Havoc in a Sheffield Library (The Daily Independent, Monday 2 September, 1935)

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Val Hewson

In the middle of the 20^th century, Sheffield readers got their books from the public library, bookshops and ‘circulating libraries’. These last were private libraries lending books for a small fee or subscription. In Sheffield, they included: Boots the Chemist’s Booklovers’ Library, the local Red Circle and small libraries run out of shops such as newsagents.

Between 1934 and 1935, there was the private Novel Library at 36-38 High Street, on the corner with Mulberry Street and just a few doors away from Walsh’s department store, a Sheffield institution. On a Sunday morning in September 1935, the Novel Library had two unusual visitors. Here is how the Sheffield Daily Independent breathlessly reported the story:

Cattle Amok in City: Windows Shattered: Girls in Terror; havoc in a Sheffield Library.

A bullock and a heifer, which dashed into a library in the centre of Sheffield yesterday, created havoc, smashed large windows, and terrified two girl assistants.

The two beasts – Hector and Harriet – and two other cattle from a farm in Well lane, Sheffield, were being driven down Norfolk street on their way to the Sheffield Abbatoir about 10.30 yesterday morning when, it is understood, the rustling of some paper on the road scared them.

The four beasts made a mad dash, followed by their drover.

Two of them continued straight down Norfolk street, but the others, Hector and Harriet, turned along Mulberry street into High street.

Mulberry Street today, along which the cattle ran towards the High St

Scattering people on their way to church, they turned up High street, where Harriet noticed the open door of the “Novel” library.

Their entry into the library scared the two young assistants in charge and caused both of them to make a rush for their lives.

One ran out into the street and the other made her escape into the cellar below the shop.

Smashed to Atoms

One of the cattle became wedged between a bookshelf and the plate-glass window and the other – Harriet – suddenly ran wild.

As she turned round, she smashed a side window to atoms. She then dashed into the opposite side of the front window to that in which the bullock was stuck, and kicking about frantically smashed it all along the side and finally took a header through it into the High Street.

The site of the Novel Library on the corner of High St and Mulberry St

The site of the Novel Library on the corner of High St and George St

Meanwhile the drover, who had recovered his other two beasts, together with the police, and a large number of other people, had arrived on the scene. They caught Harriet, who was still charging about wildly, and then led the bullock docilely out of the window into the street.

A flock of sheep following the four cattle to the abbatoir seemed entirely unperturbed at the wild dash of their four companions.

Miss Kathleen Connolly, of [36] Windmill street, Sheffield, one of the two assistants who were in the “Novel” library at the time, told a “Daily Independent” reporter of her dash for safety.

“I was seated at the ticket table at the far end of the library facing the open door when I thought I heard a customer enter,” she said. “I looked up and saw in my horror that the bullock was making straight for me.

“It was then only about a yard away. I leapt for the entrance to the basement and ran down the stairs. Then I heard the animals dashing about the library and the smashing of the windows. I thought I should never get out alive.”

Narrow Escape

Miss H. Vallans, of [19] Oak street, Sheffield, her colleague, said, “I had just opened the door wide a few minutes before they entered. I was at the counter just by the door and after I saw them dash past me I ran as fast as I could into the street.

“It is a wonder I was not killed by them, for had they come just a few minutes sooner they would have caught me in the window fixing books on the shelves.”

She pointed to the portion of the window that was then just a [mass] of shattered glass. “I was in that window only a short time before they dashed in,” she said.

The bullock was “unwedged” from the window in which he was stuck without causing any damage.

The shop was in complete disorder after the beasts had [got] away. Books lay strewn on all parts of the floor. Neither of the animals was much the worse for its escapade.

We have not been able to find out much about the Novel Library. It does not appear in local trade directories after 1935, so perhaps the ‘bullocks in the bookshop’ episode sent it out of business.

If you have heard of the Novel Library, please let us know.

‘A great wealth’: the reading journey of Julia Banks

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Mary Grover

Julia was born in Chesterfield in 1939 and moved to Woodhouse on the east of Sheffield in 1945. In later life she became a primary school teacher.

Though there were not many books in the house, Julia’s home always had a bookcase and ‘books around’. Julia was read to by both her mother and her aunt. The local library was the family’s chief source of books: ‘I was always taken to the library with my mother.’ Her mother’s favourite was Naomi Jacob. Books were Julia’s favourite presents – Enid Blyton, for example: ‘I could never wait to get the next one. Mmm … Valley of Adventure and the Malory Towers series.‘

Aunt Lil, on her father’s side ‘bought books from Boots library, in town, when they were selling them off.‘ She bought history books and read them ‘avidly’. ‘She could talk about Elizabeth the First as if she were a neighbour, you know.’

