The Day Before Yesterday: Adrian Smith, modern historian

How appropriate that the cafe I am typing this entry in should be playing The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ [surely Eric Burdon’s finest moment – a perfect fusion of the Mississippi and the Tyne].  This was the repeated plea of my wife as we drove up to the mobile home holiday camp at Leysdown which once was home to the Aero – from 1910 Royal Aero – Club (“You can’t miss it – the road leads into the sea”).  There’s a modest exhibition in the bar but  Sunday lunchtime drinking at Muswell Manor ceases sharply at 2.30pm, and it was now after three.  Furthermore, what meterologists were predicting would be the harshest storm since 1987 was beginning to hit north Kent, with the main road bridge over the Swale to the Isle of Sheppey already shut – the old King’s Ferry bridge was still passable, but at the back of our minds was a genuine concern that we might not get off the island once the wind really got going.  I parked the car outside the Manor’s locked gates, but found a side entrance and duly took photographs of the house and the small memorial recording the presence of the RAeC.  By this time the rain was lashing down, and Mary was gesticulating furiously from inside the car, but I found time to photograph a statue of the three Short brothers, with Horace’s distorted head scarcely obvious (a generous gesture by the sculptor).  Was any statue ever located in a more incongruous setting?  The three men are joyously raising their arms to the skies, but against the backdrop of surely one of the bleakest coastscapes in England – acres of brown cropped marshland, rendered even more menacing by the black clouds and 45 degree rain.  We drove back, past the pitch and portakabin of Leysdown FC, surely the most isolated football ground in the south of England, and duly passed through the sad, bedraggled, plain desperate ‘seaside resort’ of Leysdown itself.  There are around seven mobile home holiday camps, and the cheap beer bars, fast food shops and dingy bingo halls were open if empty, all eager to cater for anyone venturing so far from home for half term.  Clearly some mobile homes are rented out but most appear to be owned, and in many cases all the year round.  No wonder Ray Pahl’s groundbreaking sociological inquires were focused upon Sheppey, as there are so many questions to ask – not least who lives in Leysdown, and who comes here on holiday?  When I taught on Sheppey in the 1970s the shorthand answer was East Enders, with diamond geezers boasting shady pasts or dodgy presents having boltholes in the more remote eastern parts of the island – West Ham shirts were highly visible by way of confirmation (of the East Enders, not necessarily the criminals!).  With Mary rightly eager to recross the Swale and seek shelter we drove into Eastchurch to admire and photograph the memorial to all the great pre-war aviation pioneers who first flew on the marshes at Leysdown and then moved inland to the fields provided by Sir Frank Maclean, which later became an RNAS and then an RAF station before acquiring the prison complex that is surely the island’s second biggest employer after the NHS (each section, from high security to open, appeared run by HM Prison Service and not contracted out, thank God).  In Eastchurch we drank tea in the Shurland Hotel, speculating on whether Fairey had supped there, and whether we were unique in asking for a pot of tea (if I had ordered a drink then I fear that I would still be there, drowning my sorrows  – “What am I doing here, and why did I embark on this project?”).  We raised our cups to CRF and lamented his absence from the lengthy lists of, for me now familiar, names on the grand, elaborate memorial across the road from the hotel.  Elaborate CTC duly recorded our driving around HMP Eastchurch, and it was only as we drove back to the village and surveyed a few surviving acres of rolling grassland that we gained some understanding as to why so much flying took place here.  While I was eager to show Mary where I taught (today’s Isle of Sheppey Academy, but in the 1970s The Sheppey School – for me another time, another planet) and to rediscover Sheerness and Queenborough, common sense dictated that we returned speedily to our friends’ house in Wye before the full force of the storm hit the south-east.  At least we weren’t back home in Lymington, directly opposite the Isle of Wight where a wind of 99mph was recorded on Sunday night.  The isolation of east Sheppey had been confirmed for me.  No wonder that in 1914-15 F.H.C. Rees, ‘Gentleman’, and Fairey’s money man in setting up their company, constantly lamented CRF’s failure to get up to ‘Town’ for crucial meetings – notwithstanding the presence of a rail connection in Sheerness from the 1860s, in Edwardian England a journey from Leysdown and Eastchurch to London remained a tiring and time-consuming expedition.  The puzzling question is why CRF supposedly resented the Shorts brother’s relocation to Rochester – what evidence is there of this, when surely he would have welcomed being closer to London and living in an urban environment akin to his home in Hendon?  