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The Phantom Airship Panic of 1913: Imagining Aerial Warfare in Britain before the Great War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Brett Holman
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Abstract

In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported seeing airships in the night sky, yet there were none. It was widely assumed that these “phantom airships” were German Zeppelins, testing British defenses in preparation for the next war. The public and press responses to the phantom airship sightings provide a glimpse of the way that aerial warfare was understood before it was ever experienced in Britain. Conservative newspapers and patriotic leagues used the sightings to argue for a massive expansion of Britain's aerial forces, which were perceived to be completely outclassed by Germany's in both number and power. In many ways this airship panic was analogous to the much better known 1909 dreadnought panic. The result was the perfect Edwardian panic: the simultaneous culmination of older fears about Germany and the threat of espionage, invasion, and, above all, the loss of Britain's naval superiority. But, in reality, there was little understanding about the way that Zeppelins would be used against Britain in the First World War—not to attack its arsenals and dockyards, but to bomb its cities.

Keywords

aviationnavalmilitaryculturalnewspaperspressinvasionespionagespiesscaresfearEdwardian
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 99 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2016 

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References

1 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), AIR 1/2456, Commander C. R. Samson, 1 November 1912.

2 On the Sheerness incident, see Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and Their Government, 1909–14 (Stanford, 1989), 223–27.

3 TNA, AIR 1/2456, Captain Murray F. Sueter to Third Sea Lord [Rear-Admiral Gordon Moore], 14 November 1912.

4 Winston Churchill, Oral Answer to William Joynson-Hicks, 27 November 1912, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 44 (1912), col. 1243.

5 “Army Aeroplanes,” Standard, 28 November 1912, 4; Evening News, 6 December 1912, quoted in Flight, 14 December 1912, 1174 (all newspapers published in London unless otherwise specified).

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9 Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 427.

10 Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain's Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941 (Farnham, 2014), 177–80.

11 Ibid., 172–73.

12 The concept of an Anglo-German antagonism has recently been revised to incorporate a more nuanced understanding of the ambiguous and even positive aspects of the relationship between the two nations; but this should not obscure the mutually hostile attitudes that frequently dominated public discourses on both sides of the North Sea. See Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwath, eds., Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity (Oxford, 2008); but also Rüger, Jan, “Revisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 3 (September 2011): 579–617CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896–1914 (London, 1984). On the 1909 phantom airship panic, see Gollin, Alfred, “England Is No Longer An Island: The Phantom Airship Scare of 1909,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 43–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke, David, “Scareships Over Britain: The Airship Wave of 1909,” Fortean Studies 6 (1999): 39–63Google Scholar. For other mystery aircraft panics around the world between 1896 and 1946, see Holman, Brett, “Dreaming War: Airmindedness and the Australian Mystery Aeroplane Scare of 1918,” History Australia 10, no. 2 (August 2013): 180–201, at 183–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 On the 1913 phantom airship panic, see Gollin, The Impact of Air Power, 238–40; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1997), 106–9; Nigel Watson, Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, The 1912–1913 British Phantom Airship Scare (South Humberside, 1987).

15 Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven, 1994).

16 Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950 (New York, 1983); Holman, “Dreaming War,” 180–83.

17 Lord Northcliffe, quoted in Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902–1909 (London, 1984), 193.

18 Holman, The Next War in the Air.

19 Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 90.

20 Holman, The Next War in the Air, 28–35.

21 Ibid., 35–54.

22 Ibid., 180–85.

23 Andrew Horrall, Popular Culture in London c. 1890–1918: The Transformation of Entertainment (Manchester, 2001), 77–101; Adey, Peter, “‘Ten Thousand Lads with Shining Eyes are Dreaming and Their Dreams Are Wings’: Affect, Airmindedness and the Birth of the Aerial Subject,” Cultural Geographies 18, no. 1 (January 2011): 63–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 “Aerial Derby,” Sunday Times, 9 June 1912, 11; “The Aerial Derby,” Flight, 15 June 1912, 530. On the “Hendon Habit,” see David Oliver, Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury, 1994), 17–30.

