In June 1935, the Daily Express ran a story about three ’secret British air devices’. The source was a story in the Chicago Tribune by that paper’s London correspondent, John Steele:

The devices are declared to be a new “mirage” smoke screen, a new seventeen-foot long anti-aircraft rifle, and a robot airplane which, controlled by wireless, can charge an enemy formation.¹.

The bare descriptions perhaps don’t sound so improbable, but the details … well, judge for yourself. ‘Mirage’ was composed of different coloured smokes which created a decoy townscape:

“Brick red, yellow, grey, brown, and black smoke fumes, spreading across the landscape horizontally at different heights from the ground, or, as in the case of the black smoke, rising vertically in columns, create a complete illusion of houses, factory chimney stacks, streets, rivers, and gardens.²

This level of detail and control over smoke seems improbable to me. But supposedly Mirage had been tested in exercises, and had completely fooled some RAF bombers which had been ordered to ‘bomb’ Croydon; instead they dropped their bombs twenty miles away on open fields!

How about the AA rifle? According to Steele, it was 17 feet long, had a range of 20,000 feet and fired cartridges weighing 39 ounces (2.4 pounds). Again, this isn’t too implausible, on the face of it. But wait:

It is precisely like a giant Lee-Enfield with similar sighting apparatus.

“There is an artificial shoulder for the rifle made of rubber, while the rifleman lies on a small platform above the weapon and takes sight. No human frame could support the recoil.³

It doesn’t sound like any AA gun I’ve heard of, but I suppose it could be a garbled description of some predecessor to the 3.75 inch QF. It’s a bizarre mental image though; and iron sights wouldn’t be much use at 20,000 feet.

As for the robotic Drake:

This airplane, rising above a bombing squadron flying in formation, can keep up a perpetual hail of machine-gun fire, the firing being done automatically under remote control.

“The robot can be heavily loaded with high explosive and from below made to charge like a bull into a formation, and then be exploded by wireless.

“The explosives, projecting inflammable bullets, would fire the [fuel] tanks of the enemy, or even, if close enough, turn the enemy turtle.⁴

No robot fighter aircraft like this existed in 1935 (although the the DH.82B Queen Bee, a radio-controlled variant of the Tiger Moth, was in use by then as a target tug, and became public around then). It does sound something like Ram, a project under development by the Air Ministry in the late 1920s but which was cancelled in 1930. Ram was briefly under reconsideration in 1935, due to advances in radio technology, but nothing came of it.⁵

My point here is not so much that these secret weapons didn’t exist (though clearly that’s what I do think), but that the British press was not interested in the possibility that they did: the Express was the only national daily which relayed the Tribune report (well, nearly all: there are a couple I haven’t been able to check). This was only a few months after the existence of the German air force was revealed and the government announced a trebling of the RAF’s strength at home in order to maintain air parity. Why was there so little interest in claims that British ingenuity was coming up with clever responses to the bomber threat?

1. Daily Express, 14 June 1935, 8
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. See John Farquharson, ‘Britain and the flying bomb: the research programme between the two World Wars’, War in History 13 (2006), 363-79.

Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say “no”, but that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it.)

The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads:

This picture taken Aug. 11 shows, according to British censor-approved caption, a German raider plane “caught amidst an anti-aircraft barrage of bursting shells” — somewhere over the British coast. The balloon-shaped object in lower left-hand corner was not identified, but London caption emphasized it was not a balloon. Whether it was a “mystery weapon” of any nature could not be ascertained. Picture was sent from London by cable as swarms of German raiders continued to batter the British coast.

The same photo, rotated 180 degrees and cropped somewhat differently, appeared on the front page of the Spokane Daily Chronicle the previous day:

Whether this unretouched picture, taken Sunday and sent from London by cable today, depicts a British “mystery weapon” could not be ascertained. A German raider plane is shown, according to the British censor-approved caption, “caught amidst an anti-aircraft barrage of bursting shells,” somewhere over the British coast. The balloon-shaped object in the lower left-hand corner was not identified, but the London caption emphasized that it was not a balloon. (AP)

Because both captions refer to the lower-left corner, but the photos are rotated, it’s not clear whether the mystery object is supposed to be the vaguely blimp-shaped cloudlike object in the top photo, or the black cigar-shape seen in both. I’m not sure what either object actually is — the blimp-shaped thing doesn’t actually look like British barrage balloons of the period, which had three fins; and it would have to be in the process of deflating too. But it could be cloudlike because it is a cloud, or maybe a burst of AA (although it looks very different to the other shellburst). The cigar shape could conceivably be a fighter edge-on, but who knows.

I had a look for the same photograph in British national dailies, and found it in just one, the Daily Mirror of 12 August 1940 (again on the front page). It’s cropped differently again, and is at right angles to both the other versions.

It doesn’t give any more detail than the other two versions (although it does show a much larger area). And the caption only confuses matters, because it doesn’t mention any mystery weapon at all:

Caught in the middle of our anti-aircraft barrage — which German airmen have said “is Hell” — the German plane in the above picture was trying vainly to escape when the camera caught it. You can see the shells bursting around it.