I’ve still got Black’s Elizabeth that she gave me that I used to queue for at school or use from the reference library.

As a teenager, it was non-fiction that inspired Julia too.

Because I was at that stage when I was learning anyway and there wasn’t really time for just fiction. There wasn’t a lot of spare time to do nothing. If you’re at school you’ve got homework and you’re quite busy. But I can remember using it as a tool, really, the library.

The first adult fiction book Julia remembers reading was a book she borrowed from Woodhouse Library, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. It fascinated her because the life of the Chinese farming family was so alien but the feelings universal.

The library in Woodhouse was a great influence because they had a story hour for children in a lovely part of the building.

There was a fire place, benches and a carpet and you could sit there and listen to stories. That was in the children’s library … it was good to have something that could teach you something and lift you.

Story-telling corner at Woodhouse Children’s Library

A lot of Julia’s friends had homes in which there were no books. The presence of books in a home made her aware of ‘an outside … you were not just so concerned with the immediate’. At some time she realised they were also a ‘ladder to social mobility’.

Julia went on to Bingley to train as a primary teacher. She and her friends tended to pass round books and share them. They studied ‘Anna Karenina, you know, Henry James, and you know all the … normal … things’. She likes the fact that these books were not chosen by her.

I didn’t choose them and I think that’s good. Through school or through college you’re given prescripted books. Otherwise you would never get the chance to read them would you? As with Shakespeare you need to be taught how to read it and you should be, in my opinion, because it’s a great wealth to have. So I’m glad that I did read them but I wouldn’t go to the library and pick up Tolstoy.

But her favourite reading was Bertrand Russell: ‘you know the really hard stuff. You think, “well yeah, I never thought about that before but yeah”. You know? It was that you were learning something new.’

In 1965, when her husband’s job took the family to Holland, Julia came across a completely new source of books: the British Women’s Club Library in the Hague which was filled with paperbacks. She and her friends would run through series after series, author after author.

Mm … oh… the Poirot series, Agatha Christie, and I read through Agatha Christie like I’d read through Enid Blyton as I was a girl and loved it. And eventually you realise they’re all the same don’t you? So you’d go onto something else. One friend, she read, oh the historical one, Georgette Heyer. So we went through all those. You know, that sort of reading. Again, because we’d not got a television and because you did have time; you’re in at nights, you’ve got children

‘And so you read,’ says our interviewer.

The other legacy of her time in Holland was a knowledge of nursery rhymes in Dutch. She learned these to prepare her two children for nursery school. ‘My Dutch is based on nursery rhymes.’

During her years as a mother of young children reading time was in short supply. Julia snatched time whenever and wherever she could, as she still does.

So, I read in bed at night, I read on the bus if I go into town on the bus which I often do. I never drive into town, I go on the bus. I’ve always got a book in my handbag, that’s why the size is more important than the content.

Julia connects the experience of reading, the process of writing and the role of prayer.

Reading takes you into different situations; it puts different questions, scenarios before you. … I think very often if you read, just as if you write something, if you have a problem and you write it down it helps you to sort it out. Which I think the role is that prayer has, if you put something before somebody else really it’s like writing it down, you’re seeing it for what it really is rather than from a subjective point of view in a way.

Nowadays, Julia is more selective than she used to be and some books fail the ‘Darnall test’.

If I’ve not got into a book by the time I’ve got to Handsworth Church I very often shut it. … It passed the test if it got me through Darnall. Very often I’ve said ‘no’ and closed it before I’ve got to Darnall.

Julia looks back with gratitude on the people and libraries that helped her find the books she loved. But she concludes that, though she would have found some way of reading, because of the person she is, it would have been harder without her Aunt Lil and her wonderful books, without the trips to the library with her mother.

I would still have gone because I’m me, so I would still have gone to do my research from school and I would still have joined the reading group and got great joy from it. I would have still read and got the books from the British Women’s Club in the Hague. But perhaps a bit later on. I was lucky, you know, I had a family that gave me books and encouraged me to read. And I do think it’s a great wealth to be able to read and enjoy literature.

You can find Julia’s interview here.

Arnold Bennett? Really? Most popular novelist?

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Val Hewson

Yes, that’s right. Arnold Bennett was the most popular ‘classical novelist’ with Sheffield Libraries borrowers in 1931. His competition included the likes of Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and Charles Dickens.

Arnold Bennett – Project_ Gutenberg_etext_13635.jpg

Librarians have long been numbered among those who worry about fiction. Are novels worthwhile or a frivolous waste of time? Do they have anything to teach us or are they doing us harm?

One of the justifications for the free public library movement of the 19^th century was self-improvement (of the working class in particular). Irritatingly, however, many borrowers persisted in preferring books of the imagination over books of information, leading librarians to denounce them.

