Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain [1st ed.] 9783030605544, 9783030605551

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STUDIES IN MOBILITIES, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain Edited by Michael McCluskey Luke Seaber

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture

Series Editors Marian Aguiar Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA Charlotte Mathieson University of Surrey Guildford, UK Lynne Pearce English Literature & Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds – ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds – i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms – and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15385

Michael McCluskey · Luke Seaber Editors

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain

Editors Michael McCluskey Boston University Boston, MA, USA

Luke Seaber University College London London, UK

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-60554-4 ISBN 978-3-030-60555-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Album/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book began as a conference held at the historic Croydon Aerodrome Hotel in April 2016. Organized by Michael McCluskey, Luke Seaber, Amara Thornton and Debbie Challis, the event brought together researchers from multiple fields as well as aviation enthusiasts and members of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust, the organization that maintains the Croydon Airport Visitor Centre and Archive, which includes the world’s oldest air traffic control tower and the booking hall where many passengers and literary characters passed through in the 1920s and ’30s. The editors, therefore, would first like to thank their fellow organizers, Amara and Debbie; those who attended the conference as speakers, exhibitors, and audiences members; and Ian Walker and the volunteers of the Croydon Airport Society whose tours and stories illustrated the importance of Croydon to aviation history, British history and the emergence of air travel as we know it today. Since April 2016, this project has moved through many stages with the input and assistance of many others. At Palgrave Macmillan, the series editors Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce and the anonymous readers of our initial proposal provided useful feedback and encouragement that made this book a stronger, sharper intervention in aviation history and mobility and modernist studies. Rachel Jacobe and Allie Troyanos helped us through these early stages and on to publication with confidence, clarity and flexibility. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would also like to thank Stephen Cadywold and the English Department at University College London for introducing them and giving them a shared office in 2013 and 2014 when they were both research fellows there. The serendipity of discovering shared interests led to this volume. This volume was completed during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. In the words of the fourteenth-century Franciscan John Clyn, in a passage much loved by T. H. White, one of the authors whom this book discusses, the editors were working seeing hec multa mala et mundum totum quasi in maligno positum. The work was made lighter in dark times by the help of friends and family, and to them go our thanks.

Contents

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Introduction: Airminded Modernism Michael McCluskey

1

Part I Observations 2

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4

‘A Pinch of Inquisitive Pleasure’: Wyndham Lewis, the Great War and Military Surveillance Allan Pero

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‘From This New Culture of the Air We Finally See’: ‘Groundmindedness’ in the 1930s Luke Seaber

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Entering British Airspace: Aviation and Film Michael McCluskey

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CONTENTS

Part II 5

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Flying Blind: The Formation of Airmindedness from a Pilot’s Perspective Daniel Kilburn ‘Off the Ground and Through the Looking-Glass’: Airliners, Imagination and the Construction of the Modern Air Passenger Robert Hemmings Flying Dangerously: Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North Nicola Darwood

Part III 8

Industry

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‘A Solar Emperor’: Robert Byron Flies East Guy Woodward

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‘The Fundamental Magic of Flying’: Changing Perspectives in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient and Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Between the Acts Rinni Haji Amran

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Influencers

‘True Blue Heroines’: The 1930s Aviatrix and Eccentric Colonial Femininity Ann Rea

Part IV

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Spectacle

Spectre and Spectacle: Mock Air Raids as Aerial Theatre in Interwar Britain Brett Holman

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CONTENTS

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Airminded Nationalism: Great Britain and the Schneider Trophy Competition Jeremy R. Kinney

Part V 13

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Potential

When the Wolves Were Flying: The Box of Delights and Flight in 1930s Children’s Literature Dominic Dean

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‘The Camels Are Coming’: W. E. Johns, Biggles, and T. E. Lawrence’s Flight into the Air Force Simon Machin

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‘Watch the Skies!’: Guernica, Dresden and the Age of the Bomber in George Orwell and Rex Warner Simon W. Goulding

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Rinni Haji Amran is a Lecturer in English Literature at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She has written on the history of aviation and its impact on modernist literature including works by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner among others. Her research interests include ecocriticism, petrofiction, and contemporary Bruneian fiction. Nicola Darwood is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and leads the undergraduate programme in English Literature, teaching courses on Ulysses, modern Irish Literature, the Gothic, and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Her research focuses mainly on twentieth-century women writers; she has published work on Elizabeth Bowen (including A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2012) and Stella Benson. She is co-chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and co-editor of The Elizabeth Bowen Review. Dominic Dean is an early career researcher and teacher in literary studies, and a research policy professional. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, and his research focuses on violence towards children in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature, in the contexts of migration, technology, queerness, and intergenerational conflict. He has published work on violent authenticity in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro in Textual Practice, on migrant children in Ishiguro in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and on Thatcherism’s disappearing

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children in Literature and History. He is currently writing a monograph on killing children and children who kill in British fiction from Thatcherism to Brexit. He currently works at the University of Sussex, in a role split between teaching and managing the University’s submission to REF2021, including developing research impact from across the Humanities. He has published on the REF and its implications for research culture in the Times Higher Education Supplement and elsewhere. Simon W. Goulding is an independent scholar who lives and works in Birmingham, UK. He has written on Patrick Hamilton, George Orwell, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh among others. As a writer on London he has produced articles on Nigel Kneale, Angela Carter and Colin MacInnes. He is currently working on the Firemen writers of the Second World War. Robert Hemmings is author of Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). His work has appeared in such journals as Word & Image, Literature and Medicine and Criticism. He is presently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds working on objects of mobility in modern British culture. Brett Holman is a Professional Associate of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra, Australia. His research interests lie in airmindedness and the aeroplane in British and Australian culture; the theory, anticipation, and experience of aerial bombardment in Britain, c.1900 to 1945, particularly in the civilian and public sphere; aviation spectacle and aerial theatre; and mystery aircraft scares in the early twentieth century. He blogs at Airminded: https://airminded.org. Daniel Kilburn is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Geography and the Built Environment in University College London’s Institute of Education. He has published on topics ranging from the social history of public housing, to urban policy and planning, and the teaching and learning of research methods. A lifelong aviation ‘hobbyist’, he gained his private pilot’s license in 2015 and has since enjoyed building hours in a range of aeroplane types and flying as far afield as Spain. This is his first publication on aviation, and he hopes it will be the first of many. Jeremy R. Kinney is the Chair of the Aeronautics Department of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where he curates the air

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racing, aircraft propulsion, and interwar and World War II military aviation collections. His research focuses on technology in the United States and Europe over the course of the twentieth century. His recent publications include Reinventing the Propeller: Aeronautical Specialty and the Triumph of the Modern Airplane (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and ‘Sports Car Paradise: Racing in Los Angeles’, in LA Sports: Play, Games and Community in the City of Angels (University of Arkansas Press, 2018). He is currently researching and writing a history of international air racing in the 1920s and 1930s. Simon Machin is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton. His doctoral thesis, Ripping Yarns, is an analysis of competing codes of masculine behaviour in Boy’s Own adventure from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown to T. E. Lawrence’s The Mint. He has published on the prolific children’s writer Charles Hamilton (‘Frank Richards’) and George Orwell, and on John Buchan, T. E. Lawrence and modernity. He is currently conducting a series of oral history interviews, Recollected Yarns: Women’s Memories of Encounters with ‘Boy’s Own’ Adventure Fiction. Michael McCluskey is a Lecturer in the CAS Writing Program at Boston University. He was previously Lecturer in English at the University of York, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, and a Research Fellow at metaLAB (at) Harvard. His research looks at literature and film from (mostly) the 1920s and ’30s to consider the history of technology, the history of education, and the intersection of the two. He is co-editor, with Kristin Bluemel, of Rural Modernity in Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and currently at work on a monograph of 1930s British documentary. Allan Pero is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. He is also Editor-in-Chief of English Studies in Canada. He is co-editor of and contributor to The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell (2017). Recent publications include articles on Wyndham Lewis, Blanchot and Lacan, Lacan and the Posthuman, Ford Madox Ford, and Brigid Brophy. He is currently working on An Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory with Kel Pero for the University of Toronto Press, and on a book-length project on camp and Modernism.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Rea directs the English Literature programme at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown where she teaches twentieth-century British and Irish literature, detective fiction, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. Her research interests include Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster, middlebrow culture and the influence of Marie Stopes on thinking about marriage and sexuality. She is currently editing a collection of essays about gender and spy fiction. Luke Seaber is Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture on the Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate for the Humanities at University College London. He is author of G.K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (2012) and Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (2017). He has published various articles and chapters on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Guy Woodward is Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the project ‘The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda and British Culture’ in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. His book Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. An article on Graham Greene and flight is forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies; he has also contributed articles and essays to the Irish University Review, Literature and History and Paper Visual Art.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1

The new, expanded Croydon Airport in 1928 (Image courtesy of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust) Passengers and visitors consult the clocks in the recently opened Booking Hall of Croydon Airport (Image courtesy of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust) Wyndham Lewis, ABattery Shelled (1919) by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity) Wyndham Lewis, Planof War (1913) reproduced in BLAST (1914) Airspace infrastructure on display at Croydon Airport: aeroplanes and other vehicles, pilots, ground crew and passengers come together as crowds gather to observe it all on the viewing deck to the right of the control tower (Image courtesy of The Postal Museum) Aviation as the integration of economic, transportation and communication networks: loading air mail at Croydon Airport (Image courtesy of The Postal Museum) The booking hall at Croydon Airport (Image courtesy of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust) An Imperial Airways interior from Harry Harper, The Romance of a Modern Airway (1932) Imperial Airways promotional poster, 1931

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28 31

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65 142 144 193

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 12.1

Flying Officer Richard Waghorn speeds by a crowd of spectators in his Supermarine S.6 air racer during the 1929 Schneider Trophy Competition. (Image courtesy of Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Airminded Modernism Michael McCluskey

In 1932 the London department store Selfridge’s opened an aerodrome on its roof. It was not a functioning aerodrome with planes taking off and landing, but, rather, a publicity stunt that hoped to draw potential customers. Selfridge’s had made a name for itself staging such attentiongrabbing displays, and this ‘little aerodrome’ above busy Oxford Street capitalized on one of the biggest national obsessions throughout the 1920s and ’30s: aviation. As an article announcing the event declared, ‘Flying is the spear-head of modern progress, and it is good for us even in a remote and limited way to be in touch with it’ (‘An Aeroplane on Our Roof’ 10). To put the public somewhat in touch with modern progress, the store installed a small aeroplane in which visitors could get ‘the feel of’ flying. But the display did more than promote air travel; it hoped to encourage in the public the attitude towards modern progress captured in the period buzzword ‘airmindedness’. ‘All of us are the better for being a little airminded’ (‘An Aeroplane on Our Roof’ 10), Selfridge’s announced—a position that matched the message of many other corporations and government agencies at this time.

M. McCluskey (B) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_1

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To be airminded was to be modern, aware and accepting of the changes necessary to make Britain an active participant in international networks. It sprang from the interest in aviation that emerged as civilian air travel and entertaining air shows became increasingly popular in the years following the First World War. It also intertwined with the broader campaigns to modernize Britain in the interwar period—campaigns organized by the government and large corporations such as Shell Oil that aimed at preparing the public ‘to play our part in the new world order’ (Tallents 18). This new world order was being stitched together by the spread of international systems of transportation and communication. Aviation—once primarily a war weapon for countries to attack each other—was now being promoted as an important network for bringing nations together and circulating people, products and information among them. The successful operation of a British aviation system depended not only on the construction of infrastructure and its attendant industries but also on an airminded public that accepted aeroplanes and aerodromes as signs of progress and not threats to the stability of the nation and their local area. Aeroplanes were not just seen as signs of a spreading international infrastructure and transportation and trade network, however. They offered inspiration, entertainment, and a new way of looking at the nation. Amateur pilots took to the skies and formed local clubs for aviation enthusiasts while pilots such as Amy Johnson and Charles Lindbergh made record-breaking long-distance flights and became major celebrities. Air shows offered spectacles for large crowds and showed off daredevil stunts such as the loop-the-loop. Aeroplanes and air travel featured in novels, poems and paintings, and film-makers and photographers recorded aerial views that offered unfamiliar perspectives on cities, suburbs, historic sites, factories and the roads and railways that connected them. Interwar aviation included the expansion of transportation networks, the spread of associated industries such as airlines and airports, the promotion of an airminded attitude that embraced modernization and an international outlook and striking images for writers and artists. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain brings together these intertwining activities to consider the impact of aviation in Britain and the cultivation of ‘airmindedness’ as modernist ideology. It argues that aviation is a potent source for studies of the 1920s and ’30s as the aviation industry involved so many interconnected systems including transportation, communications, tourism, information, engineering and

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architecture. This book looks into these systems and proposes airmindedness as a crucial yet unexplored critical lens into the cultural production, economics and politics of the period. Indeed, one of the book’s main contentions is that, while aviation turned Britons’ attention to the skies, it also brought awareness to changes on the ground and offered new perspectives on the state of the nation. Airmindedness meant groundmindedness, and this book brings these new perspectives to its study of the changes that disrupted all Britons during this radical period. Aviation history has been the subject of several studies that focus on technological developments and the economics and logistics of the flying industry. Many of these look at the development of aviation in specific nations and connect the flying industry with conceptions and expressions of national identity. David Edgerton’s England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (1991) presents a thorough account of the technological and industrial developments of British aviation and challenges ‘the picture of the English elite as anti-scientific and anti-industrial, of English business as congenitally short-sighted, or of the English people trapped in an idiotic longing for all things rural’ (Edgerton xvi). In A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (1992) Peter Fritzsche demonstrates how ‘the histories of modern nationalism and modern technology are inexorably intertwined’ (Fritzsche 3) and uses aviation as a means of articulating the ‘modernist visions’ (Fritzsche 3) of the German state in the early twentieth century. Jennifer Van Vleck looks at American aviation in Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (2013). Through a study primarily of Pan American airlines, she argues that the aeroplane was a ‘conduit of power—military, economic, political’ (Van Vleck 3) whose ‘aerial perspective’ (Van Vleck 4) provided ‘an optic through which Americans came to envision their nation as a global power’ (Van Vleck 4). While these studies examine what Van Vleck describes as the ‘rich and pervasive culture of aviation’ (Van Vleck 8), other studies look at the influence of aviation on culture more broadly. In A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918 (1994) Robert Wohl presents aviation as ‘an aesthetic event’ (Wohl 1) and considers responses to and representations of flying in works by the writers H. G. Wells, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as the painters Kazimir Malevich and Robert Delaunay. Wohl captures ‘the popular passion for aviation’ (Wohl 255), which, in the period he covers, was directed at the adventurous aviator and ‘the unending triumphs of

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technology’ (Wohl 256) rather than, in the interwar period, the increased opportunities for transportation and trade and the cultivation of an airminded, modern attitude. In Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War (2003) Richard Hallion puts the emergence of the aeroplane in the early twentieth century into the wider context of flying and the human imagination from across centuries and cultures and includes accounts of ‘some of the best minds in the history of technology, as well as a host of unknown would-be inventors and occasional cranks’ (Hallion xx). Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain contributes to the technological and cultural history of aviation and examines the period interest in crossing borders, connecting to other nations and industries and expanding British influence through aerodromes, air travel and the people and products they circulated. The circulations and spaces that aviation enabled have been the focus of recent work on ‘aeromobilities’. Aeromobilities include the ‘embodied, emotional and practised geographies’ (Adey et al. 774) of air travel as well as the ‘making of new social practices, formations and spaces’ (Adey et al. 775) that stem from the aviation industry. In ‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ (2008), Peter Adey asks for a deeper and wider ‘consideration of the social, cultural and political inflections of aeromobilities’ (1319), and this book contributes to his call by considering the cultural, social and political aspects of aviation in the 1920s and ’30s— the nascent period of British aeromobility. With its focus on ‘the distinctive spaces, networks, systems and environments’ (Cwerner 3) of interwar aeromobility, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain extends recent work in modernist studies that feature industrial and technological developments, their impact on literature and culture, and the new connections they created. Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (2010) considers the impact of the development of different communications technologies and their forms of ‘connectibility’ (Goble 20) but does not include transportation such as air travel.1 In Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (2010), David Welsh looks at literature from the 1880s to the 1930s to consider the ‘knowable community’ (Welsh 14) that the London Underground helped to construct as well as ‘the broader technological, architectural, and cultural changes’ (Welsh 12) that came with it. David Trotter sees new forms of ‘connectivity’ (8) emerging in the interwar period because

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of new technologies and analyses them through the literature of the 1920s and ’30s in Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (2013). His chapter on ‘Transit Writing’ only touches briefly on air travel but presents ‘transport as telecommunication medium’ (218), an idea that Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain explores in much more detail: transportation as a form of communication. James Purdon looks at developments in information technology in Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State (2015) and helps to construct a genealogy of ‘global connectivity’ (20) by looking at writers that engaged with the information systems that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. In Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (2015) Paul Saint-Amour argues that interwar Britons were connected by a ‘collective psychosis’ (5) caused by the ‘pre-traumatic stress’ (7) of total war and offers a brief explanation of what he calls the ‘Interwar Air Power Theory’ (61) that contributed to this condition: a useful, sharply focused look at one particular military figure’s ideas for the use of aeroplanes in wartime. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain pursues the common interest in ‘connectivity’, ‘connectibility’ and ‘collective’ action that these studies share and considers the movements of machines, people, products and data that made these connections possible. It examines not only the diverse ‘mobility-systems’ (Urry 10) that the flying business entailed but also the mobilization of airminded modernism: expressions of the potential (aesthetic and industrial) of aviation as disruptive force and privileged perspective. As John Urry argues, ‘[a]ir flights and systems are thus central to the emergent global order generating mass movement, new forms of dwelling, interconnectedness, new inequalities, novel global meeting places, distinct ambivalent juxtapositions, new modes of vision and enhanced relations of “empire” as attractors’ (Urry 155). Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain looks at the global order as it existed in the 1920s and ’30s and the new modes of vision, new dwellings and new relations that constitute airminded modernism: an activation of ‘politics, technologies, people, education, policies, places and things for the development of flight and betterment of the nation’ (‘Airports and Air-mindedness’ 346).

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Flying Business The spread of civilian aviation in Britain in the 1920s and ’30s coincided with a co-ordinated effort to promote national modernization. Government and corporate agents such as the Empire Marketing Board, General Post Office (GPO), Shell Oil and ICI helped to expand communications and commercial networks and pioneered new modes of national projection. The ‘art of national projection’ (Tallents 41) was the subject of Sir Stephen Tallents’s 1933 manifesto The Projection of England—a marketing pamphlet that captured the aims of this interwar campaign to update Britain’s image at home and abroad. New inventions, Tallents argued, ‘have given to whole nations the power of communing together by new means and in new modes’ (Tallents 48). Civilian aviation was certainly one of these new modes and was part of this broader push to encourage Britons to adopt new modes of transportation and communication, to develop trade links with British colonies and to position Britain as a key player in international alliances. As Jennifer Van Vleck has argued, aviation in the early twentieth century was both ‘a symbol and catalyst’ (Van Vleck 3) for national progress. It sparked the development of a new transportation and service industry that extended existing systems across the nation and the globe. It also, as the example from Selfridge’s illustrates, tied into other industries including retail, publishing, architecture and design. But it was also ‘an especially powerful metaphor’ (Van Vleck 6) for the process of national modernization. According to Van Vleck, ‘aviation animated nationalist narratives in every country that developed the technology’ (Van Vleck 20). Nationalist narratives of strength and power were put on display during the First World War, where air power was featured in military campaigns and in propaganda that promoted the (im)morality and modernity of both Britain and Germany. Following the war the further development of military air power was complemented by an interest in creating a civilian aviation industry. What Peter Fritzsche describes as Germany’s ‘obsessive national interest’ (2) in aviation was echoed in other European nations as well as America. The 1920s saw the emergence of national airlines including the French Air Union (later Air France), the Dutch KLM, Belgium’s Sabena and Pan American World Airways in the United States. In each of these countries, an expanding aviation industry served as ‘an index of national vitality and thus national destiny’ (Fritzsche 2). For

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Britain, ‘aerial navigation’ (Wellman 15) seemed its particular destiny, the natural inheritance of its domination of the seas. The establishment of a global network of trade and transportation across oceans had prepared Britain to ‘navigate the great atmospheric ocean which everywhere surrounds and covers the land’ (Wellman 13). As Scott Anthony points out, ‘[n]aval strength had underpinned Britain’s rise as an imperial power, and aviation promised to reconfigure Britain’s place in the globalized world of the future’ (‘The Future’s in the Air’ 313). Britain sought to use its imperial connections to construct an aviation infrastructure that could support the expansion of its imperial trade network and that could position it as a crucial component in international networks. In a speech delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, the controller of civil aviation Major General Sir F. H. Sykes announced that ‘Britain must become the carrier of the world, not only on the sea, but in the air’ (‘Empire Air Routes’ 6). As Sykes argued, through aviation Britain could position itself at the centre of a ‘world-wide commercial network’ (‘Empire Air Routes’ 6) as it was ‘in an unequalled position for establishing air depots, refuelling bases, and meteorological and wireless stations in every part of the world’ (‘Empire Air Routes’ 6). Indeed, Sykes proposed that Cairo could be ‘the Clapham Junction of the India, Australia, and Cape routes, and the heart of the whole system of expansion’ (‘Empire Air Routes’ 6). This aerial age of expansion included the development of Britain’s own national airline and its first civilian airport at Croydon (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). Imperial Airways was formed from the merger of the first few independent airlines and was bolstered by government subsidies. These subsidies indicate the precariousness of the early days of the aviation industry and the commitment by some officials in keeping Britain competitive as many nations attempted to ‘conquer the air’ (Wellman 13). According to Marc Dierikx, ‘aeronautics represented one of the prime technologies through which nation-states expressed power and prestige’; therefore, ‘it was inevitable that governments should support airline ventures that sprung up within their borders’ (Dierikx 11). Imperial Airways began within the United Kingdom’s national borders, but from its founding its aim was to connect Britain to its colonies more quickly and more comprehensively through the establishment of air routes that initiated in Cairo, the Clapham Junction of an inter-imperial system that would circulate civil servants, businessmen, engineers and other workers as well

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Fig. 1.1 The new, expanded Croydon Airport in 1928 (Image courtesy of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust)

as financial documents, letters and orders for delivery through the Imperial Air Mail system that aviation could now provide. This entailed the construction of small aerodromes through the flight path from Cairo to Cape Town and from Cairo to Karachi. While flights along these routes were established to circulate British passengers and paperwork, they were also open for people from other countries to use and thus could position Britain as a leading force in international air travel and delivery. Alan Cobham, the First World War pilot who made the expedition from Cairo to Cape Town to determine the route, noted in 1925 that ‘[b]y aviation could be effected the quick passage of letters and individuals and acceleration of business’ (‘Aviation and Empire’ 13). This imperial aviation system would derive its strength not just from the establishment of interconnected aerodromes but also from the movement of goods, people and machines throughout the empire. Croydon Airport, Britain’s first civilian airport, established much of the protocol surrounding air travel as we know it today. Located about ten miles south-west of Central London, it offered air travel starting in

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Fig. 1.2 Passengers and visitors consult the clocks in the recently opened Booking Hall of Croydon Airport (Image courtesy of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust)

1920—first to Paris then further on as international aviation networks expanded. Croydon Airport had its origins in the military aerodromes at nearby Beddington and Waddon built for the Royal Flying Corps for the First World War. After the war, these facilities were combined to create a civilian airport that was expanded into a new, modern facility in 1928. ‘Throughout the 1930s, Croydon Airport was to symbolize everything that was modern, exciting and forward-looking about air travel’ (Cluett et al. 2). Croydon Airport was the first to have an air control tower, which also contained modern radio and meteorological equipment and was where radio operators established the phrase ‘May Day’ as an emergency signal for pilots. The check-in system and airport facilities familiar to air travellers today was established at Croydon, where each airline had its own booking desk, a coffee shop and bookstall were

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available, a hotel provided accommodation and a bar, and arriving passengers passed through a customs area that followed the practice of seaports handling arrivals by ship. Croydon Airport was also a popular tourist destination—both for its departing and landing aeroplanes and for its modern facilities. Public tours of the buildings were offered, crowds gathered to see the famous people who frequently arrived and a public viewing platform allowed visitors to watch landing and departing planes throughout the day. The facilities available at the new, modern Croydon Airport indicate the many other industries with which aviation intertwined and, more broadly, ‘the modernising impact of aviation’ (‘The Future’s in the Air’ 304). The expanding aviation industry was a way ‘to consolidate Great Britain’s commercial and military power in an increasingly competitive world’ (‘Representing Connection’ 152). This included the development of the technologies needed to manage an efficient aviation system as well as the tourist industry and the influence on architecture and design. As the control tower at Croydon demonstrated, modern aviation insisted on up-to-date radio equipment to allow for communication between the airport and pilot and meteorological equipment that could predict problems that the weather might cause. The lack of a direct rail link to central London spurred discussions of an expanded railway system and created the need for a hotel and other hospitality services on-site at Croydon. These services catered to tourists passing through Croydon on their way to other places. Indeed, throughout the interwar period, Croydon was Britain’s gateway to glamour. Flights from Croydon to Paris were popular and allowed tourists to catch train and flight services to other destinations. Surrey Flying Services offered relatively low cost ‘tea flights’ over London that included ‘seeing all the famous sights from the air and tea elegantly served with sandwiches and small cakes’ (Cluett et al. 30). Imperial Airways also offered this type of short trip as well as more luxurious services such as its ‘Silver Wing’ service to Paris which departed Croydon at 12:30 each day and ‘represented everything that was most glamorous about this latest form of travel’ (Cluett et al. 42). Other glamorous flight services including a ‘dinner flight’ (Cluett et al. 37) to Paris available via Imperial Airways and a ‘party plane’ (Cluett et al. 29) that could be chartered by VIPs. In 1934 the department store owner Gordon Selfridge chartered a plane to fly over London during New Year’s Eve during which he staged an in-flight fashion show of women’s evening wear available in his store (Honeycombe 67).

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Croydon of course was not the only place people could see aeroplanes taking off and landing as air shows and competitions had been a popular form of entertainment since the early days of aviation. And even those who did not seek out flying aeroplanes as entertainment could not avoid them as their presence increased in the skies over Britain with the expansion of travel services and the use of skywriting as a form of advertisement. Aeroplanes and pilots were also present in publications, films, advertisements and exhibitions. The aviation industry, as Scott Anthony argues, introduced ‘a new type of national mythology’ (‘Imperialism and Internationalism’ 138) that included new heroes and icons celebrated and circulated through newspapers, newsreels, aviation magazines and other mediums. Aviators like Alan Cobham and Amy Johnson became major celebrities for their long-distance flights, and other pilots found fame for their adventures including aristocrats such as Lady Mary Heath. The Countess of Drogheda was another early aviation enthusiast, who flew her own plane and curated the ‘Aircraft Exhibition’ at London’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1917. According to Flight magazine, the exhibition was organized to provide ‘an opportunity to the public to become conversant with the “art” of aviation’ and included a ‘big collection of pictures and photographs, ancient and modern’ (‘Airisms’ 12). Stories of these and other pilots—both real and imaginary—filled the pages of the many magazines about flying that appeared in the early twentieth century including Aeroplane, Flight , and Pilot . In addition, flying became a familiar topic in children’s adventure stories (‘the air is the thing now’, John Betjeman wrote about 1930s books for boys) as well as films, newsreels and novels (Betjeman quoted in Cunningham 168). As Valentine Cunningham contends, the pilot ‘kept on fascinating the ’30s imagination’ (169). In his extensive British Writers of the Thirties , Cunningham quite rightly includes a section on aviation and airmindedness (discussed in more detail below), although he focuses on the figure of pilots or ‘airmen’ (169): the heroic models they provided, the ideas of masculinity they offered and the failures they helped to communicate. But interwar writing—and film, photography, painting and design— was fascinated with more than just the airman: the aeroplane, airports and what Van Vleck calls the ‘aerial optic’ (Van Vleck 10) were all sources of inspiration and objects of study. Travelling by plane brought excitement, tension, and comedic moments to novels like Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) and Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1932) as well as new sites and sources of mystery for detective fiction including Freeman Wills

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Crofts’s The 12:30 from Croydon (1934) and Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (1935). The airport—or ‘aerodrome’—featured in, among others, Stephen Spender’s poem ‘The Landscape near an Aerodrome’ (1933) and in Rex Warner’s novel The Aerodrome (1940). Aeroplanes flying across the sky are warning signs in both Coming Up for Air (1939) by George Orwell and Between the Acts (1941) by Virginia Woolf. Imperial Airways commissioned a series of documentary films about their expanding air routes, and the architect Wells Coates used ‘aviation-linked’ (Darling 909) materials and ‘aviation metaphors’ (Darling 910) in his interior design. Film-maker Claude Friese-Greene filmed Across England in an Aeroplane in 1919, and the company Aerofilms produced thousands of photographs now catalogued by the Britain from Above project (2010–2014). The flying business included the movements of people, products and machines and the mobilization of a publishing and propaganda industry aimed at getting Britons to accept flying as a form of transportation and entertainment and to see Britain as a world leader in this emergent global system. Some writers and artists helped to pursue this aim while others explored the negative sides and/or used the aerial perspective offered by air travel to consider the other changes that Britain was undergoing—both changes linked to aviation and those seemingly unrelated such as urban and suburban sprawl, the despoliation of the countryside, the dereliction of old industrial sites and the emergence of new ones. As Cunningham contends, ‘[t]here had never been such an air-minded time in England’ (167), and debates about who was or was not airminded— and what airmindedness exactly entailed—interconnected with discussions of aviation and the state of the nation.

Be Air-Minded! Making people airminded was a way of mobilizing interwar Britons to accept the changes that came with the expansion of the aviation industry and other modernization projects. To be airminded was to be broadminded and to endorse the connections made possible by new forms of transportation and communication, the movements these connections created and the modern image of Britain that government and corporate agents wanted to project to the world. The campaign to create an airminded population included advertisements, newspaper articles, speeches, public exhibitions, documentary films and newsreels. These

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were sponsored by businesses that benefited from increased air travel and the popularity of aviation including Imperial Airways, Shell Oil and Selfridge’s, which sold, among other products, toy aeroplanes, and even announced plans to open its own ‘Aeroplane Department’ (‘A Selfridge Aeroplane Department’ 12). But being airminded was not just about making a trip in an aeroplane or buying aviation-related items. It also meant being aware of the threats posed by the build-up of national air power. Peter Fritzsche describes airmindedness as ‘that buzzword of the interwar years’ (Fritzsche 6) and indicates this dual nature. ‘To be airminded in the 1930s was to understand these binary meanings of aviation: on the one hand to comprehend and embrace all the newfangled possibilities and soaring achievements […] but also, on the other hand, to soberly acknowledge the stern dangers that came with the air age’ (Fritzsche 218–19). Discussions and expressions of airmindedness in interwar Britain explore this dual nature. The 1936 film Things to Come sets as its premise these seemingly competing visions of air power. Based on H. G. Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933), the film opens with an aerial attack on the British city of ‘Everytown’, followed by a thirty-year global war in which modern technologies such as aeroplanes disappear and populations become increasingly tribal. As one character announces, ‘Civilisation is over. Flying is dead’. The connection between aviation and civilized behaviour is reinforced with the eventual emergence of an international organization of ‘airmen’ called ‘Wings Over the World’ that ends the global war and leads to a peaceful future of technological advances. Things to Come offers a vision to contemporary Britons of both the immediate and distant future and, in doing so, animates interwar debates about the potential offered by air power. The chapters in Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain examine this potential. Airmindedness, it argues, was an understanding of the potential that aviation offered: the potential of air power to create international alliances, to cause aggression, to increase anxieties and to consider—and conceal—changes on the ground. Cunningham notes what he sees as the ‘airminded expectancy’ (Cunningham 168) of the period—part of the apprehensiveness of the interwar period that Paul Saint-Amour sees as ‘perpetual suspense’ (91). This apprehension was expressed, in part, through discussions of airmindedness and representations of aviation that articulated a broader concern about Britain and the world. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain

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looks at both the excitement and apprehension brought by the ‘Aerial Age’ (Wellman 1). Airmindedness was a means of promoting new connections between Britons and between Britain and the rest of the world. It was, according to Adey, ‘the organizing complex or ideal that orchestrated the enthusiasm and development of aviation’ (‘Airports and Air-mindedness’ 346). Airmindedness meant not only being aware of improved transportation but also of the improved communications that came through air travel and air mail. In a 1929 speech, Britain’s first Director of Aviation, Sir Sefton Brancker, announced that ‘[t]he more the average citizen can learn of the possibilities of aviation, both in prosecution of war and in industrial development and rapid communication in peace, the more can the world count on the power and influence of air activities being applied only to further the ends of universal friendship and general prosperity’ (Brancker quoted in ‘Twenty Years of Flying’ 118). As Brancker acknowledges, acceptance of aviation’s possibilities required explicit instruction. What Brett Holman terms ‘the airminded press’ (14) provided some of this through frequent articles about the expansion of air services. Other forms of instruction were initiated by the Air League, the Women’s Aerial League, and the League of Air-Minded Youth through events and publications (Aerial Life 28–9). ‘[A]ir-minded’ is what ‘we are now taught to be’ (8), Winifred Holtby wrote in 1930 in an account of her first flight to Paris—an experience that provided a ‘sense of superiority’ over the non-airminded (8). ‘Be Air-Minded!’ was the more direct command of a 1932 article that captured the intent of much of the pro-aviation interwar media: ‘Johnny-Head-in-Air’ was the butt of old-fashioned philosophy. The child whose thoughts are not in the air to-day will be ‘out of it’ when he comes to maturity. The danger of being backward in air-mindedness can be best realised by comparing any British with any Continental newspaper. The aeroplane implies not only a new path of travel, but a new way of life. A civilisation that is not ready to adapt itself to that transforming power will not escape the penalties. (14)

The article suggests that not being airminded would hold the nation back and connects aviation to an advanced civilization similar to the film Things to Come.

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In the interwar period, ‘to be air-minded […] was to be a good citizen’ (Airports and Air-mindedness’ 353), as Adey has claimed, and articles, newsreels, speeches and exhibitions provided the ‘air-conditioning’ (Van Vleck 106) that the public needed. One of the challenges that airminded media faced was the idea that air power meant potential aggression between countries, particularly in this apprehensive period in which renewed conflict between Britain, its allies and Germany increasingly seemed unavoidable. Even those that promoted the positive aspects of aviation and its possibilities for international cooperation acknowledged that increased air power was also needed militarily. According to Brett Holman, ideas about the threat of enemy aerial attacks could be found in ‘almost any book on airpower which an interested reader picked up in the 1930s’ (Holman 14) as well as in newspaper articles and novels such as Invasion from the Air (1934). Anxieties over—and preparations for—the ‘next war in the air’ (Holman 13) underlie many discussions of airmindedness in Britain and representations of flying machines, men and women. Cunningham notes that writers were particularly fascinated with the ‘heroic figure’ that flying offered: ‘the big, the tough, the butch, the airborne’ (170). Onto these individuals were projected national fears of failure and hopes for success not only in a possible future war but also in plans for continued modernization and integration into emerging transnational networks. The ‘Airman’ from W. H. Auden’s The Orators records in his journal: The aeroplane has only recently become necessary, owing to the progress of enemy propaganda, and even now not for flying itself, but as a guarantee of good faith to the people, frightened by ghost stories, the enemy’s distorted vision of the airman’s activities. (45)

Auden’s Airman notes that the aeroplane is necessary not just for flying but as a sign of faith—a symbol of national strength and guarantee of the promise of progress. Real-life aviators were also used to celebrate success and communicate fears. The pilot Alan Cobham embodied the promise of imperial air routes through Africa. As the Saturday Review reported, ‘no modern invention is likely to affect the future of the British Empire so intimately as the aeroplane’ (‘The Aeroplane’s Progress’ 690–91). And this future depended on Cobham, who was mapping the routes: ‘If Sir Alan Cobham, who has just

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left England on an aerial survey of Africa, can prove, besides the Imperial value of air links, the commercial value of the aeroplanes in African trade, he must fulfill these conditions’ (‘The Aeroplane’s Progress’ 690– 91). Amy Johnson broke flying records but also became a marker of the successes and failures of the modern woman. A 1934 article in the English Review titled ‘Woman Wanders—the World Wavers’ wonders: [H]as she done more than guide a machine perfected by men’s brains, along a trail already blazed by men, and now furnished with aerodromes, at a faster pace than for the moment anyone else has done? A cynical moralist might say that fast women are no new phenomenon, and that in breaking speed records woman is merely translating into a new sphere her hereditary talent. (314)

In other words, women had simply adapted old habits (and awful stereotypes) to new technologies. While not the writer’s point, the article suggests that Amy Johnson is the ideal modern citizen as imagined by much of the airminded propaganda: able to adapt to the new technologies offered by airminded men. Airmen and airwomen were presented as examples of both the potential successes and ‘high failure’ (Cunningham 155) of the interwar period because of their privileged position. They had ‘to be looked up to’ (Cunningham 168), and they could look down on others. But aviation potentially gave anyone this aerial perspective. In addition to the professionals, amateur pilots and local flying clubs took to the skies and relatively cheap, short flights were made available as new ways of seeing the sights. Companies such Aerofilms, AeroPictorial and Airco produced aerial photographs for ordnance surveys and mapping; filmmakers began to include aerial shots in sequences; and writers could describe what characters saw from the sky. Airmindedness also meant awareness of these new ways of looking at the nation—both physically and metaphorically. Fritzsche claims that ‘[t]o the pilot’s eye, the specific and particular blended into the general and common’, thus, ‘political and cultural divisions could not be seen from the air’ (155). However, as the above examples indicate, the pilot’s eye was not the only one that could access this aerial perspective. While some discussions of airmindedness and the aerial perspective did obscure political and cultural divisions in favour of a harmonious view of contemporary Britain (and its future), others used this perspective expressly to address

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these divisions and point out the changes, disruptions and movements that came along with national modernization. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain includes examples of the aerial perspective and expressions of airmindedness that emphasize the general over the particular, and it finds accounts that document exactly those disruptions and movements that these other examples hoped to obscure. Through its fifteen chapters it picks out multiple components of the aviation system and offers examples and expressions of airminded modernism. These chapters are, of course, not exhaustive, and there are many more writers, painters, photographers, film-makers and flyers whose work can also help us to consider the impact of aviation in the 1920s and ’30s, in Britain and beyond. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain offers a theoretical framework for future research and—with each chapter—useful case studies of the interconnections between mobilities, modernism, aviation and identity. Part I of the volume, ‘Observations’, brings together three chapters that examine the aerial perspective: the new ways of looking at the nation and its relationship to the rest of the world. It starts with the legacy of the First World War and the ‘weaponization’ of aerial surveillance. In ‘“A Pinch of Inquisitive Pleasure”: Wyndham Lewis, the Great War and Military Surveillance’, Allan Pero uses Lewis’s writings and paintings to consider how aviation created targets and mobilized new strategies for studying the landscape. While these had dangerous implications—including bombing British cities—they also created opportunities to consider the sites targeted by national modernizers as in need of redevelopment. Luke Seaber, in the next chapter ‘“From this new culture of the air we finally see”: “Groundmindedness” in the 1930s’, looks into literary responses to this attention to the land as seen from the sky and proposes ‘groundmindedness’ as an influential yet hitherto unarticulated aspect of aviation and British modernism. In ‘Entering British Airspace: Aviation and Film’ Michael McCluskey looks at documentary and amateur films to consider the new spaces created by the expansion of aviation and to examine the crafting of national airspace: a crucial component to British modernity, identity and industry. Part II ‘Industry’ turns attention to the technical and commercial aspects of aviation and the ways in which this industry—and its many aspects—helped to shape the modern British citizen. Daniel Kilburn takes us inside the aircraft in ‘Flying Blind: The Formation of Airmindedness from a Pilot’s Perspective’. Kilburn shows how ‘many of the technologies

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upon which today’s pilots are reliant’ come from this period and were communicated through specialized publications such as Flight magazine, a medium that helped to mould the piloting experience familiar to flyers today. In ‘“Off the Ground and Through the Looking-Glass”: Airliners, Imagination and the Construction of the Modern Air Passenger’ Robert Hemmings focuses on the civilian airline industry and its construction/courting of the ideal passenger. Writers of the 1920s and ’30s were particularly interested in this figure and helped to create a ‘new class of modern subject’: the mobile, modern citizen. Nicola Darwood looks at one example of the mobile, modern citizen—the professional businesswoman—in the chapter ‘Flying Dangerously: Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North’. Bowen’s directive to ‘move dangerously’ captures the dynamism of the aerial age, an era of increasingly disconnected interactions orchestrated by the multiple components of the flying business. Aviation created celebrities and enabled adventures that stirred the imagination. Part III ‘Influencers’ looks at the lives and impact of some of flying’s famous figures. In ‘“True Blue Heroines”: The 1930s Aviatrix and Eccentric Colonial Femininity’, Ann Rea examines the popularity of women flyers Amy Johnson, Beryl Markham and Jean Batten to consider feminism, sexism, celebrity culture and the mobility of female identities in the interwar period. In ‘“A Solar Emperor”: Robert Byron Flies East’, Guy Woodward examines the intersection of aviation and the explosion of popular travel writing in the interwar years. Woodward focuses on the work of Robert Byron, one of the period’s most popular travel writers, and uses his movements on land and in the air to document the expanding air networks that allowed travel to India, Persia, Palestine and Egypt. In the next chapter, Rinni Haji Amran discusses one of the period’s most famous flyers, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, but draws attention to an understudied aspect of her career: her influence on Virginia Woolf. ‘“The Fundamental Magic of Flying”: Changing Perspectives in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient and Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Between the Acts ’ argues that Woolf began to adopt an aerial perspective in her writing after reading Lindbergh’s book about flying (given to Woolf as a gift). The two chapters of Part IV ‘Spectacle’ look at aviation as a popular form of entertainment. Rather than flying as passengers or pilots, most interwar Britons experienced aviation as ‘aerial theatre’. In ‘Spectre and Spectacle: Mock Air Raids as Aerial Theatre in Interwar Britain’, Brett

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Holman shows how the theatrics of the annual Hendon air show helped to project British power and how popular aviation could be used to create an airminded public. Jeremy Kinney goes behind the scenes of such spectacles in ‘Airminded Nationalism: Great Britain and the Schneider Trophy Competition’. Kinney looks at British participation in the Schneider Trophy, an international air race, and examines the partnership between industry, government research and the Royal Air Force (RAF) that supported the British team and saw success as crucial to Britain’s role in international alliances. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain concludes with Part V ‘Potential’. In ‘When the Wolves Were Flying: The Box of Delights and Flight in 1930s Children’s Literature’, Dominic Dean considers the ways in which aviation was imagined in interwar children’s literature: as threat, as source of knowledge, as surveillance, as escape and as imprisonment. Simon Machin looks at the male pilot as model hero in ‘“The Camels Are Coming”: W. E. Johns, Biggles, and T. E. Lawrence’s Flight into the Air Force’. Machin contrasts the model presented by Lawrence in his memoir of his RAF experience The Mint with the series of adventure stories for young readers about fictional pilot James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworth. These two chapters consider the potential of such adventure stories in educating young Britons and the potential of airminded youth themselves in participating in—and questioning— the new movements that undergirded modern Britain. The final chapter ‘“Watch the Skies!”: Guernica, Dresden and the Age of the Bomber in George Orwell and Rex Warner’ looks at the potential of the air power and airminded population developed during the 1920s and ’30s in facing another world war. Through a study of, among others, the writers George Orwell and Rex Warner, Simon Goulding tracks ‘the dreams of luxury travel and record-breaking exploits through to the imminent threat posed by airpower as the 1930s comes to its uncertain close’. In its fifteen interconnected and interdisciplinary chapters, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain moves from the aerial attacks of the First World War to the threats of the Second and considers how the aerial perspective and campaigns to create an airminded public impacted British culture in the intervening years. Each chapter contributes to our broader understanding of British modernization and modernism, the movements they encouraged, and the mobility of identity: individual, local and national.

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Note 1. Goble refers to ‘the idea of connectibility’ in Henry James’s short story ‘The Middle Years’ (1893).

Works Cited Adey, Peter. ‘Airports and Air-Mindedness: Spacing, Timing and Using the Liverpool Airport, 1929–1939.’ Social and Cultural Geography 7:3 (2006): 343–363. ———. ‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects, Visions.’ Geography Compass. 2:5 (2008): 1318–36. ———. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Malden, MA and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010. ———, Lucy Budd and Phil Hubbard, ‘Flying Lessons: Exploring the Social and Cultural Geographies of Global Air Travel.’ Progress in Human Geography. 31:6 (2007): 773–91. ‘Airisms.’ Flight (4 January 1917): 12. Anthony, Scott. ‘Imperialism and Internationalism: The British Documentary Movement and the Legacy of the Empire Marketing Board.’ Empire and Film. Eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe. London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. ‘The Future’s in the Air: Imperial Airways and the British Documentary Film Movement.’ Journal of British Cinema and Television. 8:3 (2011): 301– 21. Auden, W.H. The Orators: An English Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. ‘Aviation and Empire.’ The Times, 22 May 1925: 13. ‘Be Air-Minded!’ The Observer, 26 July 1932: 14. Callisthenes. ‘A Selfridge Aeroplane Department’. The Times, 30 January 1930: 12. ———. ‘An Aeroplane on Our Roof.’ The Times, 9 March 1932: 10. Cluett, Douglass, Joanna Nash and Bob Learmonth. Croydon Airport: The Great Days 1928–1939. London: London Borough of Sutton Libraries and Art Services, 1980. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Cwerner, Saulo. ‘Introducing Aeromobilities.’ Aeromobilities. Eds. Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry. London: Routledge, 2009. 1–21. Darling, Elizabeth. ‘From Cockpit to Domestic Interior: The Great War and the Architecture of Wells Coates.’ The Journal of Architecture 19:6 (2014): 903–922.

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Dierikx, Marc. Clipping the Clouds: How Air Travel Changed the World. London: Praeger, 2008. Edgerton, David. England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines. London: Penguin, 2013. ‘Empire Air Routes.’ The Times, 3 February 1920: 6. Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Goble, Mark. Beautiful Circuits Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2010. Hallion, Richard P. Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity Through the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Holman, Brett. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Holtby, Winifred. ‘On Having Flown to Paris: The Real Danger.’ Manchester Guardian, 30 September 1930: 8. Honeycombe, Gordon. Selfridges Seventy-Five Years: The Story of the Store. London: Park Lane Press, 1984. Liddell Hart, B.H. ‘“Woman Wanders—The World Wavers” or Woman and the World Quake.’ English Review (September 1934): 310–325. Purdon, James. Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Saint-Amour, Paul. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Tallents, Stephen, The Projection of England. London: Faber and Faber, 1932. Trotter, David. ‘Representing Connection: A Multimedia Approach to Colonial Film, 1918–1939.’ Empire and Film. Eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe. London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. ‘The Aeroplane’s Progress.’ Saturday Review, 19 November 1927: 690–91. ‘Twenty Years of Flying.’ The Times, 24 July 1929: 118. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Van Vleck, Jennifer. Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Wellman, Walter. The Aerial Age. New York: A. R. Keller, 1911. Welsh, David. Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Wohl, Robert. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994.

PART I

Observations

CHAPTER 2

‘A Pinch of Inquisitive Pleasure’: Wyndham Lewis, the Great War and Military Surveillance Allan Pero

The ‘weaponization’ of military surveillance was one of the innovations of the Great War. The potential for successful aerial bombing, conceived as possible first by dirigible and then by aeroplane, had begun to be explored a few years prior to 1914. Indeed, East London was bombed repeatedly by Zeppelin airships the night of 31 May 1915, but aeroplane bombing remained largely a theoretical concept until 1916 (Beckett 205). As a gunner and bombardier, Wyndham Lewis experienced the difficulties of contending with the perspective and promise held by what I shall call here a weaponized aerial gaze. His first recorded experience of the effects of aerial battle occurred in June 1917. In a letter to Ezra Pound, Lewis describes his consternation and surprise at his bunker being strafed with machine-gun fire: I withdrew, put on my tin-hat, and, recovered from my amazement, once more protruded my person from my minuscule fortress, & looked

A. Pero (B) University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_2

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towards the clouds. Imagine my indignation and interest on finding two of the abominable enemy flying at an insolently low altitude, and pooping off in all directions. No sign of a British plane anywhere. There were such crowds of archies [anti-aircraft guns] firing at the two Bosches that they seemed partially embedded in an archipelago of tiny clouds, repeated little points of light showing where they flew, like a warship signalling at night. (Pound/Lewis 78)

Though these German planes were eventually driven off by British ones, Lewis’s amazement speaks to the innovation in attack. His description of the strafing captures the way this war makes air and ground increasingly indistinguishable; the clouds formed by the returning shellfire form a series of islands in a sea-like sky in which the planes are ‘embedded’. Trench warfare must now contend with enemies from another ‘ground’ entirely: the air. War now occurs in three dimensions. At the beginning of the war, aeroplanes were used exclusively for reconnaissance, for determining the enemy’s position. But even as early as 1911, military figures like Helmuth von Moltke the Younger knew that ‘aerial reconnaissance would lead to aerial struggle’ (Morrow 19). It was thus inevitable that with innovations in bombardment and machine-gun mounting, the aerial gaze of the aeroplanes would become weaponized. Had the war ended as early as had been predicted, the technological innovations in aerial fighting and bombardment would not have had sufficient time to develop (Morrow 59). Indeed, Lewis’s own gun was destroyed by aerial bombing in early October 1917, near Ypres’s Hellfire Corner, while he slept nearby in rest billets. Although he escaped unharmed, eleven other men were wounded by the blast (Durman and Munton 44).

A Watery Labyrinth: Camouflage As the threat from the air became as deadly as that from the ground, defensive measures were taken to protect airships and reconnaissance balloons from ground attack. Camouflage, which had been influential in the uniform designs of several countries among the Allied forces (with the exception of France, which suffered tremendous losses before it too adopted the stratagem), was also used to cloak airships and balloons. In fact, seeking a countermeasure against detection and surveillance, ships translated Vorticist painting techniques into camouflage (Greenwood 77). Patrick Deer has already noted the ambivalence with which modernist

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aesthetics were incorporated by the war’s architects: ‘Little wonder that when the war machine cannibalized modernist culture in its futurist moments, as in its experiments with battlefield camouflage, tanks, or air power, it did so under the camouflage of archaic rhetoric’ (Deer 29). Edward Wadsworth, Lewis’s fellow Vorticist, used his own techniques in designing naval camouflage for what came to be known as ‘dazzle ships’. The logic of camouflage, of course, is driven not by a desire for invisibility, but for obfuscation; the most often used form of airship and aeroplane camouflage involved covering them with swaths of cloth with a lozenge design (Chant 94). On the ground, batteries would themselves deploy lozenge camouflage, but in a different manner. Netting, the pattern of which aped that of lozenges, was used to obscure guns; from the air, it was then more difficult to distinguish what lay below, since the guns would, like a fragmented perspective of a Vorticist painting, be distorted by the splintering lure of the netting. Lewis was intimately familiar with the necessity of camouflage, exploring it, with its implications for vision, in several images during his commission as a war artist (Durman and Munton 51). Again, camouflage does not cause invisibility, but confusion. If we look at Lewis’s A Battery Shelled (1919) (Fig. 2.1), we see that he renders it as a maze of green-grey waves. It is unclear whether the battery soldiers in the centre are on a kind of island in the midst of a watery labyrinth, or are located in the centre of the labyrinth itself. The sense of confusion in the painting is heightened by the fragile, insect-like, soldiers, who are of the same colour and consistency as several of the objects that surround them. The camouflaged guns in the right rear of the painting reflect, in colour and consistency, the maze of mud through which the soldiers must pick their way. Above, we encounter strange twisted objects in the sky: clouds of smoke from the battle form heavy wooden arches. As Michael Durman and Alan Munton have established, Lewis is, in his execution here, evoking the clouds in Ogata K¯orin’s Waves at Matsushima (Durman and Munton 60). The material differences between earth and sky, mud and sea, soldier and smoke, begin to become indistinguishable. It is not that what is solid melts into air, but that the air is slowly subsumed by the effects of ground battle. Lewis subtly echoes and refracts these distinctions; more specifically, the figures in the centre of the painting are the same colours as those used to delineate the clouds of smoke. Part of the painting’s uncanniness resides in the spatial connection we make between the smoke, which we might expect to be ‘murky’ or ‘spectral’, and the soldiers themselves. The spectral is

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Fig. 2.1 Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled (1919) by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity)

granted a kind of substance on the one hand, but in its similarity to the figures, the consistency of the figures themselves comes into question on the other. Note the difference in perspectives in the rendering: the three figures in the left foreground are, however static and stylized, much more representational than the exo-skeletal figures who populate the centre of the painting. Lewis’s refusal to endow infantrymen with a ‘human’ face is in fact a concession; that is, he concedes that the representation of a

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humanist notion of freedom can no longer speak to the problems posed by modernity. In an earlier work, Lewis had been criticized for not making the men ‘human’ enough. His response was to place the dispassionate, ‘human-looking’ officers in the foreground, as if to say that it is this insistence on the human perspective that produces its opposite: the staggering figures in the background, who must watch their every muddy step in case they set off any unexploded shells. In effect, one could say that the prevailing critical perspective of the painter is not one of detachment, but instead one marked by the ways camouflage obfuscates and disorients by turns. Thus, the ‘alienation effect’ in the centre of A Battery Shelled shortcircuits the reductive pleasure of identifying with human suffering. In turn, the consequence of the work is that of what Heidegger calls Gestell: the enframing of the world by technology that reduces subjects to a ‘standing-reserve, enslaved by the demands of the technological’ (Heidegger 301–5). Compare Marshall McLuhan’s statement in Counterblast, his sympathetic response to the Vorticist manifesto Blast: ‘Technological art takes the whole earth and its population as its material, not as its form’ (McLuhan 13). By rendering the non-commissioned soldiers ‘inhuman’, Lewis asks us to confront the knowledge that we must analyse, and indeed work to mourn, the deleterious effects of power on how we imagine subjectivity and the abstract forces that govern those soldiers.

Vorticism: Trench and Cityscape This labyrinthine obfuscation characterizes several of Lewis’s pre-war works. Vorticist abstraction would seem to have uncannily forecasted aerial representations of trench warfare in its pre-war depiction of urban skyscrapers. Unimpressed by their verticality, Lewis proceeds to transform their box-like repetitions into dizzying horizontal planes. He bemoans the banality of contemporary architecture in The Caliph’s Design: ‘It has been the fashion lately to admire the sky-scraper in its purely engineering form […]. But a box is always a box, no matter how high. And when you think of what could have been done by a liaison of the artist’s fancy, once more, with all these works of engineering genius, you wonder that there is not one single example’ that one could cite (Caliph’s Design 46–8). In its verticality, the skyscraper holds out the promise of power, not only of individual agency, but also that of durability—its permanence implies

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freedom. But the fascination with verticality is not just an obsession with the ‘tall box’, as Lewis puts it. Its obdurate presence disavows the horizontality and multiplicity of life and imagination. The skyscraper is, in other words, a space without an inside; it disrupts, as Henri Lefebvre puts it, ‘the indispensable opposition between inside and outside, as indicated by thresholds, doors and frames’ (Lefebvre 224). The affective dimension of this contradictory space—that it is both a site of freedom and exclusion—offers a forced choice: one is either boxed in or boxed out. Essentially, architecture needs the intervention of the artist to free it—and us. Interestingly, Lewis turns immediately to the aeroplane by way of contrast. For him, the dynamism of the aeroplane’s shape precludes the need for artistic enhancement; the only role an artist might play in peacetime, he suggests, would be ‘a possible deliberate camouflaging to modify their shape, not to deceive the eye of the enemy, but to add significance or beauty to their aspect’(Caliph’s Design 48). The architectural and aesthetic problems posed by the skyscraper (explored in Lewis paintings like New York [1914]) have their uncanny parallel in Lewis’s rendering of trench warfare. Paul Edwards has already noted the spatial contradictions at play in several of Lewis’s works in this period, with their collision of ‘blocks and lines’ that suggests determinism and chaos, representation and abstraction, at the same time (Edwards 125). If we turn to Lewis’s lost painting Plan of War (1913) (Fig. 2.2) we discover a dream-like representation of trenches. Here, the human subject is completely absent, and in its absence, the space is given over to a clash of aerial perspective between the technology of the vanishing point and the vertigo of architectural moment. This collision is produced by the light-coloured positive spaces that divide the eye’s attention between the centre and the right of the image. The geometrical muddy broken arrowheads of colour obtrude as shards of negative space in the left and the upper centre of the composition, producing the effect of looking downward. However, this effect is complicated by the chaotic diagonals that appear to the upper left. The division of negative space into inconsistent blocks in the centre right of the image then suggests the opposite—that one is looking upward. Even from an aerial perspective, the eye is thus not granted the reassuring presence of a coherent vanishing point. One must either contend with the thrusting blocks of negative space that surround the lighter-coloured

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Fig. 2.2 Wyndham Lewis, Plan of War (1913) reproduced in BLAST (1914)

centre of the painting as a gaze, offering multiple, competing, perspectives in the same pictorial space, or anxiously retreat to a part of the painting that offers one perspective, and studiously ignore the presence of the other, dizzying, vantage points. There is thus a schism in perception between the Allies and the Central Powers that plays itself out not just at the level of perception, but also at the level of antagonism. What do I mean by this? It is not simply that the antagonism is the theatre of war; there is a fundamental difference in how each side experiences the space. This difference is the antagonistic blind spot that shapes how each side sees the field of battle. It is this blind spot that informs the chaotic blocks and lines of works like Plan of War. The different modes of surveillance are both attempts to cope with this fundamental (rather than proximate) antagonism; each side works towards some kind of symbolic ‘ground plan’ or ‘current map’ that represents ‘two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism, and they represent an attempt by each group to heal this “wound” via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure captured in their respective ground plans’ (Zupanˇciˇc 198). This sense of scotoma (blind spot) or visual disorientation became an integral part of modern trench warfare. The landscape of war, especially at night, produced a bizarre relation to space not unlike montage.

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The landscape was constantly hammered with bursting shells; while the space of battle was altered by the spectacular explosions, the soldier’s sense of orientation was determined by the often-blinding flashes of light that illuminated the roiling land mass. The effect would have been not unlike watching a film in which you are split into an unwitting, unwilling actor/ spectator participating in the performance called ‘The Great War’. In this case, Lewis was caught between the spectacle of death and explosions that tried literally to ‘drive you off the stage’. Indeed, Paul Fussell quotes Lewis’s description in Blasting and Bombardiering of trench warfare as a theatrical setting, filled by ‘those titanic casts of dying and shell-shocked actors, who charged the stage with a romantic electricity’. Given this metaphor, one could say that the soldier’s goal was to give up being an ‘actor’ for the relatively safer role of spectator (Fussell 202). It was the space in which the discourses of spectacle and surveillance collided and merged. It is fitting that Leo Costello would turn to an image like Lewis’s Planners: A Happy Day (1913) to consider ‘the cruel geometry of the trenches in Lewis’s twisted, jagged lines’, as we see ‘a bent figure seemingly poring over its geometric plans, unaware of a human context[.] Its very naïveté becomes the mark of its prescience in foreseeing the failures of military planning in the coming years’ (Costello 78). The image raises another question: is this a plan of war—or simply urban planning? The painting is formally ambiguous. Just as Lefebvre reminds us that the relationship of inside and outside is undercut by the dominance of the skyscraper, Lewis demonstrates that the logic of war is precisely the same: part of the delirium produced by the painting is that the maze of battle, however planned, is replete with blind alleys, false junctions, and is without solution. A plan of war is thus an oxymoron.

‘Hollow Centre of a Madman’s Dream’: Trench Warfare and Aerial Perspective In the ‘war number’ of Blast , Lewis insists to the reader that the artist must struggle on, ‘us[ing] the shapes and colours of your environment’ and that any attempt to escape this results in an utter loss of critical perspective such that ‘you soar into the clouds, merely’. At the same time, he warns, one cannot simply fall into passive imitation, and paint ‘what the dicky-bird would if they painted’. He adds wryly, ‘Perhaps airmen might even conceivably share this tendency with the lark’ (“Review” 45).

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In paintings like Plan of War, as Leo Costello suggests, Lewis would seem to have anticipated the kind of chaos that the Great War would produce. However, I would push this question in another direction; I am not sanguine about repairing to clichés like ‘the artist as visionary’ to explain this insight. Yes, artists like Lewis, Ludwig Meidner, and Otto Dix—to name a few examples—were already representing aspects of the Great War before it occurred (Meidner is famous for his depictions of aerial bombings of cities before such things were possible). But I think the motivation for these anticipatory images is not based in prediction, but in the examination of a traumatic symptom. A symptom, physical or psychological, is an effect that precedes its cause in the sense that it points towards a cause that, though historically present, remains hidden to us and awaits discovery in the future. In representing the war, war artists are attempting to represent a symptom that has no historical place, that must return from the future. If the trauma that was European imperialism finally visited itself upon Europe in the guise of the Great War, it is not simply a traumatic cultural memory that will not ‘remain in the past’; rather, it has missed the moment of its historical representation, of a narrative that will affix its place in time. In this sense, a traumatic symptom is an abstraction in the field of representation. The collisions that Lewis explores in his pre-war painting and drawing are spatial allegories of a temporal trauma. Modernist abstraction is thus not merely an intellectual game with aesthetic form; for Lewis, it is a dream-like exploration of a trauma that traditional Renaissance perspective cannot capture or absorb. Nature and abstraction, imagination and dream conspire and collide together to produce a representation of trauma in life. In various essays and prose pieces, Lewis persistently theorizes art’s function as akin to dreaming. This from the war number of Blast : ‘The Imagination, not to be a ghost, but to have the vividness and warmth of life, and the atmosphere of a dream, uses, where best inspired, the pigment and material of nature’ (‘Review’ 47). But in Lewis’s aesthetic, death is never far off. And this in a fragment entitled ‘The Infernal Fair’ (perhaps an early, abandoned version of Malign Fiesta), Lewis writes: ‘death might be, I had thought, a vast dream accumulating on the frontier of life, arranged as this is to effect a certain simultaneity, and so put all to scorn’ (‘The Infernal Fair’ 211). A ‘vast dream’ of this sort relies upon a simultaneity of past, present and future, a simultaneity that cannot be experienced directly with immediate comprehension. As Cathy Caruth

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describes it, ‘The return of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct experience but, rather, of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place’ (Caruth 62, emphasis in original). One of the important dimensions of Lewis’s work is the way in which the aerial view of war, with its relentless desire to conquer simultaneity and ubiquity alike, produces the conditions that undermine its own project— to be in the war, Lewis suggests, was to be ‘at the hollow centre of a madman’s dream’ (Blasting 140). The detachment and god-like perspective over the landscape promised by aerial surveillance alters and distorts the very reality over which it hopes to gain suzerainty; the trauma of an aerial perspective is not confined merely to the trauma inflicted on land and people, but extends to the observer, who is not a detached ‘eye’. As Lewis’s aerial work shows us, an aerial view is constituted by a desiring body—a mass of conflicting perceptual impulses demonstrating, in another context, Jonathan Crary’s point that in modernity ‘a stable punctual model of perception is no longer effective or useful’ (Crary 344). One of the most fascinating moments of his first autobiography of the late 1930s, Blasting and Bombardiering , revolves upon his absurd, repeated, attempts to man an observation post (or O. Pip, as they were nicknamed) while under fire—again by low-flying aeroplanes equipped with machine guns. This was Lewis’s next experience of what he drily called ‘aeronautical caddishness’ (164)—again, a relatively new war stratagem, since fighter planes had come into existence only eighteen months before. Traditionally, the task of directing shellfire had been left to the Battery Commander. However, the continuous ground fighting that distinguished the Great War necessitated the development of indirect fire (using an azimuth and inclination instead of a line of sight to calculate where to launch projectiles), which prompted the creation of the Forward Observation Officers (F.O.O.s), who could act in the Battery Commander’s stead. The work of a F.O.O. was complicated by the fact that as the range and power of battery guns increased, the distances between gun and target, or observer and target, also grew greater. But the power of flight also invited further complication. As Paul Virilio reminds us, ‘Aviation, at once projectile and vehicle, had just invented a new type of atmospheric machine with the overflight of the warring landscape, with the first flying squadrons of bombers and fighters; in fact, aviation would extend considerably the effects of long-range artillery’ (Bunker 38). Lewis’s task was to register batteries: ‘a conventional point is selected on the map, and one or

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more batteries begins firing at it. You, through your field glasses—up in your observation-post, observe the “burst”. You telephone back to [the batteries] (by field telephone) to “shorten” or “lengthen”, according to whether the shell fell beyond, or short of, the object aimed at’ (Blasting 168). In other words, the perspective of the O. Pip was used to bracket or calibrate the weapon’s aim in relationship to the map. One of the dangers of manning the observation post was that, in order to gain an aerial perspective over the field of battle, one would have to walk across the roiling landscape, hundreds of yards behind one’s own line, all the while avoiding shellfire. As Lewis put it in another letter to Pound: From the ridge where I was observing things, I looked down into the German front line as you might into Church Street. I was, as a matter of fact, about 400 yards behind our own line, & 600, I suppose, from the Bosche. We were shelled steadily, for three and two hours, respectively, and I eventually left with my party of signallers through a 5.9 barrage. The journey to this particular O.P. is long (2 h’ walk or more) and shelled for half that distance, especially at night. You meet plenty of dead men. (Pound/Lewis 105)

The O. Pip loomed like a half-buried eye over what Lewis dubbed the ‘lunar landscape’ of battle: ‘You may represent it to yourself as a monstrous Easter-egg, its shell of four-foot thick concrete, sunk in the earth. Its domed top protruded slightly above the level of the parapet, covered with a thick coat of caked soil’ (Blasting 166). The fact that the enemy constantly shelled the area surrounding any observation post made the job of reaching it and observing from it all the more challenging. The absurdity of setting this ovular pillbox as a gaze in the service of the eye is described fittingly by Lewis as both ‘a snare and a delusion’ (170); the O. Pip naturally becomes a target of enemy fire, and thus while its ostensible function lures one into thinking one will gain some spectatorial advantage, its very precariousness renders that a delusion. A panoramic view of the battlefield was essentially a lethal fantasy (Deer 22). Aside from ‘registration’, then, the use of O. Pips as a technology of surveillance ‘was moral rather than technical’, producing moral certainties, but certainly not empirical or absolute ones (Blasting 160). On another occasion, Lewis reached an unusual observation post, whose strangeness he had been warned about but had chosen to ignore.

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The situation devolved into ‘a case of O. Pip versus O. Pip’, as Lewis notices a German balloon flying overhead serenely relaying messages of his position back to its own battery, thus putting him in greater peril: What was the matter with this O.Pip was obviously that it was itself observed by another O.Pip—but one above it, suspended in the air. That was what was the matter with it. An expert Observer, vertically above him, was observing any Observer who might take it into his head to use this particular spot for his so-called ‘observations’. (172)

The even greater irony (and truth) of his encounters with the O. Pip is that Lewis was unable to see anything once he reached it. One of the absurdities of the observation post was that the building itself was not the point from which a Forward Observation Officer did his observing. In effect, the O. Pip was a blind eye, since the actual surveillance of the enemy was done in a trench near its entrance; the actual purpose of the O. Pip was to provide protection to the men inside it. Observation, Lewis tells us, was done ‘by periscope or otherwise’ (166). Compare, for example, Lewis’s wartime experiences to the fate of the hero of Blaise Cendrars’ novel Moravagine (1926): after fighting in the Great War, he spends every Thursday in the watchtower of a neurological clinic, slowly blinded by a pineal tumour that finally kills him (Cendrars 194–97). The irony of the comparison is compounded by the fact that Moravagine is an aviator whose command of the new technology is no guarantor of his safety: he loses a leg after being shot down, just as Cendrars himself lost an arm in World War I. But for Lewis and his men, the clash of the O. Pips had another conclusion. He realized that the blind rush through sodden mud to reach the observation post had produced the conditions whereby they had themselves been observed by the German balloons for some time. Although he was almost too late in observing their menacing approach, he narrated, in virtual flashback, the position and attitude of the enemy as they watched Lewis and his comrades struggle in their advance: ‘He had doubtless been watching us for some time […H]e had seen me enter the Anzac telephone pillbox; and he had remarked with a savage grin of glee the signaller-corporal point to the famous O. Pip in the distance, as we started upon our last lap’. What is more, Lewis even provided, in fantasy, the German pilot’s smug commentary on the hapless men below: ‘Na, na … So kommt doch! Kommt der her, Ihr Soldatchen! Wir warten

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schon! Hab keine Angst, wir werden nicht roh sein. Also! [Well, well … Come here, you little soldiers! We are already waiting! Don’t be afraid, we won’t be rough. Now, then!]’ (173).1 In the aerial attack, the intimacy of the violence annihilates the space between aggressor and assailant. The ensuing salvoes launched by the German balloon are rendered uncannily ‘personal’, as Lewis repeatedly asserts, because it is a lovely autumn morning, and the bombs are directed specifically at Lewis and his men. The alienating accoutrements of battle have disappeared. There is no arithmetic guesswork, no need for wireless communication with a German observation post. It is not ‘nation against nation’: the war is reduced to a hunt, a game of one against of five (175). Although Lewis and his signallers never reached the intended O. Pip, they found safety in an ‘Anzac refuge’; but they remained for the rest of the day under constant surveillance by the German balloon. He drew comfort from the knowledge that ‘we successfully prevented an ideally placed Observer (who might have done untold damage elsewhere) from “observing” anything except us, so absorbing did he find us’(Blasting 177). And it is this element of the story that redounds upon my earlier point about Lewis’s suspicion of utter, or ideal, detachment—it is made impossible by the desiring eye guiding the aerial attack. For Lewis, aerial bombing is not just personal, but a recipe for insanity. In the preface to H. Somerville’s Madness in Shakespearian Tragedy, Lewis argues that, from a position of sane objectivity, one would have to concur that: [T]hose very gallant gentlemen who engage themselves to be the pilots of military aeroplanes, destined to drop colossal bombs upon the houses of sleeping families (of whatever nationality at the moment labelled ‘enemy’)—from them, if we were really entirely ‘sane’, we should turn in amazement and horror, and as members of the electorate of an enlightened democracy, we should arrange that they be sent to some suitable reformatory. (Wyndham Lewis 316)

Lewis’s aerial surveillance problem illustrates what Lacan calls the split between the eye and the gaze. The lack of reciprocity between them— that the eye cannot see from the perspective of the gaze (that is, the gaze of the other)—produces a blind spot in the eye’s vision. As Lacan tells us, the gaze, occasioned by the other’s desire to reveal itself, is matched by the eye’s desire to see.

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But it is the exploitation of this desire to be seen by the other that informs the logic of camouflage: Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled - exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare. (Lacan 99)

Thus, it is the fact that the gaze is unseen that provokes the subject to identify with it, ‘to become the punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure’ (Lacan 83); in sum, it becomes a ‘snare and a delusion’, as Lewis says. But as Lacan insists, the gaze cannot be understood merely as another eye; the gaze, we are told, is an intervention. The gaze intrudes upon the space of the subject to cause its desire—in other words, the subject wants to be the objet a, the object cause of the other’s desire. In psychoanalytic terms, one could say that Lewis’s disgust with aerial bombing is prompted by the bomber occupying the position of the gaze or objet a; by doing so, he disavows his subjectivity, his ‘human position’, and his relationship to the people on the ground becomes perforce sadistic, even psychotic. In other words, the subject cannot see from the perspective of the gaze except from the space outside itself. But back once again to the scene of battle. Technologically, the more advanced balloon would seem to usurp the role of the pineal gaze assigned to its egg-shaped counterpart below—that is, the O. Pip. But is this not the fantasy of techn¯e in modernity—to find a means of incorporating the function of the gaze into the machine? In his ongoing theorization of the impact of technology upon space and time, Paul Virilio has articulated the triumph of telepresence as the coincidence of the eye, the weapon, and its target. Having foregone the necessity of the subject assuming a mediatory place in relation to the gaze, we no longer fire myopically at the enemy: ‘The fusion is complete, the confusion perfect: nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye; the projectile’s image and the image’s projectile form a single composite’ (Virilio Reader 109). This (con)fusion signals the paranoiac knowledge and the perverse violence that lurks behind the desire to appropriate the space of the gaze; to harness its perspective not in the name of otherness, but in a radical identification that alters the space of war, as a means of mastering, enframing, and, finally, guiding the touch of death.

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Conclusion The Great War grapples with the fragility of the subject (and the assailed truth of its eye) in a way that alters our conception of the body. In this period, we are still too connected to the presence of the subject. The disorientation of primitive telepresence (that is, the fragile telephone lines that ran from the battery to the O. Pip) spurs the development of different technologies to house the subject, to overcome its inadequacies. But there is a constitutive difference between the perilous attempt to think from the multiple perspective of the pineal eye, and to imagine the kind of eugenics that would produce such an organ (and the body necessary to house it). In The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis insists that we must accept the limitations of the body as it now exists: ‘Pineal eyes, great stature, a formidable carapace, would not necessarily help us. The greater our spiritual power and development, the less such considerations would occupy us: transformation, if it came, would come necessarily in the incandescence of some endeavour’ (Art of Being Ruled 190). This passage is clearly a response to the growing interest in post-human possibilities in modernism. As we see from his interwar memoir, the ‘pinch of inquisitive pleasure’ he had hoped to experience in battle was miniscule indeed (Blasting 137). In his exploration of aerial perspectives and aerial battle, Lewis offers several sharp insights into the fantasies of surveillance and the psychotic forms of war it had already produced.

Note 1. The German is as Lewis wrote it; translation mine.

Works Cited Beckett, Jane. ‘(Is)land Narratives: Englishness, Visuality and Vanguard Culture, 1914–18.’ English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Eds. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 195–212. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cendrars, Blaise. Moravagine. Translated by Alan Brown, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979. Chant, Chris. Austro-Hungarian Aces of World War 1. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002.

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Costello, Leo. ‘Wyndham Lewis: War—Art—War.’ Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I . Eds. Gordon Hughes and Philipp Blom. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014. 70–9. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Durman, Michael, and Alan Munton. ‘Wyndham Lewis at War.’ Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis’s Painting and Writing. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1996. 41–64. Edwards, Paul. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Greenwood, Jodie. ‘The Crisis of the System: Blast ’s Reception.’ Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Eds. Andrzej Gasiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 77–93. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lewis, Wyndham. The Art of Being Ruled. Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989. _______. Blasting and Bombardiering. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937. _______. The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where Is Your Vortex? Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1986. _______. ‘The Infernal Fair.’ Agenda: Wyndham Lewis Special Issue. Ed. William Cookson 7.3 (1969): 209–15. ______. ‘Review of Contemporary Art.’ Blast: War Number. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981. 36–47. _______. Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of His Prose Ed. E.W.F. Tomlin. London: Methuen, 1969. Materer, Timothy, ed. Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1985. McLuhan, Marshall. Counterblast. London: Rapp and Whiting, 1970. Morrow, John L. The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993. Virilio, Paul. Bunker Archaeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. ______. The Virilio Reader. Ed. James Der Derian. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

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Zupanˇciˇc, Alenka, and Randall Terada. ‘Sex, Ontology, Subjectivity: In Conversation with Alenka Zupanˇciˇc.’ Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 20.2 (2015): 192–206.

CHAPTER 3

‘From This New Culture of the Air We Finally See’: ‘Groundmindedness’ in the 1930s Luke Seaber

In his bizarre but best-selling potboiler of 1936, England Have My Bones , much of which is taken up with descriptions of his learning to fly, T. H. White writes at a certain point that ‘It was a good day really: air-minded till lunch, county-minded at a tennis party till supper, and beer-minded, playing nap at Tenmere, till they closed’ (142). Here, clearly enough, we see that (stereo)typical ’30s ‘airmindedness’: a manifestation of the zeitgeist where we have an interest in, obsession with, flying and airmen— Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, Day Lewis’s apostrophizing Auden as ‘lone flyer, birdman’ (29); the (classic) examples are legion, and a comprehensive sounding of them may be found in Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties (167–68, 174–76). Cunningham writes that ‘Never before (or since) have poetry and the novel been so obsessed by the action, the clutter, the machinery, the terminology, the termini of travelling by air’ (167–68), and many contributions to this current volume examine this: the novelty and modernity of the aeroplane, distant

L. Seaber (B) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_3

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or near, and the sheer excitement it conveys as synecdochic for modernity as a whole. This synecdoche can also work more bathetically, of course, where the fact of flying has become unremarkable, and as such represents the (massive, terrifying) march of modernity’s inexorability in its very quotidianity. This is brilliantly shown at the end of John Betjeman’s ‘Death of King George V’, which works as a commentary on its own epigraph of ‘“New King arrives in his capital by air…”—Daily Newspaper’: Old men who never cheated, never doubted, Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the runway Where a young man lands hatless from the air. (35)

The victory of flying—and by extension airmindedness and modernity in general—is being shown as complete in this sense by 1936: it is no more exotic and exciting than suburbia or not wearing a hat; momentous in what may it imply to an older generation regarding the world that they see vanishing, but ultimately as domesticated and domestic as the miles of suburban villas surrounding London. Nonetheless, however much this may on one level seem opposed to the sort of airmindedness that Cunningham and others discuss, at its base the central point remains the same. Modernity is represented by the aeroplane and/or its pilot; the gaze is that of the ground-based observer looking skywards or, at the very least, aircraftwards. In this chapter I wish to argue that discussions of interwar flight that focus on airmindedness in this sense are incomplete. They exclude a related but far from identical historical phenomenon, or conflate it with airmindedness. To see what this phenomenon is, let us return to the author with whom we started, T. H. White. His comment quoted above comes in his entry for 8 July 1934; the entry for a few days later, that of 21 and 22 July, details his first real flight after he has begun learning to fly in which he is a passenger rather than a pupil. It gives the reader a long descriptive passage, which deserves reproducing in its entirety, as it is perhaps the most sustained example of its type from the period: Roland was the pilot. As I had nothing to do in the front cockpit, I scribbled all Saturday: ‘Traffic at Heston. Ford Below. Cemetery tooth-pick spillikins. Keyboard treads. Toy grey flat glass river wash slow nosing motionless

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Bassett Lowke. More Gothic piqué regularity of London armadillo or horned toad. Vibro massage. Cut out? The Oval proud to recognise. Probably not. Was. Australians? Roland: “I wonder what the press would say if we shot them up?” White dentelles of Tower Bridge. Timber boats at docksides yellow just like river wrack. Bunkers golf smallpox. White beards of barges. 4-5,000. Forbidden area. Ammunition dump? Real liners? Suddenly cloud white rushing at whisps blank thin out more coming kick enjoy fear? Valkyre charge. Under us. Frightening that it should go so fast. Down at 120. Want to smoke. Chalk. Amusing fort near Rochester Aerodrome. Stooked corn like pin-stripe trousers. Clouds again black above. Air line crossing thick mist. Nice little engine scooting along by itself looking busy. The scrofulas of the earth. Sick? Lympne. The grey mud sealine ending the world. Mist. Out of the world through the back cloth. Clouded linoleum. One seagull. A flake. Capri. Sweet saliva in mouth. Ships. Tankers. Mother hippo. Practically no bumps over sea (all near Lympne) flat as hat. Clearer. Little cloud? Streak? France. The small oblong numerous serf-fields of N. France and Belgium. Patch quilt or parquet? Inlay. Zeebrugge indistinct interest. Coming back sand racing. The cross on the hill near air route (Ashford?) 8000 feet over Wiltshire the great saffron cloud towers. Lux. Soapsuds. Sun starboard. Moon port. Earth blue. This keen air. Going at them. The feeling of don’t dare to stunt or flying anything but straight and level at this insignificance. Be careful. Be modest. Beware. Distrust of wings and tail. Going at. I shake with cold and fear. But going through I like? Till he curls. Then cling in terror.’ (143–44)1

This is the first real passage like this in the book, and indeed the only one of any length: that is, one which describes the landscape as seen from an aeroplane, which is the phenomenon that this chapter will investigate under the name of ‘groundmindedness’. This gives an importance to flying that lies not just in itself, not just in symbolic airmen and technological modernity, but in what flying made possible: the landscape as seen from the sky—it is not coincidental that for White, this rather remarkable Joycean passage only becomes writable when he is not himself flying, not airminded in the sense that he has been hitherto. Cunningham does discuss this alongside airmindedness—‘the corollary of looking up was, of course, looking down’ (197)—but does not explore its non-political implications or tease out quite what distinguished it from earlier, similar, phenomena. He notes that ‘from the airmen’s position people appear less than human’ and how ‘the new photography of Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Bayer, that adopts the “looking down” angle

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[…] the elevated camera characteristically sees […] people as dehumanized puppets, tokens, manipulable objects, dolls, midgets’ (197). This is all true as far as it goes, but, mutatis mutandis, it does not at base differ from something like Louis Leroy’s famous 1874 criticism of Monet’s Le Boulevard des Capucines (note too how many Impressionist streetscapes are literally views de haut en bas ): ‘“All I want you to tell me is what all those little black licks at the bottom of the painting represent” “[…] They’re people walking” “What, so I look like that when I’m walking along the Boulevard des Capucines?!”’ (quoted in Bonafoux 39).2 There is, as this chapter will aim to demonstrate, far more to groundmindedness than its dehumanizing effects. This view of the Earth’s surface is a vertical view that is quite different from that from mountains (that other ’30s symbolic height), quite literally a new way of looking at the world. The great difference between the view from the aeroplane and the tradition of describing views seen from mountains that is at least as old as Petrarch’s description of approximately 1350 of his ascent of Mont Ventoux3 lies not just in the difference between a vertical view and a horizontal, but also in the experience of movement changing that panorama in a way quite impossible even from the highest of peaks.

Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen: The Familiarity and Strangeness of Flight A good example of how references to flight in the 1930s, in this reading, have as much to do with reference to this new visual experience as to do with the experience of flight itself can be seen in a locus classicus of interwar prose descriptions of flying, Ginger and Nina’s honeymoon flight to ‘a “tophole little spot not far from Monte”’ in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) (167): Ginger looked out of the aeroplane. ‘I say, Nina,’ he shouted, ‘when you were young did you ever have to learn a thing out of a poetry book about: “This sceptre’d isle, this earth of majesty, this something or other Eden?[…]”’ […] ‘Yes, why?’ ‘Well, I mean to say, don’t you feel somehow, up in the air like this and looking down and seeing everything underneath. I mean, don’t you have a sort of feeling rather like that, if you see what I mean?’

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Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children. The scene lurched and tilted again as the aeroplane struck a current of air. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Nina. (168)

The obvious satire on contemporary England, with the rather sordid visual reality compared with Shakespeare’s nobler but imagined bird’seye view is made possible by this new way of seeing the ground and the possibilities offered by aviation; the implied comparison of people to ants is no longer just metaphor born from an author’s fancy but has become observational; this is a view of modernity made possible by modernity, but the gaze is looking away from the air, and the modern lies as much—or rather more—in what is being viewed instead of where it is being viewed from. In fact, we might conclude that although this passage is only possible because of the existence of aviation to allow the visual commented upon, it is also an indicator of ignorance of aviation: if Ginger is heading towards France from London, we may presume that from Croydon (unless he cleared Customs at Hendon) he would head towards Lympne; in other words, he would be flying over south London. The description, though, with a disused canal and factories along arterial roads, suburbia still to get through and hills in the distance suggests neither Hendon nor Croydon, but rather a flight over west London. In other words, what we may have heard is—rather like the impossibilities inherent in Dickens’s description of Magwitch’s prowess in swimming while in irons according to John Sutherland: ‘Magwitch’s swim to shore was generally unremarked on because Dickens’s readers shared his vagueness about what human limits are in the water’ (137)—an implied shared ignorance (or, less strongly, a shared lack of interest) in the technicalities of aviation as opposed to the effects it can produce. Once again, what is important is what is seen from above, not the above from which it is seen. Another, somewhat different, example can be seen in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North (1932). Emmeline and Markie fly to Le Bourget from Croydon, London to Paris: their responses to what they see differ notably. Markie, who has never flown before, is less interested in the new landscape revealed than Emmeline, who has flown before, is:

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Her eyes kept imploring him to look down and enjoy Surrey. Surrey and Kent looked flatter and, like something with which one has ceased to have any relationship, noticeably less interesting—he had never liked either much. The grass, lawns and meadows, poorer in texture than he had expected, looked like a rubbed billiard cloth. But to Emmeline some quite new plan of life, forgotten between flight and flight, seemed once more to reveal itself: she sat gazing down with intensity at the lay-out of gardens. (133–34)

The different responses to what they see mirror Markie and Emmeline’s different characters and psychological states: jadedness despite the novelty of the experience; intensity and a sense of connection despite the familiarity of the experience (mirroring in turn aspects of the underlying relationship). But the psychological symbolism of how they view the world is placed in a context where what they are viewing is the world seen anew; the passage is made possible by aviation, but it is not on aviation that it dwells. The great difference here between this passage of Bowen’s and that of Waugh lies in the handful of years between when they were written: whereas Ginger and Nina’s flight, although presuming the reader’s shared historical awareness of the real possibility that they are seeing what they are seeing does not in fact ground itself—no pun intended—in ‘real’ flight, as we have seen, Emmeline and Markie depart from a very recognizable Croydon, down to the unmistakeable (at the time) detail of the ‘sexagonal seat round the little pharos of clocks’ (133). Between Waugh and Bowen flying becomes something that readers can be expected to know about in a far less abstract way, as one might expect given the expansion of air travel. Waugh himself can be counted a contributor to making the realities of flying better known to the reading public. Vile Bodies came out in 1930; later that same year, Waugh also published the first of his travel books, Labels: A Mediterranean Journey. This chiefly describes a cruise that Waugh took around the Mediterranean on the Stella Polaris: organized commercial pleasure cruising of this type was in itself a novelty and innovation, but Waugh’s rather uneventful trip begins with another, more obvious, form of modernity in transport. He flies from Croydon to Le Bourget for Paris, whence a train will take him to Monaco in a brief interval of more traditional travelling between the two moments of modernity. This flight, taken in 1929, is clearly a source for that deromanticized one described in Vile Bodies —the best example being how Waugh

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is sick ‘into the little brown paper bag provided for me’ (Labels 9), which becomes Ginger’s informing Nina, when she tells him that she thinks that she is going to be sick, that ‘That’s what the paper bags are for’ (Vile Bodies 168). We also have what by now should be a familiar response to flight: the description of the view. This too, though, is as unedifying in its way as the whole underwhelming, vomit-inducing, experience is in this description, which reads similarly to a less humorous draft of the scene involving Ginger and Nina: ‘The view was fascinating for the first few minutes we were in the air and after that very dull indeed. It was fun to see houses and motor cars looking so small and neat; everything had the air having been made very recently, it was all so clean and bright. But after a very short time one tires of this aspect of scenery’ (Labels 10). This, as we have seen, is expanded and made less factually correct in the novel; here, any putative importance given to this new view of the world is further undercut by Waugh’s explicitly comparing it unfavourably to more traditional vantage points such as the ‘Citadel at Cairo, or Canoni Point at Corfu, or the top of the mountain road above Cattaro [the modern Kotor in Montenegro]’ (Labels 10). This would appear to be a turning of his back on the modern, but is a little more complex than this. The three examples Waugh gives, although encountered by the reader long before the author describes them, are all places and views that he knew from the cruise that he would go on to describe, a cruise that represented modernity just as much as the view from the aeroplane did. In other words, what may look like praise of tradition here in this unstated prolepsis is in fact rather a shifting of the recognition of the new views opened up by modernity from a more obvious arena to a less. The importance of Waugh’s description in Labels of his flight—summarized as ‘disagreeable but quite unexciting’ (Labels 8)—lies not so much in his description of the flight itself as it does in his description of the processes involved in the journey. He takes the reader through the various steps: the coach from London to Croydon that was included as part of one’s ticket; the weighing of the luggage to determine how much had to be added to the ticket price; the types of chairs once aboard; the fur-lined footbags against the cold; the aforementioned brown paper bags and the fact that one either has to throw them after use out of the window or down the lavatory provided; the passport and luggage inspection after landing; the final coach journey into Paris (Labels 8–11). In short, in this section Waugh not only deromanticizes flight as he does in Vile Bodies,

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but also demystifies it. He provides some of that knowledge and familiarity, the absence of which Vile Bodies presumes and the presence of which To the North presumes. Interestingly, in Ninety-Two Days (1934), a travel book that is very much not concerned with air travel, Waugh also deromanticizes groundmindedness, or would appear to. He compares his slow progress through the Guyanese jungle favourably with travel in Europe, where ‘with modern communications’ you lose any sense of ‘heightened […] enjoyment of the change of scenery’, as when ‘you travel by aeroplane when all scenery is meaningless as a page from an atlas, as flat and as conventionally coloured, while between you and it lie fathoms of air and sunlight’ (Ninety-Two Days 142). Although groundmindedness here becomes associated with the—supposedly—by now dull and familiar type of European travel with which he and his readers are familiar, I would argue that although the form of travel and what one sees, meaningless and conventional, from it is in itself familiar and uninteresting, the fact of seeing this view is still vividly new and strange. The conjunction ‘while’ can, and I think should, be read not only as temporal (‘at the same time as you see this dull view you are in the air above it’) but also and above all adversative (‘the view may be dull, but the fact remains that is a technological marvel that you are sitting fathoms of air and sunlight above it’). The deep implied strangeness of a measure most associated with water and the lightless depths being used for height and air and sunlight points towards this reading, where the strange and the familiar become one in groundmindedness. To return to Labels, Waugh compares the dullness of his flight to France, his second ever flight, with the excitement of his first. This is described as ‘a memorable experience’ (Labels 6); he loops the loop, during which, even more than the fairground ride he compares it to, ‘one’s nerves reached the highest point of excitement, trembling between ordinary healthy terror and mad panic’ (Labels 7); he relates, jokingly but still with an element of seriousness about the psychic stresses accused by the excitement and novelty of the event how three people were converted to Catholicism due to the intensity of the experience before the intrepid pilot ‘came down in flames […] and to some people it seemed as if the Protestant God had asserted supremacy in a fine Old Testament manner’ (Labels 8). Humorous hyperbole aside, it is clear that this first flight of Waugh’s is a far more exciting one than the one he dully and sedately takes to France. But we should be careful: excitement is not the same

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as unfamiliarity, and I would argue that although Waugh’s first flight may at first appear to be potentially suitable for including as an example of airmindedness, in its removal from the normal human sphere into one far more sublime, it does in fact have far more in common with groundmindedness as discussed here. Waugh’s first flight was during his last term at Oxford with ‘an ex-officer of the R.A.F. [who] appeared in Port Meadow with a very dissolute-looking Avro biplane, and advertised passenger flights for seven and sixpence or fifteen shillings for “stunting”’ (Labels 6). Waugh has the ecstatic excitement of looping the loop because he pays the extra for a ‘stunt’ flight: the modern excitement that his account might seem to convey is much rather a domesticated type of flying, one where it is above all a popular entertainment. It is no coincidence that the comparison to which Waugh turns is as unexotic and familiar as a fairground ride. The one actual description of this flight that he gives, rather than the longer fairground comparison or anecdote about conversion, is in fact quite brief. It is, admittedly reversed, another example of groundmindedness: ‘One looks down into an unfathomable abyss of sky, while over one’s head a great umbrella of fields and houses has suddenly opened’ (Labels 7). In other words, even with such an exciting stunt flight as the this, one of the chief attractions, and chief memories remaining therefrom, is seeing the earth from the air, the heart of how I am defining groundmindedness. Having this type of flight as one’s first flying experience rather than a flight for travel was normal for the period. It was a domestication of modernity, a reduction of the unfamiliar and new to familiar and safe (technologically, one hopes, as well as socio-psychologically) entertainment. Waugh, like thousands of other people, had as his first flying experience, then, something based, even (although perhaps partially) in the case of a stunt flight, around the novelty of looking down on the landscape from a moving object at a great height. This was T. H. White’s first experience of flying too, also in an Avro; he that day not only had a sight-seeing flight but also a stunt flight (in yet another, newer, Avro) (55). Even if one’s pilot was as illustrious and airminded (at least in the public’s eyes) a figure as Charles Lindbergh, one’s first flight could be groundminded in this sense, like that of Ben Nicholson in 1935 (Nicolson 208–9). Harold Nicolson, writing to his wife, Vita SackvilleWest, recording his elder son’s experience very much foregrounds not the fact of flying itself but what one sees while doing so. Sackville-West had made her husband promise never to fly again after an accident in

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1923, and the envy that he semi-humorously expresses of their son is of views—in every direction—of a type that he will never allow himself to see again: ‘I did so envy him, damn you. That perfect summer’s day, that lovely island-studded sea, those distant mountains and that vault of blue above the scent of pines’ (209).

Look, Stranger, on This Island: Auden, Flight and Vision One of the most important figures for groundmindedness in interwar poetry (and indeed in poetry after the Second World War too) is W. H. Auden, and his first experience of flying also fits into this pattern. It would appear to have been in the summer of 1930, at ‘Father Parker’s scout camp’, which would appear to have been the Beaumont College OTC Camp run by Father Francis Parker SJ.4 If one begins looking for examples of landscapes described from on high as from an aeroplane in Auden’s early poetry, they are not difficult to find, and his importance to any discussion of the topic becomes clear. An obvious starting point would appear to be ‘Consider’, from March 1930, before Auden’s first first-hand experience of flying. It begins: Consider this and in our time As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman: The clouds rift suddenly—look there At cigarette-end smouldering on a border At the first garden party of the year. (Auden Poems 60–1)

A moment’s reflection, however, shows this to be airmindedness rather than groundmindedness, or, at most, airmindedness with an admixture of pseudo-groundminded imagery. The zooming in is too precise, as it were: whatever the visual acuity of the hawk, no airmen in flight is likely to be able to see a thrown-away cigarette butt from his aeroplane, nor for such a sight is it in any way necessary that there be the new view of the earth’s surface that flight has given. The focus here is as much on the aerial viewer as the terrestrial scene viewed. An example of a truly equal mixture of ground- and airmindedness can be found in the lines spoken by Petra’s dying brother to his late brother’s fiancée in Stephen Spender’s 1938 play Trial of a Judge (Auden’s ‘helmeted airman’ collocation is also found in exactly the same form):

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As the helmeted airman regards Through the glazed focus of height The bistre silent city abandoned like a leaf With veins in microscopic detail beneath him. (67)

Here the remarkable visual image of the city’s streets far below as a skeleton of a leaf and the audacious, almost oxymoronic, fusing of the telescopic and microscopic points of view, is clearly groundminded. However, it continues as he looks ahead to the life of the niece or nephew whom he will never see: So from my towered pause of death O sweet carrier of life, my riveted eye looks Thirty years forward when your child is grown. (67)

This, in the importance it gives to the ‘helmeted airman’, is airminded; note too the presence of ‘riveted’ and how it returns us to an airminded technologically based airman-centric point of view. It should also be noted that Spender here fuses air- and groundmindedness into what is in fact a Homeric simile; the visual strangeness and modernity of groundmindedness and the conceptual strangeness and modernity of airmindedness combine in what readers or viewers would have recognized as one of the oldest of rhetorical forms, adding another level of simultaneous strangeness and familiarity to images of flight. To return to Auden, groundminded images are scattered throughout his poetry in the 1930s—for instance, ‘Far off like floating seeds the ships’ (Auden Poems 131) from ‘On This Island’ (November 1935) or ‘Seen when nights are silent,/The bean-shaped comic island’ (Auden Poems 59) from ‘Five Songs’ (c. 1933): the key visual idea here is the phenomenon of seeing from a distant height. These are images implying a line of sight from a great altitude; whatever the symbolic value of the simile of ships like floating seeds, the visual aspect is surely one that changes totally with the possibility of the words calling up in the reader’s mind a sight only possible after the advent of aviation. This new shared visual knowledge also underpins the following lines from ‘A Summer Night’ (June 1933): Now north and south and east and west Those I love lie down to rest; The moon looks down on them all,

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[…] She climbs the European sky, Churches and power-stations lie Alike among earth’s fixtures. (Auden Poems 117–18)

The aviatrix is the poetically rather traditional moon, and at the level of meaning the potential indistinguishability of church and power stations approaches being a cliché; what saves it from this, I would argue, is the fact that now both poet and readers know that this is not just a poetic point being made—at night, from the sky, buildings are of course relatively indistinguishable, and there is a difference between knowing this as piece of imaginative reasoning and knowing it either from personal experience or from aerial photographs. In this difference much of groundmindedness lies. The most important of the instances in which Auden uses the view of the world as seen from several thousand feet comes not in his poetry per se, perhaps, but in his drama. The Chase (1934) contains in its opening lines what I would consider the best of its author’s groundmindedness: The summer holds: upon its glittering lake Lie Europe and the islands, many rivers Wrinkling her surface like a ploughman’s palm Under the bellies of the grazing horses On the far side of posts and bridges The vigorous shadows dwindle; nothing wavers. Between the cathedrals and the wide feminine valleys Where dragonflies race above the still and treacherous reaches Between the big farms and the arterial roads We show you a hedgeless country, the source of streams. (Auden and Isherwood 111)

We have here again the view of various landscapes, in a rapid series of changes that aviation has stopped being solely a poetic convenience and made into a reality—this is even stronger in the revised version of these lines that Auden wrote for The Dog beneath the Skin (1935), a collaboration with Christopher Isherwood that remoulded The Chase into a performable play: rather than showing us ‘a hedgeless country, the source of streams’ (this too a description that makes much sense visually if we think of the view from an aeroplane), the Chorus invites the audience to choose:

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Wherever your heart directs you most longingly to look; you are loving towards it; Whether north to Scot’s Gap and Bellingham where the black rams defy the panting engine Or west to the Welsh Marches. (Auden and Isaherwood 191)

‘Most longingly to look’: for the first time such looking does not have to be solely from ‘a high tower in [the] mind’ as with Bleak House’s Inspector Bucket in a scene that belongs to the prehistory of groundmindedness (Dickens 798): the audience could, and should, I think, also envisage a far more physical and literal interpretation of these words. This is above all the case given that Auden has prepared his public with the play’s first three lines: The summer holds: upon its glittering lake Lie Europe and the islands, many rivers Wrinkling her surface like a ploughman’s palm. (Auden and Isherwood 191)

This is a series of images that get their power, I would argue, from the visual stimulus given by the experience of looking out from a modern aircraft. Europe and its surrounding islands lying in a haze of sunshine on summer water is an image surely familiar to anyone who, on a clear summer’s day, has flown over the Channel or the shores of the Mediterranean; the poetic sensibility that can reduce a continent and its rivers to a ploughman’s palm and its wrinkles is informed by the reality of seeing the flatlands of Europe, their hills ironed out by altitude, scored by rivers only the lines of which, just like wrinkles, are visible. In other words, I would argue that these images are among the finest descriptions of a landmass seen from the skies; the power of their effect on the reader’s unconscious comes and came not from the simple beauty of the imagery, whether outlandish or obvious, but from the way in which it reports, for the first time in history, what its hearers may themselves have seen. I would in fact suggest that these lines of Auden’s are the greatest that aviation has yet given us, but their greatness lies in groundmindedness, not airmindedness. Another early Auden play, The Dance of Death (1933), appears to contain, in the Dancer’s temporary and eventually fatal transformation into the Pilot, one of the summations of Auden’s airmindedness in the more usual sense of that concept:

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Who will be the one To teach us how to fly from the alone to the Alone? (Auden and Isherwood 100)

What we seem to have here is Auden audaciously fusing the closing words of Plotinus’ Enneads , ‘φυγὴ μόνου πρὸς μόνον’, usually rendered into English as ‘a flight of the alone to the Alone’ (VI.9.11.50)5 with modern airmindedness through the bivalence of the semantic field surrounding ‘flight’ and through changing the translation of the genitive ‘μόνου’ from ‘of the alone’ to ‘from the alone’. Further research suggests, however, a source other than Plotinus, a source that even here brings us back to groundmindedness. Much later, in the final year of his life, Auden would note that he had never read the Enneads (Auden Prose 1969–1973 617). Where, then, might his knowledge of this phrase of Plotinus’ have come from? It is in his friend E. R. Dodds’s 1923 Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism, where it is translated ‘a flight of the alone to the Alone’ (124); Dodds’s book The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief was also the subject of the review in which Auden admitted his ignorance of the Enneads , however, and the lack of reference to this earlier work suggests that Auden had not read Plotinus even in extract there. The airminded pun also appears in a later book of which Auden was a co-author, Letters from Iceland (1936), in Louis MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, where ‘Ryan’ (MacNeice) speaks of the Irish writer whose version of Plotinus was the most famous and whose version of these words was also ‘a flight of the alone to the Alone’ (see Clark 220): There was McKenna Spent twenty years translating Greek philosophy, Ill and tormented, unable to break contract, A brilliant talker, who left The salon for the solo flight of Mind. (In Auden Prose and Travel Books 273–74)

The ‘solo flight of Mind’ is clearly a buried and punning allusion to Plotinus; MacNeice, a classicist and a friend of Dodds (who would be his executor), as well as his colleague in the Classics department at Birmingham between 1930 and 1936 (Stallworthy 148 and 482), would certainly have been more familiar with Plotinus than Auden was, and it

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could be posited that Auden had by 1933 come into contact with Plotinus’ phrase through his friendship with MacNeice, if not through that with Dodds. There is though another, more suggestive, possibility for a source that does not require us to presume either the failure of Auden’s memory for what he had read or any form of (quite pointless) dishonesty. Charles Williams, one of Auden’s favourite writers, published The Place of the Lion in 1931. Like much of Williams’s work, its basic premise is deeply unusual: Platonic archetypes appear in the shape of animals and try to take over a small town in Hertfordshire. At a certain point, Richardson, one of the heroes, pauses by a Wesleyan chapel and muses that ‘All that sort of thing was very well for the minds that could use it; he couldn’t use it, neither the small dull gatherings of the Evangelicals or the large gaudy assemblies of the Catholics. “The flight of the alone to the Alone”’ (Williams 142). In this direct quote, probably from McKenna’s translation, or possibly Dodd’s, ‘flight’ is quite clearly simply ‘fleeing’, which is, after all, the meaning of the original ‘φυγή’, where the Greek does not allow the pun possible in English. This gives us a possible source for Auden’s line in The Dance of Death that does not contradict his 1973 statement. Most interestingly for the purposes of the current study, however, is the fact that the novel also contains imagery of the groundminded type the existence of which this chapter posits. The best example of this comes when another of the book’s heroes, Anthony Durrant faces the Lion of Strength after he has seen the Eagle of Balance and has a vision (which includes the Pterodactyl that is the perverted form of the Eagle): A memory—of all insane things—awoke in him of the flying he had done in the last year of the war; it seemed as if again he looked down on a wide stretch of land and sea, but no human habitations were there, only forest, and plain, and river, and huge saurians creeping slowly up from the waters, and here and there other giant beasts coming into sight for a moment and then disappearing. Another flying thing went past below him—a hideous shape that was a mockery of the clear air in which he was riding, riding in a machine that, without his control, was now sweeping down towards the ground. He was plunging towards a prehistoric world; a lumbering vastidity went over an open space far in front, and behind it his own world broke again into being through that other. There was a wild minute in which the two were mingled; mammoths and dinotheria wandered among hedges of English fields, and in that confused vision he felt the machine make easy landing, run, and come to a stop. (68)

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We have here a link to the modernity of flying and of ‘look[ing] down on a wide stretch of land and sea’ and its connection with the First World War, prefiguring Cunningham’s later observation on airmindedness that ‘[t]he air was the only location where it was, after the War, widely supposed that heroics had survived the general disillusionments consequent upon wartime active service […] in the cleaner, freer element, heroically superior to the troglodyte infantry shut into their dark and grim trenches below’ (Cunningham 168). However, this is clearly primarily a spiritual vision and figurative ascension—but once again, there is an awareness of the physicality and literality of what was previously necessarily only figurative. It is this literalizing of the figurative that makes it groundminded, and, given the prevalence of groundminded imagery in Auden’s work, suggests The Place of the Lion as a likely source for Auden’s seeming knowledge of Plotinus, as it, as Auden does, combines the superficially airminded flight to the Alone with the more historically moored groundmindedness. Although groundmindedness, in my reading of events, saw its birth in the 1930s, it clearly did not die with that dishonest, low decade. Examples of what we might call ‘the pilot’s gaze’, which has an otherwise impossibly wide angle of vision over vast vistas from on high, can be found throughout Auden’s work until his death—the long piece in ‘Caliban to the Audience in The Sea and the Mirror (1944) that begins ‘Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butterfly nets’ (436–47), for instance, or ‘Except where blast-furnaces and generating stations/have inserted their sharp profiles,/or a Thru-Way slashes harshly across them, Bohemia’s contours/look just as amiable now/as when I saw them first’ from 1968’s ‘Forty Years On’ (783). Indeed, it is in 1954 and ‘Ode to Gaea’ that we have the most explicit formulation of what it was that Auden had already been doing intermittently for almost thirty years: From this new culture of the air we finally see, far-shining in excellence, what our Mother, the nicest daughter of Chaos, would admire could she look in a glass. (551)

The historical rarity of what Auden and others were doing in these years cannot be exaggerated. The history of literature over the centuries has, of course, seen the emergence of countless new themes mediated

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through countless new sensibilities: nature has been discovered, childhood, courtly love, modernity… the examples are perhaps endless and the scholarly literature on them huge. Hugely rarer, however, is something like that which this chapter calls ‘groundmindedness’: the introduction to literature of a new visual subject; the birth of something that had never before been seen in that way, the birth through technological change and advances in aviation technology of a whole new of seeing and thus describing the world.

Notes 1. I owe a debt of thanks to Kate Macdonald for providing me with a copy of this passage when the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for me to access my copy of the book. 2. ‘“Seulement veuillez me dire ce que représentent ces innombrables lichettes noires dans le bas du tableau!” “[…] ce sont des promeneurs.” “Alors je ressemble à ça quand je me promène sur le boulevard des Capucines?”’ My translation. 3. Petrarch notes above all the mountains that he can see in the distance; below him are clouds immediately below (‘nubes erant sub pedibus’) and further away, as below his eyes rather than his feet, the Rhone (‘Rhodanus ipse sub oculis nostris erat’). Familiares IV.1. 4. Personal correspondence with Edward Mendelson, whom I thank. 5. For various translations of this, see Corrigan 28.

Works Cited Auden, W.H. Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse: 1926–1938. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. ———. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: The Modern Library, 2007. ———. Prose: 1969–1973. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. ———. and Christopher Isherwood. Plays and Other Dramatic Writings 1928– 1938. Ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Betjeman, John. ‘Death of King George V.’ Collected Poems. London: John Murray, 2014. Bonafoux, Paul. ‘L’Impressionisme et les malentendus’. Impressionisme et littérature. Eds. Gérard Gengembre, Yvan Leclerc and Florence Naugrette. MontSaint-Aignan: Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2012. 37–43. Bowen, Elizabeth. To the North. [1933]. London: Vintage, 2016.

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Clark, Stephen R.L. ‘Plotinus: Charms and Countercharms.’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 65 (2009): 215–23. Corrigan, Kevin. ‘“Solitary” Mysticism in Plotinus, Proclus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius.’ The Journal of Religion 76.1 (1996): 28–42. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Day Lewis, Cecil. The Magnetic Mountain. London: The Hogarth Press, 1933. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. [1853]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dodds, E.R., ed. and trans. Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York and Toronto: The Macmillan Co., 1923. Nicolson, Harold. Diaries and Letters 1930–1939. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: Collins, 1966. Spender, Stephen. Trial of a Judge: A Tragedy in Five Acts. London: Faber and Faber, 1938. Stallworthy, Jon. Louis MacNeice. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. Sutherland, John. Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?: More Puzzles in Classic Fiction. [1997]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies. [1930]. London: Penguin, 1996. Waugh, Evelyn. Ninety-Two Days: Travels in Guiana and Brazil. [1934]. London: Serif, 2007. Waugh, Evelyn. Labels: A Mediterranean Journey. [1930]. London: Penguin, 2011. White, T.S. England Have My Bones. [1936]. London: Macdonald Futura, 1981. Williams, Charles. The Place of the Lion. [1931]. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

CHAPTER 4

Entering British Airspace: Aviation and Film Michael McCluskey

In his 1935 book Aircraft , the architect Le Corbusier contended that ‘contemporary society’ was ‘divided at the moment between a desire to retrace its steps and to embark on the conquest of a new civilization’ (5). As the book title indicates, aviation offered Le Corbusier a means to examine this divide, argue for this conquest and imagine a ‘New Age’ (6) of efficiency and order. This chapter considers what this ‘New Age’ entailed and how aviation factored into it. In particular, it examines the new spaces created by the expansion of the aviation industry in the 1920s and ’30s and argues that the production of ‘airspace’ was central to a new age of British modernity, identity and industry. Airspace, as I discuss it here, entailed not just the space above the earth where airplanes could travel, but also the spaces that the aviation industry required and inspired. These included aerodromes and aeroplane interiors, hotels and travel services, air shows and aerial advertising. At the same time these spaces were expanding, two new forms of film-making were also increasing in popularity: documentary and amateur film. Documentary emerged in Britain in 1926 as a means of educating audiences about changes to the

M. McCluskey (B) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_4

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nation.1 Amateur film-making expanded around this time as cheaper and more portable cameras made this pastime more widely accessible.2 Both types of film-makers were drawn to the new sites and spaces created by aviation. Documentaries were made expressly to promote civilian air travel and the use of air mail, and amateur film-makers recorded aerodromes, air shows and aeroplanes both on the ground and in the air. To produce their work, film-makers embedded themselves within these spaces, filmed from the inside and extended national airspace via film screenings. Their films, then, are vital for a study of interwar aviation and the ways in which these technologies of expansion—cinema and aviation—helped to construct an expansive, modern, mobile image of Britain. Writers of the 1920s and ’30s and more recent studies of the interwar period emphasize the ‘compression’ (Trotter 14) and ‘contraction’ (Esty 7) of time and space that aviation created. Yet, as Stephen Kern has argued, ‘[n]ew communication and transportation technologies expanded as well as compressed time and space, depending on point of view’ (Kern xxx n2). By taking the point of view of documentary and amateur filmmakers, this chapter puts the emphasis on the spaces and systems that this compression required. In doing so, it heeds the call ‘to expand our knowledge of airspaces and the social relations they enhance and make possible’ (Cwerner et al. x) and shifts the focus from a model of contraction and endpoints to one of expansion and intermedial spaces.

The Production of Airspace For many interwar Britons, the ‘conquest of a new civilization’ (Le Corbusier 5) meant the ‘Conquest of the Air’ (‘The Conquest of the Air’ 4). While this conquest meant quickened communication and decreased travel times, it also meant new spaces for work, play and travel. In The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre demonstrates that space ‘serves as a tool of thought and action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power’ (Lefebvre 26). The films that I examine here provide evidence of space as a means of control and a tool of state power exerted to encourage the acceptance of increased aviation. The state, according to Lefebvre, is not just a political organization and the subjects it acts upon, but also a ‘spatial framework’:

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Indeed each new form of state, each new form of political power, introduces its own particular way of partitioning space, its own particular administrative classification of discourses about space and about things and people in space. (281)

Government-sponsored films such as, for example, Air Post (1934) document the partitioning of space in the interwar period as part of the promotion of national aviation. Amateur films also capture the construction and division of diverse spaces as part of this promotion—and they capture citizen responses to them. Collectively, these films pick out the components of what Peter Adey calls ‘the complex and integrated spatiality’ (‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ 1319) produced by aviation. According to Adey, ‘airspaces’ include the air and ‘their related spatialities on the ground’ (‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ 1319). These spatialities include new spaces such as the aerodromes built to accommodate the expansion of commercial aviation and old ones like post offices, roads and railways that needed to be integrated into the new transportation and communication networks that aviation created (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2) In Aircraft Le Corbusier contrasts two different responses to this integration. While ‘officials still believe that aviation could be introduced into our lives by a nice juxtaposition’ and ‘soldiers have also tried to persuade themselves that aviation would politely adapt itself to the old rules’ (Vauthier quoted in Le Corbusier 3), aviation instead—according to Le Corbusier’s source—‘is bursting through everything: our customs, our law, our economy’ (Vauthier quoted in Le Corbusier 3). The films I discuss below show both successful integrations of old and new and instances in which aviation ‘bursts’ accepted patterns of behaviour. Adey contends that ‘one way of approaching the geography of the air—or aerial geographies—has been to explore how they are travelled through’ (‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ 1319). Films provide this perspective as well as offering moving images of the ‘related spatialities on the ground’ (‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ 1319). In order to capture these images film-makers must insert themselves within the spatialities they seek to document. They thus offer a privileged perspective of the architectures and infrastructures in which these spaces themselves are embedded, the exchanges these spaces facilitate, the movements they encourage and ‘the multiple social, cultural,

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Fig. 4.1 Airspace infrastructure on display at Croydon Airport: aeroplanes and other vehicles, pilots, ground crew and passengers come together as crowds gather to observe it all on the viewing deck to the right of the control tower (Image courtesy of The Postal Museum)

political and economic geographies that are tied up in the air’ (‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ 1319) and on the ground. They document spaces of integration and spaces of intrusion, and present aviation as a technology of expansion: one that creates new ‘infrastructures, spaces and architectures’ (‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ 1319) even as it compresses time and spatial distances. One reason for the interwar fascination with the aeroplane was its seeming ability to condense time and space in a similar way to other examples of the ‘technologies of speed’ (Simonsen 100) of the early twentieth century. ‘With its famed “hops”, it flew from one point on the map to another without traversing the space between them’ (Simonsen 102), Dorthe Gert Simonsen contends. Yet, of course, the aeroplane did traverse the spaces between these end points, and amateur and documentary films show us what happened in these spaces, capture the

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Fig. 4.2 Aviation as the integration of economic, transportation and communication networks: loading air mail at Croydon Airport (Image courtesy of The Postal Museum)

technologies that connected the aeroplane to points on the ground, and give us aerial perspectives of the flyover country otherwise erased in accounts that emphasize the compression of space. They not only tell us what happens between take-off and landing—on the ground and in the air—(as well as before and after flights), but also demonstrate that, as Peter Adey, Lucy Budd and Phil Hubbard argue, ‘airspace is not some asocial realm or “nonplace”’ (Adey et al. 774). The aviation films that I discuss in this chapter recognize and repopulate spaces overlooked in studies that focus instead on the contractions created by technological modernity. In seeking out the spaces created by aviation through an examination of documentary and amateur films, this chapter, then, also demonstrates how film itself—another technology that edits and condenses—also creates and expands. To capture their sequences, documentary and amateur film-makers insert themselves into

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processes and exchanges that would otherwise be inaccessible to wider audiences. In the case of films of aviation, they allow us to see what happens in flight and make visible the often hidden labours of communication, maintenance and transportation. By filling in what happens between the dots on a map, these films help to construct ‘new mappings of global airspace’ (Adey et al. 774) in the interwar period and contribute to our understanding of the impact of aviation on interwar Britain. Documentary and amateur films capture the spaces created by aviation’s ‘bursting through’ (Vauthier quoted in Le Corbusier 3) existing geographies and economies; however, they do not present the aeroplane exclusively as the radical disruptor that Le Corbusier describes. While communicating the excitement and new opportunities that aviation created, they do so through sequences that stress the nice juxtapositions and polite adaptations that Le Corbusier seems to dismiss. We do not see the upheaval caused by aerodrome construction or hear the noises that aeroplanes added to their environments. Nevertheless, these films— while emphasizing integration over disruption—provide evidence of the ‘general revision of previously accepted values’ (Vauthier quoted in Le Corbusier 3) that aviation and the development of other technologies of expansion inspired. They document a revised idea of Britain as a modern, mobile nation and capture in moving images the cultural work of crafting national airspace.

Crafting National Airspace Aviation disrupted established ideas of airspace and national identity. While ‘technological innovations in the nineteenth century [. . .] were easily assimilated to the old rules governing airspace’ (Banner 20), the expansion of civilian aviation that followed the end of the First World War necessitated a new system of international law and understanding of national boundaries. The central question was: ‘Did the sovereign power of the nation-state extend upward, or was it confined to the surface of the earth?’ (Banner 42). This question was addressed in the Air Navigation and Transport Act of 1920, which established air rights above Britain, its colonies and territories. Airspace was now the shared spaced of national identity: a form of transportation and communication that could connect spatially distanced locations across Britain and a form of expression of national modernity.

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The ‘production and control of global airspace became a matter of intense political concern’ (Budd 117) throughout the 1920s as civilian aviation and national airlines expanded. Lucy Budd has examined how national airspace was crafted by both national and international laws and practices. But, I argue, national airspace was also a cultural product and, as such, can be studied and understood by examining the works of writers and film-makers who helped to shape it—particularly in this period in which the concepts of global and national airspace were being ironed out. Budd’s work on what she calls ‘Air craft’ (Budd 115) draws attention to the ways in which ‘airspaces are socially produced, maintained and contested’ (Cwerner 14), something we see similarly in Le Corbusier’s Aircraft (though Budd does not mention the book). Le Corbusier’s study and other examples of interwar ‘air craft’ in the writings and films of the 1920s and ’30s document the expansion of the aviation system and its integration into other national and international networks, and they indicate how the abstract ideas of airspace and national identity were made material and visible in the interwar period. The ‘aerial conquest’ (Grahame-White and Harper vi) of previously boundless space contributed to the expanding networks that connected interwar Britons. According to David Trotter, ‘Technological advances in aviation and in wireless telegraphy and telephony’ (Trotter 14) produced ‘increasingly wide networks of mobility and power’ (Barney Warf quoted in Trotter 14). These networks connected Britain to what J. B. Priestley calls ‘the world of the air’ in his narration to the documentary film We Live in Two Worlds (1937). The two worlds that the film documents are the world of maps and the world of mobilities; that is, the world of national borders and the world of transnational networks that transcend these borders and enable communication, transportation and trade. The development of networks within and across national borders was the subject of several interwar studies, with aviation’s intervention in these networks a particular point of interest. Aviation allowed the transnational movements of people, products and information that Priestley describes, provided an overview of existing national networks, and served as a metaphor for the progressive, expansive mindset that proponents of national modernization hoped to instil in interwar citizens via their campaigns to create airmindedness. In his book English Journey (1934) Priestley offers an earlier take on the mapped and mobile nation by diagnosing what sees as three Englands: an ‘Old England’ of rural landscapes, historic sites, and ‘quaint high-ways

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and byways’ (Priestley 397), an ‘industrial England’ of factories, railways, hastily-built houses, ‘sooty little towns, and still sootier, grim fortress-like cities’ (Priestley 399), and a ‘third England […] belonging more to the age itself than to this particular island’ (Priestley 401). This last England is Priestley’s account of Le Corbusier’s New Age: a nation on the move participating in transnational trends and providing the infrastructure to support multiple mobilities. As Priestley describes: This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dancehalls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons. If the fog had lifted I knew that I should have seen this England all around me at that northern entrance to London, where the smooth wide road passes between miles of semi-detached bungalows, all with their little garages, their wireless sets, their periodicals about film stars, their swimming costumes and tennis rackets and dancing shoes. The fog did not lift for an instant, however; we crawled, stopped, crawled again; and I had ample time to consider carefully this new England. (401)

The scene sounds like a description written from an aeroplane, complete with the concern about fog obscuring the view. Priestley uses the aerial perspective to describe specific people and places and to provide an overview of the state of the nation. Like Le Corbusier, he takes advantage of the ‘bird’s-eye-view’ (Le Corbusier 5) that the aerial age affords. For Le Corbusier, the aeroplane was the ‘symbol of the New Age’ (6) and its ‘bird’s-eye view’ enabled an informed assessment of the state of the nation. Priestley, in this passage, in less critical of contemporary life than Le Corbusier, who claimed that ‘the airplane indicts’ (5) through its visions of disordered, decrepit cities. Priestley, instead, uses the bird’s view eye to identify—for good and ill—the markers of British modernity, including its nascent aviation industry. Coventry is ‘keeping up with the times’, according to Priestley, as its industries have diversified into the new technologies of ‘aeroplanes, wireless sets, and various electrical contrivances, including the apparatus used by the Talkies’ (Priestley 70). Kristin Bluemel notes that Priestley’s three Englands are seemingly ‘separated as much as by time as by space’ (Bluemel 17). Yet the aerial perspective that Priestley evokes brings the three together to show how

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the old, the industrial and the ‘new age’ Englands intersect and intertwine. The bird’s-eye-view afforded by aeroplanes and adopted by writers was able to document tangible connections such as railways, roads and wires, and, as Jennifer Van Vleck argues, it could also serve as an ‘optic’ (Van Vleck 4) through which the abstract ideas of national identity and national destiny could be articulated. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) George Orwell uses the bird’s-eyeview to mark the economic and technological changes of the nation and to pick apart the compressed layers of industrialization. Orwell uses the aeroplane as an example of the ways in which ‘mechanical progress’ can ‘make life safe and soft’ (Orwell 301). The aeroplane, to Orwell, is an example of a technology that has become increasingly safer to operate over time to the extent that air travel was now (in 1937) nearly as commonplace as travel by car or train. He also uses the new perspective air travel offers to comment on the permanent damage that certain industries have caused by scarring the landscape. ‘Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the places where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be distinguishable from an aeroplane’ (Orwell 175). Virginia Woolf makes a similar observation in her novel Between the Acts (1941): ‘From an aeroplane [. . .] you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleon wars’ (Woolf 4). Orwell and Woolf indicate how the aerial perspective not only picks out details unobservable at ground level, but could also open up the condensed layers of national history. While the National Air Transport and Navigation Act of 1920 extended national territory into the sky above the national landscape, these descriptions also show how airspace could be used to drill down through layers of history. In these accounts, the aeroplane provides a privileged view of the landscape—one that enables the viewer to see connections unobservable at ground level and to make connections between the past and present. This privileged perspective was commercialized by Aerofilms Ltd., a company founded in 1919 to provide aerial photos for prospective clients. Aerofilms made available technologies previously used for military surveillance. The Ordnance Survey, developers, planners and other clients commissioned specific photographs from Aerofilms, while other aerial images were purchased from the company’s catalogue for postcards

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and advertising campaigns. As a 1933 advertisement attests, ‘Aerofilms Ltd., the pioneers in aerial photography, have been employed by concerns in every branch of Business, Commerce and Industry, and aerofilms taken in all parts of the country include: FACTORIES, HOTELS, SCHOOLS, COUNTRY RESIDENCES, MUNICIPAL UNDERTAKINGS, HOUSING ESTATES, ENGINEERING AND BUILDING CONTRACTS, QUARRIES, COALFIELDS, etc., etc.’ (Deriu 259). The list indicates the range of subjects and uses for aerial images including, as the advertisement notes, the proof that ‘your goods’ are ‘British Made’ (Deriu 259). Aerofilms photographs were the feature of an exhibition at a London art gallery in 1933. As The Times review notes, such aerial photographs are ‘more enlightening than pages of description would be’ (‘Airscapes’ 8) and provide a ‘new understanding, architectural or otherwise’ (‘Airscapes’ 8) in which even familiar places ‘take on a new beauty’ (‘Airscapes’ 8). Unfamiliar images, though, are what distinguish aerial photography from other forms: ‘Several pictures of prehistoric remains and early methods of cultivation, imperceptible from the ground, are included, and there is a picture of one of the new waterless gasometers as seen from above’ (‘Airscapes’ 8). As this line indicates, the exhibition mixed the modern and the ancient and highlighted the ability of aerial images to present the otherwise imperceptible. The airplane could not only indict, then, it could unearth hidden histories and make visible evidence of the past unobservable at ground level. ‘Seen in this way’, Peter Fritzsche contends, ‘the countryside passing beneath the aviator’s gaze revealed the gigantic impress of the centuries-long work and endeavor’ (Fritzsche 162) of industrialization, and the aviator’s gaze could be recorded by photography as well as films made by amateur film-makers. The intent of these film-makers is less obvious than that of commercial companies like Aerofilms. The films I discuss are maintained by Britain’s regional media archives who, in addition to preserving and often digitizing them, provide any biographical information they have about the film-maker. This often, but not always, includes the name of the filmmaker and date of the film but rarely contains information about why they filmed the material they did. Without any written record of why these film-makers chose to film certain sequences, it is difficult to determine their motivation as well as their plans for distribution. These may have been intended for private audiences only such as the family; for wider public audiences for entertainment and/or education; or they may have

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intended to be distributed commercially, perhaps included as an advertisement or short feature before the screening of a major-studio film in a cinema. As Brian Jacobson argues, amateur films with such little attribution ‘encourage speculative readings based more on contemporary ideas about their subjects than the historical realities—often unknown, always incomplete—of their production, distribution, exhibition, and reception’ (Jacobson 198). My speculative reading of these films draws on the writings I have discussed above as well as other writings on aviation from the interwar period. I use these to reconstruct the wider debates to which these films contribute and to situate them within contemporary commentaries on aviation. These films contribute to our understanding of the crafting of national airspace as well as the crafting of cinema space to comment on the state of the nation. In particular, they capture the connective tissues that Priestley points out as part of the ‘new England’ (roads, railways and wires) and offer the privileged perspective on the past, present and future that Aerofilms, Orwell, Woolf and others attributed to aerial images. Claude Friese-Greene photographed for Aerofilms in its early days and made the film Across England in an Aeroplane (1919) for the company. He is therefore not strictly an amateur film-maker, which is one who is not paid for their film work and whose primary profession is not film-making. However, as Friese-Greene’s work saw limited distribution and, outside Aerofilms, little to no sponsorship, I include him here as an example of what Jacobson calls the ‘expert amateur’ (Jacobson 198). While FrieseGreene is better known for his film compilation about a motor tour across Britain The Open Road (1926), Across England in an Aeroplane shows off a similar interest in cities, industries, historic sites and the transportation links that connect them. Despite its title, the film focuses on southwestern England only and presents aerial views of Exeter, Torquay, the ‘Cornish Riviera’ railway and Dartmoor Prison. The film insists via intertitle that ‘a bird’s eye view is worth having’ and demonstrates the potential of aviation as a source of civilian transportation by pointedly comparing itself with the railway it flies above. ‘The Cornish Riviera Express has just left Exeter. We overtake her and . . . look back upon her doing her best along the Dawlish-Teignmouth sea-wall’. Not only does the commentary point out that the plane is faster than the train, it also adds the condescending ‘doing her best’ in describing the train’s journey along the sea wall, a detail that indicates the potential obstacles the train faces, obstacles not encountered by those that can fly over them. To move ‘across England

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in an aeroplane’ is faster and safer, the film suggests, even if its ostensible purpose is to show off the stunning views available from what an intertitle calls ‘cloud-land’. ‘To Cloudland!’ is the destination of Flying 1 and 2, a compilation of films made by C. H. Wood ‘with the cooperation of the Yorkshire Aero Club’ from 1928 to 1933. Wood worked for both the Pathé and Gaumont film companies as a cameraman, and his own company produced promotional films for various businesses and provided aerial photographs to use in their advertisements. As the intent of Flying 1 and 2 is unclear, I include Wood as another expert amateur. Flying 1 and 2 starts on familiar ground—literally—as it opens with a shot of an aeroplane taking off. ‘We’ve all seen that from the GROUND . . .’, an intertitle states, ‘Now how does it look from the PLANE?’ In this opening sequence the film acknowledges the contemporary popular pastime of watching aeroplanes take off (‘We’ve all seen that’). It then allows viewers to see what this looks like from inside the aeroplane. The camera captures the ground slowly receding until it takes in the buildings of the Yeadon Aerodrome and surrounding fields. Subsequent shots show an unidentified river, roads and the Yorkshire coast. A shot of a train running along its tracks, similar to the shot in Friese-Greene’s film, invites a comparison to the speedier aeroplane, which, as an intertitle notes, is travelling at 110 miles per hour. The aeroplane can not only travel faster than the train, the film suggests, but it can also travel to areas otherwise inaccessible by forms of ground transportation, namely, the ‘Cloudland’ mentioned in the opening intertitle sequence. Wood’s films present several shots of what an intertitle calls the ‘snowy plain’ that can be seen by flying above cloud level and through the clouds themselves. The film, then, not only provides a new way for viewers to appreciate the English landscape, but also surveys the airspace above it. The shots of the land below and the shots of ‘Cloudland’ show off the two components of national airspace—land and sky—and the perspective each provides of the other. A stunning sequence that Wood films and comments on via intertitles notes this relationship: ‘We sit still and let the earth and sky do all the tumbling and rolling’. In other words, the aerial view detaches viewers from the activities below and allows them to examine connections, changes and challenges not readily observable at ground level.

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Aerial sequences from amateur film-makers show the intersections of Priestley’s old, industrial and new age Englands, the markers that identify them and the movements between them. In 1931 C. Ernest Shippam produced a film compilation that includes two aerial sequences: one of industrial docks and the other of a country house. The docks are most likely those of Portsmouth, located near the Chichester headquarters of the family firm Shippam’s (maker of meat and fish paste); the country house is the Shippam family’s. While the film has no explicit narrative, it nevertheless maps Priestley’s England and presents a story of economic and social mobility. The success of the firm enabled the family to purchase the house and to afford the camera and commission the flight to allow Ernest Shippam to produce this and other films. The old and industrial Englands are useful reference points that, like Shippam’s 1931 film, advertise the family’s—and the firm’s—successful transition into the aerial age. The film Aerial Pictures of Selo Photographic Film Factory (1932) serves as an advertisement for two firms: Selo (located in Brentwood, Essex) and Hillman Airways, whose biplane enabled the cameraman to film the factory from the air. The film opens with a shot of a biplane with ‘Hillmans Airways’ written on the side. A camera films the biplane take-off, and the film cuts to an intertitle that states ‘HIGH UP IN THE FILM WORLD’. This begins the sequence of aerial shots. The camera captures what at first are unidentified factory buildings then flies over a building with the word ‘SELO’ written on the roof. The film edits together several sequences in which the plane flies over the SELO sign from different angles and distances. The camera then captures a nearby major road, a roundabout, surrounding countryside and newly built estates laid out neatly in identical rows that fill the entire frame. The film shows off Selo’s factory and embeds it amid a changing landscape of Priestley’s ‘arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings’ (Priestley 401). The motivation for making the film is unclear, but it serves several purposes. It publicizes the Selo factory and provides evidence of its extensive and modern facilities. It also offers an example of the services Hillman Airways can provide (though it is unclear if Hillman provided only the biplane or the biplane and the camera operator). The film documents the suburban sprawl that many interwar commentators critiqued via the aerial eye that Le Corbusier considered essential for the new age of urban planning. And, finally, it demonstrates the forms

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of advertising that came along with commercial aviation. A commercial flyover suggests the company’s modernity while also ensuring that their products are British made as the flyover serves as evidence of the production facility’s British location. The phrase in the film’s only intertitle—‘HIGH UP IN THE FILM WORLD’—renders airspace the space of the moving image as for many in the interwar period the only way they could experience the bird’s-eye-view was through the screening of sequences filmed from the air. The film not only brings the viewer into the air, it also extends commercial networks into Cloudland and serves as an example of how airspace could be crafted to suit commercial communications. As Aerial Pictures of Selo Photographic Film Factory demonstrates, airspace was advertising space.3

Airspace and Infrastructure Airspace was also theatrical space. While films were able to provide audiences with the experience of flight, many interwar Britons witnessed ‘Theatre in the Air’ (‘A Theatre in the Air’ 13) by attending air shows. These displays were held at local aerodromes and allowed viewers on the ground to watch aerial acrobatics, military manoeuvres and exhibitions of the latest aviation technology. The film Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus Display (1932) provides evidence of some of the excitement and spectacle of these air shows with loop-the-loops and other acrobatics and close-up shots of the planes on the ground. While air shows such as Cobham’s and the annual RAF Display at Hendon were popular forms of entertainment in the interwar period, many Britons found aero-fun in less formal displays by watching aeroplanes take off and land at local aerodromes. The take-offs and landings of famous aviators such as Amy Johnson, Charles Lindbergh and Lady Mary Bailey obviously drew huge crowds, but people also gathered to watch comparatively ordinary flights leave and land. Ian Christie has identified what he calls the ‘departure/arrival genre’ (Christie 22) of film in the early twentieth century, that is, films that show the departures and arrivals of the monarch and other notable figures. Christie argues that these films ‘played a significant part in communicating the experience of empire’ (Christie 22, emphasis in original). As he explains, ‘the short arrivaland-departure films created condensed signifiers of empire as a matrix of movement ’ (Christie 30, emphasis in original). Arrival and departure by aeroplane are a subset of this genre, and films that record take-offs and

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landings contribute to the creation of Christie’s ‘condensed signifiers of empire’ while also condensing the experience of flight. The take-off and landing film erases travel time and visualizes time/space compression. By only presenting the beginning and end of the flight, airspace is contracted and rendered as spectacle. The film Croydon Aerodrome (1932) presents a family watching aeroplanes take off from the viewing platform at Croydon Aerodrome. The film begins with shots of the Nightingale family and others walking around the purpose-built platform made to accommodate audiences that wanted to watch the aeroplanes. It cuts to shots of an Imperial Airways biplane on the runway then to a shot of the crowd gathered to look at the plane up close. Croydon Beautiful (1937) is a compilation of sites that celebrate the beauty of Croydon. Following opening shots of flowering trees and quiet residential areas, the film cuts to a sequence of an aeroplane taking off. Unlike in Croydon Aerodrome, the camera does not include in the frame the aerodrome buildings or people gathered to watch. Instead, it presents what looks like an empty field with trees on the horizon in the distance. Slowly, the aeroplane ascends and disappears. This cuts to a sequence of a plane landing but the frame now includes in the foreground a small group clustered near a motor car and the small, rolling staircase that, presumably, will be used to disembark passengers and/or crew. The appearance of the plane seemingly out of nowhere and the absence of shots of the air tower, radio and flagmen on the ground suggest the plane approaches on its own, independent until its encounter with the ground crew. It arrives out of nowhere, untethered to the ground and, only after landing, is integrated into the aerodrome. These films from Croydon—like the departure/arrival ones studied by Christie—amplify ‘imperial spectacle’ (Christie 30) in their display of British technological modernity, and they contribute to the spectacle of isolation and independence associated with the ‘airmen’ heroes that Valentine Cunningham sees in 1930s literature: the ‘solo flyer’ (Cunningham 171) and ‘quintessential man of action who was demanding to be looked up to’ (Cunningham 168). But these seemingly solo flyers relied, of course, on earthbound services. As Peter Adey argues, ‘The vertical life of the airmen is tethered to the terrestrial, to the location of their landing place and its local topographical idiosyncrasies, as well as its outer connectivities. The aeroplane is not necessarily liberating or liberated, but it is tied [. . .] to an infrastructure on the ground’ (‘Aerial Life’ 2). Amateur and documentary films of the 1920s and ’30s

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capture the many components of the infrastructure of aviation and the ‘outer connectivities’ of air craft: the systems that suture together flight space and ground space in the production of national airspace. While Le Corbusier emphasized the bird’s-eye-view and the aeroplane’s ability to indict, he also acknowledged its ability to ‘carry passengers, deliver the post, dispatch goods, become a domestic implement, etc.’ (Le Corbusier 9). Of course, it was not the aeroplane that accomplished these tasks, but the labour of the women, men and machines that enabled the aviation system to operate. In other words, airspace was also workspace. The 1934 documentary Air Post was produced by the General Post Office (GPO) to educate audiences about the infrastructure that supports the expanding air mail service. While the focus is on mail delivery, the film includes several sequences that document the work at Croydon Aerodrome. These sequences include preparing the aeroplane before its flight, telecommunications between Croydon and central London, the handling and loading of mail bags and the workers that ensure a safe take-off. Air Post features a voiceover narration that at one point lists the types of documents carried by the air mail for overseas delivery: ‘birthday greetings, prospectuses, reports in industry on the other side of the world, letters from soldiers in India, reports on crops, banking returns, and price lists’. These documents synecdochally draw attention to some of Adey’s ‘outer connectivities’: the commercial, professional and personal networks that intertwine with the aviation system and tether flights to activities on the ground. The film The Future’s in the Air (1937) presents a similar sequence though it uses a list of sample aeroplane passengers as synecdochal links: ‘professors on their way to Egypt, merchants from Malaya, farmers back to Australia, wives to join husbands, army men going back to India after leave, people going home, people leaving home’. Both films provide an aeroplane inventory that, in these moments, allow the films to turn in on themselves. In the absence of any explicit plot, each film is itself essentially an aviation inventory, a (partial) list of what the aviation system entails. Air Outpost (1937) is another interwar inventory film that takes us inside the aerodrome in Sharjah, built as part of the string of aerodromes to enable Imperial Airways flights to Australia.4 Like The Future’s in the Air, the film was sponsored by Imperial Airways to encourage the use of air mail, the airline itself, and the expansion of Britain’s aeronetwork of new technologies and existing commonwealth relations. The

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film’s voiceover narration celebrates the ‘conquering of space and time’ by ‘the speed and reliability of great airliners’. The film also predicts that ‘modern flying’ will eventually be as regular ‘as we take our daily journey to the office’. The narrator’s rhetoric here echoes the intentions of Major General Sir F. H. Sykes to create an international aviation network that operates like London’s commuter railway system with ‘Cairo as the Clapham Junction’ (‘Empire Air Routes’ 6). The film dramatizes this idea with a sequence of passengers disembarking at Sharjah and a montage of voices suggesting the chatty group had just left London: ‘The Coronation was marvellous.’ ‘At the Palladium there’s a new Crazy Show. The craziest one ever.’ ‘A most ghastly epidemic of ’flu.’ ‘My dear, I’ve never been sick in my life.’

The Future’s in the Air makes a similar point with its intermingling of London references and local contexts: ‘shoes from Bond Street tread the desert sand, shiny suitcases from Piccadilly reflect the glare of an Arabian sun’. Furthermore, the sequence of fragmented voices of Air Outpost has its counterpoint in the fragmentation of aeroplane parts in a sequence of The Future’s in the Air. Both films visually and aurally attempt to represent the compression of time and space through these fragmented sequences; yet, with their shots of the flyover country between stopping points and sequences of the work of ground crews, they also document what the narrator of Air Outpost describes as the ‘ever-widening organization on the ground’ that came with the expansion of British airspace. Scott Anthony notes that Air Outpost ‘was intended to present a dramatic but easily understandable microcosm of civil aviation’s development’ (Anthony 304). It also provides an inventory of the activities of a working aerodrome along the London to India to Australia route and, like The Future’s in the Air, offers examples of the often unseen work of aviation: loading and unloading passengers and supplies; monitoring the weather, wind, and air pressure; telecommunications; providing lighting for night-time landings; arranging food and lodgings for overnight passengers en route to other destinations. While the film captures the work of the aerodrome, it also calls attention to the work the aerodrome provides for—or imposes on—the local population. As a 1934 Times

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article announced, ‘the Arabs are becoming air-minded’ (‘Arabs and Aviation: Developments along Air Routes’ 16), and Air Outpost presents sequences that demonstrate what it sees as ‘the modernizing impact of aviation’ (Anthony 304). It does this through sequences that present the integration of a trans-national aviation network—not as Le Corbusier’s ‘bursting through’ (Le Corbusier 5), but as the local people’s ‘revision of previously accepted values’ (Le Corbusier 5). The aerodrome provides jobs for local workers, creates business for local farmers whose produce helps to feed passengers and aerodrome crew and enables local traders to widen their distribution as, for example, the film notes that ‘Arab merchants’ are able to ship pearls ‘to dealers in Bombay and Calcutta’ via the aeroplane. These instances offer evidence of the extension of imperial and aviation networks into local lands and the ways in which aviation adapts to its local setting. As the narrator of Air Outpost explains, the protection of the aerodrome is provided by the local sheikh: ‘If anything should happen to the airliner each man is liable to be punished in Arab fashion by loss of eye or limb’. The line stirs up the potential dangers of the local population only to dismiss them while retaining the air of adventure that air travel through such outposts carried with them. This is Elizabeth Bowen’s maxim ‘Move dangerously’ in film form (Bowen 23). Another film-maker that captures Bowen’s maxim is Ruth Stuart, whose Egypt and Back with Imperial Airways (1931–1933) offers an inside view of the flight from Croydon via Crete to Cairo. Stuart films from inside the aeroplane and shows a passenger seated against a window with a cut to a point of view shot from the plane that indicates its altitude and movement as the landscape below recedes. A sequence shot in Crete fills in some of the space between Croydon and Cairo and indicates what civilian air travel included along this route. After leaving Croydon, ‘Three days later’, an intertitle tells us, the passengers arrive in Crete. While they left London in the Hengist, a Handley Page H.P. 45 (or, at least, Stuart’s editing suggests this is the aeroplane in which she travelled), they now sit in ‘the Company yacht’ waiting for the Short S.17 Kent flying boat named Scipio to refuel. The sequence captures the intermedial spaces and exchanges that aviation across such distances required before arrival at the final destination. Stuart films from the flying boat and takes viewers ‘above the clouds’ with shots of the skyscape as well as the land and sea below. A shot of another passenger in his seat reading a newspaper and yawning indicates how such time was filled by some travellers and how, for some, such a trip was seemingly as exciting as

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commuting through Clapham. Stuart films ‘Four adventurous days’ in Cairo and includes stunning 1930s street scenes. A sequence of ‘evening’ shots shows a much calmer city though an intertitle lets us know that the quiet is punctuated by ‘the drone of aircraft homebound with the African mail’. Here, Stuart connects the local setting with the transnational aviation network in which it is embedded. The ‘home’ to which the aeroplane heads is, of course, Croydon: the aerodrome becomes synonymous with the nation. It is Croydon where the film begins, and Stuart starts her adventure with shots of the ground crews that clean the aeroplanes, guide them to and from the runways, load and unload passengers and baggage, monitor weather, and move people between Croydon and central London by bus. ‘60,000 people have travelled by air within the last twelve months’, Stuart states via intertitle, and her film offers one account of 1930s overseas air travel and the people and machines that make it possible. In presenting the aerodrome and its connectivities as workspaces, these films also demonstrate what Lee Grieveson calls the ‘work of film’ (Grieveson 25), in this case, the cultural work of crafting national airspace. Corporate-sponsored films like The Future’s in the Air and governmentsponsored films like Air Post worked to educate audiences about the infrastructure that ensured safe and efficient air travel for passengers, documents and products. The aims of amateur films like Egypt and Back with Imperial Airways , Croydon Beautiful , Croydon Aerodrome and those of other interwar amateur films that capture aspects of British aviation are less easily decipherable, though they too make critical interventions in the production of national airspace. They offer a privileged view of the work and theatre of aviation and connect the expansion of airspace with the expansion of cinema space. Both film-making and flying were, of course, privileged activities; they were pursued mostly by the middle and upper classes because of economic costs and other obstacles that limited access. These technologies of expansion, then, were also technologies of exclusion as they edited out time and space, people and places. The incompleteness of air travel, amateur film and documentary can be offset by accounts offered in contemporary writings, that is, overlapped with other incomplete accounts. But they also need to be understood as evidence of the obstacles to integration of both technologies and of the narrow though privileged perspective of film craft and air craft.

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Notes 1. For a history of documentary film in Britain, see Swann; Anthony and Mansell. 2. For a history of amateur film, see Zimmerman. 3. For a study of advertising and aviation in the early twentieth century, see Taylor. 4. For an extensive analysis of the film, see Stanley-Price.

Works Cited ‘A Theatre in the Air.’ The Times, 2 February 1932: 13. Adey, Peter. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Malden, MA and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010. Adey, Peter. ‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects, Visions.’ Geography Compass. 2:5 (2008): 1318–36. Adey, Peter, Lucy Budd and Phil Hubbard, ‘Flying Lessons: Exploring the Social and Cultural Geographies of Global Air Travel.’ Progress in Human Geography 31:6 (2007): 773–91. ‘Airscapes.’ The Times, 22 April 1933: 8. Anthony, Scott. ‘The Future’s in the Air: Imperial Airways and the British Documentary Film Movement.’ Journal of British Cinema and Television. 8:3 (2011): 301–321. Anthony, Scott and James Mansell eds., The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit. London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ‘Arabs and Aviation: Developments along Air Routes.’ The Times, 17 November 1934: 16. Banner, Stuart. Who Owns the Sky?: The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Bluemel, Kristin. ‘Beyond Englishness: The Regional and Rural Novel in the 1930s.’ Eds. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton. A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 17–30. Bowen, Elizabeth. To the North [1932]. London: Vintage, 1999. Budd, Lucy. ‘Air Craft: Producing UK Airspace.’ Eds. Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry. Aeromobilities. London: Routledge, 2009. 115– 134. Christie, Ian. ‘“The Captains and the Kings Depart”: Imperial Departure and Arrival in Early Cinema.’ Empire and Film. Eds. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe. London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 21–33. Cunningham, Valentine. Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Cwerner, Saulo. ‘Introducing Aeromobilities.’ Aeromobilities. Eds. Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry. London: Routledge, 2009. 1–21. Cwerner, Saulo, Sven Kesselring and John Urry. Preface. Aeromobilities. Eds. Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry. London: Routledge, 2009. ix–x. Deriu, Davide. ‘Capital Views: Interwar London in the Photographs of Aerofilms Ltd.’ The London Journal 35:3 (1 November 2010): 255–276. ‘Empire Air Routes.’ The Times, 3 February 1920: 6. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Fritzsche, Peter. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Grahame-White, Claude and Harry Harper. The Aeroplane. London: T.C and E.C. Jack, 1914. Grieveson, Lee. ‘The Work of Film in the Age of Fordist Mechanization.’ Cinema Journal 51:3 (September 2012): 25–51. Jacobson, Brian R. ‘The Boss’s Film: Amateur Experts and Industrial Culture.’ Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960. Eds. Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017. 198–218. Kern, Stephen. ‘Preface.’ The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. [1983]. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. ix–xxx. Le Corbusier. Aircraft. [1935]. London: Trefoil Publications, 1987. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. [1937]. London: Penguin in association with Secker and Warburg, 2001. Priestley, J.B. English Journey. London: William Heinemann Ltd. in association with Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1934. Sargeant, Amy. ‘Cinema, Aviation and Airmindedness in Britain in the 1920s.’ Frames Cinema Journal 2. (November 2012): n. p. Simonsen, Dorthe Gert. ‘Accelerating Modernity: Time-Space Compression in the Wake of the Aeroplane.’ The Journal of Transport History 26: 2 (1 September 2005): 98–117. Stanley-Price, Nicholas. ‘Paul Rotha and the Making of Strand Films’ Air Outpost.’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 32:1 (February 2012): 95–111. Swann, Paul. The British Documentary Film Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Taylor, J.T. ‘Written in the Skies: Advertising, Technology, and Modernity in Britain since 1885.’ The Journal of British Studies 55:4 (October 2016): 750– 80.

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‘The Conquest of the Air.’ The Times, 14 January 1908: 4. ‘The Future of the Air Ministry.’ The Times, 3 January 1919: 7. Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. Van Vleck, Jennifer. Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. [1941]. London: Vintage, 1992. Zimmerman, Patricia. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Filmography Across England in an Aeroplane. Dir. Claude Friese-Greene, 1919. Aerial Pictures of Selo Photographic Film Factory. Dir. Unknown, 1932. East Anglia Film Archive. Air Outpost. Dir. Paul Rotha, 1937. Strand Film. Air Post. Dir. Geoffrey Clark, 1934. GPO Film Unit. Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus Display. Dir. Unknown, 1932. East Anglia Film Archive. Croydon Aerodrome. Dir. Moses Nightingale, 1932. Screen Archive South East. Croydon Beautiful. Dir. A.G. Hinchliff, 1937. Screen Archive South East. Egypt and Back with Imperial Airways. Dir. Ruth Stuart, 1931–33. East Anglia Film Archive. Flying 1 and 2. Dir. C.H. Wood, 1928–33. Yorkshire Film Archive. [Picnic]. Dir. C. Ernest Shippam, 1931. Screen Archive South East. The Future’s in the Air. Dir. Paul Rotha, 1937. Strand Film.

PART II

Industry

CHAPTER 5

Flying Blind: The Formation of Airmindedness from a Pilot’s Perspective Daniel Kilburn

The ability to fly ‘blind’ in weather conditions in which cloud or fog deprive the pilot of visual reference to the horizon or the ground has always posed an existential challenge to the demands of modern air transport for safety, regularity and reliability. While flying through the clouds appears an enduring and romantic symbol of air travel, it is in fact a source of mortal danger in the most literal sense: the human body, if deprived of visual cues as to its situational awareness while travelling at speed and in three dimensions, is almost impossibly deficient at discerning such important information for piloting an aeroplane as which way is up or down, or whether one is flying straight and level or at an increasingly steep angle of bank (a situation almost too disarmingly termed as an incipient spin). This chapter examines the ways in which these challenges were overcome during the interwar years so as to enable flights to operate on days in which a low cloud ceiling and/or poor visibility may be encountered, thus

D. Kilburn (B) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_5

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paving the way for safe, regular and reliable air transport in weather conditions that are commonplace in all but the most clement climates. Without such advancements in blind flying, the state of airmindedness among the prospective flying public—which runs as a theme through many of the chapters of this volume—could not realistically have been attained for as long as flight operations were constrained to being a literal fair-weather activity. As a licensed private pilot myself, any examination of the emergence of airmindedness in this period is invariably shaped from the perspective of a modern-day aviator whose training, equipment and operating procedures (including in blind flying) can all be credited directly to developments attained during the 1930s. Based on a corpus study of several hundred articles published in Flight —the world’s longest-running aviation periodical and a reference among pilots since its inception—this chapter explores how aviators in the 1930s were progressively equipped with the knowledge of human physiology, the training and licensing requirements and the new technologies for cockpit instrumentation and automation required to enable blind flying in (almost) all conditions and phases of flight. In turn, as I am also a social scientist and a geographer, the examination presented in this chapter adopts an approach loosely informed by what is known as ‘actor-network theory’ (ANT) to elucidate and respond to the seemingly staggering speed with which physiological, epistemological and technological elements were aligned to create a ‘blind-flying assemblage’ which endures today. In combining the perspective both of pilot and researcher in this way, this chapter seeks to explore how the practices, processes and procedures evolved during the interwar years would ultimately enable the development of ‘modern’ aviation as the social and technological entity we would later come to recognize. Only with these advancements could a more universal state of airmindedness be formed around shared expectations concerning safe, regular and reliable air transport. The chapter begins, from a pilot’s perspective, with a closer consideration of the role of the interwar years in forging aviation’s multiple modernities of airmindedness. It then proceeds to introduce Flight magazine as a source of analytic insight into the ‘actor-networks’ involved in a more-than-representational reading of the evolution of airmindedness in this period. A closer reading of the Flight corpus is then used to elucidate the case of blind flying and the assemblage of human factors, training and

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licensing and technology and automation; these, together, would ultimately enable full blind flying by the end of the 1930s. In doing so, this chapter examines the agency behind the assemblages of human agents, knowledges and technologies which would help to realize airmindedness to the extent that the term would ultimately soon drop from our vernacular altogether.

A Pilot’s Perspective As the chapters in this volume variously attest, the passage of the interwar years constituted a period of paradigmatic evolution for modern aviation, driven by developments which would transform the exercises of mobility, connectivity and power in ways not paralleled since the Portuguese ‘carracks’ of the fifteenth century.1 The new airmindedness wrought during this evolutionary period would be witnessed from the realms of commerce to culture, and ultimately from conflict to control. The transformational agency of certain paradigmatic technologies is often ascribed to periods of history in which, to borrow the cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, modernity has appeared most decisively ‘at large’ (Appadurai). Yet, arguably, academic observers are often satisfied with simply crediting such paradigm-shaping technologies in passing (the chronometer, the railway, the jumbo jet, the worldwide web and so on) before moving on to our chosen topic, usually one which presents less of a technically bewildering ‘black box’ of components and systems.2 Heavier-than-air aircraft are, of course, among the most complex of these paradigmshaping technologies and the interwar years saw more than their fair share of advancements—from the all-metal pressurized monoplane fuselage to engines capable of producing over a thousand horsepower and cockpits equipped with radio navigation and autopilot. While this chapter cannot purport to offer anything approaching a complete elucidation of these or other such technologies, it seeks, instead, to offer a modest transect into a single obstacle facing aviation in the interwar years: the ability to fly ‘blind’. In doing so, it attests to the continuities of modernity seen from the perspective of pilots from the 1930s to the contemporary period. I am very much a modern pilot. I gained my private pilot’s licence earlier in the second decade of the twenty-first century. I trained following the latest iteration of a constantly revised syllabus of theoretical knowledge and practical exercises convened across EU member states by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). My fellow trainees and I

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revised for our nine written exams using online question banks, I accrued hours in a state-of-the-art simulator,3 and a tablet or smartphone navigation app now allows me to forgo the requirement to carry paper charts. As one might expect of a sector such as aviation, it all appears decidedly modern. Yet many of the required modules of study for flight crew licensing—such as air law, flight planning and navigation—reflect over a century of established knowledge and procedures. The very requirements for the licensing are themselves overseen across all UN member states since the 1940s by the International Civil Aviation Organization, an enduring feat of post-Second World War geopolitics. And the aeroplanes in which I have accrued the most hours are direct derivations of models that first flew in the 1950s and are powered by piston engines evolved from a US Continental Motors design of 1931. Perhaps of most importance to the human–machine interface, the cockpits of today’s general aviation fleet rely on instruments—such as gyroscopic artificial horizons and turn coordinators, radio direction finders and three-point altimeters— all perfected in the 1930s. In these respects, contemporary aviation is not quite so modern after all. I am also a social scientist and, as such, I am acutely aware that essentializing labels of ‘modernity’ can be inherently problematic in their application, as much as they can ultimately prove apt or necessary. As the contributions in this volume attest, the interwar years were undoubtedly emblematic of modernity in representations of aviation as much as in any other field. In elucidating the reception towards emergent ‘airspaces’ in this period, David Pascoe brings to bear a rich cast of literary and cultural characters—Proust, Le Corbusier, Faust—who reflected on what aviation should or might become (Pascoe). However, as a human geographer with professional interests aligned decidedly to both the contemporary and the empirical, I have always been more concerned professionally with the material rather than the representational world. As a pilot, this is perhaps even more true, for the pleasure of being at the controls of my aeroplane is derived in no small part from the freedom of mind afforded by an environment governed by physical laws, strict procedures and unambiguous criteria (as much as by the freedom of movement in three dimensions). How then, from this perspective, can we make sense of the airmindedness that was forged in the interwar years, and the 1930s in particular, which became so intrinsic to literary or cultural representations of modernity? And in turn, what might we glean from

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a material or ‘more-than-representational’ inquiry into the formation of this modernity? This chapter argues that a pilot’s perspective affords us with an opportunity to analyse the multiplicity of material modernities associated with flying in the 1930s. To become airminded represented a realization of these modernities, whether among pilots, passengers, or the then-majority made up by those who could only aspire to fly. In taking a material approach, it is argued that we can avert the risk of exceptionalizing the period and its contribution to modern aviation. To make a simple case in point, a pilot trained today would find a 1930s cockpit a largely familiar environment. Flight and engine controls would fall readily to hand, instruments would be instantly recognizable, and while operations and procedures may vary the recourse to radio navigation or wireless communication with air traffic controllers would still feel well-rehearsed. In turn, the holder of a 1930s Pilots’ ‘A’ (private) Licence would have little trouble taking most aircraft from today’s general aviation fleet for a spin around an aerodrome circuit. Step back a few years, however, and the idiosyncrasies of rotary engine handling, bi-plane aerodynamics and rudimentary instrumentation would feel dangerously unintuitive to most contemporary pilots.

Flight Magazine as a More-Than-Representational Narrative Launched in 1909, Flight was the first (and now longest-running) weekly aviation publication.4 Popular from its inception (the first edition sold out within days), Flight ’s readership encompassed a broad mix of aviation enthusiasts, travellers, pilots, engineers and others with what might be described as an informed interested in aviation. Its contributors— many of them pilots, engineers or other industry insiders—typically offered a surprising level of technical and operational detail for such a widely circulated publication. Flight therefore provides a unique archival record throughout the evolution of aviation. This chapter draws on this archive to endeavour to chart the role of the pilot in the formation of airmindedness in the period from 1929 to 1939.5 While it is my positionality as a pilot that drew me into Flight ’s archive, with its lucid technical, detailed, and often first-hand narration of flying in this period—it is my training as a social scientist which compelled my attempts to closely interrogate, contextualize and reframe these narratives.

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In doing so, I found myself increasingly disposed towards methodological and ontological approaches from the social sciences associated with a material-semiotic or what is known as ‘actor-network theory’ (ANT) orientation. Despite being denoted as a mode of ‘theory’, ANT is better thought of as a broad analytic approach which seeks to explore and describe (rather than explain) how relationships between material actors (people, machines, nature, knowledge, institutions, spaces and so on) are enacted to bring about sociotechnical outcomes or changes (Latour). As Law defines it: Actor network theory is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. (‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’ 141)

In doing so, ANT seeks to elucidate how individual elements (or ‘actors’) come to be reshaped into systems—such as those for operating aeroplanes—that come to endure over a period of time with relatively stability. This durability may combine material or technical, strategic or teleological and discursive or narrative elements: for instance, the design of aeroplanes, the environment in which they operate and the discourses (whether professional or public) which order their use or operation. As such, under a material-semiotic approach ‘the social and the technical are embedded in each other’ (‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’ 147). Another attraction of an ANT approach for me as a human geographer is its ability to allow us to undertake a ‘more-than-representational’ analysis of cultural artefacts, such as the pages of Flight . Originally emerging as a break from the predominantly representational or semiotic approaches favoured by cultural geographers, what is known as ‘non-representational’ or more-than-representational theory (the latter term appearing more appropriate here) is an ‘umbrella term for diverse work that seeks better to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds’ (Lorimer 83). Rather than seeking a strictly discursive or semiotic understanding of an object—here, for instance, the aeroplane (and its pilot) as ‘modernity’ say—a more-than-representational approach aims to allow us to examine how sociotechnical regimes also coalesce around technological, governmental and physiological, psychological or

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sensory elements that are enacted around material objects or outcomes (Barratt). While suggesting the need to look beyond the representational may seem at odds with a study of how flying was represented in a given period, I would argue that it is in fact deeply complementary as it offers two affordances: firstly, informed by my perspective as a pilot, the more-than-representational allows us to elucidate how pilots in the 1930s enacted the undeniable paradigm of a new operational, technical and sociocultural modernity in this period. Secondly, informed by my perspective as a geographer, it allows us to examine the immense spaceshaping materiality of this modernity, in terms of the ability to overcome factors such as distance, meteorology or physiology. The remainder of this chapter thereby offers a more-thanrepresentational analysis of the materiality of airmindedness, focused on the role of the pilot in the actor-networks of 1930s aviation. Examining the sorts of sociotechnical assemblages of actors, objects, and subjects that formed around aviation or other paradigm-shaping transportation technologies is by no means a novel approach. Law’s (Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience) study of the ill-fated TSR2 British combat aircraft project combined attention to official documents and the cultural record (in the sense that Flight is), to explore the multiplicity of what otherwise appears as a single object (an aeroplane). Similarly, Law’s classic study of the emergence of Portuguese maritime control and superiority from the fifteenth century showed how an assemblage of elements—human, natural, technical, discursive and so on—which alone were not necessarily novel could together be brought to bear in an innovation that was ‘durable, mobile and forceful on a global scale’ (‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’ 13). Examining how people, devices, and texts operate together to forge space-shaping innovations in this way, Law concludes, goes some way to explaining ‘the “great divide” between primitive and modern’ (‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’ 13). I argue that the same is true of airmindedness and pilots’ operations during the 1930s.

