Barry Pegram and Dick Poole provided insights during a course on V/STOL design they taught at Cranfield University that I attended. Garry Lockley and John Quinn have recently given up their time to talk to me, which has allowed me to begin extending my work beyond the Project Office, and I intend continuing this work, looking at testing and other areas of Kingston's engineering activities, now that I am 'free' of the D.Phil.     
    Chris Farara provided sustained support from the Kingston archive at Brooklands Museum, meeting my requests with constant kindness, as well as reading some of my work and jointly writing a paper on Harrier with me. Without Chris's help my D.Phil would simply not have been possible. His work at Brooklands is very valuable to all historians of technology; the archive is a unique record of the work carried out over many decades that I think is unequalled in terms of its richness of  'day-to-day' detail. It has been Chris's approach to preserve seemingly unimportant memos etc and this has proven to be the basis of the archive's value; such memos are gold to those of us trying to understand what really happened, not just what the official reorts and the company PR people said.
    One of these documents, written by Ralph Hooper, was the trigger for my D.Phil research. It was very nice to see Ralph receive the Newbold Award (reported elsewhere in this Newsletter) during the recent International Powered Lift Conference dinner at the RAF Museum. It was clear to me that most of us at the award ceremony would be out of a job if it was not for the work Ralph did in leading the development team on the Harrier.
    I hope that my thesis did justice to the work that all those at Kingston undertook in their attempts over the years to design a Harrier successor. It was very encouraging to be able to present some of the work I did in a talk to the Association some years ago. ('Beyond the Harrier', Newsletter No.12, Spring 2006). I hope to write a book based on the thesis and I am currently extending the work in a project at Manchester University. This involves looking at the Harrier and JSF design teams now in BAE Systems, and it is already clear to me that the spirit of the Kingston design team is still very much alive at Farnborough.
    Perhaps I should give the last word to the head of my current project, a former aerodynamicist at Brough, who asked me what my background was. Once I had explained this to him his response was, "Ah, Kingston. They were real engineers!"