Fairey, fly fishing, and the Test…

Last Tuesday [8 October] I was again at Pittleworth Manor talking to Sir Richard Fairey’s daughter and grand-daughter, and selecting photographs for the website, which is still under construction but now in an embryonic form.  As well as photographs ranging across CRF’s life I handled a number of artefacts, including the skates for attachment to his boots when a child visiting his family in the Fens and the fly he created for his personal use when fishing – he was very particular about the bespoke hackle [a feather wound around a fishing fly so that its filaments are splayed out] and even went so far as to breed a particular type of bantam in order to secure the correct feathers.  Standing on an isolated stretch of the Test in late afternoon, in near complete silence, I could understand why Fairey deemed the physical experience of fishing in stillness and solitude as important for his mental well-being as the fishing itself.  Similarly, I could comprehend why CRF’s determination to see the Test valley remain unspoilt by development qualifies him as a pioneering conservationist.  Can one qualify as a conservationist, while at the same time enthusiastically pursuing hunting and fishing, as was the case for CRF?  I don’t think you have to be a signed up member of the Countryside Alliance to believe this position sustainable and not wholly contradictory, even if personally I would not wish to shoot any creature and I gain quiet satisfaction from the demise of hunting (although when the legislation was passed I did wonder whether it ran roughshod over the most fundamental principle of liberal democracy, proper respect for the minority viewpoint – in practice, for all the noise generated by the CA and the  resentment clearly felt by some but by no means all rural residents, the consequences of outlawing hunting were by no means as great as anticipated).  What’s clear from the example of CRF and his country sports, and the stunning images of his J-class yacht Shamrock and the other boats he sailed (not forgetting his motor yacht, which became a minesweeper during WW2, and sank a U-boat off Gibraltar in February 1943), is that the eventual book will require a separate chapter devoted to CRF the polymath – there is just so much to write about.  I am still trying to piece together the extended family history, and am annoyed that I left behind at Pittleworth a family tree drawn up in the early 1960s.  The Fairey roots are in Huntingdonshire in and around St Neot’s, even if CRF was very much a child of north London.  I have a clearer picture now of his education, and am off to London Metropolitan Archives on Monday to explore relevant papers for Finsbury Technical College, where Fairey was a high-flying nightschool student under the tutelage of the distinguished physicist Silvanus Thompson.  I also now have far greater knowledge of the development of pre-war British aviation, and at the end of the month will return to Sheppey, where I taught in the 1970s, to inspect the remains of the airfield at Eastchurch and the house rented by the Royal Aero Club (at Leysdown?).  Close inpection of the papers re the formation of Fairey Aviation, temporarily transferred from the Fleet Air Arm Museum to Southampton’s Special Collection, have revealed the key financial role of F.H.C. Rees, ‘Gentleman’, in establishing a syndicate and then an actual company controlled by himself and CRF, but with with Fairey very much in the driving seat (e.g. squashing Rees’s suggestion that they should be joint managing directors).  I need to find out more about Rees, and ‘DP Cars’ as this was a parallel project linked to the establishment of Fairey Aviation.  The connections between Dunne [‘Captain Douglas’ in the 1915 novel Bealby], Fairey, and H.G. Wells keep growing stronger, and now I discover that CRF’s motto was taken from The History of Mr Polly.  Fairey must have met Wells for the first time at Eastchurch.  More speculative is whether he met the young Dickie Mountbatten on 15 July 1911 when Prince Louis Battenberg, in his capacity as C-in-C The Nore based at Sheerness, took the whole family flying with the most experienced RN pilots.  The Mountbatten papers contain Princess Louise’s family photographs of the summer on Sheppey, including shots of them flying.  If it’s not too solipsistic I find it fascinating that my last biographical subject and my current focus of research might have met for the first time on a hot summer’s day 102 years ago.  Neither Prince Louis Battenberg, as he then was, nor Dick Fairey, could possibly have conceived that one day they would both control long stretches of the River Test, their guestbooks and fishing dairies revealing the same members of the great and the good availing themselves of respective hospitality.