The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

Let’s start with a shameless plug for the University’s Special Collections, the staff of which, ably led by Karen Robson, and before her Chris Woolgar, have been incredibly helpful in the writing of both my Mountbatten and Fairey biographies.  This Thursday of course marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.  As well as mounting an exhibition in the University’s Hartley Library, colleagues in the Special Collections have drawn on the Wellington archive in creating a MOOC on the Duke  and the Battle of Waterloo.  This commenced on 8 June, and across three weeks is covering events from the French Revolution to Napoleon’s final defeat, embracing the battle’s significance and commemoration. To enrol go to: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/wellington-and-waterloo/

18 June is full of significance for Anglo-French relations.  This Thursday marks another anniversary, which I suspect we as a nation prefer to ignore: it’s the eightieth anniversary of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, the signing of which infuriated the French as they had no advance warning of the Anglo-Saxons coming together again exactly 120 years after Blucher joined the Duke.  In France 18 June is an iconic date because in 1940 General de Gaulle broadcast across the Channel his famous call to arms, urging the nation to continue the struggle despite immediate defeat by the Germans.  At that time most people in France did not feel generous towards the British, believing them to have run away via Dunkirk.  Thus in 1947 Bevin and the Foreign Office displayed a degree of insensitivity in reforging the entente courtesy of the Treaty of Dunkirk.  Ah, albion perfide …

Richard Fairey was never a great admirer of the French, in contrast to his enthusiastic view of the Belgians (as refugees they worked in his factory during the First World War, and in the early 1930s welcomed the establishment of Fairey Aviation’s spin-off company in Belgium).  I have recently drafted a lengthy reflection on ‘Fairey the man’ and look forward to advice and amendment from the family.  Having spent a day last week at the RAF Museum I now await the transfer of numerous boxes of papers from the Fleet Air Arm Museum to the Special Collections, so I can immerse myself fully in research on the 1930s.  Over half the book is now written, and despite all the delays and upheavals I am still working on 2017 for publication.

There are various spin-offs of course, and last Saturday I attended a conference in Oxford on ‘Physicists and the Great War’, organised by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics.  My lecture was on  ‘Warfare and Wind Tunnel: Engineers, Physicists, and the Evolution of Combat Aircraft, 1914-1918’, and I was please with the way my remarks complemented and reinforced points made by David Edgerton in his plenary address on myths and histories regarding scientists and the First World War.  The text of my talk follows:

Introduction – the overall picture

Let’s start with snapshots in the sky from the first and the last Christmas Day of the Great War.  Snapshot number one: on 25 December 1914, as elements of the British Expeditionary Force enjoyed a brief respite from the fighting, the Royal Naval Air Service mounted a truly audacious raid on the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven.  Snapshot number two: in northern France on 25 December 1917 40 Squadron’s ‘Mick’ Mannock and 56 Squadron’s James McCudden insisted their flights take the battle to the enemy the same as on any other day.  Aces and engineers, both men needed every opportunity to fine tune the power unit and armament of the SE5a, the key to the Royal Flying Corps [from 1 April 1918 the RAF] securing a definitive aeronautical advantage over the enemy: ultimately the British triumphed in the great air war of 1917-18 because of quantity and quality.

Consider first quantity.  The growth of the British aircraft industry in the course of the First World War is truly remarkable, not least the dramatic acceleration in production across the final two years of the conflict: monthly output at the start of 1917 was still only 122 machines, and yet by the time of the Armistice a workforce of around 300,000 had boosted that figure to a remarkable 2,688.  The RAF lost no less than 7,000 aircraft in the last ten months of the war, and yet operational squadrons enjoyed a steady stream of replacements.  Long-serving ground crews found the supply of spares equally reliable, enabling frontline serviceability above 85 per cent. Production on this scale powerfully demonstrated Britain’s belated embrace of ‘industrial war’, with large, suitably skilled design teams facilitating a vital balance of quantity and quality.

As for quality, compare a fighter aircraft, or scout, such as the SE5a – being flown that Christmas Day morning in 1917 at a maximum cruising height of 20,000 feet – with the mechanically simple machines taken to France in the late summer of 1914.  The rate of change in aviation across the course of the First World War was determined by a technological imperative, with one side gaining a huge and deeply destructive advantage until the other caught up and then secured its own advantage as a consequence of fresh innovation, and so on.

Yes, poorly performing machines still somehow survived the prototype stage and went into production, feeding a voracious appetite for combat aircraft.  Yet despite these death traps reaching the front line, a Darwinian process of procurement prioritised the production of planes tested in the air war taking place day after day in the skies above Picardy, Pavia, and Palestine – this was in every sense a global conflagration, with RFC and RNAS squadrons deployed en masse far beyond the Western Front.  Aircraft like the Sopwith Camel and SE5a were proven killing machines, especially when flown by pilots and technicians like Mannock and McCudden.

Yet this familiar story of the war in the air warrants qualification.  Remember that first defiant demonstration of maritime air power simultaneous with the ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914?  If aircraft were so primitive at the start of the war then how were the Admiralty’s aviators capable of launching an attack on the far side of the North Sea?

The reality was that not all aircraft were as unsophisticated as those with which the RFC crossed the Channel at the onset of the war.  Seven of the RNAS aircraft that attempted to bomb the Cuxhaven base were built by Short Brothers.  These seaplanes’ relative sophistication was the result of a close working relationship between the north Kent company and the Admiralty’s Air Department.  Pre-war the British Army never established parallel partnerships with manufacturers, relying heavily upon the publicly-funded Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough.  ‘The Factory’ as it was known would flourish in wartime, but it always had an unhappy relationship with pioneering manufacturers like Fairey or Handley Page.  Farnborough’s critics pointed to the type of aircraft flown by Royal Navy pilots as evidence that entrepreneurial aviation pioneers like the Short brothers and Tommy Sopwith were more innovative designers than their state-sponsored counterparts.

So what does this important rejoinder to the grand narrative concerning British combat aircraft in the Great War have to do with physicists?

Well, another familiar element when telling the story of British aviation across the First World War is the portrayal of applied and theoretical scientists making a significant contribution to research and development between 1914 and 1918 before they return to the laboratory and the lecture theatre.  Thus physicists of various varieties and their colleagues in pure and applied maths are mobilised in order to aid the war effort, and collectively they act as a catalyst.  In other words, their individual or joint experimentation makes a crucial contribution to wartime aeronautics and a revolution in aircraft design, but it’s unique to the four years of conflict.  Furthermore, the same phenomenon will occur again, on an even vaster scale, only a quarter of a century later.