From the hysterical:

…undoubtedly novels are the most dangerous literature of the age: they dissipate the attention; they appeal to the lazy feelings; sensation and novelty are all that are required from them … better would it be that these lending libraries should cease to exist than that they should disseminate evil influences. (J Taylor Kay, the librarian of Owen’s College Manchester, now the University of Manchester, in 1879).

To the patronising:

It may be that the library authorities of the future will maintain that the business of the library is to supply what the public wants to read irrespective of quality in much the same way that cinema proprietors supply films. (William Berwick Sayers, chief librarian, Croydon, in 1931).

But there were always public libraries which welcomed fiction. They took the view that good novels spoke to the human condition, and that popular fiction could refresh people. Sheffield was one of them. In 1931, the following article appeared in Sheffield’s Books and Readers bulletin:

Who is the most popular classical novelist?

Public Libraries are often criticised on the score of the amount of fiction issued by them. It is too readily assumed by these critics that fiction is all of one standard, and that a poor one, and to these Jeremiahs we point out the result of a recent test made of the popularity of twelve English novelists whose works may be definitely classed as literature. The Librarians at each of the Lending Libraries in the City were asked to report the number of books by certain authors available for loan and actually on loan to borrowers, with the following results:-

Author	Stock	On Loan	%
Barrie	127	69	54
Bennett	352	314	89
Conrad	261	176	67
Dickens	395	218	55
Galsworthy	288	203	71
Hardy	270	183	68
Kipling	266	132	50
Meredith	146	45	31
Scott	362	105	29
Stevenson	152	89	58
Tennyson*	135	34	25
Wells	532	337	63

An examination of these details reveals that there is no reason to feel ashamed of the quality of the fiction read in Sheffield. The high percentage for Bennett is perhaps too flattering. It may be partially explained by the fact that the test was made soon after his death, but allowing for this factor, his popularity is remarkable.

It is fascinating to review this list 85 years on.

They are all men. They are all white men. They are all British (yes, I’m counting Conrad, born in Poland, but naturalised in 1884). Eight out of the twelve were dead by 1931, and the four still alive were all well over 60 in 1931.
Literary reputations change over time. Not all of the twelve authors be considered ‘classical’ today. Only half of them appear in Robert McCrum’s 2015 list of the best 100 novels written in English (a list which generated criticism, as all such lists do – this one not least because male authors heavily outnumbered female).
The very fact of the test and the language used (‘no need to feel ashamed’) perhaps indicate the scale of the debate about fiction.
We don’t know much about the context. Which titles were borrowed? Out of the 532 books by H G Wells, say, were some more popular than others? The article speculates that Arnold Bennett’s popularity was due to his recent death. There may have been other contributory factors such as the author’s work appearing on the radio. Wells, for example, took part in three radio talks between 1929 and 1931. Then there are the borrowers themselves. Were there more men than women, older than younger people? Finally, who were the popular novelists (we can speculate that they included the likes of Edgar Wallace and Ethel M Dell) and how would they compare if included? We can’t answer any of these questions, although we do know that a survey about five years later showed 40 per cent of the fiction borrowed to be ‘classic and standard’ and the rest ‘semi-standard and popular’.

‘Prose fiction today’, wrote Sheffield’s City Librarian in the 1930s, ‘provides one of the most common means by which social, political, religious and other ideas are given to the people’, while action stories had a ‘definite, if limited, place… They give mental refreshment to highly intelligent and well-read library borrowers, they are “introductory readers” to [new borrowers] and … “escape” literature to [the] mentally and physically jaded.’

Jean A’s reading journey

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Val Hewson

Sometimes we meet a Sheffield reader who has pin-bright memories of particular books, events, people. Jean A, who was born in 1930, is one of those readers. As she talks, we see the individual pictures painted with her words.

When she was very small, in the early 1930s, and lived in rural Lincolnshire, Jean went to a ‘dame school’, run by the wonderfully-named Mrs Storm:

My mother got tired of me sort of fidgeting about so she popped me in a pram and took me round to a kind of dame school. Sat round the table, there were about eight of us, writing, spelling, dancing, arithmetic.

On family visits to Sheffield:

… this was my father’s home town. Used to come up to Sheffield to see his father and all my aunts, and they read to me. They were maiden aunts so they had the time to read to me.

Later, when the family moved to Sheffield, Jean’s schooling at Greystones Infants was disrupted by World War II:

… the roof was damaged so we had to have one or two lessons in the secondary modern school next door for a short time, then we did home service when we used to congregate in other people’s houses. We had some children living in our attic, only a few of them … a family, if they could, they used to provide a room so we didn’t lose out on our teaching. So my mum offered our attic. It was a nice room up there, plenty of light. I think we had about four or five. … There would be different children in each house. … I could stay at home but we also had to go to the fishmonger’s up the road; he had a room to spare and I think Peak’s the Butcher’s had. So we didn’t just stay in my house.

