Adrian Smith

It totals 175,890 words, and it took four years to write, off and on (and a considerable part of those four years was ‘off’), but The Man Who Built The Swordfish: the Life of Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 is finally written. The next stage is compiling the bibliography and selecting the photographs, after which I …

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Apr 21

Almost there…and the news from Hayes and Harlington

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With the tenth chapter written, and despatched to Jane Tennant and Charles Fairey for comments and colour, the end is nigh. In terms of writing what remains is for me to reread chapters 1-10 and then write the conclusion. What a long strange trip it’s been… In writing the chapter on the final decade of …

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Jan 16

The winter interregnum

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Nothing has happened on the book other than my drafting a forward, which is a bit like buying the 45s before buying the record player (dated reference but apposite in an era when vinyl is in the ascendant – like the Ryan Gosling character in the wonderful La La Land, I am as I type …

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Sep 26

Airmen, from Sussex and Poland

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As I’m treading water before diving down into the research and writing of my chapter on the final decade of Sir Richard Fairey’s life, here is an observation and then a series of observations linked through aviation to the project but with no other connections. Firstly, am I alone in thinking that the opening lines …

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Sep 20

The final straight…

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Having finished my [very long] chapter on Fairey and the Second World War in mid-August, and sent it out to members of the Fairey family and specialists in the field for comment, my involvement in the project has been fairly low key, i.e. other commitments have prevailed. So this constitutes a brief blog, simply to …

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Aug 16

Wartime Washington – a bourgeois town

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Leadbelly found wartime Washington a bourgeois town in his 1938 song of the same name – in DC at the invitation of folklorist Alan Lomax, he and his wife were repeatedly refused hotel accommodation. How ironic given that well over thirty per cent of the federal capital’s population was African American, and service and support …

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Jun 10

A Sunday spent at Chartwell

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Until I spend a day in the archives at the Fleet Air Arm Museum next week I’m treading water; with the bulk of Fairey’s postwar papers to be found at the RAF Museum this will be my last trip to Yeovilton. Once I have looked at the remaining boxes in the FAAM’s Cobham Hall (a …

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Jun 10

Today 100 years ago the Grand Fleet leaves Scapa Flow and Rosyth …

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Having written so much about naval aviation in the course of writing The Man Who Built the Swordfish: Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 (still a working title, but the title given to the most likely publisher – with a much belated submission date of this time next year), it would be remiss of me not to …

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Apr 15

Goodbye to the Devil’s Decade

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Finally the two big chapters on the 1930s – surely Fairey’s decade – are in near final form. All I need to do is consult: the files on sailing at Bossington, not least so I can see CRF’s correspondence with the New York Yacht Club in 1933 and 1935-7 re switching from the J-Class to …

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Mar 26

12 metre yachts aren’t twelve metres, and is there light at the end of the wind tunnel?

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I still haven’t been to Kew to discover to what extent, if any, Fairey had dealings with the security services regarding Russia. Clearly a day at the National Archives has to be a priority after Easter, if only because I need to check the Admiralty account of HMS Evadne’s involvement in the sinking of a …

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