Where They Know Nearly All The Answers

By Val Hewson

In Sheffield City Library is a department called Sheffield Room. It is a treasure house of historical records of the city and district.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, Tuesday 17 January 1939

Sheffield Central Library, opened in 1934
(image courtesy of www.picturesheffield.com, ref no. s19847)

In years of searching newspapers for stories about public libraries, I’ve found various articles discussing the obscure, odd and funny questions people apparently expect librarians to answer. It’s hard to tell if these are the idea of the journalist, editor or librarian. When I mentioned this to a friend, he even suggested that the questions are just made up for effect. At all events, the resulting articles are an easy job for a journalist and good publicity for a library service, with readers presumably both amused and bemused by the information sought. The stories tell us something about how libraries work – and about what life was like before Google.

On Tuesday 17 January 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II, one of these stories appeared in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, under the title: ‘Where They Know Nearly All The Answers’. It must have been a collaboration between librarian and journalist. The statistics included were clearly official and the City Librarian, Joseph Lamb, who was quoted, was very canny in securing publicity for his service.

J P Lamb, Sheffield City Librarian, 1927-1956

The 7,000 books, 30,000 manuscripts, 5,000 plans, and 6,000 deeds in Sheffield Room omit nothing of importance in the city’s history. The room is constantly in use. In addition to personal inquiries on an average there are two inquiries a week by post, which lead to research among the voluminous records, steeped in the atmosphere of bygone tradition.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, as above

After setting the scene, rich in tradition and scholarship, the unnamed journalist got down to business with ‘the most recent inquiries’: the Spence Broughton affair, William Mompesson and the Lescar Inn on Sharrow Vale Road. There was something for everyone in these fragments of local history.

Spence Broughton, the library’s record revealed, was a farmer, who, having squandered his money took to robbery.

BODY HUNG IN CHAINS

One night a boy was taking the mail from Sheffield to Rotherham. Broughton and another man – who was never caught – set upon him at Attercliffe, took the mail bag and left the boy bound upon the highway. In 1792 Broughton was hanged at York for the crime. His body was brought back to Attercliffe, where it hung in chains for 35 years. This is believed to have been the last example of gibbetting in England.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, as above

I detect a hint of local pride in those last two sentences about the gibbet. To this day there is, you might note, the Noose & Gibbet Inn on Broughton Lane in Attercliffe.

Artist’s impression of Attercliffe Common in the late 18th century, near what is now Broughton Lane, showing the gibbet post of Spence Broughton
(image courtesy of www.picturesheffielf.com, ref no. t00983)
Mompesson’s Memorial (image from the Geograph project collection. Copyright owned by Andy Stephenson and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence}

In the case of William Mompesson, ‘the parson of Eyam plague fame’, the enquirer was looking for his date and place of birth. This proved a ‘teaser’, reported the journalist.

Finally, it was established after extensive research that neither the date nor place of Mompesson’s birth was definitely known, although it was possible to trace the approximate date of his birth from a tombstone inscription.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, as above

Then there was the enquiry from the man writing a book on inn signs. How did the Lescar Inn, still a popular pub today, get its name?

The library records showed there were two grinding wheels in Sharrow Vale Road —they had been there since 1547 – called the Upper and Nether Lescar Wheels. The inn, built in 1879, was named after them.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, as above

Upper Lescar Wheel, River Porter (1868) (image courtesy of www.picturesheffield.com, ref no. s10459
The Lescar today (image copyright Mike McCarthy)

Having established the library’s credentials with these stories, the reporter turned to the City Librarian:

It is one of the purposes of a library to provide material for research, though it cannot, of course, undertake unduly detailed work … In the main … we provide the source of information that will satisfy queries, but in cases of inquiries from overseas the actual details asked for are also supplied if possible.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, as above

The overseas enquiries, it seemed, usually referred to family history. People in Australia or America would get in touch in the search for their ancestors or long-lost relatives. Not much has changed then, as genealogy remains big business for public libraries. Sheffield Libraries, like many others, offer advice and free access to sites like Ancestry and the British Newspaper Archive.  

In the 84 years since the Telegraph published its article, things have changed. People do still ask librarians questions, and use their libraries for research, but they also turn easily to Google, or sites like Find My Past and Ancestry, for information. It takes seconds to search Google to find the Wikipedia entries on Mompesson (his birth still seems obscure, by the way) and on Spence Broughton. There’s a lot of interesting information on Broughton, including this song of the time, in which he has apparently learned his lesson:

Hark, his blood, in strains so piercing,
Cries for justice night and day,
In these words which I’m rehersing,
Now methinks I hear him say –
‘Thou, who art my spirit’s portion
In the realms of endless bliss,
When at first thou gav’st me motion
Knew that I should come to this.’

Spence Broughton’s Lament by Joseph Mather

Spence Broughton (image courtesy of www.picturesheffield.com, ref no. s08474)

The obvious question in all this is whether there is still a need for public libraries in this context. Of course there is. Who but library and archive services have the capacity and expertise to collect and store the information the online articles draw on? The services are impartial. They are not out to make a profit or run by characterful billionaires. They have the trained and qualified staff to help people access, search and assess the material available. As Joseph Lamb noted all those years ago,

A library … was a storehouse of knowledge and experience, and if properly used could supply the answer to any reasonable question.

Sheffield Evening Telegraph, as above

Steel City Readers

If you follow Reading Sheffield on Twitter (@readsheffield) or Facebook, you’ll know that we are raising funds to support the publication of a new book, Steel City Readers: Reading for Pleasure in Sheffield, 1925-1955. The book, by Mary Grover, who founded our group, is an important celebration of Sheffield’s literary heritage. It’s based on the interviews with our 65 Sheffield readers which are all available here, in audio and transcript. Liverpool University Press (LUP) plans to publish the book on 1 June 2023. Here is the wonderful cover design, which uses an image from Sheffield Archives’ Picture Sheffield collection.

We want to raise £12,500 to support the publication. LUP’s plan is to make the book downloadable by anyone from the internet at no cost. To do this Reading Sheffield needs to invest £10,000 to help LUP pay for design, editing etc and to compensate for the loss of sales, and to have some funds to help promote the book etc. This is a big commitment for Reading Sheffield, but it would be wonderful to have a book free to everyone. We have a crowdfunding page – Just Giving – and are grateful for any donations.

