The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

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.

Before plunging back into 1914 centenary activities I finally had an extended period of work back on Fairey, with a fair old chunk of chapter one now written – my man is just about to commence his premium apprenticeship at Jandus, a company in Holloway that manufactured arc lights under licence from America, with complementary training at Finsbury Technical College – of which more in a later blog.  When not chronicling CRF’s early life (helped by an illuminating conversation with Jane Tennant last Tuesday afternoon), I have contributed to a sixthform conference on the Great War and chaired a session at the impressive international conference organised by my colleague Professor Mark Cornwall: ‘Sarajevo 1914: Spark and Impact’ – scheduled to coincide with the exact centenary of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s fatal visit to Bosnia; and before that delivered my inaugural lecture on the soldier-poet, Keith Douglas – given on the seventieth anniversary of his death south of Bayeux on 9 June 1944.  The lecture spawned an article on Douglas in the New Statesman, and was recorded – for article or recording I suggest turning to Google as shameless self-promotion can only go so far.  All of these activities deserve more extended – and suitably scholarly – comment, but regrettably at this precise moment I don’t have the time.  Can a blog in itself constitute work-in-progress?

Even before getting home from running the marathon in Boston and  then visiting my faculty’s partner institution in Ontario, Huron University College/Western University (a vast campus on the edge of London, a city far larger than I had envisaged located at the very heart of Anglophone Canada), I was aware that my plans for a swift return to Fairey would not materialise.  As well as marking/moderation and fulfilling a couple of magazine commitments, May was taken up with researching and writing a report for the University, thereby negating any prospect of research on CRF’s papers presently on loan from Yeovilton and drafting a preliminary account of my man’s early life (a partially filled framework for chapter 1).  However, apart from two or three WW1 commitments over the next five weeks, belatedly I should be back to Fairey; uninterrupted across the summer through to the end of the year.  Let’s hope that these words do not come to haunt me, as my previous blog clearly has.  Tonight I give my (belated) inaugural lecture, marking the seventieth anniversary today of the death in Normandy of the soldier-poet and memoirist Keith Dougals (captain, Sherwood Rangers/Nottinghamshire Yeomanry).  There is a tie-in article in the current issue of the New Statesman and a podcast of the lecture will eventually be available via the Faculty of Humanities website.  But enough of this shameless self-promotion – I need to put on my fresh shirt, pressed suit, and suitably sombre tie.