A More-Than-Representational Airmindedness Edmonds refers to airmindedness as ‘a state of mind’. The evolution of aviation between the wars was accompanied by this parallel and necessary formation of airmindedness among commentators, observers, politicians

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and the flying and non-flying public alike. Despite finding obvious expression in representational forms, airmindedness itself grew out of a decidedly more-than-representational assemblage of devices (aeroplanes and their accompanying technologies), geographies (aerodromes and other airspaces), knowledge (of aerodynamics, engineering, meteorology, physiology, navigation and more) and people (flyers and non-flyers). In order to elucidate the formation of these airminded assemblages—the likes of which now appear so potent to have rendered the very term itself obsolete—the Flight archive was searched for all references to airmindedness between 1930 and 1939. This reveals the formation of airmindedness through an actor-network extending out from pilots, aeroplanes, and aerodromes, to encompass the everyday habitus of the British public. The material technologies of aviation, most obviously aeroplanes themselves, appeared as the central component in this airminded assemblage. The motif of a public enthralled by flying machines is a long-standing one. Even a modest two-seater training aircraft was credited in growing the ranks of the airminded when, in late 1930, Flight declared that ‘the Doncaster public are evidently air-minded’ after ‘between 8,000 and 9,000 people’ went to view a two-seat Avro ‘Avian’ open cockpit biplane displayed statically at a car showroom in the city centre (‘Private Flying and Club News’ 1439). Aircraft themselves were also marketed to the aspiring airminded public. Under the curious tagline ‘How would you try to sell this woman an aeroplane’ (lacking a question mark in the original), a 1936 advertisement for the five-seat, twin-engined ‘Monospar’ aeroplane began, ‘You are air-minded, secure in the excellence and superlative safety of your machine’ (General Aircraft). For consumers with more modest means, ‘air-minded motorists’ were encouraged to consider the installation of a motor car compass; ‘an unusually useful gadget’ according to a Flight review from 1934 (‘The Industry’ 392). Despite the vivid symbolism through which they were presented, a more-than-representational reading suggests the material role played by aviation technologies as artefacts in enabling the public to experience airmindedness. Aerodromes also played an important role as nodes which connected the potentially airminded public with the possibilities of aviation. This ‘state of mind’ could be advanced, for instance, simply through the opening of a new local aerodrome—as was declared when Gloucester ‘took its place among the air-minded cities of England’ with the opening of its airfield on 27 September 1932 (‘New Aerodrome at Gloucester’

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939). Today, Gloucester arguably retains its status among pilots, at least, having been awarded ‘Best General Aviation Airport’ twice in succession (Flyer). Two years later, under the headline ‘Our Air-minded Air Minister’, Flight extolled the virtues of Lord Londonderry’s contribution as Secretary of State for Air in spreading ‘the gospel’ of air-mindedness through his opening of the new Ards Aerodrome as the ‘first civil aerodrome in the North of Ireland’ (‘Private Flying: A Section for OwnerPilots and Club Members’ 973). Ards was constructed on land owned by Lord Londonderry and (now as Newtownards) also remains in operation as a popular general aviation airfield. In highlighting the role of essential material elements such as aerodromes and aircraft, Flight illustrates the enduring importance of non-human actors—such as the new place and space of the aerodrome—in the emergence of airmindedness as a state of mind that was both expressed and enacted through more-than-representational forms. Human actors also played an important role in the formation of airmindedness. Pilots, in particular, were tasked with the potential both to embody and enact an airminded state. Lord Londonderry was also a qualified pilot, and this was seen as instrumental to his role in spreading the gospel of airmindedness: […I]t is encouraging to note the enthusiasm with which Lord Londonderry endeavours, by personal example, to spread the gospel of airmindedness, a state of mind which must permeate the body politic if civil aviation is to develop as it should. Not only has the Secretary of State learnt to fly during his present term of office with this object in view, but his interest in flying is shared by his family in no less degree. (‘Private Flying: A Section for Owner-Pilots and Club Members’ 973)

For the growing ranks of the ordinary airminded public, however, piloting an aeroplane remained a distant aspiration. As one ‘B.D.P.’ of Haywards Heath, Sussex, complained in a letter submitted to Flight entitled ‘Cheaper Flying’: We are continually being asked to be airminded. I know a number of people who are airminded, but how far can they get? If they want to fly they pay 5s. to 10s. and go up in an Avro 504, that is all they can do: they cannot afford to learn to fly, or to travel by air! (B.D.P. 212)

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Instead, for the few lucky passengers or those assembled to watch the movements of aeroplanes from the ground, bearing witness to the exploits of their pilots would have to make do. As Flight describes the first ‘Railway Air Services’ flight from London (first via train from Victoria Station to Croydon Airport) to Belfast (Aldergrove), with a stop in Manchester (Barton)—which remains another important general aviation airfield today: Barton gave the air-minded passengers something to think about as the pilot brought the machine in just over the boundary fence, tail down, and, even then, ran the length of the aerodrome. (‘Commercial Aviation [Airlines/Airports]’ 959)

Pilots were thereby a key element in the airminded assemblage, whether tasked with spreading the gospel of airmindedness or simply demonstrating that marvel of flight. Yet then (much, unfortunately, as today) their exploits were to be marvelled at second-hand due to the prohibitive cost and limited opportunities for the public to learn to fly. While taking the controls remained out of reach for most, the 1930s did offer ever-increasing opportunities to experience flight as a passenger (for those who could afford to). To be airminded therefore also meant to be conscious of the commercial potential for aviation. The very instigation of new routes was itself cited as a mode of furthering airmindedness. A news item from January 1930, for instance, described how National Flying Services, which drew government subsidies to co-ordinate passenger flights from London’s Hanworth Air Park, were ‘continuing their intensive policy of making the nation air-minded’ through the provision of air taxi services (at 1s. 6d. per mile, for two passengers) to cities such as Southampton, Hull and Glasgow (‘Private Flying and Club News’ 150). However, beyond new routes alone, the imperative lay more with achieving standards of safety, efficiency and regularity. These concerns were echoed in Flight with respects to establishing the first commercial (‘air mail’) routes across Britain’s dominions and (as the title of the piece declared) ‘on to Australia’: The Commonwealth authorities have been airminded for many years past, and the Government’s liberal but judicious system of air mail subsidies had built up a number of air lines inside Australia which for years set an example

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to the world for safety, regularity, technical efficiency, and—a most notable point—of usefulness to the districts served. (‘On to Australia’ 1316)

In turn, the impact of public attitudes towards these pioneer routes was stressed in a feature on Imperial Airways’ inaugural air service between London and Cape Town: There is rarely a rush for seats in the early days of a new service. The world is not yet sufficiently air-minded for that. Confidence is gradually created by punctual arrivals and departures over a period of time. (‘London—Cape Town,’ n.p.)

Here, it then appears, our lofty state of mind comes back down to earth, with the demands of ‘safety, regularity, efficiency’ reflected in punctuality and ‘usefulness’. This final material and utilitarian element in the airminded assemblage appears both the most banal and most crucial if the world were to become sufficiently airminded to embrace the new services that the 1930s would see proliferate. The 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation formed the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as the world’s governing body for aviation—one of the key stated objectives of which remains to ‘meet the needs of the peoples of the world’ for ‘regular, efficient and economical’ air transport (ICAO Convention on International Civil Aviation [7300/9] 20). At the birth of large-scale civil air transport, operators were faced with significant challenges in order to meet the needs of a burgeoning airminded public. Edmonds concludes that ‘sometime after the 1930s the word “airmindedness” slipped out of the language because it was no longer needed’—likening the use of the term to referring to humans as ‘bipeds’ (Edmonds, n.p.). However, this belies the paradigmatic developments required to achieve the aim of safety, regularity and efficiency throughout the 1930s and to realize the potential of the airminded assemblage of aircraft technology, the geographies of and between aerodromes and the flying public. The significance of the emerging paradigm of modern air transport was such that both today’s passengers and pilots alike would recognize the legacy in their own airmindedness. It is towards a closer analysis of one small but significant development within this history—the ability to fly blind in poor visibility or adverse weather—that this chapter now turns.

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Blind Flying In August 1937 a Flight feature on ‘Instrument Planning’ described the ‘new service blind-flying panel’, under the confident subtitle ‘Six Essential Instruments Correctly Grouped’ (Williamson). The accompanying official RAF photograph shows the ‘Airspeed indicator, Artificial Horizon and rate-of-climb indicator, sensitive altimeter, Directional Gyro and turn and bank indicator’ (capitalization as in the original). At first glance this might appear as a modest move by the military to adopt a standardized layout for a ‘recognised primary blind-flying instrument group’ (Williamson 193). Yet in formalizing the combination of these instruments, still affectionately referred to by pilots today as the ‘six pack’, this announcement represented the product of a decade-long preoccupation with establishing the means by which aeroplanes could safely and efficiently operate blind (without visual reference to the horizon and/or to the ground below) in conditions of low visibility or through bad weather. Today, pilots follow ‘instrument flight rules’, abbreviated IFR, as a set of strictly enforced and adhered to procedures involving additional training, licensing, flight planning and air traffic control requirements (ICAO Icao Annex 2: Rules of the Air [Chapter 5: Instrument Flight Rules], n.p.). Yet, at its heart, as the Flight feature anticipates, ‘instrument flying’ (as it quickly and aptly became termed) simply demands that ‘in conditions of poor visibility […] the pilot will consult his instruments in a regular sequence’ to glean information about the speed, altitude and position of his aeroplane (Williamson 193). Every pilot is still taught to scan these same six instruments—the most important of which, the artificial horizon and turn and bank indicator, were perfected in the 1930s—and rely on this technology entirely in conditions when cloud, fog, haze or rain impede the ability of our senses alone to determine situational awareness. A sociotechnical assemblage was formed through the 1930s in response to this problem, without which the development of aviation would have been severely hindered by meteorological constraints that would otherwise have rendered regular air travel impossible. This assemblage began with the human factor of pilots and the problems that experience had shown were likely to be encountered once flying blind. Typically, these involve a loss of situational awareness regarding either the attitude of the aeroplane (potentially risking a subsequent loss of control such as an inadvertent stall and/or spin) or its position with reference to the ground (potentially risking controlled flight into terrain as the pilot descends

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through the murk hoping to seek out landmarks necessary for navigation).6 In the first half of the 1930s, this assemblage developed to encompass formalized training in blind flying and flight crew licensing requirements—the basis of which remain firmly in place today. The final consolidation of this assemblage of human, technological and operational factors then involved refinements in the provision of instrumentation, aircraft design, autopilot, radio navigation and ‘blind landing’ aids. Once the assemblage had formed by the mid-1930s, commercial, military and private flying could operate with relative safety and reliability in weather that previously would have been the realm only of risk-taking pioneers. And with it, the system was established for instrument flying as passengers might recognize it today, as flight proceeds unimpeded by weather conditions in which the ground disappears from view almost immediately upon take-off and looms back through cloud or mist only moments before landing. A search of the Flight archive revealed nearly 280 articles referring to ‘blind flying’ (or variants thereof), ranging from brief news items to extended features. These were collated into a corpus that was analysed to elucidate the assemblage of various actor-networks involved in the establishment of the instrument flying procedures that have proven so instrumental in enabling safe, regular and reliable air transport since the 1930s—procedures that would be entirely recognizable to pilots today. Three distinct sets of actors were identified: the first were human factors associated with the physiology and psychology of pilots under blind-flying conditions; the second involved knowledge distributed through flight training and subsequently prescribed through pilot licensing requirements; the third involved technologies and devices developed to enable aeroplanes and aerodromes to operate in blind conditions. While the 1930s saw paradigmatic advances in each of these areas, alone they would not afford the safety and regularity required to enable a fully airminded public to entrust their lives or their capital to the burgeoning air transport industry. It was only through combining these actor-networks into an effective blind-flying assemblage that airmindedness was realized.

Human Factors At the mercy of the climate and the seasons, a cross-country flight away from the vicinity of the departure aerodrome may encounter poor visibility associated with adverse weather. The early pioneer aviators gleaned

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insights into the challenges of flying blind in such conditions. At a luncheon of the Women’s Committee of the Air League of the British Empire in June 1928, Commander W. Stultz described the transatlantic flight, on which ‘the Atlantic airwoman’ Amelia Earhart was a passenger, to an enthralled audience of the airminded great and the good: […B]ad weather reigned throughout over the ocean. When at last after hours of blind flying a hole in the fog was sighted a small fishing vessel came into view which indicated the presence of land […] He did not know then that Ireland had been crossed by him in the fog. (‘Luncheon to the Atlantic Fliers’ 517)

Such accounts of pioneering heroics were among the very first references to blind flying in the Flight archive. Other pilots recounted what it was like ‘to have to climb two kilometres in the impenetrable darkness to avoid the mountains’ on their world tours (‘Around the World! Captain Bremer’s World Tour’ 1155), or to be ‘flying over a layer of thick clouds, with a hole here and there showing fleeting glimpses of the country beneath’ on the long route from Australia to England (Fysh 1150). One retrospective of 1935 described how in this period ‘during those millions of miles courageous individuals […] have fought their way in totally unsuitable Service machines through thousands of feet of cloud’ (Taylor 401). This cemented in the minds of a still often un-airminded public that flight in something as otherwise innocuous as gloomy weather constituted an immense feat of derring-do. As a paper delivered to the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1930 on ‘Air Transport in Fog’ made clear, poor visibility was ‘the greatest enemy’ of commercial air transport and ‘there are numerous difficulties still to be overcome’ (‘Air Transport in Fog’ 1226). Despite the air of invincibility portrayed by these pioneers, at its heart the problem of blind flying was down to the basic fallibility of human senses. This was conveyed to Flight readers with clarity and detail bearing striking similarity to contemporary flight training manuals7 in a 1931 feature on instrument flying: There can be no quibbling over the fact that a very large number of the cases wherein aircraft pilots find themselves in difficulties are caused by having to fly through cloud or other thick weather, so that the horizon is obscured and the pilot’s senses thereby blanketed to such an extent that

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he cannot trust them, with the consequence that all too often the machine gradually becomes, to him, unmanageable. (‘On Instrument Flying’ 779)

The reason for this, the feature makes clear, is the antagonistic relationship between sensory cues and actual attitude in blind conditions. Pilots flying in visual meteorological conditions rely on sight (of the horizon) completed by other senses (say, of the aeroplane’s attitude or its movement with respect to gravity). When deprived of sight as a source of information, a pilot’s natural tendency will likely be to resort to other senses that can provide misleading information—still commonly referred to in today’s training literature as the ‘seat of the pants’, just as it was in the aforementioned Flight feature. It is this unreliable and often contradictory sensory information that can lead an otherwise perfectly serviceable aeroplane to become gradually unmanageable to its pilot. As a result: Nearly all pilots who have tried to fly in a cloud, particularly if they have endeavoured to manoeuvre under these conditions, can admit to peculiar and erratic results. They obey their senses, notably that of deep muscle or ‘seat’ feel, and the aeroplane, unfortunately, does not behave as it should. The result is that most pilots come out of a cloud in a steep, nose-down spiral, and frequently in a spin. (‘On Instrument Flying’ 781)

Even if provided with basic instrumentation that conveys the actual situation of their aeroplane, the likes of which were available although still not widely used in the early 1930s, a pilot may become disinclined to trust these in response to contradictory sensory information, with the resultant disorientation risking a dangerous or deadly loss of control. The first innovative response to this basic physiological problem was an equally simple technological solution. In 1929 advert for Hawker’s new ‘Tomtit’—‘The ideal training machine, and the only type completely equipped for blind flying’ (Hawker 1160)— emphasized how existing instrumentation was combined with the novel feature of a fabric hood which an instructor could position over the student’s (separate) cockpit to simulate the experience of flying blind. Flying ‘under the hood’, as it is still widely referred to and practised today (albeit usually with an opaque plastic visor worn in front of the pilot’s eyes), was thereby established as a means by which to provide a realistic experience of being blinded at the

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controls of an aircraft. As another Flight columnist would later describe, in terms that contemporary pilots would equally recognise: The psychology of the business is really rather peculiar. After spending half an hour in the greenish gloom and recovering, shakily enough, from two most un-pleasant spins, the hood was freed with relief. (‘Private Flying Topics of the Day: Under the Hood Again’ 79)

The hood allowed pilots to be trained to disregard their senses with a result that ‘should ensure that no pilot would suffer from a sense of panic when entirely enveloped in cloud’ (‘On Instrument Flying’ 779). The hood soon became a feature of derring-do in its own right. At the 1932 Brooklands Air Display the school’s chief instructor: […] took off, flew round, turning in all directions, spun, circled the aerodrome, and finally glided into land; all while under the hood. […] A thoroughly convincing performance which showed the advance that has been made in blind flying recently, and which should do a great deal to engender a feeling of safety in the general public as regards flying. (‘Brooklands Civil Air Display’ 448)

The blind-flying assemblage was thereby conceived of as a sociotechnical actor-network of brilliant simplicity, combining the pilot, their aircraft (equipped with otherwise conventional instrumentation) and the simple technological mediation of a fabric hood to conceal the pilot’s view. Pilots are still trained this way today, with instrument hours logged ‘under the hood’ (or, more commonly, wearable equivalent—affectionately known as ‘foggles’). By devising a means whereby pilots could replicate blind flying, their ‘convincing performance’ under the hood might ‘engender a feeling of safety’ that would encourage a burgeoning airminded public to accept the possibility of flying in conditions which they had hitherto been told were so perilous to human sensory fallibility.

Training and Licensing Law’s analysis of the assemblages which yielded dominance for Portuguese maritime innovation in the sixteenth century identifies the importance of ‘drilled people’ for mobilizing transportation technologies over previously insurmountable distances and inclement prevailing conditions (‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’ 234). Following the

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emergence of the hood as a device for simulating blind-flying conditions, coupled with existing instrumentation to provide basic situational awareness of speed, altitude, rate-of-climb, and attitude of pitch/bank, training that might enable pilots to become ‘drilled’ in blind flying was a major preoccupation of the early 1930s. As the 1931 feature on instrument flying made clear: To make flying by instruments safe, however, two things are necessary; the first is an adequate set of the right type of instruments, and the second a training in the use of these instruments. (‘On Instrument Flying’ 779)

Notably, one particularly institution— ‘Air Service Training Ltd’ (or A.S.T.) of Hamble on the south coast of England—became synonymous with innovations in blind-flying training (especially for commercial, or ‘B’ licence, pilots). As the above feature confidently proclaimed; ‘A.S.T. can claim to have evolved a technique of training which should result in producing pilots capable of flying safely under any conditions’ (‘On Instrument Flying’ 779). Training was the predominant topic of discussion relating to blind flying in the pages of Flight in the first half of the 1930s: announcements of schools initiating blind-flying courses (from Brooklands to Bristol, Hatfield to Heston); news of the production or acquisition of new blind-flying training aeroplanes (most being open cockpit aircraft equipped with a hood, with novel exceptions, such as the Vickers ‘Victoria’ which positioned the trainee in an enclosed cockpit in the tail); and acknowledgements for those successfully undertaking or completing training (including, in 1932 alone, at least half a dozen women). All these became routine in the weekly roundup of airfield news. In addition, advertisements appeared for training courses as schools competed to offer the lowest rates of hourly instruction. And in 1932 an instructional book was even published on the matter (Blind Flight in Theory and Practice by Major W. C. Ocker and Lt. Carl J. Crane), favourably reviewed by Flight and available for 15s. 6d. (post free). This emerging mode of training was complemented by competitions and awards for demonstrating of blindflying skills and accuracy, while instructors continued to demonstrate that they were the best ‘drilled’ in the new techniques with feats of blind flying at air shows and open days. The role of British aviation in the global advancement of blind flying was also apparent, with trainees from Finland, Italy, Greece, Norway and Siam among the pupils at A.S.T. alone, while

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Brooklands became popular with Indian pilots, and the de Havilland’s blind-flying-equipped Moth aircraft was delivered to schools from Brazil to Malaysia. At Heston alone, by 1935 it was proclaimed that ‘blind-flying has been nearly doubled’ with respect to the previous year, with seventeen certificates issued and 136 instructional hours flown (‘Airport News: Heston’). What remains remarkable about this rapid evolution in training for blind flying are the similarities with instrument flying training methods still deployed today. This simple assemblage of devices (a hood and basic instruments), people (a trainee pilot and instructor) and knowledge (of the basic physiology of sensory deprivation and situational awareness) continue to form the basis for training pilots to fly in instrument conditions. One further evolution that stands out within the mid-1930s involved new requirements for flight crew licensing to operate in ‘blind’ conditions. Prior to 1931, there was no formalized training nor any specific licensing requirements for blind flying. As Flight ’s feature on A.S.T. observed: So far, few flying schools have made any real effort to teach their pupils how to fly safely under such conditions, and it is only latterly that the need for this has been recognised. (‘On Instrument Flying’ 780)

Blind conditions were seen as dangerous for routine operations and thus the (unregulated) domain of pilot-adventurers alone. Even though training and certification now proliferated, neither was a legal or licensing requirement. This represents a major disjuncture with contemporary regulations, which demand that only suitably licensed pilots may operate in instrument conditions. This began to change, driven again by A.S.T., as the Hamble school incorporated blind flying ‘in the normal training for all pupils undergoing instruction for their [commercial] “B” licence’ in 1932 (‘News: The Air Service Training Blind Flying Trophy’ 56). This innovation appeared to have caught on with dramatic effect: in the following year, ‘situations wanted’ adverts regularly demanded blind-flying certificates alongside the ‘B’ licence. And in 1934, a changed was proposed to require British ‘B’-licensed pilots to undertake a blind-flying test. These new blind-flying licensing conditions caused some concern within the industry. ‘At first thought the new blind-flying regulation for “B” licence candidates may appear to be a very excellent idea’, observed a Flight opinion piece of 1934, ‘but mature consideration will bring

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several difficulties to light’ (‘The Industry’ 1343). These included the observation that lesser-qualified ‘A’ licence pilots with more real-world blind-flying experience might find the (30-minute) test easy enough, ‘but hardly one of them could be trusted to do a job of work under transport conditions’. Problems also included the impact of the change on pilots needing to undertake the ‘expensive course’ themselves. Indeed, the implementation of this change was delayed by the Air Ministry until mid-1935, ‘in order to meet certain difficulties that have arisen, particularly with regard to pilots who are operating abroad’ (‘Blind Flying Test Extension’). Yet the eventual change formalized the nexus for blind-flying training, skill, and certification in a mode which is still established today. While it is theoretically possible to qualify as a commercial pilot without one, the vast majority of contemporary pilots undertake a costly and timeconsuming ‘instrument rating’ to allow them to operate outside of visual meteorological conditions. Moreover, Flight ’s prescient observation that skilled amateurs may also possess the ability and experience to fly in these conditions has been recognized in current provisions for restricted ‘Instrument Meteorological Conditions’ (or IMC) ratings for private pilots and the most recent ‘Competency-Based Instrument Rating’ (CBIR) (EASA). The very same considerations and responses that emerged within a few years in the early 1930s continue to preoccupy and constrain the decision-making and budgeting of today’s aspiring pilots.

Technology and Automation The evolution of a formalized training and regulatory environment set the foundations for the governmentality of the blind-flying problem. However, the dependence on relatively basic existing technologies could only go so far towards achieving the operational aim of regular and reliable scheduled flights in poor weather (and reassuring the public of their safety). In 1930, opinion remained that it was ‘impractical’ for air transport to operate without visual reference to the ground (‘Air Transport in Fog’ 1227). This debate continued in the pages of Flight , with a particularly aptly titled 1933 opinion piece on ‘FAITH!’ stressing that ‘in aviation, as in Religion, faith plays a very important part’ and thus, while regular transport flying can proceed ‘when the weather is fair’, in order to satisfy the demands of an airminded public ‘in future it will also have to be done when the pilot cannot see’ (McClure 1213–14). Faith among

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passengers indeed had some way to go before the notion of a ‘blinded’ pilot might become acceptable. Here, technology would be required to break from its existing mould in order to afford more accurate instrumentation, systems for radio navigation when landmarks were not visible and—of perhaps the greatest difficulty and importance—the ability to land in conditions where the pilot would not be guaranteed clear sight of the runway throughout their approach. Again, no single innovation could suffice, but rather, more components would need to be added to the assemblage, drawing on both the existing equipment and knowledge of pilots while also incorporating paradigm-shaping technological innovations. Radio navigation came first in the form of basic wireless direction-finding, initially tuned into civilian broadcast radio stations, before networks of direction-finding stations were created at major aerodromes and along key air routes. This innovation drew on experience of using light beacons to facilitate night-flying operations. Then came evolutions to existing cockpit instrumentation, with the likes of the Sperry Horizon and Directional Gyro and the Reid & Sigrist Turn Indicator.8 These instruments drew on existing systems based on vacuum-driven gyroscopes, yet their rapid development from the early 1930s soon enabled them to provide the essential inputs for the operation of automatic pilot systems. And last came systems for ‘blind landing’, which provided radio-based information to pilots to ascertain their position, height and orientation relative to an aerodrome’s landing area. Air transport operators were as quick to adopt these new technologies as Flight was to celebrate their affordances for the flying public. News reports and features declared ‘A Fast Trip to Scotland’ (‘A Fast Trip to Scotland’), ‘Faster to Switzerland’ (‘Faster to Switzerland: Imperial Airways and Swissair to Operate Two Services Daily’), ‘Perfect Air Travel’ (‘Switzerland Non-Stop: Scientific Navigation on Swissair’s LondonZurich Run’), ‘Tons by Air’ (‘Tons by Air: The Amazing Work Done by Air Transport in New Guinea’) or ‘Scientifically to Sweden’ (‘Scientifically to Sweden: A Study of Modern Methods of Transport’). The theme of this discourse was invariable around modern methods of air transport, informed by scientific, i.e., ‘blind’, navigation, to deliver the regularity, speed, and reliability that the travelling public and commerce demanded. Key to this was the assemblage of technologies, procedures, knowledge, and training required for operation using automatic pilot,

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radio navigation, air traffic control, and blind landing. The latest generation of aeroplane brought these technologies together and extended illustrated features showcased the new Douglas DC-2s of Swissair and Lockheed Electras of British Airways Ltd. In 1939, a notable two-part feature entitled ‘TOWARDS 100 per Cent. REGULARITY’ emphasized the centrality of blind flying to both the new sociotechnical assemblage of air transportation and the approval of an airminded public: It is an accepted fact that regular airline operation in Europe necessitates a great deal of flying in conditions of very bad visibility, and to this end a ground organisation of considerable complexity has been built up. Whilst this is still capable of improvement, it is now possible, provided that suitable machines fitted with the necessary equipment are used, to operate regularly in the daytime in visibility down to something of the order of 200-300 metres for landings and very much less for departures. (Brent 1584)

Nevertheless, the author (a commercial pilot with Croydon-based ‘Wrightways’) went on to conclude that ‘the question of full-scale training in all methods of blind approach and take-off’ remained ‘lamentably ignored’ and that, despite their widespread update, many points within these new methods for operating blind were ‘found to need attention’ (Brent 1584). Indeed, this rapid move towards sophisticated augmentation and automation of the human–technological nexus of blind flying raised concerns on a number of fronts. The very notion of flying blind could not easily be reconciled and, it was suggested ‘is no doubt interpreted by the public as […] an aerial blindman’s buff’ (‘Reid-Sigrist Turn Indicator’ 971). Frustration was also expressed at the slow adoption of blind-landing technologies at Croydon, in particular—where at least one 1935 accident was blamed on delays in installing the German ‘Lorenz’ system fitted in other major European aerodromes (‘A Pressing Need’). Meanwhile, for pilots, concern turned towards the complexity of these technologies and the new demands played on workload and ability. On this topic, Francis Chichester—a regular Flight contributor—published an opinion piece aptly entitled ‘Pity the Poor Pilot’ in which he complains that ‘Too much is demanded of the modern air pilot. He is being overwhelmed with knobs, jobs, dials and levers, and will soon need to be, not a man, but a marvel’ (Chichester 334). He goes on to observe that ‘on one modern

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instrument lay-out I counted no fewer than sixty-four’ instrument dials, and concludes that more coordination between crew members (now a major training component for commercial pilots in its own right) was required to handle the new technology (Chichester 334). As the complexity of the new actor-network threatened to introduce its own problems for flight crews, the need for a more ergonomic approach towards organizing cockpit instruments was emerging. As the pioneer aviator and Imperial Airways executive Major Herbert Brackley appealed: Every designer and every person who expresses practical opinions on design matters should witness from the control cabin at least one blind take-off and one blind approach. He would then appreciate fully the difference between a compact and complete instrument grouping and one of the haphazard kind. (85)

The solution appeared in the form of moves towards standardization in the provision and layout of essential instruments. As the feature concluded, ‘the grouping of instruments on the panel was very important. It should be such that, the pilot had an un-restricted view and did not have constantly to re focus [sic] his eyes’ (101). It was in this context—after a mere decade of feverish innovation and radical change— that the need to simplify and rehumanize the blind-flying assemblage was ultimately recognized. What began as a sensory, physiological and psychological problem would arrive at a surprisingly simple solution: the ‘six pack’ that is now so familiar to all pilots, or indeed anyone who has studied a cockpit instrument panel. This would allow the formation of what one contributor, in an opinion piece aptly entitled ‘Not So Blind’, described as ‘dashboard consciousness’ (‘Not So Blind’). The instruments that play such a fundamental life-or-death role in blind flying would thus fall ‘to eye’ as naturally as the controls themselves would fall ‘to hand’.

Conclusion If I speak as a geographer, the wide-ranging impacts of developments in aviation in the 1930s are indisputable. As a space-shaping actor-network, aviation wrought unprecedented time-space compression, shrinking journey times between the furthest points on the globe from weeks or months to hours or days within of a single decade. The control of European powers over empires and dominions was cemented as air

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transport extended new and more direct forms of governmentality. At a regional scale, speed and frequency facilitated travel and communication with the potential to forge new forms of collective identity between and within advanced capitalist economies. The groundwork—or ‘airwork’— was laid for a technology that would quickly become as instrumental for as it was emblematic of contemporary globalization. If I speak as a pilot, however, the advances realized in this period were perhaps even more significant. Behind the iconic advances in aircraft design that afforded ever greater speed, safety and comfort, an arguably even more significant actornetwork was forged that enabled pilots (and their passengers, cargos, and airlines) to operate beyond the constraints of meteorology, human physiology, or the existing state-of-the-art technologies. The course of a single decade saw the evolution from pioneer aviator-adventurers whose feats were consumed at an almost mythical distance by the general public to the possibility of reliable, regular and routine passenger operations for ordinary (if wealthy) travellers. A pilot’s perspective, perhaps more than any other, serves to illustrate how human and non-human actors were assembled to achieve the universal state of airmindedness through the 1930s that Edmonds says was so pervasive that the term itself served its purposes and faded from our vernacular. Airmindedness itself demanded an assemblage of technological, geographical and human elements. People could marvel at (or even aspire towards) flying machines, but this alone could not afford a true state of airmindedness until aerodromes brought these machines to land—both literally and figuratively—in the towns and cities they would serve. Pilots could spread the ‘gospel’ of airmindedness through their feats of aviation and their influence as key stakeholders in this burgeoning industry, but without a wider body of paying passengers seated in their cabins (or aspiring to) a universal airmindedness would never be possible. In sum, this state of mind was never an entirely technological nor entirely human product. It was neither material nor discursive, nor can it be understood through a purely representational or non-representational lens. Instead, a more-than-representational perspective illustrates the necessary combination of people, knowledge, and technology through which airmindedness was forged and which the representations and discourses of Flight , and the other sources examined in this volume, bore witness in the interwar years. In turn, we

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can see that aviation—as with other paradigmatic technologies and practices—came both to symbolize and shape modernity through experience, experimentation, and evolution. The case of blind flying illustrates how just one of a multitude of actornetwork assemblages functioned to enable this advancement of aviation and airmindedness. Human factors associated with flying ‘blind’ first had to be identified through the exploits of pioneer and adventurer pilots. The fallacy of human senses when deprived of essential inputs such as sight of the ground or reference to the horizon were soon identified. Today, pilots are still trained to be acutely aware of this potentially cruel combination of psychology and physiology through modules and exams on ‘human factors’, and logging hours ‘under the hood’ remains an essential component of flight training, attesting to the effectiveness of this single simple actor-network assemblage of pilot, aeroplane and obfuscation. Formalized training and flight crew licensing requirements for blind flying followed, many aspects of which remain today. The impetus that commercial pilots be drilled in blind flying was of particular importance to ensure safe operations. Today, the equivalent ‘instrument rating’ is widely seen as the most gruelling and costly element of a commercial pilot’s training, requiring 50 hours of flying training, up to fourteen theory exams, and a rigorous practical ‘skills test’ (EASA). And given that blind flying demands complete recourse to technology to provide situational awareness, the evolution of cockpit instruments together with radio-based navigation and landing aids and air traffic control through radiotelephony was essential. While many of these functions are now combined in the computerized displays found in modern ‘glass’ cockpits, their fundamental mechanisms of operation still rely on devices such as gyroscopes and directional radio beacons that were developed in the 1930s. If modernity implies a degree of coherence between the past and the present then the assemblage of components within these actor-networks attests to the fundamental importance of the 1930s for aviation and the decade’s cultural, social, and economic significance. Seemingly small developments such as the RAF’s standardized ‘six pack’ of cockpit instruments offer insights into the coherence between past and present and the enduring legacy of material achievements wrought during aviation’s coming of age.

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Notes 1. See Law, John. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 2. See Winner, Langdon. ‘Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology’. Science, Technology, & Human Values 13.3 (1993): 362–78. 3. ‘Simulator’ is an encompassing rather than technical term in aviation, such devices being instead referred to as FNPTs (Flight Navigation and Procedures Trainers). 4. Flight remains in print as the weekly Flight International magazine and online at Flightglobal.com. 5. It pains the author to report that the (open access) Flight archive was taken offline some time in December 2019, having been available continuously since 2007. At the time of going to press, the archive has been offline for over six months. The archive spanned 1909–2005 and contained nearly every issue of Flight in PDF format (with only a couple of exceptions that are thought to have been permanently lost). It was catalogued, searchable and available for non-commercial use. Needless to say, the community of researchers and enthusiasts who relied upon access to this invaluable resource have reacted with a mixture of shock, concern and sadness. The author was among many who wrote to FlightGlobal.com to seek information on this decision, but to no avail. Others apparently received responses citing technical difficulties. Given the high profile of the archive amongst researchers and enthusiasts and the apparently stability of the ‘permalinks’ to individual pages of Flight , unfortunately the author’s own archive of many hundreds of records was not fully catalogued with complete bibliographic information (especially volume, issue and page numbers). For this reason, some references in this chapter are incomplete. 6. See Jones, Debra G., and Mica R. Endsley. ‘Sources of Situation Awareness Errors in Aviation.’ Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 67.6 (1996): 507–12. 7. See for example Thom, Trevor. The Air Pilot’s Manual: Human Performance & Limitations and Operational Procedures (Elstree: Pooleys—Air Pilot Publishing, 2018). 8. Sperry and Reid & Sigrist manufactured their instruments in Brentford and Kingston upon Thames respectively, illustrating the importance of these peri-London locations in the global aviation industry.

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Works Cited ‘A Fast Trip to Scotland.’ Flight 25 (1933): 957. ‘A Pressing Need.’ Flight (1935). ‘Airport News: Heston.’ Flight 29 (1936). ‘Air Transport in Fog.’ Flight 22 (1930): 1226–1227. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ‘Around the World! Captain Bremer’s World Tour.’ Flight 25 (1933): 1155. B. D. P. ‘Cheaper Flying.’ Flight 23 (1930): 212. Barratt, Paul. ‘“My Magic Cam:” A More Than Representational Account of the Climbing Assemblage.’ Area 44:1 (2012): 46–53. ‘Blind Flying Test Extension.’ Flight (1935). Brackley, Maj. H.G. ‘Piloting Commercial Aircraft.’ Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society 40:302 (1935): 85–101. Brent, Frank. ‘Towards 100 Per Cent Regularity: Some Suggested Equipment and Methods for Airline Operation in Poor Visibility.’ Flight 35 (1939): 1584. ‘Brooklands Civil Air Display.’ Flight 24 (1932): 488–489. Chichester, Francis. ‘Pity the Poor Pilot.’ Flight (1937): 334. ‘Commercial Aviation (Airlines/Airports): On the Irish Route—Impressions of a Trip to Belfast by Railway Air Services.’ Flight 26 (1934): 959–960. EASA. Annex I—Part Fcl. European Aviation Safety Agency, 2016. Edmonds, Leigh. ‘How Australians Were Made Airminded.’ Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 7:1 (1993): n.p. ‘Faster to Switzerland: Imperial Airways and Swissair to Operate Two Services Daily.’ Flight (1935). Flyer. ‘Airport Safety Week Announced as Glos Wins 2016 Award.’ Flyer 2016. https://www.flyer.co.uk/airport-safety-week-announced-as-glos-wins2016-award/. Fysh, Hudson. ‘The Log of the Astrea: Australia to England by Air with Imperial Airways.’ Flight (1933): 1148–1152. General Aircraft, Ltd. ‘Advertisement: Monospar.’ Flight 28 (1936): 27. Hawker. ‘Advertisement: The Hawker “Tomtit.”’ Flight 21 (1929): 1160. ICAO. Convention on International Civil Aviation (7300/9). Montreal: International Civil Aviation Organization, 2006. Icao Annex 1: Personnel Licensing. The Convention on International Civil Aviation, Quebec: International Civil Aviation Organization, 2014. Icao Annex 2: Rules of the Air (Chapter 5: Instrument Flight Rules). The Convention on International Civil Aviation, Quebec: International Civil Aviation Organization, 2005. Jones, Debra G. and Mica R. Endsley. ‘Sources of Situation Awareness Errors in Aviation.’ Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine 67:6 (1996): 507– 512.

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Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Law, John. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. ‘London—Cape Town.’ Flight 24 (1932). Lorimer, Hayden. ‘The Busyness of Being “More-Than-Representational”: Some Recent Work in Cultural Geography.’ Progress in Human Geography 29:1 (2005): 83–94. ‘Luncheon to the Atlantic Fliers.’ Flight 20 (1928): 517. McClure, Ivor. ‘Faith!’ Flight 25 (1933): 1213–1217. ‘New Aerodrome at Gloucester.’ Flight 24 (1932): 939. ‘News: The Air Service Training Blind Flying Trophy.’ Flight 24 (1932): 56. ‘Not So Blind.’ Flight (1936). Ocker, William C. and Carl J. Crane. Blind Flight in Theory and Practice. San Antonio, TX: The Naylor Co., 1934. ‘On Instrument Flying.’ Flight 23 (1931): 779–781. ‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India.’ Sociological Review 32:1 (1984): 234–263. ‘On to Australia.’ Flight 26 (1934): 1316. Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001. ‘Private Flying and Club News.’ Flight 22 (1930): 149–153. ‘Private Flying: A Section for Owner-Pilots and Club Members.’ Flight 26 (1934): 973–975. ‘Private Flying Topics of the Day: Under the Hood Again.’ Flight 28 (1935): 79. ‘Reid-Sigrist Turn Indicator.’ Flight 24 (1932): 971. ‘Scientifically to Sweden: A Study of Modern Methods of Transport.’ Flight (1937). ‘Switzerland Non-Stop: Scientific Navigation on Swissair’s London-Zurich Run.’ Flight (1936). Taylor, H. A. ‘Instrument Flying—The Technique of Moderntraining in Blind Flying: Instruments Employed and Their Methods of Application.’ Flight (1935): 401. ‘The Industry.’ Flight 26 (1934): 1343. Thom, Trevor. The Air Pilot’s Manual: Human Performance & Limitations and Operational Procedures. Elstree: Pooleys—Air Pilot Publishing, 2018. ‘Tons by Air: The Amazing Work Done by Air Transport in New Guinea.’ Flight (1936). Williamson, G. W. ‘Instrument Planning—The New Service Blind-Flying Panel Described: Six Essential Instruments Correctly Grouped.’ Flight 32 (1937): 193–195. Winner, Langdon. ‘Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology.’ Science, Technology, & Human Values 13:3 (1993): 362–378.

CHAPTER 6

‘Off the Ground and Through the Looking-Glass’: Airliners, Imagination and the Construction of the Modern Air Passenger Robert Hemmings

Early in the morning of 15 July 1919 clouds hung low over the London Hendon Aerodrome. The air was thick with drizzle portending heavier downpours. W. N. Pilkington buttoned up his heavy leather coat, tightened his helmet strap, and adjusted his goggles. He wiped the small windscreen afore the rear cockpit. Could Pilkington Glass have made a clearer cockpit shield? He slipped on the shearling gloves provided by the pilot. Raindrops beaded on the wires that braced the upper to the lower wings. It had been an unseasonably cold and damp July. Just before half past seven a member of the grounds crew tugged at a blade of the propeller and the 230 horsepower Siddeley Puma engine roared to life, animating Pilkington’s seat and cramped cabin with ongoing vibration.

R. Hemmings (B) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_6

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The pilot turned and shouted something he could not hear, signalled with a thumb up, and opened the throttle as the Airco 9 turned and bumped along the grass runway into the wind. At just over 60 mph, the wheels lifted from the field and the ride immediately smoothed out. While the plane rose, Pilkington’s stomach dropped as he watched the aerodrome shrink slowly away. The Airco 9 levelled out at about 1000 feet and in front of him Pilkington watched the pilot’s head turn as he dipped the wingtips left or right to pick out landmarks to guide the way. Soon they approached another aerodrome, London’s Hounslow airfield, descending to three hundred feet (Pudney 40), where they were scheduled to stop to clear Customs. Below another plane was being prepared for take-off and the pilot turned to Pilkington and, pointing down and shaking his head, indicated that they would skip this stop and press on to Paris. The pilot headed for Folkstone, then Dover, and then across the blustery channel (Middleton 12). They bobbed along in turbulent and rainy conditions, pressed down by low clouds, the choppy sea barely 200 feet below (Jackson 3). Just the day before, Pilkington had read in the Evening News notice that the Air Ministry had temporarily permitted a London–Paris air route for the week of 13–20 June (Hudson 14). With an urgent need to attend a business meeting for the family firm in Paris, he telephoned AT&T (Aircraft Transport and Travel) at the Hendon Aerodrome on 14 July and chartered a flight for the next morning. And so here he was, his athletic frame—he had been a top-flight rugby player at Cambridge (‘History’)—squeezed into this passenger cockpit, wind buffeting the aeroplane’s fabric-covered spruce and ash framework (Jackson 3). He smiled at the prospect of attending the urgent meeting he thought he would surely have missed with Lucien Delloye, general manager of SaintGobain glassmakers. An alliance with the French could ward off the threat of Belgian incursions into Pilkington’s post-war plate glass market (Barker 265). The pilot was Captain Henry ‘Jerry’ Shaw, who had first flown as a passenger in a Blériot monoplane before the war (Whitaker). He was the AT&T manager at Henslow and, as he was familiar with the route to Paris-Le Bourget, assigned himself to ferry his first airline passenger across the English Channel, guiding the aeroplane at 90 mph through the torrential rain (‘Jerry Shaw Retires’ 641). He had no radio, no navigational aids save for a faulty compass subject to ‘northernly turning errors’, no means of communicating with his passenger, let alone anyone on the ground (Coombs 58). He flew ‘blind’, picking out familiar landmarks

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along the route to chart his course. The Airco 9 touched down on the muddy landing field at Le Bourget at 10:15. No one took much notice of their arrival. No Customs officials appeared, so they boarded a tram for Octroi, and caught a taxi from there into Paris (Pudney 41). This was the world’s first scheduled international commercial flight. It cost Pilkington £42 one way, tram and taxi fare not included (Jackson 3). Upon the inception of civil aviation after the First World War, flight, and its transcending symbolic cultural qualities, became a tool of business (travel) efficiencies and experiential commodities. The pilot became more a part of the machinery of commerce and geopolitical exploit, less a heroic individual, as he or she had been popularly conceived since the Wright brothers first success at flying a heavier-than-air machine in 1903. In this chapter, I explore the experience of flight not so much as a means of constructing an individual hero, but as a means of accruing cultural capital (not to mention economic capital) for airline passengers, still a privileged few in interwar British culture.1 In particular, I am interested in the ways in which civilian aviation’s new subject—the airline passenger— siphons off the glory once popularly attached to the pilot, simultaneously making themselves ascend and demoting the stature of the airline pilot, through the literary imagination’s mediation of the material conditions of the aeroplanes that facilitated their experience of flight. I explore how the ‘grandeur’ of the aviators—French literary culture figured wartime and post-war pilots as ‘Knights of the Air’ (The Spectacle of Flight 157–60); for Wyndham Lewis, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s protagonist in Vol de nuit , like all pilots, ‘is marked off from other men’, in a veritable ‘Aristocracy of the Air’ (273)—transferred to a new class of modern subject by looking at representations of aeroplane passengers, pilots, and flight in contemporary accounts, concluding with literary representations by Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh. Throughout, I investigate the role of the literary imagination, captured in the chapter’s title (a quotation from an early air traveller), in apprehending the thrilling if sometimes unsettling experience of flight within the material confines of interwar airliners.

‘Knights of the Air’ Originating in the first decade of the twentieth century in an ostensibly civilian context, on the windy flats of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, aviation was conceived primarily as a military enterprise. The Wright brothers, private American citizens who made history by successfully flying the first

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manned heavier-than-air machine, were later criticized in the Spectator in late 1906 for not sharing their ideas and technology with other wouldbe aviators (‘Conquest’ 10). The Spectator had grounds for the criticism: around the time of their article, the Wrights were in secret negotiations to sell their flyer and aviation insights to the British War Office. They were also in contact with governments in the US, France, Germany, Austria, Japan, Italy and Russia. The British War Office was very interested in the military application of this technology, but could not accept the Wrights’ terms: the deal must be done, the contract signed and delivered, before the War Office could observe a demonstration of their aeroplane in flight (Edgerton 3–4). Eventually, in 1908 the Wrights did demonstrate their aeroplane to prospective clients in France. Lord Northcliffe, who backed his enthusiasm for flight with substantial prize money for spectacular aerial feats2 sent a representative to observe these demonstrations. This representative sent Northcliffe a telegram explaining what he saw: ‘AEROPLANE PRIMARILY INTENDED WAR MACHINE STOP’ (Edgerton 5). Northcliffe’s envoy was not wrong, as the first half of the twentieth century makes plain. Advances in the technologies of flight were dramatically accelerated by the imperatives of battle during the First World War, but even in the midst of war, aviation pioneers were anticipating the application of aircraft to civilian life. In 1916 George Holt Thomas, founder of the British AT&T (Aircraft Transport and Travel) envisioned a civilian airline after the war (Jackson 1). Pilkington was its first passenger. Despite this damp, expensive and not very glamorous beginning, much of the cultural history of civil aviation in Britain between the wars is imbued with a nostalgia that fetishizes the period as one of individual heroics and public spectacle, and links aeroplanes and flight as vehicles and experiences limited to a select few, set apart from ordinary, earthbound subjects. At the pinnacle of the aerial firmament was that heroic modern figure, the pilot. The Wrights, Blériot, de Havilland and Handley Page were all aeroplane designers and pilots who contributed to the development of aviation from the inception of the industry, in the years before the war (Edgerton 1–28), and adapted their designs for military purposes during the war, producing the machines that helped transform their pilots into heroic, transcendent beings (to some). After the war, before an audience of British aircraft manufacturers, including Handley Page, Winston Churchill paid tribute to the pilots of the war as ‘grand fighting men whose brilliant feats had opened a new chapter in the history of chivalry and romance’ (‘Fighting

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Angels’ 15, emphasis added). Rather than national history or strategic warfare, Churchill draws upon literary codes of romance and its concomitant etiquette guidelines to measure the accomplishments of the air force. ‘There was no doubt whatever’, Churchill continued, ‘that [British pilots] produced a higher class of fighting airmen, fighting beings, or rather fighting angels in the air’ (‘Fighting Angels’ 15). Appealing to the ‘great chain of being’ that underpins medieval chivalric codes (Lovejoy 59ff), Churchill bumps pilots up a few links to near the top of that ontological chain, and recruits that ascension to an expression of patriotic might. He recruits the toxic, though populist, blend of patriotism and literary tradition so evident in the work of Kipling, or the later poetry of Rupert Brooke, so entwined and reified by Churchill’s famous obituary.3 Like heroic military pilots, civilian aviators were seen, and tended to see themselves, as extraordinary subjects who did extraordinary things. Pilots, even civil aviation pilots, were a breed apart. And indeed, many of the early civilian pilots formerly flew for the RFC or RAF, men, for they were typically men at this stage of civil aviation, accustomed to risk and danger, heroics and hero-worship. The popular image of the flying ace that emerged from the war, and clung to the civilian pilot combined, according to Robert Wohl, ‘the daring of the acrobat, the sporting code of the amateur athlete, the courage of the soldier, the gallantry of the medieval knight, the killer instinct of the hunter, and the male bonding of an all-boys school’ (A Passion for Wings 204). It is a figure of masculinity easily recruited to the needs of empire, both during wartime and afterwards.4 After the war mechanized flight was still in its infancy, barely a decade old, and its spectacular potentials took many forms. The challenge of crossing enormous distances for tantalizing prize money and celebrity-focused public attention on feats of endurance and derring-do. Blériot blazed the trail before the war, capturing the £1000 prize offered up by George Holt Thomas (who went on to create Air Transport and Travel during the war) for being the first to cross the English Channel in 1909 (Edgerton 14). The ante was upped by Lord Northcliffe in 1913, with £10,000 to the pilot first to cross the Atlantic Ocean. This prize was claimed 15 June 1919—a month before the AT&T charter flight to Paris—by Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown (‘Atlantic Prize’ 13) after they had flown over sixteen hours from Newfoundland to a boggy field in Ireland. At the prize ceremony, Churchill, newly appointed Air Minister, was on hand to announce on behalf of George V the King’s intention to bestow knighthoods upon

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them (‘Atlantic Airmen’ 7). In his speech Churchill observed that Alcock and Brown’s ‘achievement’ proved ‘that our civilization has combined the science of the 20th century with the virility and love of adventure of the knights of old’ (7). ‘But why’, Churchill went on, ‘should there not be only Knights of old? Why should there not be Knights of today?’ (7). Their modern accomplishment measured by the masculine codes of heroic knights, Alcock and Brown became lionized figures of the realm; more specifically, they were invested with ‘the Insignia of Knights Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (Civil Division)’ (‘Capt. Alcock’ 830). For their acts of ‘courage’, ‘audacity’ and tenacity (7), and of ‘virility’, Alcock and Brown had become, literally, Knights of the Air. Aerial acts of courage, audacity and endurance by pilots continued to capture the public imagination in the years between the wars. Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson became figures of immense global renown. For her solo flight between England and Australia, Amy Johnson was honoured by the crown, though as Commander of the British Empire (CBE), she obtained a lower rank than Alcock and Brown’s Knights Commander laurel. Little surprise that the accomplishments of an ‘aviatrix’ were less valued than those of an aviator. But Johnson was also celebrated with her likeness in Madame Tussaud’s within weeks of her flight’s completion in 1930 (‘Exhibitions’ 14). She was thereby enshrined in the firmament of celebrity, an extraordinary being marked off from the ordinary, grounded folks below.

Imagining the Air Passenger But the post-war airline wing of civil aviation charted a different course, in which efforts were made to downplay the heroic or courageous dimensions of flight, and to commodify its spectacular sensations, its speed and views, the exhilaration of flying. Early airlines also sought to contradict the ten-year-old assertion by Northcliffe’s envoy that ‘AEROPLANE PRIMARILY INTENDED WAR MACHINE STOP’, which was difficult since the industry was essentially built from war surpluses, in terms of both aeroplanes and personnel. In the first international commercial flight, as described above, passenger, pilot and aeroplane all had direct links to the war. Pilkington had joined the Prince of Wales Volunteers in 1900 (Barker 476) and was a Major in the South Lancashire

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Regiment, awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1916 ‘for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’ (‘Maj. William’). Captain Henry ‘Jerry’ Shaw served with the Royal Fusiliers in France before joining the RFC in 1916 (Whitaker). His main duties were as a ferry pilot transporting aircraft from Kent to France for operational service, before being appointed to the Communications Squadron, newly formed immediately after the Armistice, where he ferried VIPs and mail to Paris to attend the Peace Conference (‘Jerry Shaw Retires’ 641). This experience helped convince Holt Thomas to hire Shaw as AT&T’s first pilot. The Airco 9 was the civilian designation for the DH9 light bomber, designed in 1917 to replace the DH4 (Jackson 3). The DH9 proved far less successful than the aeroplane it was designed to replace, being slower than, and ‘hugely inferior’ to, the DH4, and was soon shifted to non-combat roles (‘Airco DH9’). The first Airco 9 to fly for AT&T was very little changed from its military bearing, the open observer’s cockpit being transformed into the ‘passenger’ compartment. Some Airco 9s were retrofitted with enclosed and slightly expanded passenger compartments, generating a seating capacity for two passengers (‘Airco DH9’). The civilian air industry was built upon the ample supply of military discards, like the DH9 and DH4, ‘hundreds [of former air force aeroplanes] being disposed of at bargain prices’ (Coombs 59). Other early passenger aircraft expressly designed for the civilian market tended to be modifications of medium or large bombers, featuring enclosed cabins for passengers but open cockpits for pilots. The Handley Page 0/400 twinengine bomber was converted to civilian use in 1919 for the popular London–Paris route, its cabin fitted with seating for twelve, and, with the removal of the nose gun, two more passengers could be accommodated in that open cockpit. The 0/400 featured another open flight cockpit for pilot and engineer (Hudson 16). The French Farman Goliath, to take another example, was also used on the London–Paris service in 1919, its draughty interior equipped with a dozen rattan seats for passengers, with a pedestal positioned for the pilot, whose head poked out the top of the fuselage for enhanced control (Coombs 58). Even the purposebuilt de Havilland DH66 Hercules, first flown in 1926, left the pilots open to the elements (‘De Havilland DH66’). Pilots, especially those trained during the war, did not like to be cramped up in what one called a ‘bloody chicken coop’ (Jackson 34). These ‘hardy types’ preferred to feel the ‘airstream on their cheeks’, which they believed gave them a better sense of the crosswinds on landing approaches (34). In the first years of

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airline traffic, there were no radios aboard aeroplanes and communication with the ground was an entirely visual endeavour. Ground control contacted approaching aeroplanes with green or red signals from Aldis lamps to indicate clearance for landings. Crossing the English Channel was often a breathtaking experience, with aircraft skimming above the rough seas, pressed down by low, heavy cloud cover. Ground routes were often plotted by memorizing bridges or by following railway lines, which came to be known as ‘Bradshawing’ (‘Jerry Shaw Retires’ 641); some stations in Southern England painted their names in large white letters on their rooftops, others installed beacons that signalled their location in Morse code (Jackson 12). In the earliest flights to the Middle East, great furrows were ploughed through the desert sands; every twenty miles or so, a circle was drawn around ground suitable for an emergency landing. Large arrows pointed towards these landing grounds (39). Pilots flew these routes low with their eyes glued to these markers in the sand. To control and navigate these early passenger aeroplanes certainly required great skill, energy and nerve. And yet, increasingly the mystique and allure of mechanized flight were being conferred upon airline passengers. For airline pilots, who were literally marked off from their passengers by the open cockpit design of the early passenger aircraft, this separateness did not enhance the image of rugged individualism and pragmatic ingenuity that characterized heroic pilots of the day. Rather, the separateness marked a barrier between the privilege of the passengers and the insecure and uncertain position of the work-a-day pilot in this fledgling industry (Coombs 59). In the immediate post-war years, there was a surplus of demobilized pilots to accompany a surplus of military aircraft, which drove down wages and the costs of acquiring aircraft. Small airlines could be started with a single aeroplane and one pilot, and become insolvent without warning. Even AT&T had to shutter in December 1920 due to insufficient support from the government, despite having flown tens of thousands of miles (‘Jerry Shaw Retires’ 641). Early commercial airline pilots were far from a glamorous crew, ‘often [wearing] oil-stained trousers, a sports jacket, whose sleeves were patched with leather and a battered felt hat’ (59). Especially with the smaller operators, airline pilots might be expected to refuel, load cargo and help with maintenance of their aeroplanes (59). In the 1920s, Imperial Airways even compelled pilots to pack their own sandwiches since stewards were forbidden to provide them with food (59). Early airline

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pilots became less knights of the air, more aerial omnibus drivers. Passengers, enclosed in their cabins, were largely oblivious to the navigational, sartorial and gustatory hardships faced by pilots. While they may have required some hardiness of their own to cope with the turbulence and noise, their experience of modern flight, though dependent upon the pilots’ abilities to cope with these hardships, was increasingly directed inwards, towards leisure, reflection and contemplation, towards reading and the imagination. After Pilkington’s chartered flight, AT&T commenced regular service between London and the Continent in August 1919. AT&T described the Airco 4 biplanes, converted DH4 military aircraft, as ‘two-passenger machines fitted with comfortable seats and tables and a certain amount of room for baggage. Passengers would be covered-in from the wind, could travel in their ordinary clothes and read and write, play cards or do business on the way over’ (‘Thirty Years Ago’). These early commercial flights cost £21 and averaged four hours from London to Paris, including roughly two and three-quarter hours’ flying time. While the pilot was wrestling headwinds and feeling the sting of drizzle on his cheek, passengers were invited to read or to write. The nephew of the first international commercial airline traveller W. N. Pilkington (actually a first cousin once removed), William Pilkington, became an avid airline passenger in the late 1920s, embarking on journeys as far flung as Australia (Barker 474). William Pilkington measured the comfort of aeroplane travel compared to train travel by the relative clarity of his handwriting: impossible even for him to read on the train, while quite ‘legible even to others’ on the aeroplane (Hudson 68). With purpose-built commercial aeroplanes, such as the Handley Page W8, a civilian adaptation of the HP 0/400, which first saw service early in 1920, more passengers—fourteen—could be carried. Some aeroplanes were equipped with a lavatory, and the fare, which included limousine service from city to aerodrome, was comparable to a first-class London–Paris fare on train and boat (Jackson 6). By the early 1920s, commercial flight was increasingly viable and more widely available, and increasingly understood with reference to the literary imagination. A correspondent from the Spectator recounted his first experience of flight in 1923 in an article which he begins with a George Eliot quotation about the not very self-reflexive Mr Riley from The Mill on the Floss . ‘Most people’s knowledge of flying is [. . .] like Mr. Riley’s knowledge of Latin’, the correspondent asserts (‘Air Travel’ 13). While the

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general sense of Latin/flying might be grasped, the comprehension of Latin/flying’s particularities ‘“were not very ready”’ (‘Air Travel’ 13). His article promised to rectify this lack by providing the particularities of his first flight. To begin with reference to a literary text so thoroughly anchored in a pre-flight Victorian realm is itself an interesting choice, and serves to forge an immediate connection between reading and flying. The correspondent’s immediate response upon embarking on his first flight was to wonder why he had not flown before: ‘Once off the ground and through the looking-glass one finds oneself in a wonderland from which there is no desire to return’ (‘Air Travel’ 13). Through the double references to Lewis Carroll the correspondent conflates the chaotic randomness of Alice’s wonderland with the nonsense schemata of her looking-glass world, situating the experience of flying within a thoroughly transporting and fantastical imaginary. He goes on: The monotonous roar of the engines and the rhythmical action of twelve cylinders just outside the cabin window quite compel confidence, and the feeling of security is as complete as you have in a railway train or motorcar.[. . .] On the main services to the Continent the cabins hold from twelve to fourteen passengers. These cabins are, of course, closed, and except for a cold draught that creeps round one’s legs are well heated. (13)

The correspondent concludes that modern air travel has only two main drawbacks, which are still partly with air travellers today. First, reliability is dependent on reasonable weather (obviously problematic for English fliers); and second, aerodromes are far from city centres. One of the chief benefits of air travel, according to the correspondent, besides the comfort, smoothness and speed of the journey, was its exclusivity. One heads to Customs with a dozen fellow sophisticates, not the crowds that swarm from the channel-crossing boats. To fly as a passenger, then, could capture one’s imagination. Indeed, a literary imaginary could help one apprehend the modern experience of flight. Airlines attempted to attract passengers by adding luxury to the experience of flying, with greater or lesser degrees of success. This became increasingly possible once manufacturers like de Havilland and Handley Page begin designing aircraft primarily to fly passengers, rather than accommodating passengers into retrofitted warplanes. Flights aboard some DH34s in the early 1920s provided liveried cabin boys who at age

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fourteen had trained at the Savoy Hotel, although there was no food and no drink to serve onboard these early flights (Jackson 25). By the late 1920s, Imperial Airways had introduced their ‘Silver Service’, which on the newly designed HP42 provided more palpable luxury. Passengers were served on ‘delicately patterned blue and white china, and damask table clothes and napkins’ (Cluett et al. 20). Each passenger was issued a brochure that explained and reinforced their experience of luxury aboard the HP42: ‘The saloons which are scientifically heated and ventilated, are luxuriously equipped. Wide corridors, softly cushioned seats, shaded electric lights, and neat tables for one’s refreshments and books —all these are at the traveller’s service, while a touch upon an electric bell will summon the steward from the buffet. The saloon windows provide an uninterrupted panorama of the land, sea or coast below’ (quoted in Cluett et al. 20, emphasis added). The technological perks of modernity, temperature and air quality ‘scientifically’ regulated, lights and personal service activated through electric current, were available in flight at a passenger’s press of a button. So too were neat tables and electric light for books. The architectural expression of the exciting, sophisticated and modern means of travel appeared in a new type of building, the airport (Bingham 107). There was a ‘design harmony’ between terminal and airliner: ‘the interiors or earth-bound waiting rooms and airborne cabins were frequently complementary, using similar fixtures, materials and style. [. . .] many architects designed the terminal building in the shape of a bird or an aeroplane’ (107). And this last architectural flourish, perhaps difficult to recognize from within or from the ground, would have been readily apparent to airline passengers peering from their windows as the aeroplane approaches its destination. Continental airports may have embodied this spirit of the machine age, but English airports lagged behind. Croydon, which replaced Hounslow to become London’s main airport in 1920, accordingly took its design cues from the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century, more classical than modern, reflecting a governmental lack of commitment to the spirit of a dawning new transport industry (109). Nevertheless, the Croydon Airport Terminal was the building where most of the English early adopters first underwent their transformation into airline passengers, a uniquely modern subject position. From a haphazard collection of huts and outbuildings, canvas hangars and grass fields, in 1920, a purpose-built modern, concrete airport emerged at Croydon in 1928, then one of the busiest airports in the

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world (Bingham 108). A contemporary account of Croydon in the Daily Mail gives an impression of the kind of passengers being served by airlines between the wars: Outside the wind was blowing nearly a gale. It howled across the bare field [. . .]. Low, grey clouds raced ominously overhead. [. . .] Inside the little waiting-room there were none of these qualms. It was a curious place, that waiting-room. For one thing, it was vastly cleaner and more cheerful than most of them. It lacked the air of tense activity that usually precedes a long and adventurous journey by land or sea. In fact, it was strangely quiet and placid. A central skylight gave it unusual brightness. The rows of long wooden benches, against a background of open-fronted, miniature offices, where clerks talked in low tones; the spotless floor and polished panelling, all contributed to an effect of calmness, not to say repose. It was occupied at the moment by a number of equally sedate people who did not appear to have any definite plans for the day. There was an old gentleman in spectacles, spats, an ulster, and a muffler, smoking meditatively over a literary review, who had obviously settled down for a long stay. His grey-haired wife beside him was making entries in a pocket diary. (‘John, I am sure you gave that head porter too much!’) (Phillips 6)

In this account of the new airport in the Daily Mail from May 1929, airline passengers are set apart. Here they are set apart from the weather, ensconced in the protective calm of Croydon’s terminal. They are also set apart from the non-flying masses by the imminent spectacle of flight, in which they are about to participate. The account helps to create a mystique about these airline passengers. Unlike the harried porter, the gentleman in spats and his wife are figures of repose, even though the typical passenger between the wars was more likely travelling for work in some capacity than for leisure by a 3– 1 ration (‘Incidental Tourism’ 54).5 Nevertheless, during the extended period of travel, passengers entered a kind of liminal space of leisure. It is striking how often contemporary accounts make explicit connections between airline passengers and reading, such as AT&T’s announcing in 1919 that their two-passenger Airco DH4 would allow passengers the space, and a table, ‘to read and write.’ The Spectator’s correspondent opens his first-hand account with explicit literary allusions from George Eliot and Lewis Carroll. Imperial Airways’ ‘Silver Service’ brochure draws

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attention to the HP42’s ‘neat tables for one’s refreshments and books’. The gentleman with spats waiting at Croydon was immersed in a ‘literary review’. While the publicizing of civilian flight as a modality of luxury for the business traveller, so familiar to us in the twenty-first century, did exist between the wars, air travel was far more likely to be promoted as a modern experiential commodity. Flight was seen as a portal to distant destinations, and as a portal to the imagination, through literary reference and reading.

Literary Passengers For Virginia Woolf, the entire exercise of representing in language the experience of being a passenger on an aeroplane is an exercise of the imagination. In her imagined account, ‘Flying Over London’ (1928), Woolf situates the speaker as a passenger, not a pilot. Her account’s ‘and then she woke up’ concluding paragraph, in which Woolf divulges that the pilot chose to cancel the flight due to mechanical issues, reveals that the passenger’s entire account of flight had been imagined, reflecting Woolf’s own experience as someone who never flew. With a ring of H. G. Wells, Woolf names the pilot ‘Flight Lieutenant Hopgood’, and gives him the last word: ‘’Fraid it’s no go to-day’ (172). It is a line conspicuous in its slangy indication of class, delivered to the passenger ‘very sheepishly’ (172), and helps to position the pilot in line with the mechanicals who tinker and shepherd the aeroplanes around the aerodrome at the opening of ‘Flying Over London’. But before readers reach this conclusion, the speaker strives to communicate an account of the sensation of flight, delivered to her by the paid pilot. This is a joy ride, as opposed to a scheduled commercial flight, but the passenger’s relation to the pilot is analogous to the airline passenger’s. Hopgood is a facilitator, an agent peddling the experience of flight. What emerges is the passenger’s exploration of the binary distinction between life on the ground and life in the air, and the containment of the pilot, with his god-like capacity for flight, as a grounded (indeed undergrounded) attendant within a literary framework. Acknowledging that ‘a thousand pens’ have sought to describe the sensation of flight, the passenger speaker seeks to distinguish herself from her predecessors by her novel method of analogy (167). Rather than the earth dropping away, Woolf’s speaker remarks that upon take-off, the sky falls, and suddenly the flyers are ‘immersed in it, alone in it’ (167). She

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associates the experience of earthly life viscerally with the body: ‘Vertebrae, ribs, entrails, and red blood belong to the earth’, as do the crops and animals we eat (167). But in the sky, the aeroplane becomes a boat that ferries her to a new, ethereal home dominated by ‘wraiths (our aspirations and imaginations)’ (167). And in this preferred realm of imagination, as set against ‘mutton and entrails’, the passenger finds ‘the idea of death [. . .] now suggested itself’ (168). She turns to the literary tradition for succour. Hopgood, seated at the controls of the Moth biplane in front of her, becomes a furry-rimmed leather helmeted ‘winged pilot’ (169). He is Charon, ‘remorselessly conducting his passenger’ across the channel between earth and sky to the realm of extinction (169). As they plunge into cloud they are beset by a hailstorm, and the passenger sees her Charon as a kind of monstrous figure better suited for hulking life on the ground than the flitting, soulful dancing with ‘vapour and air’ that is flight (168): Then Charon turned his head with its fringe of fur and laughed at us. It was an ugly face, with high cheek-bones, and little deep-sunk eyes, and all down one cheek was a crease where he had been cut and stitched together. Perhaps he weighed fifteen stone; He was oak-limbed and angular. (169)

This is Hopgood become Charon become Wyndham Lewis’s Self Portrait as Tyro become Frankenstein’s creature. This is not the nimble, heroic figure of Wohl’s modern aviator, all acrobatic athleticism and knightly chivalry. Nevertheless, he pilots his passenger across the passage between entrails and vertebrae and wraiths, up to the clouds and down low over London, from its outskirts to its banking centre and its slums. Or rather, he doesn’t, because of a worrying sound he detected in the engine when it first sparked to life on the ground and the flight is postponed. This conclusion emphasizes the imaginative nature of ‘Flying Over London’, but I would like to emphasize further how Woolf turns to the literary canon to scaffold her flight of fancy and to chart the relative ascension of the aeroplane passenger as set against the bulky, embodied inertia of the working (if not exactly working-class) pilot. The reader is left to conclude that for Woolf the transcending possibilities of mechanized flight exist as much in the imagination of the passenger as in the actual experience of flight, and if this is the case, the figure of the pilot becomes subservient, an off-putting necessity the passenger apprehends through literary allusion.

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In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), the pilot in a key scene of air travel is also made superfluous. A dark satire of the post-war generation of Bright Young Things, Vile Bodies is not primarily a book of transit, though it does open and close with scenes of travel across the English Channel. It opens with a terrible sea-crossing from France to Dover, characters being ferried back to France by a captain ‘engrossed in a crossword puzzle’ unfazed by the swells, though most of his passengers become violently sick (16). Air travel to the Continent promised to obviate the need for such tortuous voyages. While the vicissitudes of flight could guarantee no moratorium on travel sickness, air travel speeds (roughly 125 mph), generally produced faster, less nauseating journeys. Near the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist’s erstwhile fiancée Nina has decided instead to marry her childhood companion Ginger, who has arranged their honeymoon to begin by crossing the Channel in an aeroplane en route to Monte Carlo. A pilot is obviously present and at work, but not mentioned. During their flight, Ginger peers out from his enclosed cabin and observes the land he left lying far below. Things are much more comfortable for international airline passengers a decade after W. N. Pilkington’s London-Hendon to Paris-Le Bourget flight in 1919, but cabin noise is still troublesome. To share his thoughts with his beloved, he must ‘shout’ (199), and what he shouts is another example of how the literary imagination can be used to regulate and stabilize the modern experience of flight: Ginger looked out of the aeroplane: ‘I say, Nina’, he shouted, ‘when you were young did you ever have to learn a thing out of a poetry book about: “This scepter’d isle, this earth of majesty, this something or other Eden”? D’you know what I mean?—“this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea… ‘“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England […]”’ (199)

Ginger does not know the source of the lines he mostly remembers, insisting they come from a ‘blue poetry book’, and not a play, as Nina suggests, but the aerial view nevertheless conjures up in his dim mind the idealizing speech of English patriotism from John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II (199). It is noteworthy that he recalls the lines accurately, with the exception of one bit which he fudges—‘this something or other Eden’. The clause he obscures is ‘this seat of Mars’ (II.i.41), god of war. It is almost as if his mind subconsciously covers over

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reference to war so as not to unsettle his ennobling reverie of England, for which he serves in the Imperial army in Ceylon (indeed, he is called up to join his regiment on the very day he returns from his honeymoon). This disavowal further serves to sever the connection between the aeroplane and its military associations, perhaps assuaging his anxieties of separation at the dawn of his marital union. Regardless, the association between war and the aeroplane is reasserted in the novel’s coda, set on the bombed-out battlefront of a newly declared war, with the sound of aeroplanes circling above the clouds. On the honeymoon aeroplane, Ginger recites a few more lines and asks: Well, I mean to say, don’t you feel somehow, up in the air like this and looking down and seeing everything underneath. I mean, don’t you have a sort of feeling rather like that, if you see what I mean? Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon [of cluttered modern life]. (200)6

Unlike the vapid Ginger, Nina does not see an idealized literary version of ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’. She sees what the aeroplane affords her: an aerial view of twentieth-century English life, with its factories, functional and empty, its disused canals, red suburbs, little motor cars, trunk roads, overhead power cables, wireless masts and little people shrunk to dots, shopping, earning, marrying, breeding. What she sees echoes the scenes that Woolf imagines her passenger imagining seeing. But the effects are very different. Rather than dwelling in the ‘vapour and air’, Nina is more bound more literally to ‘ribs, and entrails’ (Woolf 168): The scene [from the window] lurched and tilted again as the aeroplane struck a current of air. ‘I think I’m going to be sick’, said Nina. (200)

For Nina, the experience of flight is less governed by literary imagination, even though she is better versed in Shakespeare and recognizes the source of the lines that Ginger hazily recalls, than it is by the embodied material conditions of air travel on a modern airliner. She is a character of incredible privilege, but above all a Bright Young Thing, and remains unimpressed by the trappings furnished to the modern air passenger.

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Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop famously pillories contemporary journalistic practice and political radicalism with characteristically nasty aplomb. But the novel also represents some of the anxieties surrounding modern technology, including the aeroplane. William Boot, the naïve countryman, at sea in the capital of empire, let alone in an African country set among distant colonial outposts, is both writer and reader and quiet celebrant of the social traditions of rural England. He is not modern. And for the most part, his experience of modern travel is disastrous. Whether by train, ship, motor car, lorry, all modes of travel are fraught with mishap and occasion troubling exposure to social otherness. And yet, Boot is fascinated by flight. He ‘very deeply, long[ed] to go up in an aeroplane’ (Scoop 40). Boot’s ‘remote and secret ambition of fifteen years or more’ to fly dwelt in his imagination, or his subconscious, and only occasionally surfaced: ‘it haunted his dreams and returned to him, more vividly, in the minutes of transition between sleep and wakefulness, on occasions of physical exhaustion and inner content’ (40). He longed to fly in an aeroplane to experience the transcendence of flight, not as a pilot, but as a passenger. His unlikely posting to Ishmaelia allows his longing for flight to be realized. The idea of flying for Boot is comingled with the pastoralism that is his preferred literary mode, which finds expression in his newspaper column, ‘Lush Places’. He has fantasies of flight: High over the chimneys and the giant monkey-puzzle, high among the clouds and rainbows and clear blue spaces, whose alternations figured so largely and poetically in Lush Places, high above the most ecstatic skylark, above the earthbound badger and great crested grebe, away from people and cities to a region of light and void and silence—that was where William was going in the Air Line omnibus. (40)

Like the countryside, but more effectively, flight represents an escape from the rush of modern life, ‘people and cities’, an escape to inspiring purity of form— ‘light and void and silence’, not unlike Woolf’s ‘vapour and air [. . .] aspirations and imaginations’. This same skyscape inspires Boot’s poetic, literary, pastoral vision. But while flight affords William, and any passenger, passage to a region of ‘light and void’, it hardly offers silence. When he is finally aboard his plane, ‘the propellers were thundering’ and the steward’s voice was ‘lost in the roar of the propellers’ (46, 47). His journey to Africa involves many modes of transportation, and

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is on the whole uncomfortable and calamitous, but it almost begins on a high note. At Croydon, on the concrete forecourt, he watches transfixed as the three engines of his aeroplane roar into action; it is probably a Westland Wessex, a British tri-motor monoplane often configured as a six-seater passenger aeroplane (‘Westland’ 1083) that serviced short-haul charters in the 1930s. On the very cusp of boarding, he comes up short— he has no passport. Two days of misadventure in the imperial capital later, he has the necessary papers and returns to Croydon. He flies LondonCroydon to Paris-Le Bourget in an aeroplane, specially chartered for him and all of his colonizing gear at a surcharge of £103 (to his employer). It is literally a dream come true for Boot: The machine moved forward, gathered speed, hurtled and bumped across the rough turf, ceased to bump, floated clear of the earth, mounted and wheeled above the smoke and traffic and very soon hung, it seemed motionless, above the Channel, where the track of a steamer, far below them, lay in the bright water like a line of smoke on a still morning. William’s heart rose with it and gloried, lark-like, in the high places. (47)

While the aeroplane allows Boot’s heart to soar in ‘the clear blue spaces’, the pilot’s role in this realization of the fantasy of flight is barely registered. With the engines roaring, ‘the pilot threw away his cigarette and adjusted his helmet’ (46). For Boot, or Waugh for that matter, the pilot holds no mystique. He is after all no more than the driver of the ‘Air Line omnibus’ (40). The flight’s the thing. And Boot as passenger is transported to a glory he articulates through a kind of aerial pastoral vision. The demotion, and more often complete erasure, of the airline pilot is not just about ascension of the passenger. It is also connected to the passenger/focalizer’s fantasies of flight as an inhuman endeavour, one that transcends the inconveniences and encumbrances of embodiment. In this way, these representations seem to perpetuate, though in different registers, the association between air travel and ethereal transcendence. The pilot, human facilitator of this transcendence, cannot be tolerated since his embodied presence would interfere with these idyllic, ‘gloried, lark-like’ splendours of flight. A misunderstanding about Boot’s wealth and supposed privilege positions Boot to generously share passage on ‘his’ aeroplane with ‘Mr Baldwin’, a character of true privilege, a modern capitalist with sufficient wealth to purchase the mineral riches of Ishmaelia. Baldwin, who

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later reappears in an aeroplane above Ishmaelia’s capital, and parachutes safely to ground, is also strongly associated with the aeroplane, but represents not its literary and imaginative embodiments of freedom, but this modern machine’s complicity in imperial adventure.7 Certainly the aeroplane’s contribution to imperial conquest, exploitation of natural resources, and the perpetuation of the colonial project, is of a piece with the previous associations made between aeroplane and idyllic pastoral, ethereal transcendence. Boot’s connection of the aeroplane with the pastoral splendour of Britannia helps naturalize the imperialism upon which that splendour was built. Scoop demonstrates how airline passengers both draw upon literary imagination to apprehend their experience of flight, through Boot’s naïve celebration of liberating movement given form through his aerial pastoral idyll, and participate in the threatening potential of the aeroplane as an instrument of imperial conquest, through Baldwin’s cynical and deceptive manipulation and colonialist exploitation. For Waugh, as for Woolf, the pilot’s role is not heroic, but instrumental. He is derided and dismissed, less chivalric knight of the air, more driver of the aerial omnibus, inscrutable ferryman transporting the passenger into the mythical experience of flight. From the showily erudite correspondent for the Spectator, to Woolf’s imaginary passenger, to dim passengers like Ginger in Vile Bodies , airline passengers are able to make sense of the unsettling experience of modern mechanized flight through appeals to the literary imagination.

Conclusion Airlines understood that the public was fascinated with the spectacle of flight and that feats of courage, endurance and derring-do could still transform pilots into national heroes. But they also understood that the mystique associated with flight was better connected with airline passengers than airline pilots. After Amy Johnson’s acclaimed solo flight across the empire to Australia in the spring of 1930, Imperial Airlines ran an advertisement in the Times: YOU may not be able to fly yourself to India like AMY JOHNSON

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but you can follow her example and fly as a passenger in luxury and comfort (‘Imperial Airways’)

Imperial Airways passengers can be like Amy Johnson, the ad asserts, and all the while travel in greater comfort without all the fuss and bother about navigation and fuel management, not to say aviation skills. The comfort and luxury afforded the discerning passenger could include sleeping bunks for night flights, available with tea service, and equipped with electric lights for reading (Hudson 69). In 1935, the year the first international air passenger, Major W. N. Pilkington died, his ‘nephew’, William Pilkington, decided to return home from a family business trip in Australia via Imperial Airways. He kept a detailed travel diary of these flights, no doubt appreciating the smooth rides of the Short Empire Flying Boats and the Handley Page HP 42 Heracles that flew many of the legs of this epic journey, with their steady tables affording legible handwriting. In one passage, well past the halfway point of the journey, Pilkington notes with a certain amount of disdain, his callow fellow passengers were all five of them having to read Pilkington’s own books which only he had been wise enough to pack: ‘no one else had come with sufficient literature to get them even as far as Baghdad’ (quoted in Hudson 67). For Pilkington, it is almost as if literature is a kind of obligatory fuel for the imagination to propel airline passengers through the experience of flight. He rarely mentions the airline pilot, for the pilot, with his corporeal connections to the mechanics of flight, his need for tobacco and sandwiches, not to say his Charon-like associations with death, presents a problem for the passenger’s construction of flight as a transcendent, literary experience. A solution to his problem is the disavowal, erasure, dismissal of the pilot’s embodied presence. In this way, the new modern subject, the airline passenger, engages the literary imagination to mediate and structure their fantasies of flight as idyllic, aerial pastoral, ethereal visions. These visions aim to transcend the inconveniences and encumbrances of embodiment that persist in the very materiality of airliners in interwar Britain, the noise, the draughts, the turbulence, the mechanical unreliability, that no amount of ‘Silver Service’ can entirely obscure.