Some historians have suggested that security considerations were in J.W. Dunne’s mind when he attempted to fly his ostensibly stable early prototypes at Blair Atholl, on the Marquis of Argyll’s estate, and it would be tempting to say the same consideration was in his mind when  conducting later experiments on the far end of the Isle of Sheppey.  The presence of Dunne, Shorts and then a critical mass of aviators (Roe, Sopwith et al) is more attributable to circumstance, in that the land was made available, and then the process was accumulative – flying at Eastchurch was surprisingly high profile, witness the presence of the Battenberg family in July 1911.  Nevertheless, as I stood in the gloom soaking wet and staring out across the Thames estuary (“Is that Essex or Thanet?”), I couldn’t help asking again, “Sheppey – why?!”.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: from reflections upon fly fishing to scrutinising examination marks from Finsbury Technical College.  I need to go back to the London Metropolitan Archives to see if I missed any relevant records (a confession in that I spent too long having lunch in Exmouth Market with Colin Seymour-Ure; but then I probably wouldn’t be working in a university if it wasn’t for the man who with David McClellan and Maurice Vile enabled Politics at Kent to punch above its weight, and who is the key figure in establishing newspaper history’s place within the academy).  For obvious reasons I don’t want to go into too much detail regarding Fairey’s two years as a night student at FTC (autumn 1902 to spring 1904), but I will say that the official record doesn’t on the whole match the myth of mathematical and mechanical precosity.  Les Hewett, Kiwi genealogist, continues to send me useful information from Napier NZ, his latest missive being a Wiki entry re Aino Birgo, a Swedish actress who made low budget films in Germany and Britain, married and divorced Richard Fairey (1943, so after both legs were amputated following his horrific experience in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic), and was killed by a V1 explosion.  I’m still trying to deepen my knowledge of Edwardian aviation, not least what was taking place on Sheppey exactly one hundred years ago.  A genuinely scholarly study, as opposed to a string of interesting anecdotes [Peter King’s Knights of the Air is an honourable exception, as David Edgerton acknowledges in the bibliography for his reissued England and the Aeroplane], is Hugh Driver’s 1997 The Birth of Military Aviation: Britain 1903-1914, based upon what must have been a brilliant doctoral thesis – reading this thoroughly researched and insightful monograph, rooted in critical analysis, I keep wondering if the wrong man is writing about Richard Fairey, aviation pioneer (and, judging by his FTC marks, fast learner).

Last Tuesday [8 October] I was again at Pittleworth Manor talking to Sir Richard Fairey’s daughter and grand-daughter, and selecting photographs for the website, which is still under construction but now in an embryonic form.  As well as photographs ranging across CRF’s life I handled a number of artefacts, including the skates for attachment to his boots when a child visiting his family in the Fens and the fly he created for his personal use when fishing – he was very particular about the bespoke hackle [a feather wound around a fishing fly so that its filaments are splayed out] and even went so far as to breed a particular type of bantam in order to secure the correct feathers.  Standing on an isolated stretch of the Test in late afternoon, in near complete silence, I could understand why Fairey deemed the physical experience of fishing in stillness and solitude as important for his mental well-being as the fishing itself.  Similarly, I could comprehend why CRF’s determination to see the Test valley remain unspoilt by development qualifies him as a pioneering conservationist.  Can one qualify as a conservationist, while at the same time enthusiastically pursuing hunting and fishing, as was the case for CRF?  I don’t think you have to be a signed up member of the Countryside Alliance to believe this position sustainable and not wholly contradictory, even if personally I would not wish to shoot any creature and I gain quiet satisfaction from the demise of hunting (although when the legislation was passed I did wonder whether it ran roughshod over the most fundamental principle of liberal democracy, proper respect for the minority viewpoint – in practice, for all the noise generated by the CA and the  resentment clearly felt by some but by no means all rural residents, the consequences of outlawing hunting were by no means as great as anticipated).  What’s clear from the example of CRF and his country sports, and the stunning images of his J-class yacht Shamrock and the other boats he sailed (not forgetting his motor yacht, which became a minesweeper during WW2, and sank a U-boat off Gibraltar in February 1943), is that the eventual book will require a separate chapter devoted to CRF the polymath – there is just so much to write about.  