Wynne’s reading journey

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

Wynne was born in 1919, making her one of our oldest interviewees. She lived all her life around Sheffield’s Ecclesall Road area. She married a man from Newcastle and they had two daughters, Joan and Anne, and a son, Richard. With the exception of Richard, who was ‘more for enjoying the outdoor life’, everyone in the family loved books.

Wynne’s niece Diane Haswell, who sat in on the interview, said later:

[Auntie Wynne] says throughout the interview how little she could remember especially of authors’ names and titles, which is to be expected. However, as my dear godmother, she never missed a birthday or Christmas gift for me, and it was always books or book tokens and [she] always wanted to know what the books had been about and discuss them with me. Hugely supportive too when I was a student and started teaching in the ‘60s. She was very interested to know what I’d been reading to the children and later to my own.

Wynne, interviewed at the age of 92, had forgotten lots of the books and authors she had read. But it didn’t bother her. What she did remember was the pleasure reading had given, and was still giving, her (by 2011, she had taken happily to reading in bed). ‘Oh I always say I’d hate to go blind and can’t read,’ she said.

Wynne supposed that she learned to read at school, but had no clear memory of that, or of anyone reading aloud to her. But no-one ever seemed to suggest that reading was a waste of time and so somehow the habit developed, and got stronger over time. The first type of material that came to mind during the interview was not in fact a book, but a popular magazine. The stalwart People’s Friend was a favourite for both its ‘proper stories’ and its strong roots in Scotland, in which Wynne was interested. Wynne recalled enjoying the serials and short stories in such magazines in the early years of her marriage, reading them at the table, which was ‘naughty’:

I think probably it might have been a case of enjoying that more because they were short stories, not a full story or book.

The People’s Friend today, not so very different from the days when Wynne enjoyed it.

Is this evidence of how much work was involved in looking after a home and young children when washer-driers, dishwashers and ready meals were pretty much unknown? Perhaps.

Wynne used to take her children to the Ecclesall branch library, then called Weetwood, when they were small, ‘because both Joan and Anne loved reading, wanted to read all the time’. She didn’t remember getting books for herself, but the library building made a lasting impression on her, as it did on others. It was a rather grand house in beautiful gardens, which had been sold to the Council and converted to library use in 1949, as part of a major post-war programme to extend library services in Sheffield.

This early investment in Joan’s and Anne’s reading paid long-term benefits. In time, they came to support their mother’s reading, just as she had supported theirs.

It might have been my daughters who eventually said, “We’ve been reading a book, you might enjoy it. We’ll give it you and if you like it fair enough and if you don’t, don’t bother.”

Joan would take charge of Wynne’s birthday and Christmas lists, ensuring that she got presents of books she would like, and Wynne, Joan and Anne shared books and chatted about them:

No, more or less we have the same [taste in books], apart from Anne … I can’t think of the author, there’s one book and she says, ‘I don’t read hers’ but Joan and I love them and Anne says, ‘Oh, I can’t read hers,’ and I can’t think of who it is.

One result of this little family book group was that Wynne’s tastes developed. She recalled a series of books about early settlers in Australia, where she had relatives, and another book about the horrors of workhouses:

[At school] I hated history, but since reading some of these books which are historical so there [is] a bit of truth in a lot [of] them, I have really enjoyed them and enjoyed historical things more.

Books beat television, in Wynne’s opinion:

… television’s all right but it seems to have taken over with the children. Sit them in a chair and put in front of the television. I don’t agree with a lot of that. I mean I know you say, ‘You can’t stop progress,’ but a lot of it’s not for the good.

Whereas reading:

sinks more, sinks more in my mind. The only problem is that after a while I forget even it. But I can’t do anything about that.

By way of example, there was Jung Chang’s 1991 memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China:

I can’t remember the years when it happened but when I read it, I said, ‘But this was in my lifetime and I don’t remember a thing about that happening’ – this book just astounded me. … I still think about it, that book.

You can read Wynne’s full interview or listen to it here.

Library memories from the Sheffield Forum (Part Three)

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

A third set of library memories from Sheffield Forum.

S talks about Hillsborough and Broomhill libraries:

Broomhill Library

As a child, I used Hillsborough Junior Library; I think the children’s librarian at one time was Maureen Raybould (?). The Junior library was/is a single storey extension built on to the side of the enormous old house which housed the adult library. I used to go to Library Club and loved both the story time and, when older, the quiet reading sessions.
In the dark winter afternoons, when the park gates were shut, the only access to the library was down a fenced walkway entered from Middlewood Road. During the 1940s and 50s (and maybe into the 60s?), there was an infant welfare clinic on the top floor of the adult library building.

When I left school in 1966, I started working for Sheffield City Libraries. My first appointment was to Broomhill Library on Taptonville Road. Bruce Bellamy was the librarian in charge. I liked helping out in the children’s library, Mary Wilde was the children’s librarian. Each week, classes of boys from Birkdale Preparatory School came to change their books. One part of the job I really enjoyed was “call-booking”; this was going out to the addresses of people who had not returned their library books in an attempt to get the books back. Sometimes we were successful, often not, the borrower had a call booking fee imposed on top of the fines, needless to say, we hardly ever got any money, even if we got the books back. The left tickets file back at the library was stuffed with wodges of tickets belonging to people with fines owing (people weren’t allowed to borrow more books until all outstanding fines had been paid).

