Sheffield’s eighteenth century library

Posted on January 2, 2017 by Val Hewson

By Loveday Herridge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry Brearley’s Reading Journey

Posted on December 22, 2016 by Mary Grover

By Mary Grover

As a Christmas treat, we would like to introduce the reading journey of one of Sheffield’s most illustrious steel pioneers, Harry Brearley, who invented the process of manufacturing stainless steel. As we contemplate the possibility of the destruction of central library provision in this city, this is a story to reflect on. Brearley did not become one of the world’s pioneers by accident. He was able to satisfy his curiosity and his appetite to acquire skills because he was mentored by a man who lent him books. He came from a background which made the acquisition of formal qualifications and the purchase of books an impossibility. However this mentor and a library gave the boy the confidence to use whatever opportunities came his way.

Harry Brearley was born in 1871 and died in 1948. He was too frail to attend more than a few years of school, broken up by ill-health. His father, a steel worker, was uninterested in teaching him the practical skills that would have helped him make his way in any metal working industry. Yet throughout his childhood Harry read.

I have no idea of how I learned to read. My father and mother and elder brothers were readers of novelettes and blood and thunder stories. But there were no books at home, absolutely none. There was a ballad in a paper cover stitched at the back with worsted. It was called ‘The Story of an Unravelled Stocking’. I knew this story before I could read. I knew a few other stories learned from my elder brothers and sisters who had probably learned them, from my mother, when they were children. I was the eighth child and my mother was too throng to tell stories by the time I was born.

When he was eleven Harry entered the world of work. He ricocheted from job to job, always outspoken but always observant, until he found himself, at the age of twelve, working in the Laboratory of Norfolk Works. He came under the supervision of James Taylor, a metallurgist who recognised the boy’s intelligence and fostered it. Harry was in awe of Taylor’s skills as a metallurgist and would do anything that he was told to do.

Taylor seemed to be a magician. During the second week Taylor asked me what I read and I said the ‘Boys of England’, the ‘Boys Comic Journal’ and ‘Jack Harkaway’. He appeared not to have heard of any of these papers and I noticed no smile of recognition or approval when I produced copies for his inspection. He offered me a copy of Roscoe’s Chemistry which I honestly tried to read but with a total absence of either pleasure or understanding.

Despite his apparent lack of connection with Roscoe’s Chemistry, Harry was lent numerous books by Taylor, such as The Irish National Arithmetic. Then in 1885 Taylor bought his fourteen year-old assistant Todhunter’s Agebra, ‘a large book of 600 pages, which cost 7/6d’.

I was touched that anyone should think it worth while to give me a book costing so much money. I can see myself proudly taking it home and showing it to my mother who was swilling down the pavement after a load of coal had been delivered. Except the rather shabby looking arithmetic book, this was the first book I possessed, decently bound and gilt lettered on the back. I have it still.

In 1892 the boy suffered a double blow. James Taylor left England to work in Australia and at about the same time his mother died. Aged 21, Harry identified with typical good judgement the girl he was to marry. He also found another mentor.

After Harry and his much-loved elder brother had moved out of the family home, they found lodging with a man called Dacey.

He was a railway guard but had been a bandsman in the Royal Navy, and afterwards a newspaper reporter. He was well read, he talked well, he wrote without apparent effort and he had a very good memory. He made me a reader of ‘The Clarion’, the first number of which had just been issued, and introduced me to the writings of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. He had a small library of books of which I made use. He had visitors who cared about literature and politics … particularly labour politics.

I attended a bible class at the Sunday School. It was one means of meeting Nellie but it had other attractions. Some of the young men were very wide-awake. They read and talked of strange books. They were interested in talking and a few of them talked well. There was a mutual improvement class on Saturday evening where good speeches would sometimes be made. I used to think Harry Harper, a brainy young man of feeble physique was an orator. He was a very sensible, well educated chap and a good linguist. Many of the youths wrote shorthand and so I learned it. After a couple of months effort, well enough to report a speech.

I was so much attracted by some of Ruskin’s books, after Taylor left England, that I neglected everything else to read them and to read some of the less intelligible Carlyle. Ruskin’s ‘Unto this Last’ was a revelation. It was a Library copy I read. I dare not steal it and could not afford to buy it so I copied it out in my most careful hand-writing and bound it in cloth boards with leather back and corners. Bookbinding was one of the things I learned by watching professionals bind accounts and then begging enough of their material to see me through a few trial. My copy of Ruskin’s ‘Analytical Economics’ (‘Unto this Last’) and Todhunter’s Algebra are the two books I prize above all others.