I am still trying to piece together the extended family history, and am annoyed that I left behind at Pittleworth a family tree drawn up in the early 1960s.  The Fairey roots are in Huntingdonshire in and around St Neot’s, even if CRF was very much a child of north London.  I have a clearer picture now of his education, and am off to London Metropolitan Archives on Monday to explore relevant papers for Finsbury Technical College, where Fairey was a high-flying nightschool student under the tutelage of the distinguished physicist Silvanus Thompson.  I also now have far greater knowledge of the development of pre-war British aviation, and at the end of the month will return to Sheppey, where I taught in the 1970s, to inspect the remains of the airfield at Eastchurch and the house rented by the Royal Aero Club (at Leysdown?).  Close inpection of the papers re the formation of Fairey Aviation, temporarily transferred from the Fleet Air Arm Museum to Southampton’s Special Collection, have revealed the key financial role of F.H.C. Rees, ‘Gentleman’, in establishing a syndicate and then an actual company controlled by himself and CRF, but with with Fairey very much in the driving seat (e.g. squashing Rees’s suggestion that they should be joint managing directors).  I need to find out more about Rees, and ‘DP Cars’ as this was a parallel project linked to the establishment of Fairey Aviation.  The connections between Dunne [‘Captain Douglas’ in the 1915 novel Bealby], Fairey, and H.G. Wells keep growing stronger, and now I discover that CRF’s motto was taken from The History of Mr Polly.  Fairey must have met Wells for the first time at Eastchurch.  More speculative is whether he met the young Dickie Mountbatten on 15 July 1911 when Prince Louis Battenberg, in his capacity as C-in-C The Nore based at Sheerness, took the whole family flying with the most experienced RN pilots.  The Mountbatten papers contain Princess Louise’s family photographs of the summer on Sheppey, including shots of them flying.  If it’s not too solipsistic I find it fascinating that my last biographical subject and my current focus of research might have met for the first time on a hot summer’s day 102 years ago.  Neither Prince Louis Battenberg, as he then was, nor Dick Fairey, could possibly have conceived that one day they would both control long stretches of the River Test, their guestbooks and fishing dairies revealing the same members of the great and the good availing themselves of respective hospitality.

As with all major projects one’s ambition of maintaining a structured, focused approach is constantly challenged by reality – if not necessarily the law of unintended consequences then the wholly unexpected.  Having submitted my grant application to support an extended period in the States a year from now researching Sir Richard Fairey’s direction of the British Air Commission, I returned to piecing together his early life and education:  I still don’t have precise dates re the latter (and have yet to hear back from the archivist at Merchant Taylors’ School the details of CRF’s brief tenure there before his move to the less expensive St Saviour’s [today’s Ardingly College]), and one consequence is a long list of files re Finsbury Technical College which I need to consult when visiting the London Metropolitan Archives next month.  Hopefully, once immersed in the City and Guilds of London Institute archive at the LMA I can swiftly establish CRF’s student status and period of study at Finsbury TC, and then eliminate a number of the files I have requested to see [a tip for anyone considering use of the voluminous LMA, you can register a month in advance so long as when you first arrive at the information point you have acceptable proof of identity and place of abode].  However, having re-immersed myself in late Victorian/Edwardian London, out of the blue I was contacted from Napier, New Zealand, by a very distant relative of Queenie Markey, Fairey’s first wife, whom he married in 1915 and divorced in 1931.  A keen genealogist, my Kiwi source generously provided invaluable information about the colourful Markey family (no doubt the serious-minded CRF disapproved of various individuals, not least the variety performer George Clarke, who married Queenie’s sister).  He also sent me Fairey’s divorce petition from May 1931 charging his estranged wife with serial adultery that stretched from Kenya (shades of White Mischief) to the home counties; the detail provided suggests that CRF hired a private detective to track his wife’s activities.  Needless to say, electonic correspondence with the Markey descendant on the other side of the world, plus close perusal of the documentation he sent me, proved an illuminating if slightly prurient distraction from the task in hand, namely focusing on worthier and less sensational activities at the turn of the last century.  