Madeleine Doherty’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 19, 2015 by lizz

Madeleine was born in Sheffield in 1940 and grew up near the Botanical Gardens. She lived with her parents and her brother, who was four years older. Her father was an engineer. Her mother was French and Madeleine’s French grandmother also lived with them. After leaving school, Madeleine trained as a teacher. She married and had a family; her husband taught engineering.

Madeleine says of the house she grew up in:

…it was a house full of books,..a lot of them were my father’s engineering books, then there’d be my mother’s French books, and then there were my brother’s books.

Her early memories of books are of being read to but by the time she was eleven she was choosing books and reading them. From this time she remembers the Milly Molly Mandy stories, a French book called Les Malheurs de Sophie about a naughty girl, a weekly comic called Sunny Stories which came out on a Friday and a series of books, The Twins, about twins in different countries. Her favourite book was a beautifully illustrated edition of The Water Babies, which was a present from her father’s mother. Although she understood French and had French books read to her, she didn’t read any herself.

She used to go to the Children’s Library in Sheffield, first with her mother and later with her brother. He would also take her to the Saturday morning film shows at the Library Theatre. When she was a bit older, she would sometimes get the tram to Ecclesall Library but she always preferred the Central Library. She loved Enid Blyton and probably read them all. She read some of her brother’s books, for example, historical stories by G.A. Henty.

Later on school became important for Madeleine’s development as a reader. She went to grammar school and when she was about 14 had a form teacher who was also Head of English. She had a cupboard full of books which anyone could borrow. Madeleine identifies this as the point at which she became an avid reader.

I used to stay up reading half the night, you know. I’d not turn my light out but I read them too fast…

She read many classic novels at this time: Thackeray, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Mrs Gaskell. She read what was there and didn’t necessarily seek out other books by writers she liked; in fact she thinks that even now there are Dickens’ novels she hasn’t read. She remembers C.S. Forester and E.M. Forster from that time as well.

Another powerful memory for Madeleine comes from when she was about 17 or 18 and she was introduced to the novels of Charles Williams by the curate at her church. He ran a youth club after church on a Sunday evening which she went to with friends, though she was the only one who borrowed books. Madeleine doesn’t recall the titles of these books but she remembers clearly their compelling quality. She has sometimes looked for them since but has never found them.

…I was absolutely hooked on those books…I just read them one after the other. I probably had one a week, something like that.

Madeleine talks more about Williams than about any other writer and his books clearly had a great impact on her. He was one of the Inklings group of writers, along with Tolkein and C.S. Lewis. His novels are very difficult to categorize but are usually described as religious or supernatural thrillers. Each one features a conflict between good and evil, with powerfully drawn characters on either side. This conflict is played out in a world where the boundary between the everyday world and the spiritual world is porous, with certain characters able to move between the two. The atmosphere of the novels is uncanny and quite unmistakable.

During the 1950s, Madeleine’s family didn’t have a television though she used to watch it at friends’ houses. She remembers seeing Quatermass at a schoolfriend’s and thinking that she wanted to read it. Later on she got the book.

Madeleine went to Notts County Teacher Training College in Retford. She used to come home at weekends and collect books to read. She mentions 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World and also the novels of Nevil Shute. Madeleine’s husband wasn’t a reader and after she was married and had children, she read less. Television had a big effect. She thinks that having one meant she read less, although sometimes it would lead her to read something, as with Quatermass. Watching a television version of a book is different from reading,

…television actually spoilt people’s reading. I still believe it now. I watch things and that’s giving you a picture…and it might not be what you would have thought if you had read it yourself.

Or if you have read the book first, ‘I watch it and I think, “That’s not what I read”.’

Madeleine also enjoyed reading poetry and ‘years and years ago’ had a hardback book into which she used to copy poems. She also learned some off by heart.

She does read more now, mostly books given to her by her daughter.

Read or listen to Madeleine’s interview in full here.

Note: reviews of three of Charles Williams’ novels can be found on Reading 1900-1950 and further information about his life and work from the Charles Williams Society.

Access Madeline’s transcript and audio here

The Enduring Appeal of Anne of Green Gables and L M Montgomery

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Val Hewson

Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert’s head and cracked it – slate not head – clear across.

Gilbert Blythe was my first literary crush. I said this recently to a group of women, and got more than one nod of agreement. I first read Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L M Montgomery (1874-1942) because it was my mother’s favourite childhood book – she described her best times at school as the rare afternoons of ‘quiet reading’. When at about the age of ten, I found the ‘Anne book’ in my local library, I fell upon it. Over the next few years I probably borrowed it more than any other book. (It helped that, like Anne, I had red hair. I hated geometry too, although my mother suspected, unfairly, that I was just imitating Anne and could learn to love it if I tried. And then, of course, there was Gilbert.)

Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables (Credit: Library and Archives Canada / C-011299)

I am not alone in my fondness for this book. Some of the Reading Sheffield interviewees remember it well. Dorothy (b. 1931) recalled:

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I had had a daughter…she would have been called Anne.

The hold of this remarkable book is as strong as ever. It is easily Maud Montgomery’s most popular story and remains in print after a century, with millions of copies sold in many languages. Prince Edward Island has a healthy Anne/L M Montgomery tourism industry. There have been around 20 film and television adaptations and related productions (the star of the 1934 movie, Dawn O’Day, even changed her name to Anne Shirley) and a new version is due in 2016, with no less than Martin Sheen playing the role of Matthew Cuthbert. The adventures of an orphan in rural, late 19c Canada apparently remain as enjoyable as ever, and Anne has retained her gift for friendship over the years.

For those who don’t know, Anne of Green Gables is the story of a young girl given a home by a brother and sister living on a farm on Prince Edward Island. What no-one knows as she arrives on the Island is that the orphanage made a mistake. The request was for a strong boy to help with farmwork, not an imaginative, sensitive, lonely chatterbox of a girl. Miss Marilla Cuthbert, who does not like her plans overset, intends to return her but is persuaded not to, and so Anne gets the home she needs and spinster Marilla and bachelor Matthew the child neither expected. Her adventures last for a further five books, well into adulthood, and include the incident quoted above, in which Gilbert, on first meeting Anne, unwisely pulls her hair and calls her ‘Carrots!’ She is, you see, very sensitive about the colour and longs for it to be a ‘handsome auburn’:

Oh I could endure anything if only I thought my hair would be a handsome auburn when I grew up. It would be so much easier to be good if one’s hair was a handsome auburn, don’t you think?

L M Montgomery, it is said, based her novel in part on a newspaper story about an orphan girl sent in error to a couple who wanted a boy. (Does anyone know what happened to the girl? I long to know.) But she also clearly drew on her own difficult childhood and later life. Unlike Anne, she was not orphaned as a baby, but did lose her mother very early and afterwards saw little of her father. She was brought up in a community like Avonlea by her maternal grandparents in an austere household. The Cuthberts and their Green Gables farmhouse were probably based on relatives living nearby (you can visit their house still). Maud had little money and worked as a teacher to fund university, although unlike Anne she did not complete her studies. Both married and lost children.

The real Green Gables (copyright Pam Gibson)

On the strength of this, it is easy to over-estimate the autobiographical element of Anne of Green Gables. I certainly assumed this as a child. But Anne Shirley and Maud Montgomery are not the same. Anne knows sadness but has, through Gilbert and her family, the security to help her overcome tragedy. Maud’s journals, published long after her death but with her permission, apparently show a troubled woman who had a difficult marriage with a depressive man, who lost a child and did not always get along with her surviving sons, all while living a very public life. It comes as a huge shock to the reader of the Anne books to learn that their author may have committed suicide in despair and weariness.

Anne is then not so much the real as the might-have-been-Maud, just as her other characters like Emily of New Moon and Jane of Lantern Hill appear to explore aspects of Maud’s life. Emily develops her writing talents and Jane eventually re-unites her estranged parents in a way Maud never could and is secure in their love.

Maud’s bedroom (copyright Pam Gibson)

For Maud, there was a long period in the critical wilderness (all those happy endings, all that folksiness and whimsy, all those adjectives…) but ordinary readers apparently always appreciated her. She created a secure, rural world based on the one in which she grew up (and possibly warmer and funnier than the real thing), which is enormously attractive. As are her spirited heroines, who are unusual, as heroines should be, but not so much so that we cannot identify with them. Thousands of girls probably wanted to be Anne and/or one of the others. I certainly did.

Maud Montgomery is not alone in this type of literature: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jo March and her sisters, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna and Katy Carr are all cousins of Anne (some more distant than others). But I think Anne has the edge over these others, even Jo and Laura. Through Anne, Maud remains more popular than other writers of her period and type, no matter what the critics thought or think. If you read them in childhood, there seems a good chance that you will remember them with affection in adulthood. As Reading Sheffield interviewee Florence Cowood (b. 1923) said: ‘I just liked the story and the struggle in [it].’

Did you read Anne of Green Gables or other books by L M Montgomery? Why do you think they remain popular?

