The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

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 must wrestle with the technological challenge that is preparing camera-ready copy.  As regular readers of this blog will have long since ascertained, researching and writing Fairey’s biography has been a challenging and not always happy experience (unhappy largely because of factors unrelated to the task in hand).  Working with his daughter and grand-daughter, Jane Tennant and Esther Bellamy, was always a pleasurable and rewarding experience – getting to know Jane, Esther, and their extended family has been a privilege and a real pleasure for Mary and myself.  Unless there is a dramatic change of plan the book will be published by I.B. Tauris early in 2018.  I anticipate the launch party, hosted by the Fairey family, will be a grand affair (the RAF Club would be an ideal venue), but all that is in the future.  For the present it’s time to thank the modest readership of this blog, and to sign off.  It’s not the first time in this blog that I’ve quoted the Grateful Dead – what a long strange trip it’s been…

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 Sir Richard Fairey’s life I noted that, like Evelyn Waugh, he felt that he lived in an occupied country so long as Labour remained in power.  His most hair-raising views re ‘the socialists’ he wisely kept to himself, censoring first drafts of speeches in the interest of discretion and good business.  CRF encouraged Vinson, his deputy chairman, to contest Hayes and Harlington as the Conservative candidate in the 1950 general election.  This was the company constituency, so one can imagine the sense of disappointment in the boardroom when, contrary to the swing against the party elsewhere in the country, Labour took the seat.  Since 1950 the Labour Party has held Hayes and Harlington except for a brief period in the 198os following the 1983 election.  That contest was catastrophic for Michael Foot’s party, just as the coming general election looks equally ominous for Jeremy Corbyn and his closest acolyte, the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell.  Mention of the latter signals a delicious irony in that a man who Sir Richard were he alive would consider the devil incarnate is member of parliament for…   Hayes and Harlington.

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 listening to a jazz LP, Wynford Marsalis’s debut album to be precise – how on earth did he get Miles’s sidemen, including Herbie Hancock, to play on it?!). In my blog entries over the past two years I have made only oblique reference to the reason why this project has moved forwards in fits and starts. There is no cause to do so any longer – from January 2015 our son, Adam, was terminally ill; and sadly he died just before Christmas. Not surprisingly, writing about Richard Fairey has not been a priority. The Guardian online contains an obituary of Adam, which hopefully will appear in the actual newspaper [http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/13/adam-smith-obituary]. Almost a month has passed since Adam’s death, and the grieving continues, but sooner rather than later I’ll embark on the penultimate chapter, while at the same time concluding my review of the previous chapters with Jane Tennant. Once forward/acknowledgements and concluding chapter are written then the complete draft will be read by a relative of Jane’s whose knowledge of aviation means he can OK or correct technical detail in the book. While the aerospace expert is reading the book, I’ll review family film material now on DVD to see if it contains any information I might want to feed into what is a penultimate iteration. The book will then be ready for the copy editor, and for me to carry out the necessary selection of photographs. But all this depends upon my writing the chapter on Fairey 1945-56, and that in turn depends upon me – at least to a degree – coming to terms with the loss of our darling boy.

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 of ‘Jesus Alone’, the first song on Nick Cave’s critically acclaimed new album, Skeleton Tree, is not somehow a premonition of his son’s sad death at Beachy Head, but a direct reference to the Hawker Hunter which crashed on the A27 during the Shoreham Air Show last year (‘He fell out of the sky, into the River Adur…’)?  Secondly, having a polemic on selection published in this week’s New Statesman (a magazine CRF must surely have loathed), I was prompted to write a second piece, on the appalling harassment of east and central European people, especially Poles, since the Brexit result.  Pressure on space during the conference season means the NS can’t publish the article, hence its appearance here:

In my secondary boys school over half a century ago Nowak and Brzezicki cut lonely figures (names have been changed). Nobody seemed very interested in them, and yet their family histories no doubt reflected the appalling upheaval experienced by all Polish families after August 1939. Nowak and Brzezicki – no first names in those days – have been in my mind a lot recently; my memory of them prompted by the news that over thirty attacks upon Polish people have been reported since the Brexit vote, including the murderous incident in Harlow. Added to this are numerous unreported attacks, and the low-level abuse experienced by Poles of all ages – xenophobic behaviour, triggered by a referendum campaign in the course of which the unacceptable became acceptable, and the intolerable became tolerable. As my former class mates could remind us, for the second time in seventy years the British display deep ingratitude to those eager to be our closest friends and allies.

