“There was only us…”

On the Fairey front little to report as I sit writing in the studio at the end of the garden (I’m sure we have had the predictable gag in an earlier blog).  I’m almost out of the First World War, although the relevant chapter still requires my writing about CRF’s private life – getting married is scarcely a minor detail worthy only a footnote.  When not at the far end of an increasingly soggy lawn I’m at work undertaking appropriate professorial duties (Southampton’s HE review looming ever larger) or focusing upon Great War centenary activities.  I’m particularly excited about two projects History is launching under the auspices of the AHRC WWI Public Engagement Centre for SE England, based at the University of Kent.  Encouraged by the University of Portsmouth as a formal member of the Centre’s network (Southampton is for want of a better term an associate, notwithstanding our close working relationship with the modern British historians at Kent), we are seeking funding for a joint project with Hampshire Cultural Trust and Southampton Records Office on ‘Thornycroft and the Great War’, and with the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum on ‘The Hampshire Regiment and the Great War’.  The emphasis is on accessibility of material (the Thornycroft archive is huge, covering activities at the company’s Basingstoke and Southampton plants), and on maintaining the WWI momentum through 2016-18.  For the digital exhibition with the RHRM we will organise a pilot project on the Hampshires at Gallipoli [2nd Battalion landed from the Clyde on V Beach on 25 April 1915 – Anzac Day], and I will act as the lead academic for this, working closely with museum curator Col. (Rtd.) Colin Bulleid.  The lead academic for the other project will be Roy Edwards from the University’s newly named Business School.  Roy will do a terrific job – if allowed he would spend Christmas Day trawling his way through a company archive – and in a separate capacity has been extremely helpful to me in understanding how and why Fairey Aviation went through so many incarnations before finally the company was floated as a public joint-stock company in 1929.

Yesterday I received a copy of the Air Power Review, an RAF authorised publication which I must confess that I was unaware of.  Looking at the current issue, and the contents list on the digital archive, I was suitably impressed by the quality of articles.  The journal online linked readers to the Chief of the Air Staff’s annual list of recommended reading, which year on year comprised of pertinent and intellectually challenging literature.  I couldn’t help but notice the presence of work heavily critical of recent operations by the British Army, such as Frank Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars.  Just as in Air Power Review I was struck by the total absence of the RNAS from articles about the air war above the Western Front.  This reminded of my thoroughly enjoyable evening at the Fleet Air Arm’s ‘Taranto Night’ at HMS Excellent in Portsmouth on 14 November 2012, where the entertainment primarily comprised of taking the piss out of the RAF (e.g. two Italians discussing the security of the Taranto harbour: ‘I can guarantee, general, that we are safe from the RAF – there are no four or five star hotels within 400 miles of the port, and no bomber can cover such a distance.’).  Not inter-service rivalry, but I recall a wonderful clash between a veteran’s recollection and a historian attempting an ostensibly accurate account of the same event.  This was at the Edinburgh conference on the Battle of Britain which formed the basis of the Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang edited The Burning Blue: young German academic quotes extensive data re Luftwaffe losses in Poland and France to support his case for RAF command of the skies over Britain; HanEkkehard Bob, squadron leader of 9/JG 54 in mid-1940, strides to the podium and looks down contemptuously at his young fellow countryman – “The RAF?  We never saw them!”.