Professional historians can be sniffy and snooty about the thousands of people eagerly researching the preceding generations of their family (or families), but these enthusiasts’ contribution can be invaluable in rescuing the long forgotten from the ‘condescension of posterity’.  Quotation of E.P. Thompson’s famous phrase reminds me that 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Making of the English Working Class – last spring the Working Class Movement Library staged an exhibition and History Workshop organised a conference, but commemoration of such a key moment in ‘history from below’ was lamentably low key, and tells us much about the condition of history as a discipline in the second decade of a century which Thompson would have found both alarming and intriguing (my own feeble acknowledgement was to read Peter Conradi’s impressive biography of older brother Frank Thompson, with its de facto life of Edward up to the end of the Second World War).  The amateur genealogist’s favourite TV programme is of course Who Do You Think You Are?, and last night’s focus upon BBC foreign affairs editor John Simpson’s ancestors generated coverage of Sam Cody’s credentials as the first to fly a powered aeroplane in Britain (he and Simpson’s great grandmother were not in fact married but claimed to be so – it’s a long and complicated story so check out the BBC website…).  Cody was the rival of J.W. Dunne, Fairey’s patron at the start of his aviation career.   The American showman and engineer didn’t die until a fatal air crash in 1913 – in the immediately preceding years did the young and ambitious Fairey ever get to meet the great man, and if so what did he make of him as it’s hard to think of two characters so different?

To date blog entries have been intermittent, the most recent gap being a consequence of spending time on holiday in France, but with the start of the academic year the project really takes off.  My immediate priorities are twofold.  Firstly, I need to complete preliminary work on the British Air Commission in Washington, 1940-46, which Sir Richard Fairey (CRF) was deputy director of until 1942, after which he was director for nearly three years.  This will be the focus of my research in the United States in a year’s time when I am on research leave, and the present gathering and assimilation of relevant material for the purpose of applying for funding to facilitate my visiting American archives (e.g. the papers of Philip Young, lawyer turned Lend-Lease administrator and a close associate of CRF, are in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas).  Fairey was sent to the States by Beaverbrook, a friend in so far as ‘The Beaver’ could be friends with anyone; and the press baron was very much in my mind on holiday as he is the collaborationist PM in the novel I read, C.J. Sansom’s disturbingly counterfactual novel Dominion.  Sansom’s highly convincing portrayal of Britain in 1952 as a near client state of Nazi Germany is the creation of someone who has really done their homework – apart from minor errors (e.g. Eton’s main winter sport is football not rugby), the only inaccuracy I came across was Sir John Colville as Churchill’s principal adjutant.  Yes, Jock Colville did become a loyal Churchillian, but not in May 1940 when he was an admirer of Chamberlain for whom he served as private secretary, and he was deeply alarmed at the prospect of the maverick First Lord becoming PM and not the Foreign Secretary: the novel is premised on Halifax succeeding Chamberlain and consequently signing the ‘Treaty of Berlin’ with Hitler, and so in this alternative scenario Colville would not have found himself seduced by the newly installed Churchill’s eccentricities and charisma.  The second and ongoing priority is to reconstruct CRF’s early life, and this in the short term entails clarifying details regarding his education prior to entering Finsbury Technical College.  He attended Hendon Preparatory College prior to a year or so at Merchants Taylor School, before spending a number of years at the precursor of today’s Ardingly College, the Sussex public school near Haywards Heath.  Ardingly’s archivist Andrea King has been extremely helpful, and I now need to approach her counterpart at Merchants Taylor to see if the latter’s records confirm exactly when Fairey was on the school roll.  My next visit to London will entail visiting theMetropolitan Archives where I hope to find more about CRF’s tutelage at Finsbury Technical College under the distinguished physicist Silvanus Thompson.  Meanwhile, I still have to address the familiar demands of the University at the start of a new academic year, whether attending committee and board meetings, providing a briefing on recruitment at the History away day (plus as usual delivering colleagues to the venue in the mini-bus), liaising with PGRs, briefing the PT member of staff taking over my undergraduate teaching, and umpteen other matters which I hope will fall away by October and allow me to focus upon the task in hand.