Britain and France offered scant military aid to their newest ally in September 1939 as Germany invaded Poland from the west, followed by Russia’s arrival in the east. Under the terms of their newly signed pact the two dictatorships occupied respective halves of Poland until Hitler ordered his forces eastwards in June 1942. Remarkably, eighty thousand service personnel avoided capture, a quarter of whom did so again when France fell in June 1940. They joined Polish air crew already in Britain, and sixteen squadrons would serve with the RAF. The most successful Hurricane squadron in the Battle of Britain was Polish. Polish squadrons would fly over Normandy on D-Day. Around twenty thousand served in the Polish Air Force, with a further three thousand in the Polish Navy. Soldiers of the First Army Corps, formed from those who got out of France, finally returned to mainland Europe in the summer of 1944; and that autumn Polish paratroopers covered British airborne forces’ withdrawal from Arnhem.

Those regular soldiers and their families who survived the onslaught of 1939 were transported to Siberia by the Russians, with the NKVD murdering hundreds of officers in the Katyn forest. When in 1943 the Germans revealed how many had died at Katyn, Stalin feigned ignorance, with Roosevelt and Churchill exercising a discreet silence in the interest of alliance real politick. For the same reason neither prime minister or president gave the exiled Polish government in London serious support when Russia allowed German forces to crush the Warsaw uprising in late summer 1944, extended its border with Poland westwards, and facilitated the imposition of a predominantly pro-Soviet regime.  Stalin’s only concession was to release the remnants of the Polish Army, which under General Wladyslaw Anders constituted a formidable fighting force. While Anders’ seventy-thousand men made their way to Palestine, their families endured a long and demanding journey to India. From there many, fearful of returning home, travelled to Britain after the war – their experience of exile and resettlement, as seen through the eyes of his grandmother, is movingly recreated in Matthew Kelly’s Finding Poland. Under Anders’ command the Polish Second Army Corps fought their way across North Africa and up through Italy, sustaining significant losses and impressing all who saw them in action. Nowhere were those losses greater than at Monte Cassino, the monastery south of Rome where today a huge Polish cemetery marks the sacrifice made in achieving victory.

Today the remarkable record of Anders and the Second Army Corps is properly commemorated in Warsaw; but during the Cold War Poland’s Communist government deliberately ignored their exploits, and those of their comrades based in Britain. Nearly two hundred thousand exiled Poles fought from 1939 to 1945, of whom well over ten percent were killed or missing.   In Europe and the Mediterranean the Poles fought bravely under British command. Yet in June 1946 the Labour Government responded feebly when Soviet pressure prevented Polish veterans from participating in London’s splendid and spectacular Victory Parade: Attlee and Bevin treated shabbily a nation still traumatised by the horrors of war and occupation.

My class’s shunning of Nowak and Brzezicki can be seen as teenagers’ instinctive suspicion of the unfamiliar. We like to think that in contemporary, multi-cultural Britain such behaviour is a thing of the past – school must be a safe environment in which all are welcome. Hopefully that can be the case, but what about parental influence beyond the playground? What of the impressionable young children exposed to toxic views at home, where prejudice constitutes the norm? Harassment of anyone settled in Britain, young or old, must be condemned unequivocally. Yet targeting Polish people seems especially obnoxious.  How cruelly ironic that too often those demonising the descendants of such staunch wartime allies should be the same people who see the Brexit result as once again ‘our finest hour.’