This excursion into literature excited an appetite which will never be satisfied. But I saw no living in it and I was really equally greedy to understand more of my daily work from whose interests I had temporarily separated myself. There was some prospect of becoming an analyst which I could not afford to neglect. …. At night school in addition to mathematics and physics I had attended classes in German, Latin and literary subjects. I had attended lectures on the English language and literature with a moulder who had a decidedly original mind. This moulder took no man’s word for gospel and he had a disconcerting knack of asking awkward questions and putting an unconventional view. He also was one of my teachers to whom no fees were paid to whom grateful thanks are due.

Quotations are from Harry Brearley’s autobiographical notes, Stainless Pioneer, published by British Steel Stainless in conjunction with The Kelham Island Industrial Museum, Sheffield 1989.

Without libraries what have we?*

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Val Hewson

Writing up our own reading journeys has long been the plan for the Reading Sheffield team (here is our web designer Lizz’s reading journey). The threat to libraries across the country brought the task into sharp focus for me. Libraries have been, and are, my regular staging posts along the road. It saddens me that so many of them are closing and so many of us will thus find the way harder.

Even before libraries, there were my parents. My father paused his reading about Newcastle Utd in the Evening Chronicle (well, the news was often bad) to help me spell out letters, then words, from the headlines. ‘Goal’ was probably one of my first words. My mother, keen to give me the education she missed, taught me the alphabet – in upper case, which later irritated my teachers. She helped me grasp narrative early on by telling me stories. One was about how much she enjoyed ‘reading time’ at school, with Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm her favourite books.

There was a scheme allowing very young children – I was about two years old – to borrow picture books from the local library. For us this was the Redheugh Branch in Gateshead, an Art Deco building with pale yellow doors, now a recording studio. We went there as often as I could persuade my mother. I remember a low table-cum-box, divided into four compartments for the picture books and known apparently as a ‘kinderbox’, with three-legged stools around it. Table and stools were painted yellow and red.

Redheugh Library

Inside Redheugh Library

A kinderbox

When I was four, we moved. It was around then that I started school, and found shelves of books in most classrooms. The Council was keen on school libraries. There were Ladybird books, Janet and John and two books which, perhaps because they were the first ‘proper’ stories I ever read, stay with me. First was Neighbours in the Park, about a girl who lived with her parents in a double-decker bus and made friends with a park-keeper’s daughter. The park, bus and girls were shown on the green, black and white cover. Then came The Bittern, which had a pale green or brown cover with, I think, a drawing of a rather mournful, long-haired girl. I have no idea what The Bittern was about, or who wrote either book, but between them they caught me, and I was never free again. (If anyone knows these books, I would love to hear of them.)

The nearest library was now Gateshead Central, a Carnegie library. I had no fear of it, or sense that time reading was time wasted. It was the first place I was allowed to go to by myself. In holidays I would go at least every other day and, in term time, on Saturdays and a couple of weekday evenings. Often my father was persuaded to give me a lift. ‘You won’t be long now, will you?’

Gateshead Central Library

To join, I had to read a passage aloud to the children’s librarian, stern in brown tweed suit and knitted jumper. Her hair was corrugated cardboard. But, frightening as she was, she had the power to make me free of the books on her shelves, so it was a worthwhile ordeal. The library was a large room, with high shelves and big, oak reading tables and chairs. It was perhaps not very child-friendly, though this never struck me then. It was just the library, where the books were, and I wanted to be.

Here I found Anne of Green Gables and loved it as much as my mother had. How I adored Gilbert Blythe, in common with Anne and many other readers. Anne herself was important because we both loved stories and hated geometry, and we shared red hair and the name Anne, although mine lacked the important final ‘e’. There were also Jo, Meg, Amy, Beth (how I cried!), Katy Carr, Rebecca and Pollyanna, who was too glad to be endured for long. And I found adventurous children like Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, the Dana Girls and the Hardy Boys. My Reading Sheffield colleague Mary Grover points out that these are all from across the Atlantic, and wonders if the library had any American connection. Not that I know of.

School and ballet stories were important too. My favourites, which were plentiful in the library, were Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series – I can still name all of Joey Maynard’s eleven children – and Lorna Hill’s Sadler’s Wells books. I begged for ballet lessons, to no avail, and was reduced to copying the ballet-trained glide of a luckier classmate. I didn’t read about horses, the other staple for young girls. A teacher had read Black Beauty aloud, and I was haunted by the cruelty.

What other books stay in my mind?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with its brilliant opening, where Lucy meets Mr Tumnus under the lamp-post in the snow. But I found Aslan disturbing and never managed the other Narnia books.

Any book by E Nesbit. ‘You’re so funny!’ said the psammead. ‘Have your parents tried boiling you?’

The Changeling of Monte Lucio and other old-fashioned, Ruritanian novels by Violet Needham. Quests, rebellions, secret societies, castles, mountains – what more could anyone want?

A non-fiction series called The Young …, about the early lives of the famous. My favourite was The Young Mary Queen of Scots, by Jean Plaidy. Mary, with Marys Beaton, Seton, Fleming and Livingston, escaped from Scotland to France, where she married the Dauphin. The book ended with her returning to Scotland, aged about 16 and wearing white mourning for her young husband.