SD recalls a small, private library:

I used to frequent the Southey Green Library and Central library. I remember a private library on Snig Hill, not sure of the name maybe Red Circle.

I had an uncle, Reg, who had an industrial accident. With the money he got in the settlement he purchased a mobile library from someone. It consisted of a pile of books and a wooden hand cart. I remember visiting my Aunt in the late 40’s and seeing all the books on shelves in the living room.

O knew the library at Highfield:

I used to go to Highfield Library in the early 60’s every Friday afternoon with my mum. The squeaky floor amused me more than the books. It must have made an impression somewhere as I could read before I started school, and am still an avid reader now.

Highfield Branch Library

AB worked as a library assistant:

I was a Library Assistant at Handsworth Library and Central Library from 1968 until 1973. They were interesting places to work, with lots of variety and lots going on ‘backstage.’ like hunting for reserved books, repairing books, processing new releases and shifting books round in the underground ‘stack,’ Plus plenty more. As well as the many branch Libraries and the mobile Library unit, I don’t know if most people realised the many different Libraries housed in the Central building. There used to be the Central Lending Library, and the Children’s Library, but there was also the Music Library, the Library of Science and Technology, The Business Library, Central Information Library, The Local History Library, the Reading Room, and the Picture Library up by Graves Art Gallery on the top floor. There was also the massive two storey underground ‘stack’ for keeping overflow and specialist books and vaults in the basement where the valuable and rare books were kept in their own little padlocked cells. It was such an extensive network that they even used to run tours round all the different departments. It was a brilliant service for the people of Sheffield. I love libraries, what they represent, and what they can do.

I am so disappointed that some branches and services have had to close in Sheffield. Even in this digital age there’s nothing like real books, real Librarians and real libraries.

What do you remember about libraries?

Library memories from the Sheffield Forum (Part Two)

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Val Hewson

Here are more memories of local libraries from the online Sheffield Forum.

L recalls:

Courtesy Picture Sheffield

When I worked at Brown Bayley’s on Leeds road, Attercliffe in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I used Attercliffe library all the time. I remember on one occasion I wanted to reserve a book called “Sir you *******”. Feeling a little awkward at asking for the book, I whispered the title and author to the librarian. Unknown to me the librarian was a little bit hard of hearing and asked me to repeat the title again. I raised my voice a little and repeated the request, again she asked me to repeat the title of the book. I did so in a slightly higher voice ( but still quite low). She suddenly realised what I had said and almost shouted back at me ” Sir you *******” yes we do have it but it is out at the moment so do you want to reserve it?. The library was quite busy at the time and everyone turned round to see who was ordering a book with such a title.

If you still haven’t read the book, replies someone else, it’s available via Abebooks.

B remembers the library’s own reading clubs:

I remember Hillsborough Junior Library in the late 40s. They had a reading club.Which I seem to remember was run outside normal opening hours. The perk of this was that you could get first chance of reading any new books that had arrived. Which was a rare event at that time. The downside was you could only read them in the library, not allowed to take them home.

Yes, in the 1950s it was on Wednesday evenings – I think it was called the “Reader’s Circle”. (says H)

Hillsborough Library, with the children’s library extension

TW went to Walkley Library:

Walkley Library

Whilst at St Mary’s School, Walkley, in the mid 1960s, we used to gather in pairs just after lunch with the oldest at the front (add the year group of each child in the pair), and then be walked along South Road, past all the shops, until we reached Walkley Library on the end. We then had to replace our library books from the children’s section. Sometimes it was difficult to choose a new one in the time. I remember liking: the Cherrys (by William Matthew Scott), the Adventure Series (by Enid Blyton); Secret Seven (by Enid Blyton); Famous Five (by Enid Blyton); Jennings (by Anthony Buckeridge); Just William (by Richmal Crompton), Biggles (by W. E. Johns) and probably many more. At least one time we spent longer in the library (I think it was also over several weeks) and researched a topic. I chose (or was given) “History of Railways” as I thought at that time that my great great great grandfather (who was called Rockett) drove Stephenson’s Rocket when it won the Rainhill Trials. I remember taking great care to colour in a picture that I had drawn of the Rocket.

KK remembers fun at Firth Park Library:

Oh dear! I might be lowering the tone, but…I lived on Firth Park Avenue from 1960 age 5 to 10, don’t recall what age I was but, I loved to go in Firth Park library and play hide and seek around the great big bookcases, spent what seemed like hours in there and had lots of shushing and tutting from the librarians and stiffling the giggles made it even funnier. At age 60, I still immediately see the hide and seek potential in most big or ornate buildings I go into, before I see the architectural beauty of the place!!

More serious response to your question…I do remember paying the fine for late return and it going into the triangle shaped collection box on the high counter. I used to feel like a mini criminal. Also the sound of the date stamping in the book and the flicking through of the cards to put your library ticket into the index system. Hide and seek anyone? Lol

What are your memories of libraries in Sheffield? Use the Comments box to let us know.

Library memories from the Sheffield Forum (Part One)

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Val Hewson

In February 2016 Reading Sheffield put out a call for memories of local libraries on the online Sheffield Forum. Here are some of the stories and comments we got.