The Joy of Reading, with Robin Ince

Robin Ince, BBC Radio 4 personality, author, comedian and all-round booklover and good egg, is coming to Sheffield to do two benefit shows to help us raise funds for Steel City Readers. The shows will be part of Robin’s nationwide tour of independent bookshops to talk about his own new book, Bibliomaniac. Both shows, each lasting about an hour, will take place on 11 January 2023, in the Carpenter Room in Sheffield Central Library on Surrey St, Sheffield, S1 1XZ. The first starts at 4pm, the second at 7pm. Tickets cost £15 and all the money raised will go to our fundraising. Here are links to book tickets for the two shows through Sheffield Libraries’ Eventbrite:

4pm show

7pm show

Tea, cake and books

On Saturday 3 September we held a tea party to support Mary Grover’s new book, Steel City Readers. We want to raise £12,500 so that the publisher, Liverpool University Press, can make the book free to download online.

Steel City Readers is based on the memories of 65 Sheffielders. We asked them about the books they read for pleasure between 1925 and 1955. (You can read or listen to the interviews in full here.) Mary explores their compulsion to read when there seemed little to be gained, the background – home, school, library – to their reading and the effect of factors like class and gender on their reading choices.

The tea party was a wonderful occasion. Tea, cake and talk about books. What’s not to like?

We heard from Mary, who described how she researched the book, formed the narrative running through it and put her own reading journey into it.

Some of the books informing Steel City Readers

The Sheffield artist Lizz Tuckerman brought along some of the pictures from her exhibition In Praise of Libraries, illustrating the reading journeys of some of our interviewees.

The Lord Mayor and other guests viewing Lizz Tuckerman’s pictures

Sheffield poet Eleanor Brown read poems inspired by our interviewees. You can read the poems in Eleanor’s latest collection, White Ink Stains, published by Bloodaxe Books and available from local and online booksellers.

Slaap kindje slaap
Sleep baby sleep
Daar buiten loopt een schaup
Outside is a sheep
Een schaap met witte voetjes
A sheep with little white feet
drinkt eijn melk zo zoetjes
who drinks his milk so sweet.

from White Ink, by Eleanor Brown, in White Ink Stains (Bloodaxe Books, 2019).

Julia Banks and Shirley Ellins, two of our interviewees, described the pleasure and pride they had gained from their participation in Steel City Readers. Julia talked about her life in the Netherlands, learning Dutch nursery rhymes to help her young children as they went to nursery school. Shirley told how reading helped her discover her passion for history, the subject she taught for many years.

The young Shirley Ellins
Julia Banks

Our special guests were Sheffield’s Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, Councillors Sioned-Mair Richards and Jackie Satur. The Lord Mayor, who regularly reads to groups of schoolchildren in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour, spoke about what reading meant to her and about her discovery of books like The Little House on the Prairie series, Little Women, school stories, Susan Coolidge’s Katy books and Jean Plaidy’s historical romances, to name but a few.

Councillor Sioned-Mair Richards, Lord Mayor of Sheffield

Many thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make the tea party so enjoyable.

Here is the link to our Just Giving page. We are grateful, especially in these hard times, to everyone who has donated so far, and hope for more donations.

Steel City Readers

By Mary Grover

Reading Sheffield’s main activity this year is to raise money to support ‘Steel City Readers’, the book by our founder, Dr Mary Grover, about reading for pleasure in Sheffield between 1925 and 1955. The memories of the Sheffield readers we interviewed for our oral history project are at the heart of the book. We want to raise £12,500 to make ‘Steel City Readers’ free to download through an Open Access Licence, so that anyone may read it. Here is our Just Giving page where you can make a donation.

Mary Soar (born Wilkinson)

When you joined the queue of boys waiting to ask Mary Wilkinson to dance, you didn’t know that you were in for something more than swinging a girl round ‘in a room with a lovely bouncy floor above the garage on Psalter Lane’. For, in between dances, Mary brought out her ‘Confession Book’.

With this and a fountain pen, the resourceful girl soon extracted from her friends, male and female, but mostly male, their innermost desires. Each person had to ponder how to conclude a set of prompts like these:

‘I am going to marry for . . ‘

‘My favourite girl is . . .’

My favourite dance band is  . . . ‘ (Harry Roy being the ‘Marmite’ band)

My favourite author is . . .’ (Most of them were thriller writers like Edgar Wallace and the authors of the long-running Sexton Blake series.)

Reading Sheffield discovered Mary’s precious time-capsule ten years ago when we set out to explore the books that mattered to Sheffield readers in the Thirties and Forties. We interviewed 65 readers from all over Sheffield, born before 1945, about what they read when they were growing up.

Mary’s Confession Book is a treasure because people who are not famous, like Mary and her friends, rarely leave records of how they thought and read. Yet, our personal histories and our tastes are individual and surprising, and reflect the times in which we grew up.

The first reader whose memoir I explored did indeed become famous. He was born long before our readers and his reading could easily have derailed a career which was to see him inventing the process of creating stainless steel. Yet Harry Brearley’s first love was reading.

Harry Brearley

Like most of our readers, Brearley had no books at home and even less schooling. He had no access to books from municipal libraries, so, being the resourceful child he was, he made his own. He became a bottle washer in a chemistry laboratory, went to night school, and was inspired by the great educator and philanthropist, John Ruskin. The boy kept borrowing Ruskin’s economic treatise, Unto This Last, copying it out, page by page. He bound the pages with scraps of leather he had scrounged and created a copy of Ruskin’s great work that was his to keep. A formidable achievement, but it was Sheffield’s good fortune that he decided that ‘Reading, there was no living in it’. He turned his attention to the chemistry textbooks lent him by the head of the laboratory.

Adele Jagger aged about 16 in the back garden of 277a Ecclesall Road

For most of our readers, growing up during the Depression, the Second World War and the hard times that followed, there was, still, less of a living to be made from book-learning than there was from taking up a good apprenticeship, if you were lucky enough to be offered one. So why were so many of the people we interviewed gripped by the reading bug and the desire to entertain and educate themselves by reading? For many, with little encouragement, reading became a kind of addiction. Adele, born in 1942 whose father was a painter and decorator, never saw either of her parents hold a book yet, as she put it, ‘something gets hold of you, doesn’t it?’  When I suggested to Doreen, born in 1934, that when she started courting there might not have been time for reading, she was quite tart with me: ‘You can read and dance, Mary!’ Doreen had to leave her grammar school early for lack of parental support. Mary Wilkinson had to leave school early because the family printing business folded. Both girls never let the absence of a School Certificate rob them of an education. They kept on reading.