There were Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper and magazines every week:

Every Saturday we used to go to Greystones Rd. On [the] right hand side as you go up there are these fairly new houses. Well before they were built there was a little row of cottages. In one of them Mrs Dabbs, she used to sell papers and comics from a little house. I can remember getting Chick’s Own. Rainbow as well. She was a huge lady. She would sit on the table and it was covered with papers and comics and things. You had to pay for them of course. Oh Mrs Dabbs!

As Jean was growing up, she recalls doing ‘more reading because, the dark nights, you couldn’t go out to play. And no box. We listened a lot to the radio. It was a family thing.’ A case in point was The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, read when she was about 15:

We went to the Children’s Library in the Central. I can remember going there … It was fine, lovely. I was a great reader. I can remember reading The Forsyte Saga when I was about 15, late at night. I was engrossed in it. … Oh I did [enjoy it]. I didn’t enjoy the latter end of it, the 1920s. I didn’t think it had the same gusto as the Victorian part.

When she left school, Jean wanted to do social work. She worked for a year for Sheffield Council Social Service, visiting families all over the city. Then she did a two-year social sciences course at the University of Sheffield. After qualifying, she worked with older people. In March 1953, Jean joined the Wrens, where she trained as a driver and ‘enjoyed the freedom’. Later, she married, had two children and returned to Sheffield.

You can read and listen to Jean’s full interview here.

‘Destroyed by the war…’

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

This month has seen international commemorations of the Battle of the Somme, which resulted in over a million men being killed or wounded. Even with this anniversary to remind us, World War One is very distant now. But in the years immediately following it, the Great War was of course still very much in people’s minds. Gradually over the 1920s, memoirs, novels, plays, poetry and official histories began to appear.

One of the best remembered today is All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque*. The novel, describing the experiences of German soldiers in Western Europe (where Remarque fought briefly as a conscript), attracted both great acclaim and criticism. Millions of copies were sold and there were over 20 translations from the original German. But the book was seen by some in Germany, including the Nazi Party which was then rising to power, as a condemnation of their war effort and even as a betrayal of the country itself. In 1933, Goebbels banned Remarque’s books and had them publicly burned and Remarque left Germany to live in Switzerland.

Erich Maria Remarque (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-10867/CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons

In November 1929, not long after the novel’s publication, Sheffield Public Libraries commented on All Quiet on the Western Front and war literature generally in its publication, Books & Readers. The terms used are unusually strong for what was a free monthly bulletin listing new books and announcing library news:

Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” of which there are sixty-five copies circulating in our libraries, has set a fashion in war books which is now being feverishly copied by writers and publishers. “All Quiet” has been criticised in some quarters because of its frankness. It has been said that however true the book may be of the German side, it is certainly not true of the British. Anyone who saw the war at close quarters must realise that “All Quiet” suffers from the defect that all war books must share – the whole truth is too foul ever to appear in print. J. L. Hodson’s “Grey Dawn, Red Night” describes the gradual moral, spiritual, and physical degradation that sapped away the humanity of a fine soul. It deals with a war foreign to Bairnsfather and the war correspondents with a restrained yet devastating realism. It is to the good of humanity and the coming generation that those who were stricken dumb for ten years by their war experiences can now write as truthfully as ordinary decencies will allow about them. There is no surer encouragement for the efforts of Britain and America to make war unthinkable, than the realisation of what the four years meant to those who in the words of Remarque’s dedication of his book, “were destroyed by the war, though they may have escaped its shells.”

‘…the whole truth is too foul ever to appear in print,’ and the novel ‘deals with a war foreign to Bairnsfather and the war correspondents,’ says the unknown author. This sounds like bitter experience talking. No doubt men and women who worked in Sheffield’s libraries suffered and died because of the war, and after ten years the author felt that the truth could, or should, be faced. The war correspondents dismissed here had perhaps massaged their reports to keep up morale or spare feelings; and the very popular ‘Old Bill’ cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather were there to make people laugh. That 65 copies of All Quiet were bought for the libraries in 1929 is an indication of the interest in the war, the need to reflect on it and perhaps to process it, as we might say today. There are by the way a few copies of All Quiet available from Sheffield Libraries today, including one, in storage, which dates from 1929. Perhaps the last of the original 65?