‘Career novels’ like Margaret Becomes a Doctor, in which girls trained for a career but always met a nice young man and gave up their hard-won jobs. Linked with these for me were two series – American, again – about nurses Cherry Ames and Sue Barton, who had both adventures and principles. Cherry was unique in never settling for domesticity.

The Psammead: Five Children and It by E Nesbit

When I was around 13, I’d outgrown the children’s library but was too young for the adult. Ingeniously, I bullied my parents into joining and then used their tickets, always ready if challenged to say I was just collecting their books. But no-one ever asked.

Today I belong to Sheffield Library, and Newcastle and Leeds have also known me over the years. Libraries and I have been together for over 50 years, and we see no reason to split up now.

* The answer? ‘We have no past and no future.’ So said Ray Bradbury.

Wartime: Barrage Balloons and the Library

Posted on November 26, 2016 by Val Hewson

Books for Balloon Barrage Men (Telegraph and Independent, Thursday 14 September 1939)

Sir. – At various points in and around the city the men who man the balloon barrage are working in small groups. Their hours of duty are long, and their means of recreation limited. The YMCA are providing games and other amenities, and I have been asked to help to arrange a supply of suitable books for them.

There must be many readers in Sheffield who would be willing to give books from their private libraries, and I should be very glad to receive them at the Central Library, the Libraries Committee having kindly given permission for books to be received, selected and issued there. Light reading is most likely to be welcomed, and there should be a ready use for fiction, plays, travel, belles-lettres and similar types.

May I appeal to all who have suitable books to spare to send them to the Central Library for this purpose?

Yours etc

J P LAMB

City Librarian

This letter from City Librarian Joseph Lamb, dated just a few days after the start of World War II and repeated in the Star, was probably the first of Sheffield’s wartime book drives. That such an appeal should be issued so soon after the declaration of war suggests preparedness and foresight.

Air-raid defences, including barrage balloons, were being put in place around the UK during the late 1930s. Sheffield had around 70 of the huge balloons. They aimed to interfere with an aeroplane’s flight path and efforts to drop bombs. They might even bring it down by catching it in the cables which secured them to winches on lorries. The balloons were managed by crews who, day and night, manoeuvred them into place and raised and lowered them to protect suspected targets. Wind and rain made the job more difficult. The crews were often housed in schools and other public buildings, and their lives must have been a mixture of hard work, boredom and tension.

Hence the need for books and games for relaxation and diversion. J P Lamb asked for ‘light reading … fiction, plays, travel, belles-lettres and similar types’. This was a change from the usual calls of librarians of the period for their borrowers to read serious books. (In fact, Joseph Lamb did not scorn light reading, stocking popular books ‘in the belief that having attracted novel readers … [libraries] are given the opportunity of leading them to better reading, or at least to informative books’. He was criticised for this by other librarians. Furthermore, in the lead-up to war, books which explained the international situation had been in demand from the library.)

Unfortunately, there are no records of how people responded to the appeal. How many books were donated? What were they? The success of two book drives in 1943 and 1944, when over a million books were collected, suggests that this early appeal was probably successful. And we do know that when crews moved on, they often left behind games and books for their successors; and that by October 1939 there was a library service for troops stationed in Sheffield.

In September 1939, the war was for newspapers the only story in town, and they were unsurprisingly patriotic and positive. J P Lamb’s letter shared space with:

‘Why Germany Has Invaded Poland’, a long article by Count Sforza, former Italian Foreign Minister
a leader, ‘Nazis’ Rage’, doubting the German war effort and mentioning the plight of Jews ‘treated … with such devilish inhumanity’
reviews of a book about British naval history and essays by historian Lewis Namier who was a Polish Jew by birth
discussion of blackout regulations and lighting restrictions as the long nights drew in.

But it was not all serious. There was a column by the Rambling Naturalist and, by popular demand, a crossword (puzzles had been dropped to make way for war news).

Sheffield’s other main paper, the Star, was much the same: a leader entitled ‘Hitler’s War on Women’, an article by Beverley Baxter MP asking ‘Have German Plans Miscarried?’; and – lighter in tone – a snippet that research by Sheffield metallurgist Robert Hadfield had helped produce the newly essential tin hat.

Lamb’s letter was also an early indicator of his library’s important role in the wartime life of the city, for example, in public information and assistance services. But this story is for another post.

Here are the pages from the Telegraph and Star.

14091939-barrage-balloons-daily-tel

14091939-barrage-balloons-star

Firth Park Teacher Guiding Sheffield’s Literary Taste

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Mary Grover

While exploring the review pages of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in the 1930s, I found that only one reviewer was named. Among the totally anonymous or mysteriously initialled reviews (how I would love to know the identity of EKM and LASW), only Frederick T Wood was allowed to sign his columns and be held to account for his views.