R said:

I used to go to Firth Park Library late 30s early 40s. I would read anything I could get my hands on. I went one morning to borrow a book, read it and took it back the same afternoon to exchange for another, but the librarian wouldn’t let me as she said I hadn’t read the one I was taking back.

The old Firth Park Library building today

A recalls a private library on Abbeydale Road:

I grew up as a child on Gatefield Road, off Abbeydale Road in the fifties/early sixties. In the row of shops between the bottom of Gatefield Road and Marden Road, there was a newsagents – I believe it was called Yeadon’s. On one side of the shop, they had a small private lending library which my parents used to use regularly. I usually had the task of running errands to fetch my dad his 10 Park Drive (none of this underage stuff in those days) and my mum her quarter of liquorice torpedoes.. Sometimes, I’d take their books back, The shop always seemed very dark and miserable to me. If I’m remembering correctly, they called it the Abbeydale Lending Library. The reason I know this is because, many years later, while clearing out one of my older brother’s belongings, I found a borrowed book with that name stamped inside. The shop owners had been long gone by then, so the family guilt feeling was significantly less! After they shut, I graduated to the much grander Highfields library – “Just William” books being my staple reading for several years after.

AE thinks of the temporary library at Low Edges:

My first experience of a library was as a child and using the one on the Lowedges estate. It was in the centre of a shopping parade. It was used as a temporary facility until a new one was built at Greenhill shops. I used this for many years. I remember always wanting to take out books produced by either Antelope or Reindeer publishers although I cannot recall what the stories were about. Later I became interested in football autobiographies.

SA used three libraries for study:

Manor Library today

I used three libraries as study areas when I was a student at Sheffield university. The reading room at the main library on Surrey Street was a great venue as it provided desk space and peace and quiet, which were not always available at home. I also used the Manor Top library for the same purpose, as well as the Woodhouse library. The Surrey St library was also a spot where street folk and those in low income boarding houses used to hang out during the colder months. It was warm in there and they were no problem.

J recalls Firth Park Library:

I have fond memories of Firth Park library. I was at Firth Park Grammar school in 47/48, after school I would go to the library & spend hours looking at reference books on ancient Egypt.

What do you remember? Please let us know.

A very local library

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Val Hewson

When she sat in on the interview of her aunt Wynne Wilson, Diane Haswell contributed an interesting story about an unusual private library in Sheffield in the 1950s. You can read Wynne’s story here.

Diane Haswell was born in 1947. As a small child she lived off Rustlings Road near Endcliffe Park in Sheffield. She remembers unusual competition for the public library service – a very local library run by a man called Smith, from a back room in his house which was, she thought, somewhere around Louth, Peveril or Ranby Roads.

Well, I can remember … going to a man’s house and I think he was called Mr Smith and in one back room there was a treasure trove of books and I could pick three books as a young child and my mother picked three books and she also picked three books for her husband, my father.

And he stocked all the Enid Blyton books and things like that. I think that was why it was so popular in the ‘50s so we had that for about ten years so we didn’t go to another library apart from school.

Diane’s memory is pretty good. Kelly’s Directories between 1951 and 1965 record ‘Frederick R. Smith, library’, based at 30 Blair Athol Road, near Rustlings Road.

Here is the house from which Mr Smith ran his library.

How did Frederick R Smith’s enterprising library work? Although Diane doesn’t remember money changing hands, she thinks there was a subscription fee – ‘my mother must have paid’. The loan period was a fortnight. Subscribers had their own codes which were written in the front of each book they borrowed, with the result that there was a record of what they had read. Even though it is over 60 years ago, Diane still remembers that her family code was 33 S, because they lived at 33 Stainton Road. Presumably the ‘librarian’ kept a list of who had borrowed what and when. Reading this, you wonder how often, and with what, Mr Smith refreshed his stock.

At all events, the library was well-used for years.

… we sometimes had to stand in a queue before we got to the living room, taking the old books back and pick[ing] up the new and sometime there were queues of people outside the front door so it must have been a popular venue and a source of books.

Just like the public library, Mr Smith developed his own mobile service. When Diane’s family moved seven miles away to the Handsworth district in 1952, Mr Smith’s son, Eric, used to come round in a small van, ‘which [Diane] can picture now’. He would open this up to reveal a selection of books. Despite the change of address, the family kept their 33 S code, which Diane ‘thought was strange’. Soon the library ‘took off in [our] little neighbourhood and [my] mother’s neighbours used to borrow these books’.

Mr Smith’s home-made library seems to have been popular despite Ecclesall branch library and the Central Library, both of which were nearby and free to use. Ecclesall had opened in October 1949 at the bottom of Knowle Lane (about a mile away from Diane’s childhood home) and became one of the busiest branches. The Central Library was less than three miles away in Surrey Street, on a good tram route. Of course, at this remove, we have no notion of the scale of Mr Smith’s library, but perhaps it was popular because it was so very local and therefore easy for busy families. Maybe its casual nature was also attractive, although Sheffield Libraries was informal in terms of layout, rules etc, especially in its children’s libraries.