By Val Hewson

Note: Anyone wanting to know more about L M Montgomery should read Mary H Rubio’s excellent biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (Anchor Canada, 2008), which made me think about the woman who created Anne Shirley. And the Lucy Maud Montgomery Research Centre at the University of Guelph is well worth visiting.

Dorothy Latham’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Val Hewson

Dorothy was born in 1931 in Catcliffe, between Rotherham and Sheffield, and grew up there, attending Woodhouse Grammar School. Dorothy became a civil servant, working in careers guidance and employment. She married Derek, who ran his own plumbing and heating business and they had two sons.

Even now I’m always reading, you know…

Always a passionate reader, Dorothy talked of reading in bed from childhood, on the bus to and from work and in the evenings while her husband pursued practical hobbies like joinery and repairing machinery.

I’d often, to be quite honest, read on the buses. I mean you had a long journey sometimes…I still try half an hour in the evenings before I go to sleep in bed. It relaxes me.

But she was conscious of her reading tastes and interests changing over time. ‘I think you alter as you get older on what you like.’

Dorothy’s reading habit was inherited from her mother. She recalled being told Rupert the Bear bedtime stories and then reading for herself: ‘…once I could read, you know, I just didn’t put them down’. This included, you sense, reading to cope with the disruption of the Second World War, when Dorothy remembered standing in her garden and watching Sheffield being bombed in the middle of the night.

The first book Dorothy really loved was the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery.

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.

Within her family, books seemed to be a means of both enjoyment and self-improvement. ‘You know my mother was always encouraging me…in that kind of life.’ Dorothy was unusual in her village in winning a scholarship to Woodhouse Grammar School. There she was introduced, as children usually are, to Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and other classics. ‘It was always the English that I was good at.’ Meanwhile the war made buying books and much else difficult, and so Dorothy and her mother often borrowed from the private Red Circle library: ‘…I was brought up in an ordinary household but somehow I got the best’.

As she grew older, the reading habit grew stronger. Dorothy’s father was very protective of her, and she spent many evenings reading at home rather than going out.

It may sound strange but I was encouraged in…erm…I mean I never went out. I suppose I was too young in the war but I’d meet some people and they were out dancing and doing all that. Well my father wouldn’t have, he – he was very protective. You could say I missed it really.

Marriage did not stop Dorothy’s reading: ‘…when I got married I had to limit myself to what I did but I’ve always, always loved the reading’. Her husband and mother-in-law were not much interested in books (indeed she thinks her husband was dyslexic), but her father-in-law was, to borrow a phrase from Anne of Green Gables, a ‘kindred spirit’. He told her, for example, about finding a ‘wonderful book’ which she must read: Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

And you know, I’d discuss books with him and all sorts and you see my eldest son, his first memory of being taken to a library was being taken by his grandpa.

Dorothy sometimes made compromises between reading and looking after home and family:

…you know I thought I could just be a bit of a monkey and sit down and read and not get on with what I was doing. I mean my husband never bothered, I could have done what I wanted really. I mean you have to look after the children and things and I tried to look after my parents. So you’ve got to fit things in, haven’t you?’

Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son was an example: ‘Oh, yes! Oh I thought that was fantastic. I found it…it absorbed me, yes it did. I didn’t want to put it down.’

By now L M Montgomery had been replaced in Dorothy’s favour by Emily and Charlotte Bronte. She liked Jane Eyre but her favourite was Wuthering Heights. ‘Soooo romantic and now I just think: “oh, not so much”.’ The past was always interesting. Dorothy liked history and so looked for classics like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope and also lighter, historical novels by writers like Georgette Heyer, Margaret Irwin, Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy. But her reading was very wide. She happily quoted: Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Margaret Mitchell, Catherine Cookson, Rosamund Pilcher, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, P D James, Ellis Peters, Edgar Wallace, Anthony Hope, Nicholas Monsarrat, Dennis Wheatley, Betty Neels, Arnold Bennett, A J Cronin, Nevil Shute, J B Priestley, Somerset Maugham and Howard Spring.

When it came to books vs television and/or film, Dorothy preferred books:

If I’ve read a book and it’s made into a film, I’m disappointed because your mind works with the book and when I read them, they don’t, they’re not the same…I’ve always felt let down… [Filmmakers] don’t go into the detail and I don’t think they realise that when you read your brain is working out and in your brain visually you are imagining the positions and the circumstances…

(Not that Dorothy disliked all adaptations: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice and The Forsyte Saga all gave her a lot of enjoyment.)