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 record that this autumn marks the commencement of the final phase: the penultimate chapter (the last being a conclusion), on CRF’s last decade, 1946-56.  Given that I can’t get to the RAF Museum for some heavy duty archival work until late October, before which I shall be in the Lake District, not a lot of research is occurring at present.  I will, however, read Peter Twiss’s published account of Fairey’s experimental delta-wing jet breaking the world-speed record in 1956, not long before the company’s founder passed away – in this respect Fairey died a happy man.  Unlike Hawker, Fairey’s aircraft were generally not known for their good looks, but the record-breaker was a stunningly beautiful aircraft.  Still much to do, but the end is clearly in sight…

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 staff were overwhelmingly black.  The Fairey family lived in Washington from the summer of 1940 to the start of 1945, for most of that time CRF serving as Director-General of the British Air Commission.  Leaving aside the difference in the racial and ethnic composition between the respective capitals of the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1940s, the contrast between the American and British home fronts was stark – on those occasions during the war when the now Sir Richard Fairey returned home (crossing the Atlantic courtesy of Pan Am Clipper, Douglas Skyliner, and requisitioned liner) the difference between the quality of life enjoyed by Americans and the austerity experienced by the British was striking.  Having written around 17,000 words of my chapter on Fairey’s wartime years, a few more days will see its completion.  Sitting at home in the conservatory with my leg propped up on cushions and crutches by my side, one day after my knee operation, I’m aware that completion will be delayed for a little while.  Nevertheless, it won’t be that long; and then I shall just have to research and write a lengthy chapter on Fairey’s final decade.  Add a conclusion and a forward/acknowledgements, and the manuscript will be finished.  At that point I shall await Jane Tennant completing her reading of each chapter, and spend time at Pittleworth Manor viewing home movies to spot anything relevant. Last Monday I went further up the Test and visited Bossington at the invitation of Sarah Jane Fairey to examine a fascinating collection of photographs and news cuttings previously held at Yeovilton.  At least one of those photographs I envisage featuring on the cover of The Man Who Built The Swordfish, which will now definitely be published by I.B. Tauris.  Onwards and upwards, albeit limping along the way!

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 treasure trove of aircraft and helicopters not on display, with many awaiting refurbishment), then I can begin writing about the soon to be Sir Richard Fairey’s tenure in Washington as deputy and then director of the British Air Commission. In an ideal world I would have spent some time in Washington and Abilene, but my failure to secure funding killed that idea; and in any case personal circumstances mean an extended absence from home is not really feasible. Treading water means more than labouring in the garden, and on Sunday afternoon my wife and I visited Chartwell. We had been before, but in winter when the house is closed. In late December the numbers visiting the gardens are predictably small, but on a Sunday in June with the sun shining Chartwell’s gardens were the place to be. We had made the necessary prior booking for a tour of the house, and at the last the vicarious became an actual experience: rooms familiar from TV documentaries and biopics looked much smaller than when seen on screen. At last the blurred image became a real artefact, allowing the opportunity to study fine detail, from the names listed for a cartoon depiction of anthropomorphic cats attending a late gathering of the Other Club (Duff Cooper seemingly a post-1945 recruit) to the gloriously kitsch glass cockerel given to Clemmie by De Gaulle (“Mon general, merci beaucoup – c’est charmant et parfait pour la salle de dejeuner!”). For such a large house the number of rooms open to the public is quite small, with two or three converted to exhibition areas. While relieved that a tour of the building doesn’t become an endurance test (Broadlands is similarly modest, so no fear of visitor fatigue), one is left slightly dissatisfied. Perhaps this is because, as Mary pointed out, we learned almost nothing about life below stairs, or about family life at Chartwell (such information came from the impressively well-informed guides – lots of references to ‘Winston’ à la Thatcher, but thankfully not in the same fake referential tone). Apparently Randolph was forced to sleep in a very small bedroom, which explains a lot! More about the children would have been welcome as most [sanitised] references were re their adult lives. At least there was an acknowledgement that Clementine didn’t actually like the house, and that ‘friends’ purchased the freehold in 1946 to ease the Churchills’ financial burden. The National Trust would presumably argue that it has to address a huge international audience, and so the priority is to tell the – deliberately heroic – story of Sir Winston Churchill, focusing upon his first premiership and in particular his leadership in 1940, the nation’s ‘finest hour’. Most other key moments in his political career, including his lengthy periods of ministerial office up to May 1929, attract only passing reference, e.g. a recognition that Gallipoli was a disaster, on the basis that Churchill himself acknowledged the severe damage of the Dardanelles to his political career. This reminds us that the great man’s peacetime record rightly attracts considerable criticism [yet he was a great man, if only for his determination to face down Halifax and fight on in 1940 – even if the path to that decision was not as simple and straightforward as popular myth dictates].

