Search Results for: Tim elkington

A wonderful week for cycling, with sun most mornings as I biked across to Holborn, starting the days either at Volans or SustainAbility.  The new office is really starting to come together now that the new desking is in, so people have migrated from the boardroom table in the front room to the large room, overlooking the gardens at the back.  And the place is starting to take on the salon-like feel Sam and I always had in mind, and which is so nicely captured in the book The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson, which I read recently – and several other members of the team consider some sort of bible. 

An example was Wednesday, when Jodie (Thorpe) of SustainAbility came over with Kelly Michel, founder and executive director of Artemesia International (http://www.artemesiafoundation.org), to talk about their work with social entrepreneurs in Brazil, France and Senegal.  Part-way through the session, Pamela invited to rest of the Volans London team in and the Medicis came readily to mind.

Spent a good deal of time on the World Energy Council White Paper I have been drafting – but the highlight of the working week was a session yesterday with Rupert Bassett on the design of the new Volans visual identity, which we will launch in September.  Again, as the photos show, something of a team effort.

Have spent much of today, when not reading through the usual heap of newspapers or musing in the sun, in drafting new sections of the Volans website, also due to launch in early September.  The thing is really starting to come together. 

Red seated    Ale Hoovering – with one of our two Henry machines   Ale’s birthday cake – with match instead of candles   Cake 2   Design 1: Astrid and Rupert   Design 2: Rupert and Astrid   Design 3   Design 4: Astrid, Pamela, Charmian, Sam   Design 5: Smita, Rupert, Astrid, Charmian, Pamela, Sam   In a meeting at SustainAbility (taken by Sam)

R.J. Mitchell and Supermarine Prototype K5054   Aircraft plotting

After Goodwood, we continued south to the old RAF airfield at Tangmere, where we visited the Military Aviation Museum.  I have always loved the name, whose origin is uncertain. ‘Mere’ implies a pool rather than a grand lake, according to Wikipedia, and ‘tang’ is thought to be of Norse origin meaning ‘tongs’. It could be that Tangmere was the pool at the fork, or junction of two ancient paths. The pool was later filled in to form a small village green.  When I mentioned that Tim was shot down nearby (West Wittering) on 16 August 1940, the team at the Museum couldn’t have been more helpful, fishing out the records for us.  They also noted that Tangmere – which is where Tim was based during the Battle of Britain – was bombed on the same day. 

But the highlight for me, without question, was seeing the duck-egg blue prototype (K5054) of the Spitfire, with a mock-up of R.J. Mitchell‘s studio in front of it.  Was thinking only a few days back of two things: firstly, the role of prototypes in advancing our thinking and economies, the subject of a paper I’m planning to work on with Alejandro Litovsky; and, secondly, Mitchell himself as a possible candidate for a scheme I have to hang a series of protraits of ‘unreasonable people’ through history on the walls at Volans’ new Bloomsbury Place offices.  Quite extraordinary to walk in and find and K5054.

Tangmere was also a way-station for the Special Operations Executive.  And there on the walls of one of the galleries was a photograph of one of my childhood heriones, Violette Szabo.  She was only 23 when executed in 1945.  Her last mission didn’t leave from Tangmere, apparently, but from Harrington, near Northampton.  Knew of her via Carve Her Name With Pride, starring one of my favourite actresses, Virginia McKenna.

 

Violette Szabo

Lane 1   Lane 2

After leaving Tangmere, we wondered whether we could track down Moses Farm House, of which I have long had fond memories, the family having stayed there on our way to Cyprus in the 1950s.  I had called my parents this morning to see whether it was near Haslemere, as I remembered, but they couldn’t remember.  So Elaine had Googled it before we left, finding a Moses Hill near Marley Heights.  Then as we passed Lurgashall on our way south to Goodwood, I noted that it rang a strong bell. 

In any event, once we had been to Goodwood and Tangmere, we prowled around the astonishingly beautiful lanes of this part of West Sussex, which represent one of my strongest memories of that era.  Convinced that the house was just around the corner, we pulled up alongside an elderly – but sprightly – couple to ask for directions.  Weirdly, they turned out to live in nearby Moses Hill Farm, where they have lived for some 50 years.  They knew the name of the people who lived there previously and it wasn’t Tobin, as it would have been if it had been Tor and Marjorie, Pat’s mother and her second husband. 

(Later in the day, Pat told us that Tor often over-stretched in terms of property, leaving with the bailiffs almost literally snapping at his heels, though that didn’t happen here.  Still, he was good painter, if temperamental.  At least once Marjorie spent hours stitching up a canvas of a stormy seascape that he had slashed with his palette knife in the midst of a drunken nocturnal rage.) 

Then the woman told us about the other house in the area with a Moses tag, Moses Farm House.  Turned out that it was a few miles away, very close to Lurgashall. So off we went, little expecting to find it.  As we drove down the lanes, squeezing past oncoming Lamborghinis, Ferraris and the like, I told Elaine that I remembered that the drive hooked back to the right.  My main memories of the house were of discovering and adopting a nest of pheasant’s eggs in the hedgerow that ran alongside the drive and, secondly, of Tor firing an air rifle out of the windows overlooking one of the lawns – showing me how the pellets ricocheted off the plumage of the guinea fowl that robotically pecked their way around the grounds.  Pat remembers there being three, dubbed ‘The Three Musketeers’ by Tor – but in this case the musketry came from a different direction.

Then we found the house, with the drive hooking around exactly as I remembered it.  We drove in, hoping to find the current owners, but the house was empty.  Strange sense of homecoming to a house that was never home, more of a way-station between Northern Ireland, Dulverton (where Tim’s mother Isabel lived with her second husband, Carey Coaker) and Cyprus.  But pretty much the perfect end to an extraordinary day out from London.

Sign   Gate

Childhood haunt – and where the guinea fowl used to roost

Hedgerow

 

House – with sniper’s posts on first floor

Oxford Street eastward 1

One of the great joys of cycling in London is the sky views overhead. Stopped several times today to take photos of the aerial extravaganzas overhead.

Oxford Street eastward 2  Holborn

One of Britain’s finest contributions to the art of well-informed conversation is The Chatham House Rule. Frustrating, too. Had dinner this evening at the Chef’s Dining Room, Mews of Mayfair. Others around the table included the CEOs of well-known companies.  The conversation revolved around climate change in general – and, in particular, the conclusions of Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund in his new book, Earth: The Sequel.

 

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had this to say about the book: “Krupp and [Miriam] Horn have turned the doom and gloom of global warming on its head.  Earth: The Sequel makes it crystal clear that we can build a low-carbon economy while unleashing American entrepreneurs to save the planet, putting optimism back into the environmental story.”  These – at the for-profit end of the entrepreneurial spectrum – are some of the people we aim to find new ways to help through our fledgling new company, Volans Ventures.