Crisis reading: Sheffield Libraries in 1938-39

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Val Hewson

In 1938-39, the book most requested in Sheffield Libraries was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Seventy-five years on, this comes as a surprise. But in the context of the time and the role of a public library it makes sense: people turned to their local library to learn about, to understand, the awful international situation.

Mein Kampf (public domain)

Events in 1938 and 1939

In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria. Then, prompted by Hitler, the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia began agitating for self-government and in September, Hitler demanded the Sudetenland, a third of Czech territory. On 30 September the Treaty of Munich was signed by Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain, forcing Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudeten territory to Germany. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was hailed as peacemaker by many on his return from Germany, appearing with the King and Queen on the Buckingham Palace balcony. But he was condemned by others as an appeaser – the reputation he still has. On 1 October Germany annexed the Sudetenland. Next, on 9 November, came the violence of Kristallnacht, with hundreds of Jews killed, thousands more imprisoned and their property damaged or destroyed. Soon Jews in the Third Reich were forced to wear the Star of David and their civil rights were removed.

During 1939, Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and made territorial demands on Lithuania and Poland. Hitler’s attacks on the Jews continued. On 31 March, Britain and France, which had abandoned Czechoslovakia the year before, agreed to defend Poland in the case of invasion. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.

Books in Demand

Sheffield Libraries’ 82^nd annual report, for 1938-39, discussed people’s response to the international situation.

Mein Kampf ‘topped the list of reserves in every library’. Next came Guns or Butter (1938) by diplomat and journalist Robert Bruce Lockhart, which had as a subtitle ‘War Countries and Peace Countries of Europe Revisited’; and Insanity Fair (1938) by Douglas Reed, who was anti-Semitic but said to be wary of Hitler. Also in demand were: Inside Europe (1936) by John Gunther, Kurt Ludecke’s I Knew Hitler (1937) and Madeleine Kent’s I Married a German. Gunther was a US foreign correspondent based in Europe and Ludecke, a Nazi supporter who had fallen out with Hitler. I cannot discover much about Madeleine Kent, but the title of her book sounds rather sensationalist.
Sheffield Libraries routinely recorded non-fiction borrowed by category. The annual report speculated that the sharp increases in the categories of politics, travel and history* were due to the international situation. Almost 10,000 more books were read on politics, from 47,614 in 1937-38 to 57,094 in 1938-39 – an increase of nearly 20 per cent; and travel and history were each up by about 4,000. The total issue that year was, by the way, 2.7 million and it was estimated that 18 per cent of the Sheffield population had library tickets.

Apparently it did not prove easy to meet readers’ demands:

The demand for ‘crisis’ books has, in fact, been rather embarrassing. The pace of events makes such books quickly out of date, and the sum available for new books does not allow of their being bought in the quantity necessary to satisfy more than a fraction of the demand for them during their life of immediate appeal. Moreover, it is a library’s function to select those of merit, and it is not easy to separate these quickly from the hurried ‘pot-boilers’ which have appeared on the market.

There was a particular problem with Mein Kampf, and the resolution shows how responsibly Sheffield Libraries took the business of meeting readers’ needs. The German edition was available in the Central Library but there was at first no full English translation. There was an abridged version and ‘an attempt was made to supplement [this with pamphlets from the Friends of Europe] summarising and commenting on the main points of the full German edition’. A note was inserted in this short version explaining that it did ‘not give an adequate representation of Hitler’s views … It is, however, useful as a guide to some of his ideas’. The Sheffield annual report, probably written by the City Librarian, Joseph Lamb, comments drily:

The shorter English edition is still on service, as readers may prefer to read this, in conjunction with the pamphlets, rather than attempt the 560 pages of the full translation, which is a formidable task to a reader with a clear mind – not merely because of its length.

We do not know how great the demand for ‘crisis books’ was, although it must have been significant to be noted for the annual report. Other than the borrowing figures by non-fiction category, there is no indication of how many people reserved these books and we know nothing about who they were. It is interesting that the annual report goes on to note:

But the third place in lending library records of reserves was held by Gibbons’ Stamp Catalogue, which last year topped the list. Next were Evens’s Out with Romany Again, Mackenzie’s Windsor Tapestry, Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Haldane’s A.R.P.

The Stamp Catalogue was probably a standard in lists of reserves. Windsor Tapestry (1938) was a study of the new Duke of Windsor by novelist Compton Mackenzie. In 1938, Edward VIII must still have been of great interest, as perhaps was T E Lawrence, who had been killed in 1935. Out with Romany Again (1938) was the latest book from GB Evens, aka Romany, a popular broadcaster on the countryside. Haldane’s ARP [Air Raid Precautions] was an analysis of stress based on his experience of air raids during the Spanish Civil War, and interest in it might perhaps be linked to the developing crisis.