The exhibition(s) and the house contents, especially the photographs, provide the informed visitor with a counter narrative, running parallel with a NT meta-narrative rooted in popular mythology and national psyche (‘our island story’ – in fact a very southern English story, rooted in Calder’s ‘Middle England’, and symbolised by Chartwell’s magnificent view across the Kent countryside: ‘This Is England – Fight For It!’). The invisibility of Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax, MacDonald, et al – the ‘Guilty Men’ of appeasement – is unsurprising, and perhaps the same might be said of those generals and admirals whose framed photographs are noticeable by their absence. Churchill never understood the taciturn and cerebral Archie Wavell (but then neither did Attlee, who sacked him as Viceroy), so presumably the portrait was turned to the wall sometime around 1943. Wavell’s successor in New Delhi was Mountbatten, whose absence is striking – was Dickie and Edwina’s photograph placed in a drawer in August 1947 when both were seen as party to the ultimate betrayal, granting India independence? SEAC’s success 1943-5 was rooted in the unlikely partnership Mountbatten forged with Slim. These days ‘Uncle Bill’ is seen by many as Britain’s greatest fighting general in WW2, but his modest character and Churchill’s relative disinterest in the ‘Forgotten Army’ explain Slim’s absence from the walls of Chartwell. Needless to say, from room to room Montgomery is highly visible, this legacy of ego and relentless self-promotion obscuring the visitor to the fact that as CIGS Alan Brooke was at the PM’s side for much of the war; the 1950s controversy over his published diary’s criticism of Churchill obscured a then deferential public to the fact that if anyone won the war for Britain it was ‘Brookie’. If the Chief of the Imperial General Staff is an ever present in Grand Alliance conference photos, so too is the Foreign Secretary; but I found no reference to Eden anywhere in the house.

However, the most striking absence is surely Lloyd George. The personal and working relationship of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill is crucial to our understanding of British politics in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and Richard Toye is not alone in exploring their individual and shared impact on the shape of British society right up to the present day. For all his character flaws, Lloyd George was as successful in peacetime as in time of war. Overall, his record in office is markedly superior to Churchill, the latter very much the junior partner in Asquith’s cabinet despite his elevation to Home Secretary and then First Lord of the Admiralty. With handy ammunition such as the postwar honours scandal, the Tories, quietly encouraged by Labour and the Asquithian Liberals, trashed LG’s reputation after 1922. A self-inflicted wound was shaking hands with Hitler in 1935, fuelling wartime suspicion that Britain as a satellite state of Nazi Germany would have seen Lloyd George play the role of Petain. What’s striking about centennial events re the Great War is the absence of references to the Chancellor of the Exchequer>Minister of Munitions>PM. This winter how publicly and prominently will we mark the formation in December 1916 of the second wartime coalition, with Lloyd George replacing Asquith in Number Ten? Undoubtedly Churchill’s premiership 1940-45 has all but obliterated Lloyd George’s primary place in the national consciousness, as Chartwell so clearly demonstrates. It’s time to redress the balance…

