Collections distractions #4: A schoolboy describes a burning zeppelin to his father

Here's a letter I stumbled across a while back, not a surprise as such but startlingly real. It's a letter in which a boy tells his father, in quite a considered, illustrated account, about the burning of a zeppelin right by the house to which he had, I suppose, been evacuated. All four pages can be read in these high-res scans: sheet 1; sheet 2.

Zeppelins were terrifying new technology and were responsible (amongst other things) for many civilian deaths in WW1. They must also have been quite terrifying to be on, being so slow, visible and ludicrously flammable. I was reminded of all of this, and particularly this letter, today whilst talking to some of the people I met at Who Do You Think You Are Live. A gentleman from the RAF Museum told me how it had taken until the middle of the war to realise that, by combining some technologies that had been around for a decade or more, it was possible to set light to enemy balloons (not actually in the way that happened in this account, though, with an incendiary bomb dropped from an aircraft above).

And it all brought back my very first week at IWM, 4 years back, when we new recruits did an object handling session. The mystery object that my group was given turned out to be a felt overboot, worn outside the leather boots of a zeppelin airman (it gets damn cold up there). It was recovered from a Suffolk field after its owner jumped to escape a conflagration of the sort that Patrick Blundstone described. The felt was still blackened from the burning hydrogen.
This is not the boot, but it's not dissimilar:


Boot (felt), Imperial German © IWM (UNI 12723)

As always, remember that I'm not a historian and many or all of the statements in this post may be incorrect!

Collection distractions #1: IWM's First World War films

This week at Imperial War Museums we finally made available a newly digitised set of films dating to the First World War (and just before/after). These added hundreds to those we had already digitised, bringing the total to around 1200 hugely varied early films. In fact I think there may be more that listed at that link, because some have not been tagged with their period (feel free to remove the period filters). Digitisation was funded with the generous assistance of the EFG1914 project, part of the European Film Gateway. Take a look at what they have. You are welcome to reuse many of the films you can see on our website - just click the "share and reuse" link to grab the embedding code, where it's available. At the moment I'm afraid it's streaming Flash but I have that in my sights, together with higher quality renditions (those annoying watermarks should go in due course). Today I've picked a couple of aviation-related films that have caught my eye:

British Women's Air Force
Not as glamorous as it sounds...
Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters taking off from HMS Argus
This one I can't embed, but go and take a look. It's quite cool seeing how they're brought up to the deck on lifts, and they seem to take off at almost walking speed.
Unfolding the wings of a Short bomber and various other shots of aircraft - flying boats etc. I don't know much about these early planes but I'm constantly surprised at how these things could even fly, at the speed of development that took us from the Wright brothers barely getting off the ground a few years earlier to these varied and formidable weird machines.
German fliers and planes on the Western Front, 1916-1918.
Talking of unexpected machines, when I first saw pictures of the Gotha bombers I was taken aback. Here's a whole variety-pack of German aircraft, including Gothas (which first brought the terror of war from the air to London), as well as dog-fights (some of it fake), aerial photography, and (in reel 2) observation balloons on fire, the Red Baron, and Hermann Goering. Ugh. Here's reel 1: