please empty your brain below

What a story indeed. Thanks for the telling.
A really interesting full account of an event that I had never before heard about, great research thank you DG.
No doubt today 'human rights' lawyers will be suing the British for damaging the Zeppelin and putting the lives of the crew in jeopardy.
Gosh, never heard that story before. Fascinating how these events disappear into the mists of time.

Having looked a little further, it seems the damaged airship was attacked by the Royal Flying Corps and Alfred Bradon won a DSO; part of the frame of the Zeppelin are apparently in a nearby church; and a girl born on the night was christened "Zeppelina". Poor thing.
@ Andrew

DG mentions Zeppelina Williams towards the end of his piece.

Anon (human rights)
I'm sure you realise that's nonsense. Shooting down an aircraft which is in the process of bombing you is an act of self defence, even if we had not been formally at war at the time.
Nice article - would just like to say that the 100kg bombs were high-explosive not incendiary. Zeppelins carried both. Incedniary bombs - as illustrated in the article - weighed only about 12kg and were designed to set buildings alight, not demolish them, as happened in the case of the Black Swan.
Kind regards
Ian

dg writes: Thanks Ian, I've amended the text. And thanks for your excellent website, a most useful source of information.
Great description of what, at the time, must have been the latest deadly stealth technology.
Fascinating piece. Exactly a month earlier one of L33's sister ships had carried out a raid over SE London striking parts of The Isle of Dogs, Greenwich, Deptford, Plumstead, Eltham and Blackheath*
It was the only one of 13 (thirteen!)Zeppelins that set off to reach Britain: it's a pretty fair assumption L33 would've been one of the other 12 which failed to reach their targets.
http://blitzwalkers.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/heinrich-mathy-blackheath-and-first.html

*It was the south east of the capital which also suffered heavily during WW2, with the enemy bombers seemingly keen not to extend their flying time over London any more than they had to.

@ Ian. I don't know if it was the same in WW1 but - as you say - the practice during WW2 was to drop a combination of heavy explosive and incendiary bombs, with the former to shake the structure of buildings and dislodge roof tiles, and the latter to penetrate the 'softened' targets and create fires in them.
In fact L.33 didn't take part in the August 1916 raid, 23/24 September was her first time over Britain.

The bombing process wasn't quite the same in WW1 as in WW2. It is still a learning curve in WW1. Captains made up their bombload as they saw fit and often they carried a lot of incendiaries as Germany believed a new 'Great Fire of London' would seriously damage British morale. But often you see Zeppelins dropping a few incendiaries, then HE, then incendiaries - but as they generally appeared over targets singly, and were dropping bombs as they progressed, you rarely see two bombs hitting the same target.
Cheers, Ian
Having now seen more about L31's raid on 24 Aug 1916, it seems two of the bombs dropped over Eltham fell on roads on the Progress Estate, built just a year earlier as housing for workers at the Woolwich Arsenal munitions works.
Sorry to go off-track, but the estate is now a preservation area which celebrated its centenary just last year. Could be a place to visit if you haven't been already.
Timbo, sorry, can't have read carefully enough the first time.

All sorts peculiar places were bombed in 1915 and 1916, Cheshunt and Ashford and so on. Another German airship was shot down at Cuffley a few weeks before this one, and also attracted hordes of curious visitors.

We will get to the centenary of the first fixed-wing raids next year...
I wondered why the post appeared earlier than usual and not at a 'rounded' time, then noticed that it was exactly 100 years to the minute.

Nice tribute.
this was also covered, though not in such detail, in a list of 'events that happened on this day' for 24 Sept. So I've now read about it twice (I was finding items for a quiz about On This Day) though I'd never heard about it before.
A brilliantly written post dg. Very close to home in more ways than one.
I take it that you've made the journey to the Zepfest because that's in your nature. I look forward to reading about it and seeing some photos soon.
I can't recall a year when there has not been any wars/conflicts going on in one part or other of the world. And there seems no real effort to change that. That really makes me sad.
There appears to be no record of the fate of the landlord of the Black Swan, EJ Reynolds. Can only add that his full name was Edwin John Reynolds and he was landlord from 1915, as per the
http://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Bow/BlackSwan.shtml

dg writes: Thanks, full name added.
@ Grumpy Anon

Whilst any conflicts is too many, the global trend is fewer conflicts, and as a species we've never had it so good:
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-long-run
Henry Adams is my great grandfather, he had just returned from war,literally, uniform and gun in hand and was in the hallway when the bomb hit the pub. He ended up with a metal plate in his head and lost an arm. After seeing a picture of his baby daughter hanging from the rafters which was published in the local paper when he was in hospital, he had a breakdown and spent some time in a mental asylum to come to terms with the tragedy. Heart breakingly sad.










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