Gone with the Wind (public domain)

Fiction was, of course, also in demand. Most of the books popular in 1938-39 are solidly middlebrow and they and/or their authors are almost all remembered by our Reading Sheffield interviewees. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) was still the book to be seen with, not least with all the excitement about the casting of Scarlett O’Hara for the December 1939 movie. Also sought after were: A J Cronin’s The Citadel; Winifred Holtby’s South Riding; Francis Brett Young’s Dr Bradley Remembers; Kenneth Roberts’s North-West Passage; Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca; Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables; Leonora Thornber’s Portrait in Steel; Howard Spring’s O, Absolom!; Philip Gibbs’s This Nettle, Danger; Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth; and Cronin’s The Stars Look Down.

The interest in Les Misérables, the annual report speculates, was because of the BBC’s 1939 serialization, while Portrait in Steel was ‘undoubtedly due to the book’s local associations … referred to in the local press’. It was set in Stelborough, a thinly disguised Sheffield. South Riding had local associations too. Sheffield Libraries might also have noted that: films of The Citadel and South Riding were released in 1938 and The Good Earth in 1937#; and that Pearl S Buck won the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature. The resulting publicity no doubt influenced these choices too.

Sir Philip Gibbs’ book, This Nettle, Danger, takes us back to international problems. Perhaps the City Librarian had not read it or he might have included it in his crisis list too, as it is a fictionalized account of Munich. The title, from Henry V, was famously quoted by Chamberlain on return from Germany. Gibbs apparently felt that Chamberlain had been right in 1938, but also that the Munich settlement was probably only temporary.

Today’s crises

Do we turn to libraries today, to understand international crises? Are people asking for books now about Syria and ISIS? Library memberships are falling, while books are cheaper and more available (including online) than in the ‘30s. And we have: rolling news, with instant updates and expert analysis; politicians who are (generally) gifted communicators never far from a microphone; and social media and even citizen journalism. So the answer is: perhaps yes, we still look to libraries – but not to anything like the same extent as in 1938.

* In full, these categories were: politics, economics and social science; travel and description; and history.

# North West Passage, Rebecca and The Stars Look Down were all filmed in 1940.

Ladybird, Ladybird (Sheffield Central Library, 2015)

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Val Hewson

It may be slightly beyond our Reading Sheffield remit, but I cannot resist blogging about the Ladybird, Ladybird exhibit recently on show at the Central Library during Off the Shelf, Sheffield’s annual literary festival. The work is by artist Andrew Malone. As a whole, the exhibit has the look to me of a delicate 1950s fabric, suggesting the work of Mondrian. Closer up, you see the way Andrew Malone has cut into the pages to make the drawings of animals, planes, trees etc pop up and out. This is inspired, although I also find the idea of cutting into books disturbing.

None of our Reading Sheffield interviewees mention Ladybird books but I’m confident that most would remember them, either from their own schooldays or their children’s. For so many people, Ladybirds were the first books they learned to read, practising their skills on the beautifully designed and carefully scripted pocket-sized books. Whole generations of children across the world were brought up with them – the books have been translated into over 60 languages. Even now, as I look at them, I feel a sense of security, even serenity, reminding me of my own schooldays in the mid-60s. But of course I also recognise now that some of them portrayed an idealised, middle-class world where Mummy always did the housework, Daddy went out to work and everyone seemed to be white.

According to the Ladybird Books website, the first Ladybird books appeared in 1914, marketed as ‘pure and healthy literature’ for children and published by the printing firm of Wills and Hepworth. Henry Wills had started with a bookshop in Loughborough in 1867. He was joined in 1904 by William Hepworth and the company focused on printing guidebooks and catalogues. Their Ladybird range was developed by editorial director Douglas Keen to include the Key Words Reading Scheme (better known as the hugely popular Peter and Jane stories) and the Nature, How It Works, Learnabout and What to Look For series seen in Andrew Malone’s art. The company policy was to commission experts to write the text and quality artists to illustrate them.

The Guardian’s 2008 obituary for Douglas Keen described the creative development process:

In 1948, using the kitchen table as his desk, Keen devised the first factual Ladybird. He made a mock-up of a book of British birds, with watercolours by his mother-in-law, drawings by his wife and text by himself, and took it to his boss, Jim Clegg. The resulting Nature books were to be the longest-running of the Ladybird series. Clegg and Keen now steered the company towards the educational publishing for which Ladybird was to become world-renowned.

For a whole generation the price of a Ladybird book was maintained at 2/6 – 12.5p now, half a crown then, which meant that you could buy eight for £1. This low price resulted from the production process which used a single (large) sheet of paper for each book.

Wills and Hepworth was taken over by Pearson in the 1970s and then merged into Penguin Books in 1998. The long-established Loughborough printing works was closed down around this time (I used to travel through the town by train and remember a big sign at the station welcoming people to the ‘home of Ladybird Books’). Ladybird has continued to thrive, with new titles and series, including e-books and apps.

Ladybird’s new directions include their first books for adults, which started appearing in 2015. The tongue-in-cheek titles include: Mindfulness, The Shed, Dating and The Hangover, and the books have the traditional look. I admit to mixed feelings about this development. On the one hand, it’s quite a good joke, but on the other, I think it’s rather a pity to trespass on my childhood memories. I suppose the fact that Ladybird can think of doing such a thing speaks to the strength of the brand.

The Reading of Fiction (Sheffield City Libraries, 80th Annual Report, 1936-37)

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Val Hewson

We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the thought of our day. (Joseph Conrad, 1924)

The benefits of reading novels (and even of reading in general) have long been debated. For some fiction is a clear waste of time, but for others an education, an entertainment, an escape. There are people who have never touched a novel, at least since leaving school, and there are people who always have at least one close at hand.

For Reading Sheffield, we asked our interviewees if they were ever made to feel guilty about reading. The majority said no, with many talking about encouragement from parents and teachers. But some became readers against the odds:

If I picked a book up to read she’d say, ‘Put that down and come and help me do so-and-so. You’re wasting your time and my time’. You know. So she’d always find me a job to do. (Doreen Gill)

‘Did anyone make you feel that reading was a waste of time?’ ‘Uh, yeah, I think so. My mum was a very practical person, she were always busy doing something.’ (Dorothy Norbury)

And some liked reading but preferred fact to fiction:

I’ve always preferred fact over fiction. Fiction is, in my opinion, very nice and you can lose yourself in fiction, but at the end of the day, you come back to fact and it’s nice to read about people who have started and had an influence on the world one way or another, whether they’re famous or not so famous. (Peter Mason)

I liked History – I’ve always slightly thought that novels are a waste of time in that … I suppose, indirectly, you learn things but … I got more out of biographies and history books. (Peter B)

In Sheffield, the City Librarian, J P Lamb, and the Council’s Libraries, Art Galleries and Museums Committee had their say about reading novels in the annual report for 1936-37.

There are many misunderstandings about the place of prose fiction in the work of a public library, and it is felt that an examination of some of them might suitably be made in this report. Prose fiction today provides one of the most common means by which social, political, religious, and other ideas and beliefs are given to the people. The novel also offers a suitable framework for the presentation of history, and there are many cases of books issued during the past few years which have given such clear and vivid pictures of political and social events that they are used as historical and social source books. Indeed, so valuable is the novel form for work of this kind that many biographies are now written in a style which makes it difficult to decide whether they should be classed as biography or fiction. Even the least pretentious novel gives ideas and mental pictures to the reader, and to this extent allows him to project his mind beyond his limited environment. If, as some people seem to wish us to believe, the reading of novels is not a good thing, this should surely also be true of other imaginative literary forms such as poetry, drama, and essays. But as all educational institutions, particularly those concerned with higher education, give considerable time in their curricula to attempts to train young people in the appreciation and understanding of imaginative works in all these forms, it would appear that these are considered by educationists to be an important part of the process of education. It is difficult then, to see why the intellectual value of the issue of fiction from libraries should not be looked upon as equal, if not superior, to much of what is classed as non-fiction.

It may be that those who decry the issue of fiction believe that public libraries issue only the more popular type. A test of this was recently made in the Central Lending Library. All the fiction stock was divided into two groups – 1. Classic and standard literature; 2. Semi-standard and popular; – and a test of issues was made on this basis. No less than 41.38 per cent. of the fiction issued from this library was found to be in the first group. If the system of classification were based on the quality instead of the form of such books, these issues would have been recorded in the literature class. The division of fiction into such groups is by no means an easy task, and probably no two persons would agree about the placing of certain modern writers. The semi-standard and popular group includes such novelists as H. E. Bates, Hans Fallada, Winifred Holtby and G. B. Stern. The quality of the work of some of the writers included in this group might be considered by some critics to be high enough to justify their inclusion among the standard writers. H. E. Bates, for example, steadily gains in reputation among discerning people, and his writings already have a high place in the regard of good judges of literature.

