Here’s an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough — it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car:

Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.¹

A ’special correspondent’ wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples — two ‘London ladies’ staying at ‘the Hut’ near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at ‘the Cottage’ also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods’ bedroom was then illuminated by the car’s headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.

But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):

Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.²

This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town’s medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King’s Lynn.³

We know now that there were no German spies motoring about East Anglia at night giving directions to incoming Zeppelins. It’s an operationally pretty absurd idea, for one thing; it was hardly possible to accurately navigate a Zeppelin to a given area of coastline for a night-time rendezvous. And I doubt the church at Snettisham was very high up on German target lists, for example. Instead I’d go with the explanation offered by one anonymous ‘official’, that the cars ‘were driven by persons who followed the course of the airship out of curiosity’.⁴ Or perhaps by military or police keeping watch on the raider.

Rumours about signalling didn’t always involve motorists: they could just consist of a light showing from a house. After an airship raid the Kentish coast on 17 June 1917, The Times reported:

There is an ugly rumour going round to-day that signalling was reported to the authorities to have taken place half an hour before the attack began. It is widely stated that such an incident occurred and that the Zeppelin was most deliberate in its attack. Its engines could be distinctly heard as it went round the coast, and, after going a few hundred yards, the engines were stopped while the commander took his bearings. Then it would pass along another few hundred yards, and it is believed by many that during one of these stops signals were given from the western side of the town.⁵

The occasional claims of signals to enemy aircraft I’ve come across from the Second World War are more like this, such as the case of Emil and Alma Wirth I’ve discussed previously.

So why were these types of claims made about motorists? And why did they stop? It’s all clearly bound up with the pre-war spy and phantom airship scares, which indeed carried over into the early war years. More generally, I can imagine a certain type of person (curtain-twitchers, wowsers, what-have-you) disapproving of these newfangled, noisy, expensive cars and wondering if their owners really do need to be driving about at all hours, and no doubt they’re up to no good anyway. So when Zeppelins came along and start dropping bombs, and cars were seen on the roads beneath, it was a good excuse to condemn an annoying member of society: the leisure motorist. As for why these suspicions faded, petrol rationing came into effect from August 1916, after which there were far fewer private cars on the roads. (And Zeppelin-chasing may have become passé by then anyway.) So busybodies had to turn to other targets. In the Second World War, car-ownership was much higher (for the middle and upper classes, at least), so driving was now longer such a minority activity, not so easily stigmatised (as the relative complacency over the horrific road toll in the 1930s perhaps suggests). But also petrol rationing came into effect straight away, so there were fewer cars on the roads during air raids, and less enthusiasm for pleasure driving. Moreover, blackout restrictions meant that cars had very little light to show. By the time heavy air raids started in August-September 1940, there would probably have been very few cars in private ownership capable of carrying on the tradition of the mystery car of Maldon …

1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10.
4. Ibid., 23 January 1915, 10.
5. Ibid., 18 June 1917, 10.

Christopher Andrew. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Most valuable for me on the Edwardian spy mania, but looks like a fun read for the rest of the thousand-odd pages.

R. V. Jones. Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945. London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]. A reprint of this important autobiography; no doubt it’s been superseded as a history of the wizard war but at the time it was groundbreaking.

I’m pleased to announce that my first paper has been accepted for publication, by War in History. It’s about the international air force idea and is entitled ‘World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945′. It won’t actually appear for some time, but under the terms of the publishing agreement I’m allowed to make the originally-submitted version (i.e. before peer review) available for download. It can be found from my publications page.

After my little misadventure at Camelford, I started the next day out of position, and had a long way to go just to get back to my real hotel in Truro for a change of clothes. So for my day’s excursion I didn’t want to go too far from Truro, and luckily Falmouth is only a short trip by train.

What does Falmouth have? Yachts!

Ships!

Even a quasi-aircraft-carrier-cum-hospital ship (technically an aviation training and casualty receiving ship), RFA Argus, a veteran of wars from the Falklands to Iraq.