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Notes 1. The Air Ministry records indicate that between 1924 and 1939 558,706 passengers flew on Imperial Airways flights (Pirie, ‘Passenger’ 66). Obviously, many of these passengers would be repeat customers, so the number of people who were airline passengers in Britain between the wars would be far lower than this figure. As Gordon Pirie puts it, to conclude that nearly half a million Britons flew in this period ‘would be a gross exaggeration’ (66). Imperial Airways is of course just a single airline, even if it was Britain’s main carrier during the interwar period, but the figure does not include British people who flew on other national airlines. All to say, it is very difficult to ascertain good quantitative figures on the number of interwar British airline passengers. 2. George Holt Thomas had offered £1000 to the first pilot to fly across the English Channel, a prize claimed by Louis Blériot in 1909 (Edgerton 14), not long after the Comte de Lambert had circled the Eiffel Tower and inspired Le Corbusier to proclaim ‘the airplane, the advance guard of the conquering armies of the New Age’ (Le Corbusier 6). Almost a decade later, Lord Northcliffe took a bolder step by establishing a £10,000 prize for crossing the Atlantic, claimed by Alcock and Brown in 1919, as discussed above. 3. Brooke’s Collected Poems , which included a memoir by Edward Marsh, was first published before the end of the war, and includes this obituary as a fitting conclusion to the memoir (Marsh, in keeping with Churchill’s tone, notes that Brooke was buried on Scyros, linked to Theseus, Achilles and Pyrrhus, on the ‘23rd of April, the day of Shakespeare and of St. George’ [cliii]). In the obituary Churchill declares that Brooke’s poetic voice struck a note ‘more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other’ (clviii). He died, but ‘he expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause’ (clviii). For Churchill, the literary merits of the ‘poetsoldier’ that enhance his ‘most precious’ sacrifice are difficult to disentangle from Brooke’s image, nurtured by Churchill, as one of ‘England’s noblest sons’ who never doubted the righteousness of his ‘dear England’ (clix, clviii). 4. While notable exceptional women, Amelia Earhart or Amy Johnson for example, captured the popular imagination in the West between the wars for their exceptional feats of bravery and endurance as heroic individual pilots, the first woman pilot to fly a British airliner did not take off until 1965 (Sintes 12). For more on the connections between the aeroplane,

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gender, and empire see my ‘Modernity’s Object: The Airplane, Masculinity and Empire.’ Criticism 57.2 (2015). 5. In ‘Incidental Tourism: British Imperial Air Travel in the1930s’ Gordon Pirie indicates that the records of airline passengers between the wars are incomplete and convoluted, so that it is difficult to get a very accurate figure of just who these passengers were and why these passengers chose to travel by air. On non-European Imperial routes, he quotes Peter Lyth: ‘the typical air traveller was most likely to be a government official’ (53). But because of the nature of the flights, with over 30 stops, presented built-in opportunities for sight-seeing on the ground, even passengers travelling on imperial business would become ‘incidental tourists’ inadvertently. Comparing surveys of Imperial Airways passengers in the years 1927–1939 suggested that roughly 25–30% were travelling for pleasure (53). 6. For another analysis of this passage in Vile Bodies, see Chapter 3 by Luke Seaber in this collection. 7. Civilian aviation in interwar Britain was expressly seen as a means to consolidate the cohesion of the Empire. It is entirely fitting that Britain’s first national airline was called Imperial Airways. Samuel Hoare, four-time Secretary of State for Air, entitled his memoir of the 1920s: Empire of the Air. There is interesting scholarship that articulates the function of Imperial Airways in reinvigorating contacts between far-flung outposts of Britain’s maritime Empire (see for example, Gordon Pirie’s Air Empire: British Civil Aviation, 1919–1939, Manchester University Press, 2009).

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Works Cited ‘Airco DH9.’ BAE Systems: Our Company: Heritage. https://www.baesystems. com/en/heritage/airco-dh9. ‘Air Travel and an Exhibition.’ Spectator, 6 January 1923: 13–14. ‘Atlantic Airmen Knighted.’ The Times, 21 June 1919: 7. ‘Atlantic Prize Won.’ The Times, 16 June 1919: 13. Barker, T.C. The Glassmakers: Pilkington: The Rise of an International Company 1826–1976. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977. Bingham, Neil. ‘Arrivals and Departures: Civil Airport Architecture in Britain during the Interwar Period’. The Architecture of British Transport in the Twentieth Century. Eds. Julian Holder and Steven Parissien. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004. 106–132. Brooke, Rupert. Collected Poems with a Memoir. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1921. ‘Capt. Alcock and Lieut. Brown Knighted.’ Flight (26 June 1919): 830. Cluett, Douglas, Joanna Nash, and Bob Learmonth. Croydon Airport: The Great Days, 1928–1939. Sutton, Surrey: London Borough of Sutton Libraries and Arts Services, 1980. ‘De Havilland DH66 Hercules.’ BAE Systems Our Company: Heritage. https:// www.baesystems.com/en/heritage/de-havilland-dh66-hercules. ‘Exhibitions.’ The Times, 25 June 1930: 14. ‘Fighting Angels.’ The Times, 21 March 1919: 15. Foster Stovel, Nora. ‘The Aerial View of Modern Britain: The Airplane as a Vehicle for Idealism and Satire.’ Ariel 15:3 (July 1984): 17–32. ‘History.’ Liverpool St Helens Heritage. http://lshheritage.co.uk/history. Hudson, Kenneth and Julian Pettifer. Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travel. London: Bodley Head, 1979. ‘Imperial Airways.’ The Times, 27 May 1930: 12. Jackson, A.S. Imperial Airways and the First British Airlines, 1919–40. Lavenham: Terence Dalton, 1995. ‘Jerry Shaw Retires.’ Flight (21 November 1952): 641. Le Corbusier. Aircraft. [1935]. London: Trefoil, 1987. Lewis, Wyndham. Filibusters in Barbary. New York: McBride, 1932. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. ‘Maj. William Norman Pilkington, D.S.O., S. Lane. R.’ Supplement to the London Gazette, 16 September 1918: 10859. Phillips, Percival. ‘Air Travel “The Thing”.’ Daily Mail, 23 May 1929: 6. Pirie, Gordon. ‘Passenger Traffic in the 1930s on British Imperial Air Routes: Refinement and Revision.’ Journal of Transport History 25:1 (2004): 63–83. ———. Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation 1919–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.

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———. ‘Incidental Tourism: British Imperial Air Travel in the 1930s.’ Journal of Tourism History 1:1 (2009): 49–66. Pudney, John. The Seven Skies: A Study of BOAC and Its Forerunners Since 1919. London: Putnam, 1959. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. John Jowett et al. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 339–368. Sintes, Yvonne Pope. Trailblazer in Flight: Britain’s First Female Jet Airline Captain. Barnsley: Pen and Sword Aviation, 2013. ‘The Conquest of the Air.’ Spectator, 24 November 1906: 10–11. ‘Thirty Years Ago.’ Flight (25 July 1949): 213. Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. [1938]. London: Longmans, 1964. ———. Vile Bodies. [1930]. London: Penguin Books, 2012. ‘Westland “Wessex.”’ Flight (3 October 1930): 1082–1087. Whitaker, Katy. ‘Henry “Jerry” Shaw (1892–1977).’ Britain from Above: 1919– 1953. https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/. Wohl, Robert. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908– 1918. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994. ———. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920– 1950. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Flying Over London.’ Collected Essays, Volume 4. London: Hogarth, 1967. 167–172.

CHAPTER 7

Flying Dangerously: Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North Nicola Darwood

In May 1932, Imperial Airways flew a record number of passengers (3372) from London to Paris in just one month (‘In the City’ 6), having already carried a total of 240,000 passengers in the preceding eight years (‘Air Travel Progress’ 8). Two months later the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer reported that the company had made an annual net profit of £10,186, paying a dividend of three per cent to its shareholders (‘Imperial Airways’ 13). In the same year Elizabeth Bowen published To the North, a novel which has a focus on travel—particularly air travel—and on speed. Many novels of the 1930s, according to James Gindin, drew on the themes of travel, geography and place, novels in which ‘[g]eography signifies’. Such literary texts, he argues, were concerned with fears often associated with the interwar generations, fears about security, about change, but also excitement about those changes and, for the middle classes, a greater disposable income which meant that travel was more affordable (15).1 In To the North Bowen draws on notions of restlessness,

N. Darwood (B) University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_7

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change and destruction in her desire to write about geographical place and, in so doing, clearly demonstrates her understanding of the technological advances of the age. The novel foregrounds ideas of travel—by train, car and aeroplane—as Bowen explores the world through her young protagonist, Emmeline Summers. Both the pleasure (that is, perhaps, the sense of curiosity identified by Gindin) and the inherent danger of travel are recurrent themes in To the North, echoing the Modernist desire for speed, but Bowen’s use of this motif can also be read as a metaphor for the destruction of the innocent individual in an increasingly corrupt and disconnected society where it can be more convenient to speak to others by means of a ‘speaking-tube’ (To the North 69) rather than communicating in person. This essay explores the notion of ‘flying dangerously’ in the novel, through Bowen’s representation of ‘airmindedness’ (To the North 144), where travel proves to be dangerous (both morally and physically) and, ultimately, fatal on that final journey on the road ‘[t]o the North’. It focuses particularly on the role of Emmeline as a partner in the travel agency, an agency which ‘seemed to radiate speed’ (To the North 144), and also provides a discussion which locates Emmeline’s work both in terms of the travel industry of the 1930s and her position as a female partner in an expanding business. Bowen responds to a growing fascination with aeroplanes and with air travel in To the North, a fascination which was engineered by enthusiasts and aviators such as Sir Alan Cobham2 and, in particular, his campaign for National Aviation Days, launched in March 1932. In an article, ‘Promoting Air-Mindedness’ in the Portsmouth Evening News on 30 March 1932, the reporter details Cobham’s campaign, which was ‘to stimulate public interest in civil and commercial aviation’ through aviation displays throughout the country, promoting the idea of airmindedness and encouraging people and communities to become involved in all aspects of aviation, including the building of aerodromes (6).3 Arguing for a greater involvement by the public in matters of aviation in an article published in the Biggleswade Chronicle just nine days later on 8 April 1932, Cobham stated: ‘I am convinced that sufficient opportunity is not given to the British public to come into close contact with practical flying’ and expressed his desire to promote flying and aircraft through a National Aviation Day ‘in every town of importance throughout the country’ (‘Sir Alan Cobham for Cardington’ 3). While it is not known if Bowen ever attended one of Cobham’s National Aviation Days, her engagement with the notion of air travel in

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To the North would suggest that she was already fascinated by the opportunities afforded by this form of travel. Emmeline’s travel agency is one which extolls the promises offered by the advertising campaigns of Imperial Airways, such as the advertisement in the Illustrated London News on Saturday 17 December 1932 which guarantees ‘speed and luxury’ and exhorts the readers to fly to Paris ‘while you lunch [on the] magnificent mid-day Silver Wing Service’ (‘The Luxury That Is Not Expensive’ 958). Such a flight might well have been the one taken by Emmeline and Markie on their trip to Paris where Emmeline is to meet two Serbs with a view to establishing a partner office in Paris. Indeed, the illustration accompanying the advert provides a pictorial image of the journey itself where Emmeline and Markie sit opposite each other with ‘a little table between’ them (To the North 135).

Travelling David Farley states that ‘[t]ravel and travel writing transformed literary modernism as surely as they were transformed by it’ (1). While, of course, To the North is not ‘travel literature’, a genre which saw a boom in popularity in the 1930s—for example, J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934) and Midnight on the Desert (1937) or George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)—as Debra Rae Cohen suggests, ‘[t]he language of travel dominated the 1930s even beyond the confines of the dedicated travel narrative’ (164). It was a language that Bowen appeared happy to appropriate: writing about her fifth novel, The House in Paris (1935), Bowen highlighted the importance of ‘showing scene [sic] in fluidity, in (apparent) motion’ continuing that for this to be a successful narrative device: the beholder must be in motion himself, on foot or on or in a conveyance of whatever kind, of whatever speed. The greater the speed, the more liquefying the process. […] He does not merely—as he would were he at a standstill—see scene [sic], he watches it compulsively like a non-stop narrative. (‘Pictures and Conversations’ 40)4

Within this passage it seems to me that Bowen establishes a connection to a very Modernist trope—one of speed, of travel, of movement— and it is one that she returns to later in this essay, written in 1972, where she comments: ‘speed is exciting to have grown up with. It alerts

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vision, making vision retentive with regard to what only may have been seen for a split second’ (‘Pictures and Conversations’ 44). It is a trope which can arguably be seen to form a guiding tenet of much of Bowen’s fiction and which can be seen especially in To the North.5 As Bowen also writes, ‘Bowen characters are almost perpetually in motion’ (‘Pictures and Conversations’ 41). She continues: Bowen characters are in transit consciously. Sensationalists, they are able to re-experience what they do, or equally, what is done to them, every day. They tend to behold afresh and react accordingly. An arrival, even into another room, is an event to be registered in some way. When they extend their environment, strike outward, invade the unknown, travel, what goes on in them is magnified and enhanced: impacts are sharper, there is more objectivity. (‘Pictures and Conversations’ 42, emphasis in original)

Bowen is not a lone voice in extolling the virtues of speed and travel; such a stance was, of course, familiar territory for the followers of Futurism, for example. Nor is Bowen alone in using these notions as metaphors, in this case using travel and speed as metaphors for the loss of innocence of Emmeline. For Bowen, speed ‘alerts vision, making vision retentive with regard to what may have been seen for a split second’ (‘Pictures and Conversations’ 44). She was thrilled by the notion of speed, something that she shares with Emmeline who meets Markie (her lover) at Croydon Aerodrome. While waiting for him, ‘[s]uch an exalting idea of speed possessed Emmeline that she could hardly sit still and longed to pace to and fro’ (To the North 135). Andrew Bennett notes that Modernist literature responded to ‘the very condition of change’, change which encompasses ‘Darwinian accounts of evolution, post-Newtonian physics, the increasing importance of air travel, the internal combustion engine, new telecommunications networks and so on’ (27) and, as Bowen suggests, having been born before the ‘age of speed’, she was better placed for the excitement that came with the advent of that internal combustion engine, an invention which ‘was at once disagreeable and enigmatic’ (‘Pictures and Conversations’ 43). This phrase highlights the dichotomy inherent inTo the North: speed, in the form of the last journey ‘to the North’, might be fatal but speed is also something to be celebrated in a novel where travel within England, to and from Europe, to America even, is often seen as a means of escape.

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Travel Writing/Writing Travel Bowen often uses the tropes of travel and speed to convey more abstract notions: of fear, of growing sexuality, or of excitement. Ostensibly, Emmeline and Markie are travelling to Paris so that Emmeline can discuss business with two Serbian brothers. However, the flight from Croydon to Le Bourget provides not just a geographical description but also, as will be discussed below, a narratorial opportunity to foreground the possibility of Emmeline’s forthcoming loss of innocence or, perhaps, arguably, her descent into corruption and a hellish existence: Soon after the Oise, Le Bourget surprised them before they had thought of Paris. Markie’s fingers tightened, blood roared in ears as the plane with engines shut off, with a frightening cessation of sound plunged downward in that arrival that always appears disastrous. (To the North 139)

In her 1952 introduction to the Alfred Knopf edition of The Last September, Bowen discusses the writing of ‘fiction with the texture of history’ (98), a technique she uses in much of her fiction and so, while using the language of travel to describe such tumultuous emotions she also draws on her factual knowledge of travel. Emmeline sits and waits for Markie, where ‘he was so very late she feared he would miss the plane’. Bowen continues: In her thin grey coat and skirt [Emmeline] sat waiting under the skylight on that sexagonal [sic] seat round the little pharos of clocks. A huge blue June day filled the aerodrome and reflected itself in the hall: she heard a great hum from the waiting plane hungry for flight.6 (To the North 135)

The ‘hunger’ for flight is suggestive both of excitement and fear on the part of any passenger, and particularly on the part of Emmeline as she launches herself into a very uncertain future, but Bowen’s descriptions of aeroplanes and airports also provide accurate portrayals of this increasingly popular form of travel. This can be seen particularly in her description of Croydon Aerodrome where, on entering the Booking Hall, one could sit under the skylight on a hexagonal seat, while looking at the clocks which told the time from around the world (Fig. 7.1). The booking hall had its first day of operation on 30 January 1928, and had been built, according to the Gloucester Citizen on that day, at a cost of £260,000 (‘New Super Air Terminus’ 7), although other accounts, such as the one

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Fig. 7.1 The booking hall at Croydon Airport (Image courtesy of the Historic Croydon Airport Trust)

in the Wallington and Carshalton Advertiser for 2 February 1928 (Cluett et al. 1), suggest that the cost was £267,000, a figure used by Harry Harper in The Romance of a Modern Airway, published in 1932 (38). It was, according to the Gloucester Citizen: ‘the finest and most up-to-date in the world, embodying nearly nine years’ experience in the operation of high speed passenger airways’ (‘New Super Air Terminus’ 7). Croydon Aerodrome is also described in great detail in the Guide to Croydon Aerodrome (The Air Port of London) published in April 1929 by the Air Ministry at a cost of 2d.7 From this publication we learn that in the Booking Hall ‘tickets are issued or checked and where, incidentally, newspapers and magazines to beguile the time of the trip may be

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purchased’, passengers are then escorted ‘to the Emigration Hall […] and, finally out on to the aerodrome itself, where the air liner is waiting’ (16).8 A more romantic picture of the booking hall is painted by Harry Harper; it is one which, had Bowen read it, she may well have taken to heart: As you […] enter the great domed booking-hall, something of the fascination of the place grips you. It seems as though the romance of some novelist has suddenly come true. You feel as though the whole place might be some figment of the imagination, ready to vanish at any moment. (The Romance of a Modern Airway 39)

It is not just the aerodrome’s booking hall which is depicted accurately, but also the aeroplanes which flew from there, in particular the fourengine biplane Handley Page H.P. 42 used by Imperial Airways (Cluett et al. 20), aeroplanes in which you had to walk ‘uphill to the front car’ with facing seats separated by ‘a little table’ (To the North 135) into a cabin not dissimilar to the one discussed in Harper’s The Romance of a Modern Airway (1932), a ‘roomy, lofty, spacious [… with] separate armchair seat[s]’ space which is ‘scientifically heated and ventilated’ (47) (Fig. 7.2). However, there does appear to be one major disparity between Bowen’s narrative and the reality of flight or, rather, the reality of flight depicted in the newspapers of the day which talk of the quiet to be found in the aeroplane cabins. For example, in an article in the Portsmouth Evening News on 2 September 1932, Harper (whose byline in that newspaper reads: ‘Author of “The Evolution of The Flying Machine” etc.’)9 writes about the luxury and silence to be found in the cabin on the twoand-a-quarter-hour flight to Le Bourget, sitting in ‘in a luxurious arm chair, with stewards at one’s service at the touch of an electric bell’ (Air Travel Progress 8), all for the price of five guineas.10 In comparison, the flight taken by Emmeline and Markie is noisy, so noisy in fact that they have to communicate by written notes to each other, scrawled on scrap pieces of paper. It is through this particular narrative device that Emmeline has the violent realization that Markie has no intention of marrying her. The very start of the flight suggests aggression: The roar intensified, there was an acceleration of movement about the aerodrome as though they were about to be shot out of a gun; blocks

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Fig. 7.2 An Imperial Airways interior from Harry Harper, The Romance of a Modern Airway (1932)

were pulled clear and they taxied forward at high speed, apparently to the coast […] earth had slipped from their wheels that, spinning, rushed up the air. (To the North 135)

But this literal violence does not last, much to Markie’s relief. As ‘an immense sense of ordinariness established itself in the car’ (To the North 135), he starts to compose notes to Emmeline. Bowen frequently uses letters in her novels to communicate emotions which are apparently impossible to articulate verbally. Quite often though, as is the case later

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in To the North, letters go astray or are never posted.11 In this instance, however, Markie’s communication skills are effective but cruel; after some superficial comments, he reflects on this form of correspondence which ‘began to appeal to him’, an appeal which lay in the ‘deliberation unknown in speaking, boldness quite unrebuked by its own vibrations and, free of that veil of uncertainty and oblivion that falls on the posted letter, the repercussions upon her of all he said. The indiscretions in letterwriting, the intimacies of speech were at once his’ (To the North 137). Markie’s notes then take on a darker hue as he answers what he believes to be an unspoken question: ‘You must know what I want: all I want. If I COULD marry, it would be you. I don’t know if you know what this means. I didn’t think this could happen. For God’s sake, be kind to me. Understand?’ (To the North 138). In asking Emmeline to ‘be kind’, Markie is ensuring that he will not attract any of the blame should Emmeline mistake his intentions; in his mind this is appropriate, that ‘the repercussions’ should be all hers, regardless of his actions. In order to underline his cruelty, in a subsequent note he writes: ‘We could not marry’ and then, in response to her written request to talk in Paris, responds ‘No more to say’ (To the North 138). This is a cruel, violent act on the part of Markie, and the noise in the cabin of the aeroplane allows him to deliver this fateful blow in a way which, had the cabin been quiet, would have appeared cowardly. And yet it is possible that a 1930s readership would have mostly agreed with his stance that, having told Emmeline how he felt, Markie was absolving himself of all responsibility. A very positive review of the novel by L. P. Hartley demonstrates this position, arguing that Markie ‘did not try to deceive Emmeline, either about his intentions or himself. He was honest with her. […] Emmeline then, like most tragic heroines, had only herself to blame for what happened […] Emmeline did not heed the warning. Her emotions, once roused, were quite beyond her control’ (Hartley 306). However, the sudden declaration of Markie’s intentions comes too late for Emmeline; she is already ‘embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible; she could now turn back only by some unforeseen and violent deflection—by which her exact idea of personal honour became imperilled—from their set course’ (To the North 138). She longs for some sense of permanence, something not offered by Markie and, instead, starts a journey which will lead to a ‘passionless […] surrender’ (To the North 142) and, ultimately, death.

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Of course, not everyone in To the North is as comfortable with the concept of flying as Emmeline. Neither Markie nor Peter (Emmeline’s business partner) is particularly keen on any form of travel (especially by air) and their reticence is understandable in an era when there were numerous air travel-related accidents, for example the Imperial Airways flight to Paris on 9 May 1932 which was struck by lightning (‘Lightning Strikes Air Liner’ 9). Later in the year in September a French pilot was killed when the aeroplane he was flying crashed into trees near Croydon Aerodrome because of poor visibility due to thick fog (‘Pilot Killed and Mechanic Hurt’ 10). Others, however, have different reasons for scorning the use of aeroplanes and in considering air travel to be dangerous: although equally fascinated by travel, Cecilia, Emmeline’s sister-in-law, prefers to travel by train or by car, a choice not particularly endorsed by her aunt, Lady Waters. Cecilia needs to be in constant transit, but Lady Waters feels it necessary to express her concern to Emmeline: ‘Cecilia […] never seems to be happy when she is not in a train—unless, of course, she is motoring.’ ‘It depends rather where she is going.’ ‘She goes where she likes: it’s neurosis. I’m really anxious about her.’ ‘I often wish she would fly.’ ‘She would arrive too quickly,’ said Lady Waters. ‘Also I understand that one cannot talk in an aeroplane. I really dread these journeys; she picks up the oddest acquaintances.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Emmeline. (To the North 15)

It is apparent from this exchange that Lady Waters is not concerned for Cecilia’s physical safety, but rather the safety of her reputation, something that might be maintained in a noisy aeroplane as she ‘cannot talk’ in such an environment and, therefore, would not be able to ‘pick up’ the wrong sort of man, for example someone like Markie. Lady Waters is right to be fearful, but the concern is for the wrong young woman, for it is Emmeline for whom the aeroplane flight to Paris leads to her ultimate fall from innocence.

The Travel Industry The 1930s saw a significant increase in the number of people taking summer holidays and, as Gordon Pirie notes, by this time, passenger air travel was becoming less of a novelty, particularly as commercial airlines,

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such as Imperial, became established (49). However, much of this travel was still for business purposes, rather than tourism, with businessmen, officials and engineers accounting for the majority of air passengers (Pirie 50). But holidays which incorporated air travel were growing in number and in 1927 Imperial Airways marketed a month-long trip by air which included stops in France, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Algiers and Italy (Pirie 50). It is within this climate, an era of increased air travel and the growth of middle-class tourism, that Emmeline and Peter start their travel agency. Travel agencies were not a new phenomenon in the 1930s. For example, Thomas Cook, the travel agency with whom Emmeline is keen to avoid comparison, started trading in 1841; their first excursion was a trip for temperance workers from Leicester to a meeting in Loughborough (‘Thomas Cook History’). The business continued to expand under the management of his son and then his grandson, Frank H. Cook, who, as well as managing the business, undertook personal tours. According to his obituary in the Gloucester Journal on Saturday 2 January 1932, Cook ‘personally conducted’ travel parties of special importance, parties which included for example, King George, the Duke of Clarence and the former Kaiser of Germany through Palestine and Syria (13). Wishing to disassociate herself from the working-class roots and perceived mass tourism of Thomas Cook, when Emmeline tells Julian Tower, the future fiancé of her sister-in-law, that she runs a travel agency and he says ‘I see. Like Cook’s’, her emphatic ‘No’ is met with equanimity as Julian responds ‘[j]ust a travel agency… How very nice’. (To the North 23).12 It is the very size of that travel company which Emmeline rails against; the enormity of Thomas Cook is highlighted in an article in the Birmingham Daily Gazette on Tuesday 26 January 1932, an article which reads more like an advertisement: The activities of this famous firm [Thomas Cook and Sons, Ltd.], whose Birmingham offices are situated in New-street, are so numerous that once the traveller places himself in their hands he need have nothing further to worry about. They give equal care and attention to the smallest item, from the conveyance of luggage to the purchase of tickets, as they do to the planning of a world tour. Their banking, exchange and other financial arrangements are second to none and solely devised to help the traveller in any direction in which he needs assistance. In many of the most important cities they have their own offices and staff of guides to take tourists to the show places, or assist them at busy railway Junctions. (‘The Ideal Holiday’ 5)

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Emmeline believes her agency caters for the discerning traveller; she does not want the sort of traveller—‘the most awful people with legs like flies who come into lunch in bathing costumes’—who so annoyed Edith Sitwell when she visited Levanto on the Italian Riviera in the 1930s or the ‘swarm of very noisy transatlantic locusts’ in Amalfi who became the focus of Osbert Sitwell’s ire in the late 1920s (quoted in Fussell 40–1). Indeed, Emmeline tells Julian: Our organization is really far-reaching […] we can tell anyone almost everything: what to avoid, what to do in the afternoons anywhere— Turkestan, Cracow—what to do about mules, where it’s not safe to walk after dark, how little to tip. We have made out a chart of comparative dinner times all over Europe […] we keep very much up to date. (To the North 23)

Interestingly, although they may promote the notion of international travel, hinting at the delights that will await the traveller at their destination, neither Emmeline nor Peter actually travels much themselves. As Emmeline explains to Julian, ‘My partner can’t move, he gets sea-sick and air-sick and quite often train-sick and I haven’t got time to go everywhere’ (To the North 24). The main asset of the travel agency appears to be the partners’ integrity—‘You may not enjoy it the whole time, but you’ll be glad to have been there […] yes, the cooking is oily, but that is good for one’s insides’ (To the North 92)—and their own personalities, especially ‘Emmeline’s fervour and Peter’s determination to talk shop everywhere [which] attracted a good many clients, a number of whom remained’ (To the North 70). However, their business acumen does not extend to their ability to produce succinct advertising material. While Sir Alan Cobham’s slogan for the National Aviation Days—‘Fly yourself’ (‘Sir Alan Cobham For Cardington. Second of the National Aviation Displays’ 3)—appears to be unambiguous, Emmeline and Peter’s is more oblique and appears to foreshadow the dénouement of the novel: ‘“Move dangerously”—a variant of “Live dangerously” you see’, she says to Julian, but then asks, ‘“I wonder,” […] raising her eyebrows anxiously, “if it is such a very good slogan? It seems to need some explaining—”’ (To the North 23).

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A Businesswoman in a Man’s World Emmeline is, in some circles, considered to be a woman of good business sense; for example, when Julian says to Cecilia that he thinks Emmeline is rather young to be running a business, Cecilia responds firmly ‘So her clients all think, till they get her bills’ (To the North 166). Although perhaps in a minority, women were not strangers in the business world and there were many who started and built very successful businesses during the period. Emmeline then is representative not only of the mobility offered by air travel but also the mobility that travel and other industries offered the professional woman, from the office secretary to the partner in a business. Phyllis Pearsall and Agnes Dillon provide two examples of this professional mobility. According to one account, in 1935 Pearsall, struggling to find the location of a party, noted that the most recent map of London streets had been published in 1919. As a consequence, she decided that she would remap London and so walked the streets for eighteen hours a day while constructing an alphabetical index of 23,000 streets—this became the first London A-Z Street Atlas in 1936, the year in which she started the Geographers’ A–Z Map Co Ltd., a company that made her a multimillionaire (Baker 1–2). However, it should be noted that Richard Hornsey has shown that this story is apocryphal (Hornsey 270–72). While Pearsall may not have traipsed around London in order to construct the atlas (the story about getting lost on the way to a party also appears to be a myth), it seems evident that her marketing skills and business acumen led to the creation of this extremely successful guide to the streets of London, a guide which aided pedestrian and vehicular mobility around the city. In the same year, Agnes Joseph Madeline Dillon (better known as Una Dillon), armed with loans totalling £800 but no business experience, opened a bookshop at 9 Store Street in Bloomsbury, London. This small bookshop became a huge success and her customers included Cecil Day-Lewis and John Betjeman. Although lacking in business expertise when she opened her first shop, in 1956 she entered into an agreement with London University which led to the formation of Dillon’s University Bookshops Ltd. and, by 1967, the company had an annual turnover of over £1 million (Cook, n.p.). While Pearsall and Dillon may well be seen as business contemporaries of Emmeline and her work in the travel industry, Suzette Worden and Jill Seddon point to the difficulties faced by many women in business

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in an era when women were expected to return to the home following the liberation of the workplace during the First World War. Writing of the need to act forcefully, Worden and Seddon enumerate the ways in which women designers negotiated their way in a world dominated by men, either in a light-hearted way or in a way which appeared to ‘defy conventions about femininity’ (183), as they sought to benefit from the resulting social mobility associated with the male-dominated professions. They provide the example of Margaret Partridge, a member of the Electrical Association for Women, who donned her father’s top hat in order to associate herself with male engineers at a conference which organized events for delegates’ wives—the addition of a red ribbon giving the hat ‘a hybrid semi-feminine air’—and the women who wore men’s suits and had their hair cropped short in order to ‘downplay’ their feminine appearance (Worden and Seddon 183). While Emmeline may not adopt a form of masculine dress, she is criticized for not behaving in an accepted feminine manner. Having left her alone with a new client, an elderly gentleman who doesn’t really want to go abroad but whose wife seems to be insisting that they do, Peter, Emmeline’s business partner, eavesdrops on their conversation: ‘Listening critically, he thought Emmeline’s manner insufficiently feminine; he could have done it better himself’ (To the North 33). Emmeline’s life as a businesswoman and someone who is criticized for not being sufficiently ‘feminine’, is thrown into sharp contrast with that of her sister-in-law, Cecilia—who spends her days either travelling or lunching and dining with friends, and fretting about money—and Gerda Bligh, a married woman with two small children. Gerda, whose ‘line as a hostess was of adorable inefficiency’ (To the North 127) is a woman who ‘[h]aving read a good many novels about marriage, not to speak of scientific books, […] knew not only why she was unhappy but exactly how unhappy she could still be’ (To the North 52). Despite the desire in some areas of society that women should only work in the home, typified in part by journals such as Woman’s Own, the 1931 census indicated that, although there were fewer women in employment than men, in some areas of the workforce (such as the manufacture of clothing, textiles, food and paper), the majority of jobs were held by women. It was also a time when women typists were displacing men as personal secretaries; in 1931 women formed 42% of the clerical workforce (Grandy 489). Emmeline and Peter are the reluctant employers of one of these female clerks, Miss Tripp; unfortunately, though, she has few skills that would be of use to the travel agency, ‘recently down from

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Lady Margaret Hall, [she] worked for ten shillings a week and the experience’ (To the North 31). Although she is not particularly liked by her employers, neither Peter nor Emmeline can bring themselves to terminate her employment, and it is perhaps in this regard that Emmeline is not the hard-headed businesswoman she would like to be; recognizing this she berates herself for [t]here was no doubt she had been as unscrupulous as only the pure can be. Her own passion for business, however disinterested, had led to the exploitation of Tripp—why ask why she was exploitable?—one had been affected by Peter’s cynical: ‘More fool she.’ Of Tripp’s interior, Emmeline had not for a moment attempted to take account. Emmeline’s exaltation was dangerous and unsparing, she would have cut off her own hand to advance travel and had undoubtedly taken a finger or two of Tripp’s. She had taken for granted that Tripp should stay late to work with her when there was high pressure: devotion to the business had been assumed. (To the North 124–25)

In her portrayal of Emmeline as part-owner of a travel agency, whose ‘exaltation was dangerous and unsparing’ (To the North 125), in an era of airmindedness when air travel is promoted and celebrated, Bowen appears to write against the propagandist message of the media and magazines such as Women’s Own for women not to work outside of the home. Rather than be castigated and berated by the popular press, To the North suggests women in the workplace should be admired and their professional mobility encouraged. While there would have been an expectation (particularly from Lady Waters) that Emmeline give up her work should she get married, it’s not a choice that she makes, and, rather than the novel ending with a happy marriage for Emmeline, the reader is also left to wonder if Cecilia and Julian will ever marry as they wait anxiously for Emmeline to return from her car journey to Baldock with Markie.

‘Flying Dangerously’ Drawing on notions of airmindedness in the novel, Bowen utilizes both the imagery and language of air travel to discuss notions of innocence, of individuality and of consciousness, exploring many of the fears that characterized the 1930s. While Emmeline may be the partner in a successful travel agency, it is her desire to ‘fly dangerously’, to ‘move dangerously’, which eventually leads to her death on the road to ‘THE NORTH’, the

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sign observed by Markie as they speed out of London (To the North 239). After her ‘passionless […] surrender’ (To the North 142), Emmeline questions ‘if this distended present, this oppressive contraction of space would be properties of airmindedness’ (To the North 143), an airmindedness which forces constant movement and travel and which, at this moment in Emmeline’s life, is something to be abhorred rather than celebrated. Describing the last moments of Emmeline’s life as she and Markie drive up the Great North Road, Bowen returns to the idea of air travel, but not in a celebratory fashion. Instead, in this instance, she uses the notion of flight to once more explore the dangers potentially associated with that freedom. In a passage which echoes the language used to describe the descent into Le Bourget, the narrator conveys the desperation felt by Emmeline on a journey where ‘her speed had the startled wildness of flight’ (To the North 243): An immense idea of departure—expresses getting steam up and crashing for termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising […] possessed her spirit. […] Blind with new light she was like somebody suddenly not blind, or, after a miracle, somebody moving perplexed by the absence of pain. Like earth shrinking and sinking, irrelevant, under the rising wings of a plane, love with its unseen plan, its constrictions and urgencies, dropped to a depth below Emmeline, who now looked unmoved at the shadowy map of her pain. (To the North 244)

While Emmeline and Peter’s travel agency may promote the idea of adventurous travel, to ‘move dangerously’ (To the North 23), that movement, and for Emmeline, the discarding of tradition and societal expectations once Markie states firmly that ‘We could not marry’ (To the North 138), ends not in a glorious aeroplane journey to Paris, but rather in a disastrous drive on the Great North Road which concludes in Emmeline’s death—or suicide, perhaps—and the death of Markie. The narration of this drive invokes the speed associated with airmindedness: ‘the little car, strung on speed, held unswerving way’ (To the North 245) as the ‘immense sense of departure’ (To the North 244) takes hold of her in that last, fatal drive: Emmeline’s marketing slogan, ‘move dangerously’, now seems sadly prophetic.

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Notes 1. See also Paul Fussell’s account of the importance of travel highlighted by the fiction of the interwar period (Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars: London, 1980). Fussell’s exploration has been expanded by David Farley’s book Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad (Columbia and London, 2010). 2. Sir Alan Cobham was well known in aviation circles, particularly for his record-breaking long-haul flights, for example he was the first person to fly to from England to South Africa in 1925/1926 (‘Sir Alan Cobham, a Pioneering Aviator’). 3. As well as being an aviator, Cobham was obviously in favour of speed in all forms of transport and was not, apparently, averse to breaking the speed limit. The Liverpool Echo reported on Friday 7 October 1927 that he was ‘fined £2, to-day, at Brentford, for exceeding the speed limit on the Great West road. His speed was said to be forty-six miles an hour. A solicitor, on Sir Alan’s behalf, said such speed was not so great as it would be for other people of less ability to control a motor-car’ (‘Sir Alan Cobham Fined £2’ 9). 4. Bowen intended that ‘Pictures and Conversations’ would be a full-length book comprising of five sections: ‘Origins’; ‘Places’; ‘People’; ‘Genesis’ and ‘Witchcraft: A Query’, arguing that while she had been the subject of a number of books, she had ‘found some of them wildly off the mark’. So much so, she writes that ‘if anybody must write a book about Elizabeth Bowen, why should not Elizabeth Bowen’ (Bowen ‘Pictures and Conversations’ 62–3). However, although she completed the first two sections, sending them to Spencer Curtis Brown in 1972; it was a project that she left unfinished (Curtis Brown vii–viii). 5. Bowen utilizes the idea of air travel as a narrative device in a number of her novels and, particularly in Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968) in which a letter composed on a flight to America becomes the central scene of the novel. 6. The word ‘pharos’ is particularly associated with the Pharos (or lighthouse) of Alexandria. 7. 2d is two pence in pre-decimal currency when there were 12d (pence) in a shilling. Today’s equivalent of a shilling is 2d is approximately 40p, but even in 1929 2d would have been a very small sum of money. 8. This fascinating booklet provides plans of the aerodrome, details of the organization of the flights, and even information about the posting and delivering of overseas mail. 9. The title page of The Romance of a Modern Airway lists some of Harper’s other publications: ‘The Evolution of the Flying Machine’, ‘Twenty-five Years of Flying’ and ‘The Steel Construction of Aeroplanes’.

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10. One guinea was £1.1.0 (i.e., one pound and one shilling). The average annual wage in 1932 was approximately £128.00. 11. See, for example, Eve Trout or Changing Scenes (1968). 12. Bowen’s ellipsis.

Works Cited Air Ministry. Guide to Croydon Aerodrome (The Airport of London). N.p. The Air Ministry, 1929. Baker, Anne P. ‘Pearsall [née Gross], Phyllis Isobel.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. 2017. Bennett, Andrew. ‘Bowen and Modernism: The Early Novels.’ Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Eibhear Walshe. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. 27–39. Bowen, Elizabeth. ‘The Last September.’ Elizabeth Bowen. Afterthought: Pieces about Writing. [1952]. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1962. 95–100. ———. Eva Trout or Changing Scenes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. Print. ———. ‘Pictures and Conversations.’ Elizabeth Bowen. Pictures and Conversations. [1972]. London: Allen Lane, 1975. 3–63. ———. To the North. [1932]. London: Vintage, 1999. Cluett, Douglas, Joanna Nash and Bob Learmouth. Croydon Airport 1928–1939. Sutton: London Borough of Sutton Libraries and Arts Services, 1980. Cohen, Debra Rae. ‘Rebecca West’s Palimpsestic Praxis.’ Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain. Ed. Kirstin Bluemel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 150–167. Cook, Jean H. ‘Dillon, Agnes Joseph Madeline [Una] (1903–1993).’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Curtis Brown, S. ‘Foreword.’ Pictures and Conversations. Ed. Elizabeth Bowen. London: Allen Lane, 1975. vii–xlii. Farley, David. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2010. Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Gindin, James. British Fiction in the 1930s: The Dispiriting Decade. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992. Grandy, Christine. ‘Paying for Love: Women’s Work and Love in Popular Film in Interwar Britain.’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 19:3 (2010): 483–507. Harper, Harry. ‘Air Travel Progress.’ Portsmouth Evening News, 2 September 1932: 8. ———. The Romance of a Modern Airway. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1932. Hartley, Leslie P. ‘The Literary Lounger.’ The Sketch, 16 November 1932: 306.

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Hornsey, Richard. ‘The Cultural Uses of the London A-Z Street Atlas.’ Cultural Geographies 23: 2 (April 2016): 265–280. ‘Imperial Airways’. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 12 October 1932: 13. ‘In the City.’ Hull Daily Mail, 13 June 1932: 6. ‘Lightning Strikes Air Liner’ Nottingham Journal, 10 May 1932: 9. Medcalf, Alexander. ‘“We Are Always Learning”: Marketing the Great Western Railway, 1921–1939.’ The Journal of Transport History 33:2 (2012): 186– 211. ‘New Super Air Terminus. Finest and Most Up-to-Date in the World.’ Gloucester Citizen, 30 January 1928: 7. Pirie, Gordon. ‘Incidental Tourism: British Imperial Air Travel in the 1930s.’ Journal of Tourism History 1:1 (2009): 49–66. ‘Pilot Killed and Mechanic Hurt.’ Yorkshire Evening Post, 17 September 1932: 10. ‘Promoting Airmindedness’ Portsmouth Evening News, 30 March 1932: 6. ‘Sir Alan Cobham, a Pioneering Aviator’. RAF Museum. https://www.rafmus eum.org.uk/research/online-exhibitions/sir-alan-cobham-a-pioneering-avi ator/south-africa-flight.aspx. ‘Sir Alan Cobham Fined £2,’ Liverpool Echo, 7 October 1927: 9. ‘Sir Alan Cobham for Cardington. Second of the National Aviation Displays.’ Biggleswade Chronicle, 8 April 1932: 3. ‘The Ideal Holiday: A Cruise on a British Liner.’ Birmingham Daily Gazette, 26 January 1932: 5. ‘The Luxury That Is Not Expensive Imperial Air Travel.’ Illustrated London News, 17 December 1932: 958. ‘Thomas Cook History.’ http://www.thomascook.com/about-us/thomas-cookhistory/. ‘Well Known Travel Agency: The Late Mr. Frank H. Cook.’ Gloucester Journal, 2 January 1932: 13. Williams, Keith. British Writers and the Media 1930–1945. Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1996. Worden, Suzette and Jill Seddon. ‘Women Designers in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s: Defining the Professional and Redefining Design.’ Journal of Design History 8:3 (1995): 177–193.

PART III

Influencers

CHAPTER 8

‘True Blue Heroines’: The 1930s Aviatrix and Eccentric Colonial Femininity Ann Rea

The woman aviator—the aviatrix1 —embodied glamour, evoked public fascination and carried immense cultural significance in 1930s Britain and throughout the empire. Amy Johnson, Jean Batten and Beryl Markham, in particular, served as examples of the potential of the modern woman, and ushered in new ideals of feminine heroism which, I will argue, arose from the culture of the colonies. As versions of modern femininity, these women are intricate figures who not only help us to understand the complexities of gender politics in the 1930s, but also the relation of the colonies to England, with regard to gendered behaviour. Girls’ school stories, particularly those representing imperial girlhood, and their literary criticism and history, allow us to see how, as Cecily Devereux argues, ‘the figure of the colonial girl is constituted or fabricated in colonial girls’ adventure fiction and how that fabrication operates to index the ways in which colonial space is itself constructed in language and representation’ (Devereux 31).2 Essentially the aviatrix refreshed the British ideal of

A. Rea (B) University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Johnstown, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_8

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womanhood, I would argue, using a more flexible, less restrictive, ideal of femininity that benefited from the influence of the empire.3 Popular newspaper representations of aviatrices, while responding to and creating the public’s fascination with aviation and, especially, aviatrices, also took the figure of the aviatrix and mobilized her to represent femininity in a version overlaid with representations of imperial femininity. The aviatrix’s representation in the popular press, in film, biographies and autobiographies relied upon certain colonial freedoms that applied to women and upon an upholding of the idea of the empire itself, although ultimately the women may have merely exploited the empire in order to justify their aviatory adventures. Nevertheless, by creating an, at times, eccentric unconventional femininity, while also relying on the ex-centricity of colonial femininities that contravened the norms in the metropolis, these women carved a space of relative freedom, in spite of the fact that representations of them in the popular press and biographies would often apply limitations to what they could do as women. Depictions of these aviatrices—in newspaper stories and biographies— struggled with the inherent contradictions caused by the new model of heroism they presented that conflicted with British culture’s need to reinforce certain conventional ideas about femininity. These women’s exploits served to reinvigorate the metropolis’s post-First World War femininities, in a period of complex conservative gender politics that allowed certain kinds of restricted progress for women. What Alison Light terms ‘conservative modernity’ can help to explain these simultaneous advances and the restrictions that curtailed their force (8). The ‘plucky’ aviatrix undoubtedly exemplified characteristics celebrated in empire adventure stories for both boys and girls, such as the spirit of adventure and independence, thereby suggesting the admirability of these qualities to English readers. Yet although the record-breaking flights exhibited the aviatrix’s courage and the engineering knowledge of how to maintain her own aeroplane over a long distance while navigating her course without sophisticated instruments, and although the women were economically independent, nevertheless descriptions of them in the popular press would still evoke conventions as by, for example, emphasizing their appearance as they landed. Eventually, the newspaper stories would also pruriently assert the possibility that they would ‘settle down’ into marriage and domesticity, even though that would lead to the public’s loss of stories about the eccentric escapades that the media celebrated. And, of course, the reassertion of colonialism was itself a conservative gesture in 1930s Britain, a

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reaction to challenges to Britain’s dominion over the empire. Amidst this complexity of cultural meaning, the three aviatrices I consider— Beryl Markham, Amy Johnson and Jean Batten—served as what Devereux terms, ‘a crucial link in the circuits of empire’ (32). At the same time I would argue that these women also served the same purpose that Michelle J. Smith observes in Bessie Marchant’s girls’ novels, in that ‘they regulate appropriate moments in which work that would ordinarily be a marker of unfeminine traits is not only acceptable, but in fact admirable’, and in doing so not only appease ‘British imperial anxieties’, but also serve as inspiration for women in the colonies and in England, because of their iconoclasm (85).

Constructing the Aviatrix In the interwar period, people were looking upwards to transcend the material realities of the Great Depression: as Ronald Blythe so aptly put it, ‘The dole queues [were] lifting up their eyes unto the hills’ (Blythe 83). Aviation offered excitement and thrills that the era sorely lacked and exemplified the technological advances of modernity. As Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note, at the end of the war T. E. Lawrence, ‘considered the conquest of the air as the most important task of his generation. So did the Daily Mail , which offered large money prizes to adventurous airmen’ (74). While Graves and Hodge4 focus on airmen, airmen and women came to embody the need for new heroics that the aviatrix became uniquely able to meet in the decade after the First World War. Airmindedness, as other chapters in this collection have explored, encapsulated the need for early twentieth century, post-First World War heroism coupled with modernist hunger for speed. Valentine Cunningham posits that, ‘Never before (or since) have poetry and the novel been so obsessed by the action, the clutter, the machinery, the terminology, the termini of travelling by air’ (Cunningham 167). He continues: The air was the only location where it was, after the War, widely supposed that heroics had survived the general disillusionments consequent upon wartime active service—up there among the aviators of the Royal Flying Corps, the RFC, in the cleaner, freer element, heroically superior to the troglodyte infantry shut into their dark and grim trenches below, lapsed

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heroes bogged down in the mud and the messy ruins of once glorious suppositions about war. (168)

Cunningham conveys airmindedness’s potential for liberation, with its sense of free, light, and speedy movement, and exploration of a new medium above, after the paralysis and gross materiality of trench warfare below. While he notes that literature did not generally celebrate women pilots,5 the aviatrix occupied a different cultural space outside high culture (172). Predominantly, the aviatrix appeared in popular media, newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express , produced for an urban mass audience, and importantly her representation appeared alongside photographs. I would argue that the aviatrix’s representation overlaps with middlebrow characteristics, and that it was imbued with what Adrian Bingham calls, ‘middlebrow attitudes’ that entailed ‘the avoidance of moral controversy’ (56). The period of aviation pioneering coincided with the rising phenomenon of popular newspaper celebrity, and the two phenomena were interdependent, as Bernard Rieger describes it: Like sporting heroes and film stars of their day, [Amy] Johnson [and her husband James] Mollison […] belonged to a relatively new socio-cultural species that struck a host of observers as quintessentially modern: […] media celebrities who owed their prominence to exposure in the press, movies and on radio shows designed for an urban, mass clientele. (370)

As glamourous popular cultural icons, 1930s aviatrices relied on both the publicity and the financial support afforded by the popular press,6 and stories about aviatrices in turn boosted newspaper circulation. But importantly, the popular press exhibited differences from its twenty-firstcentury iterations and was culturally cautious, censorious and concerned about respectability. Bingham comments, ‘Fleet Street was driven by profit and circulation figures, and it encouraged a mindset in which sales and circulation became essential markers of value. The preoccupation with the bottom-line discouraged certain types of risk-taking, and especially […] moral controversy’ (65). These newspapers promoted feats of aviation, particularly by women, applauding each new record, creating public excitement and celebrating the women’s achievements, accentuating their ‘pluck’ and determination, but also their looks and their romantic lives.

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We know how aware these women were of this scrutiny of their appearance, and that, for example, Jean Batten wore a white flying suit and also carried a white silk dress to change into before landing, making sure to powder her nose and apply lipstick for the inevitable cameras. We can also see that the women sought to manage public intrusion into their privacy, although Batten struggled with the pressure of the public gaze. Mary S. Lovell’s biography of Beryl Markham carries a Preface written by Markham in which she says, ‘some memories I have kept for myself as everyone must’ (Lovell, Preface). Privacy would have protected some details of their romantic and sexual lives from public scrutiny, and the women sought to manage their scrutiny by the public, even if they relied on the financial gain that came with it, and also became vulnerable to its intrusions into their private lives. Social historians, newspaper reporters and biographers refer repeatedly to how the women looked. Ronald Blythe, somewhat hyperbolically, explores the phenomenon of Amy Johnson’s fame and appeal: She was true-blue and ‘a brick’. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face with a fresh clear skin, eyes stretched wide by tremendous horizons, dreamily plucked eyebrows, a slightly hard, gamin little mouth, neat useful hands like a mechanic and an accent which Beverley Nichols described as ‘pure Wapping’ but which was in fact impure Yorkshire. (83)

Elsewhere, Blythe’s rhetorical flourishes sometimes lead him astray from biographical accuracy, but he nevertheless conjures a sense of Amy Johnson’s appeal. He presents her knowledge of what she needs to do with her hands, imagines what an aviatrix has seen and its effects on her and places Johnson in an English version of girlhood created by school stories; as he contends, ‘If anyone had invented Amy it was Angela Brazil’ (98).7 Although Blythe does not reveal whether he had read any of Angela Brazil’s school stories (or if so whether he knew any particular book), as a source for the prototype of the aviatrix he might have been referring to Leader of the Lower School (1913), whose protagonist: had grown up a thorough little Colonial, self-dependent and resourceful, […] The roving life had fostered her naturally enterprising disposition; she loved change and variety and adventure. At her various schools she had of course learnt to submit to some discipline, but her classmates were colonials accustomed to far more freedom than is accorded to English girls,

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and the rules were not nearly so strict as in similar establishments at home. (Brazil 22)

Having lived in America, New Zealand, and South Africa, Brazil’s heroine Gipsy had ‘an adventurous temperament’ and ‘wild spirits’, and enlivened school for the other girls, just as the aviatrices Johnson, Markham, and Batten would enliven the popular media’s portrayal of British womanhood (Blythe 80, 198). Blythe asks: So why should her [Amy Johnson’s] flight in particular have caught the imagination of mankind, pushed all the rest of the news into small type, monopolized conversation and set reception committees in action wherever she touched down? The answer must remain hypothetical. In the first place she was not so much an amateur flyer as a professional heroine. She had a brilliant intuitive understanding of her role and played it, for as long as the world allowed her to play it, faultlessly. (97)

Blythe pinpoints Johnson’s ability to appeal to the public and affinity with the media, which lay partly in her ability to use the new media celebrity to her advantage, as much as her aviation skills. But this celebrity depended to a large extent on the photographs of these women, as well as to their exciting innovation and the potential they introduced into feminine roles. The aviatrices’ gender and youth provided novelty that the press could commodify and that the women could exploit in financial backing for their flights, without which their exploits would have been impossible. Rieger argues further that celebrity itself—a modern phenomenon— contributed to the impact and significance of their flights: Good relations with the media were particularly important for female pilots, who had no access to regular jobs in the overcrowded British and German aviation sectors that—to name just one discriminatory practice—actively barred women from employment as civilian airline pilots. In a sense, becoming famous was the only career move available for female flyers like Johnson [and Batten and Markham] who, lacking private wealth, sought to derive a comfortable income from aviation. Given these economic stakes, it is hardly surprising that the public image that the female and male aviation stars presented to their fans was anything but authentic. (369)

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The press made the women’s exploits sensational, but in so doing created examples of new potential for modern women that drew on the freedoms accorded to colonial women. Johnson and Batten, in particular, recognized the need to manipulate their public images, and the biographies, autobiographies and fictional accounts of these women walk a fine line between gender contradictions, simultaneously emphasizing the radical nature of their flights, and tempering this with reassurances of their conventional femininity. In her 1934 autobiography Batten recalls the oil stains that resulted from carrying out her plane’s maintenance in her white flying suit. She relates, ‘Thinking to arrive in Batavia the following day looking more like the novelist’s conception of a girl flyer, I suggested that the suit be washed during my stay overnight in Singapore’ (Solo Flight 162). Batten is clearly aware of representations of the ‘girl flyer’ to which she feels a need to conform, and like a conventional woman her engineering aptitude does not make her so eccentric that she is unconcerned about stains. The emphasis on ordinary details—in their tendency to ask for a nice cup of tea after completing a record-breaking flight, and frequent reminders of the thermos of tea and packet of sandwiches with which Johnson fortified herself during flights, for example—appears to place them in middlebrow culture, with its emphasis on the ordinary and its scrutiny of women’s domestic lives, in spite of aviation’s iconoclastic potential to remove them completely from domesticity. The rise of aviation and celebrity culture coincided in a moment when women, because of their aviation feats, appeared anomalous, and could therefore capitalize on media and public interest, if only for a brief period.8 Added to the women’s undeniable courage, their sense of adventure and the fast motion of modernity, the titles of books by and about them, such as Solo Flight and Alone in the Sky (1979) suggest that the aviatrix could rise above earthly social constraints into ungendered freedom. The risk of tragic danger, in the midst of which the biographies show the women’s fearlessness, only enhanced the women’s embodiment of a fresh, exciting, unrestrained femininity. These aspects of modernity, then, allowed the spectacle of women advancing in the most glamourous of unconventional spheres, even if the representation of their feats had to be tempered with conventional ideas about femininity. Stories of women’s aviation pioneering provide insight into how the colonies produced a version of womanhood that allowed and perhaps

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even produced fearlessness and a taste for adventure, and hence Liz Millward wonders, ‘did Batten’s body generate an emancipatory model for some women’s relationship to the Dominion?’ (154)

Eccentric Femininity Aviation pioneers Lilian Bland, Beryl Markham and Jean Batten each originated on the margins of the British Empire and exemplified the eccentric femininity that at least allowed, if it did not perhaps produce, the daredevil aviatrix. In addition, Amy Johnson, although she hailed from Hull in Yorkshire, justified her pioneering flights as a means of uniting the Empire, becoming known in the press as ‘Australia’s Sweetheart’ (Luff 150). Twenty years earlier, exemplary eccentric, and one of the first aviatrices, Anglo-Irish Lilian Bland of Carnmoney,9 Northern Ireland, was the first woman to build and fly her own plane, in 1909, in what may even have been the first flight in Ireland by a man or woman. Her story includes details of eccentricity such as the bicycle handlebars she used to steer her plane, and an ear trumpet, borrowed from her aunt, to funnel petrol into her makeshift tank: an empty whiskey bottle. Bland exemplifies Anglo-Irish ex-centricity. Living at a remove from the metropolitan centre of England and outside middle-class Northern Ireland, and perhaps characterizing that eccentricity for which the Anglo-Irish are often noted, she benefitted from having the money and privilege to flout conventions, in addition to the loan of land by Lord O’Neill for her first take-off. Jean Batten, another colonial, was born and grew up in New Zealand, and Beryl Markham’s father took her to live in Kenya when she was four, where she grew up with her father, after her parents’ separation, with no women figures to serve as models of feminine conventionality. Markham’s girlhood was characterized by her tendency to head off into the veldt accompanied by an African servant and a dog, with a rifle under her arm, and in her later years she predominantly spoke Swahili, preferring it to English. Her autobiography and biography reveal that Markham’s unconventionality extended to her struggles with monogamy when she became an adult, which undermined her marriages, but she also achieved notoriety as the result of a long affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, son of George V. Biographies of Jean Batten, Beryl Markham and Amy Johnson dedicate considerable space to recounting these women’s romantic and sexual lives, and newspapers exploited public interest in their romances, to

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the extent of vilifying deviations from acceptable behaviour in relation to men. Batten’s lack of interest in heterosexual monogamy took on a different iteration. We read in Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies (1990) that Batten’s mother took her to see a film about venereal disease, Damaged Goods (1914), which convinced Batten that ‘Mother considered that emancipation should not be confused with the advocacy of licentiousness. True freedom could only be attained by training the mind to master the emotions’ (quoted in Mackersey 30). Batten’s biographer, Ian Mackersey, portrays Batten’s mother as preventing Jean from forming close relationships with men and frequently alludes to Batten as a ‘gold digger’ who convinced her male admirers to finance her flying, money which she rarely paid back, Mackersey argues, and that Batten fails to mention in her autobiographies. Perhaps Batten saw her autobiographies as a public discussion of her feats where these private details would not belong. Mackersey simultaneously applauds Batten’s single-minded determination to fund her aviation exploits, and also attributes her financial cupidity to a sexual coldness inculcated in Jean by her mother. Fiona Kidman roots Batten’s lack of interest in men, instead, in her father’s promiscuity, and loyalty to her mother. Liz Millward’s more recent and revisionist account of Johnson and Batten alludes to the possibility that Batten might have been a lesbian. These biographies interpret Batten’s sexual behaviour as aberrant, even if they do so in a variety of ways. However relevant the women’s private lives ultimately are, many biographies of the three 1930s aviatrices attribute their motivation or means of realizing their flying ambitions to their sexual behaviour. So we can read that Batten funded her flights by coldly manipulating men who loved her; that Amy Johnson pursued flying lessons as the result of the heartbreak she endured after being ‘mistress’ to Hans Arreger, in a chapter entitled ‘Hell Hath No Fury…’ (Luff). And Lovell’s biography of Beryl Markham, Straight On till Morning (1983) links Markham’s fearlessness to her inability to abide by sexual restraints. While each woman extends the potential of women of her era, then, representation of each of them not only mobilizes conventional perceptions of glamour, but also wraps her iconoclasm in a narrative about her that is based on a perception of her as being sexually aberrant. Alison Light argues that ‘conservative modernity’ can explain postFirst-World-War changes in Britain as a gendering of culture in reaction to the ‘instability of former models of masculine power’ revealed by the war (8). Valentine Cunningham also argues that there was a perception

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that Britain needed to replace the ‘troglodyte’ infantryman by the war’s end (168), a shift that Light perceives as ‘strongly anti-heroic’ (8). In describing the ‘unquiet […] depths […] beneath the apparently unruffled surface of sensible and quiescent womanhood in the 1930s’ that she sees Daphne du Maurier portraying in her fiction, Light points to: The instability of being middle-class, the treacherous and tricky limits to respectability and the awkward insistence of desires which are strictly forbidden, […and which…] threaten to return and trouble the calm of conservatism’s sexual and social economies and suggest at what costs the ideals of femininity and of private life were maintained [and the] rebellions on the boundaries of the most secure states. (13)

Light foregrounds a shift towards middlebrow fiction as part of a general cultural shift towards scrutiny of domestic life, and here her account of du Maurier is especially pertinent in understanding portrayals of the aviatrix in popular news sources and biographies, and helps explain how Johnson, Batten and Markham could be celebrated for their iconoclasm and simultaneously censured in their private lives as a means of applying a brake to their radical challenge to gender norms. The aviatrices exemplify the persistence of the ‘awkward insistence of desires which are strictly forbidden’ in the variety of ways in which their sexual and marital behaviour is portrayed as aberrant. Like du Maurier’s novels, biographers of aviatrices struggle with the private behaviour of these women, casting it, to varying degrees, as outside the bounds of middle-class respectability. The most conformist of the three, Amy Johnson, impetuously married aviator James Mollison in 1932, having known him for a matter of hours. The result was a celebrity couple of aviators who made the news again and again, thrilling the public, not only with their dual flights,10 including an attempt at the challenging west-to-east trans-Atlantic flight, but also with Johnson breaking several of Mollison’s flying records, although David Luff believes that Mollison would have preferred a wife who had ‘settled down’ more fully (Luff 206). But even this marriage made in the skies, if not in heaven, could be painted as aberrant. The marriage eventually gave way under James Mollison’s infidelities and drunkenness. Publicity exposed Batten’s deviation from acceptable behaviour too, and applying similar pressure, friends, the press and the public hoped that Jean Batten would give into what they saw as a woman’s essential nature, and become a wife

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and mother. Millward points to the many efforts to domesticate Batten, including an Auckland newspaper comment that, ‘Besides her aero career, she has the eternal, age-old career of Eve before her’ (161). Lovell’s biography of Beryl Markham records that when Beryl and Tom Campbell Black were lovers, they would imagine themselves ‘as just such a pair’ as the famous glamourous Mollisons (Lovell 122). Lovell contends, ‘There was no doubt in [Beryl’s] mind that she and Tom were linked together and would find fame in the eyes of the world as a flying partnership’, aspiring to the media-created image of an aviator couple (122). But Lovell notes that people she knew also criticized Markham’s relationship with Tom: ‘the pair were openly criticized for living together. Beryl was known to be a married woman with a child, and a past, in England’ (123). Lovell connects this censure with tension between Britain and the Kenyan colony when she narrates that a ‘gentleman’ in the club in Nairobi frequented by influential colonials described rumours about Markham as, ‘Just the sort of thing that’s given Kenya Colony a bad name…’(123). Light points to a rather different concern with domestic respectability and the colonies when she argues that: In these years between 1920 and 1940, a revolt against, embarrassment about, and distaste for the romantic languages of national pride produced a realignment of sexual identities which was part of a redefinition of Englishness. What had formerly been held as the virtues of the private sphere of middle-class life take on a new public and national significance. I maintain that the 1920s and ’30s saw a move away from formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of national destiny and from a dynamic and missionary view of the Victorian and Edwardian middle classes in ‘Great Britain’ to an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private—and, in terms of pre-war standards, more ‘feminine’. (8)

Here Light asserts an Englishness that is more rooted in private life in Britain, and less dependent on Britain’s imperial strength. While her account helps us to understand why a particular brand of heroism might be rooted in the aviatrix, instead of the male aviator, she does not take into account aviation’s association with, and reassertion of, the empire in the popular press. While Light’s concern is largely with literary culture, not the popular media, nevertheless her account of domestic fiction’s inward turn neglects the glare of celebrity that focused on aviation pioneering, with its dependence on undomesticated femininity and ties with the empire.

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Imperial Connections Narratives by and about Amy Johnson, Beryl Markham and Jean Batten contest Light’s account of a new, less imperial, post-war Englishness. Batten’s Solo Flight closes with an account of Batten’s extended welcome in New Zealand, where in spite of the fact that it is her native land, Jean is treated like a celebrity tourist and shown the wonders of the islands, including singing and dancing by M¯aori girls, and a ceremony in which she is made a chieftain (Solo Flight 211). The final paragraph of the book consists of a panoramic vision of ‘the last few years’, studded with ellipses like a story by her compatriot Katherine Mansfield, to produce a kaleidoscopic and cinematic impression of her achievements, until finally she says, ‘The scene moved swiftly now… strange lands… flying through almost unbearable heat… tired and dusty, I saw myself speeding on towards my goal… arriving in Australia… joy of achievement and the realization of a dream come true’ (Solo Flight 215). But her ‘dream’ is couched in other terms when she describes her arrival in Auckland welcomed by a huge crowd. She looks back on her ‘achievement’, saying: Had the setbacks and discouragements been threefold the flight would still have been worth while. Not only for the personal satisfaction and the joy of achievement but also for the fact that in some small way by my flight I had perhaps been able to strengthen the great bonds of friendship not only between England, our Motherland, Australia and New Zealand, but between all the Dominions and Colonies of the Empire. (Solo Flight 197)

Here Batten applauds the empire as a motivation for her exploits, as Amy Johnson just before her had used the most modern form of technological innovation—the aeroplane—to connect the empire’s parts as justification for her journey. Public opinion required greater justification than the pilot’s ambition alone for dangerous aviation pioneering exploits, deeming the challenge and desire for adventure to be insufficient. Johnson found a rationale to satisfy the public when she heard Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, urging the need for air links between the parts of the Empire. Johnson wrote to him arguing that if she—as a woman—flew solo to Australia, it would convince the public that air travel was safe. Federico Caprotti also observed that, ‘representations of women in aviation can be described as gendered because they implied, in part, that if a woman could fly, anyone could’ (393).

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While it is unclear whether Johnson was sincere in these imperial claims, or whether they merely served to advance her cause, she was surely prescient in her awareness of how aviation could advance colonization. Caprotti describes the imperial agenda that sought to increase fascist control over Italian East Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland): Aviation played a key role in this process on two levels: materially through the institution of networks of air-routes criss-crossing the deserts mountains, and coasts of the Horn of Africa, rapidly connecting far-flung colonial outposts with colonial capitals and Rome, the imperial capital; and discursively, through the elaboration of imaginations connected with aviation constructing the airplane and aviation technology as one of the means through which ‘natural’ African landscapes could be subjugated and controlled by advanced fascist technology. (380)

Amy Johnson’s flight was less directly connected with an invasion and exploitation of Australia, of course, and cheering crowds welcoming her as ‘Australia’s Sweetheart’ saw her as a symbol for the country that would benefit from the increasing prevalence of air transport, even if aviation served, ultimately, to consolidate the colonial enterprises. She landed in Australia on Empire Day, and on Trafalgar Day gave her talk to the Society of Engineers in London about her flight to Australia, focusing especially on how she maintained her plane throughout the journey, perhaps only accidentally choosing these significant dates (Luff 144). Returning to London she told the massive crowd, ‘I want to show by my flying how much I love England and its people, how glad I am to be back home, how proud I am to be a member of our own great Empire and how deep is my gratitude to you all’ (quoted in Luff 160). But the colony offered potential for a woman aviator in a different way, as Luff also argues: ‘Not only was Australia far more airminded than Britain at that time, but it was also the home of an incipient feminist movement, which saw in Amy a potential propagandist for their views. For them she became a symbol of women’s emancipation’ (157). While Johnson’s aviation contributed to the functioning of Australia as a colony, it also served to enhance Australians’ perception of women’s capabilities and opportunity and allows us to see that gender politics were not homogenous across the empire. Liz Millward argues:

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Consumers may have domesticated her meaning into something local and personally and physically empowering rather than identifying with the figure of corporate and national modernity constructed by C.C. Wakefield and Co., the New Zealand government, and the various manufacturers whose products she endorsed. (157)

By ‘consumers’ here, Millward primarily considers the readers of women’s magazines in New Zealand, who read stories about aviatrices alongside knitting patterns and recipes. This points to the variety of meanings a cultural phenomenon might have for various people, and the inability of powerful cultural forces, such as a colonial government or a large oil company, to control interpretations of cultural phenomena across an expansive and heterogeneous empire. Millward observes that, ‘If gender relations were turbulent, relations between the imperial centre and the colonies and dominions were also under pressure. […] Airspace had the potential to be a form of abstract space imposed throughout the unwieldy empire, but this potential was undermined by the actions of pilots such as Jean Batten who embodied their own national desires and promoted logical designs on airspace’ (182). Women across the empire found unconventional inspiration in Batten, Johnson or Markham, despite the popular media’s efforts to curtail and domesticate their power.

Ordinary and Exceptional Alison Light observes the existence of a, ‘buoyant sense of excitement and release which animates so many of the more broadly cultural activities which different groups of women enjoyed in the period’ (Light 9). Both Light and Rieger, who draws on her arguments, point to a ‘conservative modernity’ that ‘could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present’, instead of merely resisting change (Rieger 366). David Luff attributes other motives to Johnson than that she was the ‘incipient feminist’ her critics saw her to be. But then his narrative about her abounds in contradictions in its handling of the gender politics influencing Johnson’s portrayal. This is a typical passage: Amy landed into the shimmering heat of the northern Syrian desert in the late afternoon of 7 May to be greeted by the smell of oil on hot sand. As soon as she climbed down from her faithful Jason she immediately began to peel off the heavy outer garment of her Sidcot flying suit and made

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herself more comfortable in an open-necked shirt, riding breeches and boots before tackling the work on her aircraft. She always maintained that the hardest part of the flight was the servicing that she had to do on the ground. […] It was not every day that an attractive young lady pilot called into the aerodrome, and she soon found herself the centre of attraction, as some of the officers asked her to pose for photographs. (124)

Luff never fails to evoke our sense of what exactly Johnson would be wearing on her arrival in the Syrian desert,11 nor to remind us of her prettiness, in spite of noting that she performs her plane’s maintenance herself. Luff cites newspaper stories that cast Batten as, among other things, ‘lissome’ and ‘fresh-complexioned’ and ‘not a severe, unsympathetic impersonation of efficiency, but just a pleasant, normal girl, like any other, but with a rather charming smile’ (173). This quotation implies that a woman, never mind a girl, would only ‘impersonate’ efficiency, and not actually achieve it. In addition, many newspaper stories stress the ordinariness of the aviatrix, even as they report their aviation feats as pioneers. This undercuts the radical potential of the women’s pioneering flights and their symbolism as emancipatory figures. Luff also undercuts the reality that Johnson knew a great deal about her aeroplane’s engine and its functioning. In a presentation to the Society of Engineers she impressed its members that she was qualified and knowledgeable about her plane’s engine, but Luff notes that when she was in Baghdad she went sight-seeing and left the refuelling and servicing of her plane to mechanics at the airport, explaining selfdeprecatingly, ‘I knew that proper men mechanics would do the job much better than I could, so I had no compunction in leaving it to them whenever I could’ (Luff 125). Luff reflects, ‘This is small comfort perhaps for those who would seek to portray Amy Johnson as an incipient feminist’ (Luff 125). In fact, on her long-distance flights Johnson frequently found mechanics to be unreliable in their servicing of her plane, especially when a language barrier between them made communication difficult and during her England to Australia flight, Amy found engineering problems which she diagnosed and repaired herself, some of which resulted from the inattention of the mechanics who had serviced her plane. Elsewhere in Luff’s biography, Johnson’s dramatic arrival at aerodromes is typified as, ‘a great deal of excitement for the “young London typist” had beaten the men at their own game’ (128). In fact, Johnson had a degree from

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the University of Sheffield and although she worked as a solicitor’s secretary in an office in London, living in rented lodgings in Maida Vale near Hendon aerodrome while paying for flying lessons and earning her pilot’s license, she also spent time in the hangars learning about the mechanics of the planes, until she earned her ground engineer’s licences. To call her a ‘typist’ is even less accurate if we consider that she gave up her solicitor’s office job to pursue more flying lessons and to study aero engines.12 In fact, as Luff also records, Johnson was the only woman to hold a ground engineer’s licence. Lovell also emphasizes the aviatrix’s attention to her appearance including her: famous livery of white silk shirt and cravat and the loose white slacks which fitted snugly over her slim hips and flowed sensuously around her exceptionally long legs […S]he was always aware of the impression she created. Furthermore she was not displeased with reactions to her unusual combination of stunning looks and somewhat masculine profession. (134)

Lovell quotes Tom Campbell who described Markham as, ‘one of the most feminine women I have ever met’ just before her east to west transAtlantic flight, as if her femininity needed to be stressed. But Markham rebuts this fixation on her femininity, saying: I may be ‘just another blonde’; but as a professional pilot accustomed to working for my living, and as this flight could not even in my wildest dreams be described as pleasure, I look on it as another job of work. In describing my, as yet unaccomplished, but no doubt amazing exploit, please give me the credit of being an ordinary human being without too many of the conventional virtues. […] I am neither an innocent girl from the country, nor a city slicker, but an ocean flyer, in embryo. If I can dispense with the last two words I am more than satisfied. (Lovell 158)

The newspapers perceived a need to emphasize the aviatrices’ ordinariness, and that these women seemed like other women, although perhaps more glamourous. And Ronald Blythe quotes Amy Johnson’s claim that, ‘Every woman will be doing this in five years’ time’ (98). She famously beseeched an enormous Australian crowd, ‘Don’t call me Miss Johnson, just plain Johnnie will do, that’s what my English friends call me’ (Blythe 99). Millward posits that Batten’s appearances at public events and in New Zealand magazines for women often described the aviatrix in surprisingly

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feminist terms, but also sought to promote New Zealand’s commodities. Millward says that the magazine’s placing of stories about Batten, for example, had the ‘overall effect’ of: creat[ing] a tension in the very idea of the aviatrix. On the one hand, she appeared next to the pattern for a smart golfing cardigan or hints on how to remove a stain. Such juxtapositions made her actions normal, part of the shared knowledge that the magazine’s women created for women. On the other hand, activities in Hollywood and those of royalty were also detailed in every issue, and their presence might suggest that the flights of aviatrixes [sic] were as far beyond the realms of possibility for most readers, as were life in front of a movie camera or on a throne, although women might well dream that they could attain these states. Then again, the role of pilot itself was not so rigidly fixed as to be beyond all women. (160)

But then again, as Devereux reminds us, ‘the colonial girl is likewise a fiction. She is likewise a textual construction, an image, made in Britain, and circulated throughout the empire’ (42). The image of the aviatrix, imbued with characteristics of the colonial girl as created by fiction for girls, with a certain degree of the aviatrix’s complicity, was circulated throughout England as well as the empire, returning to England a version of feminine behaviour invented in imaginations of the colonies, although these partly relied on writers like Bessie Marchant who never left England. In her study of American women flyers and feminism in the 1920s, Dydia DeLyser contends that ‘the woman pilot became aviation’s antidote to the risk-taking ace, proving-by-doing that aviation was both safe and straightforward’ (DeLyser 88). Yet, portrayals of Johnson, Markham and Batten in the popular media shows a contradictory combination of impulses, both towards ordinariness and the exceptional, and perhaps inadvertently encouraged a sense that ordinary women could undertake pioneering adventures, even if the stories are simultaneously motivated to undercut readers’ sense that the aviatrices are remarkable and unconventional. Johnson, Markham and Batten show a variety of responses to these normative pressures, and to the perception among ordinary women that they were inspiring. Each woman resists, in her own way, full conformity to gender conventions and while each of them is heroic, she still faced expectations that she comply with the rules for gendered and sexual behaviour. Perhaps the solitude the women found while in the air affords their only escape from the pressure and the publicity that financed their adventures: Batten gives her biographies the titles Solo Flight (1934)

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and Alone in the Sky (1979) suggesting that flight offered escape from social conventions and pressures. In the air the women could do what they loved to do, away from the scrutiny of the news-reading public and reporters. Paradoxically though, the fame that accompanied these solo flights embodied the opposite of the solitude that they found in the air. By emphasizing the women’s ordinariness and pushing them to become even more ordinary as wives and mothers, these biographies and press reports mobilized ‘middlebrow attitudes’ as a normative force. Even decades after the aviatrices’ pioneering flights, representations of them still exerted a prurient heteronormative pressure, emphasizing their looks and that they ‘settle down’ in marriage and motherhood, though ironically these efforts were exerted on iconoclasts who exemplified modernity’s radical potential for women. And while newspapers and biographies exposed and exploited the excitement of these women’s ventures, noting their engineering and navigation skills and their courage, the conservative culture needed to apply a ‘brake’, as Light would say, on the speed of the social change they exemplified. The popular press and biographies exploited and advanced these stories of daredevil fearlessness and the British public found in these women and their ‘airborne mobilities’ (DeLyser 91) a new heroism that the post-war period desperately needed. Women were inspired by them as examples of the potential of the modern woman, so the empire served as a source of liberation for these aviatrices and the women who read about their lives. Although Light’s concept of ‘conservative modernity’ does not explain how these women would use the British Empire to justify and mobilize public opinion behind their aviation exploits, her concept nonetheless helps us to understand how modernity could liberate, while simultaneously restraining them. In addition, the empire provided eccentric ideas of femininity, based on fictitious idealizations of girlhood, that allowed these women unconventional freedoms, and the women cleverly claimed the unification of the empire as justification of their aviation. Upholding the empire was not in itself a radical gesture in the decades after the First World War, but the colonies became a source of radical freedom in allowing the women to realize their adventurous desires.

Notes 1. The OED lists the terms ‘aviatress’ and ‘aviatrice’ as being in use from 1911, with ‘aviatrix’ appearing for the first time in

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5. 6.

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9. 10.

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1927 (https://www-oed-com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/13743?red irectedFrom=aviatrix#eid31873134). For a thorough explorations of girls’ fiction and the empire see the works by Michelle J. Smith and, in particular, Cecily Devereux. It is important to recognize that when we talk of the empire, not only do we need to observe the heterogeneity of colonial spaces themselves, and of their gendered practices, but also that, as Michelle J. Smith notes, ‘The British Empire is certainly comprehensible now only chronotopically: it does not refer to anything that can be understood as “real” at this time; this empire, this time-space, does not exist. […] It always represented, as Richards suggests, a fiction. It was always only knowable in text’ (40). They discuss the aviatrix in a different section of their book, The Long Weekend, whereas other studies show that the aviatrix owed her popularity, in part, to a need for a new kind of heroism after the First World War. Exceptions are Ada Doom in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) and Mrs Rattery in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934). The Daily Mail paid Amy Johnson £10,000 for the story of her journey, as the result of James Martin’s bargaining, and Lord Wakefield offered Amy half the cost of the Gypsy Moth in which she would complete her flight from London to Australia, in exchange for which he required her to publicize Wakefield Castrol Oils (Luff 115, 125). Angela Brazil wrote enormously popular girls’ school stories with titles like, For the School Colours, Joan’s Best Chum, Bosom Friends, The Madcap of the School and A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl, published between 1904 and 1946. They coincided with an increase in the education of girls at boarding schools, and the increase in a reading public who would want to read girls’ school stories. They marked a shift away from Victorian representations of girls in didactic fiction towards stories in which the girls created a social world with its own attitudes, including loyalty to each other and to the school. The outbreak of the Second World War led to a recall of civil flying licenses, and women were not accepted as military pilots but could only fly planes to deliver them. Beryl Markham became a bush pilot in Kenya after her pioneering flights ended, but Batten and Johnson found their opportunities hampered. See ‘The Mayfly – The First Irish Light Plane – and How She Was Built’ in Flight , 17 December 1910. Anne Lindbergh, although she was an accomplished pilot, and flew on surveying trips with her husband, nevertheless did not become an aviatrix, but instead a writer and ‘home-maker for her children’, according to Luff (205). Liz Millward asserts that, ‘Batten certainly had an impact on two of the roles available to women: consumer and dependent’ (154).

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12. James Martin played a crucial role in Amy’s career by encouraging her deeper knowledge of engineering, and especially in his hope that Amy would ‘demonstrate his new and “secret” aeroplane’ that was a development of the monoplane when others were still focused on biplanes, and also had the innovation of placing the engine behind the pilot (Luff 107). As Luff notes, Martin ‘could see that there would be enhanced publicity value for his new brainchild if it were demonstrated by a lady test pilot’ (107).

Works Cited Batten, Jean. Solo Flight. Sydney: Jackson and O’Sullivan, 1934. Bingham, Adrian. ‘Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press.’ Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. Eds. Erica Brown and Mary Grover. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 55–68. Blythe, Ronald. The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919– 1940. London: Phoenix Press, 1963. Brazil, Angela. Leader of the Lower School. Glasgow: Blackie, 1913. Brown, Erica and Mary Grover, eds. Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Caprotti, Federico. ‘Visuality, Hybridity, and Colonialism: Imagining Ethiopia Through Colonial Aviation, 1935–1940.’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101:2 (2011): 380–403. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. DeLyser, Dydia. ‘Flying: Feminisms and Mobilities—Crusading for Aviation in the 1920s.’ Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects. Eds. Tim Cressell and Peter Merriman. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 83–96. Devereux, Cecily. ‘Fashioning the Colonial Girl: “Made in Britain” Femininity in the Imperial Archive.’ Colonial Girlhood in Literature: Culture and History, 1840–1950. Eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 30–44. Graves, Robert and Alan Hodge. The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Kidman, Fiona. The Infinite Air: A Novel About the Enigmatic Jean Batten. London: Aardvark Bureau, 2013.

