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the following January he’d set up search lights, stationed
sixty aeroplanes in the London-Sheerness-Dover triangle
and ordered pilots to learn how to fly at night.
The Bombing Begins
Because of his family connections to the British Royals
the Kaiser was initially reluctant to allow England to be
bombed: like many he believed the whole thing would
blow over before too long. But it didn’t and under pressure
from his generals the Kaiser gave the go ahead to let
England, but not London, to be attacked from the air.
Thus it was that in the first ever air raid on Britain bombs
fell in January 1915 - on Great Yarmouth! Not by design –
the target had been the Humber - but Britain’s greatest
defence and weapon against the airships was always the
weather. Blown hopelessly off course 4 people would die
and 16 would suffer injury that evening in Norfolk, the
first a 53 year old cobbler called Samuel Smith who came
outside to see where the noise was coming from and the
second, Martha Taylor, a 72 year old spinster walking home
with her groceries. Attacks on Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds,
Southend, Ramsgate and Dover followed and within a
month the Kaiser had lifted the embargo on London with
the generals cynically agreeing to his (impossible to
guarantee) condition that no historic properties or royal
palaces be damaged.
Ten months after the outbreak of the war the first bombs
fell on the capital. On number 16 Alkham Road in Stoke
Newington to be precise. The occupant a clerk called Albert
Lovell escaped uninjured with his family but in Hoxton a
3 year old was killed and two adults died in the Balls Pond
Road. In Shoreditch the Empire Music Hall was evacuated
when incendiary devices fell on the roof. In Shoreditch and
Spitalfields a whisky distillery and a synagogue were hit
down in flames by British troops who mistook the Union
flag for the Iron Cross of Germany. Following this awful
tragedy the Royal Flying Corps adopted the stylised
poppy cockade or roundel resembling a bulls eye that
had been used by the French since the time of the French
Revolution. They reversed the colours so that the British
roundel was red, white and blue reading from the centre.
The Italians, Belgians, Russians and Americans also
used roundels and today the First World War aviation
historical association magazine is called the
Cross
& Cockade International.
Army & Navy
Britain had run a programme from 1909 to build rigid
airships but after Bleriot’s Channel crossing they began
to look more towards aviation. In 1911 The Royal
Engineers disbanded its Balloon Section and created
the Air Battalion head quartered at Farnborough, which
also became the location of the Army Aircraft Factory.
The army and navy would initially combine to form a
single Royal Flying Corps but before long the traditional
tensions between the two proved insurmountable and
the senior service left to establish the Royal Naval Air
Service. The two services would be merged to form
the Royal Air Force towards the end of the war in 1918,
becoming the world’s first air force to become
independent of army or navy control.
At the start of the war the Admiralty under Churchill
assumed the Home Defence of the capital and the Army
the rest of the country. Churchill, who had taken flying
lessons in 1913, was alone in the government in believing
in the threat of aerial attack with London, the Woolwich
Arsenal and Portsmouth the most likely targets.
In October 1914 he ordered blackouts in London and by
The Taube
Dove & Zanonia seed