I want to suggest that, while clearly plentiful examples exist of physicists who made a significant impact for the duration of the conflict, there was also a strong thread of continuity – that the pioneering generation of designers were from the outset keen to utilise university-educated scientists and mathematicians, not least because their own training as engineers had left them heavily indebted to physics and physicists.  Tyro industrialists like Geoffrey de Havilland, Fred Handley-Page, and Richard Fairey were as comfortable on the shop floor as in the boardroom, and as adept at reading a spreadsheet as a blueprint.  This was a unique generation of technicians driven by enterprise, who by dint of youth and education had a distinctly modern attitude concerning the contribution of science to making machines and making money.  This respect was reciprocated by graduates of Cambridge, Imperial, Manchester, etc. who were encouraged by practical-minded tutors to embrace and enter what later would be labelled the ‘sunrise industries’.  Readers of David Edgerton will be familiar with an industrial-academy inter-relationship very different from the negative view of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain advanced by the ‘declinists’ like Corelli Barnett.  Barnett downgraded the calibre of science and technology tuition in Britain, while applauding comparable centres of excellence in the Wilhelmine Empire.  As we shall see, British universities’ curricula of both pure and applied science contrasted favourably with the narrow focus upon engineering maintained in most of Germany’s technical high schools.

Aircraft design rooted in a firm theoretical understanding

The fascination with heavier-than-air manned flight dates back to Icarus, with the Wright brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903 having a long and complex back story.  On both sides of the Atlantic and of the Channel the science of aeronautics was formalised and institutionalised in the second half of the nineteenth century, with global telecommunications facilitating a fertile exchange of ideas.  Not surprisingly, engineers rooted their experimental designs in hard science – a solid grounding in physics and mechanics was a prerequisite.

Furthermore, they were adamant that their successors inherited the same intellectual equipment.  Thus the autodidact Horace Short, a mathematical genius and co-founder of Short Brothers, insisted that the first cohort of Royal Navy pilots trained by his company should fly by day and at night study the science of flight to a level testing of the brightest physics graduate.  Nor were the founding fathers of the Fleet Air Arm unique in their impressive scientific credentials given that several wartime recruits to the RNAS had studied engineering at Cambridge under the supervision of Bertram Hopkinson.  Professor Hopkinson made sure his students in Mechanical Sciences secured a solid grounding in technical design and assembly.  He encouraged undergraduates to spend their summer vacation at focal points for Edwardian aviation like the Isle of Sheppey.

A similar insistence on practical experimentation rooted in rigorous calculation and computation was the norm at Manchester University, where mathematicians and physicists mounted ambitious programmes of experimental aerodynamics.  Their preoccupation with wing design later extended to hydrodynamics, with Manchester and Farnborough jointly modelling optimum seaplane performance at take-off and landing – and sharing their calculations with the cerebral seaplane manufacturer Horace Short.  Manchester’s most distinguished physicist, Ernest Petavel, combined a chair in engineering with a pilot’s certificate, suitable credentials for later in his career rebuilding the National Physical Laboratory’s first wind tunnels.

Clearly the aviation industry in Britain on the eve of the Great War was handicapped by mutual suspicion between the public and private sectors.  Yet there was also a surprising degree of communication between the academics, the engineer entrepreneurs, the service ministries, and the fledgling state-funded institutions, notably the Royal Aircraft Factory and the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex.  This was not an easy relationship, and Churchill’s Admiralty was crucial to fostering cooperation; but it ensured that, contrary to popular assumption, the British aircraft industry could boast a modest infrastructure at the onset of war.  This needs immediate qualification, as a credible aero-engine industry scarcely existed, and the lack of reliable high performance power units remained a major brake on the British war effort until the early months of 1918.

These engineer entrepreneurs were young men reaching their creative peak at the very moment aeronautics accelerated away from the rudimentary technology that had lifted the Wright brothers off the ground in December 1903.  Inspired by Horace Short and his siblings, the most talented of this first generation of aircraft manufacturers – men like T.O.M. Sopwith and A.V. Roe – first of all met the unprecedented demands of ‘industrial war’, and then survived the rude shock of peacetime retrenchment.  They were products of a late Victorian middle-class that placed a premium on manufacturing and on commerce.  These were mechanical polymaths, stripping down and rebuilding cars and motorcycles before moving on to balloons and aeroplanes.  Resisting the narrow specialism of the varsity graduate, the likes of Geoffrey de Havilland or Dick Fairey looked to municipal technical colleges and polytechnics for a thorough grounding in all aspects of applied science and mathematics, not least mechanics.  They were comfortable with physics and unfazed by scientific theory, but by dint of training and direct experience were highly practical.  Whether at the drawing board or on the shop floor they were quintessential problem-solvers, as adept with a torque wrench as a slide-rule.  They understood the dynamics of flight but saw ab initio research as an inductive and applied process requiring hard graft on the runway and in the engine shed.  The quality of their education – several key figures studied under the eminent physicist Silvanus Thompson at Finsbury Technical College – ensured an equal partnership when working with graduate scientists and mathematicians.

For example, Richard Fairey was an intuitive ‘stress man’: he shed excess weight from a machine by a systematic identification of key stress points, which in turn ensured the precise deployment of struts and wire, to optimal effect. Most ‘stress men’ boasted maths degrees, like Farnborough’s Edward Busk whose cutting-edge experimentation in inherent stability was cut short by a fatal air crash.  Fairey’s adeptness in the complex process of countering and minimising stress depended heavily on the published calculations of Harris Booth, another ‘hands on’ graduate of the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Cambridge.  Booth was at that time engaged in theoretical work on stress at the National Physical Laboratory.

Busk and Booth signalled the future – a largely graduate industry where the complexity of the technology demanded specialist expertise available only within select institutions (symbolised by Imperial College’s expansion in the 1920s, partly at the expense of Finsbury Technical College).  What’s striking is how long this took to come about, with the first generation of aircraft manufacturers still key players at the dawn of the jet age, and beyond.  Nevertheless graduate scientists – a number of them physicists – were contributing to aircraft design and manufacture before August 1914; and most of them would continue to do so after the war, assuming their company survived a collapse in Air Ministry orders.

Clearly there is continuity; and yet it’s worth noting that the wartime contribution of highly qualified applied scientists – in 1914-18 and again in 1939-45 – signalled a belated reconstitution of the British aerospace industry in the final third of the twentieth century.

Physicists go to war, 1915-18

Before focusing upon Farnborough it’s important to acknowledge the contribution of the National Physical Laboratory.  This hothouse of research in Teddington was a natural home for physicists throughout the war.  Its standing as a centre of scholarship rested to a considerable degree on the outstanding leadership displayed by its first two directors, both of whom were passionate about the science of flight.

