"Gremlins, while imaginary, played a very important role to the airmen of the Royal Air Force. The concept of gremlins as a scapegoat was important to the morale of pilots according to the author and historian Marlin Bressi: This led John Hazen to note that "the gremlin has been looked on as new phenomenon, a product of the machine age – the age of air". In reality, the gremlins were a form of " buck passing" or deflecting blame. As such, gremlins were portrayed as equal opportunity tricksters, taking no sides in the conflict, but acting out their mischief from their own self-interest. Gremlins were also thought at one point to have enemy sympathies, but investigations revealed that enemy aircraft had similar and equally inexplicable mechanical problems.
The flight crews blamed gremlins for otherwise inexplicable accidents which sometimes occurred during their flights. This concept of gremlins was popularized during World War II among airmen of the Royal Air Force (RAF) units, in particular the men of the high-altitude Photographic Reconnaissance Units (PRU) of RAF Benson, RAF Wick and RAF St Eval. An article by Hubert Griffith in the servicemen's fortnightly Royal Air Force Journal dated 18 April 1942, also chronicles the appearance of gremlins, although the article states the stories had been in existence for several years, with later recollections of it having been told by Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots as early as 1940. Īn early reference to the gremlin is in aviator Pauline Gower's 1938 novel The ATA: Women with Wings, where Scotland is described as "gremlin country", a mystical and rugged territory where scissor-wielding gremlins cut the wires of biplanes when unsuspecting pilots were about. According to Paul Quinion, it is plausible that the term is a blend of the word "goblin" with the name of the manufacturer of the most common beer available in the RAF in the 1920s, Fremlin. Hazen states that some people derive the name from the Old English word gremian, "to vex", while Carol Rose, in her book Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia, attributes the name to a portmanteau of Grimm's Fairy Tales and Fremlin Beer. Aviation origins Īlthough their origin is found in myths among airmen claiming that gremlins were responsible for sabotaging aircraft, the folklorist John W. There is evidence of earlier RAF reference in the 1920s to a lowly menial person, in other words a low-ranking officer or enlisted man saddled with oppressive assignments.
Later sources have sometimes claimed that the concept goes back to World War I, but there is no print evidence of this. Use of the term in the sense of a mischievous creature that sabotages aircraft first arose in Royal Air Force (RAF) slang among British pilots stationed in Malta, the Middle East, and India in the 1920s, with the earliest printed record in a poem published in the journal Aeroplane in Malta on 10 April 1929. Stories about them and references to them as the causes of especially inexplicable technical and mental problems of pilots were especially popular during and after World War II. Depictions of these creatures vary widely.
A World War II gremlin-themed industrial safety posterĪ gremlin is a mischievous folkloric creature invented at the beginning of the 20th century to originally explain malfunctions in aircraft, and later in other machinery, processes, and their operators.
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