Robinson Philip James Vol1

Hidden Spaces Camouflage and the British Landscape, 1936-1945 James Philip Robinson PhD University of Wales, Aberystwyth 2012 Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed:..................................................................... (candidate) Date:........................................................................ STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Where *correction services have been used, the extent and nature of the correction is clearly marked in a footnote(s). Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references. A bibliography is appended. Signed:..................................................................... (candidate) Date:........................................................................ [*this refers to the extent to which the text has been corrected by others] STATEMENT 2 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed:..................................................................... (candidate) Date:........................................................................ Acknowledgements This research was funded by Aberystwyth Postgraduate Research Scholarship and I am indebted to this financial assistance in enabling this research to take place. I would like to acknowledge the support of academic and support staff at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University throughout the eight years that I’ve spent there both as an undergraduate and postgraduate. My initial thanks go to my two supervisors, Dr Peter Merriman and Dr Mark Whitehead, for their enthusiasm, ongoing support and critical remarks on earlier drafts of this thesis. I am extremely grateful for their patience and willingness to read long and at some times excessively detailed chapter drafts that sketched out my initial ideas. I also wish to acknowledge the advice and support of my friends and fellow postgraduate colleagues who have been very much a part of my PhD journey – Dr Rhys Dafydd Jones, Dr Lucy Jackson, Katherine and Martin Jones, Dr Cerys Lloyd (née Jones), Dr Sarah ‘Geo Sis’ Mills, Jess Pritchard, Alexander Phillips, Dr Libby Straughan, Jennifer Turner, Dr Marc Welsh, Dr Paul Wright (whose words of wisdom about a PhD shall forever remain immortal) and Dr Sophie Wynne-Jones – I owe you all so very much for helping through this. I also wish to extend my thanks to the ‘new’ human geography post-grads for their lunch-time conversations over the course of my final year – Jon Brettell, Robert MacKinnon, Oliver Morris, – I wish you all the best with your respective PhD journeys. I would also like to thank existing and former members of the department with whom discussions have helped shaped the ideas of this thesis: Dr Chris Bear, Professor Deborah Dixon, Professor Matt Hannah, Dr Jesse ‘The Guv’ Heley, Dr Gareth Hoskins, Professor Rhys Jones, Dr Jessica Pykett, Dr Heidi Scott, and Professor Michael Woods. From the ‘dark side’ of the discipline that is physical geography, I also wish to thank John Balfour, Nia Blackwell, Henry Patton, Rachel Smedley, Rosie Stirling and Hollie Wynne for the Friday night ‘Ship’ conversations. Also, thank you to my Aber friends who started my camouflage journey with me some five years ago: Matt Ruckwood, Charlotte Jones, Rhys Fowler, Sebastian Wildfeuer, Chris Smith. I also wish to thank various academics, researchers and fellow postgraduates for their academic engagements with my work at various conferences and workshops over the course of the last four years. These discussions helped me think about the geographical contributions of the thesis as well as challenged me to explore different research avenues which I had initially overlooked. My thanks also go to numerous anonymous reviewers of papers for publication which also helped shaped the ideas of this thesis. The historical nature of this research has meant that a great deal of the work has been conducted within various archives around the U.K. and I am indebted to the archivists for their assistance. Amongst the archivists I am indebted to are those I visited at the National Archives at Kew, the Image, Film and Documents archives at the I.W.M. London, the Transco National Gas Archive at Warrington, the Julian Trevelyan Archives at Trinity College, Cambridge University and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre at Chippenham. My thanks also go to the Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich Branch), the London Transport Museum, the Hull City Archives and the Royal Commission on the Historical and Ancient Monuments of Scotland for dealing with my numerous requests. Finally, I would also like to thank