It is not surprising that he filled a position of such stature for he was a remarkable man and a great addition to the cultural life of Sheffield, not only in the 1930s, but until his death in 1967, just a term after his retirement from schoolteaching. He reviewed a wide range of books: a biography of Thackeray; the latest novel by Louis Golding dealing with the persecution of the Jews in contemporary Germany; the latest anthology of modern poetry; and a history of the social life of the Middle Ages. He dealt with each volume in a fair, scholarly and totally accessible way, perhaps his skills as a teacher helping him connect with the general reader.

Frederick Wood

The only information I have been able to find about Frederick Wood is on the website of Firth Park School. From 1928 to 1961, Wood was English master at Firth Park Grammar School for Boys. Reading Sheffield interviewee John D, whose interview you can find here, was at Firth Park, but sadly doesn’t mention Wood.

Dr Wood’s influence spread far beyond Firth Park or even Sheffield. He was known across the globe as the author of English Prepositional Idiom which was printed in many different languages, and is still generally available.

The following obituary from the Firth Park School website makes it clear that he was a highly reputable scholar, a brilliant teacher and a man who, guided by his strong Unitarian faith, had strong principles.

Dr Frederick T Wood – School teacher

In 1928, Frederick T Wood, having achieved his doctorate at London University, was confronted with the choice of a career as University Lecturer or as Schoolmaster. Choosing the latter, he was soon invited to an interview in Sheffield for the post of English master at Firth Park Secondary School. By the next post came a similar invitation from Birmingham: but the interview at Sheffield was the earlier one, and he was offered the post at Firth Park. And so he left his native Kent to come to Sheffield, and to the School which was to be his academic home for the rest of his teaching life. How deeply he has enriched the life of this city and this school. He soon turned to the writing of books, first School Text Books, then Anthologies and other works, and – recently – he produced his greatest work, Current English Usage, which is certain to be a standard authority for many years to come. Altogether he has published over thirty volumes, the majority for students in all parts of the world who wish to learn and understand the English language. His works have appeared in a dozen languages, including Serbo-Croat, Arabic and Japanese. At the same time he has been a devoted and conscientious member of the school staff, setting a high standard of scholarship for his Sixth Forms, and meticulous in the performance of the multifarious details of school life. In particular, he has for thirty-seven years carried the immense burden of the School Magazine, a task which he undertook in 1929 – “on a temporary basis!” He was not, however, simply academic in his interests. He was a man of principle, devoted to the truth, and dedicated to the championing of freedom of thought and speech. He was never afraid of being in a minority of one. He conceived it to be the right, and the duty of each individual to proclaim and indicate the truth as he sees it. He was a genuine nonconformist in the widest sense of the word. He was a devoted member of Upper Chapel, Norfolk Street, and on many Sundays in the year went out as a lay-preacher to the country chapels of Derbyshire and the West Riding. He was a notable personality in the Unitarian denomination, and was the President Designate of the Assembly of Unitarian Churches for the year 1968. His fame and reputation was nation-wide. He told the story that he received a letter, safely delivered at his Sheffield home, addressed simply “Dr. Frederick T. Wood, England.” He is the only member of the staff whose name has ever appeared in “Who’s Who.” His letters and articles have appeared from time to time in The Times. He was offered – but declined – the post of Professor of English at a Swiss University. Yet, despite all this, he never paraded his learning or tried to impress with his importance. He was always prepared to go to infinite trouble to clear up difficulties about the meaning and use of words, both for staff and boys. He was invariably kind, helpful and good-natured; he loved to tell stories against himself. He never said or did anything mean or malicious in all his time at Firth Park.

When he retired at the end of the Autumn Term in 1966, he was so much looking forward to the freedom he would enjoy in writing the many books of which he had already drafted the outlines, and we all wished him a long and happy commitment to the consummation of his work. But it was not to be. His early death has caused us much sorrow; but we honour him for his scholarship and integrity, and remember him with affection for his goodness of heart.

For a teaching lifetime he ran his race solo

Pacing relays of boys in the school he refused to leave,

Turning down a Professorship abroad;

And making a map of even the seemingly bleakest moorland

Of prepositional idiom for foreigners

So they might immigrate to our mother tongue.

I think of him screwing his erudition down

On exam scripts, accurate to half a mark;

Or classifying himself in his “English Usage”

Not as “Kentish Man” but “Man of Kent”.

Exile to the externalised catarrh of our

Northern so-called Spring, the dignity of the

Old Buildings tower rising above

His ground floor room as he removed a howler

From a schoolboy’s brain, he could tell the hair’s breadth

That had fallen golden from the Muse’s head

Between the pages of a school edition.