Doreen Gill and her husband

Most of our readers depended on Sheffield’s superb libraries for the books they read but annuals and comics also changed people’s lives. When Fred Jones from the Manor got tuberculosis in the Thirties at the age of 8, he was a non-reader: ‘I just couldn’t fathom it’. He was sent to Nether Edge isolation hospital and thanks to a mound of comics donated by an imaginative benefactor, he came out fluent, ‘never able to put a book down’ and got to night school.

Fred’s story is told by one of our interviewees, Malcolm Mercer, a boy who never passed his 11+ but became headmaster of Parson Cross School largely because of his own reading. When he left school at 14 to become a shop-assistant he bought himself a notebook and recorded everything he read. He borrowed books from Park Library, setting himself his own curriculum, which included Scouting for Boys, Lord Beaverbrook’s Success, 100 Tips for more Trade and Tolstoy’s Tales of Courage and Conflict.

Park Library

Steel City Readers is inspired by the pleasure Malcolm, Doreen, Mary and others found in the books they hunted down. Liverpool University Press is publishing it as an e-book which will make it free to readers globally, but an author must find £12,500 for the licence fee and other costs to publish it. Will you help Reading Sheffield pay the fee? If you could make a donation, perhaps in memory of someone you know whose life was changed by reading, we would be most grateful and you would be contributing to preserving Sheffield’s history.

The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary

By Val Hewson

This month our sister project, the Sheffield Hallam Popular Fiction Group, is celebrating its tenth anniversary by publishing a collection of reviews, The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary: Exploring Popular Fiction 1900-1950.

We think this wonderful cover image is a publicity photo for Sheffield Libraries (Picture Sheffield. Ref: u02265. Used with permission)

When the idea of a book was first suggested, we felt that members of the group should choose the books and authors they wanted to review. This was risky, as we might have ended up with 20 Agatha Christie reviews, but the strategy paid off. There are 22 authors and 25 books in The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary. There is everything from children’s classics to dystopian science fiction, from politically radical to conservative, published between 1908 and 1950, mostly British – but also Russian, Canadian, Austrian and French – some still popular and others long forgotten. No Agatha Christies, but she gets lots of attention elsewhere, so we don’t feel guilty.  

Helping to edit the reviews gave me the chance to revisit books I know well, like L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (a friend for 50 years now), but also to get to know books new to me, like Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel. The work made me wonder if our Reading Sheffield interviewees said anything about the authors chosen for the anniversary book.

Dennis Wheatley appears to be the best remembered, with at least 15 interviewees mentioning his tales of espionage, war and the occult. Chris F (b. 1939) recalled:

… the house library at school had one or two Dennis Wheatleys and they all had the salacious bits in them and we all knew where they were, pages 27 and 28, and if you opened the book, they were well-thumbed.

Dorothy Latham (b. 1931) revelled in L M Montgomery’s stories of Canadian girlhood:

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I’d have had a daughter – which I didn’t. I had two sons – she would have been called Anne…I adored it, and I – I was just absorbed with it.

For James Green (b. 1936), Rafael Sabatini brought back family memories:

My mum always used to read romances. And my dad’s two favourite authors which you very rarely hear anything about now were Rafael Sabatini, and Jeffery Farnol. And I think, if I remember right, they’re mainly historical novels about French revolution, and you know, that sort of thing.

Ken M (b. 1928) told of borrowing Leslie Charteris’ Saint books from ‘a tuppenny library down at Fir Vale shops that had a huge selection of stuff’.

Warwick Deeping, Ethel M Dell, Mazo de la Roche, Josephine Tey, Compton Mackenzie and others all appear in at least one interviewee’s account of reading. Alan B (b. 1944) told of being asked at school to name a famous author and answering ‘Mazo de la Roche’, who was one of his mother’s favourites: ‘I was laughed at and … I perhaps realised that perhaps all our authors aren’t equal!’ And here’s James Green again, on Hank Janson, whose ‘not very well written’ books excited many of those charged with upholding public morals:

And Hank Janson was a detective who was a bit Mickey Spillane type. And they were considered very very racy. In fact, the teacher would take it off you if he caught you reading one of those.

Madeleine Doherty (b. 1940) is our only interviewee to mention Charles Williams, a member of the Oxford ‘Inklings’, along with C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien, who wrote Christian fantasy thrillers. Madeleine was ‘hooked’ on Williams’ books, but they made her uneasy: ‘they were weird, they were weird. Sometimes I used to frighten myself’.

Some of the authors chosen for review by the Sheffield Hallam reading group do not feature at all in our interviews: Gaston Leroux, Lettice Cooper, Pamela Wynne, Lady Eleanor Smith, Vicki Baum, Valentine Williams, Mary Dunstan, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. This doesn’t mean that they weren’t read by our interviewees but simply that they weren’t remembered. My bet is that many, if not all, were read.

In some cases, books were made more popular by being made into films. Vicki Baum’s novel, Grand Hotel, for example, was a huge success and the 1932 film, starring Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and John Barrymore, made it still more popular. The case of Lady Eleanor Smith is similar: her 1941 Regency romance-with-touches-of-horror, The Man in Grey, was the source of the first and very successful Gainsborough film of the same name, with the sterling British cast of Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Stewart Granger and James Mason. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and Gaston Leroux also wrote novels that were adapted for films.

Even where there were no films to help, there were libraries. Tuppenny libraries of the sort found at Fir Vale would certainly have stocked the thrillers of Valentine Williams and the romances of Pamela Wynne, and Lettice Cooper would have featured in the book lists of many subscribers at Boots Booklovers’ Library on Fargate. Sheffield Libraries might also have had copies of some or all of these, as the City Librarian, J P Lamb, took a much more liberal view of fiction than many of his counterparts. Lamb believed that popular books helped establish the reading habit in people, and stocked his branch libraries with Ethel M Dells and Edgar Wallaces, as well as classics.    

Whether they are well-known and/or admired today, or lying for now unloved on the shelves of second-hand bookshops, all the authors featured in The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary are interesting for what they tell us about the times in which they were written.

The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary (ISBN 978-1-4717-0438-3) is available from Amazon or can be ordered from any good bookshop.

The Carnegie Letters (Part One)

By Val Hewson

Busy with our Sundae Opening project (more about this shortly), we’ve not been able to post anything here for a while. Many thanks to MS who put me in the way of the Carnegie letters about Sheffield. A great way to stoke up the blog again.

Whatever agencies for good may rise or fall in the future, it seems certain that the Free Library is destined to stand and become a never-ceasing foundation of good to all the inhabitants.

Andrew Carnegie, An American Four-in-Hand in Britain (1883).

In April 1904, Geo Hy Capper, of Fernleigh, Tinsley, wrote a letter to R A Franks of the Home Trust Company, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, asking about ‘your method of procedure, so that I shall know exactly how to work’.