Old Bill (By Bruce Bairnsfather (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11232) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Old Bill (By Bruce Bairnsfather [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

(There are no library copies of the other novel mentioned, J L Hodson’s Grey Dawn, Red Night, also published in 1929. Hodson was an English journalist who fought in the war and dedicated his novel to the people who went to France with him, but did not return. Why Remarque’s book survives and Hodson’s does not is not clear. Perhaps All Quiet is simply a better book, or perhaps the Nazis’ treatment of it ironically ensured its survival.)

Today’s reader is of course conscious that, just ten years after this Books & Readers was published and only 21 years after the war to end all wars, World War Two broke out. The League of Nations – presumably what the author had in mind when writing ‘the efforts of Britain and America to make war unthinkable’ – had failed.

* The novel was one of those read by Reading Sheffield interviewee Sir Norman Adsetts before he went to university. Here is his reading journey.

Dorothy Norbury’s reading journey

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Val Hewson

The daughter of a newsagent, Dorothy Bagshaw was born on 11 January 1934 in Dinnington, near Sheffield. She married Malcolm Norbury in 1954 and had three children. The family lived in Dinnington until Malcolm joined the police force and the family had to move to Sheffield. Dorothy worked in her parents’ shop, then as a child care assistant in a school and, when she was 40, trained as a nursery nurse.

And we had to, obviously we had to read books for exams and things like that, but I never ever finished them. I found out in later years that I’m dyslexic. I didn’t know at the time, I mean it was a thing that was unheard of.

Dorothy might be described as a reader against the odds. Now she reads in bed, ‘probably for an hour every night’. She enjoys Catherine Cookson – she has read every one of her books – and similar writers of historical fiction:

I read, I like to read books that make you realise how lucky you are to be living at this time in life and not at the turn of the century when there was so much hardship. … Like, I didn’t realise that children used to run about without shoes and socks on. And they used to go gleaning in the coal, in the slag heaps and things like that. I didn’t realise anything like that until I actually read about it in novels. And I was just amazed, yeah.

As you listen, you realise that Dorothy’s reading journey has not been an easy one. She clearly liked stories from an early age:

I had a girlfriend that lived next door and we were born four days between each other. We grew up like sisters and we used to have sleepovers, and one of my greatest joys was to lay in bed with her while she read to me.

But her mother – ‘a very practical person … always busy doing something’ – made her feel that reading was a waste of time. When Dorothy was a child, her parents were ‘always very busy’, working long hours in their newsagent shop, and so they never read to their daughter. Dorothy describes herself as a ‘very poor reader’:

When I was in the junior school, the teacher used to pick out people to stand up and read from a book. And I used to stand and die if you picked me. Absolutely, because I was just … Apart from not being able to read very well, I just lost it, you know, my nerves.

This doesn’t mean that she never read. Dorothy liked comics like Girls’ Crystal and, when she was older, women’s magazines like Woman and Woman’s Own. She could get all of these from her parents’ shop. And there were some books:

The books that I got were from family. My favourite book which is going to be … is Christmas morning, I used to wake up and I used to have a Rupert book in my sack and it was the first thing I went for and I wasn’t bothered about anything else. I used to take a torch upstairs with me so I could read it in bed. And I used to read Rupert.

There were books at school too. ‘I did read books when I went to Maltby Grammar School.’ But Dorothy remembers not finishing them, with occasional exceptions like The Count of Monte Cristo. ‘Absolutely fascinated me, that did. I really loved that book.’ But Dorothy left school without qualifications. Although she passed the mock exam, a family illness prevented her taking the final School Certificate.

Dorothy did go to the local library, but with mixed results:

I started going to Dinnington library with that girlfriend of mine, Ena, when I was in my very early teens. But the books, I never read them because I found it so difficult to keep reading them. And when I came to live in Sheffield and I used to take the children to the library, my children to the library, and I took out … And the books I used to get then were gardening books or cookery books, or anything that was practical. I was not interested in novels then.

It was not until Dorothy was about 40 years old that she really began to read. This was when she enrolled at college to become a nursery nurse and had course books to study. She had been working at a school for ten years as an unqualified child care assistant, until ‘they would only employ people with qualifications, not that anybody said anything to me, but I decided to go back to college’.

It was her training that gave Dorothy the clue to her problem:

But going back to work at school with the children and seeing the people coming in and testing children, and I think, “Oh, that’s me. I do that and I do that.” And it made me realise that I was dyslexic, just slightly. Yeah.

‘Somebody should have picked up on this,’ Dorothy says, but no-one did.

You see, all those classics, I love the stories, but I haven’t got the patience to read them, even now. I have to read every word. I can’t skip read like other people do, you know. I have to go through it all. It takes me a while to go through a book.