Despite the difficulties attendant on any attempted classification of values in the writing of novels, it is felt that this experiment has been worth while because it has made possible an authoritative statement of a fact already known to the [Council] Committee – that a very considerable proportion (approaching 50 per cent.) of the fiction issued from the libraries is definitely of a high standard. It should not be assumed, however, that the remaining items are of poor quality. The semi-standard group includes, in addition to those mentioned above, scores of modern writers of considerable literary gifts – Vera Brittain, Ethel Mannin, Russell Green, P. Bottome, E. Boileau and W. Greenwood – for example. There are, of course, works by writers of action and problem stories in this group. These books have a definite, if limited, place in the library organisation. They give mental refreshment to highly intelligent and well-read library borrowers, they are “introductory readers” to those newly finding an interest in reading, and they are “escape” literature to those who are mentally and physically jaded. They widen vocabulary, extend horizons, stimulate ideas, and often add factual knowledge, and there is a good deal to be said for a well-known lecturer’s remarks at a library lecture, that “even Edgar Wallace may be discovered and hailed by a literary critic of 100 years hence as having possessed gifts of characterisation, humour, and literary skill which give him a secure place in the literary text-books of the future.”

I have not (yet) discovered what prompted this outburst in an official report. Had some august person expressed disquiet in the national press perhaps? Or had a local councillor muttered something after finding novel-reading in his household? Or was there research showing that fiction was generally a bad thing? (At all events, these all sound like openings for novels to me.)

Whatever the reasons behind it, the statement of support is fascinating for:

its conclusions that (i) ‘the intellectual value of … fiction from libraries [is] equal, if not superior, to much of what is classed as non-fiction’; and (ii) novels which are not, in the terms used here, ‘classic’ or ‘standard’ can still have considerable merit and may one day be acclaimed
the experiment dividing the fiction stock into classic/standard and semi-standard/popular. 41.38 per cent of fiction issued came from the first group, suggesting a taste among ordinary readers for great literature (or at least a willingness to try it). But we have no details of this experiment, to indicate scale etc. A librarian friend, by the way, says that similar experiments have been attempted – something else to look up…
the assessment of authors of the day as ‘semi-standard’. Perhaps now we would say ‘middlebrow’. Who is included, how selected and how viewed today (if at all) are all intriguing:

H E Bates, described here as ‘steadily [gaining] in reputation among discerning people’ but perhaps best known now for television’s Ma and Pop Larkin

Hans Fallada, the German novelist who is enjoying a revival for novels such as Alone in Berlin and The Drinker but who also attracts controversy for staying in Nazi Germany

Winifred Holtby, the Yorkshire writer whose most famous novel is South Riding. She has been praised by our Reading Sheffield interviewees for describing a Yorkshire they recognise

G B Stern, whose novels were often apparently partly autobiographical. Try The Matriarch

Vera Brittain: her novels are now forgotten but the non-fiction Testament of Youth is a classic. She gave one of Sheffield’s ‘Celebrity Lectures’, on ‘The World Today’, on 13 February 1936, in what is now called the Library Theatre, to an audience of 470

Ethel Mannin, the novelist and travel writer. Perhaps she came to mind because on 16 November 1936 she had visited Sheffield to open the local exhibition for Sheffield Book Week

Russell Green: perhaps the least remembered of all this list, he wrote several novels and edited Coterie and New Coterie, early 20^th century journals championing modernist poetry

Phyllis Bottome, best known now for the novel, The Mortal Storm. This was filmed in 1940, with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and is an early anti-Nazi film

Ethel Boileau, a favourite of the mother of one of our interviewees, Sir Norman Adsetts. Furrowed Middlebrow quotes some reviews and adverts here, including this for The Map of Days: ‘Romance novel of a modern Lancelot, a giant of a soldier, an ardent lover—destined to live and love greatly, and to have a strange power over women. Includes elements of second sight, mysticism, and the First World War.’

Walter Greenwood, author of Love on the Dole (1932) about working-class life in Salford in the early 20^th Working class life in Sheffield was probably not much different.

Edgar Wallace, the prolific writer of thrillers including the Four Just Men and Mr J G Reeder series. Seventy-eight years after the annual report (‘even Edgar Wallace may be discovered and hailed by a literary critic of 100 years hence’), Edgar Wallace is remembered but not yet celebrated.

Alma’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Val Hewson

Alma was born in Rotherham, near Sheffield, in 1928, and lived there until she married around 1950 and moved to Sheffield. She trained at an art school and then, fulfilling an ambition, went to teacher training college.

We always ask our interviewees how reading changed their lives. A question which some, including Alma, find difficult to answer. In Alma’s case, it may in part be because reading has been such an important part of her life. At first Alma says:

It hasn’t … changed? Now that’s a big question and I’m going to need time to think about that … I’ve just loved reading. I’ve just loved reading and whatever book I read it becomes part of me really, I think. But I can’t think of anything it has specifically changed.

Alma was born into a working-class family in Rotherham in 1928 and grew up in the town. She cannot remember learning to read or being read to as a child, but her family set store by reading. There were books in the house, along with comics, magazines and newspapers.

Well, I had this lovely aunty Alma who bought me a Peter Pan book … and I wanted to read it and I just read it! So I must have been able to read. And I can remember loving that book because of the tissue paper pictures. So that was my very first book … I had another auntie, Rosie, who bought me another present but it was a Dickens book and I didn’t really like that one, I didn’t like that one. But I loved Peter Pan, I remember that.