Easter and the First World War is for many synonymous with Dublin in 1916, and on a day when Gerry Adams is being held in custody with reference to PSNI inquiries into one of the Provisional IRA’s most notorious killings there is good reason to reflect upon how the centenary of the rising will be marked, both sides of the border.  Easter 1916 is crudely where I am in telling Richard Fairey’s story, but in the wider world attention is focused upon events two years earlier; and across the British archipelago in the spring of 1914 Ireland was very much on people’s mind as the Home Rule crisis appeared to be coming to a head – as a consequence of the 1911 Parliament Act enactment of the third Home Rule bill was imminent, hence the intensification of Unionist protest and outright resistance in Ulster.  Add to the political and sectarian divisions in Ireland the heightened activities of the suffragettes (in popular perception today overshadowing the more widely supported lobbying of the suffragists), the impact upon industrial relations of a larger and more strident labour movement, and the polarisation of Westminster politics in the five years since Lloyd George first introduced his ‘People’s Budget’, and it’s scarcely surprising that events in Europe, particularly tensions in the Balkans, were not in the forefront of people’s minds.  Thus at Easter 1914 Asquith’s Liberal administration, since the two elections of 1910 technically a minority government, was not prioritising foreign policy.  Sir Edward Grey, and his senior officials in the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service, enjoyed a remarkable degree of autonomy.  Critics later criticised the Foreign Secretary for his lack of accountability to the rest of the cabinet, let alone parliament and the wider public, and he does not emerge well from the two studies of the Great War’s origins which I took with me to North America.  As noted in a previous blog, Grey was a respected ornithologist and fly fisherman whose frequent presence on the Test provides an indirect connection with CRF.  He was probably in Scotland for the Easter holiday one hundred years ago, with most of his cabinet colleagues similarly ensconced in country houses the length and breadth of the kingdom.  Sean McMeekin, in July 1914: The Countdown To War, which focuses upon the immediate backdrop to the great powers’ respective declarations of war, criticises the Foreign Office for not recognising the urgency of the situation sooner and for Grey not sending clearer signals to his continental counterparts re Britain’s position: namely crisis resolution, but in the final analysis realising the military commitment to France that had underpinned the entente cordiale since the second Moroccan crisis if not earlier.  That military commitment was not of course evident to the majority of Grey’s cabinet colleagues, hence the increasingly intense debate between senior ministers as the situation in the Balkans moved towards a third war in as many years, but this time embracing the great powers.  The strength of hostility towards Wilhelmine Germany inside the Foreign Office, with piquant irony articulated most forcefully by Eyre Crowe, is examined closely by Christopher Clark in his magisterial The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914, which richly deserves the plaudits bestowed on it by historians of every complexion and opinion.  I have always wanted to give Grey the benefit of the doubt, placing emphasis upon how in the summer of 1914  he saw realisation of the entente‘s secret army and naval commitments to France as an essentially moral obligation.  However, both Clark and McMeekin make clear that, while not sharing Churchill’s eagerness to take on Germany, Grey had a clear conception in his own mind that standing shoulder to shoulder with the Third Republic, even if that meant gritting one’s liberal teeth and fighting alongside tsarist autocracy, had by the second decade of the new century become a key principle of British foreign policy.  In this respect he was at one with the Unionists, and indeed Balfour in opposition remained a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence; but he did not convey this hardening position to most of his cabinet colleagues (although crucially, since his Mansion House speech in July 1911 Lloyd George had been on side – old Radical allies simply didn’t realise this), nor to the Wilhelmstrasse – or some might suggest to elements within the French political elite.  Grey and Asquith, as one time Liberal Imperialists allied in seeking to prevent Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman becoming PM (the ‘Relugas Compact’ of late 1905 failed, to the ultimate benefit of the Liberals when fighting the 1906 election), shared a common cause, even if the Prime Minister probably did not appreciate just how far advanced staff talks with the French were; although clearly he was aware of the French and British navies now concentrating their fleets upon the Mediterranean and the North Sea respectively.  Having said all that, as Niall Ferguson frequently points out, a British declaration of war was by no means inevitable in August 1914.  If only because of what happened across the next four years I have always been open to the case for Britain not going to war, although I can see that a deeply divided Liberal Government would have been forced to resign, and its Unionist successor would have entered the conflict alongside France and Russia on a surge of patriotism up and down the country.  Lloyd George’s resignation would of course have been the ultimate veto, but this did not occur – as was also the case when Gordon Brown supported Tony Blair’s case for invading Iraq in March 2003.  Reading Clark’s astonishingly scholarly study of Balkan power politics across the century preceding the First World War I became increasingly appalled that Britain found itself in August 1914 an ally of a bandit state like Serbia (if you want to understand Serbian nationalism in the contemporary world then read Christopher Clark’s book;  no wonder Milosevic and all the other rogues who terrorised the Balkans for so long – and continue to do so – behave in the way they do given the history of their malevolent ‘nation’).  Similarly, it is hard not to contest McMeekin’s explicit and Clark’s implicit charge that Russia and then France (primarily in the form of President Poincare) bear considerable responsibility for the war not being contained within the south-east of Europe, as Austria-Hungary and then Germany desired.  Finishing The Sleepwalkers is clearly a priority re reading, while for writing I must complete my inaugural lecture.  With the introduction to the second, paperback edition of ‘Mick’ Mannock, Fighter Pilot drafted before Easter, once my thoughts on Keith Douglas are down on paper and ready for delivery on 9 June then I can adopt a twin-track approach to the next stage of the Fairey project: research on the post-1915 papers transferred from Yeovilton to the Hartley Library and commencing the first (in practice third) chapter.  All this against a backdrop of marking and an acceleration in First World War centenary activities – which brings me back to Easter, in that in the week preceding the holiday weekend when I went to Boston for the marathon (3:49:13 incidentally) my colleague Mike Hammond and myself went to Canterbury: at the University of Kent we co-hosted with Professors Mark Connelly and David Welch a two -day conference on ‘The Great War and the Moving Image’.  Mark and in particular David were terrific in organising the event, which I felt was a real success, and my thanks to them for all their hard work – plus of course to the speakers.  This is a blog and not the home of a conference report, so I will say no more except to point out that the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television will at some point in the future publish a special issue based upon the conference proceedings – secure yourself a copy, hopefully in time to read next Easter!