Wood’s ground floor room beneath the tower

Unitarians and Sheffield reading

Frederick Wood is one of a number of Unitarians who have contributed hugely to the love of reading in Sheffield. The research by Loveday Herridge and Sue Roe on the Sheffield reading societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (which we plan to feature shortly) shows the importance of the Unitarian tradition of curiosity, learning and high principles in the formation of our first reading societies. Frederick Wood worshipped at Upper Chapel, just round the corner from where City Librarian J P Lamb was overseeing that other magnet for those who wanted to explore the world of the imagination and the intellect: the Central Library.

If you remember Frederick Wood, we would love to hear from you. Email us at mkg0401@aol.com

Mary Grover

Librarians: ‘minds like detectives’

Posted on November 12, 2016 by Val Hewson

In this article from the Sheffield Telegraph and Daily Independent of 12 April 1939, an anonymous reporter challenges Sheffield’s professional librarians to answer some obscure questions – and loses comprehensively. There is no proof but experience suggests that the idea came from the City Librarian, J P Lamb, who had an eye for publicity for his library service.

Of course, today Google will yield answers in a minute, although there seems to be uncertainty about Rock Day and its information on matildite is hard for the non-specialist to understand. But consider what information professional Ned Potter suggests here – that Google and librarians don’t do the same things and there’s a place for both.

NOTHING TOO MUCH FOR SHEFFIELD’S LIBRARY SLEUTHS

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trying to catch out a body of Sheffield people with minds like detectives – people who can trace anything, writes a “Telegraph and Independent” reporter.

You may find them in the reference departments of Sheffield Central Library.

Go and ask them anything, and they’ll tell you the answer. I think they’d even find out the numbers of the proverbial sands of the seashore, if anyone really wanted to know.

Carving from the Central Library entrance

I had heard all about the efficiency of Sheffield librarians in answering the most out-of-the-way queries, and I decided – rather heartlessly, you may think – to give them an unofficial test.

Cunning Questions

So I armed myself with a list of varied and abstruse questions, cunningly designed to foil each one of the 75,000 reference books at the disposal of the detectives.

“If they answer two they’ll be lucky,” I thought, “and they won’t answer two so very quickly.”

So I went into the Reference Library with a sly smile and approached the desk set aside for enquiries.

“Can you tell me,” I said, the sly smile broadening, “who swayed about upon a horse and thought it was Pegasus?”

The gentleman to whom the question was addressed did not look at me as if I were a madman. He was interested. Here was an opportunity for a spot of really good Sherlock Holmes stuff.

This is how he tracked the quotation down.

Pegasus was mentioned in a Greek legend. Right. Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary. He gets the dictionary, turns up Pegasus. No luck.

Carving from the Central Library entrance

Hot on the Scent

It might refer to some incident in a book. So Brewer’s “Reader’s Handbook,” Baker’s “Guide to the Best Fiction” and other books of reference are consulted. Still no clue.

Then various concordances are tried. In Keats’s concordance are found the words: “And thought it was Pegasus.” Hot on the scent now.

Keats’ “Sleep and Poetry” is turned up. In it is the passage:

with a puling infant’s force

They swayed about upon a horse

And thought it was Pegasus.

From the context the reference was obviously to eighteenth century poets, and one of my most deadly questions had gone down the drain – all in a quarter of an hour.

“Rock Day” and Why

Badly shaken, I returned to the attack with “When is Rock Day, and how did it get its name?”

My hopes rose. I began to think I had won this time. An examination of encyclopaedias, dictionaries, indexes to names, calendars, and even Chambers’s “Book of Days” revealed nothing.

Then they tried a dictionary of archaic words. A long shot, but it came off. It was found that “rock,” besides its usual meaning, was formerly a synonym for spinning wheel.

Spinning wheel? Distaff. Distaff Day?

And under Distaff Day in Smith’s Encyclopaedia of names was the following entry:-

Distaff Day. 7^th of January, so called because on that day the women who have the Christmas festival till Twelfth Day (the 6^th) return to their distaffs or ordinary work. As a distaff is also called a rock it is likewise called “Rock Day.”

“Very good,” I admitted. “But I haven’t nearly finished with you yet. What is the correct word to describe a government of old men?”

Carving from the Central Library entrance

Gerontocracy

My heart secretly rejoiced when Roget’s Thesaurus afforded no help, but I was foiled again by the best bit of detective work of the whole day.

Democracy, aristocracy, theocracy are all derived from Greek roots, the officials argued. Therefore it was likely that the word required, being of kindred meaning, would be formed in the same way.

So a Greek dictionary was consulted for the word “old man.” This was “geron.” Then a reference to the Oxford Dictionary brought to light the word “gerontocracy,” which had the required meaning.

I went into the Science and Technology Library to recover….

It was just the same in appearance – neat rows of books, spaciously designed, a counter for inquiries, assistants ready to go to any trouble to help you.

Carving from the Central Library entrance

Trump Card

Here I wanted to know what matildite was.

