This whimsical illustration, showing Father Neptune beset by all manner of aerial pests, appeared in Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great ‘Neon’ Air Myth Exposed (London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1928), opposite 410. Sueter had been a technically-minded naval officer (torpedoes, airships, armoured cars, tanks and of course […]
There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like ‘Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show’. Actually, the TNA files — part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files — don’t show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely. The cover-up is
Graham Greene. The Ministry of Fear. London: Vintage Books, 2001 [1943]. One of Greene’s lesser-known thrillers. Some evocative portraits of London during the Blitz, as when the protagonist looks out over battered Battersea and sees that ‘Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar sticks’. The world is
What was probably the world’s first aviation exhibition was held at the Crystal Palace, London, between 25 June and 4 July 1868. The ‘Aeronautical Exhibition’ was organised by the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, which itself had only been set up two years earlier (and was renamed the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1918). Here’s what
View Zeppelins over London in a larger map Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London’s V2 impact sites. Now they’ve come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly,
Peter Ewer. Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal. Chatswood: New Holland, 2009. Based on the author’s PhD thesis, this looks at the politics of Australia’s air policy before the war as well as the air attacks on Australia during it. It was a random find — surprised I hadn’t heard
This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley’s ‘When the sea failed her’ which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It’s subtitled ‘The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended’. It’s that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.
C. G. Grey. A History of the Air Ministry. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940. A valuable compendium of information by a knowledgeable (though, Grey being Grey, hardly detached!) contemporary observer. The first section covers the period up to 1918 (including the Air Ministry’s predecessors); the last the interwar period. In between there is a
I’ve put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It’s freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It’s very bloggy in
J. W. Dunne. An Experiment With Time. Library of the Serialist International, 2010 [1934]. Third edition. A curiosity, this. Dunne was Britain’s first military aeroplane designer, and would have been its first military aeroplane pilot too, if his designs had flown at the first attempt in 1907-8. Ultimately Dunne had little lasting influence on British