A brief update prior to departing for a week’s R and R in the Lake District.  Unfortunately a looming date with Lake Windermere and an unusually busy week on campus (UG/PG dissertation and essay tutorials, plus assorted other activities) stopped me in my tracks, such that I remain tantalisingly close to completion of my chapter on CRF’s creation of Fairey Aviation in 1915.  Needless to say this was not a solitary enterprise, depending heavily upon close friend Lt Dawson RNAS, a key investor, and Frank Rees, the ambitious wheeler-dealer from East Finchley who endeavoured to orchestrate proceedings but remained always firmly under Fairey’s control.  It’s a complicated story, involving among others Short Brothers and Commodore Murray Sueter at the Admiralty, as well as a group of Belgian refugees available to work in Hayes; but frustratingly it’s not quite told.  As soon as I am back from Ambleside I shall finish off the chapter (around 12000 words, same as its predecessor, and my anticipated average length for every chapter) and complete my British Academy application, recycling material from what is now an unsuccessful bid for a Radcliffe Institute fellowship – a brave attempt, but I had no illusions!  The British Academy application is for funding to visit archives at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, examining the papers of US Treasury official Philip Young, who commenced his high-flying career (including ambassadorships and a stint as Eisenhower’s chief of staff) as secretary of the main US-UK aircraft procurement committee 1940-45, chaired by the British Air Commission’s Sir Richard Fairey (Young married the latter’s widow).  Th BA application will be followed by an internal application for research funding to ensure I have adequate resources to support a fortnight in Washington DC and Kansas.   After submitting the BA bid and finishing chapter 3 I need to focus upon the pre-Easter conference co-organised at the University of Kent, ‘The Great War and the Moving Image’, before leaving for the United States and Canada on Good Friday.  Once back from Boston and London, Ontario then I can combine writing about Fairey’s upbring, and critically his scientific education (part of chapter 1), with examining the papers from Yeovilton on Fairey Aviation in the latter part of the First World War and the early years of peace.  At the same time I need to finish, firstly, the introduction to the second(paperback) edition of my Mannock biography and, secondly, my inaugural lecture marking the seentieth anniversary of Keith Douglas’s death in Normandy. So, gentle reader, a few weeks may pass before the next update, and its accompanying ruminations and reflections.

The BBC continues to mark the commencement of the First World War, and my only explanation for the corporation compressing so many radio and television programmes in to these few weeks is a presumption that no-one would watch in late July/early August.  Alternatively, someone in Broadcasting House was sufficiently prescient as to anticipate a crisis in the Caucasus that has uncomfortable echoes of a great power confrontation in the Balkans a century ago.  Having said that, the conflict that is already a frequent point of reference is not the Great War but the Crimean War, with a fascinating article in last Saturday’s Guardian by Orlando Figes explaining why Crimea is so firmly lodged in the Russian national psyche – Putin apparently has a portrait of Nicholas I in the ante-room leading to his office, and one can see why he draws inspiration from strong czars such as Nicholas, Alexander, and Peter (hapless Nicholas II looms so large in our twentieth-century historical landscape that we too often forget about his powerful predecessors – does Putin see strong Romanov autocrats as his role models rather than Stalin?).  But back to the BBC’s already comprehensive coverage of the First World War – surely this level of intensity can not be maintained for four years, as if so we will all be thoroughly sick of it all by 2018.  I have yet to watch Niall Ferguson’s 90 minutes riposte to Max Hastings’ punchy defence last Tuesday of the Liberal Government’s decision to choose war.  Sir Max, aided by a distinguished set of commentators that included not one but two regius professors (Hew Strachan and Michael Howard), made a telling case re the German Army’s appalling behaviour in Belgium and northern France in the late summer and autumn of 1914 – in the process leaving me eager to visit the rebuilt Louvain, which looked amazing.  I wasn’t so sure of his portrayal of Wilhelmine Germany, or his exaggerated demonisation of the Kaiser, who was a nasty piece of work but not I suspect ‘clinically unsound’, whatever that term means.  Hastings noted that all German men had the vote and the SPD was the largest party in the Reichstage, but insisted that the Social Democrats were an impotent political force; and yet his head nodded furiously when Margaret McMillan suggested the German High Command were eager for war so as to forestall any imminent triumph of social democracy in Germany: either Germany was a paper constitutional monarchy, or it wasn’t.  Overall I felt Hastings, despite one or two wince-making moments (nothing like Paxman episode one!), had a reasonable stab at making the case for war, even though like so many of his ilk he displayed his ignorance of Edwardian Liberalism and projected a two-dimensional picture of Sir Edward Grey (Eyre Crowe if looking down must welcome the fact he never rates a mention – the half-German who a la Lindemann and Mountbatten warns against the Germans on the basis of familial knowledge).   All this discussion provides an appropriate backdrop given that in the chapter I am writing Richard Fairey has reached August 1914 and, unbeknown to his employers at Short Brothers or indeed past commentators, is already planning his own company.  Every crisis is an opportunity, whether Vladimir Putin or Dick Fairey…