Reference to chemical dictionaries, technical encyclopaedias and general chemical texts supplied no information, but the construction of the word – ending in “ite” – suggested the possibility of its being a mineral, and reference to Dana’s “System of Mineralogy” substantiated this, giving analysis, occurrence and other details.

So I returned to the Reference Library (where they must hate the sight of me, by the way) to play my trump card.

“What place in Wales has the longest name?” I asked leering hideously.

But it was no use. True, guide books of Wales failed to give any information on that point, but Walsh’s “Handy Book of Curious Information” did.

The answer is Llanfairpwllgynggyllgogerpwllllandypilwgogo. (All right, there’s no need to laugh.)

“And how do you pronounce it?” I said.

They told me.

I went away a beaten man.

Experience Counts

But in all seriousness, Sheffield reference libraries are as efficient as it is possible for reference libraries to be. The fact that the officials found answers to questions as unusual as I set them proves that.

A wealth of record books is there, but it is only through the skill of an expert staff that they are able to give up their information; in the same way as the most magnificent of motor-cars cannot give the best results unless it is driven by a man who knows it inside out.

The libraries’ staff do not rely on catalogues to any great extent. Their experience has equipped them to go to the right reference books without any trouble.

“The best catalogue is an intelligent staff and a gradual building up of a unique knowledge of books,” Mr. J. P. Lamb, Sheffield’s Chief Librarian, told me.

It is to his credit that he has gathered around him such a staff, and sources of information which could supply the greatest scholar in the land with the answer to any question he cared to put.

Librarians’ Voices: Maureen A: ‘Like a large family’

Posted on November 5, 2016 by Val Hewson

Maureen worked in Sheffield Libraries between 1967 and 1997. She remembers the fun she and her colleagues had.

We really were like a large family, with all the problems that families have but in the knowledge that we’d got support from colleagues when we needed it.

Maureen’s first experience of the public library was in the Ecclesall branch, then located in a grand Victorian house bought by the city and converted.

It was a pleasant place to work, and power cuts made life interesting on winter nights, with lamps at each end of the counter, and eager borrowers hunting for their books with torches. I’m ashamed to say that the staff took great delight in embarrassing those readers who wanted a particular title. We would call through to the office, saying that Mr So-and-so would like to borrow this title, and make sure that the whole library could hear! Saturday afternoons were busy, and livened up by blokes rolling in from the Prince of Wales pub just across the road.

The Central Lending Library in Surrey Street was very different.

This was quite an eye opener, as it was vast, with an equally vast Browne charge.⁽¹⁾ I often wondered how many miles we covered simply shelving books.

On my first evening duty a woman brought in a beautiful fox cub, but it leapt out of her arms and disappeared around the bookshelves. It obviously hadn’t received obedience training!

This was before computerisation, and Maureen remembers the changeover from paper, which was successful ‘due to the tenacity of the Lending Librarian and his deputy’.

Every pink catalogue card had to be checked, and by the end of the day all the staff were seeing everything in green.⁽²⁾ There was near hysteria when word came from on high that all the book cards were to be thrown into bins, and five minutes later that they were to be kept!

In 1975 Maureen moved to the Sheffield Interchange Organisation (SINTO), a partnership between the library service and industry. One of her jobs was to organise the SINTO AGM, to be held in the Graves Art Gallery and chaired by the redoubtable Councillor Enid Hattersley.

[In the gallery] there was the famous picture of some 50 naked women stuffed into a phone box.⁽³⁾ Councillor Mrs Hattersley … was standing right in front of this picture with her drink, when a press photographer arrived, and Mrs. Hattersley, always ready for a picture, smiled. And click!

Occasionally Maureen had to ‘descend into the depths’. This was the library stack or basement store, with six miles of shelving – or was it twelve? Maureen wonders. It stretched across the whole site and housed ‘a vast amount of technical journals, standards, patents, EEC documents, as well as an overflow of lending material’. It could be spooky at night.

One dark night I went down for something, and nearly had a heart attack, because someone with a hideous face and long fair hair appeared, leaning against a wall. I got out fast! It turned out to be a prop from the production in the Library Theatre.

The ‘stack ladies lived a troglodyte existence’. They looked after the strongroom where the most important materials were kept. If the Local History librarians upstairs asked for something from there, this was quite a job. The stack lady had to be:

‘strong enough to open the door. You would think that there were gold bars in the place, and the books themselves could be very large and very heavy and the book lift up to Local Studies wasn’t exactly close.

Maureen remembers many Christmas celebrations.

[We had a meal] at the Norfolk Arms at Ringinglow, on one very snowy night. It was decided that a cabaret would cheer up the festivities, so four of the male staff dressed in ballet tutu skirts and walking boots and performed the Dance of the Little Swans from Swan Lake. It was so funny that all the bar staff rushed in followed by umpteen customers, and the whole place was heaving with laughter.

