★★★★★

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★★★★

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★★★★

Minding the Gap: John Singleton Copley’s Provincialism, Belatedness, and the Paradox of Colonial Self-Fashioning

Emily Ballew Neff, The Kelso Director, San Antonio Museum of Art

How does provincialism relate to belatedness? Colonial artist John Singleton Copley performed belatedness through persistent claims of colonial naiveté, which proved remarkably astute in terms of positioning himself in a broader transatlantic artistic network before he left colonial Boston in 1774. Once settled in London in 1775, the repetition of geo-temporal themes as evidenced in his work, his letters, and novel exhibition strategies, both helped and worked against him and, to some degree, his friend and eventual adversary, Benjamin West. While both artists used their colonial status to advance their careers, ultimately stunning the artistic world with contemporary history painting in the Grand Manner, Copley’s development of the genre, so closely tied to modernity—news media, celebrity, political rhetoric, transatlantic exchange and empire building—threw into question its relevance as changing global events inevitably altered its meanings. In retrospect, moving from belatedness to strategic foresight (or being “early”) was not just the expression of a remarkable career trajectory in the case of Copley. In the historiography of North American art, belatedness and provincialism evolved into positive affirmations of “American” identity.

Emily Ballew Neff is the Kelso Director at the San Antonio Museum of Art. The author or co-author of six catalogues and a contributor of essays to numerous others, she has created 25 exhibitions, including major presentations such as American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World (2013) and John Singleton Copley in England (1995) and, in the area of western studies, The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950 (2006), the latter two of which illustrate her interest in a broad range of media and dialogue with indigenous arts. Throughout her career, beginning at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she was the inaugural curator of American Painting and Sculpture, she has been guided by an interest in situating American art in a more expansive, global context and nurturing interest across diverse cultures and geographies.

Timing and History in Trumbull and Sully’s Early American Single Painting Exhibitions

Tanya Pohrt, Curator, Lyman Allen Art Museum

In 1818–1819 John Trumbull exhibited his large-scale Declaration of Independence in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. It was the first multi-city exhibition of a history painting in America, a format modelled after John Singleton Copley’s successful independent exhibitions in London in the 1780s. America was far different than London, however, and Trumbull’s Revolutionary project took nearly four decades to come to fruition. Because of this, his Declaration reflected a version of history that was out of sync by 1818-1819, leading viewers to question who was included and excluded from this symbolically important moment in the nation’s history.

A resurgence of interest in the American Revolution followed the war of 1812, facilitating Trumbull’s federal commission and motivating other artists such as Thomas Sully to paint canvases celebrating the nation’s founding. By adapting British exhibition strategies to fit the needs of American artists and audiences, Trumbull and Sully created ambitious yet flawed history paintings for the public. Belatedness explains many of their problems, yet the paintings’ inaccuracies also reflect the difficulty of history painting as a genre. By attempting to pin down iconic events in a nation’s contested and fractured history, artists opened themselves up to critique.

Tanya��Pohrt��is curator of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut. She has curated a range of exhibitions at the Lyman Allyn, including��The Way Sisters: Miniaturists of the Early Republic��(Exh. Cat., 2021),��The Prismatic Palette: Frank Vincent DuMond and His Students, 2021, and curated the permanent collection gallery��Louis Comfort Tiffany in New London, which opened in 2018. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware with a specialty in American art and was previously a Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow in American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery.

American Cultural ‘Innocence’ as Political Tool in 1930s France

Caroline M. Riley, Research Associate, Department of Art and Art History, University of California, Davis

In 1938, MoMA curators installed the museum’s first international exhibition, Three Centuries of American Art, in Paris. With Three Centuries, MoMA laid out an authoritative vision of American art history that extended its chronology to the early colonial period and encompassed countries far beyond the geographical borders of the United States. The exhibition contained over 750 artworks as well as interpretive documents, including film scripts and maps, dating from 1609 to 1938. Three Centuries operated as a representational proxy for the United States that promoted both its cultural exceptionalism in the display, for example, of folk art, including art by Black artists, and its industrial strength in the display, for example, of Chicago skyscrapers. On the cusp of World War II, how did the perception of American cultural belatedness in an exhibition of American art history benefit the French? Alternatively, how did the display of American industrialization serve as a powerful counter-narrative that shifted American and French perceptions of each other? Complicating our notion of belatedness, Three Centuries was the first collaboration between MoMA and the US government, and officials saw in it the potential to represent American democratic values as totalitarianism advanced in the 1930s.

Caroline Riley serves as Research Associate at the��University of California, Davis and a NEH Long-Term Fellow at the New York��Public Library (2022–2023).��She has published on Pictorialist photography, nineteenth-century portrait painters, and vernacular art. Her first book,��MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938��(University of California Press, January 2023), explores American art’s canonization during the interwar period and the deployment of art in international diplomacy. Her next book, presently titled Thérèse Bonney and the Global Syndication of Photography, will analyse��how Bonney’s trail-blazing life impacted the progress of women in the male-dominated professions of photographer, journalist, spy, business owner, and curator.

The second half of the event will be moderated by Angela Miller.

Angela Miller��is Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of��Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875; and lead author, along with Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer Roberts, of��American Encounters: Cultural Identity and the Visual Arts from the Beginning to the Present��(Pearson, 2008). She has published widely on 19^th��and 20^th��century visual arts and culture. Along with Sabine Eckmann, she is planning an exhibition on post-war abstraction in the US, France, and Germany that sets Abstract Expressionism within a network of international exchange.

The Long Struggle: Belatedness and International Exhibitions of American Art, 1946-1959

Mark A. White, Executive Director, New Mexico Museum of Art

As the United States asserted its influence abroad following World War II, institutions as varied as the U.S. State Department, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) followed a similar path by creating exhibitions of contemporary American art for foreign audiences. Traveling exhibitions such as the State Department’s Advancing American Art (1946-47) and MoMA’s The New American Painting (1958-59) declared the legitimacy of American modernism, which had been perceived as late to the party. Organizers of the respective exhibitions asserted that contemporary American art deserved serious consideration, having been relatively ignored on an international stage in the past. This talk will explore how these exhibitions situated contemporary American art within an international context, whether to suggest American artists had finally come of age or had triumphed over their foreign rivals.

Mark Andrew White is the Executive Director of the New Mexico Museum of Art. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1999 and spent the first decade of his career in academia at Oklahoma State University. In 2009, he joined the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma as curator and, in 2015, was named the Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director of the museum.

Exhibitions and publications include OK/LA (2020), Macrocosm/Microcosm: Abstract Expressionism in the American Southwest (2014), and Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy (2012).

Global Modernism, US Imperialism, and the Paradoxes of Decolonization

Joshua I. Cohen, Associate Professor of Art History, The City College of New York

In his classic study of Abstract Expressionism around the start of the Cold War, Serge Guilbaut (1983) noted that American art before the mid-1940s had “trailed behind French production.” Yet by the end of the decade, the United States, in terms of global cultural influence, made a “transition from colonized nation to colonizer.” For a country of epigones to become an avant-garde powerhouse, a major geographical reorientation was needed, in Guilbaut’s thesis, shifting the art world’s so-called centre from Paris to New York. Less commonly noted in postcolonial and Cold War scholarship is a revised temporal postwar schema, which was crucial for positioning the US on the cutting edge of global artistic trends and purportedly in synch with liberated Third World modernists. This paper comparatively examines landmark exhibitions of American art and US-sponsored exhibitions of artists from different parts of the decolonizing world, focusing on the late 1940s through the early 1960s. It analyzes how, paradoxically, American advocacy for the end of colonialism seeded and supported new forms of capitalist imperialism, posing a new set of challenges for modernist painters from ex-colonies.

Joshua I. Cohen is associate professor of art history at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (University of California Press, 2020), received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. He is at work on a new book project entitled Art of the Opaque: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Cold War.