Falmouth has a deep harbour and a long nautical tradition, so it was a logical place to put the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. Unlike the National Maritime Museum in London (of which it is independent), the focus is more on small craft than big ships.

For example, this is a model of a fishing boat called Mystery. In 1854-5 its owners sailed it from Newlyn in Cornwall to Melbourne and back, looking for work!

A working replica of one of the first submarines, built by Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel for the Royal Navy in the 17th century. (They didn’t want it.)

A string vest which Ernest Shackleton wore during his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914-7. Despite the undoubted historical significance of this artefact, I must admit it made me think of this.

Victoria by the grace of God did grant somebody something … sorry, I don’t know what this is for, exactly. I just liked the calligraphy!

The other major attraction at Falmouth (for me, at least) was Pendennis Castle.

Pendennis is part of the Tudor harbour defences.

As such, where Falmouth in general is characterised by ships, Pendennis Castle is characterised by guns with which to sink them. (Well, to sink the enemy’s ships, but you get the idea.)

This a (reproduction) Tudor cannon, (mock) firing through a (glass-covered) gunport (but with real smoke).

An array of late-18th/early-19th century guns. A ship of the line could carry more, but it also was made of wood and could sink.

This looks mid-to-late 19th century to me — still muzzle-loading, anyway.

A technological advance in the 1890s — breech loading.

Although this example now has a fixed position, it originally had a disappearing mount: it would rise above the parapet to fire, and then would sink below to be reloaded. To much wear and tear; these were replaced in 1913. The concrete structure in front of the emplacement was built in the First World War, and served in the Second as an aircraft spotting station.

Speaking of aircraft, here’s an anti-aircraft gun. (There’s also a First World War-vintage 3-inch AA gun, but my photo of that is boring, to be honest.)

One of the two big 6-inch guns in the Half-Moon Battery, dating from the Second World War. Radar-directed, with a range of 12 miles.

Turning to the architecture, this is the Henrician tower. Construction began in 1539: the threats it guarded against were France and Spain. (The upper left window is, I think, the gunport shown several photos ago.)

A view from the tower’s battlements.

English Heritage’s flag flying proudly over the keep. (Not that Cornish nationalists would be proud of it.)

Little Dennis — a Tudor blockhouse built right out on the tip of the point.

Some different views of Falmouth and surrounds. St Anthony’s Lighthouse, across the Carrick Roads from Pendennis,

Part of the harbourside memorial to the raid on St Nazaire, which set sail from Falmouth on 26 March 1942.

For some reason, I like the idea of having a back door which leads directly to the sea …

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the ‘Life-Saving “CAVENDISH” Anti-Gas INHALER’ — in other words, a gas mask. It’s a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare — that is, ‘The Danger of GAS BOMBS’:

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy’s airships if you are provided with enough “CAVENDISH” INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly — and for a very short time — protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need — for yourself and your family — absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I’m not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, ‘quite long enough for absolute security from danger’ — a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It’s also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it’s three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) — most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met’s commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice — and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn’t obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men, but can’t find the precise reference.)

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, ‘Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?’, Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it’s only October and the rest of the December issue isn’t online yet. The editors of JMH clearly think they’ve got an unusually significant paper here, one worth publishing early and with an accompanying press release. And I agree.

The question in the article’s title is one I’ve asked before. After the First World War, Britain gained control of Iraq (or Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire, not as an outright possession but under a mandate from the League of Nations. Some of Iraq’s inhabitants disapproved of British rule and from 1920 rebelled. A new form of colonial policing known as air control eventually suppressed the revolt, but in the meantime the (rapidly demobilising) Army and the Royal Air Force had their hands full just containing the situation. Hence the attraction of using chemical weapons such as mustard gas against tribesmen with no experience of and no protection against this new form of warfare.