the extremely friendly archivists at the James Gardner Archives, Brighton and the Glamorgan Record Office (Cardiff) for their enthusiasm in my project; although my findings from these locations have not made it into the thesis, I hope to make use of this material in future projects. Finally, the biggest debt is to my family, to whom I owe the greatest thanks. To Mum and Dad, thank you for your unending support in getting me through to the end; I may have been physically absent, but you have never been far from my thoughts. To my brothers, Richard and Andrew, thank you for the endless banter, humour and the usually well-timed phone calls on your part at mealtimes. To Poppy, for the joy and happiness you have brought to the family. To Gran Robinson, thank you ever so much for your support and belief in me. To Gran Caravan, I will forever cherish the memories of your happiness at me becoming a doctor before your untimely passing; I hope I did you proud. Thank you all for everything. Summary This research explores the historical and cultural geographies of camouflage through an empirical focus upon the British ‘civil camouflage project’ of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, the practice of camouflage has received an increasing amount of attention across academic disciplines such as art, history, architectural studies, and the biological sciences, but it remains an area relatively unexplored by geography. This research highlights how a critical examination of camouflage can contributed to some of the key debates within cultural and historical geography surrounding such issues as landscape, vision, visuality and visual culture, aerial spaces and practices, and nocturnal and military geographies. Concentrating upon the practice of ‘civil camouflage’ in the immediate years before and after the outbreak of the Second World War, this research examines the attempts of camoufleurs to devise and develop camouflage strategies in order to conceal and hide a variety of ‘natural’ and industrial features in the British ‘Home Front’ landscape. Influenced by the proliferation of aeronautical technologies and anxieties over the threat of bombardment, it examines how civil camouflage emerged as a technological response to the eye in the sky, demonstrating a complex entanglement of aerial and terrestrial spaces. Following on from this, it discusses how established artistic forms of concealment were challenged and negotiated to accommodate for a variety of other knowledges: biological, optical, horticultural, engineering and aeronautical. In doing so, it draws upon a wide range of examples, from the concealment of distinctly ‘modern’ features such as oil tanks and gasometers, nocturnal camouflage, to the concealment of water spaces and interventions in architectural aesthetics and building practices. Table of Contents List of Plates, Tables and Figures 4 List of Abbreviations 12 Chapter 1: Introduction 14 1.1: Camouflage Flights over Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, 1941 14 1.2: Camouflage: Associations/Histories/Geographies 17 1.3: The Case Study of Civil Camouflage: Rationales and Limitations 22 1.4: Research Questions 29 1.5: Structure of the Thesis 30 Chapter 2: Theoretical and Empirical Positioning 34 2.1: Geographical Visions: geography and the visual 34 2.2: Envisioning Landscape: landscape and the visual 41 2.3: Geographies of the night: nocturnal appreciations of landscape 49 2.4: Landscapes of British Modernity 58 2.5: Aerial Geographies: aeromobilities, airmindedness and aerial visions 65 2.6: Military geographies: military/civil spaces, knowledge production, 85 and the military gaze 2.7: Conclusion 92 Chapter 3: Archival Encounters and Visual Methodologies 94 3.1: Research Beginnings: navigating the archives 95 3.2: Dealing with the fragmentary nature of the past 97 3.3: ‘Encounters’ in the archive: autobiographical reflections of an 98 ‘embodied researcher’ 3.4: Negotiating ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ conceptions of camouflage 99 3.5: Gender, representations of conflict and the politics of the archive 106 3.6: Critical visual methodologies: aerial photographs, artwork and filmic 109 representations 3.7: Conclusions 117 Chapter 4: Contextualising the Civil Camouflage Project 118 4.1: ‘Menace of the Clouds’: Britain and the emotional cultures of the 118 ‘aerial threat’ 4.2: Managing morale: air raid precautions and the early days of 123 camouflage (1936-1938) 4.3: ‘Exposed’ deficiencies: the panic of Munich, 1938 130 4.4: New year, new changes: February 1939 to August 1939 136 4.5: ‘Phoney war, phoney experts’: September 1939 to March 1940 141 4.6:

Load more