The NPL’s founding father, Sir Richard Glazebrook, had established his reputation at the Cavendish Laboratory, and was a pillar of the scientific establishment even before he took up his new post.  Before and after launching the Laboratory in 1899 he secured just about every honour and appointment open to him.  He stepped down in 1919, and after a brief return to Cambridge, established aeronautics as a flagship department at Imperial.

Sir Ernest Petavel’s experimental work on wings at Manchester has already been noted.  An interest in the NPL began with his appointment as a board member in 1911.  Four years later he was appointed chairman of the Aerodynamics Advisory Committee, with sceptical manufacturers like Fairey noting his credentials as an experienced pilot.  Petavel now had a presence inside Whitehall, and in September 1919 he was the Air Ministry’s natural candidate to succeed Glazebrook.  Across the interwar period Petavel modernised the National Physical Laboratory’s site in south London, while at the same time consolidating its reputation for fostering both blue skies and applied research, e.g. Watson Watt’s work on radar.  The NPL had attracted bright young men – sadly no women – because it quickly attracted credibility within the scientific community.  Temporary recruits’ wartime acquaintance with the establishment consolidated the NPL’s reputation; and yet in terms of the popular consciousness it has never enjoyed the same high profile as the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the new name of ‘The Factory’ from 1918.

Not that the NPL and Farnborough worked in isolation.  For example, the Cambridge mathematician David Pinsent, travelling companion of Wittgenstein and dedicatee of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, spent the second half of the war based at the National Physical Laboratory; but his programme of research was conducted at Farnborough.  Pinsent’s test flights in the skies above north Hampshire became ever more hazardous, and finally on 8 May 1918 he was killed.  Pinsent was a late recruit, as the majority of mathematicians and scientists based at the NPL and the Royal Aircraft Factory were recruited in the spring of 1915.  Richard Glazebrook’s standing within the Royal Society, the Physics Institute, etc. gave him an encyclopaedic knowledge of both established and up and coming talent.

In the course of the war future policy-makers Henry Tizard and Frederick Lindemann consolidated their reputations as physicists adept at addressing the aforementioned technological imperative of meeting every challenge the enemy threw down.  This was evident from the speed with which Lindemann and his colleagues gained their pilot’s certificates once civilians at ‘The Factory’ were granted permission to fly in August 1916.  Lindemann and Tizard survived their tenure as test pilots, both men becoming rival power-brokers in the course of the Second World War.  Until August 1914 Lindemann – the future Lord Cherwell – had been researching ultra-low temperatures at the University of Berlin, when not playing tennis with the Kaiser at Potsdam.  After the war he secured a chair at Oxford, and headed the Clarendon Laboratory, largely on the recommendation of Tizard, who in contemporary parlance ‘bigged up’ Lindemann’s theoretical solution to the problem of aircraft spin.  Lindemann’s postwar career confirmed that he was not in the first rank of nuclear physicists, whereas someone who certainly was had died at the Dardanelles.  This was H.G.J. Moseley, whose work on the atomic numbers of elements in its own quiet way revolutionised chemistry.  The fact that no authority intervened to stop Henry Moseley joining the Army demonstrates how early in the conflict the urgent need to expand munitions production saw chemists and not physicists prioritised as vital to the war effort.

Henry Tizard had similarly volunteered at the start of the war.  However, in June 1915 he was transferred to the RFC as an experimental equipment officer, with a remit to improve the quality of the standard bombsight.  Once qualified to fly Tizard became a test pilot.  In 1917 Bertram Hopkinson – seconded from Cambridge to Whitehall to mastermind aeronautic research – made his protégé chief scientific officer at the newly established experimental station at Martlesham, Suffolk.  Tizard led by example, not least when monitoring aircraft performance in hazardous conditions.  His success in forging a harmonious team of civilian scientists and military personnel saw him join Hopkinson at the Air Ministry in 1918.  Later that year Tizard took over as controller of the R and D programme when Hopkinson died in an air crash.

Frederick Lindemann’s exploits at Farnborough, most famously his systematic spinning of notoriously unstable aeroplanes, may have been exaggerated.  Nevertheless, the German Germanophobe’s reports on auto-rotation were invaluable, and speedily transmitted to manufacturers such as the Short brothers, Sopwith, and Richard Fairey.  The contrast with relaxed attitudes pre-war to the sharing of information was stark.  In peacetime the transmission of knowledge was a fairly haphazard affair; but long before the establishment of the Air Ministry both the Admiralty and the War Office ensured a systematic passage of technical data from the research establishments to the manufacturers.  Similarly, the plane makers and the front line squadrons on the Western Front were encouraged to provide reciprocal feedback.  For example, the SE5a became a formidable piece of kit because collective dissatisfaction with the original marque, both at home and in the front line, prompted urgent remedial action.  Well before the war senior service personnel such as the RFC’s David Henderson and Frederick Sykes, or the RNAS’s Murray Sueter, had a healthy respect for the boffins – if Sir Hugh Trenchard, inaugural Chief of the Air Staff, received trenchant criticism when inspecting squadrons in France and Belgium then he prioritised the briefing of relevant bodies back home.

Conclusion

Aeronautics was a uniquely twentieth century science, and the exciting new technology bore witness to this.  The RAF’s very public respect for its engineers was a key element in projecting the fledgling service as an excitingly modern phenomenon.  Unsurprisingly, most of these engineers had a firm grounding in physics and mechanics, or were by dint of academic qualification physicists.  Physicists per se were mobilised from 1915 to consolidate and expand an already vibrant programme of testing and experimentation, primarily at Farnborough and the National Physical Laboratory.  Yet within the embryonic aircraft industry there were already experts in aerodynamics and hydrodynamics for whom physics had constituted a major component of their degree.  Designers without degrees in natural or mechanical sciences had invariably studied physics and mechanics at an advanced level, courtesy of well qualified staff at technical colleges such as Finsbury and Crystal Palace – their engineering skills were firmly rooted in scientific principle, and they more than held their own with colleagues boasting a more traditional academic background.  Unique among these pioneers of British aviation were the proto-industrialists, the engineer entrepreneurs who founded those companies which across the last century became household names.  Other than a keen sense of enterprise, common to all of them was a talent for mathematics.  As their personal and company papers confirm, men like Richard Fairey and Geoffrey de Havilland were brilliant at translating theory into practice; and having been educated by Fellows of the Royal Society such as Silvanus Thompson they maintained a healthy respect for hard science.  What the design and development of combat aircraft in the First World War demonstrates is that the contribution of physicists per se was important but not critical, but the contribution of physics as a multi-faceted discipline was absolutely crucial – and, to the credit of all involved, from the boardroom to the shop floor, was seen to be so.