‘Documenta? An American assault on Europe!’ Gesture Painting and the Failures of Transatlanticism at documenta II (1959)

Dr Matthew Holman, The Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow, The Courtauld

‘Art has become abstract’, wrote Werner Haftmann in 1959 and, in so doing, became ‘the first example of world culture.’ The transatlanticist Haftmann, perhaps the most vociferous supporter of modern art in post-war Germany, believed that a ‘world language’ of gestural abstraction had become a reality. This philosophical and formal attitude to art informed Haftmann’s vision for documenta II, held in the small West German city of Kassel, which he co-curated with Arnold Bode. However, just as a buoyant internationalism looked to celebrate the arrival of a ‘lingua franca’ in post-war art, the political and transnational power asymmetries in an art-world increasingly dominated by Abstract Expressionism, supported by the deep-pockets of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, exposed the fault-lines in Haftmann’s worldview. By focusing on the controversial American representation at documenta II, in which an overdetermined display of works was hung one on top of another in a claustrophobic and labyrinthine hang, this paper will use this exhibition as a case study to interrogate wider questions about Cold War cultural politics. I will argue that Abstract Expressionism––as the flagship style of American modernism––‘came of age’ at the same moment when confidence in a genuinely international mode of gestural abstraction was on the wane. If gestural abstraction offered, for some Mittel-European critics, an artistic manifestation of the North Atlantic alliance, then for others it showed a decadent American art form which was already beginning to be eclipsed by formal critiques of gesture painting in Neo-Dada and Pop, as examples of both lurked in the background of documenta II and threatened the story of art that it advocated by the end of the 1950s.

Dr Matthew Holman is The Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld. In 2020, he completed a PhD in post-war exhibition histories of American art at University College London, where he stayed on and taught modern poetry. Matthew has held research fellowships at Yale University, The Smithsonian, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and spent a year at The John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin under a Leverhulme Trust Studentship. His research has been published or is forthcoming in Critical Quarterly, Women’s Studies, The Oxford Art Journal, Essays and Studies, Modern Italian Art, and elsewhere. His first book, Curating Modern Life: Frank O’Hara and the Politics of Art, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in spring 2024

The Courtauld Gallery
Somerset House, Strand
London WC2R 0R

Opening hours: 10:00 – 18:00 (last entry 17:15).

Weekday tickets from £10; weekend tickets from £12
Temporary Exhibition tickets (including entry to our Permanent Collection) – Weekday tickets from £13; Weekend tickets from £15.
Friends and Under-18s go free. Other concessions available.

MEDIA CONTACTS

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NOTES TO EDITORS��

About The Courtauld��

The Courtauld works to advance how we see and understand the visual arts, as an internationally- renowned centre for the teaching and research of art history and a major public gallery. Founded by collectors and philanthropists in 1932, the organisation has been at the forefront of the study of art ever since. through advanced research and conservation practice, innovative teaching, the renowned collection and inspiring exhibitions of its gallery, and engaging and accessible activities, education and events.

The Courtauld cares for one of the greatest art collections in the UK, presenting these works to the public at The Courtauld Gallery in central London, as well as through loans and partnerships. The Gallery is most famous for its iconic Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces – such as Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. It showcases these alongside an internationally renowned collection of works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through to the present day.

Academically, The Courtauld faculty is the largest community of art historians and conservators in the UK, teaching and carrying out research on subjects from creativity in late Antiquity to contemporary digital artforms – with an increasingly global focus. An independent college of the University of London, The Courtauld offers a range of degree programmes from BA to PhD in the History of Art, curating and the conservation of easel and wall paintings. Its alumni are leaders and innovators in the arts, culture and business worlds, helping to shape the global agenda for the arts and creative industries.

Founded on the belief that everyone should have the opportunity to engage with art, The Courtauld works to increase understanding of the role played by art throughout history, in all societies and across all geographies – as well as being a champion for the importance of art in the present day. This could be through exhibitions offering a chance to look closely at world-famous works; events bringing art history research to new audiences; accessible and expert short courses; digital engagement, innovative school, family and community programmes; or taking a formal qualification. The Courtauld’s ambition is to transform access to art history education by extending the horizons of what this is and ensuring as many people as possible can benefit from the tools to better understand the visual world around us.

The Courtauld is an exempt charity and relies on generous philanthropic support to achieve its mission of advancing the understanding of the visual arts of the past and present across the world through advanced research, innovative teaching, inspiring exhibitions, programmes and collections.

The collection cared for by The Courtauld Gallery is owned by the Samuel Courtauld Trust.

About The Henry Moore Foundation

The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by the artist and his family in 1977 to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts. Henry Moore Studios & Gardens is the former home and workplace of sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986). From 1940 until his death in 1986, Moore lived and worked in rural Hertfordshire where he acquired over 70 acres of land and set up various studios, creating the ideal environment in which he could make and display his work and cater to an international demand for exhibitions. Now open to the public, Henry Moore Studios & Gardens offers a unique insight into the artist’s working practice and showcases a large selection of Moore’s renowned monumental sculptures in the landscape in which they were created. It also presents an annually changing programme of events, which further illuminate the life and work of the sculptor and is home to the Henry Moore Archive, one of the largest single-artist archives in the world.

Drawings Gallery exhibitions and displays

Project Space displays

MA Curating the Art Museum Exhibitions

Unearthing: Memory, Land, Materiality
15 June – 3 Sept 2023

8 June – 2 July 2022

(digital exhibition)
Opened 16 June 2021

(digital exhibition)
June – July 2020

8 June – 3 July 2019

14 June – 15 July 2018

16 June – 17 July 2017

16 June – 17 July 2016

18 June – 19 July 2015

20 June – 20 July 2014

20 June – 21 July 2013

26 June – 22 July 2012

23 June – 4 Sept 2011

17 June – 18 July 2010

25 June – 26 July 2009

26 June – 27 July 2008

McQueens Illuminating Objects displays

Launched in 2012, the McQueens Illuminating Objects internship programme is supported by McQueens Flowers Ltd and explores some of the ornate, unusual and largely unknown objects in The Courtauld’s sculpture and decorative arts collections.

The Admiralty Theatre performance that most captured the attention of the press was the reenactment of the World War I naval battle of Zeebrugge. The action took place on the Theatre’s water stage and the boats moved about on submerged rails. On stage, the dynamic texture of the water was augmented by smoke machines, lights, and off-stage sound effects. A live orchestra provided dramatic musical accompaniment.¹³ As the battle raged, a narrator explained the movement of the British and German ships while text and images were projected onto an accompanying screen. The scene introduced an intimate experience of war and was calibrated to appear as if the audience stood upon a naval ship three miles offshore.¹⁴��Outside the Admiralty Theatre, there were a set of more conventional panoramic models of the First World War which depicted battles at Ypres, the North-West Frontier of India, and Messines Ridge. These were the nineteenth-century ancestors of the theatre, pioneering the multimedia approach that would bring the Battle of Zeebrugge to life.

In the Admiralty Theatre performances, the panorama met conventional theatre and technological advances in electricity to create a unique all-encompassing experience.¹⁵��In preparation meetings for the Government Pavilion, members of the interdepartmental planning committee carefully distinguished between the experience of viewing events as models and as performances in the Admiralty Theatre. The ‘more spectacular events’, they concluded, would be better suited to the immersive Admiralty Theatre.¹⁶ This was an effective strategy, and The Times wrote ‘it makes one rapacious for a similar sight of every memorable action, naval and military, in our history. Never was there such pictorial realism in any theatre’.¹⁷��‘The spectacle’, The Times concluded, ‘seems less a reproduction of what happened than a resurrection’.¹⁸��Such ‘pictorial realism’ defined an experience of collective spectatorship that imbued theatregoers, many of whom had no first-hand experience of the terrors of the Great War, with an illusion of battle-hardened nationalism. If the resurrective capacity of the theatre could bring history to life, it could also be used to imagine future events.