CHAPTER 9

‘A Solar Emperor’: Robert Byron Flies East Guy Woodward

Impatient at the prospect of a long sea journey to India, in the summer of 1929 the English writer-explorer Robert Byron decided to fly there instead, on the recently inaugurated Imperial Airways air mail service from Croydon to Karachi, via France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq and Persia. Unwilling to pay for the £126 ticket himself, Byron managed to secure an audience with the proprietor of the Daily Express , Lord Beaverbrook, in the hope that the press baron might cover the cost of the flight in return for a series of articles in the newspaper describing the journey. Aware that coverage of the air mail service could be recruited to his nascent campaign for Empire Free Trade, Beaverbrook eventually agreed to this plan, as Byron records in his account of their first meeting: I treated my host to several profound thoughts (hastily formulated in the taxi) on the more effective welding of our imperial ties; observing, though without undue emphasis, what a vista of possibilities had been opened by this new route to the East. My seed, though I did not know it, fell on a

G. Woodward (B) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_9

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rich plough. For a fortnight later Lord Beaverbrook’s Empire Free Trade Campaign burst on the public. (First Russia, Then Tibet 129)

On 11 July 1929, Beaverbook launched the campaign to which Byron refers with an article in the Express. The Empire Crusade was a movement designed to promote the idea that restrictive tariff walls imposed by the United States could be combated by the establishment of a zone permitting completely free trade within the British Empire, in agricultural produce as well as manufactured goods (Chisholm and Davie 280). The Crusade attacked the protectionism of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Party (which had narrowly lost the general election on 29 May), and when Sir John Ferguson, Tory candidate in the Twickenham byelection, spoke in favour of the movement, Conservative Central Office withdrew support for him. As polling day in the by-election on 8 August approached, the Express promoted the Crusade with increasing fervour— on 26 July, the day before Byron set off on his journey from Croydon, Beaverbrook asked his readers ‘Are we to become a hanger-on of the European system, a satellite of America?’ and argued that Britain should instead lead a ‘British Empire made one and everlastingly prosperous by the unbreakable link of Free Trade between all its parts’ (Crowson 31). It was against this political background that Byron’s journey began, and the texts in which he described his impressions of his travels—which include a special January 1931 edition of the Architectural Review devoted to his observations of New Delhi, and the books An Essay on India (1931) and First Russia, Then Tibet (1933)—should be read in this late imperial context.

Air Passage to India In addition to his friendships with leading figures of the interwar British literary scene including Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron is probably best known today for his writings on art and architecture, notably the 1937 picaresque and modernist The Road to Oxiana, which describes his travels in Iraq, Persia and Afghanistan in 1933–1934 to observe, sketch and photograph architectural treasures of the region. The reception accorded to The Road to Oxiana since its rediscovery in the early 1980s has been adulatory and reverent: Bruce Chatwin’s introduction to the 1981 reprint famously described it as a ‘sacred text’ (9), while Paul Fussell claimed that ‘what Ulysses is to the novel between the wars,

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and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book’ (95). Such critical praise has over-promoted Byron’s status as an intrepid and stubborn adventurer, at the expense of consideration of the imperial apparatus that surrounded and enabled his journeys. This chapter traces the latent imperial and military dimensions of the aesthete’s less celebrated eastward journey to India and Tibet four years before the experiences described in The Road to Oxiana. The route taken by the Imperial Airways air mail service through the Mediterranean and Middle East emphasizes the shared imperialist ambitions of civil and military aviation in the interwar period, a time when many believed that air development could revive, renew, and secure the British imperial project. It is clear that the use of the Middle East after the First World War as a laboratory for testing the theories of air power—in particular the revolutionary airborne policing of the British mandate in Iraq—enabled the subsequent establishment of civil air routes through the region, using the very airfields constructed by the military. The use of air power in colonial policing between the wars, meanwhile, remains overshadowed by its use during the Second World War, as Thomas Hippler observes in his introduction to Governing from the Skies (2017): The historiography of air warfare, which has focused above all on the question of the legitimacy and utility of strategic bombing in the Second World War, finds it hard to take into account the importance of the colonial precedent, most often viewed as simply a ‘dress rehearsal’ before the ‘real war’ between the great powers. Yet the history of air bombing is full of this kind of ‘geographical coincidence’: the regions subjected to such bombing in the inter-war years particularly included Iraq, Syria, and the Indian ‘north-west frontier’: Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan. (x–xi)

It is strikingly coincidental too that Byron’s journeys in pursuit of architectural treasures involved visiting precisely these territories. His account of his flight to India shows that the new aerial means of crossing and connecting colonies and mandates enabled a new imaginative colonization from above, characterized by a distinctly imperial totalizing rhetoric influenced by the military context outlined by Hippler. Examining the development of balloons for military use, Caren Kaplan has persuasively argued that ‘military ways of seeing and doing are similar if not foundational to areas of culture that seem unrelated to the project of state

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security or waging war’—Byron’s writings provide a powerful interwar example of this structural relationship, whereby militarization must be seen ‘not so much as a separate, unpopular part of modernity, but as a constitutive aspect of democratic nation states’ (21). Byron claimed never to have been interested in India before his trip in 1929–1930, but in An Essay on India writes that he had begun to feel ‘burdened’ by thoughts of the subcontinent and of the relationship between East and West: ‘My worries arise because it seems to me that the outcome of the present problem between English and Indians can determine the character of all future civilization. I see the whole philosophy of Western history and culture, already thrown aside in Russia and the United States, undergoing the supreme and ultimate test of its practical value’ (4). Unmoved by Byron’s dismissal of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India as ‘unreal and impracticable’, Fussell describes An Essay on India as ‘a redaction, in the form of an expository polemic’ of Forster’s novel, published seven years earlier in 1924 (89). Byron’s Orientalism here is certainly Forsterian; he describes India as a meeting place of the ‘metaphysical’ East and ‘social’ West (5), and promotes the notion of a synthesis of cultures, whereby the East might once again act as ‘benefactor and saviour’ of the West (27). East–West interactions offered both threats and possibilities: in the field of art Byron believed that ‘the East can maintain her equality’, but he feared that in practice it was succumbing to ‘the degraded and futile nationalism introduced by the West’, and argued that countries in Asia and Africa should maintain their cultural stature by following the example of Tibet, at that time an isolated territory barely known to Western travellers, and barely touched by industrial or technological modernity (14). Byron’s apparent resistance to materialism and modernity is also reflected in the structure of First Russia, Then Tibet , a volume divided into two halves describing first his visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 (where, he suggests, ‘the moral influence of the Industrial Revolution has found its grim apotheosis’), and then his experiences in Tibet two years earlier (10). In title and form the book reverses the chronology of Byron’s travels, subverting Soviet narratives of material progress by placing the Russian section before his account of Tibet, which he concludes with hopes for its continued preservation through isolation ‘until such time as the West itself is reformed and can commend its ideas with greater reason to those who have hitherto escaped them’ (229). As Joe Cleary has argued, these kinds of literary sutures, whereby ‘the best elements of tradition and modernity are wedded together’

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so that ‘Northern energy and industry are refined by contact with Southern grace’ tend to avoid acknowledging ‘the processes of war, genocide, slavery and exploitation that produced these divisions in the first instance’ (57). Maria Couto likewise criticizes Forster’s apparent ‘liberal and humane’ stance, arguing that it ‘ignores the economic and political effects of colonisation’ and suggesting that his promotion of a synthesis between Western ‘liberal traditions’ and Eastern ‘spiritualism’ ‘was already being foredoomed by the realities of the time’ (121). Such is the pace of change at the time of writing that we can see Byron’s own attempts to theorize in this way overtaken by the rapid advances in air development; his approaches to flight and to air travel certainly complicate the anti-materialism which we might extrapolate from his praise of Tibet. In An Essay on India he suggests that the ‘Scientific Revolution’ begun in England and elsewhere in Europe in the early nineteenth century was ‘destined […] to carry Western ideas, with all their material advantages, and all their grossness, over every habitable inch of land in the seven seas’ (10). The use of the word ‘over’ and the implication of surveying and charting in the reference to ‘every habitable inch of land’ seem to signal Byron’s apprehension of the significance of air development to the colonial project, as air power made it possible to cross, survey, and control territories on a previously unimaginable scale and at hitherto impossible speed. Crossing and charting were in any case fundamental to colonial rhetoric before the existence of the aeroplane. Advancing a spatial approach to literature, Edward Said argued forcefully that observing and measuring—what he describes as ‘geographical notation, the theoretical mapping and charting of territory’ (Culture & Imperialism 69, emphasis in original)—were central to Western fiction, historical writing, and philosophical discourse of the colonial era, concluding that ‘Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control’ (271). The colonizer’s newly discovered ability to fly at the beginning of the twentieth century, enabling observation and control of occupied territories, clearly intensifies the significance of Said’s analysis of imperial aesthetics. As Peter Adey has observed: The emergence of techniques and technologies of seeing from the air moved hand in hand with the creeping movement of imperial exploration, colonial administration and development. Aerial survey and photography opened up the world to a distanciated gaze by telescoping these distances

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for the imposition and projection of power and reach. Furthermore, it focused, targeting its lens upon enemies and opportunities. (Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects 87)

Byron is certainly struck by the shrinking of distances, writing that the acceleration in mobility afforded by advances in transport has ‘unified the territories of the world’ (An Essay on India 10). He attempts to transcend this materialist observation, however, with the argument that beyond this ‘it is the moral weapon which has delivered the earth to Western civilization’—this ‘moral weapon’ being the power of the human being over matter (10). Byron argues that Western dominance should not be ascribed to trade or cheap goods alone and instead emphasizes what he describes as ‘the moral effect of the first train, of the first motor-car, or of the first aeroplane’, before sketching a hypothetical aerial alien invasion: ‘If a swarm of strangers arrived on us from the moon furnished with aerial torpedoes at moderate prices, and then converted the summit of Mount Everest into a hive of industry, we ourselves should feel inferior, and wish to reform our way of life in accordance with the new methods’ (13). Byron’s laboured attempt in this passage to imagine himself a ground-bound member of an ‘inferior’ society shamed into behavioural changes by the arrival of a technologically superior race of strangers from above, reflects a theory often promoted by British advocates of air power between the wars: that less technologically advanced peoples in colonial peripheries could be pacified through asymmetric spectacles of power and violence, rather than by violent acts per se. One 1925 account of a visit to the region features the claim that sometimes the mere sight of a plane is enough ‘to re-establish order and to impose respect for the central authority’ (A Flying Visit to the Middle East 80). As David Omissi explains, ‘It was often supposed that the very novelty of aviation would induce terrified submission to imperial authority’ (109); he quotes a claim made in 1931 by the senior Royal Air Force commander Norman Bottomley that against an aeroplane a tribesman ‘could only shake his fist and hurl the curse of Allah’ (112). In similar terms in one of his Express features Byron notes that at Jask in Persia ‘Airplanes are commonplace; though at the first sight of them three or four years ago they were propitiated with the blood of goats’ (‘The Last Day of a Flight Half Round the World’ 6). Containing such a sinister subtext, the clumsiness of Byron’s imagined alien invasion contrasts sharply with his lyrical description of his own airborne journey:

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The flight to India had been the outstanding experience of my short life. To come East for the first time across the territorial deserts, to realize the difficulties of the new air route, to talk with those engaged in overcoming them, to fly through air like hot flames, to come down at a lonely fort full of human bones, to behold from a great height the baleful pallor and desolate ranges of the Persian littoral, to cross the Trucial Oman above the black humps and silver fiords of Musandam, to take a last meal beneath a tent in Baluchistan half a day’s camel-ride from the nearest habitation; such incidents, after the ripe pleasures of a London summer, seemed at last to promise a taste of that other world where men do and breathe; such incidents were profoundly refreshing. (An Essay on India 23)

This is something of an anomalous passage in An Essay on India, which otherwise largely consists of dry and awkward attempts to theorize and pronounce; these tumbling anaphoric cadences point forward to the more impressionistic and experiential texts to come, First Russia, Then Tibet and The Road to Oxiana. But, as we shall see, Byron’s enthusiasms here—for speed and for looking down, specifically at ‘desolate’ and vacant landscapes of deserts and mountains—again coincide with those of the military and commercial imperial strategists. A much fuller account of Byron’s journey occupies the first two chapters of the ‘Tibet’ section of First Russia, Then Tibet . On the morning of 27 July 1929 Byron presented himself at 9 am at the offices of Imperial Airways in Charles Street in London, where he and his blue Revelation suitcase were weighed at two and a half pounds ‘under the permitted complement’ of 266 pounds (130). At Croydon he and his fellow passengers boarded the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy City of Wellington, anthropomorphized, in Byron’s account, in equine fashion: ‘the machine cantered across the aerodrome, turned, galloped back, and rose above a sea of small red houses’ (131). On taking flight Byron’s ‘first sensation’ was one of suffocating depression. But for a quarter of an hour in a tin and canvas Flea, which looped the loop for an extra 7s. 6d. and fell in half the week after, I had never flown before. And I now beheld myself in a dark cabin scarcely five feet across, twisting about in a constricted wicker space, and convinced that my whole being would soon disintegrate altogether under pressure of sheer noise. A long dormant home-sickness rose within me, an ache for train or boat, the old and comfortable friends of travel. (131)

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The journey to Karachi would take eight days, a prospect that initially distresses Byron before he is comforted and entertained by the sight of several fellow passengers being sick. After lunch at Le Bourget they fly to Basle, from where they travel by sleeper train to Genoa, embarking on the next stage of the journey to Naples by flying boat, the Short S.8 Calcutta City of Rome. From Naples they travel on to Corfu, a journey which takes one hour. Flying from Corfu to Athens, Byron is eager to take a photograph of Missolonghi, where his namesake George Gordon, Lord Byron, was killed fighting the Ottoman army 105 years previously; contrary to Greek laws forbidding aerial photography, the pilot allows him to enter the cockpit of the Calcutta: I perched my feet on two aluminium platforms behind him. As I stood, my head and chest were above the wind-screen, and, since the propellers were behind, could remain there without discomfort. Below us, a marshy plain stretched into the distance; to the left, mountains; to the right, mountains; in between, patches of water reflecting the blue sky; and all the land emitting that subtle rosy glitter which is Greece. And here was I, on my fourth visit in five years, arriving in the sky—arriving not with rush and hurricane, as may be imagined; but moving with measure and circumstance through the blue vault; the great wings spreading like a house behind me; and the pilot at my feet finding it superfluous to exercise more than the slightest control over so rational and self-sufficient an instrument of locomotion. The sensation was superb and like no other. A ship is always on the water, a dependent, humbler than the humblest wave. This proud vehicle, on this unflecked, sunny afternoon, asked no visible substance for support. Standing with head bare, drunk with the wind that tossed my hair and ran over my skin beneath a fluttering shirt, I travelled as sovereign of the universe, a solar emperor. (135)

We are perhaps accustomed to cultural depictions of the airman situated as Patrick Deer has observed ‘at the interface between the body and the technology’ (63), but here Byron as passenger merges himself with the machine and its power. The contrast with his discomfort on the initial leg of the journey (and with the broad comedy of ‘the sight of several passengers at their cuspidors’) is pronounced; this is a passage which rivals Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in its expressions of mythic transcendence: ‘arriving in the sky […] through the blue vault’ with ‘great wings spreading’ behind him Byron envisions himself as some kind of angel.1 However, we should also be alert to the resonance of the phrase

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from which this chapter derives its title, as Byron characterizes himself as ‘sovereign of the universe, a solar emperor’; expressions of transcendence should not obscure the imperial and military dimensions of his journey. Byron’s assertion of unsupported independence, by contrast with ships which are ‘always on the water’, is of course illusory. As Adey writes, ‘The vertical life of the airmen is tethered to the terrestrial, to the location of their landing place and its local topographical idiosyncrasies, as well as its outer connectivities. The aeroplane is not necessarily liberating or liberated, but it is tied […] to an infrastructure on the ground’ (Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects 2), and in Byron’s case the ‘landing places’ have clear contemporaneous colonial and military significance. Between Greece and Persia, the five territories traversed by the air mail route had all formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire, but following the First World War were under European imperial control or League of Nations mandate. Libya was an Italian colony; Egypt had remained a British protectorate until independence in 1922, but a British military presence remained; Palestine was governed by British mandate; Transjordan was a British protectorate, where like Egypt a British military presence remained and British control of foreign relations was retained; Iraq was semi-independent but largely administered by Britain.2 The status of these jurisdictions in the interwar period enabled the establishment of the route taken by Byron, but tensions between the imperial powers suggested future conflict. Arguing that ‘a more liberal interpretation of the freedom of the skies’ is a ‘pressing […] necessity’, Byron notes that the initial flight from Croydon to Karachi in 1926 had originally been scheduled to run via Central Europe rather than Italy, due to the obstructive ‘exaggerated dignity and would-be importance of the Italians’ (‘The New Fraternity of the Air’ 8). Relenting, the Italian authorities then made use of their ports conditional on the flight also landing in Libya, necessitating an otherwise needless stop in Tobruk, between Greece and Egypt. Byron’s allusions to the Middle East’s recent history of imperial conflict are relatively sparing. At Gaza in Palestine the airfield is some way out of town, on the site of a number of battles that had taken place between the British and Ottoman forces during the war. Byron notes that the British trenches ‘were still littered with bones and shredded clothing. Live bombs are also found, which the local gipsies [sic] use for killing fish, to the outrage of resident sportsmen’ (First Russia, Then Tibet 142). He recalls feeling ‘under the beneficent shadow of a British mandate’, however, as a result of a strained exchange with the superintendent of the hotel in which

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the passengers are staying, who aggressively and incongruously reminds Byron that the grouse shooting season begins on 12 August (143). In Baghdad Byron stays in the Maude Hotel, named after the British General Maude who defeated Ottoman forces during the First World War; he also observes bedouins ‘in those gorgeous trappings which the features of Colonel T. E. Lawrence have rendered depressingly familiar’ (147). Further east Byron begins to encounter reminders of British current and future interest in the region. In Basra, the plane lands at the RAF base— alluding to the strategic and economic significance of the port, Byron notes ‘a group of oil refineries and tanks that resembled a village of small gasometers’ (148). Then, having crossed the Persian gulf, and almost at the end of the journey, they land at Jask in southern Persia, where at the aerodrome they are greeted by ‘a strange figure, with the bearded face of a sheikh, but wearing linen plus-fours’ (149)—William Richard Williamson, known as Haji Williamson following his conversion to Islam, an English sailor, adventurer, horse trader and pearl fisher, subsequently a representative for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in the region.3 Hippler has described how the Middle East became the ‘pivot of British air control’ in part as a result of the Royal Navy’s switch from coal to oil by the end of the First World War—now dependent on oil, Britain’s ‘imperial domination of this region, including its transport routes, became absolutely vital’ (67).4 The presence of the British military airfields across the British administered territories of Palestine, Transjordan, and especially Iraq should also alert us to the radical use of air power in the policing and administration of this region during the 1920s, and also emphasizes the imperialist mission and military origins of the air mail service. Byron records that sitting in the chair behind him on the flight from Croydon to Le Bourget was Sir Geoffrey Salmond, appointed Air Marshal of the RAF twentyseven days previously on 1 July, having previously served as Air Officer Commanding India since 1926. As commander of the Royal Flying Corps and subsequently the RAF in the Middle East, Salmond had made the first flight from Egypt to India in late 1918, plotting a course via Damascus and Baghdad.5 Eight years later Salmond had been on board the first Imperial Airways flight from Croydon to Karachi, which set off on Boxing Day 1926, with Samuel Hoare, Baldwin’s Secretary of State for Air. Both men are pictured in Byron’s Express features. Hoare in his memoir Empire of the Air (1957) recalled of this period that ‘I know nothing about the technical problems of air transport services, but as a Conservative brought

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up in the days of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Chamberlain and Milner, I saw in the creation of air routes the chance of uniting the scattered countries of Empire and Commonwealth’ (90). Founded in 1924 and subsidized by government funding for the first ten years of its existence, Imperial Airways was heavily dependent on military expertise. All pilots had to be in the Air Force Reserve or the Auxiliary Air Force, and the routes initially followed those plotted by the Royal Flying Corps and RAF towards the end of the First World War and in the years which followed. The Cairo Conference of March 1921, convened by Winston Churchill (Secretary of State for the Colonies and newly transferred from the Air and War Ministries) to establish an overall strategy for the Middle East, resulted in the transfer of responsibility for all colonial policing in Iraq to the RAF the following year; the RAF successfully argued that air control would be cheaper and easier than deploying ground troops to suppress raids by Arab tribal groups on merchants. Hoare records in his book A Flying Visit to the Middle East (1925) that as a result of reducing army units from sixty-four to twelve, while increasing the number of RAF squadrons from two to eight, the cost of policing Iraq fell from £38.5m to £7.5m after the Cairo Conference, and by the time of his own visit in 1925 had fallen below £4m, as the RAF were able to ‘restore order and maintain peace with an efficiency and an economy of lives and money that are almost inconceivable’ (77–9). Effacing the terrible human cost of air attacks on tribespeople, the promotional narrative of efficiency and creativity surrounding military air development continued in its civilian iteration: for the Express Byron lavished praise on ‘the extraordinary efficiency and long pains and experience that have gone to perfect the route’, although he is strikingly eager to claim that ‘it must not be thought that the service is run on militaristic lines’ (‘The New Fraternity of the Air’ 8). In a letter written to his mother during the journey he wrote that it felt ‘refreshing to be among efficient people doing something and not just sitting in offices doing things they aren’t interested in. I think I have enjoyed that part of the journey almost more than any—the organisation of the route—there is something creative about it’ (Letters Home 124).

‘Welding the Empire into One’ David Omissi, Patrick Deer and Paul Saint-Amour have all described how the Middle East in the 1920s functioned as a laboratory in which air control and the efficacy of aerial bombardment could be tested in advance

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of any future European war. As Saint-Amour argues in his 2015 study of interwar modernism Tense Future: ‘The period’s metropolitan obsession with the “next war” and its energetic prosecution of “small wars” in the periphery have both been underexamined, as has the intimate connection between the two—between the future bombing of the metropolis and the present bombing of the hutment, kraal, and hinterland’ (53). Thomas Hippler likewise contrasts the debates in Europe during the First World War over whether civilian populations should be targeted from the air with the complete absence of such debates in relation to Africa and Asia where ‘the question was not even raised’ and concludes that ‘The use of aviation in the colonies fitted into a long history of unlimited violence on the periphery of the world system’ (63). In his 1925 account of his visit to the region ‘which the Peace Treaty had placed under our unwilling supervision’ (1) Hoare characterizes Iraq as a ‘wonderful training ground for the Air Force’ (81) which offered ‘many unique opportunities for applying Air Methods’ (82). The official Report of the Cairo Conference had eagerly contemplated the possible significance of ‘air development’ for the British Empire as a whole: ‘The Secretary of State impressed upon the Conference the necessity for carrying out a far-sighted policy of Imperial air development in the future. One of the main air routes of the Empire would undoubtedly be that connecting Egypt with Mesopotamia and India, which would shorten the distance to Australia and New Zealand by eight or ten days’ (Baker 183).6 Increasingly freighted with ambiguity, ‘air development’ is a phrase which conveys the shared imperialist ambitions of civilian and military aviation in these early years. The previous year in February 1920 Major General F. H. Sykes, controller general of civil aviation, had told an audience at the Royal Geographical Society that control of the skies rather than the seas would guarantee the future of the British Empire, given the ability to establish aerodromes and refuelling bases ‘in every part of the world’. Sykes argued that ‘Egypt for some time to come must be the “hub” or, as I have long called it, the Clapham Junction of the India, Australia, and Cape routes, and the heart of the whole system of their expansion’ (Trotter 15). The Desert Route for air mail which opened in June 1921 enabled the delivery of a letter from London to Baghdad in under nine days, rather than the previous twenty-eight by sea via the Suez Canal, Red Sea, Karachi and Persian Gulf. As Hoare’s 1957 memoir indicates, the enthusiasm for shrinking distances between Britain and its distant territories—what David Trotter has called ‘the cause of time-space compression’ (16)—was longstanding

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in imperialist discourse, and Hoare’s invocation of Rudyard Kipling is also relevant in this context.7 Kipling was particularly enthused by the imperial possibilities of both postal services and air travel, telling the Royal Geographical Society in February 1914 that ‘The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s—one hundred and sixtyeight hours’—travel; when the word “inaccessible” as applied to any given spot on the surface of the globe will cease to have any meaning’ (Rosenthal 38). Nine years previously in 1905 Kipling published the short story ‘With the Night Mail’, a futuristic fantasy of air travel in the year 2000, told by a first person journalist narrator on board an airship transporting mail overnight from London to Quebec. And nineteen years before that, in 1886, Kipling’s poem ‘The Overland Mail (Foot-service to the Hills)’ describes the heroic delivery of mail by foot in India, in which the runner braves jungles, rivers, robbers, tigers, and storms, crossing a variety of landscapes to deliver safely the correspondence of Empire. From aloe to rose-oak, from rose-oak to fir, From level to upland, from upland to crest, From rice-field to rock-ridge, from rock-ridge to spur, Fly the soft-sandalled feet, strains the brawny, brown chest. From rail to ravine—to the peak from the vale— Up, up through the night goes the Overland Mail.

There’s a speck on the hillside, a dot on the road— A jingle of bells on the footpath below— There’s a scuffle above in the monkey’s abode— The world is awake and the clouds are aglow. For the great Sun himself must attend to the hail:— ‘In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail!’ (Kipling 40)

As Peter Keating has observed, this is not ‘simply a celebration of the postal service: it is also one of Kipling’s most unashamedly joyful endorsements of imperial endeavour, with the postal activity offered as a microcosm of the far-flung Empire’ (21). The poem describes delivery to a hill station, and the perspective of the poem rises progressively in the final stanzas here, from ‘level to upland’, ‘to the peak from the vale’, until by the poem’s conclusion we are amidst the clouds and able to hail

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‘the great Sun himself’, as though anticipating the register and imagery of later airminded writing of the early years of flight. As John McLeod notes (59), the landscape through which Kipling’s runner travels is remarkably empty; this is a poem in which landscape functions metaphorically, as the dangerous woods, jungles, and ravines are crossed by the agent of imperial order and organization, an approach to terrain which of course anticipates later descriptions of flying over colonial territories. Returning to Said’s theories, and observing the continuities between pre- and postflight imperial rhetoric, it is clear that air development between the wars was understood in part as a means of strengthening British control over distant territories by reconfiguring imperial geography, shrinking the distances between the colonies, dominions and mandates as well as surveying and subduing them from the air. Byron’s writings and drawings at this time reflect this process. The first of his Daily Express articles were published on 11 September 1929 under the headlines ‘Half-way Round The World In A Week’ and ‘Welding The Empire Into One’. With (perhaps confected) Kiplingesque enthusiasm, Byron lauds the ‘vast organisation that has gone to this first attempt at welding the Empire into a physical unity’, recalling Samuel Hoare’s ambition to use air development to unite the ‘scattered countries’ of the British Empire, and echoing Beaverbrook’s vision of a ‘British Empire made one and everlastingly prosperous by the unbreakable link of Free Trade between all its parts’ (Chisholm and Davie 281). His second article proclaimed a new ‘fraternity of the air’ in which ‘lies the foundations of a new tradition, comparable to that of our merchant marine, a tradition which, in the centuries to come, may play as important a part in the history and cohesion of the British Empire as ships and the honour of ships have done in the past’. He concluded the piece by speculating that ‘our children’ could ‘live to see […] Tobruk transformed into a thriving city, thanks to British Imperial enterprise’. Byron’s third and final Express contribution on 17 September featured two illustrations drawn by the writer. One is captioned ‘Approaching Karachi’, in which conventional perspective is fractured by the appearance of the same flying boat seen from three different angles in one frame, before landing and at anchor offshore. The other is captioned ‘What we may expect after the India air mail—from Croydon to Karachi, on to Calcutta, and then to the Antipodes’, and provides a visual manifestation of the totalizing imperial rhetoric of Kipling, Hoare and Beaverbrook, depicting a vast aeroplane-shaped shadow superimposed over a map of India, Southeast

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Asia and Australasia—the plane’s nose touches Calcutta and its tail covers most of New Zealand. Byron’s drawing anticipates the iconography of an Imperial Airways promotional poster advertising routes for Winter 1931– 1932, from London to Cape Town and to India, in which the continents of Africa and Asia (decorated and represented by drawings in the first case of a desert with palm trees and a lion, and in the second by of a mountain range and an elephant) are framed and overlaid by a close-up view of the wings, struts, and fuselage of a Handley Page H.P. 42 biplane airliner (Fig. 9.1) We can observe both in Byron’s rhetoric and in his Express drawing an airborne variant of what Edward Said described as the ‘consolidated vision’ of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialist writer, whereby the empire is a ‘codified, […] marginally visible, presence in fiction’ and something that is taken for granted (Culture & Imperialism 75). Travel by aeroplane further elevates and mobilizes the perspective of the imperial or colonizing agent, as the machine and eyes of the Western individual, whether pilot or passenger, roves over the colonized and newly consolidated landscape, taking for granted not the experience of flying (as we have seen, Byron describes this in elevated and hyperbolic terms), but the fact that the landscape below exists for the pleasure of the airborne

Fig. 9.1 Imperial Airways promotional poster, 1931

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viewer, and belongs to them. In The Rhetoric of Empire (1993) David Spurr notes ‘the importance of the commanding view—the panoramic vista—to architecture, landscape painting, and sites of tourism, as well as to scientific research, military intelligence, and police surveillance’ suggesting that this perspective ‘offers aesthetic pleasure on one hand, information and authority on the other. This combination of pleasure and power gives the commanding view a special role in journalistic writing, especially in the colonial situation, for it conveys a sense of mastery over the unknown and over what is often perceived by the Western writer as strange and bizarre’ (15). The British Arabist and intelligence officer St John Philby, for example, described his first 15-minute flight over Mesopotamia as a ‘magnificent bird’s eye panorama’ which ‘doubled my knowledge’ of the territory—note here the instinctive desire to quantify and to measure (Satia 227). Here the aeroplane appears to provide a solution to what Said described as ‘the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions’ (Orientalism 20). Addressing works by Flaubert, Renan, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Cromer and others, Said’s account of Orientalist scholarship and literature repeatedly emphasizes the importance of privileged vantage points and the perspectives these allow, pronouncing that ‘The Orientalist surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him——culture, religion, mind, history, society’ (Orientalism 239). In articulating such a ‘sense of mastery’ it is also important to acknowledge that the exciting new panoramic perspective afforded by air travel permitted many things to remain unseen and then unspoken of: from the air, counter-imperialist discourses of revolution and liberation—dependent on the pursuit of national cultures, or concerned with the violence enacted on the human body—could easily be effaced by the long-distance contemplation of landscapes. From such distances signs of human habitation are often slight or entirely absent, concerned as such airborne narratives so often are with metaphorically resonant mountain ranges, deserts and oceans. The process can be seen at work when Byron describes crossing the Mediterranean, passing from Greece to the African coast: There was something impressive about this transition, in the space of two hours, from one continent to another. From Spain, the change is not so great; the coasts resemble one another. But here, as the line of dead orange

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limiting the inky sapphire sea stretched interminably on into the distance, it was plain that this was a land like no other, endowed with different shapes, colours, and lights, a vast land of black races and of strange selfcentred cultures that have remained isolated from the great movements of taste between Europe and Asia. As the aeroplane circled over the harbour of Tobruk, a burnt plain of measureless extent was disclosed, rippled but never hilly, and merging, fifty, a hundred, a thousand miles away, into a horizon of opal mist. I looked involuntarily for Capetown. I seemed to recognize the place. Then I thought of Egyptian art, and the recognition was explained. (First Russia, Then Tibet 138)

This pivotal passage further emphasizes the imperial preoccupation with time-space compression, but is also heavily suggestive of how the privileged, remote, and potent airborne perspective effected a soaring Orientalist imaginative colonization of landscapes newly viewed and conquered in thought from above. Byron’s involuntary search for distant Cape Town is an eloquent and extreme example of consolidation resulting from his assumption of unbounded vision and authority. Later Byron describes the flight from Alexandria to Gaza: The route lay over the northern border of ‘the Wilderness’, that land where the children of Israel wandered and suffered and children of Christian education continue to do likewise. Very strange it looked in the afternoon light, a sea of dunes, each rotund hummock casting an elliptical blue shadow on the golden sand, till all were absorbed into a horizon of jagged, opalescent mountains. The villages were few—small clusters of square mud buildings accompanied by occasional palms and sparse scratches of cultivation. Sometimes camels were returning to them along tracks dotted serpentwise among the dunes. Even from a thousand and two thousand feet, every footprint was visible. (First Russia, Then Tibet 142)

This last assertion of clarity and accuracy recalls the pioneering use of aerial surveillance in Palestine during the First World War, and yet, once again, human beings cannot be registered in this afternoon panorama, Byron noting instead simply that ‘camels’ could be seen returning to the villages (by contrast he is happy to conjure the Biblical ‘children of Israel’ and their contemporary Christian successors wandering the dunes). In such moments clear parallels can be discerned between the aesthete’s account of his flight and the theories and observations of the military and commercial planners and strategists driving air development, unmoved or

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flippant regarding the human cost of their actions. Describing the flight from Baghdad to Jask in a letter to his mother, Byron wrote: ‘You never saw anything like it, so desolate and terrifying—and the places we came down to refuel at, with all the natives in extraordinary costumes—one sees quite wonderful types among them exactly like Persian and Indian miniatures, down to their movements’ (Letters Home 123). A sharp contrast is registered here between the ‘desolate’, ‘terrifying’ and characteristically empty desert and the settlements populated by ‘natives in extraordinary costumes’. The specious notion that Iraq consists mostly or entirely of blank and uninhabited deserts interspersed by outposts of primitive tribespeople has had devastating repercussions for its inhabitants, yet this image was repeatedly promoted by those, like Hoare, for whom this was expedient; he described it in 1925 as ‘a country the greater part of whose surface is a continuous landing ground’ (79). Priya Satia argues that ‘To the Arabist intelligence community, Iraq was destined for aerial control for aesthetic as much as practical reasons: the infrastructural austerity of air control seemed suited to a theoretically horizonless desert that allowed power to “radiate” untrammelled “in every part of the protectorate [sic]”’ (231). Satia’s suggestion that the planners and strategists were possessed of aesthetic ambitions is illuminating, and returns us to Byron’s worries regarding the ‘great movements of taste’ and the deleterious influence of Western culture on the East. A further contrast in Byron’s letter to his mother may be registered between modernity and antiquity, specifically between the Western travellers who are free and able to move speedily along the corridor of desert settlements by aeroplane and the inhabitants observed in these places, to Byron’s eyes arrested in time, who resemble medieval artworks. Returning to his fears of Tibet’s imminent despoliation by Western modernity, the appeal of air travel for Byron here perhaps lies in its promise to enable privileged adventurers to cross dramatic landscapes and descend on isolated settlements without causing overt disruption, allowing the inhabitants to remain uncorrupted and to maintain their ancient traditions. Several ethical dilemmas are apparent here of course, but the paternalistic logic echoes that of the advocates of airborne colonial policing, who favoured the avoidance of direct engagement with Arab tribal groups on the ground in favour of surveillance and coercion from above, using aeroplanes stationed at a series of strategically situated bases. Played for comedy in First Russia, Then Tibet , Byron’s enthusiastic pitch to Lord Beaverbrook regarding the ‘vista of possibilities’ that had

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been opened by the new Imperial Airways route appears merely opportunistic, but tracing his journey from Croydon to Karachi it is clear that his texts bear the imprint of imperial rhetoric, reflecting the ways in which the route was dependent on military infrastructure. The idea promoted by Kipling, Hoare and Beaverbrook that advances in air technology could bind the Empire closer together and usher in a closer trading relationship between Britain, its colonies and dominions was comprehensively disproven by the outbreak of war at the end of the decade, but returning to this period forces us to confront the military and colonial origins of long-distance air travel; Byron’s writings, moreover, present a valuable moment of convergence between literary modernism, travel writing and imperialist discourse.

Notes 1. See Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars , originally published as Terre des hommes (1939). The bombastic assertion of superiority recalls the contemporaneous short story ‘Today!’ by Byron’s friend and sometime collaborator Brian Howard, in which the narrator describes a frantic flight from England to Paris with similarly soaring rhetoric, drawing on Miltonic and biblical allusions. The story is reprinted in Lancaster 165–69. 2. Libya at this point was divided into two colonial entities: Italian Tripolitania and Italian Cyrenaica. 3. Williamson’s career is described in Stanton Hope, Arabian Adventurer: The Story of Haji Williamson (1951). 4. In this context it is significant that Byron was met in Karachi by two employees of the Burmah Shell oil company, and that on his return to India, after his journey to Tibet, he was offered a three month contract in their Calcutta offices, writing press articles as part of a publicity campaign to convince local inhabitants of the benefits of oil exploration and production (Knox 189, 216). On the strength of this PR work he was offered a six-month retainer from Shell to develop publicity back in London. Byron continued to write and broadcast on behalf of the oil industry throughout the 1930s and even after the outbreak of war: he wrote and delivered a BBC radio talk, ‘What Oil Means to Us’, broadcast on 5 January 1940 (Knox 232, ‘What Oil Means to Us’). 5. Salmond’s brother John had also served in the Middle East (Air Officer Commanding Iraq Command 1922–1924) and also held a series of senior roles in the Air Force, including Marshal of the Royal Air Force (1933). 6. In Air Power and Colonial Control David Omissi describes how claims were made for the ‘ethical value’ of opening the air route to India, with

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reference to the opportunities for transporting people to hospital and of photographing sites of antiquity from the air (173). 7. Trotter borrows the phrase from David Harvey’s The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Works Cited Adey, Peter. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Malden, MA and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Adey, Peter, Mark Whitehead, and Alison J. Williams, eds. From Above: War, Violence and Verticality. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. Baker, Anne. From Biplane to Spitfire: The Life of Air Chief Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond KCB KCMG DSO. London: Leo Cooper, 2003. Byron, Robert. An Essay on India. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1931. ———. First Russia, Then Tibet. [1933]. London: Penguin, 1985. ———. Letters Home. Ed. Lucy Butler. London: John Murray, 1991. ———. ‘The Last Day of a Flight Half Round the World.’ Daily Express, 17 September 1929: 6. ———. ‘The New Fraternity of the Air.’ Daily Express, 12 September 1929: 8. ———. The Road to Oxiana. [1931]. London: Picador, 1991. ———. ‘What Oil Means to Us.’ BBC Written Archives, Caversham. Chatwin, Bruce. ‘Introduction.’ Robert Byron. The Road to Oxiana. [1931]. London: Picador, 1991. Chisholm, Anne and Michael Davie. Beaverbrook. London: Hutchinson, 1992. Cleary, Joe. Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Couto, Maria. Graham Greene: On the Frontier. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Crowson, N.J. Britain and Europe: A Political History Since 1918. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011. Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Hippler, Thomas. Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing. Trans. David Fernbach. London and New York: Verso, 2017. Hoare, Samuel. A Flying Visit to the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925. ———. Empire of the Air: The Advent of the Air Age 1922–29. London: Collins, 1957. Hope, Stanton. Arabian Adventurer: The Story of Haji Williamson. London: Robert Hale, 1951.

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Kaplan, Caren. ‘The Balloon Prospect: Aerostatic Observation and the Emergence of Militarised Aeromobility.’ From Above: War, Violence and Verticality. Eds. Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead, and Alison J. Williams. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. 19–40. Keating, Peter. Kipling the Poet. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994. Kipling, Rudyard. The Works of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Walter J. Black, 1936. Knox, James. Robert Byron. London: John Murray, 2003. Lancaster, Marie-Jaqueline. Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure. London: Timewell Press, 2005. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Omissi, David. Air Power and Colonial Control. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Rosenthal, Lecia. Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Said, Edward W. Culture & Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993. ———. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Satia, Priya. ‘The Pain of Love: The Invention of Aerial Surveillance in British Iraq.’ From Above: War, Violence and Verticality. Eds. Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead, and Alison J. Williams. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. 223–245. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 10

‘The Fundamental Magic of Flying’: Changing Perspectives in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient and Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Between the Acts Rinni Haji Amran

In Virginia Woolf’s notes for Three Guineas (1938), there is a noteworthy inclusion of a 1935 article from the Daily Telegraph titled ‘Soviet Women Beat Men as Air Pilots’ with the subtitles ‘Not Affected by Great Height’ and ‘Specially Suited for Fighting’ (Notes & Cuttings). The article reports the results of tests carried out in Russia that proved ‘women will make better air pilots than men for work at high altitudes in the next war’ (Notes & Cuttings). Taking into account Woolf’s feminist-pacifist stance that was particularly pronounced in the 1930s, this development must have been doubly horrifying, especially once we recall her diary entry written decades earlier during the First World War:

R. H. Amran (B) Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_10

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L[eonard] was told the other day that the air raids are carried out by women. Women’s bodies were found in the wrecked aeroplanes. They are smaller & lighter, & thus leave more room for bombs. Perhaps its sentimental, but the thought seems to me to add a particular touch of horror. (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume I 153)

In order to fully grasp Woolf’s horror, it is necessary to understand the cultural presence of the aeroplane in the early twentieth century, for it would appear that it is not only the assimilation of the objectified ‘smaller & lighter’ women into the machinery of war that Woolf objected to, but also the prevalent airminded mentality that encouraged women to be involved. Largely due to war propaganda, airmindedness was becoming increasingly prevalent in the 1920s, reaching its peak in the 1930s, encouraging the nation to support aviation and emphasizing its integral role in the military. One of the first appearances of the word ‘air-minded’, in a 1927 article in the The Times, demonstrates these propagandist roots: ‘The growth of flying clubs since the Air Ministry first arranged to subsidize six clubs 18 months ago is most encouraging, for they offer one of the most economical and direct ways of making the nation, in the words of Sir Samuel Hoare, “air-minded”’ (‘Flying in East Anglia’ 9). The figure of the airman features in two of Woolf’s critical works, namely Three Guineas and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940) and aptly illustrate the aggressive influence of airmindedness as well as the patriarchal forces behind the airminded culture. To have heard that women were also being recruited as fighter pilots, then, must have indicated to Woolf how influential and pervasive this airminded mentality had become. However, this is not to say that Woolf’s perception of aviation was wholly negative. Despite the nationalistic, military appropriation of aviation at the time, and even though Woolf had never flown—a diary entry in 1933 suggests that she was hesitant because flying seemed to her to be like ‘death’1 (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 187)—it appears that she was also conscious of the positive impact that the aeroplane could have, such as, for example, an increased awareness of the natural environment. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, what perhaps influenced her perception of aviation significantly was her reading of famed aviator— and later environmental activist—Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient (1935), which was given to her by Harold Nicholson after his visit to the United States to meet with Anne’s father, Dwight Morrow2 (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 335).3 Lindbergh’s emphasis on

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moments of intimacy shared with people from different cultures while on her journey opposes the militarized image of the aeroplane as publicized by war propagandists in Britain such as Lord Northcliffe, owner of The Times and Director of War Propaganda during the First World War. The aerial view in particular, which is frequently seen as offering an ‘authoritarian perspective’ (Evans 54) to the viewer due to the allencompassing view that it offers is seen differently in Lindbergh’s text. What she calls the ‘fundamental magic of flying’—the way the aerial viewpoint revitalizes appreciation of the planet’s natural wonders, such as ‘the waterfalls’, ‘the tops of the trees’, ‘the river’—contrasts sharply with and subverts the nationalist notion of the autocratic aerial view (North to the Orient 163). Lindbergh’s markedly contrasting perspective of aviation would have appealed to Woolf especially in the 1930s when she developed her anti-war and anti-fascist stance further in writings such as her anti-war pamphlet Three Guineas . This chapter thus argues that Woolf’s literary depictions of aviation go beyond focusing on the aeroplane’s prevalent militaristic image to suggest (and advocate) the aeroplane’s potential to promote a more inclusive, global perspective that highlights the interconnections between people and the world around them. To this end, I demonstrate how her view of aviation was shaped by her reading of Lindbergh’s North to the Orient . As I will show, Woolf’s works after 1935, namely The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), can be likened to Lindbergh’s use of the panoptic aerial view which extends the narrative scope and simultaneously promotes a more all-encompassing perspective that undermines the restrictiveness of anthropocentric and patriarchal views as well as traditional narrative forms.4 That Woolf’s representations of the aeroplane, flight and the aerial view have received, and still continue to receive, much critical attention is indicative of the complexity and integral role of these issues in her texts. Yet, so far, critics who frequently view the aeroplane mainly in terms of its military or fascist connotations have overlooked the ambivalence in Woolf’s representations that on the one hand reflect on and criticize airmindedness, but on the other hint at aviation’s potential for positive, rather than destructive, impact. An example of this interpretation is Elizabeth F. Evans’s reading of the aerial viewpoint in the preludes and interludes of The Years , which she sees as being ‘homologous’ with ‘an objective and totalizing narrative voice; political propaganda; and despotism’ (63). She contrasts this with the

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experiences of the characters at ground level, which she argues ‘exposes the subjective and fallible underpinnings of [the aerial] vision’ (70) that ‘emphasizes surfaces and erases personalities’ (61). Yet, her reading is overly reliant on the connection between the aerial view from the aeroplane and totalitarianism. While this connection can indeed be made, it leads to the obscuring of the more positive forms of aerial vision such as that illustrated by Lindbergh and her emerging environmental consciousness, which Woolf was aware of. Even in the preludes of The Years , the ‘universalizing’ focus on the weather, nature, and objects, which Evans asserts causes ‘people [to] disappear’ (69), can also be read as allowing non-human elements to emerge, thereby presenting another perspective to the anthropocentrism of the main narrative occupied by the Pargiters. By introducing this conflicting perspective of the aerial viewpoint, Woolf is subtly yet effectively critiquing the desire for conclusive interpretation, which is also in line with her ‘decision to avoid explicit critique [of tyranny] in The Years ’ (53). By avoiding propaganda, Woolf moves away from the aggressive style of advocacy taken by militarists and nationalists in asserting their views on aviation and war. Paul Saint-Amour also reads the aeroplane mainly in terms of its destructive capacity for bombing in his study of (interwar) modernist texts. He argues that the panoptic gaze of the narrator enabled by the skywriting aeroplane in Mrs Dalloway is ‘the gaze of total war’ (147), but he also notes that it is at the same time ‘paradoxically, the opposite’, being also a gaze that connects characters, places and things ‘in order to point up the fragility of their interdependence’ (148). However, he then argues that in doing so, ‘Woolf’s novel […] attempts to capture the logic of total war for redeployment in a deeply pacifist agenda’, thus placing greater significance on the aeroplane’s World War I bombing connotations (148). Similarly, Leo Mellor reads ‘aeriality’ in Woolf’s other works—namely Between the Acts , ‘Flying over London’, ‘The Death of the Moth’ (1940) and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’—specifically within the context of the British fear of the bomber. Mellor argues that the ‘manipulation of the narrative viewpoint’, which is when aeriality, or the ‘hawk’s-eye view’, emerges, ‘expla[ins] and accentuat[es] that fear’ (32). Similarly, in her study of aviation in Woolf’s texts, Gillian Beer notes the allusion to war that the skywriting aeroplane makes, but in contrast to Saint-Amour, concludes that its frivolous and playful figure suggests ‘the reassuring triviality of peace after the war’ (284). Beer traces Woolf’s representations of the aeroplane, arguing that the image changes in her

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later works to become more menacing as it reminds readers of the permeability of the island’s boundaries as well as the approaching Second World War in Between the Acts (1941). While Beer highlights the changing images of the aeroplane, she does not acknowledge its capacity to bear multiple significations simultaneously as a sign of the flying machine’s immense potential. Breaking away from these critics’ readings is Erica Delsandro’s study of Woolf’s use of the aerial view in ‘Flying over London’. Quoting Anne Herrmann who points out that ‘On the one hand, the airplane signifies the possibility of a radical elsewhere; on the other hand, that elsewhere is saturated with prior formations’, Delsandro notes the tension between the liberating quality that the aeroplane offers—its capacity to ‘queer’ conventional views—and the attendant dominant discourses by which those resultant views are shaped (117). She thus acknowledges the purposeful ambiguity of the image of the aeroplane, which is frequently overlooked by critics focusing too much on its military function. This chapter will extend this argument by outlining the ways in which Woolf incorporated the inclusiveness of the aerial view into her writing to highlight the beauty of nature alongside the narratives of her characters. Besides filling in the critical gap concerning aviation in Woolf’s texts by exploring the aeroplane’s non-military uses, this chapter also contributes to the recent debate concerning Woolf’s understanding of the natural world. Christina Alt’s research on Woolf’s perspective of nature, for example, attempts to provide a clearer picture of Woolf’s views of nature by ‘[considering] the study of nature as it was practised in her lifetime’, thus exploring Woolf’s texts within the context of ‘contemporary developments in the life sciences’ (4). Holly Henry’s study on Woolf and the discourse of science, in contrast, focuses on Woolf’s ‘personal and intense fascination with cosmology’ to delineate the formulation of her ‘global aesthetics’ (15). This chapter will add to the discussion by studying how her perception of aviation, particularly her reading of Lindbergh’s North to the Orient helped shape her depiction of nature in The Years and Between the Acts as including other beings and species in existence alongside the human characters, thereby undercutting anthropocentrism in her texts.

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Woolf’s Encounter with North to the Orient (1935) Ann Morrow Lindbergh, an avid reader, had admired Woolf’s works since she was younger, as her diary entries and letters to friends show. In her record of a dinner meeting with Harold Nicolson in January 1933, she recalls their talk concerning Woolf, listing To the Lighthouse, The Waves , Orlando, and A Room of One’s Own as some of the works that they discussed (Locked Rooms and Open Doors 11); and upon finishing Mrs Dalloway, she describes it as simply ‘perfect’ (17). The admiration seems to have been reciprocated. In fact, Woolf’s diary entry for 29 August 1935 reveals that North to the Orient had made quite an impression on her, as she confesses that it ‘Woke my insensate obsession—to write P&P’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 335), referring to one of the previous titles of Woolf’s anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas . Originally, Woolf had planned on combining Three Guineas with what was later to become The Years in an ‘Essay-Novel’, which suggests that her thoughts after reading North to the Orient had likely spilled over into The Years as well. And Woolf must have sensed some connections between North to the Orient and her own thoughts, as a few days later on 5 September she writes: ‘I was also in a stew about war & patriotism last night. And when it comes to thinking about my country! Thank God, John Bailey’s life is out, & I shall seek consolation there. And write about Mrs Lindbergh?’ (338). Although no such writing has yet been found, this diary entry nevertheless reveals a sense of affinity with the sentiments Lindbergh records in her own work of being unacknowledged as an aviator in her own right. For Woolf, excluding or neglecting to acknowledge the value of outsider opinions is what helps to fuel the patriarchal ideals behind war and patriotism: in Three Guineas , she asserts the importance of the outsider figure, who maintains ‘freedom from unreal loyalties, that freedom from interested motives which are at present assured them by the State’, and it is this quality that allows them to be able to effectively criticize the ‘opinions of men’ (130).

Lindbergh’s Writing Style Upon publication by Harcourt Brace (who had also been Woolf’s American publisher since 1921) North to the Orient sold ‘extremely well’ and even won the National Booksellers Award for non-fiction (Gherman 89).

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The Anne Morrow Lindbergh archive at Yale contains numerous letters attesting to the literary merit of her work but perhaps the most valued praise was Woolf’s own, which she expresses in a letter she wrote on 6 October 1935 and sent to Nicolson, who forwarded it to Lindbergh a few days later on 11 October, writing: ‘I enclose [Woolf’s] reply which will amuse you’ (Harold Nicolson to Anne Morrow Lindbergh). In the letter, Woolf tells Nicolson that she read North to the Orient ‘with great pleasure’ and praised Lindbergh’s writing for being ‘too good’: ‘I’m a good deal amazed as usual by the way people write who don’t write—it seems to come so clean and clear’ (Harold Nicolson to Anne Morrow Lindbergh). It is easy to see why Woolf praised Lindbergh’s writing: North to the Orient is thoroughly personal, humorous and intelligent. For instance, before they take-off on their journey, when Lindbergh is approached by a male reporter who asks her to comment on the dangerous nature of their trip, she responds: ‘I laughed, “I’m sorry, I really haven’t anything to say.” (After all we want to go. What good does it do to talk about the danger? “What navigation is there voyde of perill?” […] “What navigation—”)’ (18). Note that she inserts her thoughts, set inside parentheses, into the dialogue as opposed to making her comments after the speech marks. This inclusion appears to be a subtly assertive way of commenting on the way in which her opinions as a female aviator are neglected or overlooked by the media to the extent that she needs to carve out her own space to voice her ideas. Such a commentary on what it is like for a woman in a male-dominated field would have most certainly caught Woolf’s interest. In this passage, Lindbergh also quotes from Principal Navigations (1598–1600), written by the Elizabethan geographer and writer Richard Hakluyt, who was a great supporter of British imperialism (Cormack 52)—a stance that contrasts sharply with the Lindbergh survey expedition that contributes to thinking about a more interconnected globe. Whether inadvertently or not, Lindbergh’s application of his words to her own situation can be read as a playful jab (or subtle critique) at male oppression of female voices, heightened by the breaking off of the quote mid-way at the second repetition. Lindbergh’s writing can be seen to have traces of modernist characteristics as she resists conventional narrative form and style in an attempt to capture her idiosyncratic opinions, ideas and feelings about their journey. Rather than writing in straightforward traditional prose, she mixes in poetry and images of maps inserted in the beginning of every

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chapter, forming a hybrid narrative not unlike Woolf’s own fragmented, modernist writings. For instance, Lindbergh includes a Japanese hokku— the opening stanza of a poem—which she came upon on their stop in Japan: How far in chase today I wonder Has gone my Hunter Of the dragon fly! (North to the Orient 119)

While Lindbergh does not elaborate on the significance of the poem for her, readers may have recognized that this hokku, which their Japanese hostess explains is ‘about the mother whose little boy has died’ (119), must have resonated with Lindbergh due to the kidnapping and death of her own one-year-old son a few years earlier. Even though Lindbergh only includes a brief section of this poem, it nevertheless speaks volumes about her position as a grieving mother as well as the universality of the experience of motherhood, given that the poem is Japanese. The inclusion of the Japanese hokku thus adds not only a different cultural perspective to North to the Orient but also a more personal and affective dimension to the travel narrative. At the end of North to the Orient, Lindbergh once again contemplates the ‘fundamental magic of flying’, which for her emerges the most when she is flying above the earth, looking down. ‘Life [is] put in new patterns from the air’, she writes, as if a ‘glaze is put over life’ (163), thus capturing a serene vision of the world below, ‘like slow-motion pictures which catch the moment of outstretched beauty [that] one cannot see in life itself, so swiftly does it move’ (164). For Lindbergh, the aerial view is valuable especially because of its ability to present a fresh view of the world below, almost slowing down the pace of life for the viewer to take note of their surroundings which they may not have noticed while on the ground. Interestingly, her words echo Gertrude Stein’s comments on Picasso’s Cubist paintings: ‘One must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile’ (49). Stein differentiates between the two vehicles, contending that the automobile is ‘the end of progress on the earth’ because the landscape seen from it is the same one as seen while walking, whereas the ‘earth seen from an airplane is something else’ (49).

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Nature is what catches Lindbergh’s attention the most as her description of the aerial view consists of ‘the rippling skin of the river, and birds drifting like petals down the air’ (North to the Orient 163). Moments in which she is soaring above the earth allow her to observe the fragility of the world below that instigated her and her husband’s environmental conservationist efforts (Cevasco and Harmond 253). Her husband states in his account that the bird’s-eye view enabled by the aeroplane ‘let me know my country as no man had ever known it before’ (C. Lindbergh 81). Their preoccupation with the natural American landscape is clear in the photographs taken on their aerial explorations. Commenting on the changing American landscape, Charles observes that ‘In the decades that I spent flying civil and military aircraft, I saw tremendous changes taking place on the earth’s surface […] Trees disappeared from mountains and valleys. Erosions turned clear rivers yellow. Power lines and highways stretched out beyond horizons’ (32). As Tom D. Crouch asserts, these views observed by Lindbergh during his flights had a significant impact on his environmental awareness and instigated his active involvement in causes devoted to the preservation of the environment such as the World Wildlife Fund, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.5

The Aerial Viewpoint in The Years (1937) The opening passages of several sections in Woolf’s The Years can be seen to utilize an all-encompassing perspective not unlike the aerial viewpoint that Lindbergh experiences and describes in North to the Orient . For instance, in the opening passage of the ‘Present Day’ chapter, Woolf begins by describing the ‘gold tinge’ of the summer evening sky, likening it to ‘a thin veil of gauze’ (267). She strategically opens the passage with a description of something vast, which reflects the widened narrative perspective employed in this section. The focus then moves downward— imitating the direction of the aerial standpoint—onto ‘an island of cloud [which] lay suspended’, and then the narrative moves further onto the ground to portray a vast number of things within the narrator’s purview, including ‘sheep and cows, pearl white and parti-coloured, [lying] recumbent […,] people standing at cottage doors […] as they confronted the slowly sinking sun’ (267). Movement, both in the sky and on land, seems to be minimal, which echoes Lindbergh’s reference to ‘slow-motion pictures’ when she describes the aerial view—a reference that indicates

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the influence of the cinematic technique on her portrayal of the aerial view, which is likely to have also influenced Woolf’s own depiction in the opening passage.6 The minimal movement within the passage gives way to a vibrant description of colours, emphasizing alliteratively the ‘pearl white and parti-coloured’ sheep and cows, and focusing also on the ‘little red brick villas’, which ‘became porous, incandescent with light’ (The Years 267). The poetic language underscores the power of the evening sunlight as the ‘faces of people’ too show ‘the same red glow’ as everything else around them (267), thus literally shedding light on the beauty and coexistence of people and nature reminiscent of Lindbergh’s emphasis on the coexistence between man, technology, and nature. Interestingly, the ‘passages describing the weather and setting the scene that begin each chapter and that separate scenes within chapters’ (Radin xxii) in The Years , which frequently employ a downward-looking vantage point similar to an aerial perspective (the opening of the 1917 section, for instance, begins with ‘The moon, falling on water’, and describes the ‘moonlight [falling] on solid objects’, 111) were first added in 1936 (Radin 126), which is after Woolf had read North to the Orient . The ‘late appearance’ (Radin xxii) of these passages raise the possibility that they were in part shaped by Woolf’s reading of Lindbergh’s portrayal of the aerial views in North to the Orient . For Lindbergh, the preoccupations of humankind, which from her aerial viewpoint in North to the Orient are represented by ‘black cars all centering to one point like an anthill’, appear ‘trivial and aimless from this great height’ (163), as they become compared to the vastness and beauty of nature. Lindbergh’s allencompassing aerial view was an effective way to carry out what Woolf intended, which was ‘to give a picture of society as a whole; give characters from every side; turn them towards society, not private life; exhibit the effect of ceremonies’, or what she terms in another letter as, ‘the invalidity of their experience’ (Virginia Woolf: Selected Letters 384–5). It is important to note that, in The Years , the language in the opening passages that focus on the natural environment rather than on the characters is discernibly more vibrant and appreciative of the view compared to the language in the main narratives that follow the characters. For example, the opening of the 1880 section states: ‘The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and of purple flying over the land’ (1), and, as evening came, the moon ‘rose and polished its coin, though obscured now and then by wisps of cloud, shone out with sincerity, with severity, or perhaps with complete indifference’ (2). Nature appears

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powerful in these dynamic descriptions as the blue and purple colours of the clouds are highlighted and their movement dramatized by the use of the word ‘fly’. The romantic description of the moon, using the alliteration and assonance of ‘sincerity’ and ‘severity’ makes it seem at once beautiful, mysterious, and frightening, as the narrator is unsure of what its light signifies. When this passage is juxtaposed with that detailing the thoughts and actions of the youngest Pargiter son, Edward, as he studies, the contrast highlights the plain descriptiveness of the passage: ‘He read; and made a note; then he read again […] he must be precise; exact; even his little scribbled notes must be clear as print’ (43). Unlike the smooth flow of the opening passage that reflects the movements of the clouds, this seems staccato and unadorned as it depicts Edward’s repetitive, precise actions. Note that in contrast to the fragmentary language, Woolf uses free indirect discourse to portray Edward’s thoughts, thereby signifying the narrator’s expanded view that encompasses what goes on in the characters’ minds. The narrator’s widened perspective here, too, seems to reflect that of the panoptic, aerial view. The rigidity of Edward’s actions seems to be representative of that Oxford- (where Edward is studying) and Cambridge-educated, narrow, male mindset Woolf criticizes in Three Guineas . Outlining what an ‘experimental’ and ‘adventurous’ college would teach, she states: ‘Not the arts of dominating other people’, but, rather, ‘It should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds’ (Three Guineas 39–40). In other words, students should be taught to be more open to and accepting of people and ideas that are different from their own. Edward’s narrow-mindedness is also noted by Emily Dalgarno, who likens him to ‘[Walter] Benjamin’s translator [in his 1923 essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’] who is so intent on getting the sense right that he is apparently blind to the possibility of divergent ways of meaning’ (97). In North to the Orient , Lindbergh praises the Japanese for their ‘appreciative vision, which saw beauty in the smallest things and made beauty in the most trivial acts’ (120). Edward is an apt illustration of one sorely lacking in such a vision, as he cannot even properly express his feelings for his cousin, Kitty, whom he describes plainly, generically, as ‘a purple flower’ (Woolf, The Years 43). Even he recognizes the blandness of such a description, as he protests, ‘No, he exclaimed, not in the least like a flower!’ (43). The limitedness of his language further highlights the narrowness or restrictedness of the scope of his education.

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The recurring use of the panoptic aerial view in the preludes and interludes that set the scene and describe the weather in The Years also helps to convey the wide scope of the novel that Woolf had hoped for since she first began to think about writing it. In her diary entry in November 1932, she writes that ‘The Pargiters’—the initial name for the novel— was to, ‘take in everything, sex, education, life &c; & come with the most powerful & agile leaps’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 129). Woolf’s use of the term ‘agile leap’ here is particularly interesting as it suggests taking an all-encompassing bird’s-eye view in order to ‘take in everything’. As a result of these ‘leaps’, The Years is a chronicle that stretches from 1880 to the ‘Present Day’, which is estimated to be around the mid-1930s, when the novel was written, and follows two generations of the Pargiter family. The novel also features a variety of locations spread across England and even briefly takes place in France, which reflects the narrative’s geographical expansion in line with the widened focus of the novel. The wide scope of The Years allows Woolf to juxtapose different generations not only to highlight the differences of opinions and beliefs, but also to trace the history behind those differences. For example, Eleanor expresses her incredulity at the invention of the aeroplane when she relates to Peggy the story of when she first saw one. She excitedly states, ‘And suddenly it came over me, that’s an aeroplane! And it was!’ Peggy, in response, seems unimpressed and only laughs at the story, thinking that ‘aeroplanes hadn’t made all that difference’ (287). However, readers can empathize with Eleanor’s sentiment as they are also given an earlier glimpse into her harrowing experience of an air raid, in the 1917 section of the novel, thus explaining her impression of aviation. The large timeframe of the novel, which is illustrative of the narrative’s temporal expansion, then, mimics the properties of the aerial view that allow different perspectives to emerge. This ‘broader range of perspectives’ is also noted by Radin, who states that ‘In the galley proofs, most scenes are presented from a limited point of view, with the narrator providing insight into the thoughts of only one or two major characters’ (121). The changes Woolf made between March and December of 1936 included insertions of the ‘point of view of servants’, which Radin believes ‘was a valuable addition [as] it rounds off our view of the major characters and enriches our sense of London life of the time’ (122). Indeed, the inclusion of the perspectives of these characters such as Nurse and Mrs C., ‘who came every week with the washing’

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(The Years 21) adds another dimension to, or expands, the narrative across different social groups, making it seem closer to reality. The introduction of more perspectives into the novel, including the views of their environment in the preludes and interludes, is necessary and reflective of what Woolf set out to do, which was to better express life—a word she keeps repeating in her diary. In an early entry in December 1932, for instance, she expresses her hope to ‘career’ her characters ‘over the whole of human life’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 134). Woolf’s desire to include everything in The Years resulted in a lengthy struggle, having to separate it from what became Three Guineas , and revising, deleting, and adding passages from 1931—when she first conceived of the idea— to 1937, when she finally finished writing. After years of this struggle, in November 1936 she displays a sense of satisfaction with the book, stating, ‘Just finished it; & feel a little exalted. Its [sic] different from the others of course: has I think more “real” life in it; more blood & bone’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 38). Notably in the same entry she writes that the book has ‘some beauty & poetry too. A full packed book’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 38). Life, for Woolf, was not containable in one restricted form,7 so the novel, too, should reflect this. A New York Times article acknowledged this aspect and refers to the novel’s ‘minimum substructure’ and its ‘elusion of classification’, suggesting that it is rather a ‘long-drawn-out lyricism’, that makes it her ‘richest novel’ (Jack A1).

Aeriality and Between the Acts (1941) In Between the Acts , originally titled ‘Poyntz Hall’, Woolf returned to the more experimental format that she used in previous novels—most notably in The Waves (1932)—stating in her diary that, ‘I’m all in favour of the wild, the experimental’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 338) and asserts her desire to produce ‘a new combination of the raw & the lyrical’ (259). Hence, Between the Acts consists of verse and song lyrics, as well as a playscript for a pageant about the history of England up to the present day. If Woolf widens the narrative scope in The Years , then here she layers several narratives, which effectively undermines the notion of one dominant narrative and highlights the interconnectedness between these different stories of the public and the private, the past and the present, and man and nature. I would argue that this idea of layering multiple stories to form one novel is partly influenced by the aerial view’s capacity to reveal several

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different characteristics or markers about the world below, whether they be geographical, historical, social, or cultural. The multiple stories that Lindbergh manages to relate in North to the Orient is illustrative of this particular quality of the aerial standpoint as she conveys accounts of the landscapes in different countries and ruminates on the social, economic, and cultural impacts of these different environments. For instance, flying above Nanking in China, she states, ‘The wall of Nanking is such a dominating feature of the city that it seems almost a geographical one’ (133), thus intertwining historical past (she also notes the ‘wars and destruction [that] have broken over [the wall] like waves’, 135) with geographical landscape. In another passage, the natural landscape becomes not just a group of physical features, but also a map full of cultural markers, as she wonders whether the ‘beautifully and theatrically mountainous’ environment of Japan influenced its inhabitants to ‘appreciat[e] all small things in nature’, which is a predominant mindset that she praises them for (119). Therefore, within a single frame from the bird’s-eye view, there exists not just one single way of describing the world below, but there are multiple angles from which the view can be portrayed. Notably, Between the Acts begins with Bartholomew Oliver, the head of the Oliver household, remarking, ‘From the aeroplane, he said, you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleon wars’ (1). Here, the aerial view does not just reveal geographical markers, but also exposes the marks of historical events dating back centuries. Woolf draws readers’ attention to the notion of several narratives existing within the same space, which is relevant to the role of the pageant in the text (itself made up of several stories, contained within a novel). All these events are connected to one another by the same piece of land and, in the text, are contained within the same sentence, highlighting the interconnections between the past and the present and between different groups of people. Woolf is seen here to use the aerial view to illustrate what she wrote in her diary was to be ‘a series of contrasts’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 159), as she groups together the vastly different histories of the Britons, the Romans and the Napoleonic wars within the same sentence. This opening passage leads us to the pageant—a ‘snapshot of English village life’ (Briggs 83)— which as a narrative device operates in a similar way to the aerial standpoint in the way that it intermingles historical narratives with those of the present, and layers the visual performance with

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musical accompaniment. The pageant is introduced in the opening scene by a young girl, Phyllis Jones, as being about their ‘island history’ (47), yet questions emerge throughout the course of the pageant that challenges the idea of England as a hermetically sealed island as well as the notion of a singular historical narrative for the nation. As Oliver himself notes in the novel’s opening, there are marks on their land brought about by outsiders through wars, and aeroplanes occasionally appear in the novel that shatter the long-held notion of England as safely insular. The village itself is seeing more outsiders, as Mr Figgis observes: ‘The building of a car factory and of an aerodrome in the neighbourhood had attracted a number of unattached floating residents’ (46). Even Miss La Trobe, who wrote the pageant, is suspected to have ‘Russian blood in her’ (35). The notion of the insularity of England is alluded to in the beginning of the pageant when Phyllis Jones states: ‘Cut off from France and Germany/This isle’ (48). At first, the singing villagers that appear behind her cannot be heard by the audience (‘They were singing, but not a word reached the audience’) and Mrs Manresa in the audience feels ‘a vast vacancy between her, the singing villagers and the piping child’ (48). The idea of sound not being able to reach the audience and the space that separates Mrs Manresa from the performers reflects the cutting off of England from France and Germany, as Phyllis Jones declares. But soon after, the gramophone finally starts to ‘gr[i]nd out a tune!’, and as the ‘pompous popular tune brayed and blared’, several other sounds also emerge quickly and suddenly seem to overwhelm the scene: ‘ice cracked. The stout lady in the middle began to beat time with her hand on her chair. Mrs. Manresa was humming’ (49). As these sounds penetrate the atmosphere, mingling the pageant’s tune with the noises from the audience, Woolf effectively undermines the idea of an impenetrable national boundary as well as the notion of a single, historical narrative that is told from only one point of view. Consider the structure of this opening pageant scene in the novel: Gentles and simples, I address you all… So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue? Come hither for our festival (she continued) This is a pageant, all may see Drawn from our island history, England am I … (47)

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Note how the verse is disrupted by the inclusion of the narrator’s voice, which questions the conventional structure of a play or a narrative—where does one begin? Indeed, where can one begin when telling the story of England? As the narration moves from Phyllis Jones’s speech to the narrator’s voice (marked by the non-italicized words), and then back to verse, it weaves together these two narratives, thus implying the connections between past and present, national history and rural life. Additionally, the line, ‘So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?’ is ostensibly indented and integrated into the script’s format, rather than the novel’s main narrative, which further blurs the boundaries between verse and prose, performance and reality. Visually, the structure of the text itself forms layers of verse, prose, and then verse intermingled with prose as the verse is disrupted once again with the addition of ‘(she continued)’ in parentheses and in roman type rather than italics. The layered structure of the text enhances the idea of several narratives existing within one space. What or who exactly makes up England’s history, Woolf seems to ask, and who gets to decide? The intertwining of these narratives and the resultant fragmented structure of the text challenges the restrictions inherent in the conventional formats of prose and poetry as this novel breaks the boundaries when needed. This unconventional form aptly illustrates the ‘freer and looser’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 339) rhythm of the novel that Woolf hoped for in her diary. When Jones forgets her lines after ‘England am I’, Woolf seems to be highlighting the complexity of history that makes it difficult to be fitted into any single type of introduction. Miss La Trobe, too, appears to be aware of this complexity as the play’s narrator later changes from the little girl Phyllis Jones to the older Hilda, the carpenter’s daughter, who continues, ‘O, England’s grown…’ (49). A point worth stating here is that in the beginning of the novel, there is the mention of an ‘Outline of History’ (4), which is a likely reference to H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History (1920), famously written in an attempt to revise the dominant historical narratives taught in schools in order to make the public shed its nationalist ideals. This allusion hints at Woolf’s own attempt at challenging traditional notions of history as well as a literary form. Ayako Yoshino makes a similar point in her study of Woolf’s use of the pageant in Between the Acts , asserting that Woolf ‘must have seen the pageant—an art form explicitly associated with local pride, patriotism, charity, and on occasion the war effort—from a different perspective than [writers] who saw democracy and the possibility of “civic betterment” in it’ (53). Rather

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than adhering to the conventional nationalist tendency of pageant narratives, Woolf takes the opportunity ‘to present an alternative history’ (54) in Between the Acts . The fragmented, almost chaotic, and hurried flow of the pageant underscores Woolf’s resistance to the traditional pageant form and narrative. In the middle of the pageant, for instance, Isa is seen to be confused by the chaos of the scenes being played out: ‘There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it’. Yet, she thinks, ‘Did the plot matter?’ (56). Indeed, by resisting conventional plots and pageant (as well as novel) structures, Woolf raises questions about their validity and their (in)ability to portray multiple, layered, fragmented narratives. Facilitating the connections between these different narratives is Woolf’s use of sound. Sound at times disrupts the narratives, making us aware of the existence of other storylines, but it also acts as a connecting device intertwining these various stories. Woolf’s design may have been partly influenced by Lindbergh’s description of the aerial view in North to the Orient , which she significantly describes as being ‘a magic that has more kinship with what one experiences standing in front of serene madonnas or listening to cool chorales’ (163). In other words, Lindbergh likens this panoptic view of life—about which she states, ‘There was no limit to what the eye could seize or what the mind hold’ (162)— to musical harmony, which, it is worth reminding, is structurally several layers of different sound patterns complementing one another. Woolf’s pattern of weaving stories together using sound is also reminiscent of Lindbergh’s description of the couple’s reason for going to the Orient: besides the ‘main practical reason’ of discovering future flight routes, she states, ‘there were others playing about it, under and over it, like a running accompaniment to the main theme in music—other small, personal, and trivial reasons, which, as they braided in and out of the main one ceaselessly, made of it a stronger bond, pulling us in one direction’ (3). Her description can also be applied to her own text, for if we take a bird’s-eye view, so to speak, of the structure of North to the Orient , we would find several layers to her stories that help further capture her particular experience of their journey. For instance, she describes a ‘beautiful’ doll from Japan that she was given as a little girl and states how ‘Long afterward on my first flying visit to Japan I thought of this present. The same quality which had delighted me as a child ran like golden thread through our many impressions [of Japan] and linked them together’

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(117). Woolf must have been struck by the pattern of interconnectedness symbolized by this strategic use of motives in North to the Orient that highlights the ‘boundlessness and connectedness of all things’, which is what Jo Alyson Parker argues Woolf ‘saw as a female way of knowing the world’ (110). One of the instances in which sound is used as a connecting device in Between the Acts is when Giles Oliver’s wife, Isa, likens her feelings for Haines, a local farmer, to ‘the infinitely quick vibrations of the aeroplane propeller that she had once seen at dawn at Croydon. Faster, faster, faster, it whizzed, whirred, buzzed, till all the flails became one flail and up soared the plane away and away…’ (8). Isa is connected at that moment to ‘the presence of [Haines’s] body in the room last night […] the words he said, handing her a teacup, handing her a tennis racquet’ (8), in addition to the aeroplane that she saw at Croydon. These different layers of past moments seem to make themselves heard in the present by the different sounds of whizzing, whirring, and buzzing—the onomatopoeic words linking these moments together as ‘all the flails became one flail’. The sounds of the propellers here also foreshadow the appearance of the aeroplanes at the end of the novel, thus connecting this passage to another. At the end of the novel, the local clergyman, Mr Streatfield, gives a speech that is interrupted by aeroplanes flying past. As he starts to say the word ‘opportunity’: The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. (119)

The focus on the ‘cut’ or ‘sever[ing]’ of Mr Streatfield’s speech highlights the disruptiveness of these military aeroplanes as opposed to the aeroplane in the beginning of the novel that connects the viewer to the land’s past through the aerial view. As opposed to the relatively gentler sounds of whizzing, whirring, and buzzing, the ‘zoom[ing]’ of the aeroplanes here appears to sound harsher as they steal the attention of the entire audience away from Mr. Streatfield’s speech.8 The aeroplanes’ disruption here seems to foreshadow the impending war (which Woolf would not live to see end) that was to disrupt life once again. They illustrate ‘the future disturbing our present’ (51), as Isa states, pointing to the layering of present and future in a single moment. At the time that Woolf was

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writing the novel, air raids were occurring frequently, disrupting her own thoughts and writing, which is reflected in her diary entries. In May 1940, just after she writes about ‘P.H.’—an abbreviation of Pointz Hall—which she reveals is ‘now bubbling’, she continues with ‘Raid, said to be warned, last night’, and another in June states simply, ‘Last night an air raid here’ (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 290–2). Yet, despite the disturbance that they cause in the novel, the aeroplanes become absorbed into the natural surroundings, as the simile of ‘wild duck’ suggests, and even become part of the performance as they also become the music. It is as if Woolf steals the aeroplanes away from military use and situates them as props within her own novel, which is suggested when an audience member later tries to analyse the play, wondering, ‘— the aeroplanes interrupted. That’s the worst of playing out of doors… Unless of course she meant that very thing…’ (124). Woolf thus turns the disruption into a moment of connection between man and ‘out of doors’ nature, alluding to the possibility of a more peaceful co-existence between man, technology and the natural surroundings as opposed to the destructive, hierarchical relationship played out in the war. Sound also alerts the characters and readers to the presence of other beings. The mysterious sounds from the gramophone, most notably, signal the presence of technology and illustrate its increasing agency as its seemingly incessant ‘tick, tick, tick seemed to hold [the audience] together, tranced’ (51). Here, Woolf hints at the power of technology to both connect people, bringing them together, and its capacity to control or overwhelm large groups of people. The mysterious sounds unsettle the audience in the beginning of the pageant: ‘Was it, or was it not, the play? Chuff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily […] Chuff, chuff, chuff the machine buzzed in the bushes’ (47). The repetition and rhythm of the mysterious and continuous ‘chuffs’ throughout the pageant resist—at first—producing intelligible sounds or music. The sounds of the gramophone appear almost ominous, making the reader and the audience uncomfortable, unsure of what they mean, causing the latter to sit down ‘hastily’ in anticipation of the performance. The ‘apprehensi[on]’ (47) within this passage highlights the characters’ (and possibly the readers’) discomfort when confronted with unfamiliar sounds. Their unease is reinforced with their constant questions and attempts at interpreting the play, as if trying to come up with a conclusion that they can be comfortable with. Mrs Swithin, for instance, who asks what the play is

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about when she arrives, tries to answer her own questions, which suggests a desire to stick to answers that she is familiar with: ‘That’s England in the time of Chaucer, I take it’ (50), she decides on her own. Besides the sounds of the gramophone and the aeroplanes (representing technology) and the words were spoken by the actors (representing humankind), there are also sounds from nature, described onomatopoeically as ‘painfully audible; the swish of the trees; the gulp of a cow; even the skim of the swallows over the grass could be heard’ (120). Even the tiniest sound, like the ‘skim of the swallows’ is allowed to be heard, thus reiterating the idea that Woolf incorporates the all-encompassing aspect of the aerial view into the purview of her later writings. Between the Acts seems to extend this ‘perpetual argument’ (North to the Orient 135) into a discussion, or a negotiation that takes place between humankind, nature, and technology. There are no winners or even protagonists in the novel, and perhaps this is the point, that there can be no victor, no single dominant character or entity, and certainly no single, dominant narrative. This concept is also consistent with Louise Westling’s argument that Woolf, in Between the Acts , ‘restore[s] human affairs to their embedded place in the wide community of earth’s beings and forces’ (41), and Woolf clearly does this by highlighting the presence—through sound, in this passage—of such beings and forces as aeroplanes, animals, human beings, and the natural world. If there are no victors or protagonists, then there can also be no single meaning to the play, which the varied and inconclusive post-performance discussion suggests: ‘I thought it brilliantly clever … O my dear, I thought it utter bosh. Did you understand the meaning?’ (122). The repetition of ellipses throughout the discussion underscores the elusiveness of the pageant’s meaning that no single conclusion can manage to capture.

Conclusion In the final chapter of North to the Orient , Lindbergh writes about a flight taken after some months of rest and remarks how ‘the objects below me wore the freshly painted vividness of things seen for the first time’ (161). Her remark attests to the great potential of the aerial view that can shed new light on the world below: very likely it appealed to Woolf, urging her to experiment with her writing style to portray a more inclusive and widened worldview in The Years and Between the Acts. As this chapter demonstrates, the ‘vividness’ that Lindbergh refers to can be read in the

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vibrant language that Woolf uses in the opening passages of The Years that depict nature, which effectively helps to draw attention to its presence alongside the characters in the rest of the narrative. The same can be said for her inclusion of a pageant and poetry in Between the Acts , which presents alternatives to the prose narrative. Additionally, in an effort to extend her narrative scope, mimicking the all-encompassing aerial view, she juxtaposes verse and prose, the different literary forms of novel, script and poetry, as well as man, technology, and nature in Between the Acts , resulting in an innovative and experimental novel.