Having completed chapter 2 (the final section re Wittgenstein might not have been anticipated by anyone but Ray Monk, professorial colleague and biographer of the great man), and despatched it to various interested parties, not least members of the Fairey family, I am eager to keep the momentum going – do I move straight on to the third chapter, where CRF’s employment at Short Brothers and the onset of war leads to the founding of Fairey Aviation in 1915  (with still only minimal background information re the mysterious C.H. Rees who masterminded the company’s creation), or do I attempt a very tentative first draft of chapter 1, covering Fairey’s family background, education, and early career (with still not enough material re the family’s roots in Huntingdonshire?)?  However, for the moment this decision must be placed on pause as I type this post in Coventry, once again dealing with the aftermath of my very  elderly mother’s brief spell in hospital and insistence upon remaining in her own home – I feel the no-nonsense Sir Charles would have interpreted his filial duties in a much tougher way, and then got on with the business in hand.  Family demands may delay embarking upon the next 12k words, but so too do competing demands at work, not least mapping out future research and lifelong learning projects with Hampshire County Council’s Art Galleries and Museums Service and our partner under the umbrella of Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, the National Museum of the Royal Navy (which, via the Fleet Air Arm Museum, is of course a key element in this project).  Prominent in my mind at present, as mentioned in preceding posts, is Gallipoli; not least because the Dardanelles 1915-16 was the topic of this week’s seminar in my MA module ‘The Empire Strikes Back: British taskforces in the twentieth century’ – most of my class had read all of Peter Hart’s terrific Gallipoli, and were in the mood for demolishing myths.  I hope we assumed a suitably balanced approach to the Anzac creation myth, while noting that for ‘Johnny Turk’ it is even stronger given the commanding presence of Mustapha Kemal [i.e. Ataturk] on the heights above the Allied lines.  Within the worst elements of the Anzac myth the British scarcely feature unless displaying incompetent and malicious leadership, but for Australians, Kiwis, and the British their French ally is invisible – a fate shared by Indian regiments such as the Gurkhas.  If there is any credence in the ‘lions led by donkeys’ dismissal of Allied generalship in the First World War then it surely applies to the quality of command at Gallipoli, notwithstanding individual instances of brilliant leadership from Col. Monash at brigade level to Lt. Attlee at platoon level (the future Labour leader was almost the last to leave Suvla Beach).  I’m  particularly interested in the Hampshire connection with Gallipoli, from the hastily built M33 Monitor currently undergoing refurbishment under the auspices of Hants CC and the NMRN in Portsmouth Dockyard, to the role of the 2nd Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, who, as regulars back from India serving in the 29th Division, were present from the landing off the Clyde at V Beach on 25 April 1915 to the silent withdrawal from Helles in January 1916.  The latter’s war diaries and regimental magazine at the Hampshires’ museum in Winchester constitute a fascinating, revealing and insightful account of their testing and traumatic time on the peninsula.  In partnership with NMRN and Hants CC colleagues we  hope to stage a lifelong learning day in the Princess Royal Gallery and on board the M33 on 25 April 2015, although the interactive display in the engine room of the latter will not be open to the public until August 2015 – exactly a hundred years after the freshly built monitor arrived in the Dardanelles to support the renewed summer offensive (the gains from which? needless to say, bugger all).  There is a link with the Fairey project in that Commander Charles Sansom, aviator extraordinaire and with Commodore Murray Sueter (and First Lord Winston Churchill?) de facto founder of the Royal Naval Air Service, was posted from heading the Naval Air Station at Eastchurch, the evolution of which features in my chapter 2, to command a squadron of mainly Short seaplanes in reconnaissance and strike roles above the Turkish positions.  Thus, young Dick Fairey worked upon aeroplanes which, at precisely the moment he was setting up his brave new enterprise (based upon sub-contract work from the Short brothers at the suggestion of Sueter), were flying over Allied and Turkish lines, forlornly seeing to make sense of the chaos below.

