Lizz’s recollections of reading 1950-65

Posted on June 27, 2016 by lizz

My dad was an agronomist and when I was very young we lived in farms and agricultural colleges. My first recollections of a book as an object were pictures in a board book of farmyard animals, which I still have.

Every Christmas I received a book from my Aunty Mary. She was the Principal of Leicester Teacher Training College so I expect that the books she chose were to be educational as well enjoyable. My dad read to me every night before I went to sleep, and Aunty Mary’s books formed the core of my book collection. This is a period when books were chosen for me – for example, John Masefield (The Box of Delights), Hugh Lofting (the Dr Dolittle series) Grimms’ Fairy Tales, C S Lewis (the Narnia series), T H White (The Sword in the Stone), Andrew Lang’s Blue and Green Fairy Books, Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), Rosemary Sutcliff (The Eagle of the Ninth), A Wonder Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne. My favourites? Dr Dolittle, The Magician’s Nephew, The Box of Delights and The Secret Garden.

One of Aunty Mary’s last Christmas present books was The Hobbit, but I did not read Lord of the Rings until I was at university.

I became horse-mad around the age of six, and from then until about the age of ten horses dominated my reading. I had a huge volume called Horses, Horses, Horses that I read over and over again. Books by the three Pullein-Thompson sisters ring a bell; Black Beauty of course; a series about Romney Marsh; plus books on anatomy, riding, drawing and breeds of horses. As a family we often used the library at Impington Village College, where my dad ran a film club. I used to design and make the posters for the film screenings. My parents still directed my reading to some extent – for example, I was not allowed to read ‘trashy comics’. I got round this by devouring huge piles of the Beano and the Dandy. They were stored in a cupboard with gas masks and a tin helmet at a friend’s house. We also did not have a television, because it might interfere with our reading. Sounds crazy now.

The telly arrived when I was 11, and I increasingly selected my own reading. I was indirectly influenced because my parents just left their books about and I would pick them up. Women authors dominated my mum’s reading. She was a great fan of Jane Austen, and Emily and Charlotte Bronte. I had to read Pride and Prejudice for ‘O’ level English Lit but never really got on with Jane Austen. But I did enjoy Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier was one of mum’s favourites. Among the authors that I read due to her influence were: Edna O’Brien; Anita Brookner; Winifred Holtby; Rebecca West; A S Byatt; Katherine Whitehorn; Doris Lessing; Muriel Spark; Iris Murdoch.

My dad in contrast read contemporary fiction. Through him I read: John Updike; Salinger; John Braine; J P Donleavy; Thomas Pynchon; D H Lawrence; Hermann Hesse; and Kerouac.

Other authors I remember reading between 11 and 17 were: H G Wells; John Masters; John Wyndham; Lynne Reid Banks (The L Shaped Room); Jean Rhys; Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano); Patrick White; Saul Bellow; Zola; William Golding. I waded through The Herries Chronicles (Hugh Walpole) and attempted to read Lorna Doone but found the dialect tedious. However I quite liked Chaucer which, along with Shakespeare and a considerable amount of poetry (largely forgotten), was on the school syllabus.

Then there were the forbidden books – The Story of O by Pauline Réage, and the Kama Sutra. (Titles were passed pupil to pupil.)

I had six large factual books that I looked at repeatedly and which, looking back, have influenced the science and art that I did later.

Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon. My mum was a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment during WW2 and was stationed in Trincomalee. This was one of her books. It’s full of large black and white photographs.
The Sculptures of Michelangelo – again a book of large black and white photographs, which most likely belonged to my dad. I can remember being especially impressed by the slaves freeing themselves from the rock.
The World’s Greatest Paintings: Selected Masterpieces of Famous Art Galleries edited by T Leman Hare. Three muddy brown volumes probably inherited from my grandfather and a collection of coloured plates of what were then considered significant paintings from famous western galleries. It’s purely visual, with no information other than title and artist.

The large black and white photographs of Ceylon and the sculptures of Michelangelo have directly influenced my own photography and, although The World’s Greatest Paintings ends at the Pre-Raphaelites, it introduced me to Art History.

And lastly The Science of Life by H G Wells, Julian Huxley and G P Wells.

My version of The Science of Life was published by Cassell & Company in 1931 and included some dubious and speculative science. My favourite picture remains that of the medium ‘Margery’ extruding ‘teleplasm’ from her nose and mouth.

And here is an example of more conventional, but equally fascinating, science.