25 “The King's Visit to Olympia,” Flight, 22 February 1913, 230–31.

26 Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859–1917 (Manchester, 1992), 123–51.

27 Alfred Tennyson, Poems (Boston, 1842), 104; Paris, Winged Warfare, 91.

28 H. G. Wells, The War in the Air and Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted (London, 1908).

29 Paris, Winged Warfare, 38; Wohl, A Passion for Wings, 70.

30 On this literature generally, see Paris, Winged Warfare; Holman, The Next War in the Air.

31 R. P. Hearne, Aerial Warfare (London, 1909), 169 (emphasis in original).

32 Paris, Michael, “The First Air Wars—North Africa and the Balkans, 1911–13,” Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 1 (January 1991): 97–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Hippler, Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air Power Strategy, 1884–1939 (Cambridge, 2013), 62–66.

33 Paris, “The First Air Wars,” 101–2.

34 Paris, Winged Warfare, 208–17; Hugh Driver, The Birth of Military Aviation: Britain, 1903–1914 (Woodbridge, 1997), 249–71.

35 David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (London, 2013), 15; Ces Mowthorpe, Battlebags: British Airships of the First World War (Stroud, 1998), xxii.

36 “The Service Grant for Aviation,” Flight, 2 March 1912, 188; Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815–1914 (London, 2001), 205.

37 John H. Morrow, The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation From 1909 to 1921 (Washington, DC, 1993), 41–42, 44.

38 Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, 16.

39 Eric Grove, “Seamen or Airmen? The Early Days of British Naval Flying,” in British Naval Aviation: The First 100 Years, ed. Tim Benbow (Farnham, 2011), 7–26, at 10–11. Rigid airships (such as Zeppelins) could be larger than semirigid or nonrigid ones, due to their use of an internal skeleton to maintain their shape.

40 Gollin, The Impact of Air Power, 67–68; TNA, CAB 16/17, “Report and Proceedings of the Technical Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on Aerial Navigation, Airships,” 6 August 1912, 5–6.

41 Mowthorpe, Battlebags, 8–12.

42 TNA, CAB 16/17, “Report and Proceedings of the Technical Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on Aerial Navigation, Airships,” 6 August 1912, iv.

43 Ibid., 2.

44 Guillaume De Syon, Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939 (Baltimore, 2002), 40–70; Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 9–58.

45 Douglas H. Robinson, Giants in the Sky: A History of the Rigid Airship (Henley-on-Thames, 1973), 330–31.

46 “Incidents at Copenhagen,” Times, 20 September 1912, 4.

47 “Flight from Hamburg to Copenhagen,” Aberdeen Daily Journal, 20 September 1912, 5; see also “Germany's Air Cruisers,” Manchester Courier, 27 September 1912, 18.

48 TNA, AIR 1/2455, Captain Murray F. Sueter to Captain, HMS Actaeon [Samson], 25 October 1912.

49 Aeroplane, 31 October 1912, 440.

50 Ibid.; “The Alleged Visit of a Foreign Airship,” Times, 22 November 1912, 8; TNA, AIR 1/2456, Sueter to Third Sea Lord [Moore], 14 November 1912.

51 Aeroplane, 14 November 1912, 497.

52 “‘Ships that Pass in the Night,’” Manchester Courier, 6 March 1913, 7.

53 TNA, CAB 38/22/42, minutes of CID meeting, 6 December 1912, 12.

54 TNA, CAB 38/23/9, minutes of CID meeting, 6 February 1913, 3. A Parseval was a much smaller airship than a Zeppelin, with a much shorter range, and hence an extremely implausible candidate. Churchill supported his subordinate, hinting at “information from other sources which confirmed their belief”: ibid., 4. On these “other sources,” which included a British civilian pilot visiting Germany, see TNA, CAB 38/23/11, Winston Churchill to Admiral of the Fleet Sir A. K. Wilson, 3 February 1913.