Image from the Carnegie Corporation of New York Records held by Columbia University Libraries. Details: https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/catalog/cul:7h44j0zqvd

Here is a transcription of the letter.

Tinsley Parish Council

Clerk’s Office, Fernleigh

Tinsley, April 23rd, 1904

Geo Hy Capper, Clerk to the Council

Mr. R. A. Franks,

Home Trust Company, Hoboken, N.J. U.S.A.

Dear Sir,

On Feb’y 23rd last I received from Mr. J. Bertram a letter announcing Mr Carnegie’s approval of the plans for Library [sic], which he is giving to Tinsley, & asking me to communicate with you for payment as the work proceeds. The Contract was let last night & building operations will now be commenced at once, so I shall be glad if you will kindly let know your method of procedure, so that I shall know exactly how to work.

              Waiting your esteemed reply,

                             Yours faithfully,

                                           Geo. Hy. Capper

George Henry Capper (1859-1924), who acted as clerk to Tinsley Parish Council, was the Sheffield-born manager of a steel rolling mill and a man of substance, as his confident letter shows. (That the letter is handwritten, by the signatory, is interesting. Typewriters were becoming common in offices at the turn of the century but the parish council evidently did not use one.) Robert Augustus Franks (1861?-1935), born in Liverpool, was an immigrant to the United States who had made a success of his new life. He was president of the Home Trust Company, a private bank set up by his friend, Scottish-American steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), to manage Carnegie’s philanthropy, including the endowment of ‘free libraries’.

Andrew Carnegie, (seated, fourth from left), his daughter, Margaret, and wife, Louise, at the Carnegie Corporation’s first board meeting, 10 November 1911. Standing behind Carnegie is his secretary, James Bertram, and behind Margaret and Louise Carnegie, Robert Franks (public domain, Wikimedia Commons).

Carnegie’s contribution to libraries is well-known. At one point he was the richest man in the world, and he is said to have given away about 90% of his fortune, to support educational and cultural organisations. He believed that:

To try to make the world in some way better than you found it is to have a noble motive in life.

Andrew Carnegie, The Empire of Business (1902).

Carnegie started poor, emigrating to the USA in search of a better life, and he had little formal education. He reasoned that libraries gave people like him the chance to learn, to catch up. All in all, he helped found perhaps 3,000 libraries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spending about $55m in the process. Most were located in the USA, but towns and cities around the world, including in the UK, benefitted from Carnegie’s generosity.

Around 1903, Tinsley, now a suburb of Sheffield but then an independent township, was awarded £1,500 by Carnegie for its free library, to be built on the corner of Bawtry Road, on a site donated by Earl Fitzwilliam, the local aristocrat. Mr Carnegie’s secretary had written to the council on 18 November, setting out the terms of the offer:

Dear Sir – Responding to your communications on behalf of Tinsley. Mr Carnegie will be glad to give £1,500 sterling to erect a Free Public Library building for Tinsley, if the Free Public Libraries’ Act be adopted, and the maximum assessment under it levied, producing £100, as stated by you. A site must also be given for the building, the cost not being burden upon the penny rate.

Sheffield Telegraph, 17 December 1903.

The money might have been refused, as there was a feeling in Tinsley that Carnegie the employer oppressed the working man libraries were intended to help. There was also a suggestion that local business, rather than business based 3,000 miles away, should pay (which might have been connected to the curious fact that steel was the business of both Carnegie and Tinsley). In the end, the parish council voted almost unanimously to accept Carnegie’s offer. You can read the full story starting here.

Tinsley Carnegie Library opened to the public just over a year after Capper’s letter, on 7 June 1905, and the whole affair, from initial application to opening ceremony, took perhaps two years. The contract Capper refers to must have been the one with the local building firm, Gray and Sons, and the plans approved by Carnegie were the design by respected local architects, Holmes and Watson, which can be seen in Sheffield City Archives.

Tinsley spent Carnegie’s £1,500 well (and managed the budget well – there was an overspend of a mere 9s 10d). The Sheffield Telegraph reported from the opening ceremony:

The brick structure is effective in appearance, and, surrounded by grounds nicely laid out and planted with shrubs, the institution…besides being of educational value to Tinsley, is an adornment to the village.

Sheffield Telegraph, 8 June 1905

Tinsley Carnegie Library around 1970 (courtesy of Picture Sheffield, Ref. No. s26883)

And so it remained for 80 years, until in 1985 the library moved to a (less impressive) shop unit in a modern precinct just down the road. The building was then used as a family centre, but has stood empty and boarded up for some years now. It’s a tribute to the parish council, the architects and builders that the building remains, forlorn, water-damaged but still graceful after nearly 120 years. 

Tinsley Carnegie Library 2018

Columbia University Libraries also hold correspondence about Sheffield’s Walkley Carnegie Library, about which we’ll be writing shortly.

Romer Wilson: Remembering Sheffield’s Forgotten Novelist

Part One

By Val Hewson

The writer Romer Wilson, born in Sheffield in 1891, is now almost forgotten. Her name appears in a few databases and blogs, and she has brief Dictionary of National Biography and Wikipedia entries. A novelist who also wrote short stories, verse and a play, and an anthologist of tales for children, she was generally well regarded in her lifetime. She seems, however, to have received almost no critical attention since her early death in 1930. We found her, by chance, through her father, Arnold Muir Wilson (1857-1909), whose name came up in our research into Sheffield Libraries.

Our sister project, Reading 1900-1950, has posted an article about Romer Wilson’s novel, Latterday Symphony (Nonesuch Press, London, 1927), here. We are researching her life, and while there is much to discover, we know enough to offer a good introduction to Sheffield’s forgotten novelist.    

The first thing to know is that ‘Romer Wilson’ is not her name. On official records, Romer Wilson is Florence Roma Muir Wilson, eldest child of Arnold and Amy Letitia Muir Wilson. On her marriage, she became Florence Roma Muir O’Brien. According to correspondence archived at Girton College, Cambridge, her friends called her, not Florence, a popular name of the time, but Roma. Why Roma we cannot know, but it is interesting that her parents visited Rome on their honeymoon. Romer and Roma, invented and real, pen-name and given name. Perhaps Roma felt that Romer, which could so easily be a man’s name, would be an advantage in her career. (Indeed, critics did occasionally assume that they were reviewing the work of a man.)