Lizz Tuckerman is a freelance multimedia artist based in Sheffield. She was previously a research scientist working in genetics and reproduction. Lizz designed this website and has produced artworks inspired by the Reading Sheffield interviews. She was born near Ironbridge in Shropshire and her early childhood was spent in Penrith and Kilve (Somerset). When her father began work at The National Institute of Agricultural Botany, the family moved to first to Histon, a small village in Cambridgeshire and then to the market town of Saffron Walden in Essex. Lizz has lived in Sheffield for 26 years.

The Reading Journey of Edna B

Posted on May 30, 2016 by lizz

By Mary Grover

Edna was born in 1928. When she was a child her family were moved to a new estate, the Flower Estate, built in 1923 on High Wincobank. Billed as ‘dainty villas for well-paid artisans’, the houses had their own toilets and hot water – ‘it was’quite something’.

Edna passed the 11 plus and won a place at the City Grammar in the centre of town. She stayed till she was 16. Though her headmaster wanted her to stay on and encouraged her ambition to go into teaching, her parents could not afford it. She could have got a grant from the old pupils’ association, the Holly Guild, but she would have had to pay it back. When female teachers got married they lost their jobs. It was ‘a deterrent’ to taking on such a large debt.

Edna was conscious of how hard both her parents worked to support the children. On Saturday afternoons her father used to walk her down through the allotments to Firth Park Library. The first book she remembers reading, probably when she was about six, was Little Anne of Canada.

It was illustrated, this book, and this girl must’ve lived in Alaska, probably, and I was fascinated by this story and we seemed to get it out several times ‘cos I liked it.

Edna’s father’s mother couldn’t read and write and he was always conscious of what an education would do.

Well, to even read. I mean, he could read and write, but I don’t think he ever sat down and read books.

Edna’s mother’s family had had both money and educational opportunities. Though her mother was unable to pursue her own education she loved reading and came from a family who talked about politics.

They’d got smatterings of culture I’d say. I remember I went to me father’s mother’s and they read these trashy magazines and me mother said, ‘Don’t be reading those’. Now Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Illustrated were a little bit more posh.

It was from her mother that Edna developed her taste for the novels of Ethel M Dell – ‘They were all tragedies, weren’t they?’

Yes, and I remember standing at Firth Park bus stop waiting for a bus from school and I was reading this Ethel M Dell stood at the bus stop. He said, “Do you like those?” I said, “Oh, I love them”, but I’d only be about 12 or 13 and he was an elderly man. And when I look back I think well there was a tragedy on every page!

Edna thinks her mother would have been lent these books by a friend. The only books Edna’ parents owned were her father’s Sunday School prizes. Though her mother read, she never had time to go to the library. In the depression Edna’s mother went out cleaning and then in the Second World War she got some office work. Indoors she was always knitting and sewing. ‘She was ever so industrious.’

When I was at Junior school I had a very far-seeing teacher and she had a little library and we used to borrow those books from her bookshelf. We were supposed to write a little commentary about what we thought but I can’t remember doing it. But they’d have Swallows and Amazons, William books and those sorts of books … Anne of Green Gables and the Dimsie books.

When she won a place at the Central Grammar School, Edna became conscious of the opportunities she and her family had not had. Her friend’s father was a policeman.

They seemed to live in luxury compared to us. They got their rent paid and things like that. Her mother had got time to go to the library and things like that. But, I mean, we had standards, and me mother was a bit [pause] she liked us to speak properly and we always said Grace, you know, and we went to Sunday school, and er, she was a believer, but she, we weren’t, well, she hadn’t time, but they did go on High Days and Holidays.

Edna’s grammar school was round the corner from the Central Library at the top of which was the Graves Art Gallery. ‘We took our sandwiches in there! Well, you got away from school, you see.’

Then, when Edna was married, in her twenties, she found herself in the Derbyshire countryside, a mile from the nearest bus-stop so her reading became dependent on the mobile library: James Thurber, books on antiques – ‘I hadn’t a hope of having an antique!’ Then her sister joined a book club and passed on the thrillers she had bought. She immersed herself in whatever she read. One day her husband came home and found her in tears.

And he said “Who’s upset you? Who’s upset you?” I said, “That little dog’s died”. You know I really lived it! I lived it!

One of the books that has remained with her all her life is Thomas Armstrong’s Crowthers of Bankdam set in the wool mills of West Yorkshire.

You can’t call it trashy, but a bit earthy. The boys played rugby. I mean, as opposed to football. They were middle class people, you know. The girls would have a reasonable education and perhaps went to boarding school but they were, hierarchy, and it was a series. You could follow them on.