Sheffield Central Library, Junior Library

In fact, in time, Diane did use the Central Library with its comparatively vast resources:

As soon as I was eight, I was allowed to catch a bus into town and go to the Central Library which I thought was wonderful, just to have a thousand books rather than perhaps fifty to choose from. But I think that it was significant, the Central Library in Sheffield. I know a lot of people went to that rather than a local library.

But the start of Diane’s reading journey was in a small, private enterprise patronised by her whole family:

… in one back room there was a treasure trove of books and I could pick three books as a young child … those three books were so important to me.

[Mr Smith’s library] really did set me and my parents on the path to avid reading. If my father read authors such as Nevil Shute and Nicholas Monsarrat then so did I and I was still at primary school. But then of course my father and I could discuss the stories afterwards, which I loved.

Perhaps this sort of amateur library will come back into being, as public libraries are forced to close, or at best reduce their opening hours.

Does anyone else remember Mr Smith’s library, or anything similar? Please let us know.

Adele’s reading journey

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Val Hewson

An English teacher, Adele was born in 1942 in the Ecclesall area, and has always lived in Sheffield.

Adele Jagger age 16/17 in the back garden of 277a Ecclesall Road (now a coffee shop)

Adele age 16/17 in the back garden of 277a Ecclesall Road (now a coffee shop)

It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like without books. … I think my life would have been less rich without reading.

For this only child, reading was ‘partly comfort … partly escape … it just puts you into other realms’. Adele guesses that she learned to read easily and says, ‘I asked for books. I wanted to be bought books.’ In time she borrowed them from the Manor library too. But there were no other books at home. ‘I’ve no recollection of that at all. I can’t remember my father or mother reading to me. … No, there were no books in the house.’ Her parents just didn’t seem to be readers: ‘I never saw [my father] read a book. I never saw my mother read a book.’

Manor Library today

Did these parents see how much books meant to their small daughter? Did they believe that reading could give Adele a good start in life, even a better start than theirs? Whatever their motives, they were both supportive.

I was probably a young teenager and reading and Mum would be in the kitchen getting tea ready when Dad came home and he said, “Oh look at her. She’s sitting reading.” And I can distinctly remember my Mum saying, “Leave her alone. She’s enjoying it.”

And:

Yes, I think, really, there was encouragement when they saw my keenness and I think that helped it to grow. You can see how hard we had to work when we were at grammar school and the reading, I think, was a relaxation in their eyes. … But it was my mother who always said, “No, she’s reading. Leave her”. And yet she was the least educated of my parents. She’d been in service, but I think she’d seen a different way of life and I think she’d been surrounded by books. This is me surmising. Because she certainly didn’t talk about that.

Adele’s father did once express doubt about educating girls – ‘you’ll only get married’. She was undaunted. ‘Well, Dad, I would pass my education on to my children; in that case, it’s not wasted is it?’ She thinks her father was cautious, while her mother

‘wanted to do other things in her life that she hadn’t been able to do. And I think she felt thwarted and … wasn’t going to let me be thwarted.’

The books Adele remembers from childhood are those to be expected: Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine series, Richmal Crompton’s William stories and the Katy books by Susan Coolidge. But they have stayed with her:

And I could quote from [the Katy books], really, I think now, ‘cos I read them so much’ and ‘I absolutely adored [the William books].

{By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29925217)

It interests Adele now how middle-class all these books were, with their boarding schools, ‘picnics and tucker’ and William who was ‘right out of my milieu – as a middle-class boy’. ‘It was a different life, wasn’t it? I never read anything about MY life,’ she says. Most young readers in the 1940s and ‘50s must have shared this. It is hard to think of books featuring working-class children. How much have things changed today?

Then, as Adele grew older and looked for other books, ‘a big surprise’. Her father started suggesting books. She guesses that he had enjoyed reading but stopped when he married. (Why? Was it the pressure of daily life, or because his wife did not read? You long to interview both parents too, to find out about this and also why they encouraged Adele to read.)

And he recommended people like PG Wodehouse –‘cos that was always commented on at school: “How did you come across PG Wodehouse, girl?” “Oh, my father recommended it.” You know. And he recommended Sorrell and Son by Warwick Deeping, which I’ve since come to realise had a very great impression on him, because his mother died when he was very young – and this is what the basis of the story is – and I hadn’t realised that.

By her teens Adele’s appetite for reading was ‘amazing’. ‘I was an avid reader of very big books’ – George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence and Tolstoy. But there was also room for Arnold Bennett, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope, Nevil Shute, H G Wells, Ngaio Marsh and others. School and college reinforced the habit: ‘we were exposed to lots of literature that I hadn’t been exposed to before. And encouraged to read. And so that was a wonderful time for me.’

One interesting effect is that Adele has never felt embarrassed about books.

Even when I’ve read rubbish, I’ve never felt like that. I’m quite confident about reading. You know, I wouldn’t really care what other people thought.

These days, Adele has less energy for ‘big books’. She says her level is the ‘Booker prizewinners … I read them and think, “Well, I wouldn’t have chosen that as the winner”, you know.’ And just as her father supported her reading, she takes an interest in her grandchildren’s.

… Children are so fortunate today; they have such a choice. My grandchildren’s bookcases are stuffed with books. Which I love; I love to see that. And they love the world; they’re totally immersed in books themselves. And if they’re being naughty, one’s only to sit down and start reading out loud and they’re drawn to you – and I think that’s amazing.

