Paths to pursue (vapour trails to follow?)…

Since returning from France in mid-September the amount of time spent in my office can be counted in hours not days.  Study leave may allow some time for relaxed reading and a recharging of intellectual batteries, but in an era of  audit and accountability the onus is upon mining the archival coalface: what will be the outcome(s) of time spent dedicated to active research [I have never understood the origin of that term – what is ‘passive research’?], and how will the work undertaken translate itself ultimately into a constituent element of one’s personal submission to the next Research Excellence Framework (son of RAE)?  It is a truly astonishing – and appalling – fact that for nigh on a year my university has been planning for the 2020 REF, when the results of the 2014 REF will not be released until mid-2014.  This isn’t an indictment of the University of Southampton as within the Russell Group, and indeed Universities UK as a whole, most research-intensive institutions are engaged in similar spreadsheet planning (as in logging names and targets to be closely monitored across the rest of the decade, as was certainly the case in my own faculty last time around).  Happily, I don’t need a far distant research audit to motivate me to spend hours at Kew, Colindale, or in the special collections of Southampton’s Hartley Library.  The latter is where the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s archivist, the ever helpful Barbara Gilbert, deposited the latest tranche of Sir Richard Fairey’s personal papers, including a veritable treasure trove of articles and speeches written across the 1920s and into the early 1930s;  Colindale, once synonymous with the British Newspaper Library (now a forlorn-looking depository standing empty and doubtless awaiting demolition across the road from the Tube station), is now of interest only to those historians aware that the RAF Museum holds a singularly impressive array of aviation-related archives; and Kew is to the District Line what Colindale is to the Northern Line – a far distant repository of official papers, which for me has proved especially illuminating in the serial restructuring of Fairey Aviation across the course of the 1920s.  Thus I have spent considerable time at the National Archives in recent weeks reading Board of Trade and Air Ministry documents re the five voluntary liquidations that took place across the postwar decade, all of which facilitated a raising of capital, a freeing of cash, a strengthening of Fairey’s personal control over the company, and perhaps an avoidance of corporation and excess profits taxes.  I have forwarded my file of notes to a professor of accounting, asking her to advise on why CRF and his solicitor and fellow director C.O. Crisp restructured their enterprise so frequently (in the mid-1920s annually).  Two other points of inquiry (among a myriad of paths to pursue): given that CRF was such a staunch imperialist, and discreet critic of Stanley Baldwin, was his first encounter with Beaverbrook as a supporter of the ‘Empire Crusade’, the 1930-31 abortive challenge to the Tory leadership mounted by’Max’ and Lord Rothermere [the two press barons displaying, ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot’ – Baldwin, courtesy of his cousin Rudyard Kipling]; and did Fairey distance himself from Charles – C.G. – Grey in the 1930s as the editor of The Aeroplane became an admirer of Mosley and associated with members of The Link (like CRF’s early patron, Murray Sueter)?  The focus over the past few weeks has been almost entirely upon Fairey, continuing my twin track research of the period roughly 1917-1929 and 1940-45 when my man served as Deputy and then Director of the British Air Commission..  I have two hefty books on Inter Library Loan re the BAC, so I had better work my way through them, and also reread the postwar chapters of Trippe’s unpublished biography from the 1950s, after which I shall resume writing.  I anticipate two chapters on the latter part of the Great War and the 1920s, but they will be very much first drafts as I need far more on CRF’s private affairs, not least life in Buckinghamshire with the first Mrs Fairey, who judging by her unpaid bills was, as they say in contemporary parlance, high maintenance.  Re what has already been written, I clearly need to revise my remarks re Dawson, Wright, and Nicholl, the Cambridge students and aviators CRF met on Sheppey in 1913 and with whom he forged an extraordinarily close bond (as was the case for the group’s close friend, Crisp, Fairey Aviation’s future attorney and board member); their roles as company directors are pivotal to the telling of the story.  Meanwhile the search for a publisher continues, with a strong sign that I may be returning to an old friend.  Away from Fairey, my involvement in the University’s ‘Great War: Unknown War’ remains considerable, and on the first Sunday in  October I found myself talking to the Friends of St James’s Park about Southampton and Hampshire in the first two years of the war.  The Friends are at the heart of a remarkable lottery-funded heritage project which is a model of urban renewal and community mobilisation – let’s name names, so well done Michaela Lawlor-Levene, the principal driving force!  Last week the Tube sped me across London from Kew to the Mile End Road to hear Peter [Lord] Hennessy give a valedictory lecture on ‘Establishment and Meritocracy’ (the title of a typically readable and contentious accompanying short book) to a sell-out audience at Queen Mary College’s People’s Palace – rock start treatment indeed, and the reception was equally  packed.  I didn’t stay long, but I did have the opportunity to give Peter a present of my original Attlee Memorial  Runners red vest and the shield the AMR won as the only team to enter the 1986 Mid-Wales Marathon – I always thought that, as the club’s founder, he was more entitled to the trophy than me.  Apparently, it will have pride of place in the Hennessy library, so Lymington’s loss is Walthamstow’s gain.