Notes 1. ‘[…] the aeroplane takes a slow run, circles & rises. This is death I said, feeling how the human contact was completely severed’ (Bell 4: 187). 2. Woolf’s diary entry on 29 August 1935 states: ‘Harold gave me Mrs Lindbergh’s book’ (Bell 4: 335). 3. For a more in-depth study of how Lindbergh’s environmentalist efforts influenced her writing, see Haji Amran ‘Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient : An Account of an Aviator’s Emerging Environmental Consciousness’. 4. For a comparison of representations of aviation between Woolf’s earlier works, namely Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and ‘Flying over London’ (1928), and her later texts discussed in this chapter, see the chapter on Woolf in Haji Amran The Aeroplane as a Modernist Symbol: Aviation in the Works of H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. 5. See Crouch, ‘“The Surly Bonds of Earth”: Images of the Landscape in the Work of Some Aviators/Authors, 1910-1969’. 6. Further discussion on the influence of the cinematic slow-motion technique on literature can be found in Lara Feigel, Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930–1945: Reading Between the Frames 206–8. 7. In a letter she wrote to Gerald Brenan on Christmas in 1922, she states, ‘The human soul, it seems to me, orientates itself afresh every now and then. It is doing so now. No one can see it whole, therefore’ (Woolf, Selected Letters 152). 8. Woolf also highlights the sound of the military aeroplane in her essay, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, which was written during the London Blitz in 1940. The ‘zoom’ of the ‘hornet in the sky’, she writes, ‘rouses another hornet in the mind. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace’. In this essay, sound again becomes a connecting device, linking the aeroplane to the mind. In doing so, Woolf turns the destructive bomber aircraft into a

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potentially constructive machine that can instigate thoughts on how peace can be achieved. The essay illustrates her continued hopeful view of the aeroplane’s capacity to bring about positive change (Woolf, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ 216).

Works Cited Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Beer, Gillian. ‘The Island and the Aeroplane: The Case of Virginia Woolf.’ Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 265–290. Briggs, Julia. ‘The Novels of the 1930s and the Impact of History.’ The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf . 2nd ed. Ed. Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 70–88. Cevasco, George A. and Richard P. Harmond, eds. Modern American Environmentalists: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2009. Cormack, Lesley B. ‘Images of Empire in Elizabethan England.’ Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Eds. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 45–68. Crouch, Tom D. ‘“The Surly Bonds of Earth”: Images of the Landscape in the Work of Some Aviators/Authors, 1910–1969.’ The Airplane in American Culture. Ed. Dominick A. Pisano. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003. 201–218. Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Delsandro, Erica. ‘Flights of Imagination: Aerial Views, Narrative Perspectives, and Global Perceptions.’ Virginia Woolf: Art, Education and Internationalism: Selected Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf . Eds. Diana Royer and Madelyn Detloff. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2008. 117–124. Evans, Elizabeth F. ‘Air War, Propaganda, and Woolf’s Anti-Tyranny Aesthetic.’ Modern Fiction Studies 59:1 (2013): 53–82. Feigel, Lara. Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930–1945: Reading Between the Frames. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. ‘Flying in East Anglia.’ The Times, 28 February 1927: 9. Times Digital Archive. Web. 11 July 2019. Gherman, Beverly. Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Between the Sea and the Stars. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2008.

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Haji Amran, Rinni. ‘Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s North to the Orient: An Account of an Aviator’s Emerging Environmental Consciousness.’ Ikhtilaf 1 (2017): 20–29. ———. The Aeroplane as a Modernist Symbol: Aviation in the Works of H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. 2015. University of Exeter, PhD dissertation. https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/ 10871/18233. Henry, Holly. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jack, Peter Monro. ‘Virginia Woolf’s Richest Novel.’ New York Times, 11 April 1937: A1. Lindbergh, Anne Morrow. Locked Rooms and Open Doors. New York: Harvest, 1993. ———. North to the Orient. New York: Tess Press (Black Dog and Leventhal), 2004. Lindbergh, Charles. An Autobiography of Values. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Mellor, Leo. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Nicolson, Harold to Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Anne Morrow Lindbergh Papers. 1935–1936. Ms 829, Box 15, Folder 318, Correspondence from friends and acquaintances. Manuscript and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Parker, Jo Alyson. Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. Saint-Amour, Paul K. ‘Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism.’ Comparative Literature Studies 42:2 (2005): 130–161. Stein, Gertrude. Picasso. New York: Courier Dove Publications, 1984. Westling, Louise. ‘Literature, the Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman.’ Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. 25–48. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. [1941]. London: Vintage, 2005. ———. Notes & Cuttings. Monks House Papers. SxMS-18, Box 86, Folder B16f3, Special Collections, University of Sussex, Brighton. ———. ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.’ Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 216–219. ———. Virginia Woolf: Selected Letters. Ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks. London: Vintage, 2008.

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———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume I 1915–1919. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4 1931–1935. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. ———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 5 1936–1941. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. ———. The Years. [1937]. London: Vintage, 1992. ———. Three Guineas. [1938]. Hogarth Press, 1986. Yoshino, Ayako. ‘Between the Acts and Napoleon Parker - the Creator of the Modern English Pageant.’ Critical Survey 15:2 (2003): 49–60.

PART IV

Spectacle

CHAPTER 11

Spectre and Spectacle: Mock Air Raids as Aerial Theatre in Interwar Britain Brett Holman

‘Interwar Britain’ is not simply a retrospective label for the period of British history between two global conflicts. It also represents a contemporary mentality characterized by a growing existential dread caused by the fear that Europe would again slither over the precipice into another, even more total, war. As Paul Saint-Amour argues, this was a process of looking both forward and back, in which ‘the memory of one world war was already joined to the spectre of a second, future one, framing the period in real time as an interwar era whose terminus in global conflict seemed, to many, foreordained’ (8, emphasis in original). Aviation was central to this fear, because it meant that the English Channel could no longer keep war at a safe distance. Even though aircraft were still only emerging in the Great War as practical weapons, airships and aeroplanes had already begun to reach deep behind the trenches and beyond the coasts to attack civilians at the home front, far behind the

B. Holman (B) Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_11

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front lines. Between 1915 and 1918, first Zeppelins and then Gothas had carried German bombs across the North Sea to London, Dover, Hull, Leicester and even Edinburgh. The damage they inflicted was relatively small, especially when compared with the industrialized slaughter on the Western Front; still, around 1200 people were killed in total (Wiggam 50). England, as the saying went, was no longer an island.1 The continual, staggering progress of aviation since 1918 only served to make the next war seem ever more apocalyptic. The top speed of aeroplanes more than doubled between 1918 and the mid-1930s. The Atlantic was first bridged in a nonstop flight in 1919; the Pacific, in 1929. Aircraft evolved from wire and wood construction with open-air cockpits to streamlined, pressurized, stressed-metal airframes. These technological leaps led to a revolution in military aviation too (Hooton). Airpower experts predicted that at the start of the next war, clouds of bombers would darken the skies over the great cities with little warning and unload hundreds of tonnes of high explosive, incendiary and even poison gas bombs. Hundreds of thousands of civilians would perish in these air raids within a few weeks, perhaps only days; the economy would collapse as factories and transportation networks were destroyed; shell-shocked and starving refugees would flee to the countryside, desperate for peace at any price: a ‘knock-out blow from the air’ (The Next War in the Air 39–50). Former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, then the leading figure in the National Government, expressed this dismal vision most succinctly on the eve of Remembrance Day, 1932, when he told the House of Commons that ‘the bomber will always get through […] The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’ (632). Such fears were not merely an elite concern: in the Peace Ballot of 1934– 1935, an unofficial referendum on collective security, about 9.6 million people, nearly half the electorate, voted for the total abolition of military aircraft (McCarthy 359). The subsequent revelation of the illegal existence of a German air force led the British government not only to begin expanding the Royal Air Force (RAF) but also to activate plans for air raid precautions (ARP), eventually including the distribution of gas masks to the entire population and the design of family-sized shelters suitable for middle-class gardens (‘The Air Panic of 1935’; Grayzel 121–48, 200–23). Despite these preparations, official estimates in 1937 put the number of civilian dead from a 60-day bombing campaign by Germany at a terrifying 600,000 (The Next War in the Air 8, 10).

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There was another side to aviation, of course. Flight was an age-old dream, and for many people it was exciting to think of soaring into the sky and seeing the world from the perspective of a god (Singer). Utopian visions of the power of aviation to bring people together and unite the world proliferated (Bowler 109–13). Cinema audiences thrilled to a hugely popular genre of spectacular Hollywood films about aviation and aviators, including Wings , Hell’s Angels and The Dawn Patrol (Paris). The neologism ‘airmindedness’ was ever more common from the late 1920s, describing something to be encouraged ‘in the same way that the gospel of “road sense” has been propagated’: Flying, after all, is the thing of the future—its possibilities at least are immense—and the more the average person […] begins to regard the aeroplane as not an invention of the devil, but a comfortable safe and convenient means of travel, the sooner will come the development of aerial transport. (‘Joy’)

Physically going up into the air, if not as a pilot then as a passenger, was seen as the best way to encourage airmindedness (Adey 22). But this was still an uncommon experience between the wars, and most people encountered aircraft not in the air but from the ground, as spectators. Again, except near the slowly expanding network of aerodromes, aeroplanes were still relatively rare in British skies before the 1930s, to the extent that people would often still come out of their homes to see them pass overhead (Law 62–6). Aviators capitalized on this novelty by the spectacular use of aircraft in flight as entertainment, that is as aerial theatre: air displays, air races, air reviews, and air expeditions. As a visual manifestation of a technological sublime, or a sense of awe at the demonstration of human mastery over nature, aerial theatre was a distinctively modern form of mass entertainment for an increasingly airminded generation (‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 485–88, ‘The Meaning of Hendon’ 136–40). While British aerial theatre was pioneered before 1914 by civilian pilots, after 1918 it increasingly traded on a confusion between aviation as spectre and aviation as spectacle. This was because British aviation was dominated by the RAF, which had far more aircraft, pilots and aerodromes than any civilian organization. It was also because, as the newest of the three services at a time of financial austerity, the RAF needed to explain and justify its existence to the public. It therefore had both

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the ability and the need to create aviation spectacle on an impressive scale, and indeed the biggest and the best known air display in the world between 1920 and 1937 was the annual RAF Display at Hendon aerodrome in northern London. Hendon likely held the British one-day record for the biggest outdoors crowd for a ticketed event, peaking at an attendance of 195,000 in 1937.2 Other RAF displays were smaller but more widely distributed, especially Empire Air Day, which was held at aerodromes across the nation from 1934. At the same time, civilian air displays, although popular, struggled to find financial viability and eventually became increasingly sporadic. The end result was that by 1939, British aerial theatre was highly militarized. One consequence of this militarization was that the most prominent aspect of aerial theatre in Britain was the simulation of aerial warfare— usually, hypothetical, future aerial warfare. This emphasis was new. In their equivalent theatres, the British Army and the Royal Navy could recall glorious episodes from their long histories, such as Waterloo or Trafalgar. However, despite the popular myth of the ‘knights of the air’ of the Great War, who supposedly fought in a chivalrous manner unknown on the ground and the seas below, the RAF had won no wars, defeated no Napoleons.3 It therefore made a virtue of necessity, by using Hendon and Empire Air Day to emphasize its ability to wage and win the next war, independently of the older services (‘The Meaning of Hendon’ 143–46). However, the RAF was at first restrained in what it showed of the next war in its aerial theatre. To avoid the image of British bombers attacking problematically civilian targets, it rarely attempted to perform at Hendon and other displays the destruction of great cities from the air, as predicted by the theory of the knock-out blow. Instead, most of the combat scenarios it performed for the public involved combat between purely military forces or attacks on civilian targets with a military function, such as factories or ports. However, the RAF also carried out aerial theatre of an incidental kind, in the form of the annual Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) exercises from 1927 onwards, and in the late 1930s ARP drills, which by necessity focused more closely on performing the bombing of cities in public view. These mock air raids were not intended as entertainment, but they were nevertheless consumed by an audience primed by Hendon and Empire Air Day to enjoy simulations of destruction from the air as spectacle.

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This chapter will first map out the structure of Britain’s aerial theatre ecosystem, both civilian and military. It will then explore the representations of future aerial warfare performed in the RAF’s aerial theatre, in particular at Hendon and on Empire Air Day. While these displays set the template for British aerial theatre as a violent, militarized spectacle, it will be shown that mock air raids on cities were by necessity performed much more often in the ADGB and ARP defence exercises, attracting curious and even excited audiences. The need for spectacle in the RAF’s formal aerial theatre turned these into mass entertainment, projecting a particular vision of the next war. Focusing on the way in which these mock air raids combined both spectre and spectacle underscores the ambivalent nature of British airmindedness in the interwar period, which, despite the best efforts of its advocates could not banish the idea that the aeroplane was in fact an ‘invention of the devil’. Increasingly, aerial theatre was watched by spectators conscious that they might be seeing previews of their own deaths.

Britain’s Aerial Theatre Ecosystem One day each summer between 1920 and 1937, thousands upon thousands flocked to an aerodrome on the northwestern outskirts of London. Hendon, as the RAF Display was almost universally known, was a major event which took in ‘a veritable section of the totality of class’, in the words of one observer; something like ‘a large slice of cherry cake with all the fruit collected at the top’ (Charlton 6).4 Members of the Royal Family were usually present: if not the King and Queen, then the fashionably airminded Prince of Wales. Other members of the elite gathered into expensive private boxes: politicians, industrialists, military officers, foreign royalty, the nobility, the clergy. The middle classes increasingly drove, which meant they had to brave the snarls of traffic which spread out from the aerodrome, but also that they could watch the Display from, or even on, their motor cars while eating a picnic lunch. The less well off came by bus or, from 1925 when Colindale station opened, by Tube. The poorest gathered in open areas nearby where they could get almost as good a view of the action for free, or at most a small donation to a farmer.5 Even discounting these perhaps hundreds of thousands watching from outside the aerodrome, the numbers were huge. At the first Hendon

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in 1920, at least 30,000 people paid for admission; by the 1930s attendance routinely exceeded 100,000 and increased until the last Display in 1937, when it reached 195,000 (‘Royal’, ‘195,000’). These enormous crowds risked a bout of ‘Hendon neck’ to watch a dazzling day of aerobatics and simulated combat (‘Men’). The programme was meticulously planned by a dedicated office in consultation with the RAF’s senior leadership. Squadrons from all over Britain trained for their roles for months beforehand. The performances they put on varied from year to year, but typically included races, aerobatics and whimsical events such as ‘air skittles’ and ‘Air Manoeuvres to Music’ (‘The Fifteenth’ 673, ‘The Eighth’ 459). In 1925, the crowd heard the King give orders to a squadron overhead by wireless (‘Hallo, Mosquitos! Alter course 16 points outwards’); in 1935, the sky was graced by a DH.88 Comet, the streamlined winner of the recent Mildenhall–Melbourne air race (‘The RAF Display’ 409, ‘The Sixteenth’ 8). But the RAF’s purpose was, ultimately, not to entertain but to fight, and so many elements simulated combat in some form, ranging from demonstrations of fighter interceptions of bombers, to strafing ground forces, to the spectacular set-piece battles which formed the climax of nearly every Display. Observers almost universally described Hendon in words evoking spectacle and awe: it was always amazing, incredible, staggering. The excitement it created was key to its success as entertainment and as propaganda, and every year, it was routinely claimed, was bigger and better than the last: ‘The fastest military aeroplanes in the world flown by the most daring and skilful pilots, “stunt” flying and spectacular events combined to make a programme which drew a record crowd’ (‘Record’). Aerobatic routines became ever more exciting, with squadrons flying in sync, or tied together, or trailing coloured smoke. The skills of the RAF’s pilots— all regulars or even auxiliaries, rather than specialists—were demonstrated through ‘crazy’ flying like a drunkard, or perilously dipping wings to pick up messages from the ground. The public display of new types of aircraft, including in 1936 a swift new monoplane fighter, the Supermarine Spitfire, impressed crowds with the RAF’s modernity; the sheer numbers of aircraft taking part—250 in 1937—testified to its strength (‘Our London Letter’, Northern Whig and Belfast Post; ‘Efficiency’). Simulated combat, the set-pieces especially, allowed the greatest scope for impressing the spectators with exciting narratives, thrilling escapes, and (not incidentally) pyrotechnic explosions. A journalist described the 1936 set-piece as ‘a gripping sight’, evoking the dynamism of its spectacle: ‘Anti-aircraft

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guns blazed at the raiders, an observation balloon was brought down in flames, and the power station was blown to pieces by bombs’ (‘Hendon Air Thrills’). In short, Hendon was an aerial theatre (‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 488–91). In part, it was an updated version of the traditions of public spectacle invented in the nineteenth century by the British Army and the Royal Navy in order to promote images of national strength to Britain’s people as well as its enemies. The Army had its military theatre of parades and tattoos; the Navy its naval theatre of fleet reviews and ship launches (Myerly; Rüger). The RAF naturally followed suit. This was all the more necessary as airpower was an entirely new arm of national defence. The RAF itself dated only to 1918 as an independent service, and its survival remained in doubt for some years thereafter (The Birth of the RAF 81–114). Although some of the RAF’s early displays drew inspiration from the Great War, such as a demonstration of trench-strafing at the first Hendon in 1920, it could point to no great victories. This forced it to capitalize on its position at the nation’s technological leading edge, and unlike military and naval theatre, which tended to focus on historic battles when they simulated combat at all, it used aerial theatre to argue for its ability to win modern wars independently, both in the Empire and in Europe (‘The Meaning of Hendon’). It was natural for the RAF to embrace its modernity and evoke the power of the technological sublime, a sense of wonder at the power of progress (Nye). But warplanes, unlike warhorses and warships, posed a threat to civilians. The RAF’s technological sublime thus risked creating emotions of fear and terror as well as hope and joy (Malin 38). The perpetual need to meet expectations of ever-grander spectacles, or face the possibility of jaded audiences, had the potential to bring forward the trauma of the next war into the present. Hendon was at the centre of the British aerial theatre ecosystem, but aerial theatre was not inherently military (‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 495–97). Its roots were civilian and commercial, with the first British air displays held simultaneously at Doncaster and Blackpool in 1909 (Pirie 49). More enduring than these early efforts was the aerial theatre pioneered by Claude Grahame-White, runner-up for the Daily Mail prize for the first London–Manchester flight and founder, in 1911, of the Hendon aerodrome. Grahame-White moved beyond circuits and races to elementary aerobatics and spectacular stunts, such as night-flying in illuminated aeroplanes or dropping plaster bombs onto the outline of

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a dreadnought, and was successful in regularly attracting a paying audience (Oliver 17–28). Aerial theatre became a national obsession only after 1918, however. The wartime hiatus in aerial theatre was followed by a brief post-war barnstorming boom, fuelled by cheap war-surplus aircraft and a large pool of experienced pilots looking for work. The novelty of this soon wore off, and civilian aerial theatre at first struggled to find a niche. This changed in the late 1920s, as intermittent government support created an expanding network of municipal aerodromes and aero clubs which used air displays for promotion, often in conjunction with touring aerial theatre companies (‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 491–92). Thus, large displays were held at irregular intervals across the country, sometimes with dozens of aircraft and tens of thousands of people in attendance—long-distance flyer Sir Alan Cobham starred at the opening of Hull’s aerodrome, which attracted 100,000 people, a third of the population of the city—ranging down to tiny affairs like an aerial pageant at St Andrews in 1931, in which just four aircraft performed before a crowd of ‘several thousand people, who were thrilled by the remarkable displays of aerobatics’ (‘Air Pageant’, ‘Hull’s’). Prospective visitors to an aerial pageant held at Blackpool in 1928 were invited to ‘Imagine the spectacle of hundreds of planes, one moment flying in perfect formation with amazing precision, and the next—swooping, dipping, looping at perilous angles that seem to defy all the laws of aviation’ (‘Britain’s’). Despite large crowds, civilian displays found it hard to break even, and without ongoing government support they rapidly declined in number; few were held after 1934 (‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 492). Militarized aerial theatre, by contrast, continued to prosper. Hendon apart, the RAF had always sporadically mounted other displays. These usually followed the pattern already established by the RAF Display, if necessarily on a smaller scale. For example, at Hawkinge in 1921, a display was mounted by No. 25 Squadron, which included a parachute descent by ‘Miss Marshall, a London actress’ as well as ‘aerial races, formation and trick flying, upside down flying, drill in the air and battles in the air’ (‘Aerial Pageant’). Other displays were held at individual RAF stations from time to time; in 1931, for example, at Andover (home of the RAF Staff College) and Halton (No. 1 School of Technical Training). The RAF’s propaganda programme intensified with the introduction of Empire Air Day, which began in 1934 as an initiative by the Air League of the British Empire, a pressure group devoted to strengthening British

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airpower (Adey 60–1, Thompson). Despite its name and its shared date with Empire Day, Empire Air Day had little imperial content, apart from scattered observations elsewhere in the British Commonwealth. Rather, according to one newspaper it was ‘the first great nation-wide movement to make Britons air-minded and peace-minded too’ (‘Thrills’). On Empire Air Day, as the Bystander explained: All aerodromes, both civil and Service, with the possible exception of experimental stations, will be thrown open to the public. There will be an opportunity of seeing the Royal Air Force at close quarters, the idea being similar to that of Navy Week, when the taxpayer is allowed to inspect his own battle-ships. (‘The Airway’)

Initially, this meant an emphasis on the routine aspects of aviation, rather than the spectacular: for the scheme’s instigator, J. A. Chamier, the Air League’s secretary-general, one of its virtues was that ‘the public would be shown the working of the aerodrome and not be herded in enclosures to witness flying displays’ (Air League). However, despite Chamier’s protestations to the contrary, Empire Air Day almost inevitably became militarized and hence more spectacular (Chamier, Thompson 9). The acceleration of rearmament from 1935 on was one factor. But it was also difficult for local organizing committees to deviate from what the public now expected, and at many stations Empire Air Day programmes tended to become ‘a local “Hendon”’, complete with aerobatics, flypasts, and set-piece battles (‘RAF’). They were rewarded for their efforts by ever greater crowds. From an initial total attendance in 1934 of just under 140,000, in 1938 over 420,000 people visited 59 RAF and 28 civil aerodromes across Britain, despite generally poor weather—more than twice as many as went to the final Hendon (Wood 2056W, ‘Empire’). A year later, amidst rising tensions with Germany, the last Empire Air Day attracted a startling total of one million spectators across the nation (‘MPs’). Even after the end of Hendon, then, the military dominance of British aerial theatre was nearly total.

Staging the Knock-Out Blow Hendon served to advertise the RAF’s usefulness to the nation in the 1920s, against the prevailing sense that general disarmament was more likely than another European war. In the 1930s, after these hopes had

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failed, aerial theatre became increasingly focused on the possibility of another, even more total war. Hendon’s set-pieces were particularly influential in promoting ideas of what this war might look like, due to their elaborate scenarios and the large numbers of people who saw them. They have usually been interpreted as ‘a manifestation of popular imperialism’, following David Omissi’s analysis (199). However, only a minority of the featured imperial themes, and they need to be seen more as a projection of the next European war, in which airpower would play a key and possibly decisive role, independent of armies and navies (‘The Meaning of Hendon’ 143–46). For example, in 1925, the climactic scenario was set at sea, with the RAF’s torpedo bombers successfully defending a British merchant vessel against Slevic, a presumably Soviet raider, with both ships simulated by huge stage backdrops (‘The Fifth’ 424–25). In 1928 the target was an oil refinery; in 1931, a siege gun, hidden among farm buildings. Some early scenarios looked back to the war: the setting in 1921 was an obviously German village, complete with ‘gaily dressed fräuleins’ (‘The RAF Aerial’ 456). Geographically generic scenarios were the norm, such as the mock air raid performed in 1936: NORTHLAND has been trying for some time to force a decision by bombing objectives, the destruction of which will seriously hamper SOUTHLAND’S production of war material. The power station in the north corner of the aerodrome is such an objective, since it is supplying electrical power to a group of munition factories. It is known that the NORTHLAND command is contemplating an attack on this power station with a group of bombers. (Programme 73)

By making it clear that the ostensibly civilian power station had a military function, this conformed both to current interpretations of international law as well as to RAF doctrine, both of which at this time emphasized the need for precision attacks on valid military targets, rather than civilian non-combatants as such (Alexander; Parton 123–25, 126–27). Despite the efforts of organizers to provide contextualizing information, whether those watching understood this distinction is less clear (Adey 65–6, ‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 496). RAF aerial theatre beyond Hendon also included mock air raids. The 1938 Empire Air Day displayed at Upper Heyford, for example, ended with an attack on an industrial target:

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On the far side of the aerodrome the set piece—an oil refinery—had been built, and as they passed over the attacking aeroplanes bombed it with high explosive bombs, and set it alight. Some of the raiders were hit by the antiaircraft guns. Others turned back and flying at a low altitude attempted to complete the destruction of the refinery with incendiary and gas bombs. (‘Upper’)

As the ‘air raid warning signal’ sounded, ‘an excellent idea of the precautions that are mapped out to deal with such attacks’ was given (‘Upper’). At Catfoss, an ‘Air raid on defended railway station’ was performed; at Hucknall, it was promised, ‘a specially erected “factory” will be blown to bits’ (‘Empire’ 536, ‘RAF’). These mock air raids were identified as attacks on civilian targets with military uses, rather than on civilians as such. At Hendon, for example, the German village bombed in the 1921 set-piece was described as containing a military headquarters, while the power station bombed in 1936 was said to be ‘supplying electrical power to a group of munition factories’ (‘The RAF Aerial’ 456, Programme 73). Again, both of these were clearly valid targets. The RAF did sometimes venture representations of attacks on wholly civilian targets in its aerial theatre. In 1925 a squadron of its aircraft took part in ‘London Defended’, a tattoo held six nights out of seven for several weeks as part of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. According to the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent, ‘All the thrills of a night air attack were accorded in one of the main spectacles’: Warning of an invasion was sounded, and, as searchlights swept the sky, a squadron of aeroplanes, with fairy lights under their wings, soared overhead. Through the fire of anti-aircraft guns the raiders reached their objective, and a building at the west end of the Stadium was set alight by incendiary bombs, and a large tower at the east end also burst into flames. The conquest of the flames by the fire brigade, after a display of rescues by fire escapes, was an equally exciting spectacle. (‘“London Defended”’)

Similarly, the 1927 Hendon set-piece was preceded by another elaborate scenario, in which ‘Hostile bombing squadrons will endeavour to attack London from the north, and, following the receipt of wireless intelligence, fighter squadrons from the London Defence station at Hendon will ascend to intercept the raiders’ (‘Air Attack’).

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What made the representations of the bombardment of cities permissible in these displays was that the RAF was shown as defending civilians against air raids, not attacking them. Due to the undesirability of offending Britain’s potential adversaries, as well as the necessity of playing attacker as well as defender, this was difficult to do in the more usual, generic style of Hendon set-pieces. What the RAF Display, especially, did do was make the simulation of future aerial warfare not only exciting, but expected. Organizers of air displays believed that people wanted to see militarized aerial theatre of this kind. Spectators too were primed to see any kind of mock air raids as entertainment, even when they were carried out for the more sobering purposes of testing the efficiency of Britain’s defences.

ADGB and ARP Exercises as Incidental Aerial Theatre Most of the RAF’s peacetime activities were not intended to impress anyone on the ground. Yet they could also take on the character of aerial theatre, if only incidentally. Sometimes this was trivial in character, as when aircraft flew overhead on training or operations, an increasingly common sight from the mid-1930s as the RAF expanded in response to the new German threat. A Mass-Observation worker was present in Bolton, probably in 1937, when eight unidentified aeroplanes suddenly appeared overhead: Two men in the garden of no. 84 shout to attract the attention of two women. Young woman points and says, ‘Look at them!’ Other woman points and says, ‘That’s war!’ and laughs. The butcher at the Co-op shop and the landlord of the Royal pub come out to see. (quoted in Hall 113)

Even at this level, a group of aircraft doing nothing more than flying in formation was interpreted in a military context. Much more unmistakably violent, if only theoretically, were the exercises held by the RAF around the country with increasing frequency as war approached. They typically involved multiple squadrons flying simulated missions in hypothetical wars over the course of several days, something like a Hendon set-piece on a grander scale (if less spectacular, since there were no pyrotechnics). These mock air raids were meant to test the effectiveness of defence planning, organization, and equipment, as well as provide personnel with some

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experience in warlike conditions. However, by their nature they were held in the open, often using real towns as their virtual targets, and so were visible to members of the public. Especially prominent were the exercises mounted by ADGB, the command responsible for the air defence of Britain (from 1936, Fighter Command), which between 1927 and 1939 were held once or twice a year over large areas of the country, often including London as a target (Ferris; Powers 196–99, 202–4). Millions of people were thereby exposed to these mock battles, who treated them much as they did any other form of aerial theatre: as a spectacle to be watched, and even enjoyed. When the 1928 exercises began, at the first sounds of the ‘attacking’ aeroplanes ‘People rushed on to the roofs of City and West End buildings, small crowds stood in streets, and tram and ’bus passengers gazed upwards’ (‘Dummy’). There was a festive atmosphere in some places: Thousands of spectators witnessed the inauguration of the great attack, and omnibuses took parties of sightseers to the hills around London. Thrilled and greatly enthusiastic, these sightseers watched evolutions that fourteen years ago would have sent them all scuttling for cover, but no ammunition or bombs were used. (‘Wiping’)

South of London, the residents of Redhill saw ‘a thrilling fight’ between ‘nearly forty machines’: A squadron of defending planes intercepted and attacked a formation of big Hawker Rolls-Royce bombers, and, playing hide-and-seek among the clouds, managed to cut off two of the attackers from the main formation. A second squadron of fighters joined the defenders, and after a stern fight the bombers were driven off to the south-west, hotly pursued. (‘250’)

Despite such successes, the press interpreted the ‘chief lesson’ of the exercises in conformity with the knock-out blow theory: ‘in aerial warfare attack is the best defence’ (‘London Raid’). The format and location varied in the following years. London was excluded in 1930, meaning that ‘the North of England will have an opportunity of watching’ for the first time, though the Air Ministry also purposely staged mock raids in ‘sparsely populated districts’ so as to minimize disturbance (‘Aerial Warfare’). The newly formed Fighter Command conducted its first mock air raids over three nights in August 1937, pitting two hundred attacking aircraft against a similar number of defenders. ‘Thousands’ of Londoners

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stayed up until the early hours of the morning ‘scanning the skies for the searchlight displays and to see to what extent the first air defence division had been able to spot the “raiders”’ (‘400’). A parallel set of ARP exercises were held at increasingly frequent intervals from 1936, when the government began to address the public more directly about civil defence against aerial bombardment. The educational aspects of this programme included scenarios designed to provide civil defence workers and the wider public some idea of what to expect, and how to behave, if war should come (Wiggam 76–80). These exercises were carried out under the auspices of the Home Ministry and local authorities, and could be entirely ground-based, with, for example, simulated rescues of simulated victims from simulated bombed-out buildings. But they often converged with aerial theatre by the inclusion of bombers flying overhead, to add realism for ARP workers and to test the effectiveness of the blackout. Lindsey Dodd and Marc Wiggam suggest that ‘public exposure to ARP exercises in Britain remained limited’, but it is clear that many people engaged with them enthusiastically when the opportunity arose (143). At Deal in October 1936, a ‘mock raid’ was carried out by five RAF bombers, exciting tremendous curiosity among the public: People crowded the streets and watched the manoeuvres of the bombers with great interest. Even the crowd, which had gathered for a popular wedding at St. George’s Church, forgot the bride and bridegroom as the ’planes swooped over them just as the young couple left the church. (‘Air Raids’)

At Reigate the following August, twelve aeroplanes—in this case civilian, rather than RAF—‘were used to provide a realistic touch [by] giving an attractive exhibition of aerobatics’. Here, the public was asked to stay off the street, but nevertheless ‘took interest […] largely from their windows and doors’ (‘“Bombers”’). Despite poor weather at a blackout exercise at Edinburgh in April 1938, people gathered on Calton Hill and the Castle Esplanade to see the city darken, and ‘strained their eyes trying to follow the lights on the aeroplanes participating in the test’ (‘Forth’). Air and civil defence mock air raids became more elaborate, and more spectacular, as the likelihood of war increased. In August 1938, Fighter Command’s exercise again simulated attacks on London involved 900

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aircraft, which ‘brought home to millions of people the reality of preparations for defence’—if only through having ‘their afternoon nap or their night’s rest’ disturbed (Ward). At St Neots, however, ‘Hundreds’ gathered to watch an anti-aircraft unit in action, with the result that police were called in ‘to keep sufficient space clear for the sound indicators’ used for aircraft detection (‘The Week-End’). The guardedly abstract scenarios now gave way to more alarming language, and audiences were informed of the gravity of what they were seeing and hearing. One Belfast reporter described a mock raid carried out by five biplane bombers ‘flanked, in war-time formation, by Hawker “Hurricanes”’, on the Harland and Wolff shipyards at the end of October 1938, as ‘terrifying’, adding that the ‘thousands of employees […] are not likely to need any further demonstration of the disastrous possibilities of such an attack by enemy forces’ (‘“Attack”’). Aerial theatre was increasingly combined with the simulated destruction of urban areas. At Leighton Buzzard in June 1939, around 2000 people watched their high street ‘demolished in theory […] As three bombers from Cranfield RAF station made a raid’, in which ‘“bombs” exploded [and] a house erected in front of the Market Cross collapsed, burying the occupants’ (‘Two’). The final pre-war exercises held by Fighter Command, in August 1939, were the biggest yet, with 1300 aeroplanes taking part. By now, however, the novelty was wearing off, with grumbles about the inconvenience—Nottingham had its third practice blackout in less than a year—replacing reports of spectators enjoying the view (‘“Lights”’). The affective response to mock air raids was changing. Aerial theatre was no longer mere fun, and spectacle could no longer ensure enjoyment.

From Spectacle to Spectre The RAF’s mock air raids had long-disturbed left-wing critics, who especially questioned Hendon’s role in promoting militarism through its thrilling spectacles. In part, they recapitulated older debates about the malign influence of lurid sensations on impressionable minds (Omissi 214, Jackson 70). In 1924, Ernest Thurtle, a Labour MP, sarcastically asked the Under-Secretary of State for Air whether at the next RAF Display ‘there shall be depicted, not only the bombing of warships and tanks, but also the bombing of the houses of non-combatants?’ (1490). There was also persistent unease on the part of pacifists at whether schoolchildren— who were invited to attend the dress rehearsal day for free—‘should

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be allowed to witness demonstrations of destruction’ (‘The Hendon’). Another Labour MP, J. M. Kenworthy, argued that Hendon ‘helps to inure the popular mind to the prospect of further wars and to familiarise it with the spectacle of death thrown from the heavens’ (186). He found the set-pieces to be particularly distasteful: ‘The crowd cheers and goes wild with excitement. Its feelings are the same as the crowd at the Roman gladiatorial games calling for more blood’ (187). Disquiet about Hendon began to spread from the early 1930s, with the unsettled economic and political conditions in Europe and the collapse of disarmament efforts. Short-lived protest campaigns, often with links to national groups, sprang up to organize resistance, and spectacle was now used to fight spectacle: Communists attempted to disrupt the 1932 Display itself while pacifists even dropped anti-war leaflets on the surrounding suburbs (‘Hendon Air Pageant’, ‘London Gossip’). In 1933, the largely Communist Hendon and District Anti-War Council planned ‘Gas masks [sic] parades, the performance of anti-war sketches in the streets, whitewashed protests on the road surfaces, a petition to the Air Ministry and war-horror tableaux mounted on lorries’ in protest against the Display (‘The RAF Display Opposition’). Two years later, the Hendon Anti-Air Display Committee—which included pacifists and former Labour MPs Leah Manning and Fenner Brockway, as well as Communist filmmaker Ivor Montagu—called the Display ‘one of the most cunning and therefore dangerous types of pro-war propaganda’, as it was aimed at ‘deluding the population into the belief that bombers, &c., are beautiful and exciting to watch, necessary but harmless’ (Manning et al.). Despite the sometimes angry criticism from the left about the direction and even desirability of civil defence, the ARP exercises seem to have attracted relatively little comment.6 An attempt to disrupt the first blackout test by lighting ‘a chain of small bonfires which blazed out on hill-tops’ near Chatham received little publicity but resulted in a veteran and pacifist being fined £3 for lighting a fire on War Ministry land (‘Ready’, ‘Incident’). By contrast, in 1934 the Daily Herald, part-owned by the Trades Union Congress, proclaimed that the ADGB exercises were ‘one of the most potent peace propaganda exhibitions of recent years’: Night after night bomber squadrons have shown the people of London, the Midlands, and South-East England that Britain is wholly vulnerable from the air. Highly organised defences, with civilians acting as ground observers, have failed to intercept the bombers, though these have been

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much below the strength of any attacking nation. Within a week of actual hostilities being declared, in fact, huge areas of Britain and great numbers of people would, it has been proved, be wiped out. (‘Air Battles’, emphasis in original)

Indeed, by this time the crowds who were flocking to Hendon and Empire Air Day in ever larger numbers were becoming aware that the mock air raids they were seeing stood a very good chance of soon becoming real, once the interwar period finally ended. Rather than the Communist and pacifist diatribes, to which few seemed to have paid much attention, the trigger for this realization was the increasing prominence in the news of the bombing of civilians, in Abyssinia, China and especially Spain (The Next War in the Air 203–19, Stradling 177–93). During the power station set-piece battle at the 1936 Hendon, some spectators identified the attacking ‘Northland’ bombers as ‘Germans’, and afterwards one remarked that ‘It might have been Battersea power station’ that was blown up so spectacularly. When an earlier event featured a low-flying attack by fighters upon a ‘band of marauders’ crossing the imperial frontier, implausibly claimed to be white, ‘people thought of Harar’, recently the target of a devastating Italian air raid upon Abyssinian civilians (‘Our London Letter’, Birmingham Gazette). Even the aeronautical correspondent for the Tatler, Oliver Stewart, himself a fighter ace from the Great War, confessed in 1938 that ‘I cannot enjoy Empire Air Day’, especially ‘now that the grim reality is so close […] I cannot enjoy any kind of show in which modes and mechanisms for mangling human bodies are fed to the populace under a sugar-coating of brass bands and gold braid, pomp and pennants’ (522). Paul Virilio writes that ‘There is no war […] without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception’ (8). He uses as an example the terrifying sirens fixed to the undercarriage of the German Stuka dive bomber, but he might equally have meant the shock and awe induced by the aerial theatre of the RAF, deployed in peace against the people it was supposed to protect in war.

Conclusion Aerial theatre did not only draw its power from its spectacularity, but from its actuality as well. The scenarios may have been imaginary, but the aircraft were real, and the flying was, too. Those watching the machines

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soaring and tumbling through the air necessarily learned something about the actual capabilities of aircraft. In aerial theatre, aircraft were literally seen to be fast, agile and powerful, and hence useful. But those uses were bounded by the agendas of the organizers as well as the limitations of the technology, and by simulating war they helped to define a relationship between aviation, the nation, and its people, both those in the air and those on the ground (Adey 58). In the case of the RAF’s aerial theatre, this relationship was an increasingly troubling one. As David Edgerton argues, the aeroplane has never been a civilian technology needing rescuing from militaristic pervasion, as held by liberal narratives of technological progress: after all, almost no sooner had the Wright brothers successfully tested their aeroplane than they tried to sell it to the British and American War Offices (xxi, 62–6; Gollin 90–7). Aerial theatre, however, followed a different trajectory. Nineteenth-century aerial theatre, centred on the largely unmilitary balloon, was almost entirely pacifistic (‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre’ 485–86). The coming of the aeroplane in the twentieth century initially did little to change this, but the dominance of the RAF as well as the need for spectacle led British aerial theatre towards militaristic themes. The nexus between spectacle, aviation and war became mutually reinforcing, and the space diminished for a public understanding of the aeroplane as anything other than an instrument of violence. The aeroplane has always been bound up with war; it was aerial theatre that was militarized. How far did this militarized aerial theatre prepare the British public for the real aerial warfare they were about to experience? The Blitz was not a knock-out blow, but it was still devastating: between September 1940 and May 1941, more than 43,000 people were killed in Britain by German bombs (The Bombing War 126–27). The understanding of aerial warfare that spectators might have taken from watching aerial theatre depended on its form and content. As performed at Hendon and Empire Air Day, and in the ADGB and ARP exercises, it certainly differed from Hollywood’s glamourized version of aviation spectacle. While the skill of pilots was emphasized in RAF aerial theatre, particularly in air displays, it was usually as part of a team effort. Compared with the popular wartime myth of chivalrous aerial knights in single combat among the clouds, the scale of combat in mock air raids was enlarged from individuals to buildings, villages and cities, and destruction was wrought by bombs and gas, not bullets. And these imaginary wars were set at home, over Britain, rather than on the Continent.

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For all the attempts to use realistic sets and action, however, only gradually did mock air raids approach something like the knock-out blow from the air that increasingly seemed inevitable and perhaps imminent. Even then, while pacifist protestors were busy using Hendon as an opportunity to protest against war from the skies, few spectators seemed to mind until the mid-1930s, when newspapers began to fill with reports of the torment of Abyssinian, Spanish and Chinese civilians under aerial bombardment. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the ADGB exercises, with their nightly mock raids against London, were treated as free spectacles by a public used to seeing mock air raids as entertainment, worth the price of a bus ticket for a better vantage point. This kind of engagement may explain why the ARP exercises, with their simulation of the next war in the next street so far from the Hendon model of stunning aerobatics and joyous pyrotechnics, seemed to have evoked so little disquiet, let alone dissent. Despite the centrality of anxiety, fear, terror and panic to air raid narratives, the emotional history of aerial bombardment is just beginning to be written. Aerial theatre will complicate our understanding of the role played by anticipation in creating interwar Britain.7 During the 1934 ADGB exercises, ‘An impressive spectacle was provided for Coventry folk’: At least three separate assaults upon Coventry were made on Tuesday night, the first materialising about 7.30, when thousands of citizens saw three separate squadrons over the objective […] These three squadrons, operating in a clear and bright sky, presented a splendid spectacle. Flying in close formation—some as low as 2,000 feet—they ‘attacked’ Whitley [aerodrome] time after time, and were unmolested. The flashing signals, followed by clouds of white smoke, which indicated the release of bombs, were seen very clearly. (‘War’)

This turned out to be a less spectacular, and far less deadly, preview of what many of those watching were to experience on the night of 14 November 1940, when the Luftwaffe laid waste to the centre of Coventry (Taylor). Here, the distance between the next war that was imagined and the Second World War that was actually experienced was both alarmingly small and grotesquely large.

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Notes 1. A phrase which has been widely attributed to the press baron Lord Northcliffe in the context of early aviation, though it was in fact in use from the mid-nineteenth century: Gollin 193; Holman, ‘No Longer an Island? – I’. 2. Derby Day crowds at Epsom Downs exceeded half a million on a number of occasions in the interwar period, but no admission was charged. See, e.g., ‘Derby’. 3. On the construction of the ‘knights of the air’ myth, see Wohl 239–50; Bujak 43–5. 4. On Hendon generally, see Omissi; Oliver; Gardner 60–3. 5. On class, see Adey 63–5; Law 67–8. 6. On criticism of the government’s ARP programme, principally but not only from the left, see Haapamaki 105–33. 7. For some differing approaches to writing this history, see Gottlieb 171–73; Haapamaki 19–34; Holman, The Next War in the Air 180–85.

Works Cited Adey, Peter. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Malden, MA and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ‘Aerial Pageant.’ Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate, and Cheriton Herald, 30 July 1921: 8. ‘Aerial Warfare Exercises.’ Yorkshire Post, 8 August 1930: 10. ‘Air Attack on London.’ Belfast News-Letter, 31 May 1927: 6. ‘Air Battles Prove London Helpless in War-Time.’ Daily Herald, 27 July 1934: 6. Air League of the British Empire Executive Committee. Minutes. 3 October 1933. Air League of the British Empire, Air League Archives, Air League, London. ‘Air Pageant at St Andrews.’ St Andrews Citizen, 12 September 1931: 7. ‘Air Raids Precautions.’ Belfast News-Letter, 23 October 1936: 9. Alexander, Amanda. ‘The Genesis of the Civilian.’ Leiden Journal of International Law 20.2 (2007): 359–376. ‘“Attack” on Belfast Shipyards.’ Belfast News-Letter, 31 October 1938: 7. Baldwin, Stanley. Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 270 (10 November 1932): 632. ‘“Bombers” over Reigate.’ Surrey Mirror and County Post (Reigate), 6 August 1937: 6. Bowler, Peter J. A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress From H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ‘Britain’s Greatest Aerial Display.’ Nottingham Journal, 3 July 1928: 10.

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Bujak, Edward. Reckless Fellows: The Gentlemen of the Royal Flying Corps. I.B. Tauris, 2015. Chamier, J.A. ‘Empire Air Day Criticisms.’ Flight (22 June 1939): 642. Charlton, L.E.O. The Next War. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937. ‘Derby Day Crowds.’ Reading Mercury, 20 May 1939: 28. Dodd, Lindsey, and Marc Wiggam. ‘Civil Defence as a Harbinger of War in France and Britain During the Interwar Period.’ Synergies Royaume-Uni et Irlande 4 (2011): 139–150. ‘Dummy Aerial Battles.’ Nottingham Journal, 14 August 1928: 1. Edgerton, David. England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines. 2nd edition. London: Penguin, 2013. ‘Efficiency and What We May Lose by It.’ Leeds Mercury, 28 June 1937: 6. ‘Empire Air Day.’ Flight (26 May 1938): 535–536. Ferris, John. ‘Fighter Defence Before Fighter Command: The Rise of Strategic Air Defence in Great Britain, 1917–1934.’ Journal of Military History 63.4 (1999): 845–884. ‘Forth “Black-Out”.’ Scotsman (Edinburgh), 26 April 1938, 9. ‘400 Fighting Planes in Air “Battle” over London.’ Western Mail and South Wales News (Cardiff), 10 August 1937: 7. Gardner, Sophy. ‘The Prophet’s Interpreter: Sir Samuel Hoare, Hugh Trenchard and their Campaign for Influence.’ Air Power Review 21.2 (2018): 5074. Gollin, Alfred. No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902–1909. London: Heinemann, 1984. Gottlieb, Julie V. ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Grayzel, Susan R. At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain From the Great War to the Blitz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Haapamaki, Michele. The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-War Britain. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Hall, David. Worktown: The Astonishing Story of the Project That Launched Mass Observation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016. ‘Hendon Air Pageant.’ Shields Daily News, 25 June 1932: 1. ‘Hendon Air Thrills.’ Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 29 June 1936: 6. Holman, Brett. ‘No Longer an Island?–I.’ Airminded, 20 March 2019: n.p. https://airminded.org/?s=island. Holman, Brett. ‘The Air Panic of 1935: British Press Opinion Between Disarmament and Rearmament.’ Journal of Contemporary History 46.2 (2011): 288–307. ———. ‘The Meaning of Hendon: The Royal Air Force, Aerial Theatre and the Technological Sublime, 1920–1937.’ Historical Research 93 (2020): 131– 152.

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———. ‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre: Air Displays and Airmindedness in Britain and Australia Between the World Wars.’ Contemporary British History 33.4 (2019): 483–506. ———. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Hooton, Ted. ‘Military Aviation—The Slow Developer.’ Biplane to Monoplane: Aircraft Development 1919–39. Ed. Philip Jarrett. London: Putnam Aeronautical Books, 1997. 55–73. ‘Hull’s Air Pageant.’ Daily Mail (Hull), 11 October 1929: 15. ‘Incident During “Black-Out”.’ Shields News (North Shields), 15 June 1935: 6. Jackson, Lee. Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment. London: Yale University Press, 2019. ‘Joy Rides in the Clouds.’ Chichester Observer and West Sussex Recorder, 25 August 1926: 5. Kenworthy, J.M. Will Civilisation Crash? London: Ernest Benn, 1927. Law, Michael John. The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. ‘“Lights Out” Order for Half England.’ The Scotsman (Edinburgh), 11 August 1939: 9. ‘“London Defended”.’ Manchester Guardian, 11 May 1925: 9. ‘London Gossip & News.’ Midland Daily Telegraph (Coventry), 21 June 1932: 3. ‘London Raid Lessons.’ Belfast News-Letter, 18 August 1928: 11. Malin, Brenton J. Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Manning, Leah, Ivor Montagu, Arthur Gillian, Alex Gossip, A. Fenner Brockway and J.R. Campbell. ‘Air Force Display at Hendon.’ Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1935: 9. McCarthy, Helen. ‘Democratizing British Foreign Policy: Rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934–1935.’ Journal of British Studies 49.2 (2010): 358–387. ‘Men and Affairs.’ Birmingham Gazette, 4 July 1927: 4. ‘MPs’ View of Secret ’Planes’.’ Nottingham Journal, 24 May 1939: 9. Myerly, Scott Hughes. ‘“The Eye Must Entrap the Mind”: Army Spectacle and Paradigm in Nineteenth-Century Britain.’ Journal of Social History 26.1 (1992): 105–131. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Oliver, David. Hendon Aerodrome: A History. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994.

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Omissi, David E. ‘The Hendon Air Pageant, 1920–1937.’ Popular Imperialism and the Military. Ed. John M. MacKenzie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. 198–220. ‘195,000 Crowd Sees the Air Might of Britain.’ Leeds Mercury, 28 June 1937: 7. ‘Our London Letter.’ Birmingham Gazette, 29 June 1936: 6. ‘Our London Letter.’ Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 29 June 1936: 6. Overy, Richard. The Birth of the RAF, 1918: The World’s First Air Force. London: Allen Lane, 2018. ———. The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Paris, Michael. From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Parton, Neville. ‘The Evolution and Impact of Royal Air Force Doctrine: 1919– 1939.’ PhD thesis. University of Cambridge, 2009. Pirie, Gordon. ‘British Air Shows in South Africa, 1932/33: “Airmindedness”, Ambition and Anxiety.’ Kronos: Southern African Histories 35 (2009): 48–70. Powers, Barry D. Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy 1914–1939. London: Croom Helm, 1976. Programme of the Royal Air Force Air Display 1936. n.p.: n.p., n.d. ‘RAF to Demonstrate Its New Might at Hucknall To-Day.’ Nottingham Journal, 28 May 1938: 13. ‘Ready for Sudden Attack from the Air.’ Evening Telegraph (Dundee), 1 June 1935: 1. ‘Record Crowd Watches RAF Daredevils.’ Lincolnshire Echo (Lincoln), 27 June 1931: 1. ‘Royal Air Force Pageant.’ Western Daily Press (Bristol), 5 July 1920: 6. Rüger, Jan. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Singer, Bayla. Like Sex with Gods: An Unorthodox History of Flying. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Stewart, Oliver. ‘Air Eddies.’ Tatler, 15 June 1938: 522, 526. Stradling, Robert. Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Taylor, Frederick. Coventry: 14 November, 1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. ‘The Airway Becomes the Highway.’ Bystander, 20 February 1934: iv. ‘The Eighth RAF Display.’ Flight (7 July 1927): 452–460. ‘The Fifteenth RAF Display.’ Flight (5 July 1934): 666–674. ‘The Fifth RAF Aerial Pageant.’ Flight (3 July 1925): 420–425. ‘The Hendon RAF Display.’ Daily Mail (Hull), 28 June 1928: 4.

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‘The RAF Aerial Pageant.’ Flight (7 July 1921): 451–456. ‘The RAF Display.’ Flight (2 July 1925): 404–413. ‘The RAF Display.’ Flight (2 July 1935): 4–11. ‘The RAF Display Opposition.’ Hendon Times and Borough Guardian, 28 April 1933: 2. ‘The Sixteenth RAF Display.’ Flight (4 July 1935): 4–11. ‘The Week-End Air Exercises.’ Bedfordshire Times (Bedford), 12 August 1938: 12. Thompson, Rowan G.E. ‘“Millions of Eyes Were Turned Skywards”: The Air League of the British Empire, Empire Air Day, and the Promotion of Air-Mindedness, 1934–9’. Twentieth Century British History, advance access (2020): 1–23. ‘Thrills of Empire Air Day.’ Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate, and Cheriton Herald, 26 May 1934: 4. Thurtle, Ernest. Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 175, 3 July 1924: 1490. ‘250 Planes Engaged.’ Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 14 August 1928: 7. ‘Two Thousand Saw Bombers Make Mock Raid on Leighton.’ Luton News and Bedfordshire Advertiser, 1 June 1939: 15. ‘Upper Heyford “at Home.”’ Banbury Advertiser, 2 June 1938: 2. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989. ‘War in the Clouds.’ Coventry Herald, 27 July 1934: 12. Ward, Charles. ‘Thunder Was in the Air.’ Bystander, 17 August 1938: 40. Wiggam, Marc Patrick. ‘The Blackout in Britain and Germany During the Second World War.’ PhD thesis. University of Exeter, 2011. ‘Wiping Out London.’ Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 14 August 1928: 5. Wohl, Robert. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908– 1918. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Wood, Kingsley. Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 336, 1 June 1938: 2056W.

CHAPTER 12

Airminded Nationalism: Great Britain and the Schneider Trophy Competition Jeremy R. Kinney

On 13 September 1931, Flight Lieutenant John Boothman of the Royal Air Force (RAF) High Speed Flight won the Schneider Trophy flying a Supermarine S.6B air racer at five and a half miles per minute over the Solent in southern England. Hundreds of thousands of excited spectators witnessed the event, including many who paid a first-class fare to view the contest from the White Star Liner Homeric (James 623). Two weeks later, Flt Lt George Stainforth flew a record speed of over 400 mph in another S.6B, making him the fastest man in the world. These flights initiated a celebratory reaction to the airplane, the RAF and British aviation in general, especially among airminded advocates in industry and the press. In an address broadcast over the BBC three days later, Sir Robert McLean, the head of Supermarine Aviation, hailed the victory as a ‘wonderful spiritual tonic’ that deflated a growing ‘inferiority complex’ in Great Britain that existed due to financial, cultural and

J. R. Kinney (B) Aeronautics Department, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_12

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political instability brought on by the worldwide economic depression (‘Broadcasting’ 10; McLean 784). For C. G. Grey, the editor of the Aeroplane, winning the trophy demonstrated the ‘British way’ of delivering a ‘supreme effort[…]to defeat time and space when the occasion arises’ and illustrated why Great Britain was a superior nation of the world (‘On the Schneider Trophy Contest’, 1931 686). From 1927 to 1931, the British government competed in the Schneider Trophy competition, the world’s most famous air race, in the name of airminded nationalism. Winning races and setting speed records in front of some of the largest public crowds in interwar Britain, with the world watching, encouraged the development of new technology, showcased industrial prowess, marketed aeronautical exports, upheld national honor and engineering prestige and fuelled airmindedness. The effort consisted of temporary partnerships between industry, government research, the RAF and enthusiastic groups and individuals with overall leadership from the British department responsible for aviation, the Air Ministry. Participation in this high-speed motorsport tested those relationships while taxing the coffers of the Treasury and generating a public debate regarding the Air Ministry and the RAF’s appropriate role in the spectacle of air racing. In the process, the pilots, designers, and benefactors involved became aviation celebrities and national heroes that cemented into popular memory the image of high-speed aircraft as stirring symbols of modernity and national pride in the 1930s and 1940s.

Airminded Nationalism and Air Racing Great Britain’s participation in the Schneider Trophy competitions illustrates how deeply interwoven was the sport and technology of government-sponsored air racing with ideas of nationalism and modernity. Each of these elements had a distinct British character that energized an airminded nationalism on the part of aeronautical enthusiasts determined to bolster the nation’s economic, industrial, military, and cultural well-being through flight. Their actions revealed a persistent belief that Britain, its empire and the airplane were inseparable. Air racing and the setting of speed records facilitated the expansion of, and enthusiasm for, ‘mechanized sports’ in interwar Britain, where achievements equated to modernity and progress in society overall (Huggins and Williams 63–4). Jack Williams has uncovered how ‘aeroplane sport’, which ranged from rallies and tours to racing in the air,

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revealed the intentions of the airminded upper-class enthusiasts—aristocrats, the wealthy and well connected, professionals in aviation—that controlled the activity. They advocated for government support of flying, something they refused to do for other ‘sports’ such as automobile racing. They wanted to increase popular access to the sky while reinforcing imperial interests and the existing social status quo (450–51, 459). The sport of Schneider Trophy air racing inspired technological innovation to gain a competitive edge. Air racers incorporated the stateof-the-art in high-speed design and technology: aerodynamic streamlining; high-horsepower, liquid-cooled engines; advanced fuels; and metal propellers. Their spectacular performance led their aeronautical communities to herald them as national symbols of advanced engineering and technology. Historians have documented that innovation story as part of the international quest for speed in which Britain triumphed over all rivals.1 Countless popular books have celebrated these technologies, although only recently have scholars analysed the engineering process of the designers behind the Schneider racers.2 Historians have addressed that interrelationship where British aviation reinforced ideas of nation, industry and modernity, and aeronautical achievement signified national strength. Gordon Pirie’s analysis of imperial civil aviation has documented the existence of an interconnected ‘Air Empire’ stretching to Asia and Africa (Air Empire 1–4; Cultures and Caricatures 1–6). David Omissi and Bret Holman’s studies of the annual Hendon Air Pageant from 1920 to 1937 have revealed the ‘propagandist purpose’ (Omissi 199) of a ‘militarised aerial theatre’ (Holman 485– 88) that promoted popular imperialism through spectacular and violent, but bloodless, public displays. Above all else, as David Edgerton has argued, the enthusiasm for flight across political and ideological spectrums reflected a national emphasis on war, science, technology and industry (xiv-xvii). Most of all, Britain’s commitment to air racing embraced modernity. A Schneider racer was the ultimate icon for what Robert Wohl has characterized as an early twentieth-century Western ‘cult of speed’ that valued fast-moving technologies like the automobile, train, motorboat, and steamship and celebrated the exploits of speed-hungry aviators via newspapers, radio, and newsreels. Britain’s celebration of the glamour, danger, and excitement, or what Wohl termed the ‘spectacle’, of flight through air racing connected people to aviation and generated airmindedness (4, 279). These ‘modern wonders’ as Bernhard Rieger has called

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them, and their associated ‘ideas of scientific and technological superiority’, permeated the imperialist mindset and helped define British notions of modernity. Interwar Britain embraced the airplane as a modern technological symbol intimately connected with national identity and international prestige (6, 224–79).

The Schneider Trophy and the Militarization of High Speed Flight French industrialist and early aviator, Jacques P. Schneider, created the Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider in 1912 to encourage the international development of commercial seaplanes through the sport of air racing. The details of the competition changed over the years, but there were four constants. It was not an all-out race, but a time trial where aircraft took off at intervals and raced against the clock around a course in the sky. A navigability test assessed the seaworthiness of the racer. The country that won the previous year hosted the next race, and the first country to win three competitions retained the trophy permanently. Amateur and professional pilots and aircraft manufacturers from the early flight era from across Europe and North America first competed for the trophy in 1913. They raced under sanction by their national aero clubs, which in turn were part of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the international regulatory body for aviation records founded in 1905 to advance the ‘science and sport’ of aviation (‘History’). Britain’s first two Schneider victories reflected the private and sporting nature of the contest, much like the equally new form of automobile racing. Sopwith Aviation Company test pilot C. Howard Pixton flew the company’s Tabloid biplane at a speed of 86 mph to win at Monaco in April 1914. On the day of the race, the Aeroplane wished the Sopwith team ‘every success’ in their effort to ‘uphold the honour of British sport’, since it was the first time a British team competed in the Schneider (‘Sopwith Schneider Cup Machine’ 454). The Royal Aero Club (RAeC) took possession of the Schneider Trophy and put it on display in London. The bloodbath of World War I suspended the competition until 1918 and bad weather and administrative difficulties the following year resulted in no winner being declared. Italian fliers and aircraft dominated the 1920 and 1921 races. At Naples in August 1922 Henri Biard, the test pilot for Supermarine Aviation Works of Southampton flew the company’s Sea Lion II biplane flying boat

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to victory at a speed of 145 mph. Despite the success, it was no small feat for manufacturer-sponsored teams to enter the Schneider. H. T. Vane of Napier and Son, the manufacturer of the Sea Lion II’s engine, noted that his company had to form a coalition in partnership with Supermarine to finance their team since their combined shareholders ‘objected to money being used for sporting purposes’ (quoted in ‘On the Royal Aero Club Dinner’ 342). The RAeC hosted the 1923 Schneider competition at Cowes, the Isle of Wight, on 28 September. Besides British and French teams, the US Navy entered three aircraft. In the United States, Army and Navy teams competed against each other in the Pulitzer landplane races, which served as their aerial proving grounds for high-speed aeronautical technology and a means for those organizations to promote their roles in their national defence establishments. The Navy’s Curtiss CR-3 racers, equipped with floats, came in first and second. Lieutenant David Rittenhouse won at a speed of 177 mph, which was twenty miles an hour faster than Henri Biard’s third place finish in the Supermarine Sea Lion II. British observers reflected on the stunning success of both the Navy’s racers, their technology, and the next steps for British participation. To W. H. Sayers, formerly of the Royal Air Force, everything about the Curtiss racers, from their propellers and engines to the overall streamline design, was ‘nearly perfect in every detail’. Equating the Schneider to an ‘inter-governmental sport’, Sayers believed ‘one cannot expect the British Aircraft Industry to compete on level terms with the American Government’ (346). The Times saw no momentum for Air Ministry involvement when it reported that ‘British habits’ did not support government organization and control of ‘a sporting event’. It was the responsibility of the RAeC and the trade group, the Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC) (‘The Schneider Cup’ 9). C. G. Grey lamented that the Air Ministry and the Admiralty did not join in keeping for the Empire the ‘honour and glory’ of possessing the trophy. He hoped ‘some English millionaires’ would fund the next British effort since ‘nobody in the Trade’ could afford to participate (‘On the Schneider Trophy Contest’, 1923 538, 540). In reaction to the American victory at Cowes, the Air Ministry embarked upon a high-speed aircraft development programme that included the Schneider competition and world record attempts as an adjunct activity for the manufacturers, their pilots, and the RAeC. The government provided funding through contracts to airframe and engine

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manufacturers, Supermarine in Southampton, Gloster in Cheltenham, and Napier in London, while the research staff at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment at Felixstowe, and the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington provided technical assistance and data. The Air Ministry made the aircraft available to the manufacturers for their pilots to train and compete in the Schneider while the RAeC continued to represent and organize the racing effort. The programme was a technological point of departure for the British aviation industry. Supermarine’s self-taught chief engineer and designer, R. J. Mitchell, responded to the Air Ministry’s call for a high-speed aircraft with the futuristic S.4, which featured an improved 700 horsepower Napier Lion engine, a metal propeller, a wood, monocoque fuselage, one-piece cantilever monoplane wing, and two metal floats. The design was in direct contrast to his previous Sea Lion II flying boat racer. While preparing for the 1925 Schneider competition, Henri Biard established a world’s speed record of 226 mph for seaplanes on 13 September. Confident in success, the British team travelled to the United States for the Schneider competition near Baltimore, Maryland. During the week of the race, Harrods, the landmark London department store, displayed a facsimile of the S.4’s Napier engine for its shoppers to view (‘Harrods’ 7). Unfortunately, Biard wrecked the S.4 and did not race. US Army Air Service Lt. James H. Doolittle won the Schneider in a Curtiss R3C-2 racer on October 25 with an average speed of 232 mph. He shattered Biard’s record the following day with a world record speed of 246 mph. A British team did not compete in the 1926 Schneider competition at Hampton Roads, Virginia. The government teams of the United States and Italy opposed each other with Major Mario de Bernardi of the Regia Aeronautica winning at a speed of 247 mph. The American press cast the loss as a ‘crushing defeat’ that placed the United States at the ‘tail end’ of nations competing for aeronautical supremacy (‘America Outclassed’ S1). After the race’s conclusion, the Air Ministry expanded its highspeed aircraft programme to include RAF pilots in preparation for the September 1927 Schneider contest at Venice (Orlebar 24). Called the High Speed Flight, or simply ‘The Flight’, they were the first service pilots to work exclusively in high-speed flying. Assignment to the Flight was an honour. In RAF organization, a ‘flight’ is one-half of a squadron, which is approximately six pilots. There were hundreds of applicants, and

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the selection committee based its recommendations on service experience and individual qualifications (Schofield 170–71). The Air Ministry’s decision to compete in the Schneider Trophy Race as a ‘service exercise under Government auspices’ reflected the fact that Britain’s two main adversaries, the United States and Italy, had abandoned private participation and competed as national governments. The Air Council, the governing body of the Air Ministry, justified the effort because it would stimulate new aircraft designs from industry and test the airmanship of its pilots in a competition environment (Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 1). The press took note that ‘in aircraft circles there is general satisfaction that at last the British effort […]is being undertaken from first to last as a service exercise’ (‘The Schneider Trophy’, Times 7). Besides racers from Short Brothers and Gloster, the Air Ministry ordered three new S.5 aircraft designed by Mitchell at Supermarine. The ultramodern S.5 racer featured hybrid construction with a metal fuselage and floats joined by flush rivets and plywood externally braced wings that spanned only thirty feet. The Napier Lion engine generated almost 900 horsepower. Graceful, streamline and fast, the S.5 was so advanced that Flight member Harry Schofield admitted that it ‘took our breath away’ when the team first saw it. They instantly knew they had a chance to win the Schneider (195–96). Despite their gracefulness, the S.5s were temperamental, unreliable, and dangerous to fly. The erratic engagement of the supercharger at high speed could explode the engine. The pilots easily went unconscious during high-g turns equal to five to six times the force of gravity. The poisonous fumes from the special aviation gasoline made Schofield feel ‘a wee bit swimmy’. Nevertheless, he justified being ‘cramped in a tiny cockpit behind vast power, crashing through the atmosphere’ because it worked towards the completion of ‘another step in the advancement of science and the prestige for our Country and Service’ (189, 197, 201, 203, 205). Before the Flight and their aircraft left for Venice, the Air Ministry held the first official inspection of the team at Calshot in August. The racers, the S.5 and Gloster IV, were on display, and the pilots answered questions. The press was not able to see the racers fly due to bad weather, but The Times insisted that a British victory ‘would have an invaluable effect on British air prestige’ (‘The Schneider Trophy’, The Times 7). The militarization of the British Schneider Trophy effort yielded results. Flight Lieutenants Sidney Webster and O. E. Worsley were the

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only two aircraft to finish the race at Venice. Webster’s first place victory was at a record speed of 281.65 mph. Stanley Spooner, the editor of Flight , declared the race ‘cannot fail to increase British prestige abroad’, especially since Webster exceeded speeds generated by landplanes for the first time and made the Schneider the world’s fastest air race (677). After the victory in Venice, Flt Lt Samuel Kinkead of the Flight set out to break the world’s speed record and the mythical 300 mph barrier on 12 March 1928. Speeding at over 300 mph just 150 feet above the water, Kinkead crashed his S.5 into Southampton Water and died instantly (‘Fatal Speed Trial’ 16). The Times characterized the ‘disaster’ as ‘no sporting adventure’, but a ‘serious experiment in the improvement of air navigation and air transport’ that was ‘made in the interests of the Empire and with official permission and encouragement’ (‘The Disaster in the Solent’ 17). As Bernhard Rieger has outlined, accidents contributed to ‘Progress’ (36). The High Speed Flight formed in January 1929 in preparation for competing the following September in response to the FAI authorizing the Schneider competitions be held on a biennial basis (Gwynn-Jones 129). The core group were flight instructors known for their skill as an aerobatic demonstration team at the RAF Hendon Pageants. The Air Ministry ordered two new S.6 racers from Supermarine, which featured all metal monocoque construction. A manufacturer new to the programme, Rolls-Royce, provided the new 1900 horsepower R twelve-cylinder Vee engine. With the race in England, there were many opportunities for the Schneider team to interact with the public. Flight Lieutenant D’Arcy Greig remembered that in the immediate days before the 1929 race at Calshot, the Flight welcomed members of Parliament, the Air Council and various royal, governmental, and industry dignitaries to survey the aircraft and component equipment. They also formed relationships with several aviation journalists (254, 237–38). Freelance writer F. A. de Vere Robertson authored a recurring column for Flight that went into the dayto-day preparations for the race. He shared the personalities and attributes of the members of the Flight since though ‘serving officers they may be’, they were ‘now public characters’ (933). On 7 September 1929, Flying Officer Richard Waghorn came in first in his S.6 at an average speed of 328 mph over the Solent (Fig. 12.1). The closest Italian racer was 40 mph slower. Flying Officer Richard Atcherley set two new world speed records in excess of 330 mph over specific parts

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Fig. 12.1 Flying Officer Richard Waghorn speeds by a crowd of spectators in his Supermarine S.6 air racer during the 1929 Schneider Trophy Competition. (Image courtesy of Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)

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of the course. After the race, team commander Squadron Leader Augustus Orlebar flew his S.6 to an absolute speed record of 358 mph. At the award ceremony following the 1929 race, the fervour for the British victory inspired Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to assure the Italian delegation that ‘we were going to do our level best to win again’ (‘Message from the King’ 14). His statement implied that Great Britain would pursue another victory to retire the trophy to Britain. The press celebrated the victory and MacDonald’s pledge. The Daily Mail heralded it as ‘a triumph for Britain’ that would ‘enable our aircraft firms and engine-makers to reap a rich harvest in sales in all the aerial markets of the world’ (‘What the Win Means’ 5). The public attendance at the 1929 Schneider competition made it arguably the largest spectator event in Britain during the interwar period (Williams 457). The slate card in an Empire News Bulletin newsreel shared with cinemagoers that ‘hundreds of thousands of people lined the Solent Course to witness the great race’ (‘1929 Schneider Air Trophy’). The Daily Mail asserted that a million spectators converged on the shores and waters of the Solent to watch that drama unfold in the sky. Thousands of them, the majority reported to be women, travelled to the area on the ‘greatest trek ever known’ in England. Special excursion trains carried 100,000 people from London alone (‘All Roads Lead to the Solent’ 9). According to The Times, the spectators enjoyed ‘one long succession of thrills and surprises’ as the racers ‘roared and screamed above their heads’ in ‘projectile-like flight’ (‘Man and the Schneider Trophy’ 13).

Was Air Racing Worthwhile? The Air Ministry’s militarized air racing campaign appeared to be on course with one more race to win. Britain’s status through the lens of national reputation and military power, industrial and engineering prestige and competitive sport was on the rise. There was, however, the question of whether there was going to be a race in 1931. Underneath the airminded spectacle and rhetoric, government and military leaders discussed whether air racing was an appropriate use of Treasury funds and Air Ministry personnel and equipment. Combined with outside factors, such as the worldwide economic depression, an ongoing re-evaluation of the value and purpose of international air racing led to the Air Ministry’s withdrawal from the Schneider programme. The reaction of airminded

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nationalists erupted into a public discourse in the nation’s media and Parliament. The Air Council expressed its doubts on the value of continued participation in the Schneider soon after the 1927 competition and gathered a long list of reasons why air racing was not worthwhile over the following two years. They recommended a withdrawal from Schneider participation for reasons that included the fact that the US government, a primary adversary, was not going to continue its participation. The competition was not in ‘the spirit of the sporting event’ and might lead to diplomatic incidents through continued and intense international rivalries. The Air Ministry could support high-speed aircraft development by ‘other and less costly means’, such as conducting record attempts and time trials on an ad hoc basis (Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 1–2). Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Cabinet countered the Council’s decision in January 1928 by requesting that the Air Ministry ‘spare no endeavour’ to secure another win in 1929. The Air Council adopted reasons that easily justified to the Treasury the cost of organizing, executing, and competing in another Schneider competition. Primarily, the RAeC was not capable of organizing and hosting an international event equal to the one provided by the Italian government at Venice in 1927, and no British team could hope to compete successfully on its own without government support. Moreover, the Air Ministry could not simply give money to a ‘private undertaking’ (Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 2–3). The Air Council rekindled its resolve to withdraw from air racing after the highly successful 1929 competition. Just days after the race, the Chief of the Air Council, Hugh Trenchard, communicated to the Secretary of State for Air, Christopher Thomson, his concerns regarding whether the Air Ministry entered the next contest. If that were to happen, the Air Ministry should authorize a ‘Service team under Service arrangements’ and win, but he bluntly stated, ‘I see nothing of value in it’. Racing drained financial, personnel, and engineering resources, and it was a distraction from more important work required by the RAF. The Service’s technical specialists devoted two months while the manufacturers allocated up to a year to prepare for the race (Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 5). There were also diplomatic and institutional concerns. The competition was not in ‘the spirit of the sporting event’ and might lead to diplomatic incidents through continued and intense international rivalries

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(Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 1). For the service, air racing was ‘not good for the morale of the Air Force as a whole’ because the winning officers received too much public attention, which caused resentment among fellow service members (Trenchard, Minute Sheet). Trenchard’s belief echoed larger societal values in interwar Britain that hailed sportsmanship and camaraderie over individualism and celebrity (Huggins and Williams 58–9). Above all, there was the expense. The cost of the aircraft and engines, including spares and necessary repairs for 1927 and 1929, was £196,000 and £220,000, respectively. The conveyance of the British team to Venice and maintaining them there cost £3380, while accommodation and hospitality for the Italian team and other arrangements in 1929 was approximately £4000. As for Ramsay MacDonald’s pledge that ‘we were going to do our level best to win again’, the Air Council believed that the British aviation industry, which had been experiencing success from a reported £2 million in exports, had the capital and resources to support the Schneider competition in full for 1931 (Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 5–6). A conference between the Air Ministry and the RAeC estimated the cost for a 1931 competition encompassing both the aircraft and necessary arrangements to be approximately £100,000 (‘Cost of Schneider Trophy Contest’). The Air Ministry released a statement on 25 September 1929 officially withdrawing from Schneider competition (Barker 215). Debates and discussions with the RAeC, the SBAC, and others continued through 1930. With no resolution, the Air Ministry issued a final communique stating its position on 15 January 1931. It stated that while ‘the entry of a Royal Air Force team had given a much-needed impetus to the development of high-speed aircraft, sufficient data had now been collected for practical development in this direction, and that the large expenditure of public money was therefore no longer justifiable’ (‘Schneider Trophy Contest, 1931’). The intense reaction to the Air Ministry’s announcement reflected the airminded nationalism of the aeronautical community. RAeC Chairman Philip Sassoon argued that the ‘money spent on the Schneider Trophy Contest would not be wasted, but invested’ in terms of orders for manufacturers. Competing was also a matter of national pride. In early 1931, British subjects and technology held world speed records in the air and on land and water (‘The Schneider Trophy’, Flight 86, 88).

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As those negotiations were taking place, the airminded press took the debate to the public and made its arguments along political lines, which emphasized the interrelationship between sport, nationalism, and industry (Wohl 1). ‘A Special Correspondent’ in the right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail commented on the public’s ‘complete contempt’ for the ‘Socialist Government’ choosing not to ‘defend the proud position’ the British aviation community held ‘as speed champions of the air’. If no effort was made to win ‘one of the greatest sporting events in the world’, then the writer threatened that ‘trade will follow the trophy’ to a foreign country (‘If We Let the Schneider Trophy Go’ 11). Letters to the editors of The Times and the Daily Mail echoed similar themes. Earl Howe, a highly successful international race car driver and former member of Parliament, wrote that he could conceive ‘no worse advertisement for our country’ than the ‘absolutely disastrous’ decision to withdraw support of a race that supported the aviation industry (6). Samuel Hoare stressed that air racing and record speed attempts were not ‘stunts’, but an ‘outward and visible sign of the surpassing excellence of British methods, designs, materials, and, above all else, British pilots’. The decision not to race was ‘a great pity’ (15). K. Massey and G. O. Saffery of Clifton Gardens, Maida Vale, London, asked, ‘How can the present generation allow the Old Country to drop out of this Homeric struggle, especially in these times of dire necessity, when Britain’s every gesture is watched and noted by her foreign rivals in sport and trade?’ (8) Norman Cameron from Wrexham in northern Wales accused Ramsay MacDonald’s government of ‘dealing a blow at both our air prestige and our aircraft industry from which we shall not quickly recover’ (10). In the end, the Daily Mail affixed the blame on the Air Ministry. It was ‘the runaway gentlemen of the Air Ministry’ that despite leading the RAF, the ‘most sporting and daring force in the world’, they adopted the ‘non-English attitude’ of ‘WE CAN’T WIN’. Great Britain was a ‘nation of sportsmen’ and ‘should defend the trophy and not surrender it without a fight’ (‘The Real Schneider Runaways’ 9). In a brief, but productive, debate in the House of Commons on 29 January 1931, MacDonald and airminded members of the House of Commons led by Oliver Locker-Lampson, Philip Sassoon and Samuel Hoare, came to a compromise. The government guaranteed participation, but qualified that ‘the running of the race will not involve a public charge’. The RAeC had to raise the adequate funds and if they could, then the Air Ministry and the RAF would participate (House of Commons).

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In reaction to the outrage put forth by the British aeronautical community, Lady Houston, an eccentric shipping heir and philanthropist, offered the required £100,000 in January 1931. The richest woman in England, Houston was a staunch Conservative, an ardent nationalist, and an outspoken and virulent critic of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. She used the public opportunity of funding the Schneider to go on the offensive. She declared in a telegram to MacDonald, ‘To prevent the socialist government from being spoilsports, Lady Houston will be responsible for all extra expenses beyond what Sir Philip Sassoon says can be found, so that Great Britain can take part in the race for the Schneider trophy’ (Houston telegram). Houston’s additional public statements clearly indicated her intentions. From her perspective, ‘Every Briton would rather sell his last shirt than admit that England could not afford to defend herself’. She accused the MacDonald government of fostering a ‘poisonous doctrine’ that England was a ‘third-rate power’ (quoted in ‘Schneider Race Guarantee’ 7).