The Defences of London was the War Office and Air Ministry’s contribution to the rotation of performances in the Admiralty Theatre. It was unique in its form, its focus on the domestic sphere, and its evocation not of a historical event, but a potential threat. The pictorial realism of the Battle of Zeebrugge was redirected towards a speculative future. To include the The Defences of London was a striking choice on the part of the War Office and Air Ministry and it challenged the careful political calculations of the Government Pavilion. The planning committee was concerned with producing a unified message, and often reminded the various departments involved that they were required to ‘ensure that the nature and presentation of any exhibits or displays are unobjectionable on political or general grounds’.¹⁹ Yet, during a February 1924 meeting, the committee discussed the fact that ‘possible objections may be raised to the inclusion … of an imaginary air attack on the House of Commons’. The politics of the display had come close to flouting the committee guidelines.²⁰

While contemporaneous newspaper accounts, including The Times and The Illustrated London News, detail the technical specifications for the water stage and the reenactment of the Zeebrugge raid, they did not record the theatre’s transition to the attack on Westminster.²¹ However, models of the Houses of Parliament were ordered for the stage, which makes a similar combination of miniatures, lights, film, and explosives the likely tools of the The Defences of London.²² To convert the theatre from the Zeebrugge Raid, the water stage was covered and replaced with a miniaturized model of the Westminster skyline as viewed across the Thames from the London City Council building.²³��Like the placement of the viewers of the Zeebrugge raid three miles out to sea, the set designers carefully chose a realistic vantage point for the audience to take in the scene.

The Illustrated London News published a drawing and description of the scene on July 19, 1924:

Lights go up in the House of Commons. A moment later there is a faint rumble, and there are strange flashes in the sky. Raiders are coming, and they are already dropping bombs. With little to hinder them—nothing but a few anti-aircraft guns, position-revealing searchlights, and fighting aeroplanes in insufficient numbers—they sweep and swoop over the city, and their bombs still the heart of Empire, leaving it a blackened, shrivelled, useless thing.²⁴

The accompanying illustration presented the moment of final disintegration (Fig. 2). Swirling smoke tinged with fiery pinks and reds draws both the audience and the newspaper reader towards the strange beauty of destruction. Yet the raiders themselves are gone from the sky and the viewer is left to imagine the presence of the enemy. While the outline of Big Ben remains intact, it only serves to emphasize the ruin of the Houses of Parliament. The neo-gothic edifice is crumbled and skeletal, still consumed by fire. Hazy light from the smoke-filled screen falls on the audience. It most visibly highlights the profile of a well-dressed woman in a red hat who, enthralled, raises her hand to her mouth. For women like her (who had probably never seen the battlefront), the radical dissolution of familiar space was intended to produce a dramatic immediacy. It transposed the experience of war gleaned from the static dioramas of Ypres and the Somme, which sat just outside the theatre, into the present moment. The imminence of ‘resurrection’ turned this conjectural event into something resembling lived history.

The Air Ministry intended to use the emotional reaction to this dystopian drama to increase support for national air defence. The headline from The Illustrated London News concentrated on this aspect of the event, declaring ‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air-Raid Defence: A Dramatic Object Lesson, in the Government Building’.²⁵��The Defences of London argued that the horror of war could quickly enter the home front. The message was made clear through the second half of the program, which saw the skyline saved by the efforts of the Royal Air Force. Because of this intervention, the program concluded with the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben intact (likely much to the relief of the woman in the red hat).

However, in 1924 there was no comprehensive aerial defence force and, like the entire show, the denouement was only an imagined alternative scenario. Aerial defence was a contentious issue in the 1920s. Brett Holman points out that between the First World War and the early 1920s, military theorists and political commentators, including RAF officers and amateur airpower strategists, advanced the theory of the ‘knock-out blow’ as an existential threat to the home front.²⁶��The concern was that an enemy force could plan a surprise air raid to preempt the declaration of war. Bombing in London and major industrial areas would limit production capacity, confuse the government response, and lower the morale of the civilian population. The enemy could essentially win a war before it began.²⁷��In 1924, without a defending air force, Britain seemed unprepared for the demands of future aerial combat.²⁸

The German Zeppelin raids of the First World War were a key precedent for the knock-out blow theory and had piqued anxiety about the threat to civilian populations in modern warfare. With these attacks, the Germans aimed to diminish morale and disrupt the noncombatant labour force. Whereas locations distanced from the battlefield had previously been protected, these air raids, as Susan Grayzel argues, created the notion of the home front as its own sphere of battle.²⁹��The German Zeppelin raids in London began in March 1915 and took place sporadically throughout the First World War. The bombs caused visible damage, with over five hundred people killed and various English towns and cities sustaining damage. However, the technological limitations of the Zeppelins and the novelty of air attacks, as Ariella Freedman has pointed out, made the imagined threat of the raiders more significant than the reality of their reach.³⁰��Crucially, as Grayzel notes, the bombs disrupted the feeling of safety previously borne of England’s island geography. Civilians could now face the same danger as soldiers at the front.³¹

Compared to conventional warfare, however, the tools of aerial bombardment were diffuse and mysterious. The Zeppelins flew high above the ground and this distance prompted many contemporaneous observers, according to Freedman, to liken them to weather or gods rather than tools of earthbound combat.³²��In this way, I argue, aerial bombardment took on the mantle of potential apocalyptic destruction previously reserved for natural disasters and acts of God. An encounter with the flying instruments of war was similar to the terror of the sublime.³³��These machines represented a future in which technology could challenge geographical boundaries and the patterns of warfare.

The technological intrigue of aerial warfare provoked conjecture about the dystopia that it could create. Martin Ceadel, Uri Bialer, and Christopher Simel have shown that these fears were codified through both changes in government policy and contemporaneous cultural interpretations in art and literature.³⁴��Because of the unprecedented nature of the Zeppelin raids, they contend, these cultural reactions are significant historic documents. The aerial turn played out in the public sphere and, as a result, demanded a robust cultural response. This included, I argue, The Defences of London and London Defended. Bialer underscores the scholarly relevance of inventions such as these, asserting that there was little difference between the administrative responses to the potential crisis of aerial warfare and the scenarios put forward in speculative literature.³⁵��To this end, literature scholars have identified a body of interwar science-fiction and futuristic writing that directly responded to Zeppelin raids and the aerial threat.³⁶��While there is less evidence of this trend in performance or the visual arts, the capacity of the Admiralty Theatre for lifelike resurrection made it an ideal venue for evoking the dystopian possibilities of aerial combat.

The Defences of London, facilitated by the advanced technology of the Admiralty Theatre, made the potential destruction of the city tangible in order to attune audiences to the importance of home defence. In addition, however, the aerial spectacle could have aided the Air Ministry itself in envisioning the form of a future aerial apocalypse. John Ferris points to the theoretical nature of aerial warfare in the interwar period. He quotes the 1934 Chief of Air Staff, who noted that

The RAF had to rely on ‘pure guess-work’ and ‘arbitrary assumptions’ about every detail of strategic air warfare, ‘as we have no practical experience of air warfare on a major scale under modern conditions to provide us with definite conclusions capable of mathematical expression’.³⁷

These circumstances bolster Bialer’s argument that in the novel sphere of aerial warfare the line between professional analysis and the larger cultural imagination was blurred. The Defences of London used the Admiral Theatre’s ‘pictorial realism’ to instruct the audience. It also could have given concrete form to the elements of ‘pure guess-work’ that defined the RAF’s preparation for the modern conditions of air warfare. ‘Nothing could illustrate more realistically what might happen to London were it inadequately defended in time of war’ wrote The Illustrated London News.³⁸��This level of realism could have helped both the audience and the RAF understand and plan for an otherwise inscrutable future. The visual power of the Admiralty Theatre made the speculative future real.

