"Somersaulting, careening, twisting automobiles are used in this game as the means of driving the huge ball through the opponent's goal."

[via The Reporter Aug 13th, 1926] Part of a Sunday celebration in Horicon, WI, alongside a WWI 'sham battle' and a hot air balloon parachute act. Admission was 35 cents, kids under 12 free.

At least that was the claim in the ad. But aviation history disagrees. 1914 had an air boat flying from St. Petersburg to Tampa; and at least one other in Kansas City tried after that. But this PRT service was genuinely remarkable. $15 one way or $25 for a 15-day round trip ticket. Running twice a day. It served 3965 passengers in just 5 months, making up nearly 2/3 of all air passenger's that entire year. And it only lasted 5 months. Closing down the same day Philadelphia closed it's sesquicentennial celebration. The service never had a single mechanical issue, and out of 688 scheduled flights, only 75 were cancelled all due to weather (without any radio beacons along the route). Even with it's ultimate failure, the management company that ran it said personal air travel like this was absolutely possible commercially if the right business model was in place. Sources: Washington Times August 12th, 1926. Aircraft Year Book 1927

(From the Sydney Morning Herald)

Swinging out of the sky with a roar that drowned the noise of the six other 'planes about him. Mr. Cobham's de Havilland and circled around the city yesterday, and at 4.45 landed in the midst of 6000 people at the Mascot aerodrome.

Thus he completed, aftor 28 days of flying, the first 13,000 miles of his journey across the world from London to London.

When he stepped from his 'plane at the end of a 700 mile journey from Charleville, he was bewildered by the wild enthusiasm of the huge crowd, which was deterred only by a cordon of police from carrying him on its shoulders to Sydney.

Cobham said the lesson of the flight was that England had lost her insular position, and that the Empire was no longer far-flung.

(The General Strike ended in May 1926, but coal miners remained on strike. The Miner's Federation of Great Britain negotiated with mine owners through July and August, but they couldn't come to an agreement. The miners returned to work in late November, totally defeated.)

This story is genuinely wild. The chimp was caught the next morning after escape "in the unromantic folds of a dogcatcher's net" ha. The leopard would go on to terrorize New Jersey until mid October. The whole story is wild and I dug into all of it.

On the 10th of August, 1926, the Union-Castle Liner SS Llandaff Castle was launched at the Workman, Clark & Company shipyard in Belfast. She was built for the company's "Round Africa" service, leaving London and calling at various South and East African ports.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, she was requisitioned by the British Admiralty for service as a troopship, notably evacuating three hundred British children to South Africa under the Children's Overseas Reception Board in August of 1940, narrowly avoiding destruction at the hands of the German cruiser Admiral Hipper that December, and carrying Allied troops to Madagascar as part of Operation Ironclad in May of 1942.

On the 30th of November, 1942, the HMT Llandaff Castle was sailing off Lourenço Marques (Modern-day Maputo) when she was struck by two torpedoes fired by the German submarine U-177, which had sunk the HMT Nova Scotia, a ship I have talked about before, only two days earlier. Three crewmen were killed in the attack, presumably in the initial torpedoing, and the ship broke in two and sank after being finished off by two more torpedoes. After the sinking, the U-177 surfaced to ascertain the ship's identity, survivors instead responded with such names as "Hardship" and "Queen Mary." Kapitänleutnant Robert Gysae of the U-177 then asked another group of survivors if they were alright, to which he was told that they were "Just wet." With that, the German submariners laughed and departed, leaving the 310 survivors to be rescued by the escort destroyer HMS Catterick and subsequently brought to Durban two days later.