55 For example, “The Airship Mystery,” Times, 13 January 1913, 6. On the Dover incident, see, for example, “Dover Airship Mystery,” Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee), 6 January 1913, 5; also TNA, CAB 38/23/2, minutes of CID meeting, 7 January 1913, 3. A later theory, supposedly based on confidential information, was that Hansa was hired by Henry, Prince Pless, in order to visit friends in England but was turned back by bad weather. If so, it is not clear why such an innocuous flight was never admitted publicly by the parties involved. “Airship Mystery,” Globe, 3 March 1913, 7; “Concerning £1,000,000,” Aeroplane, 6 March 1913, 271.

56 TNA, CAB 38/23/9, minutes of CID meeting, 6 February 1913, 3.

57 De Syon, Zeppelin!, 74–75.

58 John R. Cuneo, Winged Mars (Harrisburg, 1942), 125; Douglas H. Robinson, The Zeppelin in Combat: A History of the German Naval Airship Division, 1912–1918 (Henley-on-Thames, 1971), 22; De Syon, Zeppelin!, 74–75. Some writers in the interwar period did accept that a German airship was responsible, without, however, offering any evidence: C. F. Snowden Gamble, The Air Weapon: Being Some Account of the Growth of British Military Aeronautics From the Beginnings in the Year 1783 Until the End of the Year 1929 (London, 1931), 205; George Fyfe, From Box-kites to Bombers (London, 1936), 160–61. Despite apparently originating with the Admiralty, a claim that a French military airship was responsible for the Dover incident (only) found little support elsewhere: Observer, 2 March 1913, 12; cf. TNA, CAB 38/23/2, minutes of CID meeting, 7 January 1913, 3.

59 Robinson, The Zeppelin in Combat, 22.

60 “German Airships,” Irish Times (Dublin), 1 March 1913, 7.

61 Note, for example, the so-called Silent Raid of the night of 19 October 1917, when a raiding force of eleven Zeppelins encountered high winds and were scattered across western Europe; five were lost, only one due to enemy action. Robinson, The Zeppelin in Combat, 262–83.

62 Watson, Oldroyd, and Clarke, The 1912–1913 British Phantom Airship Scare.

63 For example, “Unknown Aircraft over Dover,” Times, 6 January 1913, 6; “Mystery Airship Returns,” Standard, 24 February 1913, 9; “Airship Mystery,” Globe, 26 February 1913, 2; “The Mystery Airship,” Standard, 27 February 1913, 9; “London is Visited by Mystery Airship,” Courier (Dundee), 8 March 1913, 5; “Seen at Broughty Ferry,” Courier (Dundee), 8 March 1913, 5.

64 “Another Airship Seen,” Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee), 20 February 1913, 4.

65 “More Mysterious Airships,” Standard, 26 February 1913, 7.

66 “Mysterious Lights,” Devon and Exeter Gazette, 9 January 1913, 4; “Another Airship Mystery,” Mercury (Lichfield), 10 January 1913, 7.

67 “Mysterious Airship in the West,” Irish Times (Dublin), 11 January 1913, 9.

68 “Airship Mystery,” Standard, 21 January 1913, 9; “New Airship Mystery,” Globe, 22 January 1913, 5.

69 For example, “Aircraft over Liverpool,” Times, 28 January 1913, 13; “Mystery Airships,” Daily Express, 30 January 1913, 1; “Mystery Airship,” Standard, 31 January 1913, 7; “The Fly-by-nights,” Daily Express, 6 February 1913, 5; “The ‘Mysterious Airship,’” Manchester Guardian, 6 February 1913, 9.

70 “Welsh Mystery Airship Again,” Standard, 6 February 1913, 8.

71 For example, “The Reported Lights,” Times, 27 February 1913, 6; W. H. Webber, letter, Manchester Guardian, 1 March 1913, 6; “London is Visited by Mystery Airship,” Courier (Dundee), 8 March 1913, 5; “Crossing the Bristol Channel,” Courier (Dundee), 8 March 1913, 5.

