Gillian Applegate’s Reading Journey

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Val Hewson

Gillian Applegate was born on 27 October 1941, in Frecheville which was then in Derbyshire but is now part of Sheffield. Gillian worked first in banking but later became a college librarian. She married in 1964, and her husband, Norman, died suddenly, at the relatively young age of 63. Gillian has one daughter, Jane, and a grandson.

For Gillian, books have brought not only passing pleasure but also lasting fulfilment and content.

When Gillian retrained as a librarian, she qualified with distinctions and merits and her husband Norman said: ‘Oh, I knew you’d pass. It’s as if you were rehearsing all your life.’ He meant of course that books had always been part of Gillian’s life. Her parents encouraged her from the first as they wanted their daughters ‘to read and be educated’.

I remember at school – I don’t know whether they do it now – but on a Friday afternoon, always the teachers read you a story – Milly Molly Mandy, Worzel Gummidge – and I absolutely adored it and I think that from when I could read, I’ve always had a book in my hand.

I got into libraries later in life. I worked at Castle College as a cashier … and I … was offered a job in the library which I adored. I’d found where I belonged, I think.

The time came when Gillian was very grateful for books. Gillian’s husband, who ‘had rheumatic fever as a child [and] was left with a murmur in his heart’, died suddenly and left her grieving. But books, says the interviewer, ‘seem to have opened the door to social activities.’ They came to the rescue, both socially and for comfort.

I’ve always had books and sort of read at home but not a lot. But I think it really came back when I was widowed ten years ago. He’d gone out walking, my husband, and had a massive heart attack. At least I didn’t see him ill, but it was such a shock and devastating.

When I was older, when I was widowed, a friend invited me to go to a book club. My sister … said “I think you should, because you always had a book in your hand.” And it saved me really, in bereavement.

If I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d got a book on the go, rather than get upset, just switch the light on and read the book.

‘Everybody was so kind,’ Gillian says, ‘and asked me to go to things and I went to everything.’ This included two book clubs: Sundays at Waterstone’s Sheffield bookshop and Wednesdays at the City Library. One of the first books Gillian read this way was Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring:

[It] was a bit tedious and everything but then a lady said, ‘There’s a film and they’re having it at the Anvil [a Sheffield cinema]’ and about six or seven of us went to the film and it sort of got me into circulation again after I’d been bereaved because this little nucleus started going to exhibitions. We read a book about the plague, I’d never been there and we went to Eyam,* and it sort of started life beginning again, shall we say.

In time, Gillian found a new partner (‘I’m certainly lucky to have met my partner. … And we do have fun together, laugh a lot’) and so resigned from these book groups. But she found herself starting and running another group:

… for three years I’ve been running the book club for the Oddfellows. … We meet at Crucible Corner: it was buzzing with the snooker and we’re again using the libraries: we borrow them at the libraries, so it can only be ten members because they only lend you ten books.

Oddfellows is a national social and support group. Gillian joined through a friend.

[Oddfellows] evolved from the guilds when everybody bound together and helped each other. They helped if you were ill and everything like that. … So when we meet it is really to help people meet people, meet together and have holidays. … They’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. We help each other and do different things.

The Oddfellows book club was Gillian’s own idea:

… I just thought ‘They haven’t got a book club’ because we had walks, different things, and I said to the secretary, ‘Can I start a book club?’ and he said, ‘By all means, it’s in the diary’. It was quite slow at first and then people, it wasn’t what they wanted and they dropped out. It’s all women, unfortunately. We’ve had men but it’s all women. We’ve got a lovely nucleus of nice ladies and we meet there and he supports us very much.

The members choose books in turn, ‘so we’ve all sorts’. At the time of her interview, Gillian had just got from the library copies of Julie Buxbaum’s The Opposite of Love (2009), a modern romance, but the group has also read: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (‘that was hard going and a lot of violence. I wouldn’t say it was my favourite book’); and Call the Midwife, by Jennifer Worth (‘we’d actually read that before it came on television.’)

The book group also has occasional outings, linked to the books being read, and entertained visiting authors:

… we’ve had Bryony Doran who wrote The China Bird (2011), and she came and that was lovely. And one our members is Marjorie Dunn. Again, my love, she writes historical novels, so she’s come and visited us.

