Christine’s reading journey

By Sue Roe

Christine was born in 1940 and her reading journey was inevitably influenced by World War Two, though her parents and her choice of career in librarianship were clearly also important factors.

Christine, aged 14, playing snowballs at school

Christine has difficulty remembering her first experiences of reading:

You’ve started with a difficult question here. The first thing I can remember was at school. Things like Enid Blyton and Treasure Island particularly. That was the first thing that caught my eye.

The war meant that fewer books were available. Christine read what and where she could:

I can remember a boyfriend [of Christine’s sister] of the time bringing me one of these annuals – Stories for Girls annuals… I think he was trying to curry favour with my sister. It was just a gift, and it was second-hand!

Clearly even schools seemed short of books:

[At] about eight or nine, I won a school prize. The teacher gave me a book, but it was a second-hand book. It was one of her [Christine’s teacher’s] books. The prize was a second-hand book! So you didn’t buy books then, well, not in my experience.

The prize seems to have been Anne of Green Gables, the children’s classic much loved by many of the Reading Sheffield interviewees. Christine was also reading Enid Blyton (whose books were ‘exciting. Different. A different world’) and books about life in girls’ boarding schools.

Left to myself, I went through the entire Chalet School [series] like a dose of salts. That’s the thing that really comes over to me – the Chalet School books.

It was at this stage that buying books became important, although she didn’t have much pocket money: 

We used to go into Andrews [a Sheffield bookseller] and a treat would be for me to save my pocket money, so I did collect all the earlier Chalet School books. I think I used to take my mum in and she used to help me out. So they were always considered a luxury.

Although he was away in the army for the duration of the war, Christine’s father played an important part in her reading. This was in contrast to her mother whom Christine ‘can’t ever remember … having any direct influence’. Christine still recalls her father’s collection of books:

The only books we owned were in the bookcase that was full of my father’s books and they were of the ‘Great Short Stories’ type: Great Short Stories of the World and Dashiell – Dashiell Hammett… As I grew up, I was encouraged to read them …

After the war, he would:

…push me towards these classics that were in the bookcase: the Wilkie Collins and that type of thing, which probably was a little bit old for my age group… I struggled a bit with some of the classics that my father wanted me to read.

He also encouraged her to enter competitions in the Children’s Newspaper which they had at home:

It was a short story competition and I got an ‘honourable mention’.

When she moved to the grammar school, Christine was able to take advantage of the class library – a cupboard of books such as H G Wells’ Kipps. At this point she started reading war stories:

I used to win prizes as well at school (a real swot!) and … we were always taken to the bookshop and the books I chose I’ve still got them and some were non-fiction and I got The Cruel Sea and C S Forester’s The Good Shepherd and then Best Foot Forward, which is a war story about someone who lost his leg[s] and is a bit like Douglas Bader…

 

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These war stories had a profound effect:

I’m a convinced pacifist. I think war is absolutely stupid … I think he[her father] thought I was a bit of a leftie because by the time I was 18, 19, I’d already joined CND.

Libraries were an important stop on Christine’s reading journey from an early age:

I did start going down to Central Children’s Library but I think I was older, I think it was when I wanted to be independent when I was eleven or twelve.

When she was 16, Christine went to stay with a distant relation who was ‘deputy chief librarian for Tottenham libraries’. He gave her a ‘book list’ and brought books for her to read, including The Crowthers of Bankdam and Marjorie Morningstar. Christine herself started working in libraries around then. This influenced her reading in several ways:

I got hooked on light reading. Certainly Georgette Heyer. I got through all of those and I think Lucilla Andrews, who wrote about doctors and nurses and I got through those as well.

Christine took an Open University course and professional librarian exams over the years, with the support of her employers. This led to her reading particular sorts of books, not always to her taste:

The first professional exam was a four-part thing and one part was Literature, so again I had to read things like Charlotte Bronte. … Again I was pushed into reading certain books. Again it was Victorian novelists. You’ve not got time to do anything else.

[With] the Open University I did the novel course so obviously again I had to plough through Dickens and Hardy.

Her love of books continued after retiring from the library service. She worked part-time in a children’s bookshop and had her favourites there too:

One of my favourites is The Elephant and the Bad Baby. It’s an early Raymond Briggs… [Also]  The Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business. And Peepo! Again, it’s got a war theme in it. When you see the father, he’s wearing a uniform.

Nowadays Christine enjoys crime rather than war stories:

I go more for the detective solving the crime… It’s trying to work out ‘whodunit’ and get there.

It is amazing Christine managed to fit in so much reading:

Well, because over the years I’ve studied [for] so many different exams and had to be tied in to what they wanted to read and had children. A full-time job; two children and I was studying first for a degree in and then for a master’s, so I hadn’t really got much time.

 

You can read Christine’s full interview or listen to the audio here.

 

Penfriends through the Public Library? (Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 August, 1939)

In August 1939, two young American women, Meredith Hall and Dorothy Pawlicki, of Holland, a suburb of Toledo, Ohio, sent a letter to Sheffield Libraries. They wanted to find English penfriends:

To whom it may concern

We are two young ladies, married, and interested in England, and would like to correspond with someone likewise interested in our US.

Would it be asking too much to have you give the addresses below to two other persons, preferably ladies ranging in ages 25 to 40.

The City Librarian, Joseph Lamb, passed the letter on to the Sheffield Star and, never one to miss an opportunity for publicity for the library service, got an article in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph.

