Stop-start initial stages

A Fairey family meeting at Pittleworth Manor was extremely helpful, and over the past ten days there have been a number of useful initiatives, not least the first stage in establishing a website, and posting information re the project on relevant university noticeboards.  I’m acquiring a formidable library of secondary literature re the embryonic British aircraft industry, and at the same time consolidating sources of documentary information on CRF’s early life, notably his technical education and prewar career.  I still need more information about the Fairey family prior to the Edwardian era but by various means it’s emerging.  Jane Tennant, CRF’s daughter by his second marriage and his only surviving child, and who I should soon interview for the first and by no means the last time, has lent me for photocopying the manuscript of ‘The Plane Maker The Official Biography of Sir Richard Fairey’ written in the late 1950s by a journalist Peter Trippe.  This will be extremely useful because of the access the author enjoyed at the time to family members and CRF’s colleagues and friends (it’s a great pity none of Trippe’s sources are referenced). The text itself is saccharine and sentimental, long on narrative and short on analysis – it’s way too long and, had the book secured a publisher then its editor would have demanded multiple cuts.  Nevertheless, it is an incredibly useful source which I shall make good use of  (as, I hasten to add, will be clearly shown in the footnotes – thinking of which, can I keep them confine them to the bare factual necessity or will they turn out as full as in everything I have ever written?  The latter, I strongly suspect.)  So this end of month report can take satisfaction in getting the show on the road, and I certainly know a hell of a lot more about the young CRF than I did in early July; but competition for my attention, ranging from two days at last week’s National Maritime Museum conference on ‘Navy and Nation, 1688 to the present’, where I gave a paper on the RN and its depiction in post-WW2 British feature films, through to spending an inordinate amount of time with my 93 year old mother as I endeavour to effect a painful departure from Coventry for a new life in Lymington, means that by my own standards I haven’t completed as much work as I would have liked – and August will see even slower progress as I have promised to take time off and accompany Mary on wild swimming adventures (and early September is a short ‘proper’ holiday in France – time for sustained reading, but not necessarily related to the project: I am about to finish Jean Edward Smith’s FDR and appropriately Rana Mitter’s account of the China-Japan war is top of the pile by my bed).  I am very conscious of how much faith the Fairey family, especially Jane Tennant, has invested in me; and a need to demonstrate tangibly from the outset to Jane – and to CRF’s grand-daughters Esther and Sarah Jane – that this investment is justified and worthwhile.