I’m hopeless at remembering Churchill quotes, so don’t ask me the full comment on victory at Alamein.  I can just about remember the post-Barbarossa remark about if Hitler invaded hell – ‘I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons’?  One of my favourites is November 1944 and Eden complains to the PM how hard it is to get Turkey into the war: ‘Tell them Christmas is coming.’  You have to say it in that voice.  My students will all confirm that I’ll take any opportunity to mimic Churchill (no doubt poorly).  I’m also not averse to slipping a Clem impersonation into lectures, but if I’m honest my Attlee voice sounds not that dissimilar from my Monty voice (the same clipped, officer class – although the major had a deep suspicion of generals, with good cause).  Socialist majors are very much in my mind as my 2001 book Mick Mannock, Fighter Pilot: Myth, Life and Politics has just been published in paperback with a fresh preface, to mark the centenary of Edward Mannock’s release from pretty hellish internment in Turkey.  The previous History commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan read the hardback eighteen months ago, and was convinced that if published by Pan at a modest price (almost no production costs of course) then there was a healthy audience waiting to purchase a well researched, previously well received book on flying in the Great War.  At some point over the winter, when I was distracted by family concerns, the book slipped back to Palgrave Macmillan, the academic imprint, and in consequence this near cost-free paperback is priced at an absurd £19.99.  Don’t these people want to sell books?!  I’ve written a plug for the book which hopefully will be in next week’s New Statesman.  In the piece I’ve noted that, had he not been shot down in July 1918, Mannock would probably have been his party’s candidate for Wellingborough in the ‘Coupon Election’.  As Labour won the seat my man would have left the RAF to become an MP, presumably sitting with the ILP’s awkward squad (most of whom had opposed the war, much to Mannock’s disgust).  There must be something about the water in that part of the East Midlands as the current MP is a fully paid-up member of the Tory awkward squad, the arch Euro-sceptic Peter Bone.  While his politics are on the whole a long way from my own I warmed to Bone the more I saw of him on Peter Cockerell’s excellent BBC2 series Inside The Commons.  Presumably Mr Bone (no Rt Hon there I suspect) will be pounding the streets of his constituency this weekend and not partaking of the first weekend of events at the South Bank under the umbrella title of ‘Changing Britain’.  This festival, in which pleasingly David Kynaston has had a big hand, stretches out over the next three weekend.  I was delighted to get a gig at the Royal Festival Hall next Saturday afternoon – the only time I can walk in the steps of Richard Thompson et al.  My first set is as part of a panel on postwar housing (yes, I am indeed nervous about sharing the stage with distinguished architectural and town planning commentators), and the second set is chairing a ‘conversation’ between Kathleen Burk and Vernon Bogdanor on British foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s (that’s more like performing the familiar hits, to strain the metaphor).  I have a day or two to remind myself about housing in postwar Britain as I have just finished chapter 5 of the Fairey biography (with material pushed into chapter 6, on the 1930s).  This was a blockbuster (19K words – ouch!), which covered the whole of an eventful 1920s.  I reckon, with about 80K words under my belt that I am over the hump (an unfortunate phrase, reminding me that Dickie and Bill are together at SEAC screaming out for me to renew telling the Mountbatten story), but there is still a very long way to go, i.e. an equally eventful 1930s, Washington during the war (some of that research under my belt thankfully), and then 1945-56 with a world speed record to smash in CRF’s final months.  So, I’m titling the book The Man Who Built the Swordfish, and yet I have still some way to go before the old ‘stringbag’ actually takes to the air.  No wonder I find myself quoting Churchill in late 1942, ‘buggering on’ indeed!  The chapter I am most looking forward to researching and writing is the one about sailing and fly fishing (based on direct acquaintance with the Test I hope), and Fairey’s myriad activities away from building aircraft.  This includes setting up Fairey Marine after the war; and my thanks to Charles Lawrence for giving me a copy of his beautiful coffee table book on FM, and to Gordon Curry who has lent me a large box full of photographs and other material concerning his dad, who oversaw boat construction at Hamble, and his dad’s boss the ex-RFC/RAF pilot and Fairey director Colin Chichester Smith.  I met Gordon, a neighbour of Charles Fairey, at Pittleworth on Sunday when Mary and I again enjoyed Jane Tennant’s kind hospitality (fittingly for the principal guest, our lunch was curry).  Jane of course is Sir Richard Fairey’s daughter by his second marriage, and as I move closer to events within memory of relatives and friends I shall become ever more dependent upon her advice and her extremely sharp powers of recall.  I doubt if Jane ever met Churchill, but she told me on Sunday that she did meet Beaverbrook (Max and Dick became firm friends from June 1940, but frustratingly no personal correspondence seems to have survived).  When it comes to name dropping, however, Jane’s husband David Tennant can beat them all – he has a clear recollection of Asquith, and Sir Edward Grey was his godfather.  Given that Grey wrote a book about fishing on the Test how fitting that every day his godson can stand on the riverbank, and at least twice a week put on his waders, pick up his rod, and with quiet confidence cast his fly.

To quote the Daily Mirror‘s Cassandra in 1945, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted….  Five weeks ago serious illness (not mine)left me wondering when I would next work on the Fairey biography.  A more stable situation means I have now returned to the project, albeit not being able to devote as much time as I would like.  In consequence I have begun writing chapter 5, on CRF in the 1920s.  I keep fine tuning the previous chapter, which now runs to more than 18,000 words.  A commentary upon the years 1917-22 of such length suggests that treatment of a period twice as long will require not one but two chapters.  So much happened in the history of Fairey Aviation, and its chairman/managing director across the postwar decade that I face a real test of synthesis and succinctness.  The editor at I.B. Tauris, publisher of my last two books and most likely this one, having read chapters 1 to 3 asked for more of Fairey the man.  This seemed to me a justified demand, which chapter 4 starts to address; but what I am writing at present approaches head on.  There is so much I now know about Dick Fairey, and yet so much I still don’t.  For example, I’m fully cognisant of the man devoted to field sports and sailing, but how did he relax when not out in the countryside or on the water?  Did he read much, and if so what?  I know he liked variety theatre, but did he enjoy serious drama?  Did he have an ear for music, and was he a film fan?  Jane Tennant, Fairey’s daughter, is the obvious person to ask about CRF’s domestic hinterland.   Travelling to and from London, and spending so much time waiting around, across the past month and more has left me plenty of time for reading, with David Kynaston’s  Modernity Britain The Shake of the Dice 1959-62 the current volume.  David is now into a period of time for which I have crystal clear memories (probably clearer than my recollection of what happened yesterday); and the same of course applies to the author.  The photographs of starkly contrasting scenes (ultra modern, or industrial landscape no different from thirty years earlier) highlight just how much a world which Ross McKibbin charts as dissolving away by the early 1950s was still very much present ten years later.  Larkin was right in observing the 1950s as a long decade with national awareness of The Beatles in 1962-3 signalling the delayed onset of ‘The Sixties’, whether swinging or not.  Aspirational middle class social mores and ‘standards’, consolidated in the 1950s, were resilient well into the succeeding decade and beyond – in our house swearing constituted a seismic shock, and I was expected to show due deference and respect to the ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ who were my parents’ friends – re the latter, I have passed on to David K my theory that our parents’ generation could no longer expect their offspring to address friends as Mr or Mrs, but were appalled by the notion of our using their first names (incidentally, writing ‘Christian names’ remains my male white middle aged first instinct).  A distinctive mode of youth couture was emerging, but, with the exception of defined social groups such as teddy boys, in a pre-Mod era the dress of young people wasn’t radically different from that of their parents – in Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, as late as 1966 footage shot by DA Pennebaker outside provincial venues for the ‘Judas’ tour reveal young people dressing in a surprisingly conservative fashion.

