Stakhanovite mining of the archival mother lode in June and July means I have worked my way through boxes sent to the Hartley Library from the Fleet Air Arm which contain material pertinent to Fairey in the 1930s (needless to say, the papers contained much that was relevant to before and after the decade in question, prompting minor reworking of previously written chapters or supplementing files already started re CRF’s later life). Notwithstanding Fairey’s role in wartime Washington with the British Air Commission, the 1930s is the decade in terms of our man at the peak of his powers, and the peak of his power [it sounds better than it reads!]. Ironically, it’s also the decade when the hinterland begins to dominate, at the expense of Fairey’s main mission in life, namely to build more combat (and ultimately civil) aircraft than any other manufacturer in Britain. There are too many things going on in his life, from managing the Bossington estate at the end of the decade to fast-tracking his freshly adopted persona as a master helmsman and pillar of the sailing establishment. Thus, more and more he conducts business from his motor yacht Evadne (requisitioned by the Royal Navy in September 1939), with much of his time devoted to 12-metre racing (and even J-class after he bought Shamrock V, with one eye on contesting the America’s Cup after Sopwith), weekend shoots, and uninterrupted afternoons fly fishing. I wonder if this is one reason why, despite in 1932 CRF’s chief salesman urged him to seize the opportunity and exploit a fund of goodwill towards Fairey Aviation in Moscow, he never went back; the result I suspect is that, instead of adding to the solitary Firefly exported to Russia, Ilyushin and his design team simply adopted [stole?] the technology for a home-grown version. Note that Dick Fairey had been to Russia, some time in 1931 as yet to be identified. The FAAM papers provided the memoir of a Hayes mechanic who went to Moscow in 1931 to assemble and rig a Type IIIF, and an extremely detailed diary of van de Velde who lead the Firefly sales/engineering team in the autumn of 1932, but they yielded up nothing re the Big Man’s visit in between – presumably taking advantage of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement signed by MacDonald’s second Labour Government and later reneged on after ‘Ramsay Mac’ formed the first National Government. The RAF Museum’s company papers have so far revealed nothing about Russia, including visits made by Soviet aviators to Hayes. I shall spend some time at Kew seeing if such a staunch anti-Bolshevik, albeit one who firmly believed that business is business, was reporting back to MI6 as well as the Air Ministry’s intelligence operation. What I don’t intend to do is pursue this line of inquiry, where a combination of excessive bureaucracy and a Putin-inspired accelerated shut-down of Soviet archives would see a great deal of time, effort, and expenditure generate miserable results.
Two tangential thoughts generated by immersing myself in these papers from eight decades ago: firstly, the purchase of services and of goods is – excluding Fairey’s penchant for fast coupes fresh from Detroit – exclusively British, with domestic manufacturers and retailers proving for every need, both industrial and personal; secondly, in correspondence there is an abundance of excessive deference, but this is counterbalanced by an effortless demonstration of courtesy and respect. As someone who can remember the 1950s, when as a little boy I was acutely conscious of petit bourgeois social mores, and who is in many respects a product of the following decade, when deference was signally part of redundant ‘old world values’, I do not want a society where we return to bowing and scraping. However, I do feel that courtesy and respect are values rapidly disappearing over the horizon of our fiercely atomised society. What prompts this observation is listening to Today this morning on Radio 4 and noting that the PM is now almost universally referred to as ‘Cameron’. I am not suggesting that we adopt a US-style convention of respect for the office if not the holder (a convention Republicans have increasingly ignored since Obama entered the White House), but nevertheless whoever is in No 10 deserves a measure of formal recognition. I am not an admirer of the present Prime Minister but I was genuinely shocked by the way he was addressed and spoken to on the pre-election Question Time last spring; the fact that Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband were treated worse is no excuse – none of them should have faced an audience which, however sceptical they were about each party leader’s policies, was unacceptably rude: did those audience members who accused the PM and the Leader of HM Opposition of lying appreciate the gravity of the charge and the offensive nature of their remarks? Shame on them, and on everyone else who in their day-to-day behaviour demonstrates total indifference to basic social conventions of respect and courtesy. If this is how we behave as ostensibly mature adults, then how can we in any way act as responsible role models for our children and grandchildren?
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