‘Their bombs still the heart of Empire’: Air Power and Empire

If the unknown fighters in The Defences of London evoked the recent history of German Zeppelin aggression, the air battles depicted at the Empire Exhibition also recalled the RAF’s engagement in the British Empire. After the First World War, many RAF fighter planes and bombers were quickly redeployed around the empire to control British colonial interests.³⁹ The planes had a significant tactical advantage over infantry troops. The RAF could cover large swaths of unpredictable topography and could be deployed from a limited number of bases, which required a smaller commitment of manpower. A military presence in the colonial realm was especially important for Britain because of growing nationalist movements in India and the Middle East, which were encouraged by the upheaval of World War I and the Communist revolution in Russia.⁴⁰ Faced with the threat of losing previously stable colonial holdings, the British reallocated their military assets to foreign soil instead of focusing on the home front.⁴¹��Air control was essential to imperial stability.

A performance in which Westminster (as a symbol of the Golden Age of British colonialism) was destroyed spoke to a broader concern over Britain’s role in the twentieth-century world. ‘Their bombs still the heart of Empire,’ The Illustrated London News intoned, ‘leaving it a blackened, shrivelled, useless thing’.⁴² Despite the confidence expressed by the Empire Exhibition, the early 1920s saw a slew of significant changes in Britain’s imperial role. While the decade following the Second World War was the apex of decolonisation, changes in world politics after the First World War brought Britain’s global dominance, and the internal relevance of the empire, into question. The heart of empire was susceptible to a future in which it might be ‘blackened, shrivelled [and] useless’.⁴³

The territorial peak of the British Empire was in 1921.⁴⁴��As the decade progressed, however, multiple instances undermined Britain’s identity as the invincible global power put forth by the Empire Exhibition. Tensions with Ireland, independence movements in India, the end of the British protectorate in Egypt in 1922, and the 1923 creation of the Commonwealth were all an uneasy backdrop to the imperial performance of the Empire Exhibition.⁴⁵��Alexander Geppert argues that tensions between Britain and the colonial nations manifested in the operation of the exhibition, as bureaucratic conflicts broke out between the exhibition’s organizers and the administrators of the colonial pavilions.⁴⁶��This was, he writes, an early sign of imperial dissolution. At the same time, the imperial project as a cornerstone of British identity was being challenged internally by left-wing and communist groups, who, as Sarah Britton demonstrates, wrote and rallied in opposition to the imperial project represented by this kind of exhibition.⁴⁷

In the second year of the Wembley Exhibition, which opened in May 1925, most of the programs remained in continuity with 1924. Exhibitions of timber stayed in the Canadian pavilion just as the world relief map and Admiralty Theatre remained in the Government pavilion.⁴⁸��The Empire Stadium, the large sports and performance arena that anchored the exhibition grounds, continued its program of Torchlight Spectacles. These were a series of nighttime shows in the stadium that used music, performers, monumental lighting effects, and aeroplane flyovers to create a spectacular variety show.⁴⁹ To that end, the 1924 Wembley Torchlight Spectacle included an RAF performance in the guise of an air battle.^50��In 1925, however, the show reappeared as London Defended, a life-size reprisal of an aerial attack against the London skyline.⁵¹ In a departure from the 1924 Torchlight Spectacle, the audience would now see aerial combat in their home city.

The success of The Defences of London in the Admiralty Theatre may have spurred the expansion of the performance into London Defended the following year.⁵² The 1925 performance showed a similar raid on London from unnamed enemy aeroplanes. However, as the promotional brochure highlights, instead of the miniatures and magical projections of The Defences of London, London Defended included full-size searchlights, real air fights, and simulated bombs.⁵³ shows aeroplanes dramatically silhouetted against the dark sky. Wembley Stadium and its bright searchlights glimmer below. If the Admiralty Theatre was praised for the immersive products of its stage management techniques, the Empire Stadium promised yet greater thrills. The drama of London Defended was intensified by the sights, sounds, and vibrations of actual RAF planes. The spectacle also included a display of horsemanship by the Metropolitan Mounted Police, a two-hundred-person choir, and military marching bands.⁵⁴��The Admiralty Theatre took its cue, but then departed from, conventional theatre. Similarly, the RAF section of the London Defended program, which included both ‘aerial acrobatics’ and a simulated defeat of an enemy air attack, related to another familiar format that was intimately related to imperial politics: the air show.⁵⁵

Fictitious RAF spectacles were institutionalized in annual displays at Hendon Air Base located outside London to the northeast of Wembley.⁵⁶��These performances used elaborate sets and costumed actors to transport the viewer into various spheres of combat. The focus on foreign combat—first Germany and then Middle-Eastern colonies—was an important precedent for the internal threat detailed in London Defended. The yearly series at Hendon began in 1920, following the end of the First World War. There was a similar audience base for the Hendon shows and the Empire Exhibition, as there is an advertisement for the June display at Hendon in the 1925 booklet for London Defended.⁵⁷

While Hendon also promoted a program of aerial stunts, an aeroplane race, a bombing attack, and an air battle, the domestic location of the action in the London Defended show was a notable departure from the Hendon series. The Hendon Aerial Pageants in 1920 and 1921 directly referenced the First World War, with scenes set at the Front and in enemy territory – comfortably far from London. Trenches were bombed in 1920 and in 1921 organizers built a German village out of scrap metal.⁵⁸��During the performance, the village was destroyed by RAF bombers. In 1922 and 1923, the action shifted to the imperial realm; bombings now took place in simulations of Britain’s Middle Eastern colonies.⁵⁹��Just as the 1920 and 1921 shows were preoccupied with the German military, this new geographic focus reflected the political debate over the RAF’s role as an enforcer in the British Empire. The 1922 Hendon spectacle turned away from the near history of World War I toward the future represented by imperial dominions.⁶⁰��Hendon shows the extent to which entertainment mirrored foreign policy priorities, and these performances used the threat of imperial insurgence as justification for military exercises in the colonial realm. While the Hendon shows pivoted to the colonies, the 1925 air display in the Empire Stadium at Wembley looked inward.

London Defended recreated a domestic urban scene, and a large tower was built on the stadium floor.⁶¹ Unlike the sets at Hendon, however, the recreation was a sight much closer to home for most viewers. Unlike the first act of The Defences of London, the enemy attack in this performance was met with some domestic defence. There were anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, each adding to the impressive quality of the nighttime event.⁶² The audience would have heard the planes approaching the stadium. At Hendon, the enemy had been clear – German uniforms were easily recognizable just as the architecture of the 1922 show signalled the Middle East. In the darkened Empire Stadium, however, the identity of the enemy remained elusive. Like the Zeppelin raiders of the First World War, the planes were high up, mechanical participants rather than costumed actors. The raiders coming could be anyone, from anywhere. The omission of a specific identity heightened the drama while simultaneously dispersing the identity of the opposing force.

When searchlights picked up the enemy planes in the stadium, the drama increased. An airfight ensued and the RAF was victorious. The enemy bombers, however, left the tower on the stadium floor in flames. The London Fire Brigade saved the day through their modern fire-fighting methods.⁶³ Just as the Admiralty Theater transformed from the site of foreign battles (such as the Battle of Zeebrugge) to one of internal destruction (The Defences of London), the RAF spectacle pivoted from Hendon’s imperial dramas to the domestic menace of London Defended. Despite the imperial focus of the Wembley exhibition, in this performance, the triumph of British aerial power abroad was challenged by the necessity of home defence.

The ‘Wembley Squint’: Class Conflict at Wembley

If the Exhibition was intended to signal Britain’s imperial accomplishments on a global stage, it also attempted to recapture the attention of the British working class. As Geppert points out, the suburban location of Wembley and the amusement-park style fair attractions encouraged working- and middle-class visitors to take part in the imperial project.⁶⁴��An official map of the exhibition grounds drawn by Kennedy North heightened the exotic drama of the peripheral town (Fig. 3). North’s drawing used tube routes to connect London and Wembley. The brightly coloured lines tied the fairgrounds to a stylized image of the London skyline. Beneath a banner reading ‘The Heart of Empire’, Nelson’s Column rises above the geographically outsized forms of Westminster, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Tower Bridge. For British citizens unable to travel to the outer reaches of the empire, the empire could come to them in the capital city.