Parkholme, 30 Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield, where Romer Wilson was born

‘A dark old manor house on the edge of the moors just outside Sheffield’ was Romer Wilson’s home for most of her childhood, until it was sold on the death of her father in 1909.[i] This was Whiteley Wood Hall, a 17th century house with Victorian additions, stables and extensive grounds, in Fulwood, a suburb in south-west Sheffield. Romer was born on Saturday 26 December 1891 in Parkholme, a much smaller suburban villa in Collegiate Crescent, in the desirable Broomhall area just outside the town centre.[ii] Her father, on the way up in the world, bought the Hall in 1893, when she was about two years old, for somewhere between £7,000 and £9,000 (a sum beyond the imaginings of most Sheffield residents at the time). The Hall had important historical associations: Thomas Boulsover (1705 – 1788), the inventor of Sheffield Plate, and Samuel Plimsoll MP (1824 – 1898), famous for the Plimsoll line on ships, had both lived there. The house was demolished in 1959, with the grounds and outbuildings becoming a Girlguiding outdoor activity centre. Today all around is park and common land, well-used and easily accessible. Its relative remoteness in Romer’s day perhaps contributed to her depictions of wild, even hostile moorland in her books, Greenlow (Collins, London, 1927) and All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Bronte (Chatto & Windus, London, 1928), from where this quotation comes:

West and north and south the moors hang above the West Riding of Yorkshire. They rise up bleak and black and brooding, a thousand feet, two thousand feet above the valleys. Empty and silent, without trees or lakes, without wide rivers, without grand impressive mountains, they roll away from this world.

All Alone (Introduction to Haworth – A Journey from To-Day)

Whiteley Wood Hall, Common Lane, built 1662 by Alexandra Ashton, demolished 1959. Stood in its own woods, commanding a view over the Porter Valley. Home of Thomas Boulsover, inventor of Sheffield Plate, who died here in 1788, and Samuel Plimsoll
Whiteley Wood Hall, Common Lane, Fulwood, Sheffield. Image courtesy of Picture Sheffield (www.picturesheffield.com). Ref no: y01697

Dark, remote and ancient Whiteley Wood Hall may have been, but Romer and her younger sister Natalie (born in 1893) and brother Leslie (born in 1899) had a privileged childhood. There were servants, parties and fetes, holidays abroad, chauffeur-driven motor cars, outings to the theatre, music lessons and private education.    

This comfortable life was due to the efforts of her father, Arnold Muir Wilson. A remarkably frank obituary said of him:

… at all times a theatrical personality. … Self-made, frank almost to the point of brutal bluntness to friend and foe, assertive and dauntless, relentless as a sleuthhound in business, with a boundless capacity for work and an astonishing capacity for turning unlikely circumstances to his own advantage. … a want of self-control, an almost reckless impulsiveness of action and a disregard … for the feelings of others. … one could never definitely conclude that Mr Muir Wilson had any clear creed or abstract principle, or that he was seriously in earnest … gossipy … in private he was a good fellow and an entertaining companion …

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Monday 4 October 1909
Councillor Arnold Muir Wilson (1857-1909)
Arnold Muir Wilson. Image courtesy of Picture Sheffield (www.picturesheffield.com). Ref. no. y08151.

Wilson was in many ways the classic Victorian success story. He was a prominent solicitor and a Conservative councillor for over 20 years, with Parliamentary ambitions. He had started in trade, helping out as a child in his father’s barber shop on Snig Hill in the town centre. The Wilsons evidently prospered, opening various new businesses, and in time Wilson switched from trade to profession, thus rising up a social class or two. We know little of his education (other than a period in Germany), but his professional training was through Clifford’s Inn, where he won prizes.[iii] He opened his own law firm and was much in demand. He had business interests too, owning property, land and a share in Sheffield’s newest theatre, the Lyceum. He even contrived an appointment as honorary consul for Serbia in 1898, which presumably appealed to both his vanity and his eye for an opportunity.

Around 1906, however, Wilson fell ill, consulting a ‘brain specialist’. His illness seemed to exacerbate an already volatile character. He attacked a magistrate in court, for which he had to issue a public apology. When a by-election was called in Attercliffe in 1909, dismayed not to be chosen as the Conservative candidate, he stood as an independent but lost and promptly took the official Conservative candidate to court, alleging assault and damage. The case was dismissed. After this, Wilson’s health declined further, and he went abroad, saying he would never return alive. He was right: he had a complete breakdown in Vancouver and died soon after in hospital. His body was brought back to Sheffield and quietly buried in the General Cemetery. ‘Never, probably, was a man who had played so prominent a part in public life buried in so private a manner,’ said the Sheffield Daily Telegraph (Monday 25 October 1909). He left almost £50,000, mostly in trust for his family, and instructed that his property, including Whiteley Wood Hall, be sold. His wife and children evidently moved to a smaller property nearby.   

Around this time, Romer was coming to the end of her schooldays. She had been privately educated until she was 15, when she was sent to West Heath, a boarding school in Richmond on Thames, for four years.[iv] After that, in 1911 she went up to Girton College, Cambridge to read law.[v] Socially this was apparently a happy time, with Romer making many friends including the economic historian, Eileen Power (1889 – 1940), social reformer Margery Spring Rice (1887 – 1970) and the novelist Emily (‘Topsy’) Coursolles Jones (1883 – 1966), who seems as forgotten as Romer herself. Academically, she was less happy: she spoke of ‘considerable boredom’ and passed her exams ‘with mediocre honours’ in 1914. A tutor suggested she do some writing, and she started by producing ‘rubbish for a typewritten private magazine’.

This then was the beginning of Romer Wilson’s literary career. There’s a suggestion of the accidental about it: a young woman doing a little writing to occupy her time in between social activities. She did not need to work after all. Or did the tutor’s suggestion accord with a wish of her own? At all events, she was soon working on a novel, against the background of war.

Part Two of Romer Wilson’s story will follow as we learn more about her life and work.


[i] Quoted, but not attributed, in the entry on Romer Wilson in the Dictionary of National Biography.  

[ii] Parkholme, 30 Collegiate Crescent, is now owned by Sheffield Hallam University.

[iii] Clifford’s Inn was one of the Inns of Chancery to which all solicitors belonged before the 20th century.

[iv] A more famous pupil, many years later, was Lady Diana Spencer.

[v] Law was an interesting choice. Was it a tribute to her father? No woman was allowed to practise law in the UK until the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, five years after Romer finished her university course.

How did your Nan cook Christmas dinner?

By Val Hewson

In December 2021, I gave a talk in Sheffield Central Library about what vintage recipe books can tell us about our heritage, both individual and shared. Here are my slides and notes from our Events page, along with a related paper written for the Inheriting the Family project on Research.     