Triumph, Legacy and Legend The influx of private funds gave the various elements making up the British Schneider Trophy effort six months to prepare. Mitchell and Supermarine provided two highly modified and improved versions of the previous S.6 aircraft, the S.6B, powered by four new 2300 horsepower Rolls-Royce R engines (‘Minutes of Conference on High Speed Seaplanes’). The 1931 Flight, which included Squadron Leader Orlebar and Flight Lieutenant Stainforth from the previous team, arrived at the Solent and prepared for the race (McAlery 636, 638). The preparations were costly. Accidents led to Flt Lt E. J. L. Hope receiving a serious ear injury and reassignment while Lt R. L. Brinton of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm died while attempting the dangerous and complicated takeoff sequence for the first time (Barker 231–33). On 13 September, Flight Lieutenant Boothman and the S.6B flew the Schneider course at five and a half miles per minute, or 340 mph. They faced no competitors. France and Italy were unable to field viable teams and the British did not agree to an extension because the arrangements were already in place to hold the competition. Despite the absence of a true international contest, there were hundreds of thousands of excited spectators present. They viewed the race between Spithead and the Solent from either the land or the water. After the race, the Flight met with Lady

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Houston on her yacht Liberty. Building upon successive victories in 1927 and 1929, the High Speed Flight’s achievement earned the RAeC, on behalf of Great Britain, ownership of the Schneider Trophy and with it the status of being a world leader in aeronautical technology. The Times ’s summation of Boothman’s flight reflected the interrelationship between sport, technology, nationalism and modernity, and the place of the Schneider in British aviation in 1931. The race presented ‘a wonderfully thrilling impression of almost inconceivable speed and power to the spell-bound spectators’ that crowded the shores of the course. While in pursuit of the Schneider, the British aeronautical industry led the international effort to develop high-speed aircraft to ‘a high pitch of efficiency’. The approximately 300 mph increase in speed over the course of eleven competitions since 1913 offered the possibility of ‘even greater speeds’ in the future. There was also a change in tone towards the Schneider competition. The high-speed ‘machines’ had ‘served their purpose well at a great cost of money and life’ and it was time to move on and use that knowledge and experience to develop more practical and ‘less speedy’ aircraft (‘Speed in Excelsis’ 13). Before disbanding for the final time, the Flight did have one last major objective, a world speed record. On 29 September 1931, Flt Lt George Stainforth achieved an average of 407 mph, being the first man in the world to exceed 400 mph. The King received both Stainforth and Boothman at Buckingham Palace on 31 October and decorated them with the Air Force Cross for their achievements (‘Court Circular’ 15). In contrast to Trenchard’s disdain for individual celebrity, prevailing cultural trends exalted aviators as heroes of mass culture (Wohl 4). Stainforth’s and the Flight’s popularity reflected the zealous enthusiasm for air racing, aerial motorsports, and aviation in general. As part of the popular reaction, the official journal of the Automobile Racing Association, Speed and Sport , named him the ‘No. 1 King of Speed and Sport’, and he became an aviation celebrity (Stowe 2). In the same issue, the popular cartoonist A. E. Morton illustrated the importance of Stainforth and the S.6B, the fastest pilot and airplane in the world, to Great Britain’s mechanized sporting life. He placed them alongside the fastest driver and automobile in the world, Sir Malcolm Campbell and his Bluebird II land speed record car, amidst the chaos of his Imps enjoying a variety of sporting activities, including motorcycle and motorboat racing (8). The Flight’s status as the world’s fastest pilots earned them a place for posterity on collectible cigarette cards, which were an important indicator

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of celebrity and fame for aviation and sports figures. Stainforth appeared alone in Park Drive’s Champions series in 1934 (Gallaher Champions Set’) and Carreras’s Famous Airmen and Airwomen in 1936 (Rickey and O’Shaughnessy). Atcherley, Boothman, Orlebar, and Schofield joined him in Lambert & Butler’s Famous British Airmen & Airwomen in 1935. The series celebrated the nation’s greatest aviators, including Sir Alan Cobham and Amy Johnson (Shupek). Great Britain’s airminded and nationalist campaign to capture the Schneider Trophy fostered a technical and cultural legacy. The nation won the status as a world leader in aeronautical technology. The design, materials, and construction of the racers and their component systems reflected the available state of the art in aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, and mechanical engineering. The racers themselves were not the first in a series of successful operational military aircraft. The commander of the 1929 and 1931 Flights, Squadron Leader Orlebar, reflected a Schneider racer was a ‘demonstrator of possibilities’ built to investigate high-speed flight rather than an ‘actual giver of service’ (213). The technical legacy of the race was the rapid generation of the knowledge, experience and confidence required to design, build, and fly high-speed aircraft (Anderson 134). The Air Council, as part of its discussions on whether to continue in the Schneider competitions, had no qualms about that contradiction. The intense, creative and high-pressure environment accelerated development from three years under normal conditions to one. Instead of designing according to specifications, R. J. Mitchell and his team had free rein to create their air racers. For RollsRoyce engineers, that meant doubling the available engine power for the 1929 race (Trenchard, ‘Schneider Trophy’ 4). The Times shared that dynamic with its readers where a racer not made for ‘normal conditions’, or operational service, was of great value because the required knowledge was generated in a ‘comparatively short time’ that could be used for other designs (‘Four Hundred Miles an Hour’ 13). R. J. Mitchell himself believed that the development of racing seaplanes ‘had a pronounced influence on the design of both military and civilian types of aircraft’ (1429). For his work on racing aircraft, he received a CBE in 1932. Mitchell finished his career with the streamline, all metal and eight-gun Spitfire fighter with a Rolls-Royce Merlin V-12 engine capable of over 300 mph that first flew in March 1936. Upon his death from cancer in June 1937, the aeronautical community lauded him as one

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of the Britain’s most famous and versatile aircraft designers (‘The Passing of a Famous Designer’ 604; Anderson 150). Three years after Mitchell’s death, the Battle of Britain raged in the skies over England. Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s legendary ‘Few’ in their Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes fought Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe in the first major military campaign fought entirely by air forces. The RAF’s victory inspired the public to embrace the Spitfire, and by extension, Mitchell, as icons of Britain’s resolve against invasion and its overall greatness as an aeronautical nation. Reflecting that enthusiasm, British Aviation Pictures released the widely popular, The First of the Few, starring Leslie Howard as R. J. Mitchell, in August 1942 (Mackenzie 29–39). The First of the Few cemented into popular memory the Schneider Trophy competition as the origin story for one of Britain’s greatest moments, the Battle of Britain, and one of its most iconic technologies, the Spitfire. Starting at the height of the battle, the film quickly flashes back to an idealized retelling of the Schneider competitions before Mitchell works himself to death to introduce the Spitfire on the eve of World War II. Described as ‘an imaginative biography’ of Mitchell (‘The First of the Few’, Times 2), the film cast the technical, sporting, airminded, and political reasons underpinning the British government’s foray into air racing as Conservative nationalist propaganda that justified rearmament (Edgerton 59–60). In this story, Mitchell and Lady Houston, with the airminded RAeC and RAF in support, act as ‘farsighted’ mavericks and patriots defying ‘near-sighted’ government and industrial leaders that resisted military preparedness with war on the horizon. In the end, their efforts culminated just in time to ensure the Spitfire was available for when the RAF, and England, needed it. Ultimately, viewers come away with the impression that the Schneider Trophy existed to create the Spitfire as part of a long-term defence programme (The First of the Few 53:47–1:03:44). The powerful nationalist and innovation story of The First of the Few has persisted to this day. A 2018 documentary about the Spitfire, released in recognition of the centenary of the RAF, uses the fictional scenes from the film and historic newsreel footage and media to intertwine the people, aircraft, and achievement of the Schneider Trophy programme with Fighter Command’s success in World War II (Spitfire 07:50–12:20).

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Conclusion In air racing, the long-standing British ideals of sportsmanship, technical and industrial prowess and national honour joined with the modern spectacle of the moment, the airplane. Both sports and flying characteristically exhibited romance and daring, which were themes very conducive to the mission of promoting aviation. As a result, air racing was high profile, popular in terms of appeal to all segments of society, complimentary to the overzealousness of airminded advocates, and a perfect example of an activity that symbolized national ideals. As the most popular aviation events of the 1930s, Schneider Trophy racing straddled the worlds of military and commercial aviation. The militarization of air racing occurred to bolster Great Britain’s image among other nations, which were equal in world standing and not inferior colonial territories, and to support its aviation industry for the reasons of nationalism. Competition and races brought aviation and the RAF into Britons’ everyday lives. National pride in aeronautical prowess fuelled competition. Zealousness on the part of aviation enthusiasts and proud nationalists kept the Flight going until 1931 despite the qualms of those in charge. The major protagonists, the British government, the Air Ministry, the RAF, the RAeC, the press and even Lady Houston, all expressed differing visions of airminded nationalism. In the end, financial constraints, the widely diverging difference between air racers and operational aircraft, and cheaper ways of achieving the same goals kept the British government from completely footing the bill for air racing. It was not entertaining enough to continue. The idea of militarized air racing had become obsolete. Acknowledgements The author thanks the following for assistance in the writing of this essay: John Anderson, Bart Hacker, Christiaan van Schaardenburgh, Peter Elliot, Nina Burls, Gordon Leith, Chris Cotrill, and the editors, Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber.

Notes 1. See Ralph Barker, The Schneider Trophy Races (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971); Edward Eves, The Schneider Trophy Story (St. Paul, MN:

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MBI, 2001); Mike Roussel, The Quest for Speed: Air Racing and the Influence of the Schneider Trophy Contests, 1913–1931 (Stroud: The History Press, 2016). 2. See John Shelton, Schneider Trophy to Spitfire: The Design Career of R.J. Mitchell (Yeovil: Haynes, 2008) and Chapter 5 in John D. Anderson, Jr. The Grand Designers: The Evolution of the Airplane in the 20 th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Works Cited ‘1929 Schneider Air Trophy Contest.’ Empire News Bulletin. [12 September 1929]. Reuters Historical Collection/British Pathé. https://www.britishpa the.com/video/VLVA7SIYEQUOIBJBZ7CROBHBNQ78U-1929-SCH NEIDER-AIR-TROPHY-CONTEST/query/Southsea. ‘All Roads Lead to the Solent.’ Daily Mail, 7 September 1929: 9. ‘America Outclassed.’ Washington Post, 21 November 1926: S1. Anderson, Jr., John D. The Grand Designers: The Evolution of the Airplane in the 20 th Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Barker, Ralph. The Schneider Trophy Races. London: Chatto and Windus, 1971. ‘Broadcasting.’ The Times, 16 September 1931: 10. Cameron, Norman. ‘Blue Riband of the Air.’ Daily Mail, 23 January 1931: 10. ‘Cost of Schneider Trophy Contest, 1931.’ 10 December 1930. AIR 5/537. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, UK. ‘Court Circular.’ The Times, 2 November 1931: 15. Edgerton, David. England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation. London: Macmillan, 1991. Eves, Edward. The Schneider Trophy Story. St. Paul, MN: MBI, 2001. ‘Fatal Speed Trial.’ The Times, 13 March 1928: 16. Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. ‘History’. 2017. https://www.fai.org/ history. ‘Four Hundred Miles an Hour.’ The Times, 1 October 1931: 13. ‘Gallaher Champions Set and Checklist, 1934 & 1935.’ Pre-War Cards, 1 November 2016. https://prewarcards.com/2016/11/01/1934-1935-gal laher-champions-set-and-checklist/. Grey, C.G. ‘On the Schneider Trophy Contest.’ The Aeroplane 25.3 (October 1923): 329–340. ———. ‘On the Schneider Trophy Contest.’ The Aeroplane 41.16 (September 1931): 685–700. Greig, D’Arcy. My Golden Flying Years: From 1918 over France, through Iraq in the 1920s, to the Schneider Trophy Race of 1929. Eds. Norman Franks and Simon Muggleton. London: Grub Street, 2010.

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Gwynn-Jones, Terry. Farther and Faster: Aviation’s Adventuring Years, 1909– 1939. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. ‘Harrods: Schneider Cup.’ Sunday Times, 25 October 1925: 7. Hoare, Samuel. ‘Schneider Trophy: The Government’s Decision.’ The Times, 23 January 1931: 15. Holman, Brett. ‘The Militarisation of Aerial Theatre: Air Displays and Airmindedness in Britain and Australia between the World Wars.’ Contemporary British History 33.4 (2019): 483–506. House of Commons. ‘Schneider Trophy Race.’ Hansard Parliamentary Debates [29 January 1931]. 5th ser., 247: 1145–1147. https://hansard.parliament. uk/Commons/1931-01-29/debates/bd860f8e-9eda-49b9-b3d0-7b11fa5a2 e66/SchneiderTrophyRace. Houston. Telegram to Ramsay MacDonald. 30 January 1931. AIR 19/128. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, UK. Howe. ‘Schneider Trophy: The Government’s Decision.’ The Times, 17 January 1931: 6. Huggins, Mike, and Jack Williams. Sport and the English, 1918–1939. London: Routledge, 2006. ‘If We Let the Schneider Trophy Go.’ Daily Mail, 23 January 1931: 11–12. James, Thurstan. ‘How to See the Contest.’ The Aeroplane 41 (9 September 1931): 622–624. Mackenzie, S.P. Battle of Britain on the Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. ‘Man and the Schneider Trophy.’ The Times, 9 September 1929: 13. Massey, K., and G.O. Saffery. ‘Correspondence: Schneider Trophy Scandal.’ Daily Mail, 21 January 1931: 8. McLean, Robert. ‘Has Schneider Racing Been Worth While?’ The Aeroplane 41 (23 September 1931): 782–784. McAlery, C.M. ‘The British Team’. The Aeroplane 41 (9 September 1931): 636– 638, 646. ‘Message from the King.’ The Times, 9 September 1929: 14. ‘Minutes of Conference on High Speed Seaplanes held at Messrs. Supermarine’s Works on 4th Feb. 1931, S.29955’. AIR 2/616. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, UK. Mitchell, R.J. ‘Racing Seaplanes and Their Influence on Design.’ Aeronautical Engineering: Supplement to the Aeroplane 37 (29 December 1931): 1429– 1430. Morton, A.E. ‘The Imps Discover the Speedway on the Wash.’ Speed and Sport 1 (December 1931): 8. Accessed via George Stainforth File, Royal Air Force Museum Archives, Hendon, UK.

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Omissi, David E. ‘The Hendon Air Pageant, 1920–37.’ Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–1950. Ed. John M. MacKenzie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. 198–220. ‘On the Royal Aero Club Dinner.’ The Aeroplane 23 (1 November 1922): 342. Orlebar, A.H. Schneider Trophy: A Personal Account of High-Speed Flying and the Winning of the Schneider Trophy. London: Seeley Service and Co., 1933. Pirie, Gordon. Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. ———. Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation: Passengers, Pilots, Publicity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Rickey, Lisa, and Ed O’Shaughnessy. ‘MS-519: Aviation Trading Cards Collection’. Wright State University Special Collections and Archives, Dayton, OH, USA. Rieger, Bernhard. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Robertson, F.A. de V. ‘Schneider Trophy Training.’ Flight 21 (6 September 1929): 933–934. Roussel, Mike. The Quest for Speed: Air Racing and the Influence of the Schneider Trophy Contests, 1913–1931. Stroud: The History Press, 2016. Sayers, W.H. ‘The Lesson of the Schneider Cup Race.’ The Aeroplane 25 (3 October 1923): 340–350. Schofield, H.M. The High Speed and Other Flights. London: John Hamilton, 1932. ‘Schneider Race Guarantee.’ Aberdeen Press and Journal, 2 February 1931: 7. ‘Schneider Trophy Contest, 1931: Government’s Decision.’ Air Ministry Communique No. 2530. 15 January 1931. AIR 19/128. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, UK. Shelton, John. Schneider Trophy to Spitfire: The Design Career of R.J. Mitchell. Yeovil: Haynes, 2008. Shupek, John A. ‘Famous British Airmen & Airwomen (L8-46).’ Skytamer Image Archive, 2017. https://www.skytamer.com/L8-46.html. ‘Speed in Excelsis.’ The Times, 14 September 1931: 13. Spooner, Stanley. ‘Editorial Comment: The Schneider Race.’ Flight 19 (29 September 1927): 677–678. Stowe, Fred. ‘The Quest of Speed and Sport.’ Speed and Sport 1 (December 1931): 2. Accessed via George Stainforth File, Royal Air Force Museum Archives, Hendon, UK. ‘The Disaster in the Solent.’ The Times, 13 March 1928: 17. ‘The First of the Few.’ The Times, 20 August 1942: 2. ‘The Passing of a Famous Designer.’ Flight 31 (17 June 1937) 604. ‘The Real Schneider Runaways.’ Daily Mail, 28 January 1931: 9. ‘The Schneider Cup.’ The Times, 29 September 1923: 9.

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‘The Schneider Trophy.’ Flight 23 (23 January 1931): 86, 88. ‘The Schneider Trophy.’ The Times, 10 August 1927: 7. ‘The Sopwith Schneider Cup Machine.’ The Aeroplane 6 (16 April 1914): 454. Trenchard, Hugh. Minute Sheet for Secretary of State. 10 September 1929. AIR 2/1303. National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, UK. ———. ‘Schneider Trophy: Memorandum for Secretary of State.’ 21 September 1929. AIR 2/1303. ‘What the Win Means.’ Daily Mail, 9 September 1929: 5. Williams, Jack. ‘The Upper Class and Aeroplane Sport Between the Wars.’ Sport in History 28.3 (2008): 450–471. Wohl, Robert. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005.

Filmography The First of the Few. Dir. Leslie Howard. UK. 1942. Spitfire. Dir. Anthony Palmer and David Fairhead. UK. 2018.

PART V

Potential

CHAPTER 13

When the Wolves Were Flying: The Box of Delights and Flight in 1930s Children’s Literature Dominic Dean

Children are consistently and powerfully associated with flight in interwar literature and culture. This association challenges, for reasons this chapter will explore, any characterization—contemporaneous or retrospective—of the relationship between aviation and modernity as inevitably productive of violent destruction and totalitarian power. The child in literature registers the ambivalence of flight between its experiential and political implications, and provides a suggestive trope for the temporal rupture promised by modern flight and the fraught questions of how, if at all, to manage it. In John Masefield’s strange yet persistently popular children’s novel, The Box of Delights (1935), children—who, here as throughout modern cultural history, dream of flight—are suddenly offered the prospect of really flying. Two newly discovered objects of engineered magic make this

D. Dean (B) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_13

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possible: the eponymous box of delights, and the aeroplane. The euphoric excitement and potentially infinite knowledge promised by flight is alternately offered by the sacred magic of the box and the darkly modern aeroplanes of Abner Brown’s gang. The Box of Delights, and its place within 1930s children’s literature, indicate the centrality of children—real, imagined, and written for—to the airmindedness of interwar literature and culture as a whole. The ambiguity surrounding flight in this novel requires, moreover, a revised reading of the relationship between the politics of modern technology and the associations of flight with the child. Often the tendency in theory and cultural history assessing the technologies that obsessed literary and artistic Modernism, prominently including aviation, has broadly viewed them as endogenously associated with fascist hero-worship, mass destruction, warfare and surveillance. Both the theoretical virtuosity of Paul Virilio, and the more restrained historicism of Valentine Cunningham, for example, influentially read the cultural importance of flight in the 1930s in these terms, despite their significant differences of scholarly approach. More recent works of cultural history, such as Michele Haapamäki’s The Coming of the Aerial War (2014), have continued to emphasize airmindedness in the 1930s as defined by awareness of threat. In The Box, aviation’s role as an accessory to totalitarian modernity is frighteningly evident, but it is challenged by other possibilities. This novel not only provides a case study in the richly imagined—and often materialized—relationship between flight and children in this period, but also a productively subtle frame for the understanding of that history today. This is because it offers two distinctive versions of flight—which I characterize below as sacred and modern—but also, through its child protagonist and his uncanny adversary, makes the distinction between these apparently oppositional forms of flight itself ambivalent. The child heightens the questions of what modernity’s technological achievements are, and could be, for. Yet the modern child is famously ambivalent and evasive (Kuhn, Bond Stockton); they are always imagining and re-imagining what they are taught, and finding out some of what they aren’t. It is unsurprising, then, that Masefield’s protagonist, Kay Harker, a ‘dreamy, idle muff’ according to his former governess (99), enters into a relationship with flight that challenges the still-unresolved tensions between the pleasures of modern technologies and their use by powerful organizations and perverse leaders.

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Sacred and Modern Flight Masefield published The Box in 1935 as the sequel to his earlier children’s novel, The Midnight Folk (1927). They share the same protagonist, Kay Harker, and adversary, Abner Brown, yet they are thematically and tonally different: The Box gains a sharper plot focus from its greater sense of threat, and from the intrusions of modernity into a landscape which was previously, in The Midnight Folk, one of almost uninterrupted pastoralism. Both novels have remained influential in literary and popular culture. Melissa Harrison’s recent novel All among the Barley (2018) notably features a child protagonist who is an enthusiastic reader of The Midnight Folk, and the reference frames Harrison’s concerns with childhood wonder and its vulnerability to co-option by esoteric but dangerous interwar political interests, a major theme of The Box. Overall, The Box has had the most significant afterlife of Masefield’s two novels featuring Kay Harker, with multiple adaptations for radio, theatre, and television, including a particularly successful BBC serial in 1984, which visually emphasized the 1930s periodicity of the story. The Box opens with Kay returning by train from school for the Christmas holidays, when he encounters first a Punch-and-Judy man, Cole Hawlings, and then two members of a gang pursuing Hawlings, who has warned Kay that ‘the wolves are running’ (15)—the novel’s subtitle and repeated motif. For safety, Hawlings (actually a disguised, immortal Ramon Llull) entrusts his ‘box of delights’, which his enemies are seeking, to Kay. He reveals that the box can make him ‘go small’ or ‘go swift’ (66–7)—the latter means to fly (159)—and it allows travel through both time and space. The gang—led by Abner Brown, a magician, fake clergyman and proto-fascist leader, abetted by Kay’s former governess among other assorted oddballs—increasingly closes in on the box (and Kay), using motor cars, aeroplanes and magic to kidnap a series of targets while Kay outwits them with a combination of the box’s powers and his own resourcefulness and curiosity, aided by the Jones children, who are sharing his house, the aptly named Seekings, for Christmas. The box functions as a magical and sacred object with the power to create visions and reveal hidden truths. Its capacity to enable flight is auxiliary to this, bringing a felt excitement and risk; it also operates alongside multiple sacred symbols in the novel, which has an expansive and inclusive approach to spiritual traditions (34, 41). The aeroplane, meanwhile, appears as a parallel modern tool for flight. It is also (like

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the box) the object, and an enabler, of the children’s fascinations: When the gang kidnap Maria Jones, they promise ‘an interesting world for our younger agents: lots of motor-cars, lots of aeroplanes […] one long, gay social whirl’ (148). This promise echoes how the aeroplane, and the ancient dreams of flight that it renders into modern materials, is powerfully associated with children and particularly with young men (Maria acts against the conventions of her gender). Who, after all, would attempt flight, with its ambitious exhibitionism and attendant risk of death, but the young man (or rare woman, like Amelia Earhart or Amy Johnson), who retains some untempered childhood (or childish) fantasy? Wyndham Lewis tellingly castigated Marinetti and the other Futurists for their ‘extraordinary childishness […] over mechanical inventions, aeroplanes, machinery etc.’ (Lewis 9). Yet the aeroplane’s childish appeal in The Box is complicated by its deployment as a tool of spying, kidnapping, even (albeit in comic form) of bombing (292). The different modes of flight that surround Kay embody both the threatening and transformative possibilities of flight: the aeroplanes are used for surveillance, abductions and imprisonment; the box, to undermine both established and emerging—fascistic—sources of authority. Masefield had been directly exposed to the sinister potential of human flight during his Great War experiences, which gave him both close contact with the war on the ground (through his extensive service at a hospital for the wounded in France (Babington Smith [122–32])1 and with the British political leadership (the social circle of Masefield and his wife included Prime Minister Asquith), while Constance Masefield heard and saw Zeppelin bombing raids on London (Babington Smith 135). The sinister possibilities of aeroplanes are manifested when the gang kidnap Cole Hawlings, not knowing that he has already given the box to Kay: In five seconds they had the old man trussed up and lifted. […] There came the roar of an engine from beyond Rider’s Wood. “That’s an aeroplane,” Kay said […] the engine became much louder and an aeroplane lurched into sight past the covert-end, giving across the snow to take off in the wind. “It will stick in the snow”, Kay said, “and then they’ll have to leave him.” However, it didn’t stick in the snow. It lifted after a short run, and at once lifted higher and higher, with great lolloping leaps.

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Now that it was in the air it was silent […] and swifter in going and climbing than any he had seen. It had almost no wings and was in the clouds in no time. (72)

This aeroplane, superbly modern, has capabilities beyond what the boys previously could imagine (they have enough aviation awareness to be surprized by the plane’s ability to take-off in snow2 and fly silently). It overcomes the challenges of nature; is capable of hiding from, while simultaneously observing, human society; and is extremely fast (the gang’s planes later turn out to also function as motor cars, and can rapidly transform from one to the other). In the quaint rural English setting, characterized by acceptance of nature still dominating life (the snow disrupts rail and road transport), the aeroplane is aggressively modern. Combined with the other attributes and accessories of the Brown gang— a charismatic male leader, press manipulation, a concealed radical agenda, strange sexual dynamics, glamorous fashions—it suggests the mid-1930s as a moment of potentially dangerous temporal rupture. Against the foreboding modernity of the gang, emerging under the noses of the complacent, English authorities (represented by the Inspector, who has swallowed Abner Brown’s cover identity as the Reverend Boddledale), the box offers a rupture in time of a different kind. It allows access to the past, even the ancient past, but (unlike the claims of the modern technologies) only an ambivalent grasp on the future. It is sacramentally attuned to nature (as during Kay’s use of the box to run with Herne the Hunter, 81–7), rather than seeking to dominate it. The box allows one to go swift (to fly), but also to go small, a feature of which Kay makes use to spy on the gang’s plotting, and which contrasts with the aggrandizing surveillance perspective offered by the plane. The box, then, offers a sacred flight in contrast to the aeroplane’s modern flight. Yet Masefield treats the relationship between these two enablers of flight with subtlety and ambiguity; they are not entirely unalike, and the technologies that appear in The Box are morally ambiguous, but never unequivocally or endogenously malevolent. Sacred and modern flight mirror each other, as indicated by the naturalistic similes Masefield uses for the gang’s aeroplanes, seen ‘poising just like a kestrel’ (165) and hovering ‘like a sparrow-hawk’ (204). Masefield uses his sense of the sacred, rooted in the natural world, not to contrast the sacred flight at work through the box with the euphoria of modern flight in order to exorcise and defeat the latter, but rather to offer a kind of

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sideways look at it, via the child’s fascinated gaze.3 Masefield suggests that attempts to create a perfect, totalitarian order of knowledge (identified here with the total aerial vision offered by the aeroplane) are hostile to any humane modern society; equally, his avoidance of any absolute distinction between the sacred flight of the box and the modern flight of the aeroplane, and their uncanny doublings of one another, undermine an account of modernity as inevitably catastrophic or technology as inherently inhumane. Here it is worth considering Masefield within the contexts of the cultural history of flight and the contemporaneous and subsequent theorizations of that history.

Flying Bodies: Wolves, Aeroplanes and Children Modern technologies of war and surveillance enable a visual intake of information about something at a distance, so that the body doing the looking (from a position of power) ‘takes in’ something far away without having to move and thus place itself in jeopardy. Paul Virilio, one of the most prominent theorists of speed (particularly, but not only, in aviation) as a defining characteristic of modernity, claimed that ‘by 1914, aviation was ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and breaking records […] it was becoming one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing’ (War and Cinema 17). Enabling this position of power projected and protected is, Virilio argued, a central goal of modern technology, which sought the ‘art of hiding from sight in order to see’, an ‘ominous voyeurism’ (War and Cinema 49). While of course in practice the aeroplane in warfare (at least, in the 1930s) cannot truly be hidden and thus does come into jeopardy, the aim of offering the pilot a fixed, secure position from which to observe the world still holds. In this account, which Virilio has developed to its fullest extent, the pilot’s position is a disembodied one, and this disembodiment constitutes his power. This is exactly the way in which Abner Brown seeks to use his aeroplanes, with their impossible silence and ability to climb high above the clouds. However, the development of machine-powered human flight in the first half of the twentieth century was actually a highly embodied phenomenon, not only in the physical risk evident in its appalling casualty rates, but in their necessary counterpart, the bodily excitement of flying— in fast movement, control of the aircraft and new possibilities of human vision that provoked wonder rather than exclusively violent control. These were the characteristics recognized by the Futurists in their ‘Manifesto of

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Aeropainting’, which affirmed that ‘the changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective’ (Marinetti et al. 283). The earlier Futurist Manifesto had emphasized the embodied basis of the new perspectives offered by speed, declaring that ‘we intend to exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch’ (Marinetti 51). Virilio tends to elide these embodied characteristics and perspectives with the dis embodied power he sees as fundamental to the adoption of flight by state regimes (not an unreasonable move, given the political complicities of Marinetti and other Futurists4 ; but it still downplays part of the story). This potential elision was already fearfully identified in 1930s literary culture, where, as Cunningham notes, the aeroplane became ‘the machine that most precisely apotheosized Fascism’s yearnings for dangerous dynamism and the test to destruction’ (189). Yet the elision of regimes of (technologically enabled and thus, ideally, disembodied) power with the bodily attractions of flight was also rejected, or at least made ambivalent, in other responses to emerging aerial technology during the period, just as the relationship of Futurist celebration of technology—and of flight particularly—to Fascism is itself not straightforward.5 Cunningham sees acceptance of ‘the prospects of imminent suicidal death’ (88) through flight as a Fascist gesture; but such celebration of flight as means to heroic and violent death was largely theorizing and theoretical, a translation of flight (and its risks) into symbolism rather than a motivation for actually flying; it is a reconciliation of the anxieties that flight provokes. (After all, even Fascists and Futurists did not in reality seek to crash—even if using aeroplanes to kill others was a different matter.) Although fantasies of flight transforming time and space into a single moment were indeed culturally powerful—they appear in the ‘Futurist Manifesto’,6 and in The Box via Abner Brown, as we shall see below—they were not as dominant as they sometimes appear in retrospective history or theory, and were in a degree of tension with the experiential and embodied aspects of flight, as I shall go on to discuss. The supposed ‘childishness’ of ambition to fly, in the face of early aviation’s overwhelming risks, itself undermines the elision of flight with disembodied totalitarian power, because of the child’s awkward relationship to the adult authorities. This is apparent in The Box, where the authorities are totally unaware of the sinister purposes of the flights being

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carried out by Abner Brown’s gang, and both the opportunity for alternative forms of flight and any effective response to the gang’s technological abilities is going to have to come from Kay and the other children. There are several episodes of flight in The Box that dispel any motivation of totalitarian power and heroic violence; when Kay uses the box to meet Herne the Hunter (84–7), they fly alongside the other animals rather than in domination of them (and become themselves potential prey). Even the proto-Fascist gang, seeking to groom Maria, associate aeroplanes with exhilarating life rather than with power to effect death. The box and the aeroplane combine the pleasure of sight with the pleasure of movement, creating a form of embodied looking—pleasures signalled in the name of Kay’s residence, Seekings House. ‘Seekings’ suggests its near-homonym, seeing, but in a multiple, moving form; antiaggrandizing, it evokes the body that is looking for something. Seekings House implies a point of stability and hospitality, the embodied banalities of food and warmth (and ‘buttered eggs’, 16), in symbiotic relation to the movement beyond the house to see and to seek. This relation between cyclical stability and new movement is, as I go on to argue, central to the novel’s response to the possibility of flight becoming a dangerous modern rupture or enabler of totalitarianism. The most ambiguous figure here is the wolf, identified with Abner Brown, but also with the sacred natural world that excites Kay’s fascination and provides the animal prototypes for human flight. The wolf, apex predator, embodies the power to suddenly conquer distance that the aeroplane brings to power and warfare in modern societies. The aeroplane stands alongside the wolf as two of the novel’s key motifs, symbolic and material embodiments of the gang and especially of Brown himself; yet the wolf (a real Fascist leader’s preferred ego-animal, too)7 remains embodied, a part of nature, thus emphasizing the fundamental ambiguity over modern flight, and the child’s relationship to it, that runs throughout the novel. Both aeroplane and wolf are versions of the human body transfigured beyond its ordinary capacities by technology or magic. The box also transforms the human body, giving it speed and power while also shrinking it—to a smallness, in fact, where Kay can comfortably converse with a mouse. All these objects and tools for flight appeal particularly to the child who has not accepted and internalized limits on his fantasy, creativity, and movement. The Box presents two such awkward children, Kay and Maria, along with several adults who have not grown up insofar as they still seek

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to fly; they reflect how, in the 1930s, the link between airmindedness and ‘childish’ ambition (per Lewis’s earlier complaint) was powerfully evident. The aeroplane’s place in the litany of pleasures that Sylvia Daisy Pouncer uses to attempt to groom Maria is a trap, anticipating childish enthusiasm for an adult-world characterized by its ‘whirl’ (148) of endless technologically enabled pleasures. Yet not only does this attempt fail, it is doubtful that the gang’s cynical adult knowledge of the ‘real’ purpose of the aeroplane even ultimately turns out to be definitively superior to the childish vision of it (even their own motivations are not necessarily less childish than the child’s, but rather simply deprived of the self-awareness Maria shows when her own motivations are being manipulated). Like the surveillance plane, the box gives the possibility of seeing without being seen. It thus both offers a potentially deadly power and attracts the child who hopes to evade total educational surveillance (as Maria boasts of doing, and as Kay also does—Abner’s partner Sylvia Daisy Pouncer is his former governess). When Kay and Peter Jones witness Cole Hawlings being kidnapped, they see without being seen; this extends one of the few ways in which children can exercise control by virtue of relative smallness, a smallness that the box offers to greatly increase. Here as elsewhere, the children register the relationship between flight and the body, and thus trouble the apparent unity of connections between flight and disembodied power.

The Child and the Aeroplane in Interwar Culture Masefield wrote The Box while literary culture itself was riven between realist claims to historical-social reference and the Modernist emphasis on texts and objects (which the Futurists famously extended to the aeroplane) as site of transformative experience. It ‘is not about something; it is that something itself ’, Samuel Beckett declared of Joyce’s work (quoted in Cunningham 4). The Futurists, celebrating the euphoria of speed, similarly emphasized the thing itself—not least when that thing was an aeroplane—but acknowledged that such submission to the experiential was itself a politically consequential move. The child—him- or herself a figure for the future that new technology makes both knowable and unknowable at once—dramatizes precisely this ambivalence between enjoyment of the technological object for itself, and the potential taint in the political uses of that object. The simultaneous wonder of flight and the extent of its destructive potential makes the child fascinated by the

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aeroplane a trope par excellence for the troubled Modernist relationship between the experiential and the political. Seemingly far from the artistic disputes of the decade, during the 1930s the association between children and airmindedness was reinforced and exploited not only by merchandise and advertising emphasizing the excitement of flight (over its practical constraints), but also by literature that sought to resolve the (already extensive) moral and cultural difficulties it presented into an acceptable narrative of masculine bravery and virtuosity, in service to sound ideals. Adult culture of the ’30s was certain that flight was a source of wonder to children—certainly to boys. Five of W. E. Johns’s ‘Biggles’ books had been published by 1935, and they focused on the character’s youth (Biggles enters the Royal Flying Corps underage, at seventeen) and on the excitement, though also the casualty-heavy reality, of early military flight. As Cunningham observes: [Never] had English literature ever been so air-minded […] Flying would help sell any piece of literature from humble detective stories […] to the most respectable of novels. […] Where a First-War heroic carried on at all uninterruptedly through the anti-heroic ’20s and into the ’30s, it was in air-warfare fictions, and those largely for small boys (‘the air is the thing now’, declared Betjeman in his 1938 review of boys’ books), stories by WE Johns and Percy F. Westerman and their tribe, the sort of tale published by Christopher Caudwell’s brother T. Stanhope Sprigg in his magazine Air Stories (founded 1935). Flying had remained, as Auden put it in a Listener review, unquestionably ‘heroic travel’. (167–68)

Air travel’s development during the 1920s and its increasing economic stability by the mid-1930s—with Imperial Airways and Croydon Airport now established as underpinning the industry in Britain—had provoked a startlingly wide set of political, social, and practical questions: over the role of the state in technological development, the relationship between business entrepreneurialism and military expansion, the future of the Empire (see Bluffield 13–38), the politically ambiguous heroism of young men like Lindberg and even the gender-breaking achievements of Earhart and Johnson. While The Box’s world may initially seem a long way from the arguments between proponents and opponents of economic protectionism and subsidy that characterized the British civilian air industry’s attempts to become viable, it is not altogether so distant: The benign but useless Inspector, local representative of governmental authority, has a vague notion of what the young men at the aerodrome might get up

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to, but no sense of responsibility or capability for properly understanding, let alone controlling, what happens there or in the sky over his district. This irresponsibility is not merely quaint; playful young men, and the broader culture of heroic and reckless masculine individualism associated with flight, were profoundly implicated in politics. Several of Imperial Airways’ key routes were established through the pioneering flights of Sir Alan Cobham, who had a considerable public profile, in the late ’20s. While the British air industry thus established itself, its relationship to narratives of aeronautical heroism from Cobham and others, and its use of these to seek government support, had disturbing parallels among rival powers. In 1933, Italian Fascist and aviator Italo Balbo led an expedition of twenty-five seaplanes in a mass crossing of the Atlantic, reaching Chicago for the World’s Fair, a flight intended to assert the power of Fascist leadership and the industrial and technological progress the Italian state had made under Fascist direction (Segrè 230–65). Nazi Germany, meanwhile, had begun to re-establish its air forces almost immediately on taking power in 1933 (see Muller 91–4). As Michele Haapamäki notes, ‘the interwar period was characterized by doomsday scenarios of the next war’ (3), in which aviation—and bombing—featured heavily (2). No surprise, then, to find Abner Brown’s quasi-fascist group considerably ahead in their mastery of air technology in The Box; Dennis Butts compares The Box to Rex Warner’s novel The Aerodrome (1941) and Graham Greene’s film Went the Day Well? (1942) in presenting a concealed airborne fascist threat in rural England (97). In retrospect and at the time, the aerial threat in the early to mid-1930s was marked by unpredictability, by uncertainty over exactly how, if and when the threat would fully manifest, and this unpredictability echoed aviation’s more general characteristic as an enormously significant, but practically and politically unstable, development within modernity. Yet airmindedness was by no means all sinister. Bernard Vere notes that: The aeroplane was many things in 1914: an engineering marvel, signifying the conquest of nature, a technology that seemed to render national borders useless, an emergent, rather than a developed, military force, but above all it was a spectacle […] at meetings and increasingly […] at dedicated aerodromes. Moreover, aviation was one of the major topics for the illustrated press. (4)

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In the two decades between the year described by Vere and the writing of The Box, the military potential of aircraft was, though significantly developed, still primarily a potential rather than an active threat (even if a widely known one, as Masefield’s incorporation of it into his novel indicates), and the popular emphasis on the spectacular, euphoric, or visionary aspects of flight remained strong. While trying to get technically and economically off the ground, the British air industry targeted children in building an appreciative base of potential customers. Croydon offered regular, short, and cheap pleasure flights, some of the most enthusiastic customers for which were children, taken up with limited safety precautions (Law 60–1). Between 1932 and 1935, when Masefield was writing The Box, Cobham began his National Aviation Day displays, which combined colourful spectacles to be admired from the ground with opportunities for passenger joyriding. The popular name for these events, ‘Cobham’’s Flying Circus’, emphasized the spectacle’s suitability for children, welcoming their appetite for airminded fun (Law 60). Alongside such exposure to the real thing, toy and model aeroplanes were marketed heavily, including through the Meccano company, which sold construction kits for children (boys were the presumed and targeted audience) to build their own aeroplanes. Meccano organized its young following into Guild clubs, linked through the circulation of the Meccano Magazine (subtitled, ‘Published in the interests of Boys ’, or just ‘For Boys ’); between 1930 and 1935, the magazine featured aeroplanes or other air transport on its cover eight times, often in highly imaginative, exotic and futuristic contexts (Manduca and Love 179–203). Similar themes were reflected in annual pictorial books for children, such as the ‘Wonder Book of Aircraft ’ series, published throughout the 1920s and ’30s (Golding). The world of flight in children’s toys and literature was—as these publications indicate—heavily associated with a utopian modernity characterized by visions of experiential thrill and pleasurable discovery. As the father of two young children in the 1910s and ’20s, Masefield would have been aware of such offerings for children’s delight. In The Box, the boundary between toys and real technology is highly porous. The flight is presented to children through Christmas gifts; the box is itself an unusual version of such a gift, and Hawlings also distributes ‘little paper balloons, in the shapes of cocks, horses, ships and aeroplanes […] one of a different shape and colour for each child there’ (45). Later, when the children attend the Bishop’s Christmas party, they find the

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‘most glorious Christmas tree that had ever been seen’ (111), covered with an array of gifts, including ‘aeroplanes which you could wind up so that they would fly about the room. There were others which you made to fly by pulling a trigger’ (112). It seems Christmas has already begun to fulfil Maria’s earlier demands: ‘Christmas ought to be brought up to date’, Maria said; ‘it ought to have gangsters, and aeroplanes, and lots of automatic pistols’. (24)

Maria is an enthusiast for modernity’s violent spectacles; like an instinctive Futurist, she declares, ‘I shall shoot and I shall shock’ (48). Yet the unlikely object of her desire to ‘update’ here is Christmas, the central event in this novel’s temporality: The Box begins with Kay’s journey home for the holiday and ends at Tatchester Cathedral’s Midnight Mass and millennium service, whereupon it cycles back to Kay’s opening journey again. This Christmastime is simultaneously transformational and cyclical, countering the modernity of the gang. Christmas queers the temporality inherent in giving the child a gift (especially a toy or model as miniature but functioning pieces of modernity): Such gifts can lead to premature ambitions on the child’s part, as echoed in Kay’s wish to drive a car (17)— which, his guardian reminds him, he is not yet old enough to do (though this wish is ironically replaced by the more extreme forms of movement the box fulfils) and in Maria’s love of guns and gangsters, alongside her extreme resistance to formal education (she has been expelled from three schools, 104). Access to flight as play makes young people both futuristic and frivolous, according to the hapless Inspector when Kay reports Hawlings’s kidnap: ‘We were just spellbound [Kay said], they ran out, scrobbled him up, put him in the aeroplane and away they went.’ ‘Well’, the Inspector said, ‘it sounds like the fellows at the aerodrome to me: these young fellows, Master Kay, serving their country and away from the civilising influence of their mothers, just full of spirits […] It was a Christmas gambol and a bit of what you call “ragging”’. (74)

The (real) aeroplane is itself a toy, the Inspector implies, flying a ‘Christmas gambol’. The Inspector’s assumptions about the young men at the aerodrome reflect The Box’s preoccupation with both education in the broadest sense—the child’s wayward wishes to discover more of

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the world—and with the limits of institutionalized education. Christmas embodies this ambivalence, as both an instructional religious festival and a time when institutionalized life gives way to ‘delights’: With Christmas gifts and ‘gambols’, now the child gets what they want, perhaps even something inappropriate, like the weaponry Maria so desires. The box is itself such a dangerous toy; it gives Kay what he wants, but puts him in danger both practically and spiritually, in the tradition of ambivalent gifts that promise to make fantasies of omniscience real, like Aladdin’s lamp, or Tolkien’s ring. The box’s capacity to offer time travel also parallels how the opportunity for modern flight appears as a temporal disturbance and excessive gift to the fantasies of young men (and transgressive young women), which underlines the question of how far its experiential excitement and wonder could be managed, if not by embracing this rupture as violent destructive potential, only safe for a disembodied participant—which, as we shall see, is precisely Abner Brown’s fantasy and hope. How are the fundamentally unpredictable (and childishly indulgent) pleasures and implications of flight to be reconciled with the need to sustain an ecologically and socially stable basis for human life, both individual and communal? Masefield approaches this question through the conflicts over time and control of time in his novel.

The Odd Temporality of The Box of Delights There are several temporalities at work in The Box. Seekings House and its environs seemingly inhabit a mostly timeless rural England attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, but overhead the aeroplanes are flying and outside the gang is lurking (even without their malicious modernity, there is apparently a legitimate aerodrome nearby). The children are all in various stages of education, preparing for their own futures, and Kay’s life has itself moved on since The Midnight Folk. Yet time is also stuck for much of the novel: Snow increasingly cuts off the Tatchester area from its rail, road, and telephone connections; the events entirely take place during the school holidays and Maria is already expelled; Abner Brown seeks to prevent the Cathedral marking its millennium; and the novel’s ending cycles back to its beginning. There are conflicts between cyclical time, progressive time8 and modern rupture here, conflicts that mirror the apparent contrast between sacred and modern flight. Abner Brown believes he can resolve these conflicts by stealing the box, with its ability to travel across time and space and to access spectacles

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of hidden knowledge, and by acquiring Hawling’s elixir of eternal life (271). What Brown actually wants is not to sustain the infiltration of the British state he is establishing in a rural corner of its territory, but rather to escape—by aeroplane—to a secluded island and live with his wealth and power alone. He will substitute for his dictatorial potential a final vision of spectacular and pleasurable destruction as he flies away: I will open the sluices now. I have emptied six gallons of petrol in the older parts of the house […] With what splendour shall I pass from here: a gurgling flood deep down in the caves and a roaring bonfire above. (261)

So, all the promise of modernity, all its spectacle and violence, ultimately resolves (so Brown plans) into a single consummating moment of destruction-in-creation; yet Brown also intends to make all time simultaneously available from his fixed but disembodied position on the island (disembodied, in that with the box he can go anywhere in time and space while yet always remaining secure, detached from the dependencies that bodily human existence involves). Brown seeks something like the Futurists’ ‘velocity which is eternal and omnipresent’ (Marinetti et al. 51)—the totalitarian fantasy that constitutes one version of the promise of flight. To achieve this, Brown would have to defeat Kay and the Jones children, and he is also willing to murder other children (the choirboys locked up beneath his fake theological college) along the way. The child, with the uncertain futurity he represents, is the natural enemy of Brown’s drive for a consuming end of time, and has an embodied materiality and an unpredictable curiosity that challenge Brown’s fantasies of disembodied omniscience. For all that Brown’s gang perform modernity, their relationship to the future is an awkward one—demonstrated, classically, through their queer antagonism towards children. Brown and Sylvia Daisy Pouncer (Kay’s former governess, a malevolent mother-substitute) have a relationship characterized by camp performativity (‘“Not necessarily, my Brightness”, Abner said […] “May a weak woman make a suggestion, my starlike Abner?” Sylvia said’ [100])—certainly not a conventional marriage, despite being presented to the community as such in their cover personae. Brown’s sleeping arrangements, discovered by Kay while made small by the box and searching the college, involve ‘a hard, little camp-bed that had not yet been made’ (234); the Browns’ romance remains, perhaps, rhetorical. Whereas a Christian marriage is conventionally devoted to raising children, the Brown-Pouncer partnership is

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a violent conspiracy against them; for all their mastery of futuristic technology, they are firmly (and queerly) disqualified from normative futures and progressive time. Hence their peculiar futurism is unsuccessful in controlling the child: When the gang begin to groom Maria, they astutely present their gangsterism as a wish-fulfilling adult lifestyle that perfectly matches Maria’s love of technology. Maria, perhaps in an equally astute intuition that such a perfect match between childhood wishes and an adult organization is not to be trusted, refuses. In a sense, they, the gang, are the ones who refuse to grow up, even though—or because—they have adopted the tools of modernity. Like many enduring works of children’s fiction, The Box is about a failure to grow up ambivalently shared between adults and children. This ambivalence is expressed above all in the various doublings that structure the novel. Brown, like many villains of children’s literature, is an uncanny double of the child protagonist (he is what Edelman calls the ‘sinthomosexual’, the queer enemy of the virtues embodied in the child, 41–4). Kay has the box; Abner wants the box. Abner has secured the power of flight for himself; Kay is fascinated by flight, and is given its power by Hawlings. Both Brown and Kay delight in access to esoteric knowledge of history and the natural world. Both are leaders of their respective gangs but only ambivalently so; Brown’s gang is disloyal and dysfunctional, and he intends to eventually abandon them and escape alone. This doubling between Abner and Kay emphasizes the moral ambiguity and practical difficulty of translating and sustaining powerful childhood desires—and the toys of modernity—in adult society. Christmas, the supreme alternative to school and regimented institutions, offers better fulfilment of the child’s desires than Abner’s gang— but only by also indulging those wishes, refusing to patronize them and allowing them the toys of modernity. As this suggests, and as with the distinction between sacred and modern flight, the relationship between cyclical time and modern rupture is not so straightforwardly antagonistic as it initially seems; whereas Brown offers one, absolutist, answer to the apparent conflict between them, the child, Kay, registers quite another.

(Air) Power and the Child In this novel, modernity—as emblematized in the aeroplane—appears as wish-fulfilment, while flight offers an exciting expansion of vision that puts the body both into ‘delights’ (and risk); but it also gives a potential for violent domination to a single unmoving, totalitarian consciousness:

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Abner, as he visualizes himself finally alone on his island, a wolf as a static and carnivorous body, rather than as a running/flying body (in a parallel Masefield cannot have intended, this end eerily recalls that of the real fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, who loved to think of himself as a wolf with a lair, but ultimately ended in stasis—his movement across Europe, like his Luftwaffe, grounded). Brown’s is a vision that both incorporates the tools of fascist manipulation and power-building, and yet plans to ultimately discard them. As observed by Kay (234), Brown both longs for pleasures of spectacle and knowledge, yet is willing to set them aside for some ultimate resolution of time and space themselves. All this reflects the great ideological conflicts of the 1930s and their complex claims on technology and its pleasures: Were the pleasures afforded by technology and modernity a proper aim in themselves, or means to a (potentially violent) end? And how, therefore, should the receptivity of the child, figure for the future, towards these technologies, these toys and weapons, be understood and guided, if at all? The latter is a question that both Brown and the box complicate. It is also complicated by the role of bodily comforts in literally sustaining the children, in the novel’s emphasis on the warmth of Seekings House, on sleep, the rich possets that comfort Kay and Maria and Christmas as a feast of both food and gifts. If Brown creates a quasifascist order that ultimately seeks to resolve itself into an act of epic destruction and escape into atemporal stasis, then the cyclical existence of sleep, food, teatime and Christmas provides a parallel, counter source of stability that provides acts of exploration and transformation (above all, in flight) a stable place from which to emerge. This place, with its cyclical time, is, unlike Abner’s island, fundamentally embodied; it sustains the body so that it can go off and have adventures; so that it can grow up, but not in predictable ways. The toy aeroplanes and other lively gifts here— never securely distinct from real aeroplanes—may be ‘just’ for pleasurable play, or they may open visions of consequence for the world. Masefield’s essentially generous narrative suggests that fear of flight and modernity’s potential for violence arises less from anything inherent in the technology, and more from anxieties over deprivation and unpredictability (as seen, on a larger scale, in the rivalry between nations in the race for air power and its military potential). The Box implies that visions of spectacular knowledge and the embodied experience of flight may be dangerous, but are only deadly when used to serve the desire for absolute predictability, absolute knowledge-as-power, that finally amounts to desiring to stop time itself. Ultimately, The Box is successfully resistant to that desire. This

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resistance derives from Masefield’s sense that the euphoric and disruptive experiences enabled by modern technology are not inevitably productive of violent totalitarian power, but can be made humane if they are understood as dependent on, rather than in antagonism with, the cyclical and stable sources that sustain human life (the home, food, festivals, etc.). Kay and Maria as children, with their appreciation for such sustenance that matches their fascination with flight, speed and modernity, allow Masefield perfectly to register this point. The subtle radicalism in Masefield’s reconciliation, through the figures of the child and the aeroplane, between modern rupture and cyclical sustenance, lies in how he refuses to let the latter compromise or dilute the former. As Maria’s determination to shoot and shock, coupled with her refusal to let the gang exploit such desires, suggests, modernity can be made humane but not safe, static, or smooth. This conclusion reflects the child’s presence as materially thwarting the desire to resolve modernity into a single moment. Jacqueline Rose argued of an even more foundational children’s story, Peter Pan, that its incompleteness as a text, which produced a history of constant re-writing, reflected an epistemological difficulty in adult views of childhood that both gave the story its popularity and invited endless attempts to re-write and resolve the questions that it posed. The Box is not uncompleted in the same literal sense, but nevertheless it—like the box itself, and even the aeroplane that is finally stolen from Brown—resists integration into a total vision like Brown’s. Here the child’s experiences remain invested in futurity, and thus impossible to completely know; but it is possible to give them, Masefield suggests, time and space of their own, the time and space that require material comforts that are sustainable and cyclical, providing a humane basis for the ruptures of modernity and its technology. As the aeroplane’s development—and its cultural reception in the 1930s—makes clear, childish fantasy is not merely the stuff of which dreams are made, but of which the material world is made too. Hence the texts of children and flight are also continually re-made, because they not only narrate our wishes for the pleasures of flight, they embody their unpredictable potential to become real—but this is a potential that can only be sustained when material culture is humane and generous. This resists, inter alia, any cultural history of flight as endogenously violent and totalitarian.

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Notes 1. Babington Smith quotes Masefield describing military hospitals as ‘like an impressionist-futurist picture’ (131); he was, therefore, aware of Futurism to some extent. 2. The combination of deep snow and aeroplanes in The Box may have been inspired by recollection of a recent winter: Bluffield records that in late 1927, ‘Britain was gripped by one of its severest winters. Villages were cut off by deep snow drifts and Air Taxis, the Imperial airways charter division […] was fully occupied in delivering food parcels that were dropped on isolated communities’ (68). 3. I have taken the idea of the child requiring us to ‘look sideways’ from Bond Stockton (2009). 4. The Futurist Manifesto is itself ambivalent; it emphasizes the embodied dimensions of speed, but also gestures towards some disembodied final state: ‘Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have already created velocity which is eternal and omnipresent’ (Marinetti et al., 51). For Virilio’s account of Futurism, see particularly Speed and Politics, 84, 134. 5. On the relationship between Futurism and Fascism, see Gentile (2003), especially Chapter 2, ‘Conflicting Modernisms’. 6. See Note 4. 7. It is unlikely, but possible, that Masefield had heard about Hitler’s personal wolf imagery before The Box’s publication; Hitler had been using the ‘wolf’ nickname since the early 1920s (Butts 98). 8. By ‘progressive time’, I mean time understood as developmental, for example in the child’s education and development towards adulthood, but also in the larger sense of human ‘progress’ in modernity.

Works Cited Babington-Smith, Constance. John Masefield: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Bluffield, Robert. Imperial Airways: The Birth of the British Airline Industry 1914–1940. Ticehurst: Chevron Publishing, 2009. Bond Stockton, Kathryn. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Butts, Dennis. ‘Did John Masefield Ever Meet Hitler or Stalin?: John Masefield, The Box of Delights (1935).’ How Did Long John Silver Lose His Leg?: And Twenty Six Other Classic Mysteries of Children’s Literature. Eds. Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt. London: Lutterworth Press, 2013. 96–100.

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Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Gentile, Emilio. The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Golding, Harry, ed. The Wonder Book of Aircraft. Book series. London, Lock and Ward, multiple editions c.1920–1950. Haapamäki, Michele. The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Interwar Britain. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Harrison, Melissa. All Among the Barley. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Kuhn, Reinhard. Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature. London: Brown University Press, 1982. Law, Michael John. The Experience of Suburban Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Lewis, Wyndham. ‘The Cubist Room.’ The Egoist 1 (1 January 1914): 8–9. Manduca, Joseph, and Bert Love. The Meccano Magazine 1916–1981. Ed. Allen Levy. London: New Cavendish Books, 1987. Marinetti, F.T. ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.’ 1909. Futurism: An Anthology. Eds. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009. 49–53. Marinetti, F.T., et al. ‘Manifesto of Aeropainting.’ 1929. Futurism: An Anthology. Eds. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009. 283–285. Masefield, John. The Box of Delights. [1935]. London: Egmont, 2011. ———. The Midnight Folk. [1927]. London: Penguin, 1971. Muller, Richard R. ‘Hitler, Airpower, and Statecraft.’ The Influence of Airpower Upon History: Statesmanship, Diplomacy, and Foreign Policy Since 1903. Eds. Robin Higham and Mark Pariloo. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. 85–114. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. 2nd edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Rye, Penny, dir. The Box of Delights. Television series. Adapted by AlanSeymour. BBC/Lella Productions, 1984. Segrè, Claudio G. Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life. London: University of California Press, 1987. Vere, Bernard. ‘A “Modern Rendezvous” in London: Painters, Pilots, and Edward Wadsworth’s A Short Flight (1914).’ British Art Studies 5 (Spring 2017): n.p. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. 1977. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006.

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———. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. [1984]. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989. Williams, P.B. Ellis P. By Jove, Biggles! The Life of Captain W.E. Johns. London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1981.

CHAPTER 14

‘The Camels Are Coming’: W. E. Johns, Biggles, and T. E. Lawrence’s Flight into the Air Force Simon Machin

W. E. Johns and T. E. Lawrence’s tense face-off at a London recruitment centre of the RAF in August 1922 stands comparison with the best of improbable yet chronicled meetings between famous individuals.1 A veteran of the Arab Revolt in the Negev Desert and a delegate at the Paris Peace Conference, Lawrence is turning his back on national celebrity by enlisting, under an assumed name, in the ranks of the RAF, much to the consternation of his friends. A former pilot of bombers and prisoner of war, Flying Officer Johns has by now given up any hope of taking to the skies again, settling for the reduced horizons of a recruitment manager. It is still ten years before Johns will introduce Captain Bigglesworth of the Royal Flying Corps to the world in a series of short stories for a popular flying magazine which he edits, later republishing them as The Camels Are Coming .

S. Machin (B) University of Roehampton, London, UK © The Author(s) 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_14

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For the connoisseur of such chance encounters, the attraction extends beyond merely witnessing the unexpected clash of incongruous personalities to observing how the random collision fits within the emerging pattern of two lives, a widening circle whose final shape is only fully knowable with the benefit of hindsight. The once-famous Lawrence will remain in happy obscurity until the end of his service as an aircraftman, gaining the reputation of an accomplished technician. He will die only months after retirement in 1935 from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. The once-obscure flying officer will, after retiring from the Service, appropriate to himself the more dignified title of Captain W. E. Johns and reinvent himself as one of the most successful British writers of children’s adventure stories. He will die in 1968 while working on the valedictory ‘Biggles Does Some Homework’, in which the Boy’s Own hero at last contemplates retirement.2 With hindsight, both men can be seen to have fundamentally depended upon the RAF in achieving their chosen trajectories of anonymity and acclaim. For the scholar of interwar airmindedness, looking back at the professional engagement of Lawrence and Johns with the Air Force entails placing them in the even broader confluences of literary and social life. Given the psychic shock that the First World War engendered across Western culture, it is not unnatural to see their preoccupation with postWWI aviation, at least to some extent, as a compensatory reaction to the lost illusions about valour and autonomy resulting from the carnage of the trenches. There has certainly been a tendency to emphasize the contributions made by Lawrence and Johns towards continued representations of heroism during the interwar period. In his survey of the literary 1930s, Valentine Cunningham argues that it was only natural that Lawrence should ‘fetch up’ in the Air Force, as it was the ‘only place for a would-be military hero’ (168). More recently, in an account of the fear of airborne attack in interwar Britain, Michele Haapamäki cites Johns and Biggles as evidence that aviation ‘was a new frontier where Boy’s Own fantasies of wartime courage and adventure could be realized in a space equal to empire’ (21). This approach underplays the extent to which the RAF was struggling to rupture links to the older armed services and establish its own modern culture. It also obscures how, even in 1922, winged flight was still technically in its infancy, although possessing an ambiguous glamour which held ominous as well as enticing possibilities for nation states and their civilian populations.

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Yet there is a further difficulty with any academic overemphasis upon the air as a symbolic proxy for outmoded, Victorian, representations of masculinity: the neglect of the writings of Lawrence and Johns themselves. It is forgotten that Lawrence’s day-book of RAF life, The Mint , with its Orwellian depictions of down-and-out recruits, can be read as an early exercise in proletarian mass observation.3 It should be remembered, too, that the Biggles of the Popular Flying short stories is, in his first incarnation at least, not really a boy’s own hero at all. He is a protagonist aimed at an adult readership, who is clearly designed to find his place in a publishing market which also celebrated German war aces. In this chapter I will redress this neglect by examining, inter alia, Lawrence’s prescription for a modern airborne fighting force in The Mint and Johns’s controversial yet prescient call for rearmament during his editorship of Popular Flying . I shall argue that both writers are at least as forward-as they are backward-looking in assessing the implications, particularly technological, of winged flight. Furthermore, the notion that the chronicles of First World War flying, which start to appear in the 1920s and ’30s, are written principally to resuscitate and elevate a defunct form of heroism will be challenged. Instead, these texts will be shown to accept implicitly and explicitly how advances in aeronautics have permanently changed the relationship of ground to air in warfare. When viewed as such, they take their place in a literary discussion as much foreshadowed by fear of what winged flight in the future might bring as overshadowed by a romanticized past. Evidence for the centrality of technology in the discussion of wartime flying can even be found in the 1916–1917 Boy’s Own Annual , contemporaneous to Lawrence’s engagement as liaison officer in the Negev Desert and Johns’s commission in the Royal Flying Corps. Its ‘War Notes and Pictures’ section carries an illustration of an aeroplane instrumentboard next to an article ‘Used by Aviators’, which describes state-ofthe-art navigation equipment in British fighter planes necessitated by the ‘enormous increase in the range and accuracy of anti-aircraft guns’ (360). Taking patriotic pride in the design by the General Aeronautical Co. Ltd., ‘who are contractors to the British, Australian and foreign Governments’, the commentary outlines how the altimeter, revolution indicator and velometer combine to assist aerial judgement. The lesson in engineering is sweetened considerably by the suggestion that ‘[s]upposing you, now, are the pilot of an aeroplane […t]his is the kind of instrument-board that you will have before you fastened to

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the dashboard’ (360). Given that in the Edwardian period, the Northcliffe Press’s story papers for boys, the Gem and the Magnet, had peeled away the less-privileged clientele from the Boy’s Own Paper, leaving a close social alignment between the remaining readership and the predominantly public-school intake of the Royal Flying Corps, the proposition is more than idle. For such schoolboys, far from being a fantasy, piloting a fighter could easily become a reality. After enthusiastically reading copies of Flying magazine at his boarding school, Oundle, the seventeen-yearold Cecil Lewis, author of the 1936 classic air memoir, Sagittarius Rising , had quit in 1915 for the Royal Flying Corps. He was admitted after only the most cursory training at Brooklands, the motor track requisitioned as an aerodrome by the government at the outbreak of war. The dual role of Brooklands is a reminder of the short timespan between the development of the motor car and of winged flight, and that the elite glamour attached to the mastery of speed was inextricably bound to class and money.4 ‘Used by Aviators’ was written less than ten years after the Wright brothers’ public flights at Kitty Hawk in 1908 about a technology that circumstance had driven towards military rather than civilian functions; the revisionist aviation historian David Edgerton has done much to counter the myth of British ‘declinism’ by emphasizing how technologically progressive Edwardian England was (18–19). Yet, running parallel to the national pride in gentlemanly engineering can be detected a more primordial excitement at a pilot’s being freed once again from earthly interference by the instrument-board, for as the cultural theorist Laurence Goldstein has noted, all aeronautical developments share ‘the common goal of privileging air over earth’ (1). To be airminded, then, is to be ground-conscious; to be privileged in the air is to be cognizant of social hierarchies. And to turn from the BOP article, where these truths are merely implied, to Lawrence’s The Mint is to find them fully articulated in convoluted status games between pilot and aircraft technician.

‘Aspirations for the Air’ Ever self-conscious, Lawrence, in telling the carefully constructed story of his enlistment, went to great lengths to repudiate his desert warrior reputation and reformulate winged flight as drab and unromantic. This anti-elitist ploy, setting a utilitarian RAF present against a glamorous Oriental past, is transparent from The Mint ’s opening chapter which

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purports to describe Lawrence’s experience at the Henrietta Street, Victoria, recruiting office. Its author is presented as hesitating for two hours in the filthy street outside, his fear of the challenge of enlistment necessitating a trip to a public lavatory: ‘[O]ne reason that taught me I wasn’t a man of action was this routine melting of the bowels before a crisis’ (13). The unplanned call of nature allows Lawrence to allude to a burst shoe and growing fringes on his trousers, aligning himself with the ragged-trousered working class, driven by post-war unemployment into the ranks. Onto this shabby picture he superimposes another image—of the trench-bound infantryman forced to go over the top: ‘However, we end it. I’m going straight up and in’. The airminded Lawrence presents himself as no more or less heroic than a private on the Western Front. Lawrence’s paradoxical capacity to play up his heroic uniqueness by playing it down has been particularly remarked upon by one biographer, Michael Asher, who diagnoses a curious psychological trait in his subject, which he terms ‘reverse exhibitionism’ (360). This manifests as a need for any ordeal or exploit to be witnessed by a private gallery (43) and for the social expression of the ordeal to extend in the opposite direction from success, wealth, and grandeur to ‘degradation, poverty, self-denial and enslavement’ (360). The years between the end of the war and his enlistment were indeed used by Lawrence to cultivate a small circle of eminent literary men, including Robert Graves, John Buchan, Thomas Hardy, Edward Garnett, George Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster. And it was in front of this select group that Lawrence’s seemingly contradictory desire for self-abasement before an elite was played out, giving a possible clue to his perverse decision to enlist. For although there is universal agreement that in the early 1920s Lawrence’s nerves were shattered, and that life in the RAF may have been sought as a means of avoiding even the most rudimentary decision-making, there is probably another important determining factor, which supports Lawrence’s claim not to be a man of action. This is the novelist E. M. Forster’s belief that Lawrence wanted to be known primarily as a writer (Golden Warrior 396). The 1955 edition of The Mint crystallizes this ambition. In his introductory note, A. W. Lawrence quotes from a letter that his brother wrote to Forster on 6 August 1928. Looking back to 1922, Lawrence admits that his original intention had been ‘to go on to a Squadron, & write the real Air Force, and make it a book—a BOOK, I mean. It is the biggest subject I have ever seen, and I thought I could get it, as I felt it so keenly’ (8). The plan of producing the definitive work about the newest British

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armed service would have been a grand design for any writer, but is all the more remarkable coming from the pen of an author who clearly regarded it as more significant than his record of the desert war, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Events conspired to thwart Lawrence’s authorial ambitions for the RAF, or, at least, to clip his wings. Having entered under the false name John Hume Ross to preserve anonymity and ward off press intrusion, Lawrence had his cover blown in December 1922. The publicity obliged him to leave, and since the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard, would only countenance re-admittance on the insupportable condition of his accepting a commission, Lawrence had to make do with a posting to the Royal Tank Corps under another pseudonym, Private Shaw, until canvassing by influential friends, intensified by his own threats of suicide, secured reinstatement in July 1925. The Mint follows the essentially broken trajectory of his RAF career. It concentrates principally upon his initial training at the grim Depot in Uxbridge, to the north-west of London, and then the brief and comfortable posting, from 1925 to 1926, to RAF Cadet College, Cranwell, in Lincolnshire. Although the range of his Air Force study narrowed considerably, Lawrence still renders the distinctive stamp of the service upon the men it turned out by employing the overarching metaphor of minting. There are three sections, ‘The Raw Material’, ‘In The Mill’, and ‘Service’, the first two describing the bruising process of knocking recruits into shape at Uxbridge—through parade drill, physical instruction and fatigues— and the third, the realization of the finished article, the institutionalized and skilled mechanic, in the aircraft hangars of Cranwell. Stylistic differences emerge between the London and Lincolnshire episodes. The former creates an impressionistic day-book of service life, compiled from spontaneous evening jottings before lights-out; the latter, less intensely personal, adopts a more philosophical and analytical tone, making use of considered reflections recycled from letters to friends. Lawrence’s refusal to accept a commission means that The Mint could not discuss the political battles being fought over the future of the air service. Instead, it takes as its subject the humdrum lives of his predominantly proletarian fellow recruits. Lawrence’s identification with them is immediate; from the outset, there is an insistent adoption of ‘our’, ‘us’ and ‘we’. The early chapters positively revel in a shabby realism when describing the Depot’s poor food, skin-rasping uniforms, noisome butcher’s shop and shit-house fatigues or recounting the lewd banter,

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drunken fights, and off-duty sexual escapades of his hut-mates. This siding with the hut, ‘a fair microcosm of unemployed England’ (24), embraces a communal hatred for the gratuitous indignities inflicted by NCOs and senior officers during physical instruction and parade drill. Indeed, Lawrence thought the 1928 manuscript unpublishable during his lifetime because of several unflattering and recognizable RAF penportraits, hence the delay in publication in the United Kingdom until 1955.5 Yet the author’s stated intention ‘to plunge crudely amongst crude men’ (18) is a tacit admission of the unbridgeable gap between him and the other aircraftmen, and tantamount to the avowal of a privileged, participant-observer status, however anti-establishment his observations might seem. If The Mint is quick to adopt an us-and-them attitude towards those in command, it is slower off the mark in discerning a distinctive Air Force identity in comparison to the two senior services. True enough, Lawrence insists that entrance requirements ‘refuse the last level of the social structure’ (24) and that testing and examination standards ‘were severe—more so than the army’s’ (21). Still, it is only as training progresses that he describes how ‘[d]ay and night the distinction between airmen and soldiers is dinned into us by all comers’ (77), with aircraftmen coming to ‘despise and detest’ the army, for the willing subordination of its soldiers. For Lawrence, it is a pity that the Depot has no visual reminder of the RAF’s proper business, the conquest of the air: ‘We are vowed to this enterprise […] to win the freehold of the upper element in as full measure as a man’s licence on land or a sailor’s liberty at sea’ (78). Yet because that conquest is still a novelty, he acknowledges that the RAF’s identity is work in progress: ‘we are airmen, with the new character the new force is making for itself’ (78). That in 1922 Lawrence’s aspirations for the air should amount to little more than primal aerial conquest and a competitive desire to avow the higher quality of RAF recruits is unsurprising. For, according to an official service history, Chief of the Air Staff Sir Hugh Trenchard, was having not only to fight in senior military and government circles to ensure even the survival of the RAF when both the army and navy wanted aerial control back, but also to define philosophically the work of the new service which, in his words, would ‘encourage and develop the air spirit’ (Royal Air Force 55). His argument for an independent third service which could police large areas of colonial territory at low cost proved palatable, helped by the successful 1920 air campaign in Somaliland, which, as the historian

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Lawrence James notes, at £70,000 was the cheapest imperial campaign ever (The Rise & Fall of the British Empire 401). As to the air spirit, in Trenchard’s view, flying and engineering were foundational, so an Air Force Cadet College was established at Cranwell for regular officers, and the planned training of mechanics was to be the most rigorous that could be devised. Lawrence abandons his anti-establishment tone whenever Trenchard, ‘the pinnacle and our exemplar’, is mentioned, portraying him as ‘a sure, urging giant’ who impels the RAF forward not through his inarticulate words, ‘but just by what he is’ (94–95). By the time of his 1925 posting to Cranwell, Lawrence had become considerably more definite in his own prescription for the new service as the training ground for a technocratic elite. Characteristically, he reverses the accepted superiority of pilot to mechanic, of sky to earth: in Lawrence’s cult of the airman the RAF engineer is the new type of superior being. The ground crew’s role is to keep lesser men in the air, for ‘[t]he Air Ministry recognizes a rightness in our worship of the technical engineer […] those who have understanding of the souls of engines, and find their poetry in the smooth tick-over’ (195). By contrast, a pilot is a philistine only capable of ‘ham-fisted cruelty to machines’ (194). Maintaining high engineering standards is a democratic process where ‘intelligence is taken for granted’ (182). Technical competence is examined ruthlessly: ‘Our machines fly when they’re as good as it lies in our powers to make them. If that is not good enough, we drift to mess-deck fatigues or to sanitary squad: forfeiting the technical esteem of our pals’ (182–83). Indeed, Lawrence implies that the officer class is irrelevant to the Air Force’s success, since the working mechanic has ‘the weight of the effort towards indefinite victory on his unguided head—unguided, largely because the Officers’ Mess achieves the public-school tone, and so dares not look beyond the concrete’ (194). For all his talk of the democratic and technocratic leadership emanating from the aircraft hangars of Cranwell, there is a nagging suspicion that it is only Lawrence’s emergence from the First World War as a rare success story that privileges his modernist recalibration of winged flight. Airminded but resolutely not airborne, has the former desert warrior merely conferred the heroic status previously reserved for the robes of an Arab Prince upon the oil-stained overalls of the RAF engineer? That suspicion is strengthened in the final ‘Service’ section of The Mint in a purple passage where Lawrence describes a spontaneous race between his Brough Superior motorbike and an old Bristol Fighter across the Lincolnshire

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countryside. For the competitive Lawrence, it is as if only through a trial of speed against an aeroplane—a challenge which he wins—that the pilot’s glamour can be wrested to the ground. Moreover, the exoticism of the camel-riding desert hero is incorporated too: ‘A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness’ (202). The racing vignette confirms Lawrence’s status as a contented mastercraftsman of the technologies of speed. And life at Cranwell made Lawrence happy, causing him to write less. The impression left at The Mint ’s conclusion is of a complex man finally at ease with himself, having found a fulfilling technical function and hence a new identity. Writing has allowed the former man of action the opportunity to reflect and to exorcise the past. The story told is of an exceptional individual, who, strained beyond endurance by the war, has heroically managed his own transition to a vital yet undervalued role.

Popular Flying It is a historical irony that by the time Lawrence’s story of his unaided reinvention as a master aircraftman was available to the British public in the 1950s it had been undermined by his recruiting officer for nigh on twenty years, and reduced to the dubious status of a yarn. Johns’s position as the editor of the monthly journal, Popular Flying , gave him the ideal platform to disseminate his own eye-witness account. He lost little time, following the death of Lawrence on 19 May 1935, in setting the matter straight using his ‘Editor’s Cockpit’ in the July edition: ‘The old story of how Lawrence was recognized by a particularly observant officer some time [sic] after he had joined the service has been told so many times that it has become legendary. Don’t believe a word of it’ (179). Johns’s article could hardly have been better calculated to discredit Lawrence’s account if he had access to the manuscript copy of The Mint . It contradicts Lawrence’s tall tale of a successful medical owing to the kind-hearted leniency of two sympathetic doctors, with the flat refusal of the real duty medical officer to certify him as fit; the Air Ministry had to send an external doctor to sign Ross’s medical form. As Johns’s biographers note, top-secret instructions had been sent to the Henrietta Street recruiting office five days before Lawrence was due to enlist, but through an administrative mix-up they never reached Johns (Beresford

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Ellis and Williams 111). The plans originated with the Chief of Air Staff. Lawrence’s irresistible rise to the rank of aircraftman, 2nd class, had been sanctioned by the pinnacle of the RAF. Yet what seems to trouble Johns even more than the irregular manner of Lawrence’s enlistment is the tenor of his attitude to junior officers. Repeating his allegations in a further article, written for Flying in 1938, he describes ‘a thin, pale-faced chap walking in’ with ‘something so offhand about his manner, almost amounting to insolence, that I took an instinctive dislike to him. I had got to know the type. He was “different” from the other recruits, and was letting me know’ (3). Johns appeals to the esprit de corps of the officer class who ‘always have (and always will, I hope) stick to each other in matters of this sort. In any case, I felt that it was all wrong for junior officers to be subject to the back-blast of men coming into the Service with chits from Cabinet Ministers in their pockets’. In objecting to the pulling of rank exercised by well-connected recruits Johns exhibits an independence of mind that characterized his editorship of Popular Flying , and led to his enforced removal in 1939. The manner of his recruitment into the RAF and ability to thrive in aviation circles purely on his own abilities, in the absence of friends in high places, provides a meritocratic alternative to the stereotype of the public-school flyer. A grammar-school boy, Johns had to follow the conventional route of a transfer from the Army to seal his place in the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, well after many of the first waves of public-school entrants at the start of the war had been killed in training or action. As a veteran of campaigns in Gallipoli and then Salonika, where he contracted malaria, he had decided ‘that there was no point in dying standing in squalor if one could do so sitting down in clean air’ (Beresford Ellis and Williams 32). A temporary casualty of the severe financial cutbacks affecting all the services in 1919, Johns had the tenacity to be reinstated in what had become the RAF in November 1920, serving as a recruiting manager until October 1927. Thereafter, his versatility enabled him to establish himself firstly as an artist specializing in aviation, then as a contributor of articles to magazines and books for boys and lastly as an editor at just the time when public interest in flying was making the production of specialist periodicals financially viable. His pivotal editorial role at Popular Flying , from the magazine’s inception in 1932 until his removal in 1939, complicates any simplistic conception of Johns as a purveyor of Boy’s Own imperial nostalgia. His contributions range across prophetic comments about

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flying for the masses to trenchant analysis of national aviation policy to personal wartime reminiscences, as well as a monthly Biggles story written under the pseudonym William Earle. From the first edition in April 1932 Johns set out an ambitious scope for its coverage and a progressive mission to popularize flying. One contributor, Nigel Norman, in his article ‘Flying Must Be More Popular’, even enlists ‘[e]very reader of this paper, everyone who flies or studies flying’ in the crusade ‘to dispel prejudices and to stimulate air enthusiasm’ (18). Buoyed by the magazine selling out within a few days, Johns restates the magazine’s ambition even more fervently in the May edition: ‘POPULAR FLYING will leave no stone unturned to banish notions which have done so much to retard the progress of civil aviation, notions which confine aviation to a chosen few, either wealthy, or possessed of a physique beyond ordinary standards’ (69). While Lawrence spurns the sphere of the air with an inverted snobbery, Johns encourages all his readers, irrespective of class, to consider flying. Popular Flying is punctuated from the first issue with references to alluring tourist destinations and Johns’s own foreign trips. In ‘Holidaying in the Riviera’ (65–7) readers are informed that ‘Nice is the cheapest place in the Riviera, and it is the most central’. Johns gives the cost of secondclass hotels, then moves on to discussing Monte Carlo before comparing the cost of flying as against going by boat or train, noting that Air France runs the service from Croydon. Lawrence’s iconoclasm is based upon a competitive disdain for those who fly, tacitly sustained by his own heroic history. By contrast, Johns’s radicalism is democratically open-spirited, possessing a determination to make air travel as mundane as any other form. In fairness, Johns’s long editorship allowed him the longer view upon aviation as ‘the biggest subject’, to borrow Lawrence’s term, and he had the foresight to see that in peacetime at least the air’s inevitable ascendancy over land and sea could only be beneficial. ‘The Editor’s Cockpit’ in the June 1937 issue announces that ‘Aviation is becoming Big Business’ (21), by which Johns means that the early pioneering days of winged flight are over and that monopolistic capitalists will attempt to take control of passenger traffic. This is an inevitability for technological reasons because ‘[a]fter a brief life of less than two hundred years, steam, as the world’s greatest motive power, has touched its peak, and from now on it will decline’ (121). Johns anticipates that within two years regular services will be operating ‘even over the great oceans’ and that on land

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‘things will shape very much the same way’ and ‘[w]ithin a year or two you will be able to fly from one side of Europe to the other in a few hours’ (121). Noting that, for the sake of national prestige the State has financed big ships, he observes that it is difficult to discern who will eventually control commercial aviation because ‘[t]he Government, for reasons best known to itself, has steadfastly refused to commit itself to a definite air policy’ (121). Regular readers of Popular Flying , including those in positions of power, could not have failed to notice the critical tone often adopted by the editor to the government’s approach to aviation. In the mid-1930s, of even greater concern than aviation’s commercial future was the ominous condition of international relations, and Johns was acutely aware that, in the event of a European war, the potentialities of air power were catastrophic. In a rare plaudit for the government for its establishment of the Air Raids Precaution Department of the Home Office, Johns contends that ‘[t]o the student of political history in a thousand years’ time, the conversion of the British National Government of 1935 to commonsense [sic] will command a peculiar interest’, because of ‘the awakening of Westminster to the fact that man’s conquest of the air must inevitably alter all preconceived ideas of time, space and national safety—particularly national safety’ (‘Editor’s Cockpit’, July 1935, 178). Clearly greatly troubled by the prospect of aerial bombing, Johns observes that ‘to build enough dugouts to accommodate the teeming millions of London and other industrial centres, is obviously out of the question’. He also fears for ‘our factories and depositories. Most of these have been established without regard to modern methods of warfare. There they stand howling for an enemy bomber to do his stuff’ (178). Historically, Johns’s unease must be placed within a long-standing national anxiety which dated back to the German air raids of the First World War. Haapamäki records that by the end of the conflict, raiding Zeppelin airships had dropped 6000 bombs, causing 556 fatalities and 1557 injuries (35). In his account of this offensive, The ‘Baby Killers’, Thomas Fegan notes that the shocking novelty of aerial bombing, its move to legitimize the targeting of civilians and its dispelling of the illusion of Britain as an island fortress, led to the attacks having a profound psychological impact out of all proportion to the death and destruction inflicted (9). He charts the technological evolution of the German assault, commencing with Zeppelins, then taking the form of the large biplane bomber, firstly the ‘Gotha’ then the even bigger ‘Giant’ Staaken, which

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between them added 857 dead and at least 2000 injured to the total tally of the air offensive. The use of searchlights, anti-aircraft batteries, barrage balloons and machine guns partially mitigated the scope of attacks, but the relative ease with which defences were breached created a permanent sense of vulnerability. Anxiety at the prospect of aerial bombardment in any future conflict was intensified by the Spanish Civil War, which, as well as awakening the political consciousness of writers of the Auden Generation, featured the participation of the Condor Legion from Nazi Germany in the bombing of civilian targets, which famously included Guernica. Beresford Ellis and Williams note that Johns was bitter in his denunciation of the British government for its policy of non-intervention (156) when in his view the democratically elected Republican regime should have been supported against the Nationalists and their international fascist collaborators. He was also personally saddened by the death—fighting for the Republicans in 1937—of a contributor, Christopher St John Sprigg, who had written several adventure stories under the name of Arthur Cave, but is more famous today for his posthumously published Marxist critiques under the name of Christopher Caudwell.6 Hitler’s policy of rearmament had long led Johns to reiterate the call for development of the air fleet at least to the point of parity. He argued that, far from being bellicose, his stance was motivated by a practical antimilitarism, since the possession of sufficient bombers acted essentially as a deterrent. By the January 1939 issue, in an editorial entitled ‘This Interceptor Humbug’, he was roundly criticizing the government for its failure to remember that ‘[n]othing will stop determined bombers. Nothing. Not guns, nor balloons, nor interceptors, or anything else’ and insisting that ‘there is only one defence against bombers, and that is more bombers’ (486). Stung by the criticism, several prominent politicians put pressure on the publishers, George Newnes, and Johns was informed that the May issue would be his last as editor (Beresford Ellis and Williams 170). Johns was writing from experience about the irresistible nature of aerial bombardment. He had been a pilot in a squadron of Airco de Havilland 4 bombers which was given the task in the last months of the war of destroying industrial targets in Rhineland Germany. His own memories of war service feature in the third important strand of the magazine: its articles recalling First World War flying. This was part of a growing trend towards wartime reminiscence in the 1930s. Indeed, in an assessment of how the 1914–1918 conflagration came to be conceptualized culturally,

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A War Imagined, Samuel Hynes points out that almost a decade elapsed before the important prose works about it started being published. Listing in chronological order a score of classic war books published between 1926 and 1933 (Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom coming second), Hynes speculates about why it took so long for the ‘conspiracy of silence’ to be broken. He suggests that it may take ten years for history to acquire a narrative arc and for war’s horror to be sufficiently distanced for imaginative recollection to become an act of exorcism. He also wonders whether the presence of a possible future war ‘made the telling of the past war’s story both possible and imperative’ (425). What makes Popular Flying particularly unusual and intriguing is how it ran Biggles stories and recollections by Air Force veterans alongside admonitory editorials. That Johns assumed himself to be addressing an older generation of experienced airmen as well as those new to flying is clear from his aside, when undermining Lawrence, that all officers must stick together. The Biggles stories might have seemed glamorous to young readers, but for veterans of the air they would have stirred potentially uncomfortable memories. As Johns’s editorial voice gained confidence, he experimented with personal reminiscences, which in their wry, matter-of-fact tone become conversational. For example, in June 1936 he recounts his experience of being shot down over enemy territory, stating how he was beaten up by his reception party because German children had been killed by his squadron during a church procession, when bombs were cleared from undercarriages some weeks earlier (130). The account neither justifies nor excuses the deaths of children, but clearly Johns’s unwillingness to selfcensor must mean he believed that such atrocities did not invalidate the bravery of British airmen. The lesson to be drawn from this dichotomy is surely that the aerial combat was too new and complex a sphere to be thought of in the simple terms of heroism or proto-imperialism, that Cunningham and Haapamäki imply. It could not be defined by the same considerations as the war on the ground. Tellingly, when Hynes delineates the ‘Myth of the War’, in which ‘a generation of innocent young men […] went off to war to make the world safe for democracy’ and ‘were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals’ (x), he forgets that, in contrast to the generals, Trenchard remained popular even though his offensive tactics cost many lives during the war; dominating the Air Force in the 1920s and 1930s, he was even described by Johns in his final May 1939 editorial as ‘a pillar of strength that would not be pulled down’ (54). Furthermore, there was

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no simple counterpart in aerial combat to, as it were, the poor, bloodied, infantryman. For, above the ground, the war was a more complicated affair, the combatant being delineated according to his role as a pilot attempting either to engage the enemy in a fighter plane or to evade him in a bomber—or as that largely forgotten airman, the observer. The relative academic neglect of aerial observation has recently been rectified by Terrence Finnegan’s Shooting the Front (2014), a comprehensive review of the field of Allied aerial photography and photographic intelligence. Finnegan advances the bold thesis that ‘the real value of aviation […] was in the information that was acquired by aerial reconnaissance to better support the combatant on the ground’ and that behind ‘every battlefield decision lay aerial (and other) intelligence sources that encouraged or precluded the next tactical and strategic step’ (11). Finnegan charts the transformation in thinking among the Army elite, who, like the career cavalryman French, came to see that the function of collecting information on enemy movements in the field would transfer entirely from men on horses to the air service. If this is something that historians have forgotten to remember, the same was not true of Henry Newbolt. In his Tales of the Great War, published in 1916, even the occasionally pronounced Boy’s Own fervour7 (not altogether unsurprising from the author of ‘Vitaï Lampada’, the classic poetic statement of public-school patriotism) does not obscure some cool empirical analysis. Newbolt classifies the five functions of airmen as the reconnaissance of enemy positions, observation for the artillery, raids on military-industrial targets, assisting communications between allied forces and, only fifthly, ‘fighting the enemy’s airmen’ (221). He acknowledges that in a ‘war of positions’, a contemporary euphemism for trench warfare, the aeroplane had conclusively superseded the cavalry as the means by which enemy munition lines could be disrupted. As to aerial reconnaissance, he argues that in the battles of Mons and Le Cateau British communication with ground forces was invaluable in preventing the enemy outflanking a section of the British army (222), while conceding that German methods of artillery observation led to their guns being better directed (226). Newbolt’s account tallies closely with Finnegan’s, which confirms that RFC reconnaissance averted a catastrophe at Mons (32–5) and that reforms in January 1915 gave greater autonomy to the air service and improved liaison with artillery divisions (47–8).