North’s map shows the gaily festooned tents, lush gardens, and enticing pavilions from colonies ranging from Burma to the Gold Coast. This visually cohesive space belied the fractures in both the colonial and domestic realm. Visitors to the exhibition were often enthralled by these performative aspects of imperial identity. This was a calculated strategy intended to implicate members of the working- and middle-classes in the commercial project of the empire.⁶⁵��But the experience was sometimes overshadowed in the public imagination by the accusations of financial mismanagement that dogged the exhibition.⁶⁶��Organizations such as the Trade Unions Congress and Labour Party Executive recorded their frustration with what they saw as a fundamental contradiction between the principles of the Commonwealth and the working conditions of the fair.^67��They highlighted the contrast between the significant cost of the pavilions and the low pay and poor working conditions for those who built and operated the fair.

The concern over labour rights in the exhibition was a challenge for Britain’s first Labour government under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who took office in January 1924 three months before the exhibition opening.⁶⁸ In winter 1924, the future of Wembley was imperilled by a strike. It began with a group of electricians agitating against non-union labour employed by exhibition organizers, but the protest soon expanded to encompass wage disputes and workplace safety.⁶⁹��Newspapers reported that the strike would likely slow the opening of the Empire Exhibition.⁷⁰ The Wembley strike was part of a larger effort by labour groups to develop the power of unions across geographic areas and sectors, and the electricians were soon joined by plasterers and carpenters.⁷¹ As was the case with many collective actions of the time, the local police force was called in to protect the exhibition grounds from the supposed threat.⁷² A photograph of the strike shows exhibition workers milling around a construction site strewn with raw stone slabs, lumber, and dirt (Fig. 4). A large group of policemen looms above them. In the background, the skeletal towers of various pavilions under construction highlight the stakes of the conflict. The image triangulates between the idle workers, the arm of the law, and the unfinished buildings, using the contrast to put forth a narrative that political radicalism was obstructing the core mission of the exhibition.

In the House of Commons, Members of Parliament invoked patriotism and imperial unity to compel the strikers to restart the construction process.⁷³��Though MacDonald’s government was generally cautious about imperialistic displays, the fact that funds had already been poured into the construction from private individuals, dominion governments, and the British government made it politically vital that the work on the exhibition continued.⁷⁴��The British Empire Exhibition was an important symbolic centre. Though the Labour government valued the exhibition’s focus on industry and production, the Communist Party saw an opportunity to expose the poor treatment of British workers.⁷⁵ Communist organizers wanted a public demonstration that imperial success was contingent upon the labour of the worker, in Britain and abroad.⁷⁶ What better venue, they reasoned, to jumpstart a national effort for worker’s rights? Implicit in this critique was distrust in the political project of empire writ large.⁷⁷��In September 1924, T.A. Jackson, writing in The Communist Review, noted the hypocrisy of an empire made up of disenfranchised subjects supposedly united under a democratic Parliament. ⁷⁸��Jackson termed this fallacy the ‘Wembley Squint’, stressing that the exhibition enforced the idea of the empire as a positive global force rather than a complicated political entanglement.⁷⁹

Opponents of the union strike, including Conservative news sources and politicians, argued that the strike demonstrated the inconsistency between Communist allegiance and British citizenship. Moreover, despite the efforts of the Labour government to bring the strike to a satisfactory conclusion, right-wing publications implicated them in the goals of the Communist party. The fears stoked by some Conservative publications and politicians lay in the impression that, in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, sympathy to the rights of the working class would lead to a transnational Communist takeover. In describing the 1924 strike, the unionist Belfast Telegraph wrote ‘The strike at the British Empire Exhibition Wembley is the latest eruption of the spirit of unrest that is abroad, illustrating the tactics of the small, but ceaselessly active band of Communists who are carrying on propaganda inside the trade unions’.⁸⁰

The Northern Whig and Belfast Post speculated that the Communist Party, working at the behest of Moscow, had supported the Labour party’s rise. Now that Labour was in power, the unions were leveraging the ‘sinister events at Wembley’ to incur a full-scale revolution.⁸¹��The small group thought to be disrupting the undertakings of the Empire Exhibition became an allegorical shorthand for the Communist threat to the British Empire as a whole. In this politically charged climate, the conflagration of the seat of government (Westminster, and then London itself), gained another layer of meaning. Taken in tandem with the nationalistic narratives derived from the story of the 1666 Fire of London, which I will discuss shortly, I argue that the implied faceless threat to Britain’s capital in these apocalyptic scenes could be conceived as a warning about internal political dissent, shown starkly against the backdrop of Wembley’s striking workers.

After the First World War, members of the Labour party questioned both the morality of a protracted aerial campaign in the colonial realm and the wisdom of engaging in an aerial arms race with other nations.⁸²��After the Labour party victory of 1923, Conservatives argued that this attitude in a sitting government would undermine the safety of Britain. In the first weeks of March 1924, as the final plans for the British Empire Exhibition were being executed, both the House of Commons and House of Lords debated the government’s commitment to aerial infrastructure. The Marquess of Londonderry and Sir Samuel Hoare, both of the Conservative Party, introduced a motion for the Government to affirm their dedication to maintaining a substantial domestic air force. Though the Labour Secretary and Under-Secretary for Air firmly stated that the government would support a reasonable growth policy, many remained suspicious of these claims.⁸³

The Labour party’s supposedly willful resistance to domestic air defence was the chief plot point of The Battle of London, a novel first published in fall 1923 by Harry Collinson Owen, writing under the pseudonym Hugh Addison.⁸⁴��The Battle of London tapped into the cultural concern over aerial warfare and documents how the aerial threat was manipulated to fit a variety of political goals. In contrast to the German threat from H.G. Well’s The War in the Air or the imperial concerns of Hendon, the enemy in this narrative was the British Communist Party. Owen leveraged the same symbolic triggers that would appear in The Defences of London: The Houses of Parliament burned in an aerial apocalypse.

Owen’s book collected alarmist discourses over imperial decay, Communism, and the aerial menace from Germany into one symbolic centre – Westminster. In the denouement of the novel, the Germans seized the opportunity of civil war to attack London.⁸⁵��The ensuing aerial raid decimated the Houses of Parliament, as it would in The Defences of London. Owen’s insinuation that the debate on aerial defence would lead to this future conflict was clear to readers. The Battle of London, one reviewer noted in November 1923 ‘Can be read with advantage in these election days. Bolshevism, it is argued, can be met and conquered chiefly by the efforts of the citizens themselves’.⁸⁶��To protect the country from internal (Communist) and external (German) threats, it was incumbent upon Owen’s reader to ensure a Conservative victory. While Owen’s book is an extreme example, any performance that argued for increased domestic air defence, as did The Defences of London, evoked these public political debates.

Sublime Conflagration

The drama of ruin and redemption in The Battle of London and The Defences of London had precedent in the Great Fire of London of 1666 and the burning of the House of Commons and House of Parliament in 1834. The vision of Westminster obscured by fiery smoke in The Defences of London recalled popular prints and paintings of the 1834 fire, which circulated widely in the nineteenth century. Artist JMW Turner was an eyewitness to the fire, and his depictions of the event were particularly notable for their dramatic beauty. The concept of the sublime was a key tenant of eighteenth-century British aesthetic theory and the sublime object or vista incorporated both horror and beauty. It could fascinate and attract the observer against their will, lending even terrible destruction the role of a spectacle. Just like Turner’s depictions of the 1834 disaster, The Defences of London demonstrated the emotional power of apocalyptic spectacle.