Further non-fiction reading has included Frank Ledgwidge’s Investment in Blood, as excoriating re British involvement in Helmand Province as Losing Small Wars was re the British presence in Basra, and Gregoire Chamayou’s brilliant philosophical and juridical commentary upon American military deployment of UAVs, Drone Theory, which should be required reading for every member of the Obama administration. Also ticked off the list is Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk – many readers, more articulate and insightful than me, have commented on how brilliant this book is; so suffice it for me to say that they’re right.  Before my world was turned upside down on 11 January I had read Marcus O’Dair’s life of Robert Wyatt, Different Every Time.  Apart from prompting me to revisit the great man’s masterpiece Rock Bottom as well as classics such as ‘Shipbuilding’ (a definite desert island disc), it left me reflecting upon Canterbury in its immediate post- Wilde Flowers>Soft Machine/Caravan (the latter remaining home town boys) era at the start of the 1970s.  O’Dair argues persuasively that the rebellious Wyatt, with his Bohemian domestic background, was atypical when compared with Simon Langton Boys’ nice polite sixthformers like Mike Ratledge and the Hopper brothers.  In other words, Canterbury in the 1960s wasn’t some sort of proto-hippy centre of the counter culture down the motorway from the swinging metropolis (an image that crossed the Atlantic, hence on the West Coast in 1976 one impressionable youth’s astonishment that I had travelled from Canterbury on a musical pilgrimage – why, he asked).  If this sleepy cathedral city ever did acquire a patina of dope-induced cool then it was from the end of the 1960s.  Photos of Kent’s students post-1965 suggest that they were scarcely in the vanguard of change, and the radical politics came later (the Cornwallis sit-in, the presence of the IMG not the International Socialist/SWP as the predominant far left party on campus, etc).  Why did so many UKC graduates remain in Canterbury, with those who eventually left being so reluctant to do so?  I suspect it was not because the city was the embodiment of cool, but because it was safe – a place where everybody knew your name, or at least you were guaranteed to meet someone you knew if ever you wandered down the then tourist-free, pre-pedestrianized High Street.  That seductive blend of youthful radicalism and a feeling of security was a marked feature of Canterbury in the 1970s, and post-graduation affection for east Kent built upon the bonds of student days spent in a college system that was then very much alive.  For all the unattractive nature of packed shopping-mall, tourist dense contemporary Canterbury (no nostalgia, no rose-tinted glasses, no desire these days to live there), the ties that bind – stretching back now over forty years – are astonishingly strong.  When faced with a hugely distressing experience from the start of the year, my wife and I gained comfort and remarkable support from our closest friends and neighbours in Lymington, for which we shall be eternally grateful; but beyond that immediate love and kindness there was the reassuring concern – and boltholes – of friends made in Canterbury all those years ago; all of us sharing a particular kind of camaraderie and solidarity that remains rooted in the formative years that followed our leaving home.  No doubt students all those years ago in York, or Brighton, or wherever, could point to a similar bonding; and yet there was something distinctive about the city Robert Wyatt fled as soon as he could, but in which I lived for over a decade, securing in that time three degrees, a teaching certificate, and most important of all, a partner for life.

Technical problems meant for an extended period of time I was unable to access this blog – and there was so much to comment upon.  Unfortunately, personal circumstances now mean that my focus can not be upon Fairey, or indeed any other academic matters at present.  So, hopefully for not too long a period, I won’t be contributing to my blog.  I trust happier days will enable me to do so later in the year.

On the Fairey front little to report as I sit writing in the studio at the end of the garden (I’m sure we have had the predictable gag in an earlier blog).  I’m almost out of the First World War, although the relevant chapter still requires my writing about CRF’s private life – getting married is scarcely a minor detail worthy only a footnote.  When not at the far end of an increasingly soggy lawn I’m at work undertaking appropriate professorial duties (Southampton’s HE review looming ever larger) or focusing upon Great War centenary activities.  I’m particularly excited about two projects History is launching under the auspices of the AHRC WWI Public Engagement Centre for SE England, based at the University of Kent.  Encouraged by the University of Portsmouth as a formal member of the Centre’s network (Southampton is for want of a better term an associate, notwithstanding our close working relationship with the modern British historians at Kent), we are seeking funding for a joint project with Hampshire Cultural Trust and Southampton Records Office on ‘Thornycroft and the Great War’, and with the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum on ‘The Hampshire Regiment and the Great War’.  The emphasis is on accessibility of material (the Thornycroft archive is huge, covering activities at the company’s Basingstoke and Southampton plants), and on maintaining the WWI momentum through 2016-18.  For the digital exhibition with the RHRM we will organise a pilot project on the Hampshires at Gallipoli [2nd Battalion landed from the Clyde on V Beach on 25 April 1915 – Anzac Day], and I will act as the lead academic for this, working closely with museum curator Col. (Rtd.) Colin Bulleid.  The lead academic for the other project will be Roy Edwards from the University’s newly named Business School.  Roy will do a terrific job – if allowed he would spend Christmas Day trawling his way through a company archive – and in a separate capacity has been extremely helpful to me in understanding how and why Fairey Aviation went through so many incarnations before finally the company was floated as a public joint-stock company in 1929.

