Archives

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Beaufighter TF.X

One of the archives I visited during the second half of my time in London was the Archive Collection at the RAF Museum. Sadly the material I turned up, though interesting, was not overall of much relevance for my thesis. So I couldn't justify spending a second day there. But, on the bright side, the archives closed at 5pm and the museum itself at 6pm -- so I was able to able to use that hour to whiz through and have a look at the Fighter Hall, which I'd missed on my first visit.

Above is a Bristol Beaufighter TF.X torpedo bomber (well, the TF stands for torpedo fighter but that's a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it). A very versatile and heavily-armed machine, which according to the museum's sign was called the "whispering death" by the Japanese -- but Wikipedia says this is probably a propaganda legend. In front is a cannon (I assume from a Beaufighter), with a few shells in the magazine. Those things are big.
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Probably my favourite place to research in London was the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London, where I spent the better part of two weeks digging through several personal archives. It's a very pleasant environment to work in, and the staff were very helpful in accommodating this rude colonial's requests, even at short notice! (Plus they actually sent me the roughly 200 pages of photocopies I ordered; I still haven't got the batch I ordered from the British Library, and quite possibly won't now, since it shouldn't take a month to arrive by airmail ...) KCL lies between Strand and the Victoria Embankment, near Waterloo Bridge; I'd usually take the Tube to Embankment and walk up from there, keeping my eye out for anything interesting along the way ...

Imperial Camel Corps Memorial

This is the Imperial Camel Corps memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens. I've previously written about a relative who was in the ICC and knew there was a memorial to it in London (in itself a bit odd, as most of them were Australians), which I vaguely thought I should seek out while I was there. Turns out I didn't have to as I stumbled across it completely by chance! It's quite a striking -- though incongruous, amid all the green -- statue, though the photo probably exaggerates the size of it.
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I've just spent two months at various libraries and archives in the UK. As I've noted previously, I now have a huge amount of extra primary source material to go through. Sure, in the abstract, more is better, but in concrete terms, how will this help make my thesis better than it would otherwise have been?

The most immediate benefit is for the chapter I'm currently working on, on defence panics. The primary sources for this are newspapers and other periodicals, a few of which I can get here, but not the single most important one: the right-wing and populist Daily Mail, a major advocate of aerial armaments over my period. I was able to survey the relevant dates (covering periods between 1913 and 1940) of the Daily Mail for all of the panics I'm interested in. (I also looked at a couple of months' worth of the Evening News, another Rothermere paper, from 1935; and the aviation magazine, the Aeroplane.) Ideally I would have examined other important conservative newspapers such the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph as well, but realistically I was never going to have enough time for that: scanning page after page of microfilmed newspapers for the occasional article of interest is very time-consuming, and it took me almost a month as it was! But now I know how the most influential press scaremonger in the British press portrayed the aerial menace, and so my chapter will be that much better.

The second chapter with which my research will help is a projected one on the organisation of aerial advocacy: that is, which organisations promoted aerial armaments, who joined them, what did they argue, how were they financed? I'm now in a position to be able to talk about groups such as the Air League of the British Empire, the Navy League (oddly enough), and the National League of Airmen. I will partly be viewing these through the prisms of some of their key figures: P. R. C. Groves, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and Norman Macmillan, the personal archives of all of whom I was able to examine in London. I'll supplement this with information about their activities from their journals and/or the press, and I also have the Air League's minute books for 1909-1941 to draw upon. I guess with this chapter, the question I want to answer is: where were the leagues? Anyone familiar with navalism before the First World War will recall that the Navy League and Imperial Maritime League were very active in trying to alert public opinion to the need for more battleships to counter the growing German fleet. I expected something similar would be the case with airmindedness, yet the Air League has been almost invisible in my research so far. And it turns out that this was actually a criticism the Air League had to face several times in its early history. Once I've sifted through all the data I should be better able to explain why this was.

