Gordon Pirie. Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation: Passengers, Pilots, Publicity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. 256 pp. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-8682-3.
Reviewed by John McAleer (University of Southampton)
Published on H-Empire (May, 2014)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed (Elizabeth City State University)
One wonders how often monographs about the history of British civilian aviation have been compared with London’s buses. In at least one respect, however, there are striking similarities: you wait ages for one to come along and then two come (almost) at once. In 2009, Gordon Pirie published Air Empire, also with Manchester University Press in its Studies in Imperialism series. In that book, Pirie assessed the role played by airships, flying boats, and aeroplanes in late British imperialism. In what way did these technological tools modernize Britain’s maritime empire? Was their impact limited to the expediting of imperial commerce and communications? Or did these ships of the sky play a role in legitimizing imperialism itself? Proponents of “air empire” at the time certainly regarded the wholehearted embracing of aviation as the key to securing Britain’s place at the top table of global powers, and they lamented what they saw as apathy among politicians and the public alike.
In Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation, Pirie continues that story. The book explores and opens up new perspectives offered by the history of aviation (and the history of transport more generally) for understanding British imperial attitudes and practices in the 1930s. It was in that decade that Imperial Airways became established as a worldwide airline, crossing oceans and continents in networks that corresponded to those of Britain’s worldwide empire. Pirie has written what is, in effect, the sequel to Air Empire. Like his first study, this book draws on a hitherto untapped wealth of archival sources, biographies, industry magazines, and newspapers. The author has scoured a whole host of often recondite material to retrieve a variety of vignettes that help to bring this history alive. And he weaves these sources together to re-create and reconceptualize the experiences of those who flew, whether as passengers or airline employees, for business or for pleasure.
Perhaps one of the most striking features about descriptions and representations of this intensely modern phenomenon is their reliance on images of Britain’s maritime past. An editorial in The Times of April 11, 1931, for example, praised the “descendants of the old-time explorers and merchant adventurers whose daring and contempt of danger enlarged the bounds of this island till it became the centre of a world-wide empire” (p. 49). The following year, an industry magazine, Air and Airways,carried a series of features on pilots, which the publication described as “the salt of the sky” (p. 148). At the same time, an article in The Field advocated making “air-sense as much part of the British character as sea-sense has been for so many generations” (p. 209). And, when Amy Johnson arrived in Australia after a solo journey of some 11,000 miles, she told 15,000 spectators at Melbourne to “dream dreams and see great visions” which would “breed a race of airmen comparable to Drake’s seadogs.” She spoke for many when she asserted to her audience that “our great sailors won the freedom of the seas, it’s up to us to win the freedom of the skies” (p. 27).
British civil imperial flying was not only represented to audiences in words, however. Flying offered powerful visual opportunities for conveying messages, currying trade, and molding public opinion. For example, in Britain and elsewhere in the empire, Imperial Airways used exhibitions, trade fairs, and marketing to promote its activities and to advertise the imperial connections that it offered to customers. In 1929 at London’s Olympia, at the seventh international aeronautical exhibition, the company took two stalls, both of which incorporated suitably imperial motifs. At one, a slow-moving painted panorama of scenes on the England-Egypt-India route passed behind the windows of an airliner cabin section. At the second stall, aircraft models were moved along a map of the route. Five years later, in 1934, the airline mounted its own exhibition, entitled “Flying over the Empire.” The exhibition, which comprised a large folding screen on which was mounted a map, models of Imperial aircraft, photographs depicting imperial scenes, and several dioramas, toured the provinces and was remounted for a two-month Christmas show at the Science Museum in December 1935 (renamed “Empire’s Airway” with free admission). It was subsequently sent to Canada, South Afric,a and Australia and, by 1937, an estimated one million people had seen the exhibition.
In cataloguing these powerful responses (visual, textual, and material) to the opportunities offered by aviation, one might be tempted to overlook some of the hard economic facts of flying in its early days. Importantly, Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation does not neglect this aspect. It illustrates very effectively just how expensive and exclusive flying was in this period. A flight from one end of the empire to the other could cost half the annual salary of a middle-class Briton. For example, in 1934, a seven-day, 12,800-mile single flight to Brisbane cost £195. This was twice as expensive as cheapest steamship fare (£96) and 50 percent more expensive than the first-class fare (£123). It might also have been useful to have a little more information about the febrile political climate in which civil aviation operated at this time: did the gathering clouds of war cast shadows on the flying dream? Nevertheless, Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation succeeds in conveying the power and possibilities associated with flying at the time. In some cases, the sheer weight of material unearthed by the author threatens to weigh down the narrative. Fortunately, however, it never quite manages to do so, and the book invariably makes it to its next thematic destination without too much turbulence or disruption.
In June 1936, The Observer reminded its readers that flying was like “seeing the world through different eyes.” In this book, Gordon Pirie has managed to give readers the next-best thing by offering an entertaining and comprehensive study of the unique perspective on the twentieth-century British Empire offered by flying.
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Citation:
John McAleer. Review of Pirie, Gordon, Cultures and Caricatures of British Imperial Aviation: Passengers, Pilots, Publicity.
H-Empire, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40835
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