You can read and listen to Adele’s interview here.

‘A really brawny old building’ – Sheffield’s Central Library

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Val Hewson

But I remember going with my mum to the main library. It was quite daunting because it’s a really brawny old building isn’t it? I think it’s a lovely building … (Judith G)

… when we used to go out in the afternoon we used to watch them building the new library. … we used to watch the cranes, the big stones. Very interesting that was. I was with that library right from the beginning. … I think it’s a fine building that is.’ (Ted L)

Here is Sheffield’s Grade II-listed Central Library and Graves Art Gallery, now over 80 years old. In his 1959 West Riding volume, Pevsner was concerned that the building was:

… in an incomprehensibly insignificant position. However, the plans for a civic centre, not yet in a final form at the time of writing, are to incorporate the building and provide a better context for it.

The 2004 Pevsner Architectural Guide for Sheffield says rather more. The ‘dignified Beaux-Arts’ Central Library and Graves Art Gallery, ‘steel-framed, faced with Portland stone, with giant Ionic pilasters and a high parapet wall around the top-lit galleries’ and ‘oak fittings with restrained Art Deco details’ were ‘intended to form one side of a grand civic square, first proposed in 1924 by Patrick Abercrombie’s Civic Survey as the setting for civic offices, law courts and a college’. This square, never built, was presumably where the Millennium Galleries and Winter Gardens are now. The result was that the library was ‘never really seen to best advantage’.

This is true enough, and the situation is made worse now by the brutality of Arundel Gate just below the library. This major thoroughfare cruelly – Pevsner might have said ‘incomprehensibly’ – exposes the back of the building. At one time, there was a plan for a ‘Peace’ mural by Edward Bawden here but sadly it came to nothing.

The library and gallery, designed by City Architect W G Davies in collaboration with Joseph Lamb, the City Librarian, were opened in July 1934 by the Duchess of York (better known to us as The Queen Mother).

They were a reason for civic pride. Local diarist G R Vine was among many invited to view them and wrote: ‘Magnificent! The arrangements are wonderful.’ There was considerable coverage in local papers, with the Sheffield Telegraph saying in a special feature that the building ‘resembles no other in the country’. .

Home of Sheffield’s first public library (public domain)

The music hall, looking like an illustration from Jane Austen (public domain – {{PD-US}} – published in the U.S. before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.)

The old and woefully inadequate central library had been on more or less the same site in Surrey Street, housed in a former Mechanics’ Institute and an old music hall next to it. Neither could be re-modelled or expanded. They perfectly illustrated the poor condition of Sheffield’s library service in the early 20th century. ‘Revoltingly dirty, both externally and internally’, with dust ‘nearly an inch thick with the accumulated filth of years’ and staff ‘long used to repression and neglect’, says the library’s official history (p.29). The new building, which in the end cost £141,700, symbolised the reformed, improved and expanded service and, less tangibly, cultural and educational aspirations. It housed lending, junior, reference, science and commercial libraries, a basement stack, study cubicles for students, rooms for archives and special collections, offices and staff facilities and a theatre/lecture hall.

The old one was cramped. There were smaller rooms and these lines of shelves up all close together. Quite a lot of people all mugged up sort of thing. When this new one opened everything was beautiful and spacious, art gallery upstairs, and I think they’ve got a theatre underneath … (Ted L)

Over the next 20 or so years, Sheffield City Libraries became nationally respected (for example, for its scientific and technological information exchange scheme for local businesses). Issues rose from 1.2 million in 1922-23 to 3.7 million in 1945-46. This was due largely to the imagination and expertise of the two City Librarians of the period, Richard J Gordon (1921 – 1927) and Joseph P Lamb (1927 – 1956) and a committed Council committee.

But all this success might never have happened as the Council was originally uneasy about this major project at an estimated cost of £95,000. Happily, one of their number, Alderman J G Graves, offered to help. John George Graves (1866–1945) was a pioneer of the mail order business and a local benefactor. The original plan had been for a library alone but in 1929 Graves offered a generous donation if a gallery was added:

… I am willing to defray the entire cost of the Art Gallery Section, and also to contribute £10,000 to the cost of the Free Library portion, making altogether a contribution of £30,000 …

Graves donated part of his art collection to the gallery, where it can still be viewed. The librarians and Council committee had doubts, as the gallery significantly cut down the library’s space, but it was too good an offer to miss, and so Sheffield got its new library.

Even so, the depression of the 1930s saw cuts in book and publicity budgets and issues fell accordingly for some years. The official history of Sheffield Libraries says sharply: ‘so much easier is it to destroy than to build’. (Words worth bearing in mind today perhaps.)

The library was fortunate in World War II. The worst air raids, known as the Sheffield Blitz, were on 12 and 15 December 1940* and there were huge fires across the city. The building was at one point ‘bracketed in lines of flame from the Moor and High Street’ (Raiders over Sheffield, the official history of the Sheffield Blitz). But the damage was relatively light – windows blown out and, more seriously, a long crack across the marble floor of the entrance hall, caused by a bomb in nearby Fitzalan Square.