But did Britain actually use gas in Iraq? Certainly, some historians and journalists have claimed that it did, delivered by either artillery shells or aerial bombs. They have usually done so in a remarkably casual fashion, offering little or nothing in the way of primary sources. Douglas shows that the only documentary evidence available — a 1921 letter by an Air Ministry official stating that the Army had used tear gas (then considered to be a chemical weapon, even if not a poison gas) against Iraqi rebels the previous year — was officially contested at the time, and the claim was soon withdrawn by the Air Ministry. Inquiries on the ground in Iraq turned up no evidence that gas had been used either by artillery or aeroplane.

So much for that. Something which has confused matters (and which Douglas clears up admirably) is the role of Winston Churchill, who as War Minister (and Air Minister) in 1920 did authorise the use of gas by the Army in Iraq. Again, in late 1921, now as Colonial Minister, he authorised the transfer of gas bombs to the RAF in Iraq. In both cases he was pushing the boundaries of his authority by not consulting with his Cabinet colleagues; but nothing came of either episode. In 1920, the shells arrived in Iraq too late to be of use; in 1921-2, the disarmament negotiations in Washington DC meant that Britain had to switch to a ‘no first-use’ policy regarding poison gas. So once again, there is no evidence that gas was used. But what these events do show is that there those in both government and in the military who were quite prepared to use chemical weapons against an enemy. And why not? After all, they had done so in the recent war in Europe.

Of course, public attitudes towards gas warfare were changing. As Douglas suggests, there may well have been an outcry against Churchill if his soldiers and airmen had gassed unprotected tribesmen, even if only with tear gas. That nothing like this did happen is why I’ve been sceptical of the gas-in-Iraq claim for a while now: as far I can tell, nobody claimed publicly at the time that British servicemen were again undertaking gas warfare. I would expect somebody like L. E. O. Charlton — who had been the RAF’s chief of staff in Iraq in 1923-4, who effectively ended his career because of his moral objections to air control, and who in the 1930s wrote a series of books warning of the danger of gas warfare to British civilians — to have at least hinted at the practice. But he didn’t, and neither did anyone else that I’ve come across.

Anyway, thanks to Douglas, this is one historical puzzle we seem to have solved. Now to get the message out …

It’s the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it’s the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you’ve been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you’ll know it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that’s pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 — an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.

Present-day arguments aside, what did contemporaries think of the result? The British (and Australian) press mostly celebrated Scott and Black’s win. For example, the Melbourne Argus had this to say:

Where the pioneers walked, Scott and Black ran. Perhaps the finest evaluation of their victory is found in the lot of the other competitors. Some of them were still in Europe when Darwin revealed itself like the Promised Land to the weary victors. Even the mammoth Dutch airliner, flown by the light-hearted Parmentier, was hundreds of miles behind. Flying-Officer Gilman and Mr. J. K. C. Baines had crashed to a burning death. The nearest Americans were a continent away. The whole world opened its eyes in amazement.

In a representative International race a British aeroplane, flown by British aviators, has triumphed. That is a selfish reason for jubilation, and the result cannot fail to enhance the prestige of Britain in the air.¹

But the Argus was not blind to the significance of the Uiver’s performance:

The others, however, flew bravely and well. They are all in the vanguard of the new age, Parmentier perhaps most of all. For he rode the skies in this great race like the unruffled pilot of a tourist airliner, allowing his passengers, between chicken sandwiches, to watch three continents unfolding beneath them. Could any more striking contrast be imagined than the weariness and exhaustion of Scott and Black and the pleasant excitement of Parmentier’s passengers, who flew in the world’s most notable race as tourists? All these men and women have been true to a fine tradition; and, although two lives already have been lost, a great advance has been made, lifting the horizon to an astonishing future.²

Australians, being so used to isolation, might be expected to celebrate its erosion (the Argus pointed out that only seventy years earlier, it could take up to a hundred days to get from London to Melbourne; even as recently as 1931 the best time by air was 10 days). Whether it was thanks to British technology or not was secondary. But back in Britain, the usual self-congratulations in the press stood against more pessimistic comments. Even before the race, the Daily Mail thought the Comets (two others flew in the race) were marvels, but added that

The unfortunate fact, however, is that the aeroplanes of the Royal Air Force are a whole generation behind them in design and speed.³

J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, a Conservative MP who was the first person to get a British pilot’s licence (in 1910) claimed that the ‘England-Australia race has opened the eyes of the world [...] to the lamentable position, from the technical point of view, of English aviation’⁴.

