Colindale to Quiberon to Colindale

Two full days working my way through post-WW1 and Washington 1940-45 Fairey Company papers late in August left me quietly satisfied at how much I had uncovered prior to going on holiday for the first two weeks of this month.  I shall be back at Colindale next week working through some bulky boxes I couldn’t get to before 5.00pm on the second day.  By next week the boxes I had identified at Yeovilton will have been transferred to Southampton thanks yet again to the energy and kindness of the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s archivist Barbara Gilbert.  Thus I have gone from early summer concern about a paucity of material for the second half of the Great War and the early 1920s to an embarrassment of riches.  Having said that, there is still very little on CRF’s personal life, and I need to turn to Jane Tennant for advice here on alternative paths to pursue.  What’s clear from the file of correspondence at Colindale covering Fairey’s close friendship with Moore-B rabazon [Lord Brabazon] is how much work will be required for the chapter on CRF’s hinterland – not just the sailing, but the politics of river ownership in the 1940s and early 1950s.  On holiday on the Quiberon peninsula I completely switched off from Sir Richard Fairey and – having just finished before leaving Graham Farmelo’s Churchill and the Bomb [as to be expected VG on the physicists, but the treatment of WSC was a bit thin, being too dependent on obvious secondary sources such as Roy Jenkins’ biography] – modern British history; notwithstanding my pleasure in reading the posthumous and skilfully edited final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Hook of Holland to Constantinople trilogy (great stuff, but also screaming out for parody – perhaps the basis for a future blog).  I worked my through all 706 pages of Claudio Pavone’s belatedly translated study of the Italian resistance 1943-45: at times a heavy-handed translation made reading this astonishing piece piece of scholarship hard work, but the effort was well worth it.  I thought I knew a reasonable amount about Italy’s civil war, but Pavone’s book provided a wholly fresh perspective, not least in appreciating the spread and intensity of truly horrific violence – here we are rightly condemning the bloody and indiscriminate acts of ISIS, and yet seventy years ago in an ostensibly ‘civilised’ country in western Europe remarkably similar acts of savagery were taking place on a daily basis, i.e. we should be careful in being so superior and judgemental, and at least try to understand the mentality of the people whose depth of belief is so deep that they can effortlessly justify the unjustifiable.