Yesterday I received a copy of the Air Power Review, an RAF authorised publication which I must confess that I was unaware of.  Looking at the current issue, and the contents list on the digital archive, I was suitably impressed by the quality of articles.  The journal online linked readers to the Chief of the Air Staff’s annual list of recommended reading, which year on year comprised of pertinent and intellectually challenging literature.  I couldn’t help but notice the presence of work heavily critical of recent operations by the British Army, such as Frank Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars.  Just as in Air Power Review I was struck by the total absence of the RNAS from articles about the air war above the Western Front.  This reminded of my thoroughly enjoyable evening at the Fleet Air Arm’s ‘Taranto Night’ at HMS Excellent in Portsmouth on 14 November 2012, where the entertainment primarily comprised of taking the piss out of the RAF (e.g. two Italians discussing the security of the Taranto harbour: ‘I can guarantee, general, that we are safe from the RAF – there are no four or five star hotels within 400 miles of the port, and no bomber can cover such a distance.’).  Not inter-service rivalry, but I recall a wonderful clash between a veteran’s recollection and a historian attempting an ostensibly accurate account of the same event.  This was at the Edinburgh conference on the Battle of Britain which formed the basis of the Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang edited The Burning Blue: young German academic quotes extensive data re Luftwaffe losses in Poland and France to support his case for RAF command of the skies over Britain; HanEkkehard Bob, squadron leader of 9/JG 54 in mid-1940, strides to the podium and looks down contemptuously at his young fellow countryman – “The RAF?  We never saw them!”.

As so often over the past year I see the project slowed down as a consequence of finding myself stuck in Coventry fulfilling filial duties as my nonagenarian mother recovers from yet another avoidable stay in hospital.  Thus my intention to commence writing last week was thwarted by an urgent summons to Coventry, although at least I completed digesting a couple of memoirs and biographies pertinent to the 1920s.  Awaiting perusal at home is General ‘Hap’  Arnold’s 1949 autobiography, Global Mission, courtesy of inter-library loan (a rare exception to my working rule that somewhere in the county  a branch or store of Hampshire Libraries holds a copy of whichever esoteric work of literature I need to consult – charging just 50p for online reservation and speedy delivery to Lymington Library confirms that this is an amazing service, which for me has over the years drastically reduced my ILL requests via the University Library).   Arnold was a founding father (the founding father?) of the USAAC/F, and eventual USAF, and worked closely with Fairey when he was deputy and then director of the British Air Commission.  There is a signed photograph bearing Arnold’s best wishes to CRF on the mantelpiece at Bossington, but a quick glance at the index of Global Mission suggests no mention of my man in the former chief of staff’s memoirs; more will be revealed once I get home and read the relevant chapters.  To fill my time fruitfully in Coventry I have  been doing my homework ahead of serving as internal examiner for a doctoral thesis on the Liberal Party and Home Rule.  Thus I plucked off the office shelves my long ignored copy of Patricia Jalland’s The Liberals and the Ulster Crisis, based on research undertaken nearly half a century ago and, while still illuminating, showing its age, e.g. although there is the odd quote from the PM’s correspondence with Venetia Stanley, courtesy of Roy Jenkins’ biography of Asquith, there is no apparent knowledget of just how revealing the letters are (as confirmed by the volume Michael Brock edited for OUP some time after Jalland’s book was published).  Jalland lets Asquith off lightly, even if she does draw a direct parallel between his inertia and fatalism as a wartime premier and his earlier handling of the crisis that intensified as the 1911 Parliament Act rendered Home Rule more and more a reality – on the statute book if not in practice.  Thus there is  no mention of indolent country house weekends, and no reference to an incipient drink problem.  Her argument is that the Liberal Government should have accepted a minimalist partition of four NE counties at the start of the legislative process in order not ultimately to surrender control of events to the Unionist opposition, especially Carson’s political and quasi-military power base in Belfast.  This was an administration which, courtesy of Labour’s 42 [?] MPs, enjoyed a working majority in the Commons, and could survive without the active support of the Irish Parliamentary Party – but what if Redmond, Dillon et al felt that they had to vote against an amendment in order not to sustain withering criticism from advocates of outright separatism at home?  Even if the IPP had opposed such an amendment the party’s credibility would have been seriously undermined, and the fact that the Government would be dependent upon Unionist support to secure  such a critical change in the original bill would have provided further ammunition for advocates of total separation.  Would Bonar Law and his Tory MPs have supported such an amendment, but rather smelt blood once Asquith and Augustine Birrell had agreed to such a dramatic reversal of their previously uncompromising position, i.e., with the help of an IPP with nothing to lose secured a successful vote of no confidence in the Commons and defeated a heavily battered (suffragettes, strikes, etc.) Liberal Government in the subsequent election?  This surely was the fear of more astute ministers like Lloyd George and Churchill (and Haldane?), with both men increasingly  sympathetic to the argument that their party’s survival in power demanded accommodation with the Unionists, thereby revealing coalitionist tendencies and an acceptance of six-counties partition long before events in Ulster and on the Dardanelles forced the end of the Liberals’ decade in office.   From an aged and creaking text to a state of the art commentary: my companion volume was Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923, a masterly study of individual and collective disillusion.  In reading such a lively evocation of Edwardian Dublin and the separatist community I was keenly aware of a strong authorial voice, in both the astute and sensitive commentary and the adopted style – anyone who has ever heard Roy Foster speak would have his mellifluous tones lodged firmly in their brain as they progress through the book.  There is thus a characteristic voice, and a characteristic light touch (re Ella Young’s unique journey from ultramontane Dublin to freethinking California: ‘her papers are now divided between Ballymena Library and the Centre for Lesbian, Gay and Transgender History in San Francisco.’)  So my sojourn in Coventry has been rendered more tolerable courtesy of an illuminating and highly enjoyable contribution to a discourse revived in its intensity by the imminence of 2016; with for this particular reader one unexpected consequence, namely the possibility that my wife Mary is a very distant relative of Clonakilty’s Sean Hurley, Michael Collins’ brother-in-law and a ‘martyr’ of the 1916 Easter Rising.  Republican royalty indeed!

