Perhaps the end of the beginning…

I’m hopeless at remembering Churchill quotes, so don’t ask me the full comment on victory at Alamein.  I can just about remember the post-Barbarossa remark about if Hitler invaded hell – ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons’?  One of my favourites is November 1944 and Eden complains to the PM how hard it is to get Turkey into the war: ‘Tell them Christmas is coming.’  You have to say it in that voice.  My students will all confirm that I’ll take any opportunity to mimic Churchill (no doubt poorly).  I’m also not averse to slipping a Clem impersonation into lectures, but if I’m honest my Attlee voice sounds not that dissimilar from my Monty voice (the same clipped, officer class – although the major had a deep suspicion of generals, with good cause).  Socialist majors are very much in my mind as my 2001 book Mick Mannock, Fighter Pilot: Myth, Life and Politics has just been published in paperback with a fresh preface, to mark the centenary of Edward Mannock’s release from pretty hellish internment in Turkey.  The previous History commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan read the hardback eighteen months ago, and was convinced that if published by Pan at a modest price (almost no production costs of course) then there was a healthy audience waiting to purchase a well researched, previously well received book on flying in the Great War.  At some point over the winter, when I was distracted by family concerns, the book slipped back to Palgrave Macmillan, the academic imprint, and in consequence this near cost-free paperback is priced at an absurd £19.99.  Don’t these people want to sell books?!  I’ve written a plug for the book which hopefully will be in next week’s New Statesman.  In the piece I’ve noted that, had he not been shot down in July 1918, Mannock would probably have been his party’s candidate for Wellingborough in the ‘Coupon Election’.  As Labour won the seat my man would have left the RAF to become an MP, presumably sitting with the ILP’s awkward squad (most of whom had opposed the war, much to Mannock’s disgust).  There must be something about the water in that part of the East Midlands as the current MP is a fully paid-up member of the Tory awkward squad, the arch Euro-sceptic Peter Bone.  While his politics are on the whole a long way from my own I warmed to Bone the more I saw of him on Peter Cockerell’s excellent BBC2 series Inside The Commons.  Presumably Mr Bone (no Rt Hon there I suspect) will be pounding the streets of his constituency this weekend and not partaking of the first weekend of events at the South Bank under the umbrella title of ‘Changing Britain’.  This festival, in which pleasingly David Kynaston has had a big hand, stretches out over the next three weekend.  I was delighted to get a gig at the Royal Festival Hall next Saturday afternoon – the only time I can walk in the steps of Richard Thompson et al.  My first set is as part of a panel on postwar housing (yes, I am indeed nervous about sharing the stage with distinguished architectural and town planning commentators), and the second set is chairing a ‘conversation’ between Kathleen Burk and Vernon Bogdanor on British foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s (that’s more like performing the familiar hits, to strain the metaphor).  I have a day or two to remind myself about housing in postwar Britain as I have just finished chapter 5 of the Fairey biography (with material pushed into chapter 6, on the 1930s).  This was a blockbuster (19K words – ouch!), which covered the whole of an eventful 1920s.  I reckon, with about 80K words under my belt that I am over the hump (an unfortunate phrase, reminding me that Dickie and Bill are together at SEAC screaming out for me to renew telling the Mountbatten story), but there is still a very long way to go, i.e. an equally eventful 1930s, Washington during the war (some of that research under my belt thankfully), and then 1945-56 with a world speed record to smash in CRF’s final months.  So, I’m titling the book The Man Who Built the Swordfish, and yet I have still some way to go before the old ‘stringbag’ actually takes to the air.  No wonder I find myself quoting Churchill in late 1942, ‘buggering on’ indeed!  The chapter I am most looking forward to researching and writing is the one about sailing and fly fishing (based on direct acquaintance with the Test I hope), and Fairey’s myriad activities away from building aircraft.  This includes setting up Fairey Marine after the war; and my thanks to Charles Lawrence for giving me a copy of his beautiful coffee table book on FM, and to Gordon Curry who has lent me a large box full of photographs and other material concerning his dad, who oversaw boat construction at Hamble, and his dad’s boss the ex-RFC/RAF pilot and Fairey director Colin Chichester Smith.  I met Gordon, a neighbour of Charles Fairey, at Pittleworth on Sunday when Mary and I again enjoyed Jane Tennant’s kind hospitality (fittingly for the principal guest, our lunch was curry).  Jane of course is Sir Richard Fairey’s daughter by his second marriage, and as I move closer to events within memory of relatives and friends I shall become ever more dependent upon her advice and her extremely sharp powers of recall.  I doubt if Jane ever met Churchill, but she told me on Sunday that she did meet Beaverbrook (Max and Dick became firm friends from June 1940, but frustratingly no personal correspondence seems to have survived).  When it comes to name dropping, however, Jane’s husband David Tennant can beat them all – he has a clear recollection of Asquith, and Sir Edward Grey was his godfather.  Given that Grey wrote a book about fishing on the Test how fitting that every day his godson can stand on the riverbank, and at least twice a week put on his waders, pick up his rod, and with quiet confidence cast his fly.