We had books in the house! We had books in the house. We had a bookcase! … Well there was a set of Wonderland of Knowledge books which we used to get down and look at those. I can remember looking at those. There was a bound copy of Shakespeare’s plays which I remember had sort of vellum covers, we looked at that. A book I did love, it was called A Century of Humour and that was full of short stories, short humorous stories. I remember reading that, I do remember that.

Dad had a lot of political books. They were all bound with brown paper, they were … we didn’t touch his books … Oh he [read them], yes, he was very politically-minded.

I had a Chips comic every week … which I must have read from cover to cover. And we [had] a Picture Post every Friday and I used to sit on the settee, I remember looking at pictures – I loved the Picture Post we had on a Friday and there was a daily newspaper but I don’t remember reading that. It was a News Chronicle. So that was my reading at home.

When she was older, Alma turned to the local library.

So off I went to Rotherham Library which I loved going to. It was like a cathedral. It was all hushed and quiet and wooden floors and everything cleaning [sic] and polished and nobody spoke to you and all the books were still hard-backed books, you know, with the covers, no fancy covers like they are today. And I loved it …

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

In those days Alma says she dreamed of being a librarian. She easily recalls books she enjoyed, like Anne of Green Gables (‘I loved Anne of Green Gables’), the Pollyanna books and J B Priestley. His novel The Good Companions was a particular favourite:

The best book, the best book which I read over and over again … I did love that. In fact I read it so much that when I travelled to school on the bus I used to look at people on the bus and fit them into the characters.

Years later, Alma did the same with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood: ‘that one would be that one, and that one would be that one’.

Given this habit of casting characters, it is perhaps not surprising that Alma enjoyed reading plays too – she mentions Priestley and George Bernard Shaw. Later this led to performing. ‘I loved the plays and I was in a drama society that I acted in some plays. I love plays, yes.’ She even had a go at writing her own play based on Jane Eyre:

I can remember writing a play, the one where she made her stand on a chair because she went out in the rain walking around a yard or something. I can’t remember it very well but I do remember that.

Education was a mixed experience for Alma. From the age of nine, she went to Rotherham Central School (a ‘very good school’) and enjoyed it. Her ‘really wonderful’ English teachers ‘introduced us to lots of poetry: Walter De La Mare, John Masefield’. But Alma failed her 11+ exam and had to leave at the age of 14. The usual option was a job but Alma chose – on impulse – to do something else:

There were three things you could do. You could go and work in an office … Or you could go to be a nurse … and, as my aunties had all been nurses, they all thought I was going to be a nurse. Or you could go and apply for an art school. Now I’d got these three choices. Now, as my best friend was going to an art school, I decided I would go to an art school so I went for the interview and I got accepted to go to art school for two years. So from 14 to 16 I was at Rotherham Art School.

Alma says that she was not particularly good at drawing but she was learning and loved it, and she was able to continue her reading in the nearby library. After two ‘lovely’ years, it was time to leave again. A teacher asked Alma what she wanted to do.

‘Well really I want to be a teacher.’ I’d always wanted to be a teacher and the fact [was] that I had failed my 11+ and I hadn’t got to high school and I hadn’t been able to do my School Certificate or anything. I thought that had gone. I said, ‘I really always wanted to be a teacher,’ and to my surprise he said, ‘But you still can.’ And it was just as if a light had gone in my world; I thought it was wonderful! Wow, I could be a teacher!

Alma could transfer to Rotherham High School, but she would have to get her School Certificate in a year. ‘And I ran home. I remember running home to my parents and saying, “I can go. I can be a teacher! I can go to the high school!”’

The new school was daunting at first, but Alma seems to have relished the challenge.

I was the only girl in the whole school who hadn’t got a uniform. Of course, it didn’t matter. I did have to go for an interview and I did have to do an English test and a maths test but, because the art school used to do maths one morning and English one morning, I was ok with that and so I got in. So I was in with all these very clever girls, feeling very, very much the odd one out but taking in every word and writing everything and learning like goodness-knows-what and, when we did have the exam, I passed with flying colours. I did. I got a distinction in everything. I don’t know why but I did.

When Alma wonders why she succeeded, is it fanciful to think that, alongside good teaching and her own determination, her reading habit had helped? Here surely is proof of the power of libraries.

So Alma went to teacher training college, with the enthusiastic support of her family (‘they backed me a hundred per cent … and I know it was a hardship’).