Blitz damage, thought to be in Sheffield

Today, the building is now showing its age a little. Library services have changed a lot since the 1930s, and so layouts and systems have altered. Funding is still, of course, an issue – today more so than for many years. So it is interesting to reflect on those 1930s aspirations, revealed in the fine carvings by local stonemasons, Alfred and William Tory, on the outside of the building. As the 2004 Pevsner guide says:

… around the main entrance medallions representing Literature, Music, Drama, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Mathematics, Chemistry and Astronomy. High up on the splayed corner a figure of Knowledge holds the ankh and asp to represent the choice between good and evil.

And as a library user said:

As soon as I was eight, I was allowed to catch a bus into town and go to the Central Library which I thought was wonderful, just to have a thousand books rather than perhaps fifty to choose from. But I think that it was significant, the Central Library in Sheffield. I know a lot of people went to that rather than a local library. (Diane H)

* 660 people were killed, 1,500 injured and 40,000 made homeless.

Clansmen (1936) – ‘A long new novel by Ethel Boileau’

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Val Hewson

By Mary Grover

You will struggle to find out anything much about the author, Ethel Boileau, although the indefatigable Furrowed Middlebrow offers some information about her books. However, you can now find a signed copy of Boileau’s 1936 tome, Clansmen – the story of a Scottish family struggling to maintain their ancestral estate, from just after the Jacobite rising of 1745 to 1936 – on the shelves of Sheffield Hallam University’s special collection of popular fiction 1900-1950.

This copy was donated by Norman Adsetts, after whom the Learning Centre at Hallam is named. As Reading Sheffield’s interview with Norman Adsetts revealed, Boileau was an extremely popular novelist in the 1930s. Norman should know; he grew up in between the shelves of his father’s tuppenny library where his mother would have found her favourite author, whose foreign name the little boy struggled to pronounce.

The cover and contents of Clansmen belie Boileau’s reputation as simply a writer of romance. For a start, it is unusual to find a novel explicitly promoted for its length. The first words on the cover of Clansmen are ‘Ethel Boileau’s long new novel’. Length must have been a quality her fans sought. The length owes a great deal to the time-span: 1747-1936.

Family sagas were popular in the 1930s (as they still are). John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, published in the 1920s, was succeeded by Hugh Walpole’s Rogue Herries (1930-1932); Ethel Mannin’s Children of the Earth (1930 and 1937); and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series (1927-1958). But the form was sneered at by modernists (as it is by today’s literary fiction proponents) who set value on the intense, the transitory and the subjective. The narrators of popular sagas of this period tend to assume an unfashionable omniscience.

However, in many ways Clansmen itself is about the value of the subjective, the transitory and intense and is very clear-sighted about the economic realities threatening the enjoyment of any emotional attachments. The only nineteenth century members of the Stewart clan who remain solvent are bankers. However their money is misspent by their relatives, either dissolute or dim. The focus of the main and later part of the book is Alan Stewart. His father having died in the Boer War, just before his birth, he is cared for by his uncle whose crazed and fraudulent stock market dealings wipe out what remains of the money. The generosity of a Jewish financier, Sir Isidore, and the utter loyalty of a retainer, Hector (who alone knows that he is Alan’s illegitimate half-brother), enable Alan to survive, first as an ungifted financier himself and then as a more committed laird. However, at the end of the book the success of this ancient calling is seen to be compromised by Alan’s new wife, a beauty with ‘a past’ and hopelessly bored by the Highlands. Though the dissolute cousin who attempts to seduce this desperate metropolitan beauty is pushed off a cliff by the loyal Hector, the novel ends on a decidedly equivocal note: Hector ‘with his silent stalker’s walk’ turning his back on the image of Alan’s wife in a way that reveals his own desire for her.

Perhaps it is the date when Clansmen came out, 1936, that accounts for its emphasis on the unforeseen and individual helplessness in the context of global war and pervasive economic collapse. The romance is really that of Hector, who loves both master and mistress with no hope of emotional fulfilment himself. The dedication of the novel ‘To All Scots in Exile’ and the prominence of the Stewart heraldic emblem on the cover suggest that this might be a nostalgic novel in which Scottish clans will represent threatened values of loyalty and land. In fact, it is the members of the clan with least connection with the land who make possible the precarious hold the Stewarts have on their shrinking areas of the Highlands. The benefactors of the romantic but rather obtuse Alan are the Jewish financier and a long-dead ancestor who redeemed the family fortunes by running a bank in India. The vast scope of the novel – the Highlands, Edinburgh, Calcutta, the trenches of the First World War, the battlefields of the Boer War, the fleshpots of New York and, very up-to-date, Nazi Germany – conspires to make the Scottish bogs where the action ends up very much on the edge of things, and certainly holding out no hope of stability or sanctuary.

Returning to the reader who first brought Ethel Boileau’s popularity to our attention, Norman Adsetts’ own favourite was a book by Sir Phillip Gibbs, Cities of Refuge (1937). This novel is about the often harsh and tragic fate of White Russians fleeing the revolution. This is a strange book for a six year old to read – yet what an appropriate preparation for the wartime apocalypse through which he was to grow up. The tuppenny library served the young Noman well. Not only did it fire his imagination with romance, comedy and jungle adventures. It also introduced him to the realities of the world into which he had to learn to be an adult through blockbusters (however much these might be derided by 1930s self-styled ‘realists’ or the heirs of Bloomsbury). Clansmen together with Cities of Refuge would have given the seven year Norman more knowledge of the history of twentieth century Europe than a modern boy with greater access to fiction now regarded as more appropriate to his age.

