For example, David Herbst was allowed to stay when his wife Leishi, a former Austrian tennis star, showed up and was able to prove that Herbst 'had money in English Banks'.

[...] when some were told they would have to go back to the Continent in the morning they burst into piteous cries.

One man from Cologne dropped to his knees and pleaded, in tears, with the immigration authorities.

Wailing, he fell on his face and broke his nose. Afterwards he threatened to commit suicide.

He said his father had been taken away manacled and then shot and he believed he would be dealt with in the same way if he returned to Germany.2

Herbst's travelling companions were in the same situation. The thirteen of them had chartered a Danish tri-motor for £600 to fly them out of Warsaw (one source says Cracow). Herbst got to go home with his wife; but the other twelve were detained by the police overnight.

"Nobody knows who the people are. They are a mystery crowd," it was stated by an official. "Many had little money and could not give satisfactory reasons why they should be allowed to land in England."2

I assume the official was talking about legal reasons why the refugees should be allowed to land, rather than just being utterly dense; the reasons why they were fleeing were quite clear. Two weeks earlier, after threatening to bomb Prague off the map, German troops had been allowed to march in, occupying the Czech portions of Czechoslovakia which remained after the cession of the Sudetenland the previous year. Germany ended Czechoslovakia, taking Bohemia and Moravia for itself; Hungary took Carpatho-Ukraine and Slovakia became independent. This meant that suddenly Czech Jews (and those, like Herbst, who had fled from Austria after the Anschluss a year earlier) were subject to Nazi racial discrimination.
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  1. Daily Express, 30 March 1939, p. 1. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩] [↩]

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Effect of strategic bombing on German morale, resistance, and countermeasures

Breaking the morale of a civilian population by means of aerial bombardment is quite difficult. But it's a lot easier if you only have to do it in graphical form. Here bombs of type 'killed', 'wounded', 'evacuated', 'deprived of utilities' and 'homes destroyed' come thundering down towards the edifice 'will to resist', which is formed of layers 'belief in victory', 'belief in Nazis', 'confidence in leaders', 'group unity' and 'actual resistance', and buttressed by the Nazi countermeasures 'propaganda', 'air raid protection', 'relief & evacuation' and 'police control & terror'. Will the Allied bombs shatter German morale? Looks to me like it will!

This is taken from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSB), The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), volume 1, 6. However, I came across it (by way of Wikipedia) on the website of the UK National Archives, as part of an exercise for students about the bombing of Dresden. I find it interesting, and perhaps telling, that a British government website would use an American image to illustrate wartime beliefs about the susceptibility of morale to bombing. There was a British version of the USSBS, the British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU), headed by zoologist Solly Zuckerman, but any comparison between them is undone by the differences in scale. The USSBS employed more than a thousand researchers for two years at the end of the war and published 208 reports on the European theatre alone; the BBSU comprised a few dozen people working for just a few months in 1945, producing a single report which wasn't even published until 1998. For the BBSU to have hired a graphic artist to come up with something like the above would probably would have consumed a considerable fraction of its resources. Nor was it necessary. The USSBS was a genuine research effort, but it was also propaganda for an independent air force (which the USAAF became in 1947, turning into the USAF). The BBSU was far humbler in its aims. Churchill wanted a quick and dirty assessment of the Combined Bomber Offensive ready in time for Bomber Command's redeployment to the far East for use against Japan (which of course never happened). The RAF's leaders, notably the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, were reluctant to let the Americans write the history of the bomber war. But, with the possible exception of Bomber Command's airmen, pretty much everyone else in Britain just wanted to forget about it once the war was over. And they did.

For a comparison of the USSBS and the BBSU, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 270-81.

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Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis

After knocking together The Scareship Age, I started working on turning my Sudeten crisis posts into an e-book version. I knew there'd be a fair amount of work, but I underestimated the value of 'fair'. Finding and cleaning up formatting errors is a very slow and tedious business, as is creating an index (though it helped to have done a PDF version already). Anyway, the EPUB and MOBI versions of Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 are now available from the downloads page.

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Roger Moorhouse. Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-45. London: Vintage, 2010. Bomber Command found Berlin to be of great interest, so it's something I should know more about. There are two chapters on Berlin under the raids, and the topic appears elsewhere in the book too: for example, how Berliners adapted to the blackout. Should make a nice companion piece to the Ziegler I picked up last week.