Working up a new MA module to teach in the coming semester and a doctoral viva next week (plus starting to write my inaugural lecture on Keith Douglas, inspired by walking into Canterbury from Wye last Friday – echoes of Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale and in my mind relevant thoughts re Edward Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon) means conclusion of my Sheppey-based chapter (chapter 2) is on hold for a week.  The priority then is to finish the chapter, then go back and write what will be very much a first draft of CRF’s life prior to joining J.W. Dunne at Eastchurch, before going forward to map out how Fairey and Rees founded the company in 1914-16; after which I can start looking at the post-1915 papers moved before Christmas from the FAA Museum to the Special Collections in the Hartley Library.  The other priority, which should have been signalled in my Christmas Eve round up, is returning to the website.  I really need help on this, not least as what information I did absorb in my four (!) hours of training has largely drifted to the furthest recesses of my brain as a consequence of not regularly practising what I was taught.  In consequence, I have asked for assistance from my younger and hopefully more IT-savvy colleague Dr Matthew Kelly, who attended the training sessions with me (university website have to have a nominated alternative administrator, so my thanks to Matt for agreeing to fulfil this role).  But for the moment I must focus upon the booklet for my master’s module and read what looks like a very long thesis…

Christmas Eve seems an appropriate moment for a brief review of where I’ve got to on this project, but before doing so it’s worth noting that last week I had lunch in West Sussex with Charles Fairey, CRF’s grandson and the son of Richard Fairey.  Charles was both welcoming and charming, and it quickly became clear that he can be extremely helpful; while I have already learnt a considerable amount from him, on more than one occasion in the future I shall formally interview him re his recollections of his grandfather, and the latter’s relationship with his eldest son.  When not involved in activities related to work (including myriad Great War commemoration and memorial activities), or visiting Charles Fairey, or dealing with my elderly mother (across the past five months matters related to the latter have taken up as much as three weeks of my working time, with no immediate resolution in sight), then I have continued writing what will be chapter 2, focused upon prewar flying on Sheppey.  Writing a contextual narrative, largely but not entirely rooted in secondary sources, is proving more challenging than constructing a ‘story’ rooted in primary sources and highly focused – as will eventually be the case for Fairey.  In consequence I have only written about 7500 words, albeit in a form well beyond first or second draft.  Having written about J.W. Dunne, and the Short Brothers, my next section is on the earliest days of the RNAS – after which I can focus upon Fairey’s decision to leave Shorts early in the war and with the Admiralty Air Division’s encouragement form a company to which Horace, Eustace and Oswald could sub-contract work.  The research for this has of course been completed across the autumn, plus investigation into CRF’s life prior to being employed by Dunne, as well as work on the British Air Commission for my research application(s).  I would like to be further ahead, and having to travel repeatedly to Coventry has clearly held me back, but I am reasonably satisfied with where I am.  Demands upon my time at work were more than I anticipated, and my MA/PGR commitments next semester will be considerably greater.  Nevertheless, I feel reasonaby satisfied with what has been accomplished by the first Christmas, and I hope the Fairey family feel the same.

Keen readers will note that my last blog entry dates from mid-November but has only just been posted a month later.  Having previewed the entry I foolishly forgot to hit ‘Publish’, and so my polished thoughts have remained in the draft folder for over three weeks.  There’s a lesson there of course, namely always check.  Fairey research in the intervening period has entailed a productive visit to the RAF Museum at Colindale and a return to Yeovilton to identify the next tranche of papers for transfer to Southampton from the Fleet Air Arm Museum.  The latter covers the period immediately following the First World War and the 1920s, and the papers examined in the RAF archive also went beyond my initial period of research and writing.  TheYeovilton material was brought prematurely to the Hartley Library’s special collections so that archivist Barbara Gilbert could collect the first tranche and not make two journeys.  Barbara’s assistance is invaluable, and she is also proving a good listener, whether in the Cobham Hall archives opposite the FAA Museum or while drinking recuperative coffee in the University’s social club.   Just prior to bending her ear in Yeovilton I read Alan Ransom’s biography of Sir Thomas Sopwith, Fairey’s friend, foil, and eventual neighbour.  When I expressed my freshly acquired admiration for Tommy Sopwith Barbara asked me for one aspect of his life and work superior to CRF’s, and I came up with his keen sense of the aesthetic – compare the Camel, Hart, Hurricane, and Hunter with classic Fairey aircraft, and you can see my point.  A key psychological moment in any project is when you first get something down on paper, and as of today I can boast 5000 words on pioneer flying on Sheppey prior to the outbreak of war, with the mercurial J.W. Dunne at the heart of my account.  The Short Brothers and the fledgling RNAS await, and hopefully this first draft will be all over by Christmas.  Now, hit ‘Publish’…