Dorothy’s sight, hearing and mobility deteriorated as she got older and over time she relied more and more on the home library service and audiobooks. ‘I’ve been very grateful for that, very grateful.’ She let others choose her books but she would give feedback: ‘…sometimes I say “oh I did like that” and then they send me a lot, you know. Because I’m, I’m very choosey and they know exactly what I like’. This did get her into trouble once when a friend picked up a book from the library, which turned out to be more explicit than she usually read. ‘Phft do you like this stuff then?’ he said. Dorothy had to explain how the book had been chosen without her looking at it. Sadly she couldn’t recall the title or author, but she remembered it as ‘very, very embarrassing’.

This reliance on libraries throughout her life gave Dorothy strong views about their value.

‘I was so annoyed when I came here that they sold the library… I thought it was disgusting…and they said “Well, you can go into town” and I thought I’d come here because I was disabled and I thought no library! I thought that was a shame. I hope we don’t lose the libraries.’

After years and years of reading, did Dorothy re-read the favourite books of her youth?

I don’t know about Anne of Green Gables. I absolutely was besotted with it…and I mean now I don’t want to read it. Also I though Wuthering Heights was so romantic, I don’t anymore now, I don’t know, I think it’s a bit over the top. It doesn’t seem quite real. But as young person I was telling everyone that’s my favourite book. I must have been about 20, I don’t know. Yeah, that was my favourite and I don’t think it is anymore. I think you alter as you get older on what you like.

Asked if reading changed her life, Dorothy agreed.

…as I’ve got disabled, I have to say I’d be quite lost without my books because I have to fight against getting depressed. I’m not but…because of how I am, I’m not one for just needlessly sitting about like this. I like to be occupied…I’ve switched off from what I can’t do because I’m filling my life with things that I can and that may sound strange but it’s no good…I’ve reached a good age. I’m 80 in a month and, and I think “well, I’ve done quite well really”.

By Val Hewson

Access Dorothy’s transcript and audio here

Margaret’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Val Hewson

Margaret was born in Sheffield in 1936 and grew up during the Second World War and the late 1940s. She became a librarian in the town, married John and had three children.

The men in Margaret’s early life were both readers. During the Second World War, with her father in Egypt, Margaret and her mother moved in with her father’s parents in Walkley, a hillside of terraced houses that largely escaped the bombing of Sheffield city centre below.

When we lived with grandma and granddad, it was mainly granddad who encouraged me to read. He was an avid reader and anything that was printed, he always asked me to [read] even before I started school. Grandma also read books and granny had a collection of bound – you know, the classics …Dickens and so on. And he took the Daily Express and I was encouraged to read all the headlines to do with the war, you know, the advance of the Eighth Army and so on. Yes, at a young age I knew more names of towns in Egypt than in this country!

Margaret’s grandfather had had a variety of occupations.

He joined the army at a young age and he was a professional soldier. I think he was really self-educated all round. He was a professional musician; he played in the army band. And he was also a [fitness] instructor in the army. But he was always reading, and he had loads of books. The Conan Doyle books I went through, again, by the age of nine I’d read Sherlock Holmes and so on. And he had a couple of encyclopaedias, which absolutely I loved, and I still love to this day encyclopaedias and the knowledge you can get from them.

The desire to understand the unknown world of her absent father had a strong influence on the little girl.

I remember in the encyclopaedias there was a section on Arabic, writing the alphabet and so on, which I thought might come in useful with my father being out in Egypt and the Middle East. Of course, I didn’t see him from the age of four until he came back in 1946. And I can remember trying to teach myself to write Arabic. I guess I would have only about eight or nine, I think.

The encyclopaedias and the Conan Doyles were perhaps all the more important because during the war only one new book came into the house. But before and after the war Margaret got books as Sunday School prizes, for birthdays and at Christmas: for example, Milly, Molly, Mandy and Richmal Compton’s Just William – ‘I could laugh out loud with those’. A special visit would be from Margaret’s father’s sister to Walkley from Sheffield. ‘She was a maiden aunt and she encouraged reading.’

Margaret probably ran through Enid Blyton from Walkley Library, the only municipal library in Sheffield endowed by the Carnegie Foundation (Tinsley Library was also a Carnegie library, but was opened before Tinsley became part of Sheffield).

And we were allowed a comic each, my brother – I had a younger brother – and I. My brother had either the Beano or the Dandy and I had either Film Fun or Radio Fun. And when we finished with comics we used to swap them with friends and get something different.

When her father came home from Egypt, the family were rehoused in a house of their own but the library provision was a bit of a comedown.

When we moved onto the new estate at Parson Cross [a new Sheffield housing estate], there was nothing except houses. We had no shops, no schools. And eventually, when the school was built, we had – they opened a couple of evenings a week, I think – a couple of cupboards in the school room. And as far as I can remember, there were only adult books there.