The absence of regular blog postings reflects the fact that complete immersion in the project remains pending.  As much time is spent at present on seasonal activities, ongoing administration (given the time of year mostly related to recruitment), and reading pertinent to teaching (Colin Smith’s England’s Last War With France, which benefits from the thoroughness of his Vichy-related research as the breadth of his British sources) or as part of a never-ending endeavour to catch up (notably Peter Conradi’s insightful and illuminating biography of Frank Thompson – as revealing about Edward Thompson as it is regarding his older brother).  The Colin Smith account of the 1940-42 fighting with Vichy has a vague connection with the Fairey project in that the Swordfish features prominently in naval operations across the Mediterranean, and further afield.  Thus at roughly the same time a Swordfish was crippling the Bismarck, off Syria another was sinking the French super-destroyer Chevalier Paul.  In fact the biplane’s record in sinking or badly damaging French surface ships was astonishingly good, but postwar it was clearly deemed impolitic to highlight its success in attacking the vessels of our past and future ally travers la manche.  The Swordfish aptly demonstrated how obsolescence is relative when measuring fitness for purpose, its slow speed without stalling rendering it ideal for Fleet Air Arm operations early in the war – but by 11 February1942 and the notorious ‘Channel dash’ of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen, the destruction of Eugene Esmonde’s strike force signalled the Royal Navy’s urgent need for faster, better armed, more lethal single-wing attack aircraft, most of which would come from the United States given the Admiralty’s inability in the early1930s to issue specification akin to the Air Ministry’s generation-jumping demand for what would become the Hurricane and the Spitfire.

From the outset I envisaged a website that would reflect the project’s progress, and a conversation with Melanie Philpot from the University’s iSolutions IT support team opened my eyes as to how ambitious this could be.  Much of this week has been taken up with work unrelated to Fairey, plus a very pleasant day with sport historian Dil Porter and his family in Bosham, the tiny West Sussex harbour famed for its association with King Canute (his daughter is buried in the church, and the village competes with Southampton as to the spot where he made his point to fawning courtiers about the limits of [tidal] power).  However, I have spent some considerable time completing the framework for ‘Biography of Sir Richard Fairey, aviation pioneer and industrialist’, on the basis of which Melanie and her colleagues will build the website.  A combination of the nature of the content (all those images of aircraft!) and the potential for what can be done technically means that the final outcome should look pretty good.  The home page will lead to four galleries, each of which will have sub-sections: Work in Progress and Contacts; Document Gallery; Photo Gallery; Sources.  I’ve already fed in initial material, and am in discussions with Barbara Gilbert at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, and Karen Robson who heads the Hartley Library’s Special Collections, re creating a virtual gallery of still and moving photographic images as shot by CRF and a virtual library of key documents related to his life.  There are issues of copyright and cost which need sorting out, and I don’t underestimate the problems in securing open access for this material, but at least the process is under way.  This is a wholly new experience for me in that previously I have just got on with researching and writing – turning my [professional] life into literally an open book necessitates major changes to my working practices – there’s no place to hide!