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

Frank Burgin’s reading journey

Posted on July 10, 2016 by Val Hewson

The only son of a miner and a onetime housemaid, Frank Burgin was born in 1938 in Mosborough, then a small pit village outside Sheffield. After leaving school, he worked in engineering, a job interrupted by two years of National Service. Later, when his work at Laycock Engineering became less satisfying, he worked as a technician at the University of Sheffield and, in time, taught in further and higher education in Sheffield. In recent years, Frank got his PhD.

The book was by Hemingway and Frank had not warmed to Hemingway, but it was no good. He still had to stand up and talk about it.

You were given a book you had to read before you went and then as part of the course you’d got to talk about it to the rest of the group.

Frank was not, as you might suppose, a student of literature in a tutorial, but a teenage apprentice at the Sheffield firm of Laycock Engineering in the 1950s. Laycocks is famous in automobile design for the Laycock de Normanville Overdrive, which Frank described as ‘what we had before they invented 5th gears in cars … quite a sophisticated piece of engineering’.

I started work at 15 as an apprentice at Laycock Engineering which of course is now Sainsbury’s at Millhouses. I still get a funny feeling when I go in there, when I see a bit of wall… that was the fitters… That was the tool room where I used to work. I still get the feeling that people must get when they walk down the street and find out that the house that they were born in has been knocked down… it’s become flats. You know, there’s a part of your life gone, and I’m a bit like that with Laycocks.

By the 1950s, the firm was part of the Birfield Industries group, and it seemed to be Birfield policy to bring together their apprentices at Goldicoates, a country house owned by the company.

It was a course. You had to go and learn how to talk to Brummies and people like that without fighting! It was all very posh catering, sort of thing, you went to breakfast with your jacket on.

And the Hemingway? Frank couldn’t remember the title but:

I talked about it. I presented it, I can remember doing it. I’m sure very, very hesitantly, and I wasn’t as articulate then as I am now but at least I didn’t sort of stand there tongue-tied and say aye, well it were crap, like some did.

Perhaps the reason Frank coped with the task was that he had long been a reader, enjoying ‘fairly escapist fiction … not particularly literary but they certainly had something’. (He still reads enthusiastically by the way – ‘bits of physics’ and sci fi and fantasy that is ‘totally and utterly zany’– and these days uses a Kindle.) Frank’s parents, who had only an elementary school education, were ‘habitual readers’ and saw books as a way for their young son to avoid the hardship they’d known during the ‘terrible economic times of the 1930s’.

Oh, I used to get all the time – look, lad, you’ve got to have some book larnin else you’ll get nowhere. He [Frank’s father] didn’t know what I’d got to learn, he knew that I’d got to be learning it from books … somewhere. And I was pushed and encouraged to do at well at school which I didn’t particularly.

In fact, Frank failed the important exam which in those days determined the type of secondary education he would get:

I failed part 1 of the 11 plus exam absolutely miserably of course, but nobody had ever done anything about preparing us for the 11 plus exam or even telling us that it was important.

This led, however, to his joining Laycocks, and one day finding himself talking about Hemingway to his fellow apprentices. The incident seemed to have a big – perhaps even life-changing – impact on Frank. Why, after all, did Birfield go to all the trouble?

… to get us away from the back page of the Star and things like that … No, it was all done to make us think. Some of us did think. It certainly woke up things in me that I didn’t know was [sic] there. I think it also made me think that perhaps there might be life beyond knocking very precise spots off big lumps of metal which I’d gone into engineering to do and was quite happy doing.

You can read and listen to Frank’s interview in full here.

Reading Sheffield research: The fiction policy of an English public library in the 1930s

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Val Hewson

Just posted in our Research section, a slightly edited version of a paper given by Reading Sheffield team member Val Hewson at The Auden Generation and After conference, Sheffield Hallam University, 17 June 2016

‘Even Edgar Wallace may be discovered’: The fiction policy of an English public library in the 1930s

Ted L’s Reading Journey

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Val Hewson

Ted L, born in 1919, was one of our oldest interviewees. He lived in the Norfolk Park area of Sheffield most of his life, apart from his war service as a fitter and machinist in the Ordnance Corps. He took part in the retreat from Dunkirk (he and three others were stranded for six days, with only a pot of marmalade and some cubed beetroot to eat) and then was stationed in East Africa for two and a half years. In peacetime, he worked in engineering, and the ‘only one romance [he] was ever interested in’ was with his wife, Nellie, whom he met at work and married in 1948.

All sorts of pictures in there, not just ordinary paintings, some of them extraordinary … We went to look at Leonardo … it was only dull light and there was two whacking great pictures, best paintings I have ever seen.

