Phantom airships come and go, but sometimes they come again. According to the scattered accounts of the 1909 Australian wave I’ve seen (meaning Bill Chalker’s The Oz Files and random internet sites), there was a late airship sighting on 25 October 1909 at Minderoo station in Western Australia. But I couldn’t find that event in […]
What did the phantom airships mean to people at the time? One thing is clear. The press very early on referred to the mysterious lights as airships, and it does seem that this was probably the most popular theory among those who saw them. But it was very far from a universal view. The 5
The first Australian scareship to be reported was not described as an airship, but simply as ‘beautiful revolving lights’, albeit of a mechanical aspect. This was published in the Melbourne Argus of 9 August 1909. Reverend B. Cozens, of the Port Melbourne Seamen’s Mission, came into the newspaper’s office to make a statement about something
It’s a little-known fact that Australia had a phantom airship scare of its very own. That’s mostly due to phantom airships themselves being little-known, on the whole. But the Australian sightings of August-September 1909 were also less numerous and less spectacular than the other waves that preceded it that year, in Britain in May and
The word ‘reprisals’ popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying. With
Philip Towle. Going to War: British Debates from Wilberforce to Blair. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A short and occasionally polemic book which covers a lot of ground. First looks at how different sections of society have dealt with the question of war — including novelists such as H. G. Wells and Nevil
7 October was not the end of the Blitz or even of the Battle of Britain, but it is the end of my post-blogging of 1940, at least for now. The main reason for this is because I’m running out of primary sources, especially the Daily Mail. But as I think I’ve shown, in the
Justin E. A. Busch. The Utopian Vision of H. G. Wells. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2009. Not sure about this one. There’s no doubt that Wells had a utopian vision, several of them in fact, but the index has about three dozen references for Plato as well as fifteen or so for F.
‘RAF PREPARING A GREAT NEW BOMBING OFFENSIVE’, Daily Mail, page 1: POWERFUL new R.A.F. bombers now being produced in great numbers and an amazing new long-range fighter are likely to be used, in the immediate future, for a greatly intensified bombing offensive over Germany. Hitler’s people can look forward to more than a taste of
For the third week in a row the Observer reserves its biggest headlines for a story about diplomacy rather than war — here the Hitler-Mussolini Brenner Pass meeting and subsequent threats made against Britain in the Axis press. This is deemed by the diplomatic correspondent to be a ‘bogy-war’ aimed at European neutrals, an ‘elaborate