Delia’s Reading Journey

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Val Hewson

Delia was born on 5 October 1942 in Stannington, near Sheffield, where she grew up. She was educated at Stannington County Primary School and, after the 11-plus, at Ecclesfield Grammar. She married and moved to Rotherham, where she had her children. Later she went to night school to study literature.

I just used to live in the books, you know, I was always reading, well, as I am now.

Early on in her interview, Delia comments on the impact of books – of fiction – on a child’s imagination. As she talks, book after book, author after author, come back to her, often not thought of in years but now vivid and clear, like set pieces.

‘About the first book [Delia] can remember’ was a Christmas present about a ‘pig called Toby Twirl, and his friend, I think, was a penguin’. Delia is right. In these 1940s and ‘50s picture books by Sheila Hodgetts, Toby was a pig who looked rather like Rupert the Bear and had a penguin friend called Pete.

After Toby Delia learned to read. She particularly enjoyed books set in the countryside, all handed down from her elder sister:

The Twins at Hillside Farm … It was lovely, that. It was about two children, twins, living on a farm in some country place and it would tell things about milk separators and things like that. And there was one called Ranch on the Plain, which was about cowboys. And The Girl from Golden [sic]. Oh, and another one that I really liked they called it A Pair of Red Polls, and it was about two red-headed children who lived on a farm. But I couldn’t tell you any of the authors. But that was between … I’d say I read those between five and seven years old.

Delia says she ‘used to like these books about children who lived on farms for some reason’. Perhaps this was because the countryside was all she herself knew and so a lasting connection was made:

No, it was really countrified around Stannington in those days. I mean, not like it is now. It was very much … It seemed miles away from Sheffield, miles. You had to go on one bus to Malin Bridge, and then catch a tram into Sheffield town centre. So I think I must have been about five before I even went into the town centre.

And the interest in the countryside stayed with her. In her early 20s, Delia started reading Thomas Hardy, whom she still loves: ‘I read all his books because I liked the Dorset theme to them.’

As a teenager, Delia read a book called The Secret Shore, by Lillie Le Pla. Why she remembers this so well she doesn’t say, but 60 years later she can describe it in detail. The images or characters in some books simply take up permanent residence.

Oh, and I remember reading one by a lady called Lillie Le Pla and it was called The Secret Shore and I think it was probably about the Channel Islands, which is somewhere that I love now. I remember reading that one, it just came to me, it had a blue cloth back. And it was about some … It was about a girl who would … I’m not sure if her dad had died, but they lived in this house and she found this tunnel through the cliff and there was a gate in it. And that led up to this man’s house, and she used to go straight on and it led down to the secret shore. And I remember this man, I think he must’ve been some connection of her mother’s because he bought her a lovely watch for her birthday. I just remembered. And then I think in the end there was a happy ending where they got married, where he married her mother. I can’t remember all the circumstances, but it was about this shore that she used to go down to and be on her own and find shells and things, you know.

In her later teens, in the early 1960s, Delia was working her way through popular authors like Elizabeth Goudge, Anya Seton and Agatha Christie.

Anya Seton, it was Katherine, she wrote. Yes. I remember reading that and The Herb of Grace, Elizabeth Goudge. And Agatha Christie of course, I used to read all the detective books. I used to love detective books.

The mention of Anya Seton sparks something:

… Dragonwyck, that was another Anya Seton one. Have you heard of that one? It was a film as well, an old film. Foxfire, that was another one. And My Theodosia, that was another one. Yes.

Now that she was older, Delia started getting her books from the Central Library in Sheffield, going there with a friend after work. It was amazing, she agrees, to have that much choice after small school libraries and the like, and so she started with the familiar.

I made for the authors that I knew. I started with Elizabeth Goudge and Anya Seton in the school library and I sort of went for those books again when I went to the main library. And then with Agatha Christie as well, they’d always got the latest one. And I can remember one that I never read but was advertised in Sheffield Library. It was Frank Yerby – The Old Gods Laugh. And I used to see it advertised on the counter and, you know, I never borrowed that book and I still don’t know what it was about.

Asked about Frank Yerby, Delia admits she knows nothing about him. But the image of his book – Sheffield Libraries always did lots of displays – has for some reason stayed with her, buried deep in her memory, and has been retrieved during the interview. ‘Came back to me when I was talking to you, you know, about Sheffield Library. I just remember that one.’ For the record, Frank Yerby (1916-1991) was the first African-American writer to become a millionaire and the first to have a book, The Foxes of Harrow, made into a movie. Here is a review of The Old Gods Laugh, which is not encouraging. Perhaps it is best that Delia never read it.

A little later, reading came to mean respite, with Delia borrowing books from the library in Rotherham where she now lived:

No, I’ve never dropped off reading because in 1963 I got married and immediately became pregnant with my first child and books were a wonderful escape from housework and crying babies.