The scene of The Defences of London that was illustrated in The Illustrated London News had a strikingly similar framing to Turner’s paintings of the event, both titled The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons October 16, 1834 (Figs. 5 and 6). In The Defences of London and The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons October 16, 1834, Westminster is viewed from across the Thames. These images all use the dark water to reflect the uncanny brightness of the fiery scene. In The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons October 16, 1834, the red light of the fire animates the human figures who line the bank, implicating the rapt viewers in the terrible event. The Illustrated London News similarly positions the experience of the spectator as a vital aspect of destruction. At the Admiralty Theatre, the magic lights and real smoke bring the Wembley visitors into the events unfolding on the stage. Unlike the organizers of The Defences of London, however, Turner was disinterested in individual emotional response. Rather, he depicts the spectators— or the mob, as some accounts portrayed those watching the fire— as a natural force unto themselves.

The 1834 fire was started to dispose of wooden tally sticks, an obsolete form of tax records. It soon burned out of control and the flames overtook the Parliament buildings.⁸⁷��That these bureaucratic materials destroyed the seat of government was an irony not lost on contemporary commentators. As an article from The Morning Herald highlights, some, however, saw a more nefarious subtext in the events.⁸⁸��In the aftermath of the fire, some newspapers voiced a fear that the disaster was a destabilizing force that would facilitate the growth of dissident movements. Subversive elements, they believed, could manipulate the public response to the violent destruction. In the days after the fire, The Morning Herald called attention to the mystery of the fire’s unknown origins and the strange fact that no one had raised the alarm until much of the building was already aflame.⁸⁹ While the article conceded that there was no implication whatsoever that it was a case of arson, the paper nevertheless cast a group of onlookers as suspicious villains of the drama: ‘Our accounts from the scene of destruction inform us that the mob, upon witnessing the progress of the flames, raised a savage shout of exultation’.⁹⁰��The massed onlookers in Turner’s paintings seem to embody the chaotic power of the urban spectacle.

The phrase ‘mob’ was a weighty one in 1834.⁹¹��It evoked the spectre of working-class revolt, both in the context of foreign revolutions in France and America and more recent riots in Britain.⁹² Alighting on the largely fictitious celebrating mob as complicit in, if not responsible for, the annihilation of a building that represented centuries of British political history, The Morning Herald weaponized existing paranoia about the power of the working class. The unpredictable reaction of the crowd to urban apocalypse, represented by The Morning Herald’s cheering mob, was also a consideration for the Air Ministry in the 1920s. Grayzel argues that RAF studies of the public attitude towards Zeppelin raids demonstrated a belief that the ‘others’ in the city—the poor, immigrants, or Jews—were constitutionally unfit to deal with aerial threats.⁹³��Official reports implied that the lack of morale could, itself, be a significant threat to a future war effort. Ferris also notes that RAF officers ‘held [that] bombing would spark upheaval among ‘volatile’ peoples’.⁹⁴��The instability of the ‘volatile’ crowd in the aftermath of disaster could prove as destructive as the falling bombs.

In addition to raising awareness about domestic defence, The Defences of London and London Defended prepared viewers for the possibility of future aerial attacks. By exposing the British public to the threat of domestic disturbance within the controlled setting of the Empire Exhibition, the performances encouraged the audience to maintain equanimity in the face of attack and to trust in the government’s military strategy. Political dissent, however, took on a further layer of menace. In the apocalyptic future, strikes (like the one that stalled the early construction of Wembley), anti-imperial advocacy, and immigrant communities could be perceived as threats that could fracture society. Britain’s social structure could be susceptible to both the distant enemy and the internal one.

The final act of London Defended opened with a scene of the city in the seventeenth century. A baker’s shop was ablaze, an echo of the tower burned down by the aerial raid earlier in the show.⁹⁵ This was the 1666 Great Fire of London. If The Defences of London gestured obliquely to the fire of 1834, London Defended explicitly linked the danger of aerial raids with this historical catastrophe. In the seventeenth century, the large-scale destruction of the city quickly became an exemplar of God’s wrath, with preachers and laypeople alike drawing comparisons to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.⁹⁶ Nature was, in this telling, wielded as a tool of divine judgement. The parliamentary investigation of the 1666 fire deemed that it was evidence of ‘the hand of God upon us, a great wind and the season so very dry’ and ascribed the event to nature’s inscrutable power.⁹⁷

However, some news accounts characterized the fire as an intentional attack.⁹⁸ Treachery and conspiracy were common concerns as tensions in England ran high due to sectarian violence and the ongoing wars in Europe. Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament had taken place sixty years earlier and remained a symbol of Britain’s religious divisions. As the fire raged through London’s streets, rumours spread about a Catholic attack on the city.⁹⁹��In 1666, England was also at war with France and the Netherlands, and these conflicts spurred intense xenophobia. The London Gazette reported in the aftermath of the fire that ‘Diverse strangers, Dutch and French were, during the fire, apprehended, upon suspicion that they contributed mischievously to it, who are all imprisoned and information prepared to make a severe inquisition’.¹⁰⁰��Like The Morning Herald in the days after the burning of the Houses of Parliament, the London Gazette took advantage of the opportunity to push their political agenda. The seventeenth-century disaster, just like the RAF’s analysis of London’s urban population, bred a reaction against what the establishment perceived as threatening and undesirable elements: the foreign and the politically deviant. In the days after the fire, this manifested in violent attacks on foreign citizens living in London.^101��Disaster was, in each of these real and imagined events, entwined with anxiety over the hidden internal threat.

London Defended ended with a message that celebrated national unity. When the enemy planes were defeated and modern firefighters subdued the flames of the 1666 fire, a final scene showed King Charles II visiting a camp of displaced London citizens.¹⁰² A brochure of the production explained, ‘As he arrives the smoke is transmuted into a blue haze, through which shines the dome of the new St. Paul’s with its golden cross’.¹⁰³��The hallucinatory image of this scene, with the two versions of St. Paul’s rising out of the smoke, adorned much of the show’s promotional material (Fig. 7). In this juxtaposition, the resilience of modern England was concrete and immutable. The continuity of the royal line, between King Charles II and George V, and the consistency of geographical space, with the two iterations of the Cathedral, implied a stable narrative that overcame even drastic destruction. The propaganda value of this image, which obliterated political strife and imperial decline, belied a future apocalyptic moment where the worry over aerial attacks was incontrovertibly real.

Conclusion

Just fifteen short years later, the famous blitz ��‘St. Paul’s Survives’ taken by Herbert Mason in December 1940 had an almost identical framing to the 1925 print – the dome of the Cathedral rising above the shells of burning buildings. Mason’s photograph was used in Britain as an image of resilience.¹⁰⁴��‘War’s Greatest Picture’ the Daily Mail proclaimed, ‘St. Paul’s Stands Unharmed in the Midst of the Burning City’.¹⁰⁵��The symbolic juxtaposition of Cathedral and smoke was an obvious one in both 1925 and 1940. Britain would, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes. But who, the performances of the British Empire Exhibition demanded, is part of that rebirth? What place do the rapt spectators, or the unruly mob, play in the reintegration of postwar Britain? The dystopian fictions of the British Empire Exhibition showed the enduring power of apocalyptic imagery in the British imagination—through 1666, 1834, 1924, 1925, and 1940—in uniting a populace in nationalistic fear and awe. These scenes, however, betrayed a political subtext to both natural disaster and acts of war. Apocalypse renders vast societal shifts, pushing some to embrace ruin and destruction in an attempt to excise opposing views from the public realm.