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 note what was taking place in Scotland and the North Sea exactly one hundred years ago today.  With Admiralty code-breakers cognizant of the High Seas Fleet leaving port en masse, Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet sailed out of Scapa Flow to rendezvous with Beatty’s Battle Cruiser Fleet, which had already departed its base at Rosyth.  Today it’s hard to imagine the sight off Orkney and at the mouth of the Firth of Forth as the dreadnoughts under smoke-greyed skies steamed out into open water for what all rightly deemed a date with destiny.  The loss of 6 cruisers, 8 destroyers, and over 6000 men on the night of 31 May-1 June 1916, and Jellicoe’s decision not to turn south and pursue Scheer and Hipper, haunted the Royal Navy for the rest of the war and much of the interwar period – for all the RN’s myriad achievements between 1914 and 1918 it took another world war, and the triumphs of Cunningham, Sommerville, Horton, et al, to restore in the public’s mind the Senior Service’s credentials as a battle-fighting force.  While sceptics like Eric Grove still find it hard to see the outcome of Jutland as a strategic success, this is a widely-held view today, encouraged not unsurprisingly by the Royal Navy itself.  Nick Jellicoe, in Channel 4’s documentary on the battle, defended his grandfather’s decision to maintain the integrity of the Grand Fleet as a guarantee that the Germans would remain trapped in port and subject to crippling blockade; on the British side the villain in the piece was David Beatty, ever ready to rewrite history.  This now mainstream view was advanced in Admiral Lord West’s Radio 4 documentary at the start of the month, and is presumably the basis for Dan Snow’s BBC2 film ‘Battle of Jutland: The Navy’s Bloodiest Day’; I’ve yet to see the latter, but I know it was made in close collaboration with the RN and the National Museum of the Royal Navy.  Nick Jellicoe was a speaker on 21 May at the University of Southampton Lifelong Learning study day I organised and ran, ‘Not Just Jutland: the Royal Navy during the First World War, 1914-18′.  In the morning session Mike Farquarson-Roberts, one-time very senior medical officer and the author of a terrific short history of the RN and WW1, and fellow naval historian Duncan Redford, late of the NMRN, each strongly made the case that from a strategic viewpoint the battle was a victory for the Royal Navy and decisive in terms of the Allies’ eventual victory: it ensured the blockade could be maintained and it reinforced the restricted operations of the German surface fleet given that by 1916 all raiders stationed across the globe two years earlier had been destroyed or neutralised.  Thus Germany was starved into defeat, with Redford unashamedly treating the Western Front as a costly and bloody sideshow to an essentially maritime struggle.  Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.  Yes, the blockade was devastatingly effective, but the Central Powers could have fought on for an awful lot longer without the eastern and south-eastern – and even the Italian – fronts; and significantly, by the summer and autumn of 1918 Germany was demonstrably losing the war in the west.  Critically, had there not been resistance in both western and eastern theatres in the first place, most notably the French holding the line on the Marne (and the same for the BEF at Amiens in April 1918), then the Wilhelmine Reich and its allies would have secured control across the whole of the European land mass at little cost, leaving the Central Powers able to exploit continental resources and thus withstand maritime blockade (as was the case for Hitler’s Germany following its 1940 triumph in the west).  I suspect Duncan had his tongue at least partly in his cheek when dismissing the land war, but he was absolutely right to highlight how demonstrably successful the Royal Navy was in every department other than the Trafalgar-style battle the general public had been led to expect would determine the course of the war. The Royal Navy’s embrace of new technology in the decades preceding the First World War, and across the next four years, was remarkable, and nowhere more so than in its projection of naval air power – the RNAS was so far ahead of its military counterpart that it could famously attack Zeppelin sheds before and at Christmas 1914, its partnership with Shorts meaning seaplanes flown at the start of the war were operable at the end in a way in which no RFC ‘stringbag’ could possibly have been.  The RNAS’s capacity for innovation across the course of the conflict was astonishing, witness the combat aircraft and carriers in service at the point when it merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the RAF on 1 April 1918.  Dick Fairey’s story is inseparable from that of the RNAS, as becomes clear in the third chapter of my book.  He had a lot more in common with Beatty than Jellicoe, not least their shared love of fishing and shooting, but I feel confident CRF would have recognised that here was a man not to be trusted: Duncan Redford described the RN’s impressive record 1914-18 as a team triumph, but, as I suggested in my summing up at the end of the study day, it’s hard to see Beatty as a team player – and ironically, if any admiral bears responsible for the unhappy experience of the Fleet Air Arm in the 1920s and 1930s then it is Jellicoe’s successor as C-in-C Grand Fleet and then First Sea Lord.  A further irony is that it took  Beatty’s flag captain at Jutland, Ernle Chatfield, to re-establish the FAA as a credible force late in his tenure as Chief of the Naval Staff [Chatfield was a highly effective FSL, but is overshadowed by his successors Pound and Cunningham as he was head of the RN in time of peace not war].