Finally, my (already-written) chapters on the origin and evolution of the knock-out blow will need to be updated somewhat in light of some of the books and archival sources I looked at. Nothing major -- just refining and clarifying the narrative in places. For example, I now know a bit more about when and why F. W. Lanchester wrote Aircraft in Warfare (1916), a key text in the creation of the knock-out blow paradigm. Actually, now that I think of it, the main advantage here is probably an increased confidence that I've got the the story largely right: although I obviously can't be sure that something startling might turn up, I've at least now filled in the more glaring gaps in my review of the literature.

Of course I picked up a lot of other things of interest here and there along the way, and there are the intangible benefits of meeting other researchers working on related topics as well. Overall, my thesis will certainly be much the better for the time I spent in the UK; it was two months very well spent!

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Way out

So, after just under two months in London, it's time to leave. Tomorrow morning I'm on the train1 to York, then after that, Hexham (near Hadrian's Wall), Edinburgh, Rome2 before finally getting back to good old Melbourne-town on 18 September. It should be a great way to cap off what has already been a fantastic trip, and will also give me a chance to unwind a bit before I plunge into the task of assessing the material I've gathered here in London.

So what have I been up to? From my posts it probably seems as if I've spent all my time sightseeing, but (in case my supervisor is reading this!) actually that was only one or two days a week. Apart from attending two conferences, giving one presentation, and meeting with a number of aviation historians, the rest of the week was usually spent in some archive or library, including:

I got to see most of what I wanted; though an extra day at RAeS and the RAF Museum would have been most useful, and I never made it to places like the Marx Memorial Library or the British Film Institute. And I may even spend half a day at the National Library of Scotland while in Edinburgh, though that's looking doubtful now. I printed or photocopied over 3000 pages, mostly from microfilmed newspapers, and took nearly 1600 photos of documents. And that's excluding the transcriptions I made of other documents which didn't seem worth filling out a form to get photocopied. I have no idea if this is a lot in relative terms, but in absolute terms the idea of going through all that is making me feel faint!

There have been a few surprises along the way. The most surprising thing, and a pleasant surprise at that, was bumping into Alex Dickson at the RAF Museum, who is doing his PhD on the origins of the RAF Volunteer Reserve; we eventually realised that we'd corresponded some time back, but completely by chance he had come down from Scotland to visit the RAF Museum on the one day that I was there, and to look at the same papers too! Sometimes it's a very very small world indeed.

Another surprise was that in this day and age (viz, the Internet Age) I should have to print out 3000 pieces of paper (the university library at home allows you to save to a USB stick, though the process is slightly cumbersome). And because I can't carry 3000 pieces of paper with me, I had to send them home in a big box, along with some books, totalling 25kg: I don't even want to say how much that cost! And because I was paranoid about the big box going missing on the way to Australia (and therefore wasting most of my trip here), I took the precaution of taking photos of each and every page beforehand. Some of them may be a bit blurry, but it will be far better than nothing if disaster strikes. Digital technology to the rescue, that's great and all; but it seems like there are one or two intermediate steps which could be eliminated here!

But the most surprising thing I learned here was how to put on a tie -- surprised that I had to do it at all! I've never needed to wear one before and would have quite happily gone to my grave never having learned how to tie one. But one of the conferences I went to was at RAF Cranwell; and even civilians needed to adhere to a minimum standard of dress ("Planters") while in the main building. Including, for men, the wearing of a tie. So first I had to buy a tie, which vaguely went with the shirts I brought with me, then learn how to put it on (the night before the conference). Of course that wasn't hard at all, but it wasn't anything I had expected to be doing here in London either.

Thanks to everyone who has shown me great hospitality while I've been here; you've helped make this trip memorable and not just productive! I look forward to catching up with you all some time in the future, here most likely, or in Melbourne if you ever happen to visit. I should have some form of net access while traveling, so I don't expect a real blog hiatus, though how much I'll be able to post is another question. Probably more travel blogging, I'm sorry to say: I promise there will be plenty more of the traditional Airminded fare when I get back to Australia! Er, and more travel blogging too, I suppose.

  1. I know: not very airminded of me. [↩]
  2. That one is by plane! [↩]