72 For example, “Mysterious Airship is Seen Hovering over Kirkcaldy Exhibiting a Focussed Light,” Courier (Dundee), 1 March 1913, 5; “The Phantom Airship Now Pays a Visit to Scotland,” Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee), 28 February 1913, 2; “Whose is the Airship?,” Daily Express, 26 February 1913, 1; “The Mysterious Airship,” Norfolk News (Norwich), 1 March 1913, 12; “Positive Evidence of Eye-Witnesses,” Standard, 25 February 1913, 9; “Airship Seen at Hull,” Standard, 26 February 1913, 7.

73 “More Mysterious Airships,” Standard, 26 February 1913, 7.

74 Ibid., 7.

75 “Mystery Airship at Sea Twice Circles around a Hull Trawler,” Courier (Dundee), 5 March 1913, 5.

76 Holman, The Next War in the Air, 32–33.

77 Morris, The Scaremongers.

78 Quoted in “Visions,” Liverpool Echo, 27 February 1913, 7.

79 Compare “Foreign Airships Survey England,” Daily Mirror, 25 February 1913, 5, with “England's Epidemic of ‘Airshipitis,’” Daily Mirror, 26 February 1913, 4.

80 “The Airship Rumours,” Times, 28 February 1913, 5.

81 “Night Flier,” Liverpool Echo, 26 February 1913, 7; “Explanation of Aberdeen Airships Scare,” Aberdeen Journal, 6 March 1913, 4; “More Lights,” Manchester Courier, 27 February 1913, 7; “Airship or Geese?,” Daily Express, 27 January 1913, 7.

82 “The Mysterious Airship,” Manchester Guardian, 10 February 1913, 6. For a parallel in the conservative press, see “Mystery Airship,” Standard, 31 January 1913, 7.

83 “Airship Mystery,” Globe, 3 March 1913, 7.

84 “Mysterious Airship in the West,” Irish Times (Dublin), 11 January 1913, 9. Fear of a German attack was not entirely absent in Ireland, despite increasing anti-British sentiment. See aan de Wiel, Jérôme, “German Invasion and Spy Scares in Ireland, 1890s–1914: Between Fiction and Fact,” Études Irlandaises 37, no. 1 (2012): 25–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 “Germany's Zeppelins,” Standard, 25 February 1913, 9.

86 “Airships in the Night,” Standard, 22 January 1913, 9.

87 “Britain's Peril in the Air,” Review of Reviews 47 (March 1913): 127–35Google Scholar; “Is It ‘the Sea to Us, the Air to the Foe?,’” Illustrated London News, 22 February 1913, 239; “‘The Black Shadow of the Airship,’” Flight, 1 March 1913, 248.

88 “Night Raids by Air,” Daily Express, 25 February 1913, 1.

89 “Aerial Defence,” Times, 12 February 1913, 7.

90 “Views of the Royal Flying Corps,” Standard, 25 February 1913, 9.

91 “New Law against Foreign Airships,” Daily Herald, 14 February 1913, 6.

92 “Foreign Airship Visits,” Daily Mail, 13 February 1913, 4.

93 Compare Holman, Brett, “The Air Panic of 1935: British Press Opinion Between Disarmament and Rearmament,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 2 (April 2011): 288–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holman, The Next War in the Air, 187–202.

94 “Britain's Peril in the Air,” Daily Mirror, 17 February 1913, 5.

95 “Ships that Pass in the Night,’” Manchester Courier, 24 February 1913, 7. The civilian Zeppelin Hansa did take part in military exercises early in March: “Remarkable Hits by German Dirigible,” Western Gazette (Yeovil), 7 March 1913, 8. Another civilian Zeppelin, Sachsen, was converted to military use on the outbreak of war, bombing Antwerp in September 1914, while the older Viktoria Luise and Hansa were used for training: Robinson, Giants in the Sky, 87n1. On the commercial bomber concept, of which this is a particularly early example, see Holman, Brett, “The Shadow of the Airliner: Commercial Bombers and the Rhetorical Destruction of Britain, 1917–35,” Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 4 (November 2013): 495–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 “Ships that Pass in the Night,” Manchester Courier, 4 April 1913, 7.

97 “Why Laws are Made to Prevent Unauthorised Flying of Air-ships over Foreign Territory,” Illustrated London News, 22 February 1913, 240–241; “The Peril in the Air,” Review of Reviews 47 (April 1913): 255–60, at 256Google Scholar.

98 TNA, CAB 37/115/35, “Aerial navigation. Summary of situation,” 1–2.

99 Gollin, The Impact of Air Power, 246–50; Driver, The Birth of Military Aviation, 144–45. Compare W. Joynson-Hicks, “Hot Air Arithmetic,” Daily Express, 21 March 1913, 4.

100 “Britain's Peril in the Air,” Review of Reviews, 134. See also Faber, Walter, “The First Fruits,” Review of Reviews 47 (April 1913): 261–62Google Scholar; “The Response of the Cities,” Review of Reviews 47 (April 1913): 262–64Google Scholar.

101 Rowland Hunt, Oral Question to Herbert Asquith, 24 April 1913, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 52 (1913), cols. 529, 520.

102 Aerial Navigation Bill, 8 February 1913, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 48 (1913), col. 345; Royal Assent, 14 February 1913, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 48 (1913), col. 1456.

103 J. M. Spaight, Aircraft in War (London, 1914), 59, 155–56.

104 “Latest News,” Scotsman (Edinburgh), 11 February 1913, 7.

105 TNA, CAB 17/20, “Draft Terms of Reference,” 18 October 1912; TNA, CAB 16/22, minutes of Control of Aircraft subcommittee, 29 November 1912, in “Report of a Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on the Control of Aircraft,” 3 February 1913, 18; TNA, CAB 16/22, “Report of a Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on the Control of Aircraft,” 3 February 1913, 2. See TNA, CAB 38/23/9, minutes of CID meeting, 6 February 1913, 5–6.

106 “Regulation of Aircraft,” Standard, 6 March 1913, 8. On the enforcement of the Act, see TNA, AIR 1/653/17/122/484, “Air Policy and Acts.”

107 French, David, “Spy Fever in Britain, 1900–1915,” Historical Journal 21, no. 2 (June 1978): 355–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era (Basingstoke, 2004), 27–35.

108 “Aerial Defence,” Times, 12 February 1913, 7.

109 “Mystery Airship Returns,” Standard, 24 February 1913, 9.

110 “The Airship Scare,” Aberdeen Daily Journal, 7 March 1913, 6.

111 Guy du Maurier, An Englishman's Home: A Play in Three Acts (New York, 1909); William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910 (London, 1906). See I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763–3749 (Oxford, 1992), 118–29; Bulfin, Ailise, “To Arms! Invasion Narratives and Late-Victorian Literature,” Literature Compass 12, no. 9 (September 2015): 482–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 “Government and Aviation,” Globe, 26 February 1913, 7.

113 “Mr S. Herbert at Torry,” Aberdeen Daily Journal, 4 April 1913, 8.

114 “Armaments of the Powers,” Times, 10 March 1913, 8. See David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, 1996), 189–91.

115 Morris, The Scaremongers, 429–30, n. 114. On the conscription lobby, see Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (New York, 1990), 38–42, 115–17.

116 The contemporary, and indeed later, belief that scaremongering was the chief cause of the 1909 panic has recently been challenged: Seligmann, Matthew, “Intelligence Information and the 1909 Naval Scare: The Secret Foundations of a Public Panic,” War in History 17, no. 1 (January 2010): 37–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But even if there was a rational basis for the belief that Germany would overtake Britain at sea, the often irrational response still qualifies as a panic. See also Morris, The Scaremongers, 164–84.

117 “‘Ships that Pass in the Night,’” Manchester Courier, 3 March 1913, 7.

118 “The Power of the Air,” Observer, 2 March 1913, 12.

119 C. G. Grey, “Air Ships and Scare Ships,” Daily Express, 13 January 1913, 6.

120 F. W. Hirst, The Six Panics and Other Essays (London, 1913), 103.

121 “Germany's Zeppelins,” Standard, 25 February 1913, 9.

