Parallel inquiries

As with all major projects one’s ambition of maintaining a structured, focused approach is constantly challenged by reality – if not necessarily the law of unintended consequences then the wholly unexpected.  Having submitted my grant application to support an extended period in the States a year from now researching Sir Richard Fairey’s direction of the British Air Commission, I returned to piecing together his early life and education:  I still don’t have precise dates re the latter (and have yet to hear back from the archivist at Merchant Taylors’ School the details of CRF’s brief tenure there before his move to the less expensive St Saviour’s [today’s Ardingly College]), and one consequence is a long list of files re Finsbury Technical College which I need to consult when visiting the London Metropolitan Archives next month.  Hopefully, once immersed in the City and Guilds of London Institute archive at the LMA I can swiftly establish CRF’s student status and period of study at Finsbury TC, and then eliminate a number of the files I have requested to see [a tip for anyone considering use of the voluminous LMA, you can register a month in advance so long as when you first arrive at the information point you have acceptable proof of identity and place of abode].  However, having re-immersed myself in late Victorian/Edwardian London, out of the blue I was contacted from Napier, New Zealand, by a very distant relative of Queenie Markey, Fairey’s first wife, whom he married in 1915 and divorced in 1931.  A keen genealogist, my Kiwi source generously provided invaluable information about the colourful Markey family (no doubt the serious-minded CRF disapproved of various individuals, not least the variety performer George Clarke, who married Queenie’s sister).  He also sent me Fairey’s divorce petition from May 1931 charging his estranged wife with serial adultery that stretched from Kenya (shades of White Mischief) to the home counties; the detail provided suggests that CRF hired a private detective to track his wife’s activities.  Needless to say, electonic correspondence with the Markey descendant on the other side of the world, plus close perusal of the documentation he sent me, proved an illuminating if slightly prurient distraction from the task in hand, namely focusing on worthier and less sensational activities at the turn of the last century.  Professional historians can be sniffy and snooty about the thousands of people eagerly researching the preceding generations of their family (or families), but these enthusiasts’ contribution can be invaluable in rescuing the long forgotten from the ‘condescension of posterity’.  Quotation of E.P. Thompson’s famous phrase reminds me that 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Making of the English Working Class – last spring the Working Class Movement Library staged an exhibition and History Workshop organised a conference, but commemoration of such a key moment in ‘history from below’ was lamentably low key, and tells us much about the condition of history as a discipline in the second decade of a century which Thompson would have found both alarming and intriguing (my own feeble acknowledgement was to read Peter Conradi’s impressive biography of older brother Frank Thompson, with its de facto life of Edward up to the end of the Second World War).  The amateur genealogist’s favourite TV programme is of course Who Do You Think You Are?, and last night’s focus upon BBC foreign affairs editor John Simpson’s ancestors generated coverage of Sam Cody’s credentials as the first to fly a powered aeroplane in Britain (he and Simpson’s great grandmother were not in fact married but claimed to be so – it’s a long and complicated story so check out the BBC website…).  Cody was the rival of J.W. Dunne, Fairey’s patron at the start of his aviation career.   The American showman and engineer didn’t die until a fatal air crash in 1913 – in the immediately preceding years did the young and ambitious Fairey ever get to meet the great man, and if so what did he make of him as it’s hard to think of two characters so different?