First World War

Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome

Proudly claiming to be ‘Europe’s largest surviving World War I aerodrome’, the museum welcomes visitors to an impressive, hundred-acre site.

HMS Glatton

Sometimes poor quality-control can be as lethal as bad design – this was certainly true in the case of HMS Glatton. On the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Admiralty began buying warships that British shipyards were building for…

News in brief

Funding for Strictly ballroom The Blackpool Tower Ballroom, home to Strictly Come Dancing’s annual ballroom special, has received £764,000 from the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund to help enable repairs to be made to the venue, including its historic plasterwork ceiling.…

ABOVE A recent geophysical survey of Port Meadow in Oxford revealed the remains of a First World War flying training aerodrome. BELOW Bristol F.2 Fighters on Port Meadow.

Planes over Port Meadow: revealing a First World War Home Front aerodrome

A century after the site was dismantled, can the ephemeral remains of Oxford’s tented First World War flying training aerodrome be rediscovered? The Wolvercote WWI Aerodrome Memorial Project, a community initiative, sought to find out with the help of scientific surveying. Roger Ainslie reports.

The Genesis of Air Power, 1909 – 1916

Neil Faulkner begins a short series on the history of airpower and its impact on the evolution of modern warfare.

War of Words – ‘trench warfare’

Combat on the Western Front during World War One is justly infamous for its grim lethality. Soldiers on both sides dug deep trenches in the earth to escape murderous enemy fire.

Allenby: making the modern Middle East

Edward Henry Hynman Allenby was born in 1861 in Brackenhurst, Nottinghamshire in comfortable circumstances – a Victorian squire perhaps destined to help govern the British Empire on behalf of the Queen-Empress.

War Athletes: Clem Lewis

At the turn of the 20th century, the first ‘Golden Era’ of Welsh rugby ushered in the national team’s rise to dominance and infused ‘rugger’ into the country’s lifeblood. Lewis, for his part, embraced the game body and soul.

Wartime Christmas

Christmas at the front was about making do. Here, for instance, British soldiers have gathered in a shell hole around a makeshift table. Some are sitting on the ground, others on what appears to be rolled-up sheets of wire.

War, plague, and pollution from a European ice core

For millennia, fresh ice forming on a European glacier marked the passing years like tree rings. But over time these layers became compressed, preventing individual years within the depths of the ice from being examined individually. A new technology is now unlocking this remarkable repository of information, as Alexander More, Christopher Loveluck, Michael McCormick, and Paul Mayewski told World Archaeology.