Fly Navy – recalling and reviving carrier-based aircraft

Within the past week the Queen has launched the first of the Royal Navy’s two eye-wateringly expensive aircraft carriers, the Fleet Air Arm’s PR campaign only going amiss when the Americans refused to allow an F35 strike aircraft to fly into the Farnborough Air Show – as on the Clyde, a large scale model was a rather sad substitute for the real thing.  The F35 has an unhappy history to date, and its absence from the UK was another chapter in a familiar story of attempting to build multi-purpose aircraft which attempt to do everything and land up not being especially good at anything.  Still, as previously noted, the Fleet Air Arm, with the return of fixed-wing aircraft creeping ever closer (think well into the next decade), displays a bouyancy and optimism reminiscent of the late 1930s following naval aviation’s return to full autonomy.  The Royal Navy’s scorn for the RAF’s historic claim to control maritime air power was all too evident when on Wednesday I heard the Britannia Royal Naval College’s Philip Grove give a lively and very funny talk on the Royal Naval Air Service as a genuinely innovative force from 4 August 1914 to 31 March 1918 [declaration of war to the eve of the RAF’s formal inception].  The man from Dartmouth was speaking at a three day conference on ‘Anglo-German Naval Arms Race and the First World War at Sea’ organised by the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s Duncan Redford.  Next Wednesday I have to give a talk at a workshop at Kent on ‘Situating Science and Technology in the Great War’, entitled ‘North Kent, the cradle of naval aviation: technological innovation and the Admiralty Air Department before and after August 1914′.  Grove’s talk was delivered with such authority and panache that I couldn’t help thinking he should be going to Canterbury next week and not me.  Having said that, I was able to ask him why he made no mention of the Short brothers’ accomplishments on Sheppey and in Rochester before and during the First World War, pointing out how Horace Short along with Tommy Sopwith were the key figures in realising the ambitions of Murray Sueter and Charles Sansom, Winston Churchill and Prince Louis Battenberg.  I didn’t actually mention Fairey, but would have done in a fuller excahange of ideas.  I probably did talk too much in responding to a Chicago historian’s talk on how the last great German naval law – the 1912 Novelle – influenced British diplomacy towards Germany and France: I suggested that Liberal cabinet ministers other than Churchill, Haldane, and McKenna knew remarkably little about naval technology and strategy given that the ostensible race with Germany (as a concept demolished by Nicholas Rodger in his plenary lecture – how can you have a race when you lack two credible competitors?) was such a salient political issue.  Grey was a fast learner, and Lloyd George when required (to a degree even the PM?), but Asquith’s cabinet was a collection of talented and well-educated men whose interests and expertise largely lay elsewhere – not in the spheres of grand strategy and applied science, especially naval engineering and ordnance.  As pointed out to Professor Rodger no less, I was specifically referring to the Liberal cabinet, and not the Committee of Imperial Defence where, as the great man had pointed out, politicians like Balfour and Esher were extremely knowledgeable.  All this reflects my general beef re academic discussion and media coverage of Britain and the commencement of the First World War, namely that not enough attention is given to the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party in 1914 – as so often in the early decades of the past century, Lloyd George is the key.  Having said that, with regard to naval air power from the Campania to the Queen Elizabeth II, it’s the Welsh wizard’s great partner and rival whose legacy the likes of Philip Grove keep fresh in our minds.  While Churchill is prominent in chapters two and three of the Fairey biography, and will no doubt return on numerous occasions later in the book, he is absent from chapter one, the first draft of which I have sent to family members and to the FAA Museum’s archivist Barbara Gilbert for comment.  Despite three, soon four, conferences, and two sixthform conferences, on the First World War (how many by November 2018?!), I have been able to get into the Hartley Library’s Special Collections, and very belatedly begun reading the second tranche of papers lent from Yeovilton.  While I have found a bulging file on the British Air Commission misfiled (signalling two weeks hard slog working my way through CRF’s 1940-45 correspondence), I have been disappointed by how little archival material I have come across re the period from 1916 to the mid-1920s.  I have checked the Fairey archives’ catalogue, and I didn’t miss anything when selecting boxes with Barbara.  Equally discouraging is the fact that the Fairey Aviation archives at the RAF Museum do not contain very much material for this period.  The newscuttings I am going through at present are very helpful, but I need the depth and breadth of documentary evidence that I could draw upon for chapters two and three.  However, like the Fleet Air Arm, I remain optimistic that sooner or later take off will be achieved, with hopefully the relevant chapter not matching the F35 by spreading itself too thinly.