As we sailed off for Gallipoli…

Having completed chapter 2 (the final section re Wittgenstein might not have been anticipated by anyone but Ray Monk, professorial colleague and biographer of the great man), and despatched it to various interested parties, not least members of the Fairey family, I am eager to keep the momentum going – do I move straight on to the third chapter, where CRF’s employment at Short Brothers and the onset of war leads to the founding of Fairey Aviation in 1915  (with still only minimal background information re the mysterious C.H. Rees who masterminded the company’s creation), or do I attempt a very tentative first draft of chapter 1, covering Fairey’s family background, education, and early career (with still not enough material re the family’s roots in Huntingdonshire?)?  However, for the moment this decision must be placed on pause as I type this post in Coventry, once again dealing with the aftermath of my very  elderly mother’s brief spell in hospital and insistence upon remaining in her own home – I feel the no-nonsense Sir Charles would have interpreted his filial duties in a much tougher way, and then got on with the business in hand.  Family demands may delay embarking upon the next 12k words, but so too do competing demands at work, not least mapping out future research and lifelong learning projects with Hampshire County Council’s Art Galleries and Museums Service and our partner under the umbrella of Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, the National Museum of the Royal Navy (which, via the Fleet Air Arm Museum, is of course a key element in this project).  Prominent in my mind at present, as mentioned in preceding posts, is Gallipoli; not least because the Dardanelles 1915-16 was the topic of this week’s seminar in my MA module ‘The Empire Strikes Back: British taskforces in the twentieth century’ – most of my class had read all of Peter Hart’s terrific Gallipoli, and were in the mood for demolishing myths.  I hope we assumed a suitably balanced approach to the Anzac creation myth, while noting that for ‘Johnny Turk’ it is even stronger given the commanding presence of Mustapha Kemal [i.e. Ataturk] on the heights above the Allied lines.  Within the worst elements of the Anzac myth the British scarcely feature unless displaying incompetent and malicious leadership, but for Australians, Kiwis, and the British their French ally is invisible – a fate shared by Indian regiments such as the Gurkhas.  If there is any credence in the ‘lions led by donkeys’ dismissal of Allied generalship in the First World War then it surely applies to the quality of command at Gallipoli, notwithstanding individual instances of brilliant leadership from Col. Monash at brigade level to Lt. Attlee at platoon level (the future Labour leader was almost the last to leave Suvla Beach).  I’m  particularly interested in the Hampshire connection with Gallipoli, from the hastily built M33 Monitor currently undergoing refurbishment under the auspices of Hants CC and the NMRN in Portsmouth Dockyard, to the role of the 2nd Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, who, as regulars back from India serving in the 29th Division, were present from the landing off the Clyde at V Beach on 25 April 1915 to the silent withdrawal from Helles in January 1916.  The latter’s war diaries and regimental magazine at the Hampshires’ museum in Winchester constitute a fascinating, revealing and insightful account of their testing and traumatic time on the peninsula.  In partnership with NMRN and Hants CC colleagues we  hope to stage a lifelong learning day in the Princess Royal Gallery and on board the M33 on 25 April 2015, although the interactive display in the engine room of the latter will not be open to the public until August 2015 – exactly a hundred years after the freshly built monitor arrived in the Dardanelles to support the renewed summer offensive (the gains from which? needless to say, bugger all).  There is a link with the Fairey project in that Commander Charles Sansom, aviator extraordinaire and with Commodore Murray Sueter (and First Lord Winston Churchill?) de facto founder of the Royal Naval Air Service, was posted from heading the Naval Air Station at Eastchurch, the evolution of which features in my chapter 2, to command a squadron of mainly Short seaplanes in reconnaissance and strike roles above the Turkish positions.  Thus, young Dick Fairey worked upon aeroplanes which, at precisely the moment he was setting up his brave new enterprise (based upon sub-contract work from the Short brothers at the suggestion of Sueter), were flying over Allied and Turkish lines, forlornly seeing to make sense of the chaos below.