This was Ted, talking about a visit to the National Gallery. For him, books meant art rather than anything else. His flat was full of books, and they were mostly about art, noted the interviewer, although he also enjoyed history, architecture and music. His neighbour Gillian, who sat in on the interview, described how Ted ‘devour[ed]’ all the book she lent him, and Ted himself said:

Oh yes, I used to go to the library and get books out, not reading books, technical books. I don’t read fiction books. Never have done … I have always been interested in a subject … I can learn something.

There were books in his childhood, with Ted’s mother going to the library every week to borrow, among other, P G Wodehouse, and his father (‘He wasn’t educated. He was a working class man, he was a plumber’) enjoying detective stories. And Ted himself did read fiction as a boy – ‘ripping yarns’ from authors like John Buchan and Rider Haggard, who were so popular in his youth. He remembers studying Buchan’s Prester John at Duchess Road School and also reading Blanket of the Dark, She, The Thirty-Nine Steps and King Solomon’s Mines:

… that’s a brilliant thing, that. They made a film of it. I read a lot of them … I don’t think I would ever have imagined I would have been in Africa when I read a Rider Haggard book.

At school, Ted was a clever boy, particularly interested in history and once coming ‘top in English’:

Always in the top of form. I wasn’t an idiot like some of them. … We had a good teacher called Mr Cross. He was a Londoner with a broad accent. I didn’t know what a Londoner was in those days. He had posters all over the place, Cunard Liners stuck round [and brought in books]. He was the best teacher we ever had, Mr Cross. He didn’t spare you, I liked him for all that.

As with many boys of his background, Ted’s formal education ended at the age of 14 when he became an engineering apprentice. But by then it had opened that important door to art, as for two days a week he used to go to the art school in the centre of the city.

This art school was close to the site of the new Central Library and Graves Art Gallery which opened in 1934. Ted had a ringside seat at the building:

Thursday and Friday I used to go to an art school. And when we used to go out in the afternoon we used to watch them building the new library. … Then when I was at the art school and we used to watch the cranes, the big stones. Very interesting that was. I was with that library right from the beginning.

Ted, who liked architecture as well as art, was interested in the new library, which he describes as a ‘fine building’.

Well, I think, [the old library] was an old music hall and there was a little chapel next to it … and then the other side was the art school. … The old one was cramped. There were smaller rooms and these lines of shelves up all close together. Quite a lot of people all mugged up sort of thing. When this new one opened everything was beautiful and spacious, art gallery upstairs, and I think they’ve got a theatre underneath though I’ve never been in it.

Now, when he went to the public library, ‘I didn’t get reading [fiction] books. I used to get out books about art. ‘ He also enjoyed visiting the Graves:

I like the art gallery. I have been up there for all sorts of things. In fact there was a programme the other day about Lowry, the painter. Well he came there once, after it was built. I went one day and up in one of the galleries, there were lots of rows of little seats. There was a restaurant there and it was right next to that. … and I said to this girl, ‘What’s all this for?‘ She said, ‘It’s Mr Lowry coming to give a lecture for the children’. ‘Well I never stopped for that ‘cos I never knew when it was going to be, next morning I think. But that gallery next to it was full of his pictures. That was when I first got to know about Lowry, you know. I admired his work. There were these funny little characters in it. I think they’re fantastic. I’ve got one up there now. That’s Lowry up there [on the wall of his flat].

You can read and listen to Ted’s interview in full here.

The Reading Journey of Florence Cowood

Posted on June 28, 2016 by lizz

Florence was born in Huddersfield in 1923 and moved to Sheffield when her father got an engineering job there. Later her parents ran a greengrocer’s shop. The family lived in the Abbey Lane area; initially she attended a private school and then Abbey Lane Primary when it opened. She passed the eleven plus examination at the age of 10, and went to Abbeydale Girls’ Grammar School. At sixteen, after passing the School Certificate in English and Botany, she went to the Commercial College on Psalter Lane. In 1939 she left school aged 16 and got a job with the LNER, the London and North Eastern Railway. At the end of the war she married and gave up work.

Florence was always passionate about reading:

In fact, if I was ever naughty and I was sent to my room, my mother always made sure I hadn’t got a book because she knew it was no punishment if I had a book.

One of her earliest recollections is reading one of her grandmother’s books, Little Folks:

I read all sorts of bits out of it: school stories, adventure stories, little poems, letters from children who were stationed in India, letters to the editor.

Florence’s family encouraged her reading: her grandfather was a headmaster and bought her the books for grammar school. Her godmother was a teacher and gave her books for Christmas presents: ‘she once gave me a whole lot of Enid Blyton’.

Her mother also loved reading:

I’ve got some of my mother’s books that she had as a young woman … [Mary] Anerley, two volumes of The Count of Monte Cristo. Little Women and Good Wives, yes. That was my mother’s book.