The urge to read became an urge to study. When she had had all her children, Delia ‘went to night school for English Literature’ and has now read widely among classics and older novels. ‘Yes, I’ve read most of those classic ones.’ She readily lists: Charles Dickens (‘I liked David Copperfield’), Mrs Henry Wood (‘Victorian melodrama-type thing’), Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Gaskell, Evelyn Waugh (‘Oh, Evelyn Waugh, I love those’), Iris Murdoch (‘I can’t get on with [her]’), Gustave Flaubert, Anthony Trollope, Arnold Bennett, the Brontës (‘I liked Jane Eyre’) and Jane Austen.

But – another impression – school almost destroyed Jane Austen for Delia (as it has other authors for other people).

Pride and Prejudice we had to do at school … We did it for O level. And, uh, the way you do it at school, you’re bored to tears by it, absolutely bored to tears by it. … Yes, we had to go back and forth over it and I got fed up with it. But I’ve read it since and enjoyed it. I’ve read all the others as well.

Pride and Prejudice: Mr Collins proposes

At one point in the interview, Delia is asked:

‘Were you what they describe as a bookworm? Did you immediately take to it?’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ she replies, ‘I was one of the first in the class to do what they called silent reading. So once I’d mastered silent reading, I just never stopped.’

Chris F’s reading journey

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Val Hewson

Chris F was born in 1939, in the Whirlowdale area of Sheffield. He attended boarding school and Cambridge, where he read engineering. He returned to Sheffield and worked there all his life.

But on the whole I have to say it’s the land of make-believe in most of my reading.

Chris is very clear that he reads, and always has read, for entertainment. He usually relaxes, for example, with a book for half an hour or so before sleep, and says that most of his books ‘have been bought at airports’. But if you think that books are not particularly important to him, or that he has not thought about their impact on his life, then you would be wrong. As our interviewer said:

And clearly books have been so important in your life that you can’t imagine one without.

Chris’ introduction to reading was traditional. The books he remembers from his childhood were staples: A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Allison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit and Beatrix Potter. At school, he graduated to Enid Blyton and then to school stories like Billy Bunter. Thousands of schoolboys in the middle of the 20^th century must have had a similar start. Chris was one of those in whom the habit of reading was firmly set by authors who told a good tale.

It must also have helped that Chris grew up in a house filled with books. He doesn’t remember being urged to read by his parents but ‘the means of doing it was there’.

I never recall actually going to a library because we had an enormous number of books at home … Which my parents had. I’m rather like my father, once you get a book you never throw it away.

He remembers lots of crime, with Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and the less well-remembered Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr. There was also some real-life crime:

… It was the life of the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury which I found very nice and gory at the time, I enjoyed it.

It was around this time that Chris found Nevil Shute, ‘who I think is probably my overall favourite author, which I started reading having seen the film of A Town Like Alice’. Even now, years later, he still enjoys these novels, which he says are gentle and believable:

I got all the books and I, oh about every five or six years I start again at the beginning. I re-read a lot of old favourites.

In Chris’ teens lots of his books came through his joining the Companion Book Club:

… you didn’t get any choice in those days, you got the book that they sent you. I’ve still got them all. Five bob a month it was and you finished up with a novel you probably would never have read otherwise.

By now, Chris had developed a taste for adventure, so Alistair McLean’s HMS Ulysses, his first book from the Companion Book Club, was very welcome. McLean was followed by C S Forester, Dennis Wheatley and Dornford Yates. Chris laughs as he recalls Dennis Wheatley:

… 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.

The interest in adventure – swashbuckling, espionage, war, arch criminals etc – remained constant from school, through university, into adulthood and working life. Chris remembers, with pleasure still, the adventures of Simon Templar alias The Saint, James Bond alias 007 and Dr Syn alias the Scarecrow and Captain Clegg.

Chris has tried reading some of the books he enjoyed, like Frank Richards’ Billy Bunter, to his grandsons, but with mixed results.

I’ve tried to get my grandsons involved but I have to say, modern boys are very difficult to get to read because they’ve all got their little widgets that they play with and watch television the whole t-time. It was books like Billy Bunter and like Enid Blyton that got me reading and I think got my generation reading.

He is concerned by what he sees as the declining interest in reading among children. He accepts that they gain a lot through technology (he is learning to use his own Kindle) but fears the next generation will:

have a terribly limited outlook on life … I do despair a little because with the modern exam system and the way that kids don’t read in our days we shall finish up with children with very narrow horizons.

What about improving books then? Were you led to see [reading] as an improving thing? asks the interviewer.

Well, we had books that we were studying and that we had to read. And funnily enough I can remember well the … the books that at the age of about 13 when I went away to public school that we had to read and thinking ‘Oh God, these are heavy going’. But I’ve read them again since and thoroughly enjoyed them. I think there is a difference when you actually have to read them and be questioned on them…

1st US edition of Darkness at Noon, 1941

These were books like Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler – the story of a Bolshevik who falls victim to Stalin during the purges of the 1930s. Chris still occasionally reads books his teachers would have thought of as improving:

I’m half way through Great Expectations, I never really read Dickens. I had to do Dickens at schools but I read Nicholas Nickleby recently and I’m reading Great Expectations now.

But it is the authors like Dornford Yates, C S Forester and Nevil Shute, whom he found for himself, that he goes back to, happy to re-read them: