Yeovilton to Cambridge to Champaign-Urbana

For someone who wrote two theses on a typewriter in the 1970s, relying upon air mail when unable to visit archives in the United States, and at home travelling frequently to a variety of libraries from the LSE to the Economics Faculty at Cambridge [‘You can read Lord Keynes’s papers, but you can’t make notes…’], e-mail and the internet are research boons which I shall never take for granted.  In the course of the day I have: arranged with the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s Barbara Gilbert which boxes of Fairey papers I shall check out in Yeovilton prior to them replacing the  tranche of papers that have been in Southampton for far too long; liased with Cambridge University Library re Fairey’s correspondence with Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Trenchard [digital copies of the said letters now ordered]; followed up the Cambridge archivist’s advice re letters at Churchill College from CRF to Sir Edward Spears and Sir Leo Amery [nothing of substance, so not ordered]; and ordered from the University of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a copy in the H.G. Wells archives of a letter CRF sent his hero in November 1927 (I knew of its existence because Wells’ brief reply is among the Fairey papers I have been working my way through in the Special Collections across the past fortnight).  On Radio 4’s Making History yesterday [5 August] Royal Holloway’s Justin Champion, distinguished historian of 17/18th century thought and President-elect of the Historical Association (and briefly a colleague 22 years ago: ‘You tell me what to teach, Adrian, and I’ll teach it…Right, I’ll give the Russian Revolution a shot.’), highlighted the value of digital technology in enabling undergraduates to appreciate the phenomenal range of primary sources available to them; but was rightly wary of social media and computer assisted learning as the principal means of facilitating the transition from A-level to undergraduate History.  Yes, quizzes, etc. have their place, but so too do more traditional forms of ensuring that Year 1 students appreciate the nature of the discipline, and how it is studied at an advanced level – the mobile can’t replace the library, or at least won’t for a long while yet.  It’s no good saying that we have to accommodate the children of a society that no longer places a high premium on reading.  Firstly, because that’s a caricature of contemporary British society; secondly because a large number of young people do read, and those that don’t can be encouraged to appreciate history is a subject which demands breadth and depth of reading; and thirdly, because, however sophisticated the online tools that have been and can be developed to enhance study skills and cultive a keen sense of historiography, by their very nature they can only take the student so far in cultivating a spirit of intellectual inquiry.  As another speaker on Making History pointed out, the formulaic, tick box nature of A-level History has much to answer for, particularly as a whole curriculum can be reduced to a single book (with plentiful illustrations to break up the text, leaving some students overwhelmed when encountering ‘proper’ history books), with publishers and college managers in a shared conspiracy to render these all-embracing texts electronic – we want students from an early age to discover the magic of gathering, assimilating, and interpreting information from a variety of secondary sources (the tactile experience of holding a book!) and the even more exciting experience of direct acquaintance with primary material.  Re the latter, my third year students can access Mass Observation diaries, papers, etc. online, which is brilliant and aptly illustrates how wonderful the internet is, but I also take them to Brighton so that they have the experience of holding those same documents in their hands.  I still get a thrill out of going to Kew and being given the privilege of handling the same documents that were once laid out in the cabinet room at Number 10 or on the Foreign Secretary’s desk – to give one example, when researching my book on ‘Mick’ Mannock, who was interned in Constantinople after Britain and the Ottoman Empire went to war in the autumn of 1914, I pulled out an FO file on plans for control of the Turkish capital should the Gallipoli campaign prove triumphant; there were scribbled comments by Eyre Crowe, and by Sir Edward Grey himself – a man very much in the news again this week.  Grey would no doubt have been happy to abandon the hurly-burly of Carlton Gardens for a solitary sojourn on his beloved River Test, which brings me back to Sir Richard Fairey – in his wartime personal papers, which I was reading last week, time and again he puts aside grave matters of aircraft procurement to focus upon the present state of his adopted river.  Yet again I concluded that, to do the man justice, not only will I need to learn an awful lot more about 12 metre and J-class racing, but I shall also have to soak myself in the technique and folklore of fly fishing.  One hundred years ago last Monday Grey famously stated that the lamps were going out all over Europe and they would not be relit in his lifetime, and in personal terms this was cruelly prescient: even as he spoke his eyesight was already diminishing, and the time would come when he could no longer demonstrate his credentials as an ornithologist, or cast his fly across the clear waters of Hampshire’s premier river. Hello, what’s this?  Blimey, a digital version of the Wells letter has just arrived from Illinois – incredible!