Despite the demands of college, reading for pleasure continued. ‘When I was at home, I can remember reading in bed a lot.’ All this seems to have helped Alma set standards without realising it:

What I can remember is going to my Grandma’s and seeing a little magazine called Peg’s Paper and it was a gaudy cover of a girl hiding behind a door or something and I thought, ‘What’s that?’ and I started reading it, little short stories, and I thought, ‘This is rubbish’. I never looked at it again, I don’t know who got it, who was having this Peg’s Paper. I thought I’m not wasting my time reading that rubbish.

Authors she enjoyed include: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Jerome K Jerome, Dylan Thomas, T S Eliot and Francis Brett Young. Of these, Jerome K Jerome still has a special place in her affections: ‘I still like Three Men in a Boat and, if I’m feeling a bit miserable, I read Three Men in a Boat.’

Jerome Klapka Jerome, published by Ogden’s. Cigarette card, published circa 1894-1907. 2 1/4 in. x 1 3/8 in. (56 mm x 36 mm) overall. Given by Terence Pepper, 2012. Photographs Collection NPG x136534

Marriage in 1950 changed Alma’s reading habits. At first, she read less, as she was living with her in-laws who were not readers, and the move to Sheffield meant starting anew in a new library (‘it was very big and I didn’t like it so I didn’t go’). But when they got their own house in 1952, Alma and her husband both read. Alma started reading real-life adventure like Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki because her husband liked them, and she also remembers biographies, books about ballet which interested her, and classic detective fiction by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham.

And so to the question about reading changing lives.

It hasn’t … changed? Now that’s a big question and I’m going to need time to think about that … I’ve just loved reading. I’ve just loved reading and whatever book I read it becomes part of me really, I think. But I can’t think of anything it has specifically changed.

But perhaps it fed your imagination, suggests the interviewer. And Alma nails it.

It has fed my imagination, yes. I know very well that I couldn’t live without books. That’s a dead cert. I need books, yes.

by Val Hewson

Access Alma’s transcript and audio here.

‘Children Keep Author Writing’ (Sheffield Telegraph, 10 April 1951)

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Val Hewson

Kathleen Fidler (image by courtesy of her niece)

The children invited must have felt special. I imagine them wearing their Sunday best and being carefully checked by their mothers before they left home, probably with family escort. They would have taken with them the invitation – formal, white pasteboard with the city coat of arms and a rather nice font.

Here are the words of the invitation (which is filed today in the local history section of the library) in case you cannot read it clearly from the image.

The Chairman and Members of the Libraries, Art Galleries and Museums Committee request the pleasure of the company of …………. at a meeting of members of the Hillsborough Junior Library which is to be addressed by Miss Kathleen Fidler, the well-known author and broadcaster of “Brydon” and “Mr Simster” stories, on Monday, 9^th April, 1951, at 6.30pm.

The Lady Mayoress of Sheffield (Mrs Keeble Hawson) will preside.

Oh yes, the children would have been on their best behaviour in front of a famous author, the Lady Mayoress, the chairman of the Libraries Committee, the City Librarian and the local press.

The Sheffield Telegraph reported the visit the day after. There were apparently 80 boys and girls present (a number that suggests very few refused the invitation). Girls outnumbered boys three to one, and they were all ‘hand-picked for their receptivity’ by the librarians, the Telegraph remarked rather repressively. Flowers were of course presented to the Lady Mayoress and Kathleen Fidler, by 13 year-old Anne Beresford and nine year-old Paula Mercer respectively. Miss Fidler read for about 40 minutes from the ‘domestic adventures of the famous Brydon family and a charming fairy story’. These were evidently much appreciated as, afterwards, most of the children besieged Miss Fidler with requests for autographs (this was the day of autograph books), and she ‘painstakingly signed every one. It took 20 minutes’, said the Telegraph, hence the title above.

The Telegraph explained that the visit to Sheffield had a ‘pronounced family flavour’. Kathleen Fidler brought along to Sheffield her husband, James Goldie, and her 79 year-old father, Francis Fidler, who lived in Sheffield as a boy. They were met by her sister, who was married to Frank Pinion, the headmaster of local Woodhouse Grammar School, and a cousin who lived in Woodseats.

All in all, this visit seems to have been treated rather singularly. Sheffield Libraries ran events often – exhibitions, story-tellings, lectures, discussion groups etc – and Miss Fidler was not by any means the only author to feature. But why did the Lady Mayoress and various Council dignitaries attend? Perhaps it was to promote the Council’s library services, or was it the Fidler family connection, or just someone who knew someone? (It was by the way a busy time for the Lady Mayoress. The next Monday she and her husband played host at the Town Hall to Winston and Clementine Churchill. Winston was Leader of the Opposition, but became Prime Minister a few months later, in October 1951. That visit made the front page of the Telegraph.) At all events Kathleen Fidler’s visit to Sheffield is perhaps not that different from today’s book-selling strategies: although they may travel faster and do more literary festivals, authors still do readings and sign things.