It is true, of course, to say that we won the race, but we won it with a machine that was built especially for the race, and although it redounds to the credit of the De Havilland Company that they not only won the race, but also designed and produced the machine in seven months, they would, I think, be the first to admit that it was a machine built for one particular job, and that, in a broad way, it was a speed copy of a commercial American aircraft.⁵

He pointed to two specific innovations becoming common in the United States, but virtually unknown in Britain: retractable undercarriages and variable pitch propellers (which the Comet did actually have).

As a final, somewhat-elliptical example, consider the cartoon at the top of the race, from the Saturday Review (15 December 1934, 514). The Saturday Review also lamented Britain’s performance in the MacRobertson air race, but this is another air race, one in which Britain is very definitely lagging: the race for airpower. Britain’s air force is shown to be behind those of Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, the United States and Japan. And this was a race which had to be won …

A note on ‘MacRobertson’: there’s no such name, as far as I know. It was the nickname of Macpherson Robertson, a Melbourne confectionery king, and the name of his company. Aside from giving Australia the Freddo Frog and the Cherry Ripe, he also gave generously to support Melbourne’s centenary celebrations in 1934. The air race was part of these celebrations: the first prize was £10,000. He also has a chunk of Antarctica named after him. But in his home town about the only trace of MacRobertson’s name is a high school for girls, which is popularly known as Mac.Rob. Sad to say, the great air race itself seems to have been forgotten today in Melbourne, except here at Airminded and at Vintage Aeroplane Writer, JDK’s new blog.

1. Argus, 24 October 1934, 6.
2. Ibid.
3. Daily Mail, 2 October 1934; in Arming in the Air: The Daily Mail Campaign (London: Associated Newspapers, 1936
4. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, ‘British aviation: a lament’, Empire Review, December 1934, 328.
5. Ibid.

After the Exeter conference my holiday proper began. I travelled by train down to Cornwall, to Truro where I made my base for the next few days. Truro is the county seat, though it’s not a big town by any means. (Nowhere in Cornwall is, which is part of its charm.) It does have the Royal Cornwall Museum, which I looked through on my first morning there. Among the Roman coins and old coaches is the so-called Arthur stone, which was found at Tintagel Castle — which is where I went in the afternoon.

Tintagel is a ruined 13th century castle on a windswept promontory which juts into an equally windswept sea.

The castle was built by Richard of Cornwall on the site of an older fortress.

In the 5th or 6th centuries, the fortress here guarded this little cove, which must have been busy: a large quantity of fine Mediterranean pottery has been found at Tintagel (more than anywhere else in Britain), indicating that it belonged to somebody rich and powerful.

Even earlier, in late Roman times, there was a hill fort here.

But none of that explains why so many tourists (including me!) visit Tintagel Castle.

The real reason is the Arthurian connection. Depending on who you listen to, Tintagel was where Merlin lived, where Arthur was conceived, where he was born, where Tristan and Iseult had their affair. Not that there is any shortage of such potential sites, but the importance of Tintagel was championed by such influential Arthurians as Geoffrey of Monmouth. Indeed, Richard of Cornwall apparently built his castle here precisely to evoke memories of Arthur, and did so in a conspicuously old-fashioned style.

I’ve long had an interest in Arthur. Even though I guess that was inspired by repeat viewings of the John Boorman film Excalibur, I’ve mostly focused on the historical Arthur, not the mythical one.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. There’s enough relatively early textual evidence of the existence of a British military leader called Arthur, who played a major role in fighting the Saxon invaders in the 6th century or so. While his precise history can never be recovered now, there’s nothing implausible about the existent of such a figure. So why not accept that he probably did exist?