Since returning from France in mid-September the amount of time spent in my office can be counted in hours not days.  Study leave may allow some time for relaxed reading and a recharging of intellectual batteries, but in an era of  audit and accountability the onus is upon mining the archival coalface: what will be the outcome(s) of time spent dedicated to active research [I have never understood the origin of that term – what is ‘passive research’?], and how will the work undertaken translate itself ultimately into a constituent element of one’s personal submission to the next Research Excellence Framework (son of RAE)?  It is a truly astonishing – and appalling – fact that for nigh on a year my university has been planning for the 2020 REF, when the results of the 2014 REF will not be released until mid-2014.  This isn’t an indictment of the University of Southampton as within the Russell Group, and indeed Universities UK as a whole, most research-intensive institutions are engaged in similar spreadsheet planning (as in logging names and targets to be closely monitored across the rest of the decade, as was certainly the case in my own faculty last time around).  Happily, I don’t need a far distant research audit to motivate me to spend hours at Kew, Colindale, or in the special collections of Southampton’s Hartley Library.  The latter is where the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s archivist, the ever helpful Barbara Gilbert, deposited the latest tranche of Sir Richard Fairey’s personal papers, including a veritable treasure trove of articles and speeches written across the 1920s and into the early 1930s;  Colindale, once synonymous with the British Newspaper Library (now a forlorn-looking depository standing empty and doubtless awaiting demolition across the road from the Tube station), is now of interest only to those historians aware that the RAF Museum holds a singularly impressive array of aviation-related archives; and Kew is to the District Line what Colindale is to the Northern Line – a far distant repository of official papers, which for me has proved especially illuminating in the serial restructuring of Fairey Aviation across the course of the 1920s.  Thus I have spent considerable time at the National Archives in recent weeks reading Board of Trade and Air Ministry documents re the five voluntary liquidations that took place across the postwar decade, all of which facilitated a raising of capital, a freeing of cash, a strengthening of Fairey’s personal control over the company, and perhaps an avoidance of corporation and excess profits taxes.  I have forwarded my file of notes to a professor of accounting, asking her to advise on why CRF and his solicitor and fellow director C.O. Crisp restructured their enterprise so frequently (in the mid-1920s annually).  Two other points of inquiry (among a myriad of paths to pursue): given that CRF was such a staunch imperialist, and discreet critic of Stanley Baldwin, was his first encounter with Beaverbrook as a supporter of the ‘Empire Crusade’, the 1930-31 abortive challenge to the Tory leadership mounted by’Max’ and Lord Rothermere [the two press barons displaying, ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot’ – Baldwin, courtesy of his cousin Rudyard Kipling]; and did Fairey distance himself from Charles – C.G. – Grey in the 1930s as the editor of The Aeroplane became an admirer of Mosley and associated with members of The Link (like CRF’s early patron, Murray Sueter)?  The focus over the past few weeks has been almost entirely upon Fairey, continuing my twin track research of the period roughly 1917-1929 and 1940-45 when my man served as Deputy and then Director of the British Air Commission..  I have two hefty books on Inter Library Loan re the BAC, so I had better work my way through them, and also reread the postwar chapters of Trippe’s unpublished biography from the 1950s, after which I shall resume writing.  I anticipate two chapters on the latter part of the Great War and the 1920s, but they will be very much first drafts as I need far more on CRF’s private affairs, not least life in Buckinghamshire with the first Mrs Fairey, who judging by her unpaid bills was, as they say in contemporary parlance, high maintenance.  Re what has already been written, I clearly need to revise my remarks re Dawson, Wright, and Nicholl, the Cambridge students and aviators CRF met on Sheppey in 1913 and with whom he forged an extraordinarily close bond (as was the case for the group’s close friend, Crisp, Fairey Aviation’s future attorney and board member); their roles as company directors are pivotal to the telling of the story.  Meanwhile the search for a publisher continues, with a strong sign that I may be returning to an old friend.  Away from Fairey, my involvement in the University’s ‘Great War: Unknown War’ remains considerable, and on the first Sunday in  October I found myself talking to the Friends of St James’s Park about Southampton and Hampshire in the first two years of the war.  The Friends are at the heart of a remarkable lottery-funded heritage project which is a model of urban renewal and community mobilisation – let’s name names, so well done Michaela Lawlor-Levene, the principal driving force!  Last week the Tube sped me across London from Kew to the Mile End Road to hear Peter [Lord] Hennessy give a valedictory lecture on ‘Establishment and Meritocracy’ (the title of a typically readable and contentious accompanying short book) to a sell-out audience at Queen Mary College’s People’s Palace – rock start treatment indeed, and the reception was equally  packed.  I didn’t stay long, but I did have the opportunity to give Peter a present of my original Attlee Memorial  Runners red vest and the shield the AMR won as the only team to enter the 1986 Mid-Wales Marathon – I always thought that, as the club’s founder, he was more entitled to the trophy than me.  Apparently, it will have pride of place in the Hennessy library, so Lymington’s loss is Walthamstow’s gain.

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.

For someone who wrote two theses on a typewriter in the 1970s, relying upon air mail when unable to visit archives in the United States, and at home travelling frequently to a variety of libraries from the LSE to the Economics Faculty at Cambridge [‘You can read Lord Keynes’s papers, but you can’t make notes…’], e-mail and the internet are research boons which I shall never take for granted.  In the course of the day I have: arranged with the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s Barbara Gilbert which boxes of Fairey papers I shall check out in Yeovilton prior to them replacing the  tranche of papers that have been in Southampton for far too long; liased with Cambridge University Library re Fairey’s correspondence with Sir Samuel Hoare and Lord Trenchard [digital copies of the said letters now ordered]; followed up the Cambridge archivist’s advice re letters at Churchill College from CRF to Sir Edward Spears and Sir Leo Amery [nothing of substance, so not ordered]; and ordered from the University of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, a copy in the H.G. Wells archives of a letter CRF sent his hero in November 1927 (I knew of its existence because Wells’ brief reply is among the Fairey papers I have been working my way through in the Special Collections across the past fortnight).  On Radio 4’s Making History yesterday [5 August] Royal Holloway’s Justin Champion, distinguished historian of 17/18th century thought and President-elect of the Historical Association (and briefly a colleague 22 years ago: ‘You tell me what to teach, Adrian, and I’ll teach it…Right, I’ll give the Russian Revolution a shot.’), highlighted the value of digital technology in enabling undergraduates to appreciate the phenomenal range of primary sources available to them; but was rightly wary of social media and computer assisted learning as the principal means of facilitating the transition from A-level to undergraduate History.  Yes, quizzes, etc. have their place, but so too do more traditional forms of ensuring that Year 1 students appreciate the nature of the discipline, and how it is studied at an advanced level – the mobile can’t replace the library, or at least won’t for a long while yet.  It’s no good saying that we have to accommodate the children of a society that no longer places a high premium on reading.  Firstly, because that’s a caricature of contemporary British society; secondly because a large number of young people do read, and those that don’t can be encouraged to appreciate history is a subject which demands breadth and depth of reading; and thirdly, because, however sophisticated the online tools that have been and can be developed to enhance study skills and cultive a keen sense of historiography, by their very nature they can only take the student so far in cultivating a spirit of intellectual inquiry.  As another speaker on Making History pointed out, the formulaic, tick box nature of A-level History has much to answer for, particularly as a whole curriculum can be reduced to a single book (with plentiful illustrations to break up the text, leaving some students overwhelmed when encountering ‘proper’ history books), with publishers and college managers in a shared conspiracy to render these all-embracing texts electronic – we want students from an early age to discover the magic of gathering, assimilating, and interpreting information from a variety of secondary sources (the tactile experience of holding a book!) and the even more exciting experience of direct acquaintance with primary material.  Re the latter, my third year students can access Mass Observation diaries, papers, etc. online, which is brilliant and aptly illustrates how wonderful the internet is, but I also take them to Brighton so that they have the experience of holding those same documents in their hands.  I still get a thrill out of going to Kew and being given the privilege of handling the same documents that were once laid out in the cabinet room at Number 10 or on the Foreign Secretary’s desk – to give one example, when researching my book on ‘Mick’ Mannock, who was interned in Constantinople after Britain and the Ottoman Empire went to war in the autumn of 1914, I pulled out an FO file on plans for control of the Turkish capital should the Gallipoli campaign prove triumphant; there were scribbled comments by Eyre Crowe, and by Sir Edward Grey himself – a man very much in the news again this week.  Grey would no doubt have been happy to abandon the hurly-burly of Carlton Gardens for a solitary sojourn on his beloved River Test, which brings me back to Sir Richard Fairey – in his wartime personal papers, which I was reading last week, time and again he puts aside grave matters of aircraft procurement to focus upon the present state of his adopted river.  Yet again I concluded that, to do the man justice, not only will I need to learn an awful lot more about 12 metre and J-class racing, but I shall also have to soak myself in the technique and folklore of fly fishing.  One hundred years ago last Monday Grey famously stated that the lamps were going out all over Europe and they would not be relit in his lifetime, and in personal terms this was cruelly prescient: even as he spoke his eyesight was already diminishing, and the time would come when he could no longer demonstrate his credentials as an ornithologist, or cast his fly across the clear waters of Hampshire’s premier river. Hello, what’s this?  Blimey, a digital version of the Wells letter has just arrived from Illinois – incredible!

