The sensuous charms of the archive

I’ve been making fairly slow progress for the fast month; the whole PhD process still hasn’t quite gelled in the way I’d hoped it would do by now, and I think I”m still suffering from a bit of culture shock moving up from last year. The travel up and down to Manchester seems more tiring than last year as well, but that may just be the onset of the winter blues. In better news, I passed my masters with a distinction, so I am – formally at least – no longer a provisional PhD student!

My literature review has rather stalled, partly because I need to rethink what I’ve done so far, and partly because I’ve been doing some empirical work. For the past few weeks I’ve been spending time looking at correspondence and papers in archives, both at the National Archives and at the Museum of Science and Industry. For the next couple of weeks I’m going to have to be spending more time at MOSI, as their archives are shutting after Christmas for three months as part of the museum’s refurbishment.

Archival work has its intellectual pleasures – the thrill of discovery, the hunt through the files – but I’ve been quite taken with the sensual pleasures of some of the material. I used to work with technical documentation and so I’ve handled more than my fair share of ring-binders stuffed with laser printer output. In the National Archives, I’ve been looking at ARC engine sub-committee minutes, and have greatly enjoyed the retro charms of the 1930s files as physical objects.  One way in which things were better in the old days would appear to be in the choice of paper. This is lovely cream heavy laid foolscap (did A4 even exist?)  with an SO – Stationery Office? – watermark. As the minutes go into the war years, signs of  rationing show up – the nice paper is replaced with nasty flimsy economy stuff, and later both sides are used;  The text becomes a blurry carbon copy, and the paper is covered with handwritten amendments – no retyping of a clean copy especially for the file.

Sadly, most of the the correspondence between Metrovicks and the RAE seems to have used the contemporary equivalent of bog-standard office copier paper, so for the next few weeks I’ll have to content myself with the occasional look at the company’s leather-bound minute books…

Reading

Induction week and all its attendant paperwork is now a month past, and I’ve been getting down to my reading for the PhD. As part of my faculty progression requirements I have to produce a formal literature review by Christmas, and so for the next few months my energies need to be directed towards this.

As background my supervisor suggested that I try and get a feel for where Metrovicks fitted in to the electrical engineering sector, and to try and get an overview of the interwar economy more generally. The idea is to try and understand why a heavy plant manufacturer would be given a contract to build a jet engine. Due to a variety of reasons I’ve been making slow progress, and my first draft was rather cursory – and, as was pointed out, lacking in any discussion of the historiography.

So, as well as revising my first draft, I’ve now been set the task of looking at British interwar military procurement policy. I’ve got a reasonable sense of the RAF side of things, but am pretty much at sea  for the Naval and Army arrangements. Any advice would be much appreciated.

The Topic.

Even though I’ve now only formally been a PhD student for a fortnight, I already understand about The Topic. This is what people mean when they ask you ‘what is Your Topic?’

Formally, the project title is ‘Power and Propulsion in the Jet Age: A Socio-Technical History of Gas Turbine Development at Metropolitan-Vickers, 1937-1965,’ which is a bit of a mouthful. Founded at the turn of the twentieth century as British Westinghouse, Metropolitan Vickers (M-V or Metrovick) were a Manchester electrical engineering firm. As a producer of steam generating plant they had an appreciation of the requirements of  high-temperature turbines, and they also had a strong culture of in-house research.¹ In the late 1930s RAE Farnborough awarded M-V contracts to build some axial compressors, which were followed by contracts for a gas turbine test rig, and eventually M-V was given the task of developing the RAE’s F.2 jet engine design. Post-war Metrovick’s jet division was sold to Armstrong Siddeley as part of the rationalisation of the post-war aviation industry, but the Manchester company continued to build gas turbines for power generation and other uses, building the world’s first naval gas turbine in the late 1940s.

There are a number of themes and areas that I suspect will be worth exploring over the course of the PhD:

• The post-war uses of high technology as a signifier of modernity, and as a tool for confirming Britain’s world status; This links in with the idea of ‘New Elizabethans.’
• The Warfare State and Industry
• British cultures of engineering

More on that later. For now, though, when asked, I just say I’m looking at the history of jet engines in Manchester…

¹ Including building experimental particle physics equipment for the Cavendish Lab.