Citations

¹��In addition to the public enthusiasm for the second year of the exhibition, there was a complicated financial calculation in the reopening. The initial output on the exhibition grounds was so significant that the first year of the fair lost money. In reopening in 1925, the government, who had taken on financial responsibility for the event, hoped to recoup some of their investment.
²��Many aspects of the Imperial politics evident in the Exhibition have been addressed by scholars including Anne Clendinning, ‘On The British Empire Exhibition, 1924-25.’ BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, (2012), accessed 8 October 2021, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anne-clendinning-on-the-british-empire-exhibition-1924-25; Deborah L. Hughes ‘Kenya, India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1923.’��Race & Class��47:4 (2006):��pp. 66-85; David Simonelli, ‘“[L]Aughing Nations of Happy Children Who have Never Grown Up”: Race, the Concept of Commonwealth and the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition’,��Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History��10:1 (Spring, 2009); Daniel M. Stephen, ‘“The White Man’s Grave”: British West Africa and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-1925’,��Journal of British Studies��48:1 (2009): pp. 102-128.
³ London Defended: Torchlight and Searchlight Spectacle (London: Fleetway Press, 1925).
⁴��Tony Bennett argues that, from the nineteenth century, the visual power of worlds fairs and exhibitions was used to impress systems of knowledge upon visitors. Fairgoers were given easily digestible narratives of the world through the objects that they encountered in the exhibitions. The ideological power of these objects gave tangible form to otherwise abstract concepts. Bennett famously termed this system the ‘exhibitionary complex.’ Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 59–88.
⁵��Andrew Thompson, ‘“A Tale of Three Exhibitions”: Portrayals and Perceptions of ‘Britishness’ at the Great Exhibition (1851), Wembley Exhibition (1924) and the Festival of Britain (1951),’ in Gilbert Millat (ed.), Angleterre ou albion, entre fascination et repulsion: de l’Exposition universelle au dome du millenaure, 1851-2000 (Université Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille III, 2006).
⁶��Regarding the importance of the term ‘heart of Empire’ in the context of the British Empire Exhibition, Alexander Geppert points to the intertwined relationship between London and Wembley. He emphasizes, however, that Wembley was ultimately a suburban site that remained at a remove from the capital city. Alexander C. T. Geppert, Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in fin-de-Siècle Europe (Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 144-145.
⁷��Harry Barnes, ‘The British Empire Exhibition’ Architectural Review, 1 (1924), pp. 208-217.
⁸��Guide to the Pavilion of His Majesty’s Government: British Empire Exhibition 1925 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1925).
⁹��‘Huge Stage at Wembley’, The Times, June 27, 1924.
¹⁰��‘Huge Stage at Wembley’.
¹¹ Minutes of meeting discussing government participation in the British Empire Exhibition, January 23, 1924, MT 9/1602, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
¹² ‘Storming Zeebrugge at Wembley’, The Illustrated London News, May 24, 1924.
¹³ Minutes of meeting discussing government participation in the British Empire Exhibition, March 14, 1924, MT 9/1602, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
¹⁴��‘Storming Zeebrugge at Wembley’.
¹⁵��Erkki Huhtamo, Stephen Oettermann, and Denise Oleksijczuk each describe the history of the panorama in the United Kingdom. Huhtamo’s account of the relationship between panoramas and media culture is especially relevant to the genealogy of the Admiralty Theatre performances. Erkki Huhtamo,��Illusions in Motion : Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013); Stephan Oettermann,��The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, (trans.) Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 99–142; Denise Blake Oleksijczuk,��The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2011).
¹⁶ Minutes of meeting discussing government participation in the British Empire Exhibition, July 5, 1923, MT 9/1602, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
¹⁷��‘Seeing the World, The Government Pavilion’, The Times, May 24, 1924.
¹⁸��‘Seeing the World’.
¹⁹��Minutes of meeting discussing government participation in the British Empire Exhibition, November 14, 1923, MT 6/1602, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
²⁰ Minutes of meeting discussing government participation in the British Empire Exhibition, February 28, 1924, BT 60/5, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
²¹ ‘Storming Zeebrugge at Wembley’; ‘Huge Stage at Wembley’.
²² Admiralty Tank Budget, MT 9/1602, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
^23��‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air Raid Defence’, The Illustrated London News, July 19, 1924.
²⁴��‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air Raid Defence’.
²⁵��‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air Raid Defence’.
²⁶��Holman, The Next War in the Air, pp. 23-24.
²⁷��Holman, The Next War in the Air, pp. 38-39.
²⁸��Holman, The Next War in the Air, p. 129.
^29��Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and under Fire: The Air Raid in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), introduction. See also Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941 (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 23-54.
³⁰��Ariella Freedman, ‘Zeppelin Fictions and the British Home Front.’ Journal of Modern Literature 27: 3 (Winter 2004): pp. 47–62; Barry Powers, Strategy without Slide-Rule (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 51.
³¹��Grayzel, At Home and under Fire, p. 22.
³²��Freedman, ‘Zeppelin Fictions’, pp. 50-52
³³��Freedman, ‘Zeppelin Fictions’, p. 50
³⁴��Uri Bialer, ‘The Danger of Bombardment from the Air and The Making of British Military Disarmament Policy 1932-34,’ in Brian Bond and Ian Roy (eds), War and Society; A Yearbook of Military History (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), p. 204; Martin Ceadel, ‘Popular Fiction in the Next War, 1918-39.’ in Jon Clark et al. (eds), Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979); Christopher Joel Simer, ‘Apocalyptic Visions: Fear of Aerial Attack in Britain, 1920–1938’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1999).
³⁵��Bialer, ‘The Danger of Bombardment’, p. 204.
³⁶��Bialer, ‘The Danger of Bombardment’; I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763-3749 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ceadel, ‘Popular Fiction in the Next War’; Freedman, ‘Zeppelin Fictions’; Grayzel, At Home and under Fire; Simer, ‘Apocalyptic Visions’. The progenitor of fictional iterations of the aerial apocalypse was HG Wells, who envisioned a global ruin wrought by German airships in his 1908 The War in the Air. This serialized novel anticipated, though overstated, the wholesale destruction of civilian targets that would ensue from a global aerial arms race. Wells’ predictions, whilst resonant in the First World War, would come closer to fruition in the bombing campaigns of the Second.
³⁷��John Ferris, ‘Achieving Air Ascendancy: Challenge and Response in British Strategic Air Defence, 1915-40.’ In Peter Gray and Sebastian Cox (eds.), Air Power History: Turning Points from Kitty Hawk to Kosovo (New York: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002), p. 24
³⁸��‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air Raid Defence’.
^39��Priya Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia.’ The American Historical Review 111:1 (February 2006): pp. 25-27.
^40��Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity’, p. 25.
⁴¹��David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990).
^42��‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air Raid Defence’.
^43��‘Wembley Presents the Case for Air Raid Defence’.
⁴⁴��These early pushes for decolonization were formative. However, Britain often retained its outsize influence even in countries to which it had formally granted independence. These tools of control included close economic ties and military connections. See Andrew Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), introduction.
⁴⁵��The extent to which the empire functioned as a primary actor in the consciousness of the British public is a matter of debate amongst historians, who are divided between those, like John Mackenzie, who argue that the empire remained a fundamental basis of early-twentieth-century British thought and those, like Bernard Porter, who argue that the empire was primarily an abstract concept distinct from everyday British identity. John MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986); Bernard Porter, ‘Popular Imperialism: Broadening the Context.’��The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,��39:5 (2011):��pp. 833-845,��accessed 10 October 2021, doi:. For a summary of the debate, see S.J. Potter, ‘Empire, Cultures and Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain.’ History Compass, 5 (2007): pp. 51-71, accessed 10 October 2021,��. However, in the context of public exhibitions like the British Empire Exhibition, John Mackenzie and John McAleer demonstrate that cultural productions, like the performances at Wembley, played a material role in communicating imperial identity British citizens. John McAleer and John M MacKenzie, Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