The highlight of the year was the panto, ‘very well organised’ by various colleagues. Maureen did the music.

Peter Pan was the first, followed by Aladdin, Robin Hood and then Snow White. Someone sang the very deep bass priest’s song from the Magic Flute, and I played a piano version of George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows. From the sublime to the ridiculous.

⁽¹⁾ The usual borrowing system before computers. The library assistant would take the record card from the book and file it with the borrower’s ticket in long trays, in date order, until the book was returned. Here is a photo.

⁽²⁾ Looking at one colour (pink in this case) for a long time makes you see the complementary colour (which is green).

⁽³⁾ Sadly, we’ve been unable to trace this interesting painting.

Poetry at Off the Shelf: White Ink Stains

Posted on October 29, 2016 by Val Hewson

Eleanor Brown

On 19 October 2016 we welcomed over 60 friends and poetry-lovers to the launch of the most surprising outcome of Reading Sheffield – a series of stunning poems, inspired by Sheffield readers, from Eleanor Brown, the award-winning Bloodaxe poet. We thank the Off the Shelf Festival for their generous sponsorship and Sheffield Libraries for their hospitality.

Eleanor’s poems are a unique and highly persuasive way of honouring Sheffield readers’ experiences. We are delighted that they are to be published by Bloodaxe in 2018.

Here is one of the poems Eleanor read for us, inspired by reader Jocelyn Wilson’s story. You can read more of Eleanor’s poems here and Jocelyn’s story here.

Honeymoon

Married in 1948. I had

the most exquisite nightdress, sort of like

a Greek goddess, and dressing gown to match.

They were the loveliest things I’d ever owned.

During the weeks before the wedding I’d

unwrap them from their tissue paper, hold

them up against myself and slowly sway

a sideways figure-of-eight. Didn’t have

a full length looking glass and didn’t dare

steal to my parents’ room to look in theirs.

We went away on honeymoon, the boat

to France and then by train to Switzerland.

I hadn’t brought enough to read. A kind

lady lent me a silly magazine:

the actress Lana Turner, 28,

was married for the fourth time, her trousseau

reported to have cost ten thousand pounds.

I gazed out of the window doing sums,

how many pairs of stockings must she have?

how many nightdresses and dressing gowns?

My husband hadn’t long been back from war

and – sort of totally exhausted – so

he slept a lot, in the warm weather. Well,

and I was very bored. But luckily,

luckily in this little Swiss hotel

there were a few English books. I was so

pleased to have them. I’d have read anything

(always somebody worse off than you

in a Thomas Hardy). Nobody says,

pack enough books to last the honeymoon.

In memory of Jocelyn Wilson 1926-2015

Jocelyn Wilson

Plus ça change: the British and foreign languages

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Val Hewson

In 2013 a survey for the British Council found that three out of four adults in the UK could not have a conversation in Spanish, French or other foreign language. There were calls for more language teaching in schools and colleges. Our inability to speak other languages and our apparent reluctance to try have serious economic and cultural consequences, said the British Council. Businesses miss trading opportunities, and we all miss chances to experience other cultures.

Plus ça change, you might (be unable to) say. The findings of the 2013 research are, sadly, not new: there have been many such reports over the years. Back in 1929, in their regular Books and Readers bulletin, Sheffield Libraries discussed a report of the time.

Education for Salesmanship. The charge has often been made that the British manufacturer is steadily losing his grip on foreign markets, and we wish to draw attention here to “The Interim Report of the Committee on Education for Salesmanship – British Marketing Overseas,” which has just been added to the Commercial and Technical Department. … It has been formulated by a Committee of some thirty leading business authorities and its suggestions are worthy of deep consideration.

Deficient Knowledge of Foreign Languages. This was a subject of very special inquiry by the Committee, and they report that “we agree with one witness in thinking that in view of the increasing severity of foreign competition, alike as regards trading and technical skill, the acquisition of foreign languages has long passed the luxury or drawing room stage, and their study will determine to some extent the future measure of British overseas trade prosperity.”

The report goes on to stress the importance of having catalogues and prices compiled for foreign markets in the language of the country to be traded with and in terms of the weights and measures in local use. … Yet a large number of British Firms attempting to do, or actually doing business … display a strange insistence on writing to their customers in English.”

The final summing up of the Report, as follows, is particularly challenging. “If we were asked what our evidence shows to be, broadly speaking, the outstanding weakness in British marketing overseas, we should answer:- A detached and insular attitude and unscientific practice – relics of the time, long past, when we enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the world’s markets for manufactured goods.”

The article in Books and Readers goes on to ‘draw the attention of the people of Sheffield to [the library’s] comprehensive selection of books on modern marketing methods, salesmanship, advertising, etc…’

Help available for learning languages is also described.