Kathleen Fidler was a popular children’s author of the period. Sixty years afterwards, she was remembered by one of the Reading Sheffield interviewees, Sheila Edwards:

…I joined two libraries because I enjoyed reading so much, I had a subscription to Boots library and I went to the Central Library in town … and I just read masses of books; I can’t remember what they all were now but, there were one or two I remember: Noel Streatfeild- I think she wrote books about ballet, Kathleen Fidler, another one called Malcolm but I can’t just remember what his surname was now…those were the main ones I remember…

Kathleen Fidler was born in England in 1899, trained as a teacher and rose to be a headmistress. After marrying in 1930, she moved to Scotland and eventually settled in Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, where, just like Sheffield, she often read to children in the local library. Like many others, she started her writing career with stories for her own children. In all she produced about 80 books (more than one a year), including series about two families, the Brydons and the Deans, historical novels like The Desperate Journey (1964) and animal stories such as Haki the Shetland Pony (1968). Books from Scotland notes: ‘Her work has been praised for the depth and detail of research into the background of her stories.’

Some stories were broadcast on BBC Radio Children’s Hour. For example, in 1946 there was ‘The Mysterious Mr. Simister: a school mystery play in three parts by Kathleen Fidler’. (The cast list includes Gordon Jackson, then in his early 20s but later to become famous as Mr Hudson in Upstairs, Downstairs.) Kathleen Fidler contributed to the much-loved BBC children’s programme, Jackanory, and wrote many schools programmes for the BBC and was ‘one of the pioneers of BBC Schools Broadcasting’.

After her death in 1980, the Kathleen Fidler Award was instituted for children’s literature, for previously unpublished authors of novels for children aged 8 to 12, alongside the prestigious Carnegie and Kate Greenaway prizes. I haven’t been able to discover more than a couple of the winners: in 1984 Janet Collins for her novel, Barty; and Cathy MacPhail for Run, Zan, Run in 1994. The award closed in 2002.

Kathleen Fidler is clearly less well-known today than back in 1951, although some of her books are still available, as reprints, second-hand copies or e-books. Why this fading? A novel like The Desperate Journey, about twins, Kirsty and David, who lose their home through the notorious 18th century Highland Clearances, remains enjoyable. If there is not much subtlety, the characters are nevertheless vivid and there is a very strong sense of place and an exciting storyline. But of course, while historical and animal stories are always popular, she wrote no space saga or fantasy novels about attractive vampires.

Her contemporary novels about the Deans and the Brydons may just be too dated, the Brydons for example being about a family evacuated to the countryside during WWII. There are at least nineteen stories about them. The Brydons Stick at Nothing, a pacey story about a series of local burglaries, is presumably fairly typical. The Brydons’ world – the Lancashire countryside – is conventional, comfortable and secure (and it is heartening that the children firmly reject the suggestion of adults that local working-class children may be responsible for the burglaries). The children are, in the classic way, ‘nice’, middle-class and largely free from adult supervision. The Brydon girls appear confident but tend to do what their protective brothers tell them. To today’s children the lives of the Brydons and their friends must seem as far from their own lives as the lives of Victorian children.

Kathleen Fidler was clearly a great success on the day of her visit to Hillsborough Library. I wonder whether she had a lasting influence on the children who met her. A book read in childhood can seize the imagination and change everything afterwards forever.

Have you read Kathleen Fidler’s books? Do you remember her visit to Sheffield, or any similar events in local libraries? Please let us know.

By Val Hewson

Access Sheila Edwards’ transcript and audio here.

Jocelyn’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Val Hewson

Jocelyn Wilson was born in Sheffield in 1926. She was educated, in wartime, at boarding school in Kent and was evacuated to Cornwall. In 1948 Jocelyn married and in time had children. In the 1970s and ‘80s she was a social worker.

‘Did your parents ever say, “Don’t waste your time reading a novel”?’ ‘Oh no, never. Nobody ever said that.’

How do we choose books? How do we decide what to read? And how do we judge our choices?

Looking at her interview, you feel that Jocelyn W, who read widely and had excellent recall, was confident in her opinions and happy to defend them. The quality of books, her own and others’ perceptions and the value of reading all lie just beneath the surface of her story.

Jocelyn was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Sheffield in 1926. Her first books were typical for that background and period – Alice in Wonderland, The Enchanted Forest, Cecily M Barker’s Flower Fairies and other fairy stories. Predictably, they were chosen by her mother and a ‘very dear nanny who was into reading herself’. Later, Jocelyn’s older sister helped her find books too. Nanny and Jocelyn’s parents all read aloud to the children. Jocelyn didn’t say so directly, but her first books seemed to have all the impact any parent could have hoped for: Jocelyn described them as stories ‘that made your imagination race’ and remembered them clearly 80 years later. The Flower Fairies for example, she said, were ‘part of one’s history’.