The book club helps Gillian indulge her lifelong love of history. She mentions enjoying Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Catherine Bailey and, in her youth, Jean Plaidy and Margaret Mitchell. ‘I’ve always had a love of history. Even now, if we’re in quizzes, I’m pretty on the ball if they ask historic questions.’ Her teachers hoped that she would study it at university, but her mother, ‘a very strong woman’, put a stop to this:

Silly now, but she said girls don’t need an education. You’ll get married – which you’re not forced to, are you? – you know, or you could get married and lose your husband in various ways, or never get married but at the time I think she actually got me my first job, in the bank, because she was a legal cashier and paid in and asked if they’d got any vacancies. So I went to what was the National Provincial Bank and became the National Westminster Bank near the Cathedral.

We were all so busy, we were young. It was actually a good time, although it wasn’t the job of my dreams I did enjoy it.

When the interviewer wonders ‘if reading comes into people’s lives very often when there aren’t other things to grab them’, Gillian agrees:

Yes, I think so, but now I shan’t let it go, now I’m back to it.

* Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield. In 1665 there was an outbreak of bubonic plague and the villagers quarantined themselves to prevent the disease spreading. They were shut away for 14 months and only 83 residents survived, out of about 350. The book Gillian read may have been Year of Wonders (2011), by Geraldine Brooks.

Margaret G’s Reading Journey

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Val Hewson

Margaret was born on 12 June 1924, and grew up in Walkley, a suburb of Sheffield. Her mother stayed at home after she married and her father was ‘a clerk at the Town Hall [where] he did all the salaries for the teachers’. Margaret left school at the age of 15 and worked in Sheffield, including for the local transport company. Later she trained as a nurse. She married in 1953 and had two children. She remains a keen reader, and still enjoys books she had in her younger days.

‘No, I can’t.’ Margaret is quite indignant when she is asked if she can remember learning to read, as if perhaps reading has always been there.

I can remember my parents read to me every night and my father used to draw us pictures of the stories and, er, we were always well supplied with books. … Some were presents and some they bought.

Margaret’s parents were readers, she thinks, with her mother particularly enjoying ‘what she called a nice murder’. Margaret and her younger sister both belonged to the Walkley branch library, built at the turn of the 20th century with funds from the Carnegie foundation and with its own children’s room. When they were ‘able to cross the road’, they went to the library alone and ‘read the Chalet School stories and things like that, Angela Brazil’, like so many girls of their generation.

Walkley Library

Reading was perhaps seen by Margaret’s parents as a safe, suitable activity for their daughters:

I s’pose we were still reading … I was young – very young until I was 19. We weren’t like they are today. I wasn’t allowed to do things. I mean the night of the blitz* I was going to a dance – no way was I was going to go. My parents said no and that was it. You see, they said no.

It was around this time, Margaret thinks, that she was reading popular authors like Warwick Deeping, J B Priestley and ‘a lot of Elizabeth Goudge’.

I love her books – I’ve just been reading them all again … and er the libraries have managed to get some … I’ve got one or two myself and I got Green Dolphin Country and it’s so long I didn’t remember much and it all came back fresh. … I liked even the children’s books she wrote.

I think I read Herb of Grace. I think I read some of those early on. I know I used to go around the second hand bookshops when we were away [on holiday], especially if it was a wet day. I picked one or two books up there.

But Margaret never read ‘improving books’ or classics.

I never read Dickens or Shakespeare and that’s something I’ve never wanted to read. I suppose because I didn’t do it at school.

The war brought change. When her call-up papers came, Margaret trained as a nurse at the Children’s Hospital in Sheffield. While she enjoyed it, it left little time for anything else:

… when I was nursing there was no time – only for nursing books. … You had to go for your lectures in your free time for that day.

After she married in 1953, life was still busy but perhaps there was more time to read.

… my husband would probably sit in one place and I’d be in another and we might talk all evening … you know … Once we’d got the children to bed and I mean we’d only two and I used to knit and sew as well.

There were family trips to the library, the branch at Broomhill:

Yes, we all went together. My husband never read anything non-fiction. Yes, he was a physicist, so he was really more into … he did read autobiographies, perhaps, but not many.

He didn’t like novels?

Oh no, no novels!

Broomhill Library

These days Margaret says she reads ‘mostly when I go to bed, and in the morning. Make my cup of tea in the morning and I read in bed. … But I try and save my library books for bed.’ She enjoys today’s authors like M C Beaton, Jack Sheffield and Ken Follett. ‘… the library are very good – if I ask them if they’ve got it in, they’ll send it me.’

