Hi Niall,
Fascinating stuff, and thanks for the input. If I may just wander off into a complete tangent, to clarify…

Too true, but I would hardly describe Freeman, Dowding, Courtney, Beaverbrook et al as “those that memo”. If they did not shape the RAF’s doctrine and the rationale behind its requirements for aircraft, then who did? … Between [the sources] it is possible to build up both sides of the story (within limits). We are extremely fortunate compared with, for example, someone researching the Japanese airforces, in having such an astonishing array of primary material readily available to authors, researchers or the idly curious.

You are of course, quite right, but “Freeman, Dowding, Courtney, Beaverbrook et al” were certainly “those that memo” as well as being men of action. The had all left pulling triggers behind and their action was committed with pen and instruction. My point is those memos may have been written after the event, that those memos may tell a suitable story and certainly do not document arguments, disagreement or push into prominence political point scoring or defences against that – something that certainly happened but remained undocumented. Dates of actions give you a not-before or not-after date, but in themselves may be a post-hoc tiding of the messy reality.

I’ve worked in the civil service and in business, and one thing I know is the paper trail does not reflect anything like the reality of who made what decision and why, but reflects the prominence of those that made the paper trail and those that filed that bumph. I’d use that paper to help with dates to ‘tell the story’ (and mighty boring it would be) and a researcher using the remnant data 70 years hence would tell quite a different story from that same data – a third, different again, interpretation could be made by another participant at the time – and who is ‘right’?

To come (vaguely) back on the topic and to show the depths of suspicion one can sink to: 😉

As I type I have beside me a copy of the Hawker proposal for what would become the Hurricane. Within its stylish grey, green and gold leaf cover are 14 pages of description, some back-of-fag-packet performance estimates and a basic GA drawing. It is simply an outline proposal on which no real design work had been done.

Any potential anomaly in a ‘gold leaf cover’ around ‘some back-of-fag-packet performance estimates’ perhaps? I’ve put together nice presentations with broad-brush ideas inside, but I must remember to try gold leaf when next trying to sell something to Her Majesty’s Government. 😀

Of course presentation can often outrank content, but it’s an interesting oddity, and is a way of evaluating the data beyond just taking the content as accurate. (No, I’m not disputing the conclusions – just adding another angle on ‘data’.)

Anyone interested in this area might find Tom Stoppard’s play ‘Arcadia’ of interest in how historians can be frolicking up the garden path. (Literally, and literarily in that case.)

To go back to the ‘doctrine’ concept. What those that coin the idea might have in mind undergoes modification in the real world, and the words never keep pace with the death of those initiatives, this being an almost absolute failing of documentation. We’ve all seen the ‘big new idea’ from the boss that changes to ‘something that kind of works’ after a few months, or that might fail an acid test, but at that point there’s never a big announcement about how ‘Initiative Big Idea’ has sunk without trace…

“Let’s get Charlie to write the manual” is often the signal of death for Charlie and the manual’s potential user, but the manual would survive. Pilot’s notes that are given to the squadrons months after the aircraft are a fine example of paperwork not being quite what it seems. In short, ‘Doctrine’ does not equal ‘statement of’.

As for electric kettles, Wikipedia (which I normally trust about as much as an insurance salesman) offers the following: “The first electric kettle was shown at the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893, using the electrical heat radiator concept devised earlier by R. E. B. Crompton. This was welded to the kettle’s bottom and led to a large waste of heat. In 1923, Arthur L. Large, from Birmingham, England, invented the immersed heating resistor. A safety valve was introduced by kettle maker Walter H. Bullpitt, also from Birmingham, in 1931.”

Now you’ve done it. Anyone know if electric kettles were in common use in Britain in W.W.II? I’ve just nipped off to copyright ‘Kettleology’. That’ll be fivepence. Ker-ching! 😀

The byways are fun, if not very relevant…