⁴⁶��Geppert, Fleeting Cities, p. 162.
⁴⁷��Sarah Britton, “‘Come and See the Empire by the All Red Route!”: Anti-Imperialism and Exhibitions in Interwar Britain.’ History Workshop Journal, 69 (Spring 2010): pp. 68–89.
^48��G.C. Laurence (ed.), British��Empire��Exhibition,��1925 Official guide (London: Fleetway Press, 1925).
⁴⁹��‘Torchlight Tatoo’, The Lancashire Evening Post, August 28, 1924.
^50��‘Torchlight Tatoo’.
⁵¹��London Defended, p. 10.
^52��The same interdepartmental group who had responsibility for the performances of the Government Pavilion dictated the displays at the Empire Stadium. The Stadium and the Pavilion were seen as part of the same larger government programme. Minutes of meeting discussing government participation in the British Empire Exhibition, August 30, 1923, MT 9/1602, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
⁵³��London Defended, p. 10.
⁵⁴��London Defended, pp. 4-6.
⁵⁵��London Defended, p. 10.
⁵⁶��Holman, The Next War in the Air, pp. 170-72. Holman argues that the attendance number at Hendon in the first years of the 1920s are evidence of a public interest in the RAF.
⁵⁷��London Defended, p. 12.
⁵⁸��Flight, July 7, 1921, p. 456 cited by Brett Holman, ‘Ending Hendon — I: 1920-1922.’ Airminded (blog), November 9, 2011, accessed 10 October 2021, .
^59��Holman, ‘Ending Hendon — I: 1920-1922’.
⁶⁰��The relationship to contemporary politics is evident as Mandatory Iraq, under British colonial control, had been created in 1921.
⁶¹London Defended, p. 10.
^62��London Defended, p. 10.
⁶³London Defended, p. 11.
⁶⁴��Geppert, Fleeting Cities, p. 169.
⁶⁵��The British Empire Exhibition was intended to increase working- and middle-class commitment to empire. Contemporaneous accounts evidence the excitement generated by the possibility of ‘visiting’ all corners of the empire. John Mackenzie argues that the theatre of empire that played out in England, through ‘royal pageantry, warfare, sport, and even architecture,’ was evidence of working-class enthusiasm for the imperial project, John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Indeed, Mackenzie identifies Wembley as emblematic of this trend. Though Mackenzie argues for the pervasive awareness of empire within the working-class, the British Empire Exhibition lend some ambivalence to the assertion that imperial entertainment was conducive to imperial identity. Andrew Thompson argues that, in fact, ‘Wembley may reflect a concern about the extent of the public’s ignorance of the empire, or the failure of previous propaganda to fully persuade people of its value,’ in Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?��The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 87. Scholars including Bernard Porter and David Cannadine point to how English class systems were determinative of the power structures of Empire in a way that excluded the working-class, Bernard Porter, The Absent-minded Imperialists, pp. 265-66; David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Jonathan Rose also demonstrates that the lack of knowledge about imperial structures was borne from lack of newspaper access, geographic isolation, and insufficient public education, Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 321–64.
⁶⁶��The Daily Herald did an ongoing series on the finances and working conditions of the exhibition. See ‘Inhuman Wembley Conditions. Pitiful Tales’, Daily Herald, May 14 1924; ‘Bad Management Somewhere’, Daily Herald. December 8, 1925. The financial burden of the exhibition was also debated in Parliament including the session on December 10, 1925, United Kingdom. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 189 (1925), pp. 802-836. Sarah Britton also discusses this controversy, Britton, ‘Come and See the Empire’, pp. 76-77.
⁶⁷��Britton, ‘Come and See the Empire’, pp. 75-77.
⁶⁸ Cabinet Meeting Notes, April 2, 1924, CAB 23/47/18, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
⁶⁹��‘Big Wembley Strike’, Daily Herald, March 24, 1924.
⁷⁰��‘Wembley Menace’, Edinburgh Evening News, April 2, 1924.
⁷¹��‘A Strike Threat’, Sheilds Daily News, April 8, 1925.
⁷²��‘Big Wembley Strike’.
⁷³��‘Violence at Wembley’, The Lancashire Daily Post, April 2, 1924.
⁷⁴��United Kingdom. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 189 (1925), pp. 802-836
⁷⁵��‘Communists at Work, Southampton and Wembley’, The Times, April 2, 1924.
⁷⁶��‘Colonial Resoluton’ (Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Manchester, May 17-19 1924).
⁷⁷��JR Campbell, ‘Must the Empire Be Broken Up? The Reply to Labour Imperialism’, The Communist Review, 5 (September 1924): pp. 216–24.
⁷⁸��T.A. Jackson, ‘The Sudan Scandal’, The Communist Review, no. 5 (September 1924): pp. 236-41.
⁷⁹��Jackson, ‘The Sudan Scandal’, p. 237
⁸⁰��‘Industrial Chaos’, The Belfast Telegraph, April 2, 1924.
⁸¹��‘The Wembley Strike: Communists Behind Industrial Trouble’, The Northern Whig and Belfast Post, April 3, 1924.
⁸²��Alex M. Spencer, British Imperial Air Power: The Royal Air Forces and the Defense of Australia and New Zealand between the World Wars (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2020), pp. 117-121.
⁸³��‘Air Defence’, The Times. March 5, 1924; ‘Air Defence’, The Times, March 12, 1924.
⁸⁴��Hugh Addison, The Battle of London (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1923).
⁸⁵��The appearance of the Germans at the end of The Battle of London echoes other invasion scare literature including H.G Well’s The War from the Air (1908) and the earlier Battle of Dorking (1871) by George Tomkyns Chesney.
⁸⁶��‘Gift Books’, The Western Morning News and Mercury, November 30, 1923.
⁸⁷��The Westminster complex had served as Parliament’s home since its creation in the late thirteenth century. The fire that consumed the building the night of October 16, 1834 began in the basement furnaces. That day, two workers had been tasked with the burning of wooden tally sticks, a primitive form of tax records. In October 1834, almost fifty years after they fell out of use, the Treasury finally ordered their destruction. The large fire they created in the basement furnace burned out of control, and by morning the compound was largely destroyed. For a full description see Caroline Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
⁸⁸��Caroline Shenton outlines the fear of populist movements in the days after the fire, most notably the Swing rioters, Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down, pp. 193-197.
^89��The Morning Herald’s description of the fire was syndicated in ‘Friday’s Post. Destruction of the Houses of Lords & Commons by Fire’, Ipswich Journal, October 18, 1834.
⁹⁰��‘Destruction of the Houses of Lords & Commons by Fire’.
⁹¹��E.P. Thompson, in his classic Making of the English Working Class distinguishes between a ‘mob’ and ‘revolutionary crowd’ in England during the aftermath of the French Revolution; ‘In 18^th-century Britain riotous actions assumed two different forms: that of more or less spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use of the crowd as an instrument of pressure, by persons ‘above’ or apart from the crowd.’ He goes on to argue that ‘The employment of the ‘mob’ in a sense much closer … ‘hired bands operating on behalf of external interests’ … [and] was an established technique in the 18^th century; and—what is less often noted—it had long been employed by authority itself.’ The Morning Herald used both definitions of the word, implying that it was both spontaneous popular uprising and that it was dictated by opposition political groups. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 62-76.
⁹² In 1831, anti-government demonstrations followed the failure of the House of Commons to pass the Great Reform Act. The prospect of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which would establish punitive workhouse systems and undermine existing welfare opportunities, further galvanized the working population.
⁹³��Grayzel, At Home and under Fire, p. 128.
⁹⁴��Ferris, ‘Achieving Air Ascendancy’, pp. 24-25.
⁹⁵��London Defended, pp. 10-11.
⁹⁶��Jacob F. Field, London, Londoners and the Great Fire of 1666: Disaster and Recovery (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017), p. 145.
⁹⁷��Rebecca Rideal, 1666: Plague, War, and Hellfire (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2016), p. 212.
⁹⁸��Adrian Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London (London: Cape, 2003), pp. 58-64; The London Gazette,��September 8, 1666.
⁹⁹��Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven, pp. 58-64.
¹⁰⁰��The London Gazette,��September 8, 1666.
¹⁰¹��Field, Disaster and Recovery, pp. 15-16.
¹⁰²��London Defended, p. 16.
¹⁰³��London Defended, p. 16.
¹⁰⁴��Tom Allbeson, ‘Visualizing Wartime Destruction and Postwar Reconstruction: Herbert Mason’s Photograph of St. Paul’s Reevaluated’,��The Journal of Modern History,��87:3 (2015): pp. 532-78.
¹⁰⁵��‘War’s Greatest Picture’, The Daily Mail, December 31, 1940.

DOI: 10.33999/2022.91