Within the past week the Queen has launched the first of the Royal Navy’s two eye-wateringly expensive aircraft carriers, the Fleet Air Arm’s PR campaign only going amiss when the Americans refused to allow an F35 strike aircraft to fly into the Farnborough Air Show – as on the Clyde, a large scale model was a rather sad substitute for the real thing.  The F35 has an unhappy history to date, and its absence from the UK was another chapter in a familiar story of attempting to build multi-purpose aircraft which attempt to do everything and land up not being especially good at anything.  Still, as previously noted, the Fleet Air Arm, with the return of fixed-wing aircraft creeping ever closer (think well into the next decade), displays a bouyancy and optimism reminiscent of the late 1930s following naval aviation’s return to full autonomy.  The Royal Navy’s scorn for the RAF’s historic claim to control maritime air power was all too evident when on Wednesday I heard the Britannia Royal Naval College’s Philip Grove give a lively and very funny talk on the Royal Naval Air Service as a genuinely innovative force from 4 August 1914 to 31 March 1918 [declaration of war to the eve of the RAF’s formal inception].  The man from Dartmouth was speaking at a three day conference on ‘Anglo-German Naval Arms Race and the First World War at Sea’ organised by the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s Duncan Redford.  Next Wednesday I have to give a talk at a workshop at Kent on ‘Situating Science and Technology in the Great War’, entitled ‘North Kent, the cradle of naval aviation: technological innovation and the Admiralty Air Department before and after August 1914′.  Grove’s talk was delivered with such authority and panache that I couldn’t help thinking he should be going to Canterbury next week and not me.  Having said that, I was able to ask him why he made no mention of the Short brothers’ accomplishments on Sheppey and in Rochester before and during the First World War, pointing out how Horace Short along with Tommy Sopwith were the key figures in realising the ambitions of Murray Sueter and Charles Sansom, Winston Churchill and Prince Louis Battenberg.  I didn’t actually mention Fairey, but would have done in a fuller excahange of ideas.  I probably did talk too much in responding to a Chicago historian’s talk on how the last great German naval law – the 1912 Novelle – influenced British diplomacy towards Germany and France: I suggested that Liberal cabinet ministers other than Churchill, Haldane, and McKenna knew remarkably little about naval technology and strategy given that the ostensible race with Germany (as a concept demolished by Nicholas Rodger in his plenary lecture – how can you have a race when you lack two credible competitors?) was such a salient political issue.  Grey was a fast learner, and Lloyd George when required (to a degree even the PM?), but Asquith’s cabinet was a collection of talented and well-educated men whose interests and expertise largely lay elsewhere – not in the spheres of grand strategy and applied science, especially naval engineering and ordnance.  As pointed out to Professor Rodger no less, I was specifically referring to the Liberal cabinet, and not the Committee of Imperial Defence where, as the great man had pointed out, politicians like Balfour and Esher were extremely knowledgeable.  All this reflects my general beef re academic discussion and media coverage of Britain and the commencement of the First World War, namely that not enough attention is given to the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party in 1914 – as so often in the early decades of the past century, Lloyd George is the key.  Having said that, with regard to naval air power from the Campania to the Queen Elizabeth II, it’s the Welsh wizard’s great partner and rival whose legacy the likes of Philip Grove keep fresh in our minds.  While Churchill is prominent in chapters two and three of the Fairey biography, and will no doubt return on numerous occasions later in the book, he is absent from chapter one, the first draft of which I have sent to family members and to the FAA Museum’s archivist Barbara Gilbert for comment.  Despite three, soon four, conferences, and two sixthform conferences, on the First World War (how many by November 2018?!), I have been able to get into the Hartley Library’s Special Collections, and very belatedly begun reading the second tranche of papers lent from Yeovilton.  While I have found a bulging file on the British Air Commission misfiled (signalling two weeks hard slog working my way through CRF’s 1940-45 correspondence), I have been disappointed by how little archival material I have come across re the period from 1916 to the mid-1920s.  I have checked the Fairey archives’ catalogue, and I didn’t miss anything when selecting boxes with Barbara.  Equally discouraging is the fact that the Fairey Aviation archives at the RAF Museum do not contain very much material for this period.  The newscuttings I am going through at present are very helpful, but I need the depth and breadth of documentary evidence that I could draw upon for chapters two and three.  However, like the Fleet Air Arm, I remain optimistic that sooner or later take off will be achieved, with hopefully the relevant chapter not matching the F35 by spreading itself too thinly.