Gone With the Wind was a present from her mother for her nineteenth birthday.

As a result of family circumstances, Florence spent a lot of time in libraries as she got older, especially in the Central Library :

‘That’s why I used to go to the library and that, because I think I was rather a solitary child, in that your parents are busy working. And I used, on a Saturday morning, I used to go down to the [Library]. Have a little trot around Woolworths by myself, get myself some sweeties. And I used to go to Central Library, get my library books, go up to the Art Gallery. I used to like to go up there to look at the pictures. And then I used to go down to the Reading Room. You could read all sorts of magazines down there, and I used to spend the whole day, you know, really, and then come home on the tram you know, and read my library books.

Probably another reason Florence spent so much time in libraries was that she did not see much of her school friends:

I had loads of friends, but in those days, when you went to a grammar school … People came from all over the city …So my best friend lived at Pitsmoor … another one lived out in Grindleford.

Reading was a private thing – Florence didn’t discuss her choice of books with anyone.

At school she read the familiar titles: Anne of Green Gables (she liked the struggle of the little girl); What Katy Did; Black Beauty (she loved horses); but as she got older, she graduated to more adult books. Elizabeth Goudge’s Green Dolphin Country was a present for Christmas 1944 and Florence still has her copy, which she bought herself, of Daphne du Maurier’s The King’s General. Others she borrowed from the library, like A Tree Grew in Brooklyn and all Nevil Shute’s books (except Requiem for a Wren).

She read Jane Eyre but

some of the older books, you know, like Jane Eyre, they can be a bit fulsome, if you know what I mean.

Florence had what would be considered a modern view of education – not one recognisable to Mr Squeers or Mr Gradgrind!

Knowledge and education isn’t knowing a whole load of facts. It’s knowing where to find the information you want. And I think a book is, to open a book and you find things out that you never knew before.

She read for pleasure not for self-improvement or because she thought she ought to read them:

I’ve got a full set of Dickens, but I haven’t read much of him. My godmother used to send me two or three every birthday, so I’ve got the full set. I didn’t really appreciate it… quite frankly, a lot of them bore me to death.

After school, as a girl, her opportunities were limited:

Well, you had a choice. You either went in a shop, or a hairdresser’s, or you went in an office. No, there wasn’t this business about going to university and this, that and the other.

She wanted to be a reporter and got a job on the local newspaper :

I worked in the publicity department with Gloops* and all that sort, you know. And then the war broke and … they closed the paper down … And my father said, ‘You have to get a job’ and I went to work for the North Eastern Railway.

Florence stayed there throughout the war as it was a reserved occupation and then married in 1946.

I worked there until I got married. And then I left, of course, when I got married.

However she still managed to keep on reading.

I did go on reading, but … I was occupied other ways then, you know, with cooking and all the rest of it you do when you’re married.

In some senses reading changed Florence’s life: she enjoyed reading about foreign places and travel which led to:

a love of wanting to explore, wanting to find out about things. I’m always interested in people, how people live…

Different books stimulated interest in different parts of the world:

Green Dolphin Country, gave me a yen for Australia -…You know, the other side of the world. I didn’t go to New Zealand, but I have been to Australia. … I used to like the Sundowners and all stories.

Her visit to South Africa was also stimulated by what she read.

The Valley of the Vines one gave me a yen for South Africa. I eventually went to South Africa and saw the Valley of the Vines… I always was interested in [South Africa], in particular around the Cape, the Cape district, and of course I went there, but it’s a long time ago now. Well, Nelson Mandela was still on Robbin Island and there was still apartheid. That was just after Sharpeville, I think

Florence was also a poet and painter – self-taught.

I went to the local art class … Well, my husband used to go fishing and I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t particularly want to knit, and I decided I’d try and paint a picture and it went from there.

She was interested in books about shipwrecks and painted the wreck of the Royal Charter ‘… and that is mentioned in Dickens, in Uncommercial Traveler’. She used books for reference for both her painting and gardening.

The following is a fitting tribute to the power of books and to the zest for life which Florence showed so clearly:

This is my own bit of things, and I found it, I saw it in the library van once.

I’ve travelled the world twice over,

And met the famous saints and sinners,

Poets and artists, kings and queens,

All stars and hopeful beginners.

I’ve been where no one’s been before,

Drawn secrets from writers and cooks,

Always with a library ticket

To the wonderful world of books.

I would like to say that books have been me life, all me life, and without them, my life would be nothing like as good as it has been. Because books have been there.

Gloops was a cartoon cat who appeared from 1928 until the 1980s in the Sheffield Star. There was a Gloops club for children. Gloops was hugely popular.

Written by Sue Roe

Access Florence’s audio and transcript here

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