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Even in memoirs, the observer’s role, if downplayed, was not totally forgotten. Into the Blue by Norman Macmillan, a post-war author of enthusiastic aviation books, reproduces an impressionist picture of the observer’s lot which he had written while stationed at Ste-Marie-Cappel (93–4). Condemned to fly constant patrols over many months in an aeroplane that had been superseded by more powerful enemy machines, the observer pursued the arduous and dangerous work of providing photographs of areas far behind the enemy lines, while seeing his original comrades being killed, several plunging to earth in flaming, smoking planes. The nervous strain of the role took a terrible toll, and Macmillan laments how the courage of observers gathered no decorations for their ‘functional’ performance and how they were even debarred from becoming flight commanders (135). That role was ‘exclusively a pilot’s prerogative’. Macmillan’s encomium for the observer is sadly the exception that proves the rule in flying memoirs, but at least the nature of his work differed from the bomber pilot’s, so could legitimately be celebrated. Yet by a curious twist, it was often the prerogative of the enemy fighter pilot to be celebrated more than the British observer. Stefan Goebel goes as far as to suggest that the ‘British public was perhaps even more fascinated by the chivalry of Immelmann, Boelcke and Richthofen than the Germans themselves’, an interest that had been made possible by the German lionizing of their air aces during the war, when by comparison, the Royal Flying Corps—committed, as it were, to the Newboltian concept of team sacrifice—had baulked at celebrating the achievements of individual British pilots (226). Popular Flying acceded to this trend for international celebration, when Johns chivalrously printed the riposte by a German Ace, Ernst Udet,8 to the ‘incredible slander’ by a British newspaper that Richthofen was only a defensive fighter, who scored his combat victories mainly by targeting obsolescent two-seater observation planes or waiting for British pilots to cross over enemy lines (‘Holidaying in the Riviera’ 71–2). Goebel notes that the representation of scout pilots on both sides as members of a courtly brotherhood fulfilled a compensatory function, since it reduced warfare to an equitable man-to-man fight (227). The brutal and impersonal realities of modern artillery bombardment could be forgotten if aerial dogfights could be reconceptualized as jousts in a medieval tournament. Yet the courtliness was open to a more jingoistic colouring, as when Newbolt suggests that ‘our airmen are singularly like

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the knights of the old romances because they do battle in defence of those who cannot defend themselves’ (248–49). This patriotic idealization has, of course, to ignore the brutal realities of medieval warfare to allow Newbolt to contrast the ‘frightfulness of the Zeppelin raids with the record of our airmen, the most daring and chivalrous fighters on the roll of a thousand years’ (257). Without this rhetorical evasion, the possibility of German Christian children dying as collateral damage in an impersonal discharge of British bombs renders the war in the air as chillingly arbitrary as the war in the trenches. The cunning elision between the chivalrous combat of both sides and the moral superiority of the British airman also appealed to Prime Minister Lloyd George in the most prominent use of the knights of the air trope in October 1917.9 Yet it is sometimes overlooked that in eulogizing the ‘Cavalry of the Clouds’, Lloyd George is not only mediaevalizing the airman but also modernizing his role in taking over surveillance from the Army, since his speech also describes the British airmen carrying out logistical activities similar to those prioritized by Newbolt. Although Johns, in his role of Popular Flying ’s editor is prepared to celebrate German aces and admit to the devastation of bombing, Johns the short story writer makes sure that Biggles is imbued with some of the idealized qualities of the aerial knight—youthful yet battle-hardened, sensitive to the feminine, protective of inexperienced colleagues and alive to his probably doomed status. But Biggles the chevalier is also Biggles the technocrat. An acting Flight Commander while still in his teens, so only recently out of public school,10 he is first pictured looking at how to improve the firing potential of a machine gun, alive to technological innovation, as if his very life depended on it. This trait is found in Sagitarrius Rising ’s Cecil Lewis—of the same stamp as Biggles and still not twenty at the Armistice—who is fixated about any minor improvement in aerial technology because ‘we were always at the mercy of the fragility of the machine and the unreliability of the engine’ (60). The insistence of Johns and Lewis on the practical vigilance of the fighter flyer exposes the flaw in The Mint ’s jibe about the ham-fisted cruelty to machines of public-school airmen. Indeed, Lawrence is guilty of a stereotype, which seems surprising at such an early point in winged flight’s history; any supposedly philistine pilot would quite obviously have been technologically alert at a time when life in the cockpit was perilous. There again, it might plausibly be argued that Lawrence’s naïve distinction between the flyers and the ground crew is a product

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of the 1920s, since the speed of aeronautical development was still uncertain. Johns penned the Biggles stories in a politically more troubling decade; in their representative subject matter, covering the Fokker scourge, reconnaissance flying, dogfights against the Richthofen circus, the strafing of enemy trenches and the destruction of enemy observation balloons, they are strangely valedictory. Furthermore, the psychological strain upon young airmen is unabashedly represented in the stories; the most commonly recurring emotion is blind panic at the speed of emerging danger in the skies, although this becomes exhilarating when encountered at second-hand by the reader. The enduring popularity of Johns’s First World War stories and Lewis’s memoir derives from a superior descriptive skill in rendering the minutiae of combat flying: the tactics, the quirks of specific aeroplanes, the pilot’s swirling emotions, the ethereal beauty of the heavens, and the existential terror of facing the prospect of a terrifying and painful death alone. Yet far from being a paean to Victorian heroism, their writings are infused with a consciousness of the tragic potentiality of winged flight. In his author’s note to The Camels Are Coming , Johns hopes that his stories will provide a younger generation of air-fighters with some of ‘the tricks of the trade’ which ‘are being rapidly obscured by the mists of peace-time theory’ (11). In a philosophical interlude in Sagitarrius Rising, Lewis contrasts the innocence of flying in 1917 with the realization in the mid’30s of ‘the horrors that would be loosed on the civil populations’ by an increase in air armaments (186). The only solution he can foresee is an international air police force. In essence, then, the engagement of Lawrence, Johns and other writers with the aerial combat legacy of the First World War cannot be reduced simply to a displacement activity for the lost heroic ideals of terrestrial warfare. As this chapter has shown, technological pride and intoxicated airmindedness co-existed in Boy’s Own literature; its breathless patriotic tone should not be allowed to obscure the clarity with which the changing dynamic of warfare was represented as aerial reconnaissance complicated, and rendered more destructive, the artillery battles on the ground. Indeed, Edgerton’s revisionist approach to the story of technological decline should be applied to tales of the air too. The celebration of the fighter flyer is therefore better seen as a compensatory reaction to fear of the bomber pilot; memories of his own exploits overshadow Johns’s editorship of Popular Flying . For even by 1932 he has anticipated the need to pass on flying skills to future air aces, as if looking forward to the

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Battle of Britain when the air will become the proper sphere for all-out war.

Notes 1. Though it does not include Lawrence and Johns, Craig Brown’s One on One (London: Fourth Estate, 2011) provides an intersecting daisy chain of 101 such encounters, with two for each famous person. 2. The final editor of the Boy’s Own Paper, Jack Cox, remembers being delighted to find a Biggles story running when he joined in June 1946 and thenceforward making sure that serial rights were snapped up whenever a new Biggles adventure was ‘on the stocks’ (Take a Cold Tub, Sir! 115). 3. See however Luke Seaber’s comments on this in his study of incognito social investigation literature (12). 4. Sir Walter Raleigh’s The War in the Air describes the many ‘sportsmen’ and ‘men of means’ who rented sheds at the Brooklands aerodrome and tried their hands at building machines (131). 5. A limited US edition of fifty copies of The Mint was published in 1936 by Doubleday, Doran and Co. 6. In his chapter on T. E. Lawrence in Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, Caudwell applauds Lawrence’s embrace of the proletariat and the machine, but suggests that his bourgeois education fatally halted him on the ‘nearside of achievement […] of becoming the communist hero, which his gifts and his hatred of the evils of capitalism fitted him for’ (38–9). 7. The Preface, ‘Letter to a Boy’ leaves the intended audience in no doubt. 8. Johns’s willingness to publish Ernst Udet’s article may have been influenced by his probably false belief that Udet had personally shot him down (Beresford Ellis and Williams 92–3). 9. A Parliamentary speech delivered on 29 October 1917, recorded in Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 98, col, 1247. 10. Biggles’s backstory has yet to be established in 1932, but Biggles Goes to School, first published in monthly parts in the Boy’s Own Paper in 1951, establishes that he was educated at the fictional boarding school, Malton Hall School, near Hertbury.

Works Cited Asher, Michael. Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia. London: Penguin, 1999. Beresford Ellis, Peter and Piers Williams. By Jove, Biggles! The Life of Captain W.E. Johns. London: W. H. Allen, 1981.

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Boy’s Own Paper. ‘War Notes and Pictures.’ Boy’s Own Annual 1916–17 , 360. Brown, Craig. One on One. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. Caudwell, Christopher. Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Cox, Jack. Take A Cold Tub, Sir! The Story of the Boy’s Own Paper. Guildford: Lutterworth Press, 1982. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Edgerton, David. English and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines. London: Penguin, 2013. Fegan, Thomas. The ‘Baby Killers’: German Air Raids on Britain in the First World War. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2012. Finnegan, Terrence J. Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance in the First World War. Stroud: The History Press, 2014. Goebel, Stefan. The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Goldstein, Laurence. The Flying Machine and Modern Literature. London: Macmillan, 1986. Haapamaki, Michele. The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-War Britain. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined. London: The Bodley Head, 1990. James, L. The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. London: Abacus, 1995. ———. The Rise & Fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus, 1998. Johns, William Earl. ‘Editor’s Cockpit.’ Popular Flying (May 1932): 69. ———. ‘Holidaying in the Riviera.’ Popular Flying (May 1935): 65–67. ———. ‘Editor’s Cockpit.’ Popular Flying (July 1935): 178–181. ———. ‘Kriegsgefangenenlager (War Prisoner’s Camp).’ Popular Flying (June 1936): 127–130, 148. ———. ‘Editor’s Cockpit.’ Popular Flying (June 1937): 121–123. ———. ‘Recruiting Memories.’ Flying 1:21 (1938): 3. ———. ‘This Interceptor Humbug.’ Popular Flying (January 1939): 485–487. ———. Biggles: The Camels Are Coming. London: Red Fox, 2003. Lawrence, Thomas Edward. The Mint. London: Jonathan Cape, 1955. ———. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. [1926]. London: Penguin, 2000. Lewis, Cecil. Sagittarius Rising. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2009. Macmillan, Norman. Into the Blue. London: Grub Street, 2015. Newbolt, Henry. Tales of the Great War. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916. Norman, Nigel. ‘Flying Must Be More Popular.’ Popular Flying (April 1932): 18.

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Royal Air Force. ‘The Inter-War Years 1919–1939.’ A Short History of the Royal Air Force. https://www.raf.mod.uk/what-we-do/our-history/. Raleigh, Walter. The War in the Air Vol. 1. [1922]. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969. Seaber, Luke. Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

CHAPTER 15

‘Watch the Skies!’: Guernica, Dresden and the Age of the Bomber in George Orwell and Rex Warner Simon W. Goulding

On Monday 26 April 1937, between the hours of 4:30 pm and 7:30 pm, the Basque town of Guernica was subjected to a bombing raid that would kill between 160 to 400 people.1 Across three waves a squadron of Heinkel 111s, a fighter squadron of Heinkel 51s and finally three squadrons of Junkers 52s flying south across the town would carpet bomb it with a combination of incendiaries and high explosive. Guernica was not a difficult target to navigate to, lying as it does some thirteen miles from the coast down the wide Mundaka estuary. The population of the town, increased from its usual seven thousand by approximately three thousand refugees, was enjoying the weekly market; farmers and their livestock from the surrounding area added to the numbers in town. The town authorities were not unaware of the dangers of war. Some rudimentary protection was available, refugios comprising ‘stout pine stakes placed vertically, more

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of the same laid horizontally on top, above two layers of sandbags, steel sheets, then two more layers of sandbags’ (Patterson 25). The initial attack came from a Heinkel He-111 (although it may have been a Dornier Do-17E) probably piloted by the lead pilot of the Condor Legion, Major Rudolf von Moreau of the VB/88 experimental squadron based at Burgos with the K/88 bomber squadron. His plane would drop six bombs in the area of the town’s railway station. A second Heinkel shortly afterwards cut the phone line to Bilbao and proceeded to ‘machine gun the town at random before leaving’ (Patterson 27). The fighters went in low, dropping grenades, and indiscriminately strafed the landscape. In his report, printed in the Daily Express on 1 May 1937, Noel Monks recorded how ‘the planes made several runs along the road. Machine-gun bullets plopped into the mud ahead, behind, all around us. I began to shiver from sheer fright. A quarter of an hour passed before the second wave approached’ (Monks 95). As they drove into the town they passed through fields ‘strewn with dead sheep’ (Patterson 30). The main wave of forty-two planes comprised He-111s, Heinkel He-51 fighter bombers and Messerschmitt fighters from Jagdgruppe 88. The targeted bombing began and ‘soon a thick cloud of smoke and dust hung over the town, […] obscuring the bombers’ view and encouraging them—if they needed encouragement—to drop their bombs indiscriminately on the buildings beneath. This they did’ (27). Witnesses recorded ‘cattle and sheep, blazing with white phosphorous, [which] ran crazily between the burning buildings until they died. Blackened humans staggered blindly through the flames’ (Beevor 258). Flight time over Guernica was thirty-seconds; having dropped their payload the bombers would then execute a 150° turn from the target and return to their base at Vitoria/Gasteiz ‘to reload and refuel before repeating the process’ (Rankin 118). Each chain of bombers dropped in turn 9900 pounds of explosive over the target. Sighting had therefore become a problem. As one pilot noted ‘By the time we were over the target, the town seemed to be obscured by rising dust resulting from the first bombs. So we had to drop our bombs as best we could […] the navigator in the pod couldn’t tell us what he was hitting’ (Thomas and Gordon-Witts 261). Patterson offers the following account of the raid: People started to hear the low, heavy buzz of larger bombers, this time the much heavier Junkers Ju-52s […] The planes bombed the town continuously, in waves about twenty apart, for more than two hours, until about

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7.30. […] There seem to have been at least twenty-three of the Ju-52s, dropping a combination of high-explosive bombs, of various sizes up to 250-kg, 10-kg anti-personnel bombs, and thermite incendiaries, full of white phosphorous, which burned at temperatures up to 2500°C. (28)

The various high-explosive bombs reduced much of the town to rubble; buildings which were not destroyed lost windows and doors in the blast. This exacerbated the effects of the incendiaries which ignited in exposed roof spaces. The draught effect from the opened-up houses sped the effect of the fire. With no attempt at fire control either attempted or even possible the fires spread. The journalist George Steer would record seeing the glow from the fire from fifteen miles away (Patterson 29). Though the numbers of the dead may remain a matter of some discussion, the effects of the raid remain constant; the image of a charcoaled human being the most obvious example. Even now, there remains some question as to what exactly happened in Guernica that afternoon. Details get confused, timelines stretched or shortened, events conflated. Such is the nature of a traumatic event. What cannot be disputed was that within a formalized strategic system of targeted bombing this was an attack on civilians. This was not the first time civilians had been the subject of bombing; in the previous decade tribesmen had been bombed by both the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Iraq and the Italian Air Force in Abyssinia. As will be discussed below, there is some theoretical foundation for this method of warfare. As a result of the famous painting by Picasso and the press coverage that followed, the name Guernica (or Gernika, in its Basque form) has taken on a symbolic weight that tends to outweigh the historical context and evidence. From a post-1945 perspective Guernica can be viewed as the starting point of a continuum of the use of air power as a means of mass destruction that extends to the Second World War and beyond. While legitimate and reasoned arguments can be made for Warsaw or Cologne as marking the starting point of strategic bombing for the purpose of destroying civilian morale—although few would doubt that Dresden marks the apotheosis of mass saturation bombing on a concentrated target—for the purposes of this chapter Guernica is used as a reference point as it suitably frames two English novels of the late 1930s that reflect the rise of air power as an offensive military strategy. In his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, and also in the conclusion of Homage to Catalonia (1938), George Orwell attempted to explore the effect of a changing military paradigm on the

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British mindset. For Orwell the threat is exterior, physical and factual, whereas the vision expressed by Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941) is more internal, moral and allegorical. This chapter will show that both perspectives had validity in the immediate pre-war period when they were written and will consider some of the political and social background that underpins each text. The historical progression of the novels is itself reflected in the external progression of saturation bombing; if Guernica represents a hesitant and low-tech approach, then the raid of 13–14 February 1945 by the RAF over the Saxon capital marks the culmination of a decade of thinking, theorizing and practice regarding the question of whether it is possible to destroy a civilian population from the air.

Air Power and Air Potential In this book there has been an attempt to reflect something of the passage of ‘airmindedness’ through the long 1930s. This means a progression from the dreams of luxury travel, enigmatic sky writing and recordbreaking exploits through to the imminent threat posed by airpower as the 1930s came to its uncertain close. The decade began with the glories of Lindbergh, Earhart and Johnson and the wonder of solo flight across oceans; it would end with the massed ranks of the bomber over urban space. As Valentine Cunningham contends, death has always been a part of the airminded novel, such as the deaths of commercial passengers in several detective novels of the period (Cunningham 168). Wartime deaths were also present in fictional air narratives throughout the ’30s though mostly in schoolboy stories, such as the eighteen Biggles novels by Captain W. E. Johns. Aviation scenes were also popular in films such as Hell’s Angels (1930) and The Dawn Patrol (1938), both set in the First World War. Only Things to Come (1936) would offer a contemporary take on the threat of urban bombing, its production design prophetic in its vistas of the bombed-out cities. It is not surprising, then, that flight would figure as a significant presence in Coming Up for Air. The presence of bombers in the sky is a recurring motif throughout the book, particularly in the scenes where the protagonist George Bowling returns to his childhood home of Lower Binfield (a thinly disguised Henleyon-Thames). These aeroplanes represent a new force, an increasingly omnipotent power, as well as changing the model of war: for now danger can also come from above. Early in the novel George Bowling, on his commute into London, sees a ‘great black bombing plane’ travelling

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into London that ‘for a minute or two seemed to be keeping pace with the train’ (Coming Up for Air 16–17). The fact that these are bombers enables Bowling to muse on the likelihood of the threat of these planes. It is an act of narrative ventriloquism from Orwell articulating his Spanish experiences, reflected in the famous end of Homage to Catalonia: ‘I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of [our sleep] by the roar of bombs’ (196). If Bowling’s thoughts suggest an underlying respect for what he sees from the train, then the historical record suggests this might have been misplaced. On paper the muster for RAF Bomber Command in the autumn of 1938 (when the novel was written) seemed impressive enough in terms of numbers but reflects little of their actual abilities as bombers (Terraine 67). Fairey Battle Bristol Blenheim Armstrong Whitworth Whitley Handley Page Harrow Vickers Wellesley

17 Squadrons 16 Squadrons 9 Squadrons 5 Squadrons 2 Squadrons

A brief critical examination of their performance history reflects a service still searching for reliable hardware. The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley saw most of its service with Coastal Command, although a few would fly on the Cologne raid of 30–31 May 1942. The Handley Page Harrow was designed as a transport plane and was declared obsolete in 1939; its squadrons converting to Wellingtons. By the time Coming Up for Air was published, the Vickers Wellesley had also been declared obsolete, although it did see some service overseas. The Bristol Blenheim was dogged by a lack of range and was under-gunned (Terraine 78–9). The Fairey Battle was obsolete at the start of the war in 1939 yet was still employed as a front-rank attack aircraft during May 1940 when 200 were lost, 99 of them between 10 May and 16 May (Gifford 24). Aircrews also reflected a range of capabilities and levels of training. In 1938 aircrews would only put some 10% of their training time into night flying. Even by day navigation standards could vary. ‘As late as May 1939’, one Group commander pointed out, flying, dead reckoning—‘calculating one’s position by reference to compass course, ground speed and drift due to the wind—had a margin of error of at least 50 miles’ (Longmate 56). Accuracy would remain a problem well into the war. The Butt Report

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of August 1941 revealed that only one-third of RAF planes would come within five miles of their intended target. Over Germany the figure was down to 25% and for the Ruhr it was only 10%. Under a new moon the figure was 6.5%. Including planes that failed to reach the target due to engine failure, weather, or being attacked on the way out, the average number of planes making it to the aiming point in the summer of 1941 was a mere 5% (121). Bomb design also left some room for improvement. Leftover bombs from 1918 were still being used well into the 1930s. The new bombs were provided with ‘excessively thick metal casing, fuses remained rudimentary and uncertain […] and in the quality of explosive Great Britain lagged a long way behind the Germans’ (55). In Coming Up for Air the first bombs drop on Lower Binfield. On his final morning there Bowling hears ‘a zooming noise from behind the houses, and suddenly a fleet of great black bombers came whizzing overhead’ (232). This practice flight accidentally discharges a bomb on the village. It drops on a side street with impressive results: At first sight it looked as if the sky had been raining bricks and vegetables. There were cabbage leaves everywhere. The bomb had blown a greengrocer’s shop out of existence. The house to the right of it had had part of its roof blown off, and the roof beams were on fire, and all the houses round had been more or less damaged and had their windows smashed […] But in among broken crockery there was lying a leg. Just a leg. (235)

Keith Alldritt notes ‘This incident is a gross example of Orwell’s tendency to sacrifice probability in order to make an ideological point’ (20). Quite apart from the statistical improbability of such a precise hit, the fact was that only the following spring was the RAF allowed to employ fused bombs and even then under severe restrictions over Salisbury Plain. As a historical observation the scene may be found wanting; as a thematic reflection it offers ‘a queer, anticipatory note, the business unfinished, the real conclusion drifting beyond the horizon’ (Taylor 261). Bowling is ‘hemmed in by the disasters of his century’ (Levenson 71); his pessimism that has grown throughout the return to Lower Binfield is part of the ‘self-reflective alter ego and social commentator [of Orwell] rolled into one’ (Bowker 249). This pessimism, suggests Crick, was ‘political: the world was running downhill out of control into war because political wisdom had not been applied; but it could have been’ (251).

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The bombing run may be a narrative device, but it has prescience. The physical description is a perceptive examination of the dangers that mass-bombing would bring to the country. The effects noted in Spain, and given a domestic aspect in Coming Up for Air, become very real come 1940. From Nineteen Eighty-Four, admittedly written with hindsight, comes the following: ‘The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming round the ruins’ (87). A better example can be taken from Homage to Catalonia which records the actual experience of being caught in a bomb blast: ‘[t]here seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock’ (137). Spain therefore offers Orwell an early introduction to the danger from the air, his warning about the dangers to come not some Cassandra-like warning but a realization that the game has changed. The following summer this would be a common experience in the Home Counties. Mass-Observation’s Tom Harrisson describes in Living through the Blitz (1976) such a scene from a house in London: But as soon as the first people get outside the shelter, there are screams of horror at the sight of the damage […] smashed windows and roofs everywhere…smoke streaming across the sky from the direction of the docks. (63)

Later that day, in the windowless front room of one of the shattered local houses, a young woman sits among the remains of her possessions, crying her heart out: Harrison notes it is her birthday.2 This imagery is similar to a vision Bowling has of a future Strand a couple of years hence: ‘down a side street […] an enormous bomb crater and a block of buildings burnt out so that it looks like a hollow tooth’ (Coming Up for Air 26). The explosion in Lower Binfield is, it turns out, a relative failure: ‘the Air Ministry sent a chap to inspect the damage, and issued a report saying that the effects of the bomb were “disappointing”’ (236). Three are killed, but only two bodies are found. One of the victims has disappeared completely. Bowling has a vision of the village children running down the main street like ‘a herd of pigs […] galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces’ (234), imagery suggestive not just of the Gadarene swine but also of the depersonalization that the wartime scene creates, and of the perceived lack of planning for what is to come. It is a

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scene that lies between the ridiculous and the apocalyptic; the headlong flight augmented by the faceless mass, nobody seeming quite sure of what to do, the group instinct being to rush towards ruin.

Bomb Threats Inelegant as the bombing of Lower Binfield may be as a dramatic device in its ironic humour, it does reflect a very real concern as to what the effects of bombing might be on the British urban landscape. Even at the beginning of the war there remained some debate as to what the cost and intensity would be of a German aerial bombardment. By 1937 the Air Ministry had a working figure of 50 casualties per ton of bombs, a figure with, as it turns out, no statistical validity but which would become the baseline figure for all future calculations (Harrisson 24, Titmuss 12).3 The Ministry of Health calculated the need for 2,800,000 beds in the first two months alone. Other departments offered the calculations for war preparedness. The ‘Home Office worked out that 20,000,000 square feet of seasoned timber would be needed each month to provide coffins. As this figure was unacceptable, the answer would have to be mass graves and burning with lime’, and the Cabinet Office produced a material damage multiplier of £35,000 per bomb (Titmuss 13–16). It estimated that 5% of property would be destroyed or badly damaged in the first month of the war. This would come to a sum of £550,000,000 which, as Tom Harrisson notes, was accepted by the Cabinet in October 1938 ‘and must have weighed like an albatross of anxiety round Chamberlain’s neck’ as he flew to Munich (26). The noted scientist Professor J. B. Haldane also offered his own extrapolations and predicted 20,000 dead on a 500-plane raid, with the caveat that the first raid would kill 100,000 Londoners. Haldane expected organized machine-gunning of refugees as they fled from the cities to block the arterial roads. The requirement here, he argued with characteristic force, was to reserve these roads for omnibuses only. These should be spaced ‘50 or so yards apart, protected by British fighting planes’ (25). Such thinking from government sources and from Haldane supports Bowling’s assessment that the ‘present tense is trapped within the logic of disaster’ (Levenson 74). Pre-1914 remains an emotional baseline, the prelapsarian idyll for people of Orwell’s generation before the fall that happened in Flanders and Picardy. Even then, the First World War was

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primarily fought on land, across a two-dimensional plane. The development of aerial warfare brought additional threats that were difficult to predict. Both government sources and a scientist like Haldane were wrong in their estimates of deaths and damages, so it is understandable that Bowling is also unable to comprehend this new threat.

The Aerodrome Society There are no airmen within Orwell’s writing. There is none of the exploration of the heroic flyer-type explored earlier in the decade and inventoried by Cunningham. Orwell’s concern is not with the warrior but those who live with the effect of what the warrior does. Orwell’s sympathies lie with the people under the path of the bombers, those disempowered from the processes that have put the planes above them and who are unlikely to have been in the socio-economic groups that would have been able to fly in them pre-war. It is that familiar Orwellian trope of reflecting the little man, not just through the social structure that defines him but in how that individual sees his home and how he will respond to the threat offered it. What Orwell could not comprehend in 1938 is how the landscape of rural England would be transformed by the development of Bomber Command infrastructure. There is in Coming Up for Air a realization of the industrial progress of the decade, something which many writers of the 1930s address. And Orwell and Rex Warner touch upon the effect that the development of the military-industrial complex would have upon landscape and how it is perceived. It is, as John Terraine notes, easy enough to point to a place on a map and determine this will be the location of an RAF (or later USAAF) base. However, huts and hangars have to be built, ‘living quarters laid out, runways laid down; the new air force of constantly larger and heavier machines could no longer make do with grass runways; now they had to be of concrete’ (37). Croydon Airport, for example, was bypassed by Bomber Command and later commercial flight because its runway was not long enough, and suburban development meant that there was no way it could be extended without major demolition of new housing estates. Huge spaces would be required to develop an airfield and therefore rural locations were preferred: The inhabitants of Little Warley had always known that the potato fields to the east of the village drained into Witch Fen […] Its subsoil is firm

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enough to take the weight of a bombing plane. So it was no surprise when, as war began, Air Ministry teams surveyed the place and pronounced it suitable for a Bomber Command airfield. (Deighton 78)

Such spaces could and did alter the spatial relationship between the established rural community and its site. The new military-industrial development altered this relationship, a change reflected not just in an altered demographic but also in the aural landscape. If the airfield in Coming Up for Air remains an unseen presence, the only evidence of its existence the planes that pass the train, then no such ambiguity lies over the presence of the airfield in The Aerodrome. Physically it would share much in common with the presumed site of the aerodrome in Orwell’s novel, a rural location outside of the (sub)urban constraints, perhaps somewhere similar to Lower Binfield. The airfield is not just a physical presence but is also the dominating economic existence within the landscape in which it is situated. Where Warner’s novel differs is in its employment of a more allegorical mode, specifically a dystopian form, in its examination of the power a technocratic force can offer. T. E. Lawrence, writing to Robert Graves, noted how joining the air force was ‘the nearest modern equivalent of going into a monastery in the middle ages’ (Reeve 75). Warner’s aerodrome is somewhat isolated, located above the nearby village, and populated by an elite physical yet also contemplative group. The airmen might be alienated from the world of the social as represented by its separation from the village, but in compensation they are offered a space of reward through their ‘pure and unswerving dedication to the perfect accomplishment of their allotted tasks’ (75). V. S. Pritchett in a contemporary review even describes the airmen of Warner’s novel as a ‘severe priesthood of technicians in their aeroplanes […] trained and disciplined for power’ (307). However, Warner presents the aerodrome not as a theocracy, but as a technocracy. The aerodrome develops into a powerful military and social force from its relatively inconspicuous space at the start of the novel, ‘so well concealed that many visitors to our village have gone away from the neighbourhood without ever having suspected its existence’ (Warner 17). Where once the ‘living quarters for officers and men were […] well hidden’ (17), the government acquires the land of the village and the rural becomes part of the military-industrial complex. This is a society in flux, a transforming state where the question of mindset is as important for the would-be airman as fuel yield or carpet-bombing technique. This mutable

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state is a constant presence in the novel. At the farm show agricultural equipment is exhibited alongside the latest development in machine guns and the manor house is later converted to a country club. The aerodrome is a catalyst for social progression and in consequence produces a change in the functioning of the village, a movement from the quasi-feudal as represented by the squire and the vicar to the perceived superiority of the technocratic tradition proposed by the Air Vice-Marshal. Warner’s Air Force is not a democracy. The leader that dominates the space of the flyers and their ancillary staff is the Air Vice-Marshal. For him the development of the village owes much to an Engelian analysis of historical development: ‘You will have seen, for example, in this village before it was taken over by the Air Force, conditions approximating to those of the age of feudalism’ (Warner 179). His doctrine is one of self-mastery as means for mastery over others and if this requires a martial form of purge then so be it for the greater good. The village needs to progress from rural to industrial and then, we can infer from the conversations the Air Vice-Marshal has, to a kind of post-industrial society as part of a national programme initiated locally by the aerodrome. The character of the Air Vice-Marshal includes aspects of Warner’s own youthful Marxist beliefs in social progression, but his real model is the National Socialist indicated by his ‘cultivation of the Übermensch, the new breed or superior race who combine their grand conceptions with a seemingly unstoppable military power and strictness, seeking to rid the world of its impurities in order to make living space for themselves’ (Reeve 80–1). His law is that the individual is his own God. ‘Before the individual will can be made to dominate in a country which the orthodox tenets of Christianity are nominally adhered to, he knows that it will be necessary to mollify, to set up new forms in place of the old’ (Devitis 111). Behind the theory of the need for human and, by association, social development, there is the iron fist of actualization. Part of this reconditioning is the need to produce a cadre of men, and almost from first to last this is a male force, capable of taking the conflict to an enemy that resists the progress offered by the Air Vice-Marshal and his men. They are expected to become a ‘new and more adequate race of men’ with a code of conduct ‘quite different from that of the mass of mankind’ (Warner 187). The Vicar is killed early on in the narrative; ‘quite unintentional’ says the Flight Lieutenant responsible ‘but I can’t help feeling a bit cut up about it’ (69). The Vicar is killed by a shot to the face from one of the guns on display, probably a Vickers VGO .303 or 20 mm Hispano Mk

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II, the air cannon in service at the time. If the latter, then a direct shot to face would effectively take off the head. If one wants to depersonalize the enemy, then such an act becomes essential. It is not enough to take the attack to the enemy; one has to destroy them absolutely. The only offensive force the country had post-Dunkirk, and also during the time of writing for Warner, was that of the RAF Bomber Command. It was a potential recognized as early as 1932 by the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with his famous phrase ‘the bomber will always get through’. What is less remembered is the next sentence: ‘The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’ (Longmate 47). In other words, an offensive bombing campaign may be required to protect the Imperial project. Yet, it was not until 14 February 1942 that the Air Ministry directed Bomber Command to recommence their attacks against Germany through the principle of ‘Area Bombing’ to strategic sites with a tacit acceptance of collateral damage, i.e., civilians. However: Like the Luftwaffe’s switch from bombing British fighter bases to bombing London in the summer of 1940, this was actually a continued admission of failure, arising from Bomber Command’s proven inability to bomb with sufficient accuracy for the notion of precision targeting to have much meaning. (Taylor 118–19)

It is worth noting that under the Hague Convention of 1907 such attacks were considered legitimate, covered as they were under the law of siege: if those within the walled city refuse to leave or surrender then they could be attacked with whatever the besiegers brought to bear against them. With the concept of aerial warfare, indeed that of flight itself (Blériot would not fly the channel for another two years), still undeveloped, it is unremarkable that such an omission would occur. Perhaps, then, it is inevitable that thirty years later the law of siege would be extrapolated into a justification of aerial bombardment. With the demand by the Allies for unconditional surrender, then all areas of Germany would be considered legitimate targets; the objectives of the bombing raids would not be just the material of war but also the civilian population. Warner references both Stalinist and National Socialist thought within the Air Vice-Marshal; however, there is arguably a third strand or concept that lies as subtext within The Aerodrome: Italian military strategist Giulio

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Douhet and his 1921 book The Command of the Air. Quite how many people read the book is still debated, and current criticism suggests that his reputation is mostly retrospective (Buckley 76). Yet the ideas he articulates in this book also course through much of the philosophy of offensive aerial warfare defined by General Billy Mitchell in the United States and by Sir Hugh Trenchard of the RAF. Air Vice-Marshal Robert Saundby, Deputy Chief of RAF Bomber Command from 1942 to 1945, was a noted reader of his work and later wrote of Douhet’s influence (76). It was Saundby who chose the key ninety-four cities in Germany that would be subjected to saturation bombing. Douhet’s argument was simple: there would be no more distinction between the soldier and the civilian. In previous wars only a small percentage of the population of a nation would actually fight and die. The majority went on working in safety and comparative peace to furnish the minority with the sinews of war (Douhet 9). Therefore in determining how to defeat the enemy the following must be considered: Objectives vary considerably in war, and their choice depends chiefly upon the aim sought; whether the command of the air, paralysing the enemy’s army and navy, or shattering the morale of civilians behind the lines. This choice may therefore be guided by a great many considerations—military, political, social and psychological, depending upon the conditions of the moment. (Douhet 50)

As the aviation historian John Buckley notes ‘many civilisations have used whatever methods were available to prosecute war, often with few restraints, and air power was in reality nothing more than a further, if highly significant, step in this particular direction’ (3). What Douhet proposed was a theoretical underpinning to area bombing, a rationale that offered a strategic perspective—to destroy the civilian element of the enemy both in terms of morale and physical effects. It might be assumed that there would be some element of social reprogramming required to engage young men to rain fire down on their fellow man, but in the end what comes out of so many accounts of Bomber Command personnel is that the motivation was so often simple duty or revenge. In this they were undoubtedly led by the words of Air Vice-Marshal Harris: ‘they have sown the seed, they shall reap the whirlwind’ (Harris, Pathé). Bombing becomes a means of defeating an enemy in the holistic sense, not just the military element but also the whole nation.

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What then is the aim of Warner’s fictional Air Vice-Marshal? For Reeve his ‘doctrine is of self-mastery as a precondition for mastery of others, of liberation of the mind from the fetters of convention, instinct and bloodties, and of the rebuilding, along wholly rational lines of the self in the image of the Leader’ (Reeve 80). If this means the destruction of one group of people in order to achieve this, then so be it. What is achieved on the micro-level with the Vicar can easily be realized on the macrolevel with another state. There is a cultivation of a new man, a being superior both physically and mentally, a description of a type of man that owes much to National Socialist and Communist thought. Warner’s character alternates between the two defining political positions of the decade with the nihilism of Douhet standing constantly in the shadows. The Aerodrome may be read as an exercise in social psychology, one that offers an explanation of the appeal of totalitarianism, but it also demonstrates something of the futility of such a system. There is always the sense within this environment that the epicurean delights offered by the village as well as the nineteen centuries of feudal loyalty will somehow always undercut the need for constant self-improvement, a state in transition both physically and morally. If this is indeed then a novel of transitions, then the exercise in remotecontrolled flying offers a prophetic image of the future (Warner 192–94). The advance of technology removes the human element from flying, the piloting of a drone so much easier than the cost and training of a human pilot. Where then does this leave the airman who has spent so much on achieving membership of this exclusive club? On this the novel is silent, one of the more enigmatic ellipses in Warner’s writing. Tim Robinson has noted that another difficult question remains unanswered by the text. The village has earned itself a small victory over the Air Force with the death of the Air Vice-Marshal, but his death is due to sabotage from a disaffected Flight Lieutenant and not by any action of theirs. With this plot device, the novel seems to suggest that even if the liberal democracies are unable to provide much in the way of leadership, the totalitarian regimes are likely to collapse in the end because of their own inherent shortcomings (40). The inherent tensions with the Air Vice-Marshal’s philosophy will in the end come crashing to the ground, quite literally. What Warner’s Air Vice-Marshal seems to forget is one of the key rules of a revolution: the young often end up destroying their elders. Douhet’s distinction between soldier and civilian collapses, but not in the way that he imagines. For if the flier can engage in unrestricted

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warfare against the civilian then why should they not fight back. The now grounded Flight Lieutenant becomes the slayer of the Air Vice-Marshal and many others by sabotaging the plane. This is Douhet-ism reversed as it were. In Auden and Isherwood’s play The Ascent of F6 (1936) the Abbot suggests to Ransom that the true intention of his climb is ‘to be great among men, to have power […] You wish to confront the Demon face to face and conquer him’ (70). Is there a Demon the Air Vice-Marshal wishes to defeat? Indeed, is there not an element of this in Bowling’s progress along the Thames Valley: a wish to find some evidence that the English soul has not been defeated by the march of progress? Bowling’s journey concludes at the site of the dried-up pool with the elderly naturist; the past drained away. As with the Air Vice-Marshal it is that impure element of the human soul, the part of the human being that says to itself ‘that’ll do’ which represents the enemy. There is nothing for him outside of the service that is not either incompetent or corrupt. However, suggests Orwell, get inside the whale, or rather return to suburbia and be happy with the compromise you make. For the Air Vice-Marshal the role of the Air Force is that of an agent of constant change, an ongoing processing of the human soul. The Air Force for him becomes the central point of the centripetal force that will redefine the national landscape. If there is a demon in the soul of the Air Vice-Marshal then it is a trinity of stasis, tradition, habit: the very forces that Bowling in the end succumbs to. In Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes the experience of flying as: ‘scrutinising civilisations that adorn valley floors and sometimes open out miraculously like great gardens where the climate is favourable. Thus do we now assess man on a cosmic scale […] Thus are we reading our history anew’ (34). But after September 1939 this is no more. The old individuality of the solo pilot gradually gives way as the type of machine that is flown changes in emphasis to the masscrewed bomber with all its attendant technological support. It is replaced by the tactics of target bombing: the combination of incendiaries and high explosive pacifying the urban population of whichever city the target for tonight would be, and so on, and so on and so on.

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Wartime Bombing and Beyond This chapter began in 1937 with the raid over Guernica, the first mass air raid of the prop-driven age. It ends then with one of the last, the raid by the RAF on 13–14 February 1945 upon Dresden. If the raid on Guernica offers a beginning to the age of bombing, then Dresden surely represents its climax. That night four Bomber Groups of 524 Lancasters dropped 1756.9 tonnes of high explosives and incendiaries on the south side of the Elbe creating the firestorm effect, seen in miniature in Guernica, now wrought upon the Saxon capital with a scientific precision. No longer was the bombing haphazard but a result of careful planning, an application of physics to the question of city-wide destruction. Even the actual approach was calculated: This involved marking a fixed aiming point and then assigning to the individual aircraft not just different headings for their approach—two degrees variation at a time—but also progressively differing timed overshoots of the aiming point. The aim was to ensure an even and devastating density of bombing over a fan-shaped sector. If achieved, and with the right mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs, this might well result in a firestorm. (Taylor 244)

With the payload dropped the navigator would instruct the pilot to turn. The pilot would turn on the required heading while the flight engineer would throttle forward the engines. Four Merlin engines each producing 1290 horsepower, with banking sometime as much as 90° would produce levels of torque that the Lancaster airframe always seemed to manage. Leslie Hay, a pilot on the raid, would recall seeing the fellow planes in his group performing the same manoeuvre with the same skill—‘not wingtip to wingtip, but that was how it felt!’ (Taylor 249). The death toll in Dresden remains, like that in Spain, a matter of some debate. However, whereas in 1937 the toll was between 160 and 400 in Germany current historical assessment places the death toll at between 25,000 and 40,000 (Taylor 503–9). National Socialist local government would across the war be able to produce very accurate figures for the casualty and mortality rates in the affected cities. In Dresden that civic ability collapsed. Bodies would melt into each other; carbonization of the human body occurring at 1400 °F, bone fragments remaining but not always located until often some years later. The cellars and slaughterhouses that represented NSDAP attempts at bomb shelters turned into ovens cooking

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those inside. A fan-shaped part of the city would be levelled overnight. Civil infrastructure came close to collapse. The German optical industry, mostly based in Dresden by this time, was brought to an almost complete standstill. The impact of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima six months later has had the longer lasting geopolitical and social impact, but that was dropped from one plane, flying by itself in daylight. Why Dresden matters is because it represents the apogee of the prop-driven age. No longer was flight a solo matter, either in the number of planes in the sky or people in the plane. Over Dresden the RAF was able to fly some 3600 men in formation in one of the finest designs of aircraft ever seen. They were able to do so having trained these crews over a period of years for this one purpose and with hardly any losses. They had developed plans of decoy and deceit. They had developed bomb-aiming techniques to their most accurate level. There was ‘so much intelligence, capital and labour [that] went into the planning of destruction that, under the pressure of all the accumulated potential, it had to happen in the end’ (Sebald 65, emphasis in original). When Stanley Baldwin had said that the bomber would always get through, he had probably envisaged the movement being a two-way process. Over Dresden the RAF demonstrated a level of command of the sky which would be not seen again until the Gulf War of 1991. Yet, at the same time, the new technology of the jet engine was making its presence felt. Three weeks after the RAF bombed Dresden the US Army crossed the Rhine at Remagen on 7 March. The bridge would remain standing for ten days, weakened by the failed demolition attempt, by shelling from the heights of the east bank and by strafing runs from Messerschmitt Me 262s, the first active service jet fighter (Hechler 196– 201). There were too few to have any impact on the outcome of the war but enough had been seen of what they offered. The story of flight across the decade of the 1930s was always one of further and faster. The jet age offered the same, but more. So much more.

Notes 1. The author would like to thank the staff from University Library Birmingham, especially the Special Collections team, the Newspaper Collection room at the British Library, the team at Chelsea Library and the Armaments Curator at RAF Museum Cosford for helping with some of the technical issues regarding the Vicar’s death in The Aerodrome.

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2. The passage comes from Chapter 5 of Living Through the Blitz, most of which was in fact written by Celia Fremlin rather than Harrisson, as he himself acknowledged (17). 3. The relevant material from Titmuss is worth reproducing in full: The use of this multiplier of fifty casualties per ton can be criticized on several counts. First, it might reasonably have been argued that such a casualty rate could not continue to operate for long. With several thousand tons of bombs being dropped every twentyfour hours, the population of London was, in such circumstances of damage and destruction, bound to diminish as a result of a) evacuation b) the number killed, and c) the number injured and removed to hospitals outside London. Thus, within a few days of the first raid the population would be smaller and the density of/population per acre thinner. The ratio of casualties to bombs would continue to decline as the ratio of population to land area of London declined. For this reason, it was not valid to use a fixed and constant ratio of casualties per ton. A second criticism of this ratio derives from the sketchy and unreliable character of the statistics on which it was founded. It was based on the casualties caused by the sixteen night raids by enemy aeroplanes on London (metropolitan police district) during 1917–18 in which 270 people were killed and 818 injured. The Air Staff in calculating the ratio of fifty-two (rounded off to fifty) on the basis of 1088 casualties, employed an estimate that twenty-one tons of bombs had been dropped during these raids. On the other hand, the Official History of the War (The War in the Air, Jones, H.A., vol. V, 1935, appendix I) states a figure of approximately twentyfour and a half tons, thus giving a ratio of 45. The casualty statistics themselves are open to criticism. Over forty per cent of the total casualties occurred during two raids in which seven and a-half tons of bombs were dropped by only seventeen aeroplanes. One extraordinary catastrophe at Odham’s Printing Works at Long Acre resulted in thirty persons being killed and eighty-five injured. More serious still is the fact that the ratio of fifty casualties per ton is based on figures which include 130 casualties (thirteen killed and 117 injured) caused by AA shells, and a further twenty-eight casualties (fourteen killed and fourteen injured) which resulted from a rush of people to an air raid shelter in the East End of London. A competent statistician might find other faults in these statistics; he would undoubtedly notice, for instance, two errors in certain of the casualty figures used by the Air Staff in calculating various ratios for raids on London during 1917–1918 (a figure of 532 injured was used whereas the

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true figure is 432, and the sum of 270 killed and 818 injured was printed as 1098—both these errors appeared in the Air Staff’s report to the Committee of Imperial Defence). (n 12–13)

Works Cited Alldritt, Keith. The Making of George Orwell. London: Edward Arnold, 1969. Auden, W.H. and Christopher Isherwood. The Ascent of F6. London: Faber & Faber, 1936. Beevor, Anthony. The Battle for Spain. [2006]. London: Phoenix, 2007. Blake, Nicholas. Thou Shell of Death. London: Collins, 1936. Bowen, Elizabeth. To the North. [1932]. London: Vintage, 1999. Bowker, Gordon. George Orwell. London: Little, Brown, 2003. Buckley, John. Air Power in the Age of Total War. London: UCL Press, 1999. Christie, Agatha. Death in the Clouds. [1935]. London: Fontana Books, 1957. Crick, Bernard. George Orwell. A Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1980. Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. [1988]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. Wind, Sand and Stars. [1939]. Translated by William Rees. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. Flight to Arras. [1942]. Translated by William Rees. London: Penguin, 2000. Deighton, Len. Blitzkrieg. London: Jonathan Cape, 1979. ———. Blood, Tears and Folly. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. ———. Bomber. [1970]. London: Harper, 2009. Devitis, A.A. ‘Rex Warner and the Cult of Power.’ Twentieth Century Literature 6:3 (1960): 107–116. Douhet, Giulio. The Command of the Air. [1921]. Eds. Joseph Patrick Hanrahan and Richard H. Kohn. Translated by Dino Ferrari. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2009. Gifford, Simon. ‘Lost Battle: The Carnage of May 10 to May 16, 1940.’ Air Enthusiast 109 (January–February 2004): 18–25. Griffith, Richard. Fellow Travellers of the Right. London: Constable, 1980. Harris, Arthur. ‘On the Chin.’ British Pathé. [3 June 1942]. https://m.youtube. com/watch, also https://www.airforcemag.com. Harrisson, Tom. Living Through the Blitz. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Hechler, Ken. The Bridge at Remagen. [1957]. New York: Presidio Press, 2005. Hippler, Thomas. Bombing the People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Levenson, Michael. ‘The Fictional Realist: Novels of the 1930s.’ The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell. Ed. John Rodden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 59–75. Longmate, Norman. The Bombers. London: Hutchinson, 1983. Middlebrook, Martin. The Battle of Hamburg. London: Allen Lane, 1980. Monks, Noel. Eyewitness. London: Frederick Mueller, 1955. Orwell, George. Coming Up for Air. [1939]. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. Homage to Catalonia. [1938]. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. Nineteen Eighty-Four. [1949]. London: Penguin, 1989. Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. Pritchett, V.S. ‘Rex Warner.’ Modern British Writing. Ed. Denys Val Baker. New York: Vanguard Press, 1947. 304–309. Rankin, Nicholas. Telegram from Guernica. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Reeve, N.H. The Novels of Rex Warner. London: Macmillan, 1989. Rhys, John Llewelyn. The Flying Shadow. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. Roberts, Michael. ‘Chelyuskin.’ Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. 42–4. Robinson, Tim. ‘A Question of Leadership: The Novels of Rex Warner.’ London Magazine 34:7 (1994): 34–45. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. Night Flight. [1931]. Translated by Curtis Cate. London: Penguin, 2000. Sebald, W.G. On the Natural History of Destruction. [1999]. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Penguin, 2004. Spender, Stephen. ‘The Landscape near an Aerodrome.’ Collected Poems 1928– 1985. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. 41. St John Sprigg, Christopher. Death of an Airman. London: Hutchinson, 1934. Taylor, D.J. Orwell: The Life. London: Vintage, 2003. Taylor, Frederick. Dresden. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Terraine, John. The Right of the Line. [1985]. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Thomas, Gordon and Max Morgan-Witts. The Day Guernica Died. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. Titmuss, Richard. Problems of Social Policy. London: HMSO, 1950. Warner, Rex. The Aerodrome. [1941]. London: Vintage, 2007.

Filmography The Dawn Patrol. Dir. Howard Hawks. USA. 1938. Hell’s Angels. Dir. Howard Hughes. USA. 1930. Things to Come. Dir. William Cameron Menzies. UK. 1936.

Index

A Abyssinia (Ethiopia), 243, 321 Across England in an Aeroplane, 12, 71, 72 actor-network theory (ANT), 86, 90 Adey, Peter, 4, 14, 15, 63, 65, 66, 75, 76, 183, 187, 229, 235, 236, 244 Aerial League of the British Empire. See Air League aerial perspective, 3, 12, 16–19, 30, 34, 35, 39, 65, 68, 69, 210 Aerial Pictures of Selo Photographic Film Factory, 73, 74 aerial theatre, 18, 229–231, 233–241, 243–245 aerodromes, 2, 4, 8, 9, 16, 61–63, 74, 76, 92, 93, 95, 97, 104, 105, 107, 122, 138, 173, 190, 229, 230, 234, 235, 285 Aerofilms, 12, 16, 69–71 aeromobilities, 4 AeroPictorial, 16

Aeroplane, 11, 252, 254 Airco, 16 4, 121, 124 9, 114, 115, 119 Air Council, 257, 258, 261, 262, 266 Aircraft Transport and Travel (AT&T), 114, 116, 117, 119–121, 124 Air France, 6, 307 Air League, 14, 234, 235 air mail, 14, 62, 76, 94, 179, 181, 187, 188, 190, 192 airminded, airmindedness, 1–5, 11–17, 19, 43–45, 51–53, 55, 56, 58, 67, 86–89, 91–95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 105, 107, 108, 138, 151, 152, 162, 171, 192, 202, 203, 229, 231, 251–253, 260, 262, 263, 266–268, 276, 283–286, 298, 300, 301, 314, 322 Air Ministry, 103, 114, 133, 142, 202, 239, 242, 252, 255–258,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. McCluskey and L. Seaber (eds.), Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1

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340

INDEX

260–263, 268, 304, 305, 325, 326, 328, 330 Air Navigation and Transport Act (1920), 66 Air Outpost , 76–78 airports, 2, 11, 14, 15, 123, 141 Air Post , 63, 76, 79 air raid precautions (ARP), 228 air raids, 202, 219, 228, 230, 231, 236–241, 243–245, 308 Air Service Training Ltd (A.S.T.), 101, 102 air shows, 2, 11, 61, 74, 101 airspace, 17, 61–63, 65–67, 69, 71, 72, 74–77, 79, 88, 92, 172 Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus Display, 74 Alcock, Captain John, 117, 118 Aldergrove, 94 Alldritt, Keith, 324 Andover, 234 Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 188 Anthony, Scott, 7, 11, 77 Appadurai, Arjun, 87 Ards Aerodrome, 93 Asher, Michael, 301 Asquith, Herbert Henry, 278 Atcherley, Richard, 258, 266 Auden, W.H. ‘A Summer Night’, 53 ‘Consider’, 52 ‘Five Songs’, 53 ‘Forty Years On’, 58 Letters from Iceland, 56 ‘Ode to Gaea’, 58 ‘On This Island’, 53 The Chase, 54 The Dance of Death, 55, 57 The Dog beneath the Skin, 54 The Orators , 15 The Sea and the Mirror, 58

Australia, 7, 76, 77, 94, 98, 118, 121, 131, 132, 166, 170, 171, 173, 177, 190 Austria, 116 aviatrix, aviatrices, 54, 118, 159–169, 172–177 Avro, 51, 93 Avian, 92

B Baghdad, 132, 173, 188, 190, 196 Bailey, Lady Mary, 74 Balbo, Italo, 285 Baldwin, Stanley, 180, 228, 261, 330, 335 Barton Aerodrome, 94 Batten, Jean, 18, 159, 161, 163–170, 172–175, 177 Battersea, 243 Battle of Britain, 267 Bayer, Herbert, 45 Beaumont College, 52 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook), 179, 180, 196 Beddington, 9 Belfast, 94, 241 Bennett, Andrew, 140 Beresford Ellis, Peter, 306, 309, 315 Betjeman, John, 11, 149, 284 ‘Death of King George V’, 44 Biard, Henri, 254–256 Biggles, 19, 284, 298, 307, 310, 313, 314, 322 Blackpool, 233, 234 Bland, Lilian, 166 blast damage, 321 Blériot, Louis, 114, 116, 117, 330 ‘blind flying’, 86, 87, 96–102, 105, 106, 108 Bluemel, Kristin, 68

INDEX

Bolton, 238 bombs, bombing, 17, 25, 26, 37, 38, 181, 187, 190, 202, 204, 228, 230, 233, 236, 237, 239, 241, 243–245, 278, 285, 308–310, 313, 319–322, 324, 325, 328, 330, 331, 333, 334, 336 accuracy of, 330 threat of, 322, 326 Bond Stockton, Kathryn, 276 Boothman, John, 251, 264–266 Bowen, Elizabeth Eva Trout or Changing Scenes , 153 ‘Pictures and Conversations’, 139, 140, 153 The House in Paris , 139 The Last September, 141 To the North, 11, 18, 47, 50, 137–141, 143–146, 151 Boy’s Own Annual , 299 ‘Used by Aviators’, 299, 300 Brackley, Major Herbert, 106 ‘Bradshawing’, 120 Brancker, Sir Sefton, 14, 170 Brazil, 102 Brazil, Angela, 163 Brentford, 153 Brinton, R.L., 264 Britain, 2, 6–8, 10–15, 17, 19, 62, 66, 71, 76, 94, 116, 132, 159, 160, 167, 169, 171, 180, 188, 190, 197, 203, 230, 232, 239, 240, 244, 245, 252–254, 260, 262, 267, 284, 308 British Airways Ltd, 105 British Army, 230, 233, 311 British Aviation Pictures, 267 British Empire, 15, 166, 176, 180, 190, 192, 234 British Empire Exhibition, 237 Brockway, Fenner, 242 Brooke, Rupert, 117

341

Collected Poems , 133 Brooklands, 101, 102, 300 Brooklands Air Display, 100 Budd, Lucy, 65, 67 Byron, Lord (George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron), 186 Byron, Robert An Essay on India, 180, 182–185 First Russia, Then Tibet , 180, 182, 185, 187, 195, 196 The Road to Oxiana, 180, 181, 185

C Cairo, 7, 8, 78, 79 Cairo Conference (1921), 189 camouflage, 26, 27, 29, 38 Campbell, Malcolm, 265 Cape Town, 8, 95, 193, 195 Carroll, Lewis, 122, 124 Caruth, Cathy, 33 Catfoss, 237 Caudwell, Christopher, 284, 309. See also Cave, Arthur Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 315 Cave, Arthur, 309 Chamier, J.A., 235 Chatham, 242 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation (1944), 95 Chichester, 73 Chichester, Francis, 105 China, 123, 214, 243 Christie, Agatha Death in the Clouds , 12 Christie, Ian, 74 Churchill, Winston, 116–118, 189, 267 cigarette cards, 265 Clapham, 7, 79, 190 Cluett, Douglas, 9, 10, 123, 142, 143

342

INDEX

Coates, Wells, 12 Cobham, Sir Alan, 8, 11, 15, 74, 138, 148, 153, 234, 266, 285, 286 Cohen, Debra Rae, 139 colonialism, colonies, 6, 7, 66, 159–161, 165, 169, 172, 175, 176, 181, 190, 192, 197 Competency-Based Instrument Rating (CB-IR), 103 Condor Legion, 309, 320 Corfu, 49, 186 Coventry, 68, 245 Cox, Jack, 315 craft, 67, 76, 79 Crane, Lt. Carl J. Blind Flight in Theory and Practice, 101 Cranwell Air Force Cadet College, 302, 304, 305 Crete, 78 Crick, Bernard, 324 Crofts, Freeman Wills The 12:30 from Croydon, 12 Croydon Aerodrome, 75, 79 Croydon Beautiful, 75, 79 Croydon, Croydon Aerodrome, 7, 9–11, 47–49, 75, 76, 79, 105, 123–125, 130, 140–142, 146, 179, 185, 218, 307, 327 Cunningham, Valentine, 12, 13, 15, 16, 43–45, 58, 75, 161, 162, 167, 276, 281, 298, 310, 322, 327 British Writers of the Thirties , 11, 43 Curtis Brown, Spencer, 153 Curtiss, 255 CR-3, 255 R3C-2, 256 D Daily Express , 162, 179, 192, 320

Daily Mail , 124, 161, 162, 177, 233, 260, 263 Day Lewis, C., 43, 149 Deal, 240 De Havilland DH4, 119, 121 DH9, 119 DH34, 122 DH66 Hercules, 119 Moth, 102 Delloye, Lucien, 114 Dickens, Charles, 47 Bleak House, 55 Dierikx, Marc, 7 Dillon, Agnes, 149 Dix, Otto, 33 Dodd, Lindsay, 240 Dodds, E.R., 56 Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism, 56 The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief , 56 Doncaster, 92, 233 Douglas DC-2, 105 Douhet, Giulio, 331–333 The Command of the Air, 331 Dover, 114, 127, 228 Dresden Raid (13-14 February 1945), 334 Drogheda, Countess of (Kathleen Pelham Burn Moore), 11 drones, 79, 218, 332

E Earhart, Amelia, 98, 118, 133, 278, 284, 322 Edelman, Lee, 290 Edgerton, David, 3, 116, 117, 133, 244, 253, 267, 300, 314

INDEX

Edinburgh, 228, 240 Edmonds, Leigh, 91, 95, 107 Egypt and Back with Imperial Airways , 78, 79 Eliot, George, 124 The Mill on the Floss , 121 Empire Air Day, 230, 231, 234–236, 243, 244 Empire Marketing Board (EMB), 6 Enneads , 56 European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), 87, 103, 108 Evening News , 114 F Farley, David, 139, 153 Farman Goliath, 119 Fascism, 281 Faust, 88 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), 254, 258 Fegan, Thomas, 308 film amateur, 17, 61, 63, 65, 66, 71, 79, 80 documentary, 12, 64, 75, 80 Finland, 101 Finnegan, Terrence J., 311 First World War, 2, 6, 8, 9, 17, 19, 36, 58, 66, 115, 116, 150, 161, 176, 177, 181, 187–190, 195, 201, 203, 298, 299, 304, 308, 309, 314, 322, 326 Fleet Air Arm, Royal Navy, 264 Flight , 11, 18, 86, 89–94, 96–105, 107, 109, 177, 258 Flightglobal.com, 109 Flight International , 109 Flight Navigation and Procedures Trainers (FNPTs), 109

343

Flying , 300, 306 fog, flying in, 232 Folkestone, 114 Forster, E.M., 183, 301 A Passage to India, 182 France, 26, 45, 47, 50, 116, 119, 127, 147, 179, 212, 215, 264, 278 Fremlin, Celia, 336 French Air Union, 6 Friese-Greene, Claude, 12, 71, 72 Fritzsche, Peter, 3, 6, 13, 16, 70 Fussell, Paul, 32, 148, 153, 180, 182 Futurism, 140, 290, 293

G Gaumont, 72 General Post Office (GPO), 6, 76 George V, 117 Germany, 6, 15, 116, 147, 215, 228, 235, 324, 330, 331, 334 Gindin, James, 137, 138 Glasgow, 94 Gloster Aircraft, 256, 257 Gloucester Aerodrome, 92 Goble, Mark, 4 Goebel, Stefan, 312 Goldstein, Lawrence, 300 Grahame-White, Claude, 67, 233 Greece, 101, 179, 186, 187, 194 Greene, Graham, 285 Greig, D’Arcy, 258 Grey, C.G., 252, 255 Grieveson, Lee, 79 Grosvenor Gallery, 11 Guernica/Gernika, 19, 309, 319–322, 334 Guide to Croydon Aerodrome (The Air Port of London), 142

344

INDEX

H Haapamäki, Michele, 246 Hague Convention, 330 Haldane, J.B., 326, 327 Hallion, Richard, 4 Halton, 234 Hamble, 101, 102 Handley Page 0/400, 119, 121 H.P. 42, 132, 143, 193 H.P. 45, 78 W8, 121 Hanworth Air Park, 94 Harar, 243 Harper, Harry, 67 The Romance of a Modern Airway, 142, 143, 153 Harris, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur, 331 Harrison, Melissa, 277 Harrisson, Tom, 326 Living through the Blitz, 325 Harrods, 256 Hartley, Leslie P., 145 Hawker Tomtit, 99 Hawkinge, 234 Heath, Lady Mary, 11 Hell’s Angels , 229, 322 Hellfire Corner (Ypres), 26 Hendon Hendon Air Pageant, 242, 253 Hendon and District Anti-War Council, 242 Hendon Anti-Air Display Committee, 242 Henley-on-Thames, 322 Henslow, 114 Heston, 44, 102 Heyford, Upper, 236 High Speed Flight, Royal Air Force 1927, 256, 265 1929, 258, 265

1931, 251 speed records, 258 Hillman Airways, 73 Hitler, Adolf, 291, 293, 309 Hoare, Samuel, 188–190, 192, 196, 197, 202, 263 Holman, Brett, 14, 15, 19, 246, 253 Holtby, Winifred, 14 Holt Thomas, George, 116, 117, 119, 133 Hope, E.J.L., 264 Hornsey, Richard, 149 Hounslow Airfield, 114 Houston, Lady, 264, 267, 268 Howe, Earl (Francis Curzon, 5th Earl Howe), 263 Hubbard, Phil, 65 Hucknall, 237 Hull, 94, 166, 228, 234 Hynes, Samuel, 310 I ICI, 6 Imperial Airways, 7, 10, 12, 13, 75, 76, 95, 104, 106, 120, 123, 124, 132–134, 137, 139, 143, 146, 147, 179, 181, 185, 188, 189, 193, 197, 284, 285, 293 Impressionism, 46, 312 Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC), 103 instruments, flight, 101 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 88, 95 International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 209 Iraq, 179–181, 187–190, 196, 197, 321 Ireland, 98, 117, 166 Isherwood, Christopher, 54–56, 333 The Dog beneath the Skin, 54

INDEX

Italy, 101, 116, 147, 179, 187, 256, 257, 264 J Jacobson, Brian, 71 James, Lawrence, 304 Japan, 116, 208, 214, 217 Johnson, Amy, 2, 11, 16, 18, 74, 118, 131–133, 159, 161–164, 166–168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 177, 266, 278 Johns, W.E., 284, 297–299, 305–310, 312–314, 322 ‘The Camels Are Coming’, 19, 297, 314 K Karachi, 8, 179, 186–188, 190, 192, 197 Kenworthy, J.M., 242 Kingston upon Thames, 109 Kinkead, Samuel, 258 Kipling, Rudyard, 117, 189, 191, 192, 197 Kitty Hawk, 115, 300 KLM, 6 ‘knock-out blow from the air’, 228, 245 K¯ orin, Ogata Waves at Matsushima, 27 Kotor, 49 L Lacan, Jacques, 37, 38 Lancaster (bomber), 334 Law, John, 91, 100 Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience, 91 Lawrence, T.E., 19, 161, 188, 297–305, 307, 310, 313–315, 328

345

Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 302, 310 The Mint , 19, 299–305, 313 League of Air-Minded Youth, 14 Learmouth, Bob, 9, 10, 123, 142, 143 Le Bourget, Le Bourget aerodrome, 47, 48, 114, 115, 141, 143, 152, 186, 188 Le Corbusier, 62, 63, 66, 68, 73, 76, 78, 88 Aircraft , 61, 63, 67 Lefebvre, Henri, 30, 32, 62 Leighton Buzzard, 241 Leroy, Louis, 46 Lewis, Cecil Sagittarius Rising , 300, 313 Lewis, Wyndham A Battery Shelled, 27–29 Blasting and Bombardiering , 32, 34 Blast (War Number), 32, 33 Planners: A Happy Day, 32 Plan of War, 30, 31, 33 Self -Portrait as Tyro, 126 The Art of Being Ruled, 39 The Caliph’s Design, 29 The Infernal Fair, 33 licences, pilots’ ‘A’ (private), 89, 103 ‘B’ (commercial), 101, 102 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 206 Locked Rooms and Open Doors , 206 North to the Orient , 18, 202, 203, 205–211, 214, 217, 218, 220, 221 Lindbergh, Charles, 2, 51, 74, 118 Lloyd George, David ‘Cavalry of the Clouds’, 313 Lockheed Electra, 105 London, 1, 8, 10, 11, 25, 44, 45, 47, 49, 68, 70, 76–78, 94, 95, 104, 113, 114, 119, 121, 123, 126,

346

INDEX

127, 130, 137, 149, 152, 171, 177, 185, 190, 193, 197, 212, 221, 228, 230, 231, 233, 234, 237, 239, 240, 242, 245, 254, 256, 260, 263, 278, 297, 302, 308, 322, 325, 330, 336 London A-Z Street Atlas , 149 Londonderry, Lord (Charles VaneTempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry), 93 ‘Lorenz’ system, 105 Luftwaffe, 245, 267, 291, 330 Lympne, 45, 47

M MacDonald, Ramsay, 260, 262–264 Macmillan, Norman Into the Blue, 312 MacNeice, Louis ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, 56 Letters from Iceland, 56 Madame Tussaud, 118 Malaysia, 102 Manchester, 94, 233 Manning, Leah, 242 Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment, 256 Marinetti, Filippo, 3, 278, 281, 289 Markham, Beryl, 18, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166–170, 172, 174, 175 Marsh, Edward, 133 Masefield, Constance, 278 Masefield, John The Box of Delights , 275 The Midnight Folk, 277, 288 Mass-Observation, 238, 325 Maude, Stanley, 188 ‘May Day’, 9 McKenna, Stephen, 57 McLean, Robert, 251 Meccano Magazine, 286

Meidner, Ludwig, 33 Mendelson, Edward, 59 middlebrow, middlebrow culture, 162, 165, 168 militarization of air racing, 268 Mitchell, R.J., 256, 264, 266, 267 Mitford, Nancy, 180 modernism, 5, 17, 19, 39, 139, 190, 197, 276 Moholy-Nagy, László, 45 Moltke the Younger, Helmuth von, 26 Monaco, 48, 254 Monet, Claude Le Boulevard des Capucines , 46 Monks, Noel, 320 Montagu, Ivor, 242 Morrow, Dwight, 202 Morton, A.E., 265 N Napier and Son, 255 Nash, Joanna, 9, 10, 123, 142, 143 National Aviation Days, 138, 148 National Flying Services, 94 nationalism, airminded, 252, 262, 268 National Physical Laboratory, 256 Newbolt, Henry Tales of the Great War, 311 ‘Vitaï Lampada’, 311 Newfoundland, 117 Newtownards, 93 Nicholson, Ben, 51 Nicolson, Harold, 202 Norman, Nigel ‘Flying Must Be More Popular’, 307 Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe), 116, 117, 203 Norway, 101 Nottingham, 241

INDEX

O Observation Post (O. Pip), 34–37 Ocker, Major W.C. Blind Flight in Theory and Practice, 101 Octroi, 115 Omissi, David, 184, 189, 236, 253 Orientalism, 182 Orlebar, Augustus, 256, 260, 266 Orwell, George Coming Up for Air, 12, 321–325, 327, 328 Down and Out in Paris and London, 139 Homage to Catalonia, 321, 323, 325 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 325 The Road to Wigan Pier, 69 Ottoman Empire, 187 Oxford, 51, 211 P Palestine, 18, 147, 179, 187, 188, 195 Pan American World Airways, 6 Paris, 9, 10, 14, 47–49, 114, 115, 117, 119, 121, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 152, 197 Parker, Father Francis, SJ, 52 Partridge, Margaret, 150 Pascoe, David, 88 passengers, air, 118, 128, 132, 147 Pathé, 72, 331 Pearsall, Phyllis, 149 Persia, 18, 179, 180, 184, 187 Peter Pan, 292 Petrarch, 46 Philby, St John, 194 photography, photographs, 11, 12, 16, 45, 54, 69, 70, 72, 96, 162, 164, 173, 180, 183, 186, 209, 311, 312

347

Pilkington Glass, 113 Pilkington, William, 121, 132 Pilkington, W.N., 113, 121, 127, 132 Pilot , 11 Pirie, Gordon, 146, 253 Pixton, C. Howard, 254 Plotinus Enneads , 56 Popular Flying , 299, 305–308, 310, 312–314 Portsmouth, 73 Pound, Ezra, 25, 35 Priestley, J.B. English Journey, 67, 139 Midnight on the Desert , 139 Pritchett, V.S., 328 Proust, Marcel, 88 Purdon, James, 5

R Raleigh, Walter, 315 Redhill, 239 Regia Aeronautica, 256 Reid & Sigrist, 104 Reigate, 240 Richthofen, Manfred von, 312, 314 Rieger, Bernhard, 162, 164, 172, 253, 258 Robertson, F.A. de Vere, 258 Rodchenko, Aleksander, 45 Rolls-Royce aircraft engines Merlin, 266, 334 R engine, 264 Rose, Jacqueline, 292 Royal Aero Club (RAeC), 254 Royal Aeronautical Society, 98 Royal Aircraft Establishment, 256 Royal Air Force (RAF) Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB), 230 Fighter Command, 239–241

348

INDEX

RAF Display, 74, 230, 231, 234, 238, 241. See also Hendon Royal Flying Corps (RFC), 9, 161, 188, 189, 284, 297, 299, 300, 306, 312 Royal Geographical Society, 7, 190, 191 Royal Navy, 188, 230, 233 Russia, 116, 182, 201

S Sabena, 6 Sackville-West, Vita, 51 Said, Edward, 183, 192–194 Saint-Amour, Paul, 5, 13, 189, 190, 204, 227 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de Vol de nuit , 115 Wind, Sand and Stars , 197 Saint-Gobain, 114 Salmond, Geoffrey, 188 Sassoon, Philip, 262–264 Sayers, W.H., 255 Schneider Trophy 1914 Competition, 254 1922 Competition, 254 1923 Competition, 255 1925 Competition, 256 1926 Competition, 256 1927 Competition, 252, 261, 262 1929 Competition, 258, 260–262 1931 Competition, 252, 262 debated over continued government involvement, 252 origins, 267 Schofield, Harry, 257, 266 school stories, girls’, 159 Second World War, 52, 181, 205, 245, 321 Secretary of State for Air, 93, 188, 241, 261

Seddon, Jill, 149, 150 Selfridge’s, 1, 6, 13 Shakespeare, William Richard II , 127 Sharjah, 76, 77 Shaw, Captain Henry ‘Jerry’, 114, 119 Shell Oil, 2, 6, 13 Shippam, C. Ernest, 73 Short Empire Flying Boats, 132 S.17 Kent, 78 Siam, 101 sick bags, 49 Siddeley Puma, 113 Simonsen, Dorthe Gert, 64 ‘simulators’, 109 Sitwell, Edith, 148 Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC), 255 Sopwith Aviation Company, 254 Southampton, 94, 256, 258 Soviet Union, 182 Spain, 147, 194, 243, 325, 334 Spanish Civil War, 309 spectacle of flight, 124, 131 Spectator, 32, 116, 121, 124, 131 Speed and Sport , 265 Spender, Stephen ‘Landscape near an Aerodrome’, 12 Trial of a Judge, 52 Sperry, 104 Spooner, Stanley, 258 Stainforth, George, 251, 264–266 Steer, George, 321 Stein, Gertrude, 208 Stewart, Oliver, 243 St Neots, 241 Stuart, Ruth, 78, 79 Stultz, Commander W., 98 suburbia, 44, 47, 333 Supermarine

INDEX

S.4, 256 S.5, 257, 258 S.6, 258, 260, 264 S.6B, 251, 264, 265 Sea Lion II, 254–256 Spitfire, 232, 266, 267 Surrey Flying Services, 10 Sutherland, John, 47 Swissair, 104, 105 Sykes, F.H., 7, 77, 190 T Tallents, Stephen, 2, 6 technological sublime, 229, 233 Terraine, John, 323, 327 The Box of Delights (1984 BBC television serial), 277 The Dawn Patrol , 229, 322 The First of the Few, 267 The Future’s in the Air, 7, 10, 76, 77, 79 The Open Road, 71 The Projection of England, 6 The Shape of Things to Come, 13 Things to Come, 13, 14, 322 Thomas Cook, 147 Thurtle, Ernest, 241 total war, 5, 204, 236 travel industry, 138, 146, 149 Trenchard, Hugh, 261, 265, 302–304, 310, 331 Trotter, David, 4, 67, 190 U Udet, Ernst, 312 United States Army Air Service, 256 United States Navy, 255 United States of America, 6, 140, 164, 180, 182, 202, 255–257, 261, 331 Urry, John, 5

349

Uxbridge Air Force Training Depot, 302 V Van Vleck, Jennifer, 3, 6, 11, 69 Ventoux, Mont, 46 Vickers ‘Victoria’, 101 Victoria Station, 94 Virilio, Paul, 34, 38, 243, 276, 280, 281 Vorticism, 26, 27, 29 W Waddon, 9 Wadsworth, Edward, 27 Waghorn, Richard, 258 Warner, Rex, 19, 327, 328, 330 The Aerodrome, 12, 43, 285, 322, 328, 330, 332, 335 War Office, British, 116, 244 Waugh, Evelyn Labels: A Mediterranean Journey, 48 Ninety-Two Days , 50 Scoop, 129, 131 Vile Bodies , 11, 46, 48, 50, 127, 131 Webster, Sidney, 257 We Live in Two Worlds , 67 Wells, H.G. The Outline of History, 216 Welsh, David, 4 Wembley, 237 Westland Wessex, 130 White, T.H. England Have My Bones , 43 Whitten Brown, Lieutenant Arthur, 117 Wiggam, Marc, 240 Williams, Charles The Place of the Lion, 57, 58

350

INDEX

Williams, Jack, 252 Williamson, William Richard ‘Haji’, 188 Williams, Piers, 306, 309, 315 Wings , 229 Wohl, Robert, 3, 117, 253 Woman’s Own, 150 Women’s Aerial League, 14 Women’s Committee of the Air League of the British Empire, 98 Wonder Book of Aircraft , 286 Wood, C.H. Flying 1 and 2, 72 Woolf, Leonard, 202 Woolf, Virginia A Room of One’s Own, 206 Between the Acts , 12, 69, 203–205, 213, 214, 216–218, 220, 221 ‘Flying over London’, 125, 126, 204, 205 Mrs Dalloway, 204, 206

Orlando, 206 ‘The Death of the Moth’, 204 The Waves , 206, 213 The Years , 18, 203–206, 209, 210, 212, 213, 220 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, 202, 204, 221, 222 Three Guineas , 201–203, 206, 211, 213 To the Lighthouse, 206 Worden, Suzette, 149, 150 World Wildlife Fund, 209 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 115, 244, 300 Wrightways, 105

Y Yeadon, 72 Yorkshire, 72, 163, 166 Ypres, 26