After this promising start, things went less well. Books were in short supply in Jocelyn’s life. At first this was because her family lived ‘on the fringes’ of Sheffield and ‘it was quite a journey to go anywhere where there were books to be lent’. Then World War II intervened and Jocelyn, by now at boarding school, found herself being evacuated to remote Cornwall.

And I remember after a birthday having a book token and having great difficulty in going to a bookshop in Newquay, Cornwall, to find something to buy. And in the end The Heir of Redclyffe. I can’t remember who wrote it but it was a pretty frantic book, I remember. But there was so little choice. And I think that’s one of the things we forget now ‘cos there are so many books of every kind, good and bad. And then there were very, very few.

This early experience seems to have had a lasting effect. Jocelyn said:

But of course it’s difficult for people nowadays to realise how few books came out and they were rare beasts and you waited for your birthday to get a copy. Now there’s so much; you go to a bookshop and I’m overwhelmed. I can hardly ever choose anything ‘cos there’s too much to choose from and it’s difficult to find what you really want.

Another effect of this shortage was that Jocelyn ended up reading what was available – the books on the family bookshelves – just because they were there. She considered herself lucky. ‘I think people forget now that it was like that. You could be in a situation where you hadn’t anything new to read. It seems incredible now, doesn’t it?’

Jocelyn’s family continued to influence her choices and judgments. Her mother was ‘interested in books. And so there was a good wide variety of classics’. Jocelyn remembered reading, for example, Precious Bane and Mary Webb’s other novels. ‘My mother was very sensible; she never said, ‘Don’t’. She was very good; she was highly intelligent and we valued what she thought.’ (Jocelyn’s father tried too, but was rather less successful: suggestions like G A Henty were rejected as ‘boy’s own stuff’.)

School was the next big influence on Jocelyn, and it was there that her own judgment began to emerge.

… I did a project on keeping a notebook of all the things I’d read … I know that it was criticised by the person who taught English at school, saying, ‘I can’t think why you read all this rubbish when you’re capable of reading something so much better.’ You see, it had gone through the whole range. But that was important in order to learn what was rubbish and what wasn’t.

What was this ‘whole range’ that formed Jocelyn’s taste? Over the years, there were:

classics like Jane Austen (‘she writes with such a deft touch’)
literary fiction, as we might say today, with authors like Marghanita Laski (Little Boy Lost ‘tore everybody’s heart to pieces’) and Rumer Godden (‘very delicate in her writing, sensitive and she touched one’s heart’)
popular, middlebrow authors of the day: Nevil Shute (‘wonderfully good stories’); Daphne du Maurier (‘anything she wrote was grist to the mill’); Queens of Crime like Dorothy L Sayers and adventure writers like John Buchan; Mazo de la Roche (whose Jalna books were the ‘original soap opera’)
‘rubbish’ like ‘Oh Baroness Orczy and that sort of thing, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Oh good old rubbish, that’.

Rubbish was not, however, as clear-cut as it might seem. For one thing, Jocelyn was becoming confident enough to reject other people’s opinions:

Oh yes, but I don’t count [Georgette Heyer] as rubbish … Of course she was a great storyteller, wasn’t she? And of course historically very accurate. There were things to praise about her. Even though the stories were romantic fiction in the very highest level.

And sometimes rubbish could be the thing: ‘And if you’re not feeling very well, rubbish is what you want!’ If it was what you needed, could it be rubbish?

What Jocelyn would not accept was the badly or carelessly written.

I think that now I can only read things that aren’t badly written. Sloppiness is what really gets me; and I think a lot of writers nowadays are very sloppy; they don’t do their research properly.

So Jocelyn developed her approach: reading widely; making her own assessments but open to influence; seeking out high quality but understanding the worth and pleasure in lower quality. This seemed to stand Jocelyn in good stead throughout her life.

… I didn’t read George Eliot until much later on; I came to ‘Middlemarch’ as a grown-up person. It’s a wonderful book, isn’t it? They’re very raw, some of those books by George Eliot.

…I still can read Arthur Ransome books. When I was laid low with a back injury two years ago. the thing I chose to read was Winter Holiday and I loved it and it took me back. It’s well-written and that’s the key, isn’t it?

I [chose Dracula for book group] and the men sort of withdrew in horror. A lot of them wouldn’t read it. It was quite interesting. The women mostly did. But I think it’s a marvelous book. I keep turning the pages to find out what’s next. I can’t believe it … It’s not even particularly well-written; it’s a most ridiculous story. So why are we fascinated with Dracula? I’m jolly glad I read it. [But the men] weren’t going to waste their time reading ‘rubbish’ … I said, ‘I know it’s rubbish.’

by Val Hewson

Read or listen to Jocelyn’s interview in full 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