During the talk I asked the audience to recall the cookery books important to them. About 20 people responded on cards, anonymously – an unscientific, but interesting, survey. They quoted a wide range of books, from Mrs Beeton to Nigella, domestic goddesses both, from the 19th to the 21st centuries, from kitchen ranges to smart ovens.

The cards suggest that we identify recipe books with their authors – Delia Smith, Mary Berry, Marguerite Patten and the rest. The recalled titles are often not quite right, half-forgotten while the authors stick in our minds. They are acquaintances, if not friends.

Marguerite Patten (1915-2015), for instance, appears twice on the cards. She worked for the Ministry of Food during World War Two and then became a regular on radio and television.   

My first recipe book was by Marguerite Patten. Everyday Cook Book in Colour.[i] Sold second hand by the local library! Started a lifelong love of cookery.   

Marguerite Patten. WW2 Home front / Rationing recipes (not exact title). Could be Victory Cookbook. Has many recipes for non-meat meals/vegetarian meals.[ii]

The Observer journalist, Katherine Whitehorn (1928-2021), conjures up for a whole generation memories of leaving home, being a student, the first job, getting married and making do:

Cooking in a Bedsitter by Katherine Whitehorn.[iii] Given to me late 1960s or early 1970. I had left university and was working and flat sharing in London. This is the 1st cookery book I owned.

Cooking in a Bedsitter, often reprinted, must have been tucked into suitcases by many anxious parents.

Then we have Elizabeth David (1913-1992), whose championship of French and Italian cuisine fired a revolution in British food.    

Elizabeth David. French Provincial Cooking.[iv] This is more than just recipes – can sense the location and smells and sights and people.

To illustrate the point:

… the most enjoyable of French country meals; unexacting ones, ordered and served with the minimum of fuss. An omelette, perhaps, followed by the sausages which were a speciality of the local butcher, a vegetable dish and some cheese; or perhaps snails and a homely stew, intended probably for the patron’s own dinner but gracefully surrendered; or a vegetable soup, a slice or two of country-cured ham and a beautiful big green artichoke; and on another occasion, a langouste with a mayonnaise which was among the best I have ever tasted, because of the fine quality of the Provençal oil which had gone into it, and which was followed by a dish of tender young string beans of that intense green and delicate flavour which only southern-grown beans seem to acquire.

Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking, introduction (Kindle edition).

Unsurprisingly, Delia Smith, Mary Berry and Nigella Lawson all feature on the cards too. They are among our most familiar television cooks, with Delia and Nigella, if not Mary, needing only first names. Delia gets three mentions altogether, more than anyone else.

Mary Berry. Her recipes are straightforward and easy to follow.

Have bought lots of cookery books over the years but the one I always go to and is my favourite is Delia’s Cookery Course. I also have Mary Berry’s Cakes, which I use often.[v]

Nigella Lawson, How to be a Domestic Goddess.[vi]

The first of all celebrity cooks is named just once, still an icon 160 years after the publication of her Book of Household Management.[vii] Often imagined as an old lady in black bombazine, another Queen Victoria, Isabella Beeton died from complications in childbirth in 1865, aged 28, and never knew of her fame.   

Isabella Beeton, by Maull & Polyblank, 1857 (National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons licence).
Engraved title page of Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Wellcome Library copy, 1861 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

Mrs Beeton – lots of plain, uncomplicated recipes which don’t require a huge range of ingredients (unlike many of the modern, contemporary ones!)

At this point, you may be asking where the men are. On the whole, they are absent.   

1000 Recipe Cook Book. Delia Christmas Book. Nigel Slater’s 30 minute Recipes.[viii]

Not all the books quoted are by celebrity cooks. Good Housekeeping has published dozens of books, ranging from the encyclopaedic to the pamphlet, since it was founded in the USA in 1885 and the UK in 1922. Here we have (along with an honourable mention for Woman’s Weekly).

Good Housekeeping Cookery Book.[ix] Bought by my mother-in-law when first married in 1973. The book I used with really good instructions which I used a lot when I was young was Woman’s Weekly.

and the unfortunately unidentifiable:

Good Housekeeping book.   

Three more books which are warmly recommended are:

Readers Digest Farmhouse Cookery Book.[x] They give information and the background of the different recipes. Lots of different categories, so a simple index.

Marks & Spencer c 1971/2.[xi] Can’t remember title! A4 paperback. Now has no cover, stored in a ring file binder. Used every week!

1970. Dairy Book of Cooking.[xii] From the milkman. Also remember Be-Ro.

Ah yes. Be-Ro. The books of baking recipes produced since the 1920s by this flour manufacturer are by some way the most popular with the Central Library audience.

Thomas Bell founded a wholesale grocery firm near the Tyne quays and railway station in Newcastle in the 1880s. Among his top-selling brands were ‘Bells Royal’ baking powder and a self raising flour. Following the death of Edward VII, it became illegal to use the Royal name. As a result, Bell decided to take the first couple of letters from the each of the two words of the brand name and turn them into the more catchy sounding ‘Be-Ro’.

Be-Ro – Home

Be-Ro ran demonstration events to promote their products and, when people asked for the recipes, the recipe books were written. There have been about 40 editions so far, and they seem to be both well-remembered and loved.

Be-Ro Home Recipes, published 1978. I bought this when I got married. The only recipe book I have kept after 7 house moves. Simple ingredients available. Recipes can be adapted – ingredients added. All you need to feed a small family.

The Be Ro Cookery Book. I was born in 1957. The Love of Cooking.[xiii] Sonia Allison. Bought for me in 1970s by my aunt as a good basic cookbook and still used today. Also loved by my daughter.

Be-Ro book. Good Housekeeping complete. 1975ish. Foodaid Book, celebrity contributed. (Terry Wogan, Delia Smith)

BeRo. Still my ‘go to‘ for basic recipes.

The Be-Ro cookery book. I still have one of my mums books, which I use regularly for scones and pastry – I love it!

It is at this point that I admit to fellow feeling. The Be-Ro book published around 1957 is the only cookery book I associate with my mum, and the gingham-aproned girl pictured on the cover has always been secure in my memory.

Once again, I realise that recipe books have a remarkable ability to awaken memories and to start conversations.


[i] Patten, Marguerite, Everyday Cook Book in Colour (London, Hamlyn Books, 1969).

[ii] Patten, Marguerite, The Victory Cookbook (London, Hamlyn, 1995).

[iii] Whitehorn, Katherine, Kitchen in the Corner: a Complete Guide to Bedsitter Cookery (London, Macgibbon & Kee, 1961). Re-titled and re-published: Cooking in a Bedsitter (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963). 

[iv] David, Elizabeth, French Provincial Cooking (London, Michael Joseph, 1960).

[v] Smith, Delia, Delia’s Complete Cookery Course (London, BBC, 1982). Mary Berry has written several books of cake recipes including: Fast Cakes: Easy Bakes in Minutes (London, Headline Home, 2018); My Kitchen Table – 100 Cakes & Bakes (London, BBC Books, 2011); and Mary Berry’s Simple Cakes (London, BBC Books, 2014).

[vi] Lawson, Nigella, How to be a domestic goddess : baking and the art of comfort cooking (London, Chatto & Windus, 2014).

[vii] Beeton, Isabella, Beeton’s Book of Household Management (London, S O Beeton Publishing, 1861).

[viii] Barrett, Isabelle and Harrop, Jane (eds), 1000 Recipe Cookbook: Recipes for all occasions (London, Octopus, 1960). Smith, Delia, Delia Smith’s Christmas (London, BBC Books, 1990). Slater, Nigel, The 30-Minute Cook: The Best of the World’s Quick Cooking (London, Michael Joseph, 1994).

[ix] Good Housekeeping Institute, Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (London, Ebury Press, 1972).

[x] Reader’s Digest Association (ed), Farmhouse cookery: recipes from the country kitchen (London, The Association, 1980).

[xi] Hard to identify. The Marks and Spencer archive lists several cookery books from 1977 onwards, including: Wright, Jeni, St Michael Cookery Library: Cooking for Special Occasions (Sundial Books Ltd, 1977) and Selden, Elizabeth, St Michael Cookery Library: Family Meals (Sundial Books, 1977).

[xii] Allison, Sonia, The Dairy Book of Home Cookery (London, Wolfe Publishing, 1968). For the Milk Marketing Board? Sonia Allison rates a second mention below.

[xiii] Allison, Sonia, The Love of Cooking (London, Collins, 1972).

Whan thǣt hit bee Yeol

By Val Hewson

More on literary food. Here is the tale of Sheffield Literary Club’s Christmas dinners.

Whan thǣt hit bee Yeol? Yes, well may you pause. It means ‘when it’s Christmas’. Notice ‘Yeol’, which is more usually written as ‘Yule’. The phrase is taken from the menu for a Christmas feast organised by the Sheffield Literary Club in the early 1930s. ‘Feast’ is the operative word: this was no simple roast dinner.

The Literary Club started life as the ‘Sheffield Poetry Club’ in 1923 and, with the change of name perhaps recording wider interests, lasted until the 1960s. It was a largely female and middle-class group, with members having to pay an annual subscription of at least 5/-. The Club had high ideals. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1923 commented:

Here is an opportunity for Sheffielders to refute the ancient taunt that Sheffield is unliterary, that it is ‘at the very nadir of culture’.

The original prospectus promised that:

… poetical plays will be read by lovers of drama; recitals will be given by elocutionists, of the less known good poetry; papers, and discussion on them will cultivate the essay form and encourage debate; original verse-making will be encouraged by inviting the authors to read their works.

The Club’s literary tastes were conservative. In the early years members discussed Austen, Byron, Milton and Tennyson at meetings. They shunned the avant-garde. This all deserves a blog of its own (and one day I will write it) but for now let’s focus on Christmas.  

As my colleague Mary Grover has observed, ‘nostalgia for a pre-industrial world was central to the Club’s original identity’.[i] Perhaps it was even nostalgia for a world which never existed. The 1923 prospectus promised a Christmas supper ‘at which all the beautiful English customs will be revived’ and Club papers show that there was an Old Customs committee. It was ‘Merrie England’ with a vengeance, reminiscent of the ideas beloved of Professor Welch and mocked by his subordinate Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’ novel Lucky Jim (1954):

‘The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It’s only the home-made pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd, the Esperanto…’ He paused and swayed …His head seemed to be swelling and growing lighter …

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954), Kindle edition, loc 4151.

The first Christmas supper in 1923 seems to have been modest enough but through the 1920s and 1930s the celebrations got more and more elaborate. The event was usually described as ‘ye soper æt Cristenmæsse of ye witenayemot and clubbe of lettres’ [the Christmas dinner of the literary club and its committee], and there were toasts, mummers, a gesteur, the Mayster of Ye Feste, Fader Cristenmæsse and more.

Here is the menu, with appropriate Shakespearean quotations, from around 1935:

Hu Thei Don in Cutlerstoune [Sheffield] Whan thǣt hit bee Yeol

Fare

(‘Dost thou understand thus much English?’)

Fortune speed us! Thus set we on.

Sewe [Soup]

‘He is pure air and fire.’

‘He’s of the colour of the nutmeg.’ And of the heat of ginger.’

‘Good sooth, she is the queen of curds and cream.’

Fisch [fish]

‘Must I bite?’                                     ‘Yes, certainly.’

Turkey

’Tis no matter for his swellings nor his turkey-cocks, God pless you, Aunchient Pistol! You scurvy, lousy knave, God pless you!’

Ye Heved of Ye Boore [The Boar’s Head]

‘Whose tushes never sheathed, he whetteth still.’

‘Why, I pray you, is not pig great? The pig or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.’

Plume-poding [plum pudding]

‘Why then comes in the sweet o’ the year.’

‘I cannot do’t without counters. Let me see: Three pound of sugar; five pound of currants; rice – what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. I must have saffron to colour the warden pies; mace; dates; none, that’s out of my notes; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger, but that I may beg; four pound of prunes, and as many raisins o’ the sun.’

‘O that ever I was born!’

Sherries – Sack                                                  Ale – posset      

‘Shall I have some water? Come Kate and wash!’

‘Desist, and drink.’

‘I could not find him at the Elephant,

Yet there he was!’

‘Ye Heved of Ye Boore’, ‘plume-poding’ and the rest were all part of a performance in which the members played a part. At the start,

Ye gests and clubbefelawen schal standen, eche behindan hys siege, and ye Mayster of ye Feste schal pronownce ye Bletsung … And all ye companinie schal seyen ‘AMEN, AMEN, and AMEN! … [The guests and club members will stand behind their chairs, and the Master of the Feast will give the blessing … and the company will say ‘Amen, Amen and Amen!’]

In time Fader Cristenmæsse arrives. The Uschere sing:

A jolly wassail Bowl,

A wassail of good ale

Well fare the butler’s soul

That setteth this for sale!

Our jolly wassail! Our jolly wassail!’

‘I have many towns and countries to visit and must start with Cutlerstoune,’ says Cristenmæsse, and goes on, no doubt to popular acclaim in Yorkshire:

Nay, but to cry truce with jesting, I do love the North

Hath not our greatest trouvère,

Your own poet of Somersby [Tennyson], written

‘That bright and fierce and fickle is the South

And dark and true and tender is the North.

Say to her I do but wanton in the South

But in the North long since my nest is made.’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess: O Swallow.

The Feste finally ends after a short break ‘for a man somewhæt to strechen his shanken’ [for everyone to stretch their legs] and a Toast to ‘Absent Friends’.

Presumably it was the Old Customs committee that lovingly and happily researched, composed and argued over this. There is ritual, bell-ringing, singing, quotations from Shakespeare and other Greats, Latin tags and Elizabethan, Middle and Old and – surely! – cod English. ‘Clubbefelawen’? ‘Erthenobbes?’ [Club members and potatoes to you.]

As might be expected, World War II put a stop to all this, and the custom was never revived in post-war austerity. By then the general sentiment was for making the new world, rather than re-making the old. What did the Club members feel about the Festes? I like to think that some enjoyed the playacting, while others took the evening desperately seriously and still others groaned at the thought of it.

Clubbefelawen with Ye Mayster of Ye Feste (City Librarian, J P Lamb) 3rd from the left, front row. No-one looks very jolly.

[i] Mary Grover, unpublished notes.

An Appetite to Read

By Mary Grover

We could not write about literary food without looking at our own Sheffield readers. Here from the interviews we recorded with Sheffielders born between 1920 and 1945…

When the Reading Sheffield team asked Sheffield readers what they liked to read, we often learned about what they liked to eat and how they combined eating and reading.

Comics, in particular, were described as a kind of food. Frank Burgin ‘ate comics’ and Josie Hall describes how her father ‘used to come home from work with a big pile of second-hand comics, and it was like manna from heaven: I just used to fall on them.’ 

For most of our readers, reading was an appetite, if not a craving.

Josie’s Mum had to wrest her book from her hand in order to get her to the lunch table: it was food or the book. Josie talks about reading as an addiction.

Oh yes, I’ve never smoked in my life but I know people who have and I actually do, I can, go into a panic if I haven’t got any reading material to hand or a book.  I have to take one everywhere, dentist’s, doctor’s, all waiting rooms and I can just blank off.  Even while the children have been playing on slot machines at the seaside I had to be in a corner, reading this book.  People must think I’m insane.  I panic if I haven’t got a book and I just think, “Yes, they’re your cigarettes”.  Where other people have to have a cigarette I have to have a book.  And I know which I’d rather choose. (Laughs) It’s a lot healthier.

Josie Hall

For a working woman or a mother with a day ahead full of housework and childcare, a solitary meal could be a precious opportunity to combine the compulsion to read with the necessity of eating. What Josie chose to eat for lunch was governed by whether it could be combined with holding a book:

I always have a sandwich at lunchtime and I know that the attraction of the sandwich is that I can read while I’m having lunch.

Doreen Gill who left school at fifteen to work as a cashier at Firth Brown’s used to read at her desk in the lunch hour: ‘Very unsociable but I used to do it’. The crumbs of her sandwich would creep in between the pages of Nevil Shute novel, a story by Edgar Allen Poe or a play by Terence Rattigan.

Doreen Gill

For the young servant in the vicarage of the Sheffield district of Park, the attraction of the lunch hour was that she used to have the house to herself while the housekeeper slumbered. ‘She was a proper giant to me’. Jessie Robinson at the age of 14 would tiptoe up to the study of the absent vicar and explore his copies of ‘the London papers’. When she was caught getting above her station in this way she was redirected by the giant herself to the vicar’s own copies of Dickens. 

St John’s Park Vicarage, Jessie’s grim workplace (reproduced by permission of Sheffield Libraries and Archives)

‘Now I think you will get more education, child,’ (she never called me my name, always ‘child’) ‘with Dickens’ books’ which when I did start I was a real Dickens fan, and I am now you see. Anything on there of Dickens or Shakespeare I am there, but it was through her, even her resentment gave me a gift and I love Dickens’ characters.  .. she let me take them home.

So Dickens was suitable food for a working class girl while the London papers weren’t.

Perhaps the most remarkable way in which a meal provided an environment in which books could be accessed was the experience of the fifteen-year-old Frank Burgin who found himself in late 1940s eating dinner in a grand house near Stratford-upon-Avon and discussing his reactions to an Ernest Hemingway novel with his fellow apprentices.

Frank Burgin

‘A holiday was it?’ asked Loveday, his interviewer.

Oh God, no.  It was a course. You had to go and learn how to talk to Brummies and people like that without fighting!  It was all very posh catering, sort of thing, you went to breakfast with your jacket on.

A few weeks before the weekend away Frank got given an Ernest Hemingway, the title of which now escapes him, but the memory of that evening does not.

I talked about it. I presented it. I can remember doing it. I’m sure very very hesitantly, and I wasn’t as articulate then as I am now but at least I didn’t sort of stand there tongue-tied and say, ‘Aye, well it were crap’, like some did.

When Frank was asked why he thought the training officer had encouraged the boys to read, he replied,

It was to get us away from the back page of the ’Star’ and things like that. I mean they hadn’t invented page 3 then. No, it was all done to make us think. Some of us did think. It certainly woke up things in me that I didn’t know was there. I think it also made me think that perhaps there might be life beyond knocking very precise spots off big lumps of metal which I’d gone into engineering to do and was quite happy doing.

The posh catering, the discovery that he could talk in public about a novel he had read and the fact that a training officer thought it worth the boy’s while to read the novel changed the way Frank thought about reading and he became an avid reader. Somehow his tepid reaction to Hemingway prompted him to explore other pre-war writers and he came across the novels of Graham Greene, ‘who I did relate to’.

Frank, the boy who ‘ate comics’ became not only a wide reader but a student of physics. Having left school at 14 he was the only one of our readers to have gained a PhD.

Perhaps the most heartfelt appreciation of a set-text I have ever heard, was from a student who used a food metaphor. When I first started teaching the Sheffield Further Education College in the 1980s, I was lucky enough to have an English Literature class full of women who had returned to education after years of cooking, cleaning and caring for children. The GCSE set-text was J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. When we had finished reading it through, one woman sighed appreciatively and announced, ‘Now that’s a right meat and potato pie of a book’. She knew what had ‘gone into’ that play and savoured the skills of the dramatist who had crafted it.

Here’s a recipe I found earlier: Meat and Potato Pie with a Chunky Suet Crust.