Or so I thought before reading N. J. Higham’s King Arthur: Myth-making and History (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). It completely turned me around on the subject! Higham shows that all the early mentions (and frustrating near-mentions, such as by Gildas) to Arthur are completely explicable in terms of the political context of the times in which they were written, as well with reference to earlier texts such as the Bible.

For example, the Historia Brittonum, traditionally attributed to Nennius, can be shown to have been written to support the political and dynastic claims of Merfyn, king of Gwynedd in north Wales in the 9th century. It’s not a history as we understand it, but an account designed to show that providence (i.e. God) ruled the fate of nations. It argues against the earlier work of Gildas, which portrayed the Britons as a people who had forfeited their claim to be God’s new chosen race, which was of great propaganda value for the (now Christian) Anglo-Saxon kingdoms pressing in from the west (see the venerable Bede). Higham’s close reading of the Historia shows it heavily constructed Arthur as a secular counterpart to St Patrick and as a British counterpart to Joshua (a victorious war leader who was never a king). It’s so heavily constructed that there is no reason to believe that the fragments of detail the Historia gives about Arthur has any basis in any earlier (’authentic’) tradition. So the debates over how Arthur’s description as dux bellorum fits in with the nature of kingship in the 6th and 7th centuries, for example, are beside the point: the Old Testament was the inspiration for this title.

And that’s one of the very earliest mentions of Arthur. The later you get, the less chance of any kernel of truth being preserved by some lucky oral or textual survival anyway; and Higham deals with these in similar fashion. There may be smoke, but it’s so thick that we can’t actually tell if there ever was a fire.

I have to admit that this was all a bit disappointing. But the history and archaeology of the British kingdoms is still fascinating and I’ll keep reading about it. And there’s still the Arthurian legends to enjoy. And there’ll always be Excalibur!

What else can I say about Tintagel? The less said about the village itself the better, really. It’s got some very tacky shops which have names with extra Es on the end, and somehow had far more tourists in it than the castle itself, even though it’s about the only reason to visit. (Above is the pretty awful Camelot Castle Hotel, on the cliffs overlooking Tintagel Castle.)

Though there is also the parish church, devoted to St Materiana, which might have been built as early as the late 11th century.

And which I didn’t have time to see, except from afar.

The views were indeed quite stunning.

I was glad to be near the sea; last time I visited the UK I didn’t get much closer to it than Calton Hill.

Though I must say the water didn’t look very inviting!

This is, um, a bird of some sort. A sea bird. (I do aeroplanes, not avians!)

Merlin’s Cave looking one way …

… and the other.

On my way back to Truro from Tintagel I had my first (and, luckily, my only) major transport snafu of the whole trip. I had to change buses at nearby Camelford, and I knew I’d be catching the last one (it being just out of season, this was about 6.30pm). But it never turned up! Or if it did, I wasn’t there at the right time or the right place. So I had to find an inn for the night. I can recommend the Darlington Inn if you ever find yourself stuck in Camelford after hours :)

Camelford itself has been supposed by some to be the site of Camelot, and nearby Slaughterbridge the site of Camlann, Arthur’s final battle. But as I’ve dispatched Arthur once already, I’ll let him rest in peace.

An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to ‘the East’ (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of effort went into selling the idea of air mail to the public, as this post at The British Postal Museum & Archive shows. Here, the modern lines of the Imperial A.W. 15 Atalanta is contrasted with the traditional garb of the imperial subjects in the background. The message is that technology will modernise the running of the Empire and help bind it together.

Evelyn August. The Black-out Book: One-hundred-and-one Black-out Nights’ Entertainment. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2009 [1939]. A facsimile reprint containing jokes, puzzles, games, trivia and other bits and pieces: giving a lower-brow (and I’m sure more accurate) impression of what people actually did in shelters than this. Evelyn August was the pseudonym of Sydney and Muriel Box.