Language Talks, at Hillsborough and Walkley Branches. As regards the need for better language training may we also point out that all the City Libraries stock good books on the major languages, especially from the commercial angle, and in the Central Lending Library there are in addition continually growing collections of reading matter in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Learning the written languages, however, is only half the battle and the need for actual training in the spoken language needs to be met. There are two active mechanical agencies in this work: the gramophone and the wireless.

A early Philips wireless from 1931. Were the Sheffield Libraries’ models something like this? (Creative Commons licence)

The Library does not yet stock gramophone records, but it is making an attempt by means of wireless to help students to attain a knowledge of French, German and Spanish as spoken and written to-day. The Walkley and Hillsborough Libraries have special rooms set aside for Wireless Discussion purpose*, and these rooms are available to language students on the evenings when language talks are broadcast. The set is a three-valve Philip’s [sic] All-Mains, and the tone of the loud-speaker is particularly good. For the information of students we give the [BBC] programme for the next three months:

Walkley	Mondays (2LO#)	7.25-7.45 p.m.
	French by M.E.M. Stéphan	Jan. 27^th; Feb. 10^th; 24^th; March 10^th; 24^th; April 7^th.
	Spanish by Dr. A. R. Pastor	Jan. 20^th; Feb. 3^rd; 17^th; March 3^rd; 17^th; 31^st.
Hillsborough	Wednesdays (5GB#)	8.0 – 8.30 p.m.
	German Language Talks by Mr. O. Siepmann.	Weekly, January 22^nd to April 9^th

* Wireless Discussion Groups were a BBC initiative of the 1920s and 1930s. Libraries welcomed groups of people to listen to one or more set programmes and to discuss them afterwards.

# 2LO was a BBC London station in the 1920s. 5GB, based at Daventry, became the BBC’s National Programme from the late 1920s.

Hybrid memories: Dorothy H’s reading journey

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Val Hewson

By Val Hewson and Mary Grover

Dorothy was born on 26 January 1929 and, one of a family of eight, grew up in Malin Bridge in the north of Sheffield. She married Fred in 1953, having met him at the regular Thursday night dance at the City Hall. They had no children because, she says, she ‘had had enough looking after her younger siblings’. Dorothy studied book-keeping and typing and spent 40 years working in a small business, where she ‘did everything, did [her] own filing, quotations, invoices, statements’.

Dorothy’s reading memories are bound up with film and television. This is hardly surprising, as she belongs to the first generation to grow up and live all their lives with film, radio and television. Talkies started in 1927, two years before she was born. The BBC began broadcasting in 1922 and experimented with television in 1929, the year of her birth. In the 1920s and ‘30s, cinemas – some of them glorious Art Deco picture palaces – were being built around the country, and in the 1930s radio ownership grew quickly. During World War II radio and film became even more popular, with people relying on them for both news and entertainment. The television service came into its own with the coronation of The Queen in 1953, the year Dorothy married, and it has been with us ever since.

Gaumont State Cinema Kilburn: an Art Deco picture place (Photographed by Nathan, licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War epic, is a good example of Dorothy’s ‘hybrid memories’. She still has the copy bought for her 21^st birthday by the sister of a boyfriend, but remembers enjoying the movie, and comparing it with the book:

Oh yes, I read it and of course when you see the film there is a lot cut out for the action, isn’t there? … until you sort of saw the adaptation into the film you don’t get the same feeling about it when you’ve read the book.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh are Rhett and Scarlett in Dorothy’s mind, as they are for so many people of her generation. (She does, however, think that Elizabeth Taylor would have done a better job as Scarlett.)

Rhett and Scarlett (public domain)

Change genre from epic historical romance to crime fiction, and Dorothy again associates actors and characters, book and adaptation. David Suchet is Poirot, Humphrey Bogart is Philip Marlowe and Jeremy Brett is Sherlock Holmes.

Filimg Poirot, London, 2009. (By hairyeggg. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

Filming Poirot, London, 2009. (By hairyeggg. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

Then there is comedy. Dorothy enjoys P G Wodehouse’s stories about Blandings and its porcine Empress, but is unimpressed by a recent television adaptation:

The television thing that was on not long ago, I couldn’t really put it to the actual stories that I had read. … No, I don’t think it was as good enough [sic]. I think they sort of set it a bit more modern than it actually was. … And you never heard about the pig!

Dorothy’s hybrid memories make us consider the relationship between screen and page. The two media feed on each other, promoting the film of the book and the book of the film. In the 1930s, for example, the celebrity of the author could boost the popularity of a film as much as the allure of a Clark Gable could help make Rhett Butler a romantic icon. Between 1925 and 1939 over fifty of Edgar Wallace’s stories were filmed, but it is the author we remember, not the films.

Caricature of Edgar Wallace by Low (public domain)

Dorothy appreciates the ‘double experience’ of film and book. She has always been happy to engage with both page and screen, influenced by both in her choice of reading and viewing; and using her own imagination but also drawing on other people’s.

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