But she also goes back regularly to the popular authors of earlier days:

A J Cronin: Shannon’s Way this is. Yes, this is the one, it says ‘To Margaret, Happy Christmas from Gladys and Dick’. Also you see, there’s a ‘1950’ in there and there’s ‘a pound’ on it. … I’ve just read this again and quite enjoyed it.

Mary Stewart: Oh, I like her. I’m reading all those again at the moment. … Yes, I’ve got quite a few of hers there.

Patricia Wentworth: … an older one, isn’t she? She wrote mysteries, yes. … well, I’m reading a lot of hers again with … not Miss Silver … yes, it is Miss Silver, and it’s Miss Marple. They’re quite funny really. They’re so old fashioned! They’re quite funny, quite simple stories.

And Elizabeth Goudge: … that’s what Elizabeth Goudge wrote about, families. And a lot of people would say it was fantasy but it makes good reading, and I’m finding now I’m reading properly, I’m not skipping anything. I probably did that in my younger days. I wanted to get on to see what the ending was, but I’m finding now that I’m reading more or less every word. … That is fantasy really, because it’s about a town, a small town, and everything circulates around the cathedral and the Dean and various things, and I suppose a lot of it is. But some of them write so descriptive you can feel you’re there. And that’s what I’ve found lately.

* The ‘Sheffield Blitz’ is the name given to the worst nights of German Luftwaffe bombing in Sheffield during the Second World War. It took place over the nights of 12 December and 15 December 1940. Margaret remembers it well:

And er I remember the night of the blitz I went to work the next day. I walked all the way. Course when you saw the mess, I just walked all the way back because there was nowhere to go to work. I remember that.

Sheffield’s eighteenth century library

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Val Hewson

By Loveday Herridge

As a teenager, the oldest of the Reading Sheffield interviewees, Ted L, borrowed books from the newly built ‘beautiful and spacious’ Central Library in Sheffield in the 1930s. The books there were housed very differently from their shelving in the filthy, cramped conditions of the Central Library’s predecessor, but the public book collection itself retained strong links with the past. For this collection had absorbed the local books of Sheffield’s Literary and Philosophical Society in 1932, when that important cultural organisation was wound up. And in turn, the Lit and Phil’s collection had been augmented in 1908 by a merger with the Sheffield Library.

This institution had been founded way back in 1771 when some of the members of the most influential families of Sheffield set it up. Its catalogues suggest that, while books were certainly lost, the collection simply grew ever larger over time, with books first purchased in the 1770s remaining available for borrowing. In my imagination, then, in 1934 Ted L borrows a book from the pristine Central Library which was actually purchased in 1771!

The Sheffield Library was a library financed through the subscriptions and annual fees of its members (who needed to be quite affluent to afford them), and open only to them. Sheffield’s subscription library was one of England’s earliest such institutions. It was conceived ‘on the plan of one formed a short time before at Leeds’. This Leeds library had been founded in 1768 by the rational dissenter and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley. Priestley had visited Sheffield where he had been an unsuccessful candidate in 1758 for a post as minister at Sheffield’s important dissenting Upper Chapel, and was a friend of the man appointed at the Chapel in his place – John Dickinson. Dickinson, apparently following his friend’s lead in promoting libraries as a way of improving minds, was a founder member and Sheffield’s Library President in its first year (1771), and in three subsequent years.

Upper Chapel, Sheffield (shared under GNU Free Documentation License)

The Rules for the Sheffield Library are to be found in the 1791 catalogue. They indicate that the Library was run very democratically:

annual meetings of members chose the committee of five members and a President
this committee, which organised the buying and selling of books, met monthly, and any other member could attend and vote, with two thirds of the members determining the choice of books
a librarian, who kept the catalogue and issued books, was chosen at the annual meeting.

Therefore the route by which books entered the Library suggests that the catalogue reflects quite closely the reading tastes and aspirations of its membership – just as the catalogue of the city libraries does now.

Did our Reading Sheffield interviewees pick books from the Central Library shelves that had first been purchased in the late eighteenth century by the members of the Sheffield Library, who were from influential merchant, manufacturing and professional families?

Imagining this scenario, I asked a twenty-first century Sheffield librarian whether she thought it was possible. The answer was that twentieth-century standards of cleanliness would of course have consigned those ancient books to the dustbin. But while the books themselves could not provide a physical link between those cultured men and women who set up the 1771 library and Reading Sheffield’s bookworm twentieth-century readers, what does connect them is surely the thread of curiosity and personal pleasure in books.