122 Ibid.

123 Excubitor, “Sea and Air Command: Germany's New Policy,” Fortnightly Review 93 (June 1913): 868–80, at 868Google Scholar.

124 “Britain's Peril in the Air,” Review of Reviews, 127.

125 “Defence against Airships,” Times, 20 February 1913, 4. On the Navy League, see Coetzee, For Party or Country, 138–43.

126 “The Power of the Air,” Observer, 2 March 1913, 12.

127 Minutes of Navy League executive committee meetings, 19 March 1913 and 16 April 1913, Marine Society and Sea Cadets archives (hereafter MSSC). The title echoed Grahame-White's “Wake Up, England!” aerial displays over 121 of the nation's towns and cities in the summer of 1912. See Graham Wallace, Claude Grahame-White: A Biography (London, 1960), 171–74; Paris, Winged Warfare, 69, 73.

128 Minutes of NADA executive committee meeting, 16 May 1913, MSSC.

129 For example, “Government and Aviation,” Globe, 26 February 1913, 7; “Little, Little England,” Daily Express, 28 February 1913, 4; “The Command of the Air,” Standard, 28 February 1913, 9; “The Greatest Airship,” Aberdeen Daily Journal, 25 March 1913, 4; Devon and Exeter Gazette, 26 March 1913, 2.

130 “Navy League and Aviation,” Flight, 29 March 1913, 369–70; “Aerial Perils,” Manchester Courier, 14 March 1913, 7; Claude Grahame-White, “£1,000,000 for Flying,” Daily Mail, 16 January 1913, 4; “The Coming Budget and Aerial Defence,” Flight, 25 January 1913, 81–82; “Concerning £1,000,000,” Aeroplane, 6 March 1913, 271–72. On the Aerial League, see Gollin, The Impact of Air Power, 6–8, 129–31.

131 “Airships and Visions of Airships,” Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1913, 6.

132 “The Million,” Flight, 8 March 1913, 272.

133 “The Government and Aviation,” Flight, 22 March 1913, 329.

134 Quoted in “Public Opinion,” Western Gazette (Yeovil), 21 March 1913, 5.

135 W. Joynson-Hicks, “Hot Air Arithmetic,” Daily Express, 21 March 1913, 4.

136 “Toy Airships Wanted,” Daily Express, 20 March 1913, 1.

137 “The Airship Mystery,” Daily Mail, 27 February 1913, 5.

138 “London is Visited by Mystery Airship,” Courier (Dundee), 8 March 1913, 5; “Galway People Startled,” Connacht Tribune (Galway), 29 March 1913, 4.

139 “Cardiff Aerial Mystery Again,” Manchester Guardian, 9 April 1913, 9; “Airship Seen at Stronsay,” Aberdeen Daily Journal, 22 April 1913, 4.

140 “Two to One in the Air,” Daily Mail, 12 April 1913, 5; “Defence of England,” Daily Mail, 5 May 1913, 7.

141 A final executive committee meeting was called for October, but the minutes were not recorded, suggesting an abrupt termination of its activities: minutes of Navy League executive committee meeting, 24 September 1913, MSSC.

142 “Airship Fleet for Britain,” Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee), 16 April 1913, 1; TNA, CAB 37/115/35, “Aerial Navigation. Summary of Situation, June 1913,” 9–10. See Mowthorpe, Battlebags, 125.

143 “Paper Defence,” Flight, 12 July 1913, 754.

144 “Army Estimates,” Flight, 14 March 1914, 282.

145 Only the sightings at Sheerness and Dover are mentioned in official sources.

146 Holman, “Dreaming War,” 190–91; TNA, AIR 1/561/16/15/62, “Reports of False Alarms or Rumoured Air Raids on England.”

147 Hundreds of mystery airships and airplanes were reported to the authorities between August 1914 and January 1915: see TNA, AIR 1/565/16/15/89, “GHQ. Home Forces. Intelligence Reports of Reported Movements of Hostile Aircraft and Ships.”

148 Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), 135.