However those adult books included copies of her father’s favourite, Zane Grey. Together she and her father devoured these tales of derring-do in the Wild West and Margaret went through ‘every possible Zane Grey book printed, at the age of eleven’.

When Margaret got a place at Ecclesfield Grammar School, she looked forward to new authors to explore but the school library always seemed to be locked.

There was a library, but for some reason we were never allowed in it! Only for occasional English lessons. So I still had to rely on the locked-up cupboards and the Zane Greys.

At school Margaret did come across Winifred Holtby and J B Priestley who both reflected a Yorkshire she recognised.

I think the two of them were sort of life as I knew it in Yorkshire at that time. A gritty existence, I think, true to life, realists.

Margaret became a librarian, one of the first at the state-of-the-art library opened in 1953 on the edge of another one of Sheffield’s enormous new council estates, the Manor. She had found her vocation.

I think in the branch library it was more of a family. … We were very, very efficient, we were well-taught and we were all very proud of what we did.

Librarianship, like her own personal reading, was all about discovery and opening doors to new worlds for other people to enter.

I think during the ‘50s I read things I would not read again. It’s like the Jacques Cousteau underwater books – I can’t even swim. But of course, in those days it was like going into space, it was something – the world under the sea was something all new and those fascinated me. I’ve never read romance books and historical novels and I still don’t read them, I’ve no interest in them.

When she and husband John had their family, they passed on their version of space travel. When their two sons were small, they bought them a secondhand set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.

And we had to pay on a weekly subscription for these, we couldn’t afford to pay them outright. And my son, who’s now aged fifty, our second son, still has these Britannicas, [in a] proud place in his home, in his own library at home.

When I asked Margaret whether she ever tried to set limits on her sons’ reading, to steer them away from certain books, she quickly replied that nothing was off-limits.

No, because I believe you should make your own opinions on things and if you haven’t got the knowledge, how can you form an opinion on something?

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Margaret’s transcript and audio here

Sheffield – City of the Library

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Val Hewson

Here is a selection of libraries in Sheffield: Totley, Hillsborough, Highfield and Manor. The buildings they occupy, or occupied, are one way of telling the story of the public library – and popular reading – in Sheffield.

On 1 February 1856, Sheffield’s first public library supported by the rates opened in the Mechanics’ Institute in Surrey Street (where the Central Library is today). The first branch library opened in rented rooms in Upperthorpe in 1869. Since then, in attempts to meet the needs of outlying areas, the council has opened, inherited through boundary changes, moved around and, in some cases, closed many branch libraries, part-time ‘library centres’ and mobile services.

In the early days in Sheffield libraries, as elsewhere, the emphasis was perhaps more on education and improvement than on leisure and entertainment. (Libraries do, of course, do all these very well.) The number and selection of books was at first limited, particularly in the case of fiction. The books were kept behind a counter and had to be requested from a rudimentary catalogue, rather than being stored on the open shelves familiar to us. Reading rooms, which have now disappeared, were an important feature and were often separate for men and women. Over the years, book stocks have increased hugely both in number and variety. As have the services available, with libraries regularly hosting book groups, exhibitions, concerts and other events. They now offer internet access, ebooks, films and music, as well as books between hard and soft covers. Sometimes they share premises with community centres and other public services.

The council had opened three branch libraries – Upperthorpe, Burngreave and Highfield – by 1876, although it was concerned by the expense and kept book funds low. From about 1900, building and refurbishment started in earnest and continued for many years, albeit with gaps. Progress was often uncertain, with part-time libraries set up in inadequate, rented rooms. This was the case with the first branch, Upperthorpe, which started in the schoolroom of the Tabernacle Congregational Church, Albert Terrace Road. Occasionally, grand buildings were adopted, adapted and expanded over the years. The Hillsborough branch, for example, opened in 1906 in two rooms in the former gentleman’s residence of Hillsborough Hall, grew over the years and is there still. In most cases, from Burngreave in 1872, the approach was the purpose-built building reflecting the architectural style and library management theories of the day. But happenstance has often played a part too, as a building or site became available unexpectedly and was turned into a library.

Like many other towns and cities, Sheffield benefited from the generosity of Andrew Carnegie who donated the funds to build Walkley and Tinsley. They both opened in 1905, although Tinsley did not join Sheffield until 1912 and so the credit for its library belongs firmly to the then Tinsley Urban District Council.

Highfield

In 1876 ‘twin buildings’, splendid and solidly Victorian, were opened in Highfield and Upperthorpe. They were designed by E Mitchell Gibbs, who was the University of Sheffield architect. Highfield, on London Road, is still in the library business, sharing premises with a children’s centre. Today the building looks a little tired outside but inside is bright and cheerful open-plan. Connected to the library is a substantial house for the librarian, which may indicate the council’s aspirations for its relatively new library service.

The 2004 Pevsner Architectural Guide for Sheffield describes the ‘Florentine Renaissance style’ of this Grade II-listed building. Over the main entrance are carved figures representing Literature and Medical Science and a quotation from Thomas Carlyle: ‘That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy…’ On Sheffield Forum here, PlainTalker says: ‘I love the inscription over the doorway…I find it touching and inspiring. I spent many happy hours in Highfield library as a child/young woman. I love books and love reading.’ Reading Sheffield interviewee David Flather remembered taking his wife Sally, who used a wheelchair, to Highfield: ‘…she’d go around in her wheelchair and collect a dozen books or so…they looked after her very well…’

Hillsborough

In A Yorkshire Boyhood (1983), Roy Hattersley described the library as:

‘our constant joy…part of our lives, a home from home housed in what had once been a mansion owned by a local worthy’.

Reading Sheffield interviewees Noel Housley, Bob Webster* and Joan* all remember using it, with Noel Housley saying it was a ‘very nice old house’.

Hillsborough House (on Middlewood Road) was built in 1779 by Thomas Steade (1728-1793). The Steade family’s lands apparently included not only the present park but also the land on which Hillsborough Stadium stands. The estate changed hands several times until 1890, when the council bought the house, stables and surrounding land. There was talk about turning the house into a museum or gallery but in 1906 it opened as a branch library and the surrounding land became Hillsborough Park. The house is Grade II-listed and looks well in its mature parkland, although the single-story, municipal additions – necessary for the library’s functioning – are a pity and the separate stable block, also listed, is in a very sorry state.

Totley

In late 1939, Sheffield Council was preparing for war. Junior libraries, for example, were closed as part of evacuation plans and small, part-time libraries for adults set up in some areas. But by Christmas 1939, when the expected air raids had not happened, things returned to normal. This meant that a small branch library could be opened at 288A Abbeydale Road South, in Totley, a suburb which had become part of Sheffield in 1935. Ironically, the tobacconist next door apparently ran a small private lending library. The building was previously an electricity showroom/sub-station (and perhaps a bank) and is now a hairdresser’s salon. It looks odd – windowless, like a shoebox, but with an elaborate stone garland on one wall, carved by stonemason Horatio Taylor who helped build All Saints’ Church in Dore. As a library, it was said to be long, dark and badly-lit but without it there would have been no service in Dore and Totley. The building rent was £15 a year.

It was not until 1974 that matters improved, at a cost of around £50,000. The library was moved to a new building at its present location at 205 Baslow Road, on the site of a plant nursery. This has much more light and is no doubt much more flexible, although it too resembles a box – this time, an egg-box. The architects are said to have been influenced by the shape of Sheffield’s famous Crucible Theatre, constructing two octagonal rooms for children and adults, connected by an administrative area. Since October 2014, Totley Library has been run by volunteers as an ‘associate library’, following the council’s plans to close it as an austerity measure.

Manor

Manor Library, serving a large housing estate, is a pioneer and another sign of the council’s aspirations. It somehow has a look of both the 1930s and the 1950s. This is no surprise as it was started in 1938, mothballed during the war (when it was used for civil defence) and finally opened in 1953, at a cost of about £30,000. Its opening was part of a postwar plan for 11 new branches to serve both new estates and older suburbs. It was the country’s first modular library: that is, the interior walls were kept to a minimum to allow maximum flexibility in layout. Glass screens and doors meant visitors could see all the public parts of the building from any point within it. The foyer was panelled in walnut and sycamore and the furniture made of oak and beech. It still looks very well today. Much More Than Books, Sheffield’s history of its libraries, talks about its ‘sense of its spaciousness and dignity’.

Reading Sheffield interviewee Margaret Young’s first job after school was as a trainee in the new library. For Margaret (centre above), it was a fulfilling career and happy time:

‘…we were very, very efficient, we were well-taught and we were all very proud of what we did. And very busy when the Manor Branch Library opened, particularly on Saturdays, extremely busy. So we all got on together, I think you had to do really.’

What do the stories of these four branches say about Sheffield’s libraries overall? The individual branches seem to have little in common. They are in different parts of the city. One is now a community library, while the others remain in the hands of the council. Three of the five buildings were designed as libraries, but erected over a 90-year period and so look very different, while the fourth is a historic house in the Adam style and the last an odd little building chosen because it was available. Where these buildings come together is in the council’s ambition for this public service and the commitment of the people working in them.

Do you have any memories of libraries in Sheffield, particularly Totley, Manor, Hillsborough or Highfield? Get in touch below and let us know.

* Bob’s and Joan’s stories will be published soon.

By Val Hewson

Down the Yangtze in 1949

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Val Hewson

A book group in 1949? What was it like and how did it work?

Book groups are everywhere today. They take many forms and have many starting points. Some support research projects or study for pleasure, while others are simply a chance to talk (a bit) about the latest bestseller over a drink with friends. They take place in people’s homes, in the upstairs rooms of pubs and cafés, in bookshops and libraries, online and even on country walks.

It’s easy to assume that they are a recent phenomenon. But here is a ‘book discussion circle’, from an earlier time – 1949. The invitation and suggested reading list are preserved in Sheffield Local Studies Library (the list is reproduced below for ease of reading).

The group met at 7.30pm on Monday 21 March 1949 in the Study Room at Firth Park Library, Sheffield. It was apparently cold that night – about 2°C – and must have been dark outside. There was a talk, ‘Down the Yangtze River’, by Mrs D White, who had recently visited China. We don’t know who or how many came along to hear Mrs White, or why they were moved to come. The invitation makes it clear that the circle is a regular event, organised by the librarian and with an established membership.

Sheffield Libraries have always organised story hours, talks, special book events and many other activities, and it seems that discussion groups were a settled part of the mid-20th century library round. For example, there is in the archives another Firth Park reading list from 1936 which advertises talks on ‘Travels in Germany in 1936’, ‘The New Map of Europe’, ‘Finance and War’ and ‘All’s Right with the World’. And the Sheffield Forum here includes happy memories of what must have been a junior reading circle at Firth Park in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘…such a happy and interesting place/thing to be involved with’.

We don’t know how the circle worked. The librarian’s invitation says the discussion was ‘quite informal’, with questions. The evidence we have from 1949 and 1936 suggests it was always based around a talk, and we can guess that this was probably illustrated. How many people attended? Was there ever simply an open discussion about some subject? What part did the librarian play? It is known that groups such as this depended to a large extent on the enthusiasm and time of the library staff.

Then there is the subject and the speaker. In his invitation the librarian talks of forming ‘sound opinions’ based on a first hand account of China, ‘that enigmatical country’. China was probably much in the news in early 1949. The long civil war was coming to an end: on 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong would declare the People’s Republic of China. Just one month after the Firth Park meeting, the ‘Yangtze Incident’ was headlines in Britain, when HMS Amethyst, guarding the British Embassy during the civil war, was trapped on the Yangtze for three months until a daring night-time escape. After their meeting in March, members of the Firth Park group probably felt well-informed enough to comment when this news broke.

We have no idea who Mrs D White was or how she came to do the talk. Was she local or doing a lecture tour? Not even Google can help, based on this slight information. ‘Down the Yangtze River’ sounds today like one of those upmarket cruises, but in 1949, in the middle of a civil war, Mrs White can surely not have been there on holiday. Might there have been a business, Christian mission or diplomatic connection?

That formidable, even worthy, book list repays scrutiny. It includes literature, memoir, politics and history. Surely it was not expected that everyone would have read all the books. But who compiled it and on what basis? Was it drawn up by an academic, Mrs White who gave the talk or the librarian? With a few exceptions, the books date from the 1930s and 1940s, confirming that China was of as much interest then as it is now. Unsurprisingly, Western writers are in the majority but, perhaps surprisingly, not by much. Women writers, however, are rare. The individual authors are a fascinating mix.

