{"id":33,"date":"2013-10-17T10:39:30","date_gmt":"2013-10-17T10:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/srfb\/?p=33"},"modified":"2013-10-17T10:39:30","modified_gmt":"2013-10-17T10:39:30","slug":"random-notes-by-way-of-an-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2013\/10\/17\/random-notes-by-way-of-an-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Random notes by way of an update&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the sublime to the ridiculous: from reflections upon fly fishing to scrutinising examination marks from Finsbury Technical College.\u00a0 I need to go back to the London Metropolitan Archives to see if I missed any relevant records\u00a0(a confession in that I spent too long having lunch in Exmouth Market with Colin Seymour-Ure; but then I probably wouldn&#8217;t be working in a university if it wasn&#8217;t for the man who with David McClellan and Maurice Vile enabled Politics at Kent to punch above its weight, and who is <em>the<\/em> key figure in establishing newspaper history&#8217;s place within the academy).\u00a0 For obvious reasons I don&#8217;t want to go into too much detail regarding Fairey&#8217;s two years as a night student at FTC (autumn 1902 to spring 1904), but I will say that the official record doesn&#8217;t on the whole match the myth of mathematical and mechanical precosity.\u00a0 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\u00a0following his horrific experience in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic), and was killed by a V1 explosion.\u00a0 I&#8217;m still trying to deepen my knowledge of Edwardian aviation, not least what was taking place on Sheppey exactly one hundred years ago.\u00a0 A genuinely scholarly study, as opposed to a string of interesting\u00a0anecdotes [Peter King&#8217;s <em>Knights of the Air<\/em> is an honourable exception, as David Edgerton acknowledges in the bibliography for his reissued <em>England and the Aeroplane<\/em>], is Hugh Driver&#8217;s 1997 <em>The Birth of Military Aviation: Britain 1903-1914<\/em>, based upon what must have been a brilliant doctoral thesis &#8211; 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).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the sublime to the ridiculous: from reflections upon fly fishing to scrutinising examination marks from Finsbury Technical College.\u00a0 I need to go back to the London Metropolitan Archives to see if I missed any relevant records\u00a0(a confession in that I spent too long having lunch in Exmouth Market with Colin Seymour-Ure; but then I &hellip; <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link block-button\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2013\/10\/17\/random-notes-by-way-of-an-update\/\">Continue reading &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53565,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53565"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}