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 firstly 12-metre Class and secondly a new ‘K-Class’; a file at the National Archives re the action with a U-boat off Bermuda in late 1944 which Fairey’s motor yacht, Evadne, was involved in; and any material at Kew which indicates involvement of my man with security services re the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  Now on to a chapter on 1940-45, for which I have already undertaken quite a lot of research, re CRF’s wartime work in Washington with the British Air Commission.  Then a penultimate chapter on the last decade, and a conclusion.  So, around 120K words written and roughly another 40K to go.  At last, in this unexpectedly long saga, the end is in sight.  After which, back to Mountbatten with Slim in Burma, but that’s another story… 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 firstly 12-metre Class and secondly a new ‘K-Class’; a file at the National Archives re the action with a U-boat off Bermuda in late 1944 which Fairey’s motor yacht, Evadne, was involved in; and any material at Kew which indicates involvement of my man with security services re the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  Now on to a chapter on 1940-45, for which I have already undertaken quite a lot of research, re CRF’s wartime work in Washington with the British Air Commission.  Then a penultimate chapter on the last decade, and a conclusion.  So, around 120K words written and roughly another 40K to go.  At last, in this unexpectedly long saga, the end is in sight.  After which, back to Mountbatten with Slim in Burma, but that’s another story…

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 U-boat off Bermuda in 1944, not long before the requisitioned motor cruiser was returned to CRF. I’ve been writing recently about Evadne’s role from 1931 to 1939 as Fairey’s luxury floating hotel, second office, and support vessel for his racing yachts, whether 12 metre (Modesty, Flica, and Eviane) or J Class (Shamrock V). The original intention was to cover sailing in the penultimate chapter, along with field sports and conservation, but CRF raced only from 1927 to the eve of the Second World War, and so the relevant section fits more neatly within chapter 7, on the second half of the 1930s. The latter chapter remains work in progress as I still have to write about my man’s private life from the moment when he married for the second time and again became a father – of John and Jane. Chapter 8 on the Second World War, and chapter 9 on the last ten years of Fairey’s life, will lead me to the conclusion some time next year – so will end the most interrupted project I have ever worked on: is there at last light at the end of the wind tunnel? Mention of John Fairey reminds me that I also have to visit Bossington to consult files held there re sailing. The friendly rivalry between Fairey and Tommy Sopwith, later neighbours in the Test Valley, is a remarkable story, with TOMS able to launch a second challenge for the America’s Cup in 1937, with Endeavour II, because twice CRF failed to convince the New York Yacht Club to race yachts smaller than the J Class preferred by the Americans – I know that in 1935-6 Fairey tried to launch a challenge based on a wholly new yacht – the ‘K Class’ – fifty tons lighter than the huge J Class yachts, but the present owner of Flica claims that in 1933 he tried to secure the NYYC’s agreement to race ‘second rule’ 12 metre yachts at a time when Flica and her crew were arguably the most successful combination either side of the Atlantic. I have been trying to contact America’s Cup historian, Bob Fisher, who lives just outside Lymington, to find out more but so far been unsuccessful – clearly the friendly phone call is required. I had no idea until starting this research that ’12 metre’ refers not to the length of the boat but a complex formula for determining its size, and the algorithm periodically changes – the 1934 season saw the introduction of the ‘third rule’, which had important consequences for Fairey. What those consequences were, the book will reveal.