Mildred Cable (1878-1952) and Francesca French (1871- 1960) and Harold Burgoyne Rattenbury (1878-1961) were Western missionaries. They worked in China for many years, before returning home to write and lecture on China.
Hsiung Shih-I (1902–1991), Tsui Chi (d.1951), Chiang Yee (1903-1977) and Hsiao Ch’ien (1910-1999) all lived for long periods in the UK and were credited with improving Western understanding of China. Hsiung Shih-I was a playwright who translated Shaw and J M Barrie into Chinese and was the first Chinese person to direct a West End play, Lady Precious Stream (1935). Tsui Chi taught English in China and came to Oxford in the 1930s. Chiang Yee (1903-1977) was a poet, author, painter and calligrapher. He wrote a series entitled The Silent Traveller, covering the UK, Ireland, France, the USA and Japan.
American academic Owen Lattimore (1900-1989) was an adviser to President Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek. In the 1950s he was accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of being ‘the top Russian espionage agent in the United States’ (this was never substantiated). Carl Crow (1884–1945) was an American newspaperman who opened the first Western advertising agency in Shanghai. He apparently worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore.
Lin Yutang (1895-1976) was a best-selling Chinese writer and translator, who nevertheless was criticised for attacking Western racism and imperialism. He also invented the first Chinese typewriter (challenging with a character-based language).
Sir John Pratt (1876-1970) and Peter Fleming (1907-1971) may be remembered better today for being brothers than for themselves. Pratt, the brother of film star Boris Karloff, was a British government adviser. Described by Owen Lattimore as an ‘inspired amateur’, Fleming was a well-known journalist who travelled in Asia for the Times. His ultimately more famous brother was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond (and his wife was Celia Johnson, star of Brief Encounter).
Robin Hyde (1906-1939) was a New Zealand poet, novelist and journalist. In 1938, during the Japanese invasion, she travelled through China. The resulting book, Dragon Rampant, was published in 1939, around the time she committed suicide. Here are lines from Ku Li, her poem about Chinese peasants: ‘…Too poor for marriage-bed / He looks for dreaming in the big dim shed, / Rolled in the quilt where other warmth has dossed…’

It is interesting to consider who and what is not on the list. There is no sign, for example, of Pearl S Buck (1892-1973), the daughter of missionaries who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Her best-known work, The Good Earth, became a popular film in 1937. Nor is Han Suyin (1917-2012) included. Of Chinese and European parentage, she studied medicine in London between 1944 and 1949, joining a ‘circle of progressive Asia-minded intellectuals’ according to her obituary, and Bertrand Russell said that her novel Destination Chungking (1942) ‘told him more about China in an hour than he had learned there in a year’.

These omissions are clearly not because fiction was frowned upon. Plays, poetry and short stories are included. Given the Firth Park librarian’s earnest hopes for the evening, perhaps Western fiction was considered of little value in this context. Gender may have been a factor too, as there are so few women on the list. Or they may have been too uncomfortable a choice. Han was known to have Communist sympathies at one time, and Buck once famously criticised missionaries for their arrogance and ignorance.

Libraries in Sheffield still host and support book groups. In the case of Firth Park in 1949, given those serious titles, there are strong hints of adult education and self-improvement, which libraries have always encouraged. Without reading all the books, it is hard to be sure but, given the period, the books seem pro-Nationalist rather than pro-Communist. No matter the birthplace of their authors, the books seem to meet the librarian’s stated goal of learning about ‘the other fellow’. As Cable and French said in China: Her Life and Her People: ‘[this book]…is written for those who desire a better understanding of China.’

Of the books that did make it to the list, it is somehow deeply pleasing that Sheffield Libraries still own copies of four. Sitting unregarded in the reference and reserve collections, they are: China: her life and people, by Mildred Cable and Francesca French; News from Tartary, by Peter Fleming; My country and my people, by Lin Yutang; and Lady Precious Stream, by Hsiung Shih-I. Turning their pages now gives an odd sense of that book discussion circle in Firth Park in March 1949.

Do you have any memories of book discussion circles in Sheffield libraries?

By Val Hewson

SELECTED READING LIST: Down the Yangtze River

Travel
Cable, Mildred, and Francesca French	China: her life and people (1946)
Chiang Yee	A Chinese childhood (1944)
Crow, Carl	Foreign devils in the flowery kingdom (1941)
Dobson, R P	China cycle (1946)
Fleming, Peter	News from Tartary (1945)
Hughes, E R (ed)	China, body and soul (1938)
Lin Yutang	My country and my people (1936)
Rattenbury, H B	China – Burma vagabond (1946)
Rattenbury, H B	Face to face with China (1945)
History
Farmer, Rhodes	Shanghai harvest: 3 years in the China war (1945)
Hsiao Ch’ien	China but not Cathay (1942)
Hyde, Robin	Dragon rampant (1939)
I Feng	Give back my rivers and hills (1945)
Lattimore, Owen	The making of modern China (1945)
Lin Yutang	The vigil of a nation (1946)
Pratt, Sir J T	China and Britain (1944)
Sun Fo	China looks forward (1944)
Sutton, A S E	The Chinese people (1934)
Tsui Chi	A short history of Chinese civilisation (1942)
Literature
Confucius	Book of odes (1909)
Hsiung, S I	The professor from Peking: a play (1939)
Hsiung, S I	Lady Precious Stream: old Chinese play (1937)
Snow, Edgar (ed)	Living China: modern Chinese short stories (1937)
Lin Yutang	With love and irony: essays (1941)