{"id":97,"date":"2015-02-25T17:28:32","date_gmt":"2015-02-25T17:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/srfb\/?p=97"},"modified":"2015-02-25T17:28:32","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T17:28:32","slug":"service-now-properly-resumed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2015\/02\/25\/service-now-properly-resumed\/","title":{"rendered":"Service now properly resumed…"},"content":{"rendered":"

To quote the Daily Mirror<\/em>‘s Cassandra in 1945, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted….\u00a0 Five weeks ago serious illness (not mine)left me wondering when I would next work on the Fairey biography.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In consequence I have begun writing chapter 5, on CRF in the 1920s.\u00a0 I keep fine tuning the previous chapter, which now runs to more than 18,000 words.\u00a0 A commentary upon the years 1917-22\u00a0of such length\u00a0suggests that treatment of a\u00a0period twice as long will require not one but two chapters.\u00a0 So much happened in the history of Fairey Aviation, and its chairman\/managing director across\u00a0the postwar decade that I face a real test of synthesis and succinctness.\u00a0 The editor at I.B. Tauris, publisher of my last two books and most likely this one,\u00a0having read\u00a0chapters 1 to 3\u00a0asked for\u00a0more of Fairey the man.\u00a0 This seemed to me a justified demand, which\u00a0chapter 4 starts to address; but what I am writing at present approaches head on.\u00a0\u00a0There is so much I now know about Dick Fairey, and yet so much I still don’t.\u00a0 For example, I’m\u00a0fully 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?\u00a0 Did he read much, and if so what?\u00a0 I know he liked variety theatre, but\u00a0did he enjoy serious drama?\u00a0 Did he have an ear for music, and was he a film fan?\u00a0 Jane Tennant, Fairey’s daughter, is the obvious person to ask about CRF’s domestic hinterland.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u00a0 Modernity Britain The Shake of the Dice 1959-62<\/em> the current volume.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u00a0very much\u00a0present ten years later.\u00a0 Larkin was right in observing the 1950s as a long decade with national awareness\u00a0of The Beatles\u00a0in 1962-3 signalling the delayed onset of ‘The Sixties’, whether swinging or not.\u00a0 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\u00a0‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’\u00a0who were my parents’ friends\u00a0– re the latter, I have passed on to David K my theory that\u00a0our 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\u00a0male white middle aged\u00a0first instinct).\u00a0 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\u00a0provincial venues for the ‘Judas’ tour reveal young people dressing in a surprisingly conservative fashion.<\/p>\n

Further non-fiction reading has included Frank Ledgwidge’s Investment in Blood<\/em>, as excoriating re British involvement in Helmand Province as Lo<\/em>sing Small Wars<\/em> was re\u00a0the British presence in Basra, and Gregoire Chamayou’s brilliant philosophical and juridical commentary upon American military deployment of UAVs, Drone Theory<\/em>, 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<\/em> – 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.\u00a0 Before my world was turned upside down\u00a0on 11 January I had read Marcus O’Dair’s life of Robert Wyatt,\u00a0Different Every Time<\/em>.\u00a0 Apart from\u00a0prompting me to revisit\u00a0the great man’s masterpiece Rock Bottom<\/em> 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\u00a0remaining home town boys) era at the start of the 1970s.\u00a0 O’Dair argues persuasively that the rebellious Wyatt, with his Bohemian\u00a0domestic background, was atypical\u00a0when compared\u00a0with Simon Langton\u00a0Boys’ nice polite sixthformers like\u00a0Mike Ratledge and\u00a0the Hopper brothers.\u00a0 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\u00a0impressionable youth’s astonishment that I had\u00a0travelled from Canterbury\u00a0on a musical pilgrimage – why<\/em>, he asked).\u00a0\u00a0If<\/em>\u00a0this sleepy cathedral city ever did acquire a patina of dope-induced\u00a0cool then it was from the end of the 1960s.\u00a0 Photos of Kent’s\u00a0students post-1965 suggest that they were scarcely in the vanguard of change, and\u00a0the radical politics came\u00a0later (the Cornwallis sit-in, the presence of the IMG not the International Socialist\/SWP as the predominant far left party on campus, etc).\u00a0 Why did so many\u00a0UKC graduates remain in Canterbury, with those who eventually left being so reluctant to do so?\u00a0 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\u00a0tourist-free, pre-pedestrianized\u00a0High Street.\u00a0 That\u00a0seductive blend of youthful radicalism and<\/em> a\u00a0feeling of security was a marked feature of Canterbury in the 1970s, and post-graduation affection for east Kent built upon the bonds of\u00a0student days spent in a college system that was then very much alive.\u00a0\u00a0For 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.\u00a0 When faced with a hugely distressing experience from the start of the year,\u00a0my 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\u00a0concern – and boltholes – of\u00a0friends\u00a0made in Canterbury all those years ago; all of us sharing a particular kind of camaraderie and solidarity that remains rooted in\u00a0the\u00a0formative years\u00a0that followed our\u00a0leaving home.\u00a0 No doubt students\u00a0all those years ago in York, or Brighton, or wherever,\u00a0could point to a similar bonding; and yet there was something distinctive about\u00a0the city Robert Wyatt fled as soon as he could, but in which I lived for over a decade, securing in that time\u00a0three degrees, a teaching certificate, and most important of all, a partner for life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To quote the Daily Mirror‘s Cassandra in 1945, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted….\u00a0 Five weeks ago serious illness (not mine)left me wondering when I would next work on the Fairey biography.\u00a0 A more stable situation means I have now returned to the project, albeit not being able to devote as … <\/p>\n

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