A Fairey family meeting at Pittleworth Manor was extremely helpful, and over the past ten days there have been a number of useful initiatives, not least the first stage in establishing a website, and posting information re the project on relevant university noticeboards.  I’m acquiring a formidable library of secondary literature re the embryonic British aircraft industry, and at the same time consolidating sources of documentary information on CRF’s early life, notably his technical education and prewar career.  I still need more information about the Fairey family prior to the Edwardian era but by various means it’s emerging.  Jane Tennant, CRF’s daughter by his second marriage and his only surviving child, and who I should soon interview for the first and by no means the last time, has lent me for photocopying the manuscript of ‘The Plane Maker The Official Biography of Sir Richard Fairey’ written in the late 1950s by a journalist Peter Trippe.  This will be extremely useful because of the access the author enjoyed at the time to family members and CRF’s colleagues and friends (it’s a great pity none of Trippe’s sources are referenced). The text itself is saccharine and sentimental, long on narrative and short on analysis – it’s way too long and, had the book secured a publisher then its editor would have demanded multiple cuts.  Nevertheless, it is an incredibly useful source which I shall make good use of  (as, I hasten to add, will be clearly shown in the footnotes – thinking of which, can I keep them confine them to the bare factual necessity or will they turn out as full as in everything I have ever written?  The latter, I strongly suspect.)  So this end of month report can take satisfaction in getting the show on the road, and I certainly know a hell of a lot more about the young CRF than I did in early July; but competition for my attention, ranging from two days at last week’s National Maritime Museum conference on ‘Navy and Nation, 1688 to the present’, where I gave a paper on the RN and its depiction in post-WW2 British feature films, through to spending an inordinate amount of time with my 93 year old mother as I endeavour to effect a painful departure from Coventry for a new life in Lymington, means that by my own standards I haven’t completed as much work as I would have liked – and August will see even slower progress as I have promised to take time off and accompany Mary on wild swimming adventures (and early September is a short ‘proper’ holiday in France – time for sustained reading, but not necessarily related to the project: I am about to finish Jean Edward Smith’s FDR and appropriately Rana Mitter’s account of the China-Japan war is top of the pile by my bed).  I am very conscious of how much faith the Fairey family, especially Jane Tennant, has invested in me; and a need to demonstrate tangibly from the outset to Jane – and to CRF’s grand-daughters Esther and Sarah Jane – that this investment is justified and worthwhile.

I’m Adrian Smith, and have a chair in History at the University of Southampton – and this is my first blog entry (a historic moment!).  About ten days ago I was at last able to concentrate upon my principal research project across the next three years – writing a biography of Sir [Charles] Richard Fairey, aviation (and maritime) pioneer and industrialist, DG of the British Air Mission in wartime Washington, interwar advocate of selling aircraft to Stalin’s Russia, yachtsman, philanthropist, pioneer conservationist, and archetypal ‘big man’ running a big business, in this case Fairey Aviation and its various associates, most notably Fairey Marine and Belgium’s Avions Fairey.  This is a biography written in collaboration with and supported by the Fairey family, most notably the daughter and grand-daughter of CRS [the acronym commonly used in reference to Sir Richard] who live between Mottisfont and Stockbridge at Pittleworth Manor: Jane Tennant and Esther Bellamy respectively.  I have yet to meet the late John Fairey’s daughter, and CRF’s other grand-daughter, Sarah Jane, who lives at the principal family home in the Test Valley, Bossington; but will do so this Sunday, after which I  hope she will be similarly enthusiastic about this enterprise.  At this early stage I really need the help of the family as I endeavour to piece together CRF’s life in late Victorian and early Edwardian London.  Once he commences at the City and Guilds Institute’s pioneering and prestigious Finsbury Technical College, headed by the physicist Silvanus Thompson, then the archives (notably documents held at the London Metropolitan Archives) begin to deliver necessary information.  Once our man establishes his own company in 1915 then files held at the RAF Museum and the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton become enormously helpful.  Tranches of the Fairey papers at the FAA Museum are being loaned to the special collections in the Hartley Library at the University thanks to the support and assistance of archivist Barbara Gilbert – I’ve twice visited her in Yeovilton to get an overview of what’s in the collection, and she has visited the Hartley to be assured re security, conservation, etc.  This blog will eventually have a home on the project website I am setting up, as well as within my History staff profile.  Excluding essays on my dad in City of Coventry, this is biography number three after Mick Mannock and Dickie Mountbatten.  I suspect it will be the most challenging as well as the most ambitious.  I’m now well and truly up and running, or as Mary my wife would put it, I’ve entered Faireyland.  I’ve drunk a pint of Wadworth’s Swordfish to signal I’m on my way, and a cracking colour photograph of a wartime Swordfish now constitutes the desktop on my laptop.  All I have to do is build the Airfix kit Mary bought me (marking the Kriegsmarine‘s 1942 dash up the Channel and not Taranto or the crippling of the Bismarck – almost every Swordfish was lost, so I hope this isn’t an inauspicious signal!), and I’ll have every accutrement a boy needs to write the life of someone who in his own quiet way was a serious player.  Onwards and upwards!