Sadly, we have not been able to find out why Dorothy and Meredith chose Sheffield or if they ever made friends locally. There don’t seem to be any further newspaper articles. Perhaps the outbreak of World War II in Europe, just three weeks later, put paid to any correspondence. But perhaps not. It would be good to think that transatlantic friendships were made, particularly in wartime.

Following Dorothy’s and Meredith’s enterprising example, we contacted the Holland-Springfield Journal. Thanks to the Journal and the local historical society, we have been able to find out a little about the two women.

Buildings Dorothy and Meredith would have known.: the Hotel Secor (top) and the Ohio Bank Building (above), Toledo, Ohio (both public domain).

Dorothy was born Dorothy Stirn on 24 November 1910 in Paulding, Ohio and died 27 March 1979 in Toledo. She married Alfred F Pawlicki in 1930 and they had two children, Janet (b. 1931) and Jerry (b. 1939). In later life she worked as a secretary at a law firm. Meredith was born on 27 March 1907 in Swanton, Ohio and died in Florida on 30 November 1993. She was married three times, including to Canadian Myrven Hall and had one son, Charles Wyant (b. 1924). She worked most of her life as a telephone operator for the Riverside Hospital in Toledo.

Columbus Drive, Holland, Ohio today (public domain)

Not perhaps a very successful piece of research, but it does illustrate the unusual requests sometimes made of public libraries.

‘The most important tool of industry’ (J P Lamb, Yorkshire Post – Monday 26 September 1932)

Libraries are under threat today. Councils say there is not enough money. People claim that, with Google, Kindle and the like, there is simply no longer a need for buildings filled with paper or the librarians who look after it. Sometimes the lack of funds and the redundancy of print are combined, justifying cutbacks or closure in an unconvincingly circular argument. Meanwhile, defenders[i] (they are many and we at Reading Sheffield are of their number) point out that libraries are safe, social spaces. They secure and organise knowledge efficiently, impartially and to accepted standards. The information they hold is available to all, in support of democracy and free speech. Librarians are expert guides who help us find what we need. (This is not to dismiss the internet, which is powerful but altogether less discriminating.)

Librarians have always had to promote their services to potential users. At its annual conference in September 1932, the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux[ii] discussed how to encourage businesses to use libraries. According to a report in the Yorkshire Post on 26 September, Bertie Headicar, the librarian of the London School of Economics, commented on the need to win business trust. There was the ‘difficulty of the library user who dare not tell the librarian what books he wants’ for fear of appearing ignorant or giving away secrets. ‘No true librarian,’ asserted Headicar, ‘was capable of [such betrayal].’ (You can hear the ‘harrumph’.)

The City Librarian of Sheffield, Joseph Lamb, said:

The ordinary man completely fails to grasp the fact that in these days, when national economic survival is largely a question of applied and organised intelligence, the book has become the most important tool of industry. … The public library can provide material and an organisation which will help industry in the unceasing fight to maintain its position, and further developments are possible. But we are faced with the problem of convincing commerce and industry of the library’s ability to do these things.

Lamb lamented that only rarely did industrialists use scientific and merchants, commercial libraries.

In the year 1932, a great firm in my city was not aware that British patents specifications were stocked at the library, though they had been there for fifty years.

Headicar and Lamb agreed about the contribution made by the thoughtful, professional librarian. ‘Nothing mechanical could take the place of the human element…and the personal contact with the librarian,’ said Headicar. (Today’s librarians, mindful of the search engine, might substitute ‘technological’ for ‘mechanical’.) Lamb thought that public librarians could be better at selecting reference library stock. Many, he said, still thought ‘in terms of pure literature.’ He went on, in typically trenchant tones:

They brought to their task of keeping up to date a modern scientific library the outlook of the cloister and shrank from the ruthless modernity of weeding. The staggering pace of research, the extraordinary development of the application of chemical processes to industry, left them a little bewildered.

The Yorkshire Post article notes that there had been meetings with businessmen in Yorkshire, to tell them what libraries could do for them, but these had been poorly attended. ‘Our Yorkshire business men must be assured of value for money.’ (It was ever thus.)

Back home in Sheffield, Lamb did not give up the fight to convince businesses of the value for money of the library service. He must in fact have been planning his next move as he spoke at the conference. Sheffield’s ‘economic survival’ depended almost exclusively on steel and other metals. Lamb’s innovative Scheme for the Interchange of Technical Publications, introduced in 1933, was a partnership between his library and local industry for collecting and exchanging technical and commercial information. SINTO (the Sheffield Interchange Organisation), as it later became known, lasted into the 21st century. Lamb also oversaw the establishment of the World Metals Index (WMI), a comprehensive listing of grade names, trade names, series numbers and abbreviations of metals, which survives to this day. Finally, in 1955, he wrote Commercial and Technical Libraries, a handbook published by the Library Association.

Here is an example, from librarian Alysoun Bagguley’s memories, of SINTO helping local industry.

In 1970, when fire almost destroyed the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, Alysoun unearthed invaluable information about Robert Stephenson’s original, Victorian construction for Husband & Co, the Sheffield consulting engineers helping re-build the bridge.

What lessons are we to take from this story? Libraries have knowledge in depth, curated by experts. They gather their holdings over time (weeding as they go, as Lamb advised) and without bias. They change and develop, according to the needs of their borrowers. They are, not stuffy mausoleums, but living institutions. They lived in the days of Lamb and Headicar, and they do now.

 

[i] Ironically, of course, many of us use the internet to promote our views.

[ii] Founded in 1924 and now known as ASLIB, the Association for Information Management.