Because the scale is much larger, and because the contrast is very low, I’ve circled the Me 109 (blue) and the blimp-like thing (red) — the cigar-shape doesn’t really show up at all here:

The actual identity of the objects aside, what was going on here? Why did the American papers speculate about a possible British mystery weapon, and the British one didn’t? The proximate cause presumably lies with the captions attached to the photos. The American papers got their copy of the photo from the Associated Press (AP); presumably the Daily Mirror got it from a British bureau or from the Ministry of Information or Air Ministry. The captions are said to be approved by the British censor (presumably meaning the MoI) but that seems to imply that AP actually wrote the captions. Maybe whoever that was had been given some information suggesting that there was a secret air defence weapon in this photo, or maybe they wanted to boost Britain’s chances to the folks back home (the American correspondents in London in 1940, generally speaking, wanted Britain to win and wanted the United States to help it). But either way, no British papers picked up on the secret weapon angle, or were perhaps not permitted to by the censor.

Thanks to Drew Williamson for finding the American items.

On my third day in Cornwall I avoided the usual tourist traps entirely, because I was in search of my ancestors’ home: a tiny little place called Tremayne, which is towards Land’s End, in the hundred of Penwith. To get there I caught a train to Camborne, then a bus to Praze-an-Beeble (no, really!), and then walked along a winding country lane with no footpath and some very high hedgerows. Luckily I didn’t get run over, as that would rather have spoiled what was a beautiful day.

This is the turn-off into Tremayne. There’s no actual sign saying ‘Tremayne’: I don’t think it’s big enough to warrant one! (It doesn’t show up in Google Maps, but it is on the Ordinance Survey’s ones, along with Tremayne Farm, North Tremayne and Carn Tremayne.)

The main street. In fact the only street.

Some of Tremayne’s buildings look like they could have been there when my mob left.

And I don’t know why they did leave. I know they go back to at least 1732 there, or near there, when James Holman was born, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (I think that’s the right number of greats!) His grandson, John Holman, emigrated with his wife, Millicent (nee Hodge), and their eight children to the new colony of South Australia in 1839. Six other children had died in Cornwall, which suggests a grinding poverty. Their passage was assisted, so they certainly had few means at their disposal.

John Holman’s application for assisted passage listed him as a farmer (Tremayne, incidentally, means ‘farm by stones’ in Cornish). And farming is what he did for the rest of his life, first in Prospect Village, then in Willunga.

South Australia was itself only founded in 1836; so we were there pretty early. It attracted many Cornish emigrants, not only for the economic opportunities (later, especially due to copper strikes) but because of its freedom. Firstly, it was not a penal colony, so it was free of the convict stain. Secondly, it had no state religion, and indeed welcomed Nonconformists. Cornwall was a Methodist stronghold, but the Church of England still had legal and financial privileges which non-Anglicans would have found offensive: landowners had to pay tithes to the (Anglican) parish church, which is also where banns of marriage had to be read, and so on. I’m not actually sure whether the Holmans in Cornwall were Methodists, but at least one was a Methodist lay preacher in South Australia, and John Holman’s second wife was buried in a Methodist cemetery. So they may well have been.

If they were Methodists, it looks like the nearest chapels were in Praze (though it depends on what denomination they were). But the parish church in nearby Crowan is where many Holmans from the district were baptised, married and buried. So from Tremayne I set off in search of Crowan.

There was a public footpath, which I immediately managed to lose and trespass my way through a field and a barbed wire fence. But I did find this surprisingly sturdy bridge. I wonder why a simple crossroads wouldn’t do? Maybe it was for mine traffic.

This is the church at Crowan, dedicated to Saint Crewenna. It was built in the 15th century but restored extensively in 1872.

Saint Crewenna was an obscure 5th century missionary from Ireland, a companion of Saint Breaca, who herself was a disciple of Saint Brigid.

The church was locked, so I looked around the churchyard instead.

Except for it not being dark and wreathed with fog, it’s just what you want from a churchyard: lots of old tombstones, some broken and tumbledown.

I didn’t find any ancestors, but I did find some probable relatives.

Beneath
THIS STONE,
are deposited the mortal remains of
Jacob Holman
of
Tremayne in this parish
WHO WAS KILLED UNDERGROUND.
September 4, 1834 Aged 18 Years.
Oh! Fatal stroke that rent my heart
I little thought so soon to part,
But since tis so weep not for me
Hope in heaven to meet with thee.

MARIA HOLMAN W[HO DIE]D
[...]

So Jacob was a miner (probably copper) who died at work. Maria could have been his sister. Either way it’s unclear what relation they are to John and Millicent, despite living in the same tiny place, Tremayne, at the same time: Jacob died less than five years before they emigrated. I do know the names of John and Millicent’s children, and there are no Jacobs or Marias: however there a James and a Mary, both of whom died in Cornwall. These are cognate names: perhaps they were treated as interchangeable, or used as nicknames?

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
JANE,
WIFE OF FRANCIS HOLMAN
Who Died
March 6th 1891.
AGED 67 YEARS.
ALSO OF FRANCIS, THEIR SON
Died April 5th 1869.
AGED 17 YEARS.
ALSO OF
FRANCIS HOLMAN.
HUSBAND OF THE ABOVE
WHO DIED MARCH 2ND 1909.
FOR ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST, AND TO DIE IS GAIN

Francis senior was a stonemason. At the time of the 1841 census he was living at Tremayne, with several siblings and his father, Jacob. Not the same Jacob as above, obviously, but the shared names and the Tremayne connection suggests that they’re all part of the same bunch as me. (And John Holman’s father, also named John, had a brother named James — Jacob?)

I’m going to stop there before my brain melts!

After that it was back to Truro, via Tremayne, Praze and Camborne. I wish I’d been a bit better prepared — if I had been, perhaps I would have known about the former Methodist chapel in Praze, or found the address of the Holmans (if not my Holmans) in Tremayne from the 1841 census. But it was still very evocative to see where some of my forebears came from. And I can always come back when I know more!

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.