Though she enjoyed J.B. Priestley and Arnold Bennett in the early fifties, it was in the sixties, when the family returned to Sheffield, that Edna went to Richmond College and developed reading tastes for some of the authors on her A level literature course: Graham Greene, Gorky and Steinbeck – ‘The Grapes of Wrath, I adored that’. Less to her taste was James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist: ‘it was so repressed’. This was the only time in Edna’s life that she regularly bought books for herself. When she was a girl she might buy secondhand books from a stall in Norfolk Market or the Girls’ Crystal from the local newsagent, but apart from her college days Edna relied either on libraries or friends for her books. Her college courses changed more than her book-buying habits. When Edna enrolled for her social science course her mother ‘went mad’.

‘ You’ve had three children and there you are going to college!’ I thought mother, ‘I’m nearly going out of my head here’. It was a life saver going up there.

You can access Edna’s audio and transcript here

Blue Bird, by Seiko Kinoshita

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Val Hewson

Enter Sheffield’s Central Library and Graves Art Gallery and, just before the entrance to the Lending Library, stop and look up. What you see above you is Blue Bird by Japanese-born, Sheffield-based textile artist Seiko Kinoshita. Made from paper yarn which is hand-dyed and woven, this wonderful work is said to be inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 play, The Blue Bird, about the search for happiness.

Here is Seiko Kinoshita’s website, where you can read about what inspires her and how she works.

Peter Mason’s Reading Journey

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Mary Grover

Peter Mason was born on the 29^th September, 1929 and grew up in Handsworth, on the east side of Sheffield. He spent his adult life as an educational administrator. He went to High Storrs Grammar School and Sheffield University where he studied politics and administration. He did two years National Service between 1947 and 1949. His father was a mining engineer who had worked in India in the early 1920s.

Peter’s reading was, from the very beginning, a family affair:

My brother used to encourage me to read because he was six years older than I was so the books he finished he passed to me, but my parents were avid readers … and my uncle and aunt. … Later on in life as my uncle was blind and my aunt used to have Braille books that she read to him. I was encouraged to read to him; I would read the newspaper to him or something like that.

Once he got going, Peter quickly graduated from Enid Blyton, Just William and Biggles to C.S. Forester’s naval adventures and Rider Haggard’s African fantasies.

During the Blitz, in 1941, many of Sheffield’s schools were closed for a time and pupils were sent to a teacher’s home to learn. Pupils were given books to take away and read on their own. Though this only lasted a few months it helped Peter become a confident and independent reader.

During the war, while Peter was at High Storrs Grammar School, he was using the school library as well as the Central Library intown. He studied Joseph Conrad and G. B. Shaw at school, read most of Charles Dickens and particularly enjoyed Thomas Hardy. His aunt supplied some of the twentieth century bestsellers, including James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and A.E.W. Mason’s cautionary tale about manliness The Four Feathers.

As a teenager Peter read partly to understand his place in the world: first, books about Yorkshire in particular, followed by histories of the United Kingdom then, encouraged by his uncle, books connected with the International Labour Party, frowned on by his parents. In his teens his interest in the current political situation was obviously fuelled by the fact that his country was at war. Peter still seeks to understand the world through reading histories, biographies and political autobiographies.

Many of the volumes in Peter’s extensive library were given to him as presents. During his two years in the forces, he was sent books and magazines, chosen to distract him from rather than engage him with the present. No doubt the ‘rather blue’ novels that circulated in the NAAFI served the same purpose. While Peter was on his military service in his late teens, he found many of his fellow conscripts could neither read nor write. One young man had been faced with a choice of prison or military service; Peter helped him write letters home and read the replies. Peter was full of praise for the military education service.

The forces not only introduced Peter to men for whom books were unavailable; it also introduced him to a new kind of recreational fiction: American genre fiction by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse was a great favourite with his fellow soldiers. After the war he admired The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. He links the satisfaction such stories give him, the sense that good will triumph over evil, to his religious faith. However, Peter’s curiosity compels him to keep looking for a book that will overturn his expectations: ‘I’ve always been waiting to read a really good book where evil triumphs over good but I’ve not got that far yet.’

He is sensitive to the unsettling qualities he perceives in Jane Austen’s novels:

I thought she was great, but to me there was always a darkness about Jane Austen. In a way, I was being drawn into her world, which was fair enough and what she should do as an author, but I wasn’t happy about it if you know what I mean. There was a bit of misery attached to her work but, don’t get me wrong, she was a great author.

But Peter’s first choice has always been fact rather than fiction. Both his father and his uncle urged him to read newspapers, which he still ‘devours’ and which offer him models for his own writing. Reading is what he does to relax: on holiday, in bed and while his wife watched television he would move to another room to concentrate on his book (sometimes one of his wife’s Georgette Heyers that he ‘sneaked’ a look at).

Peter’s reading has made him ‘an inveterate letter writer’. ‘The only way you can write correctly is if you are expressing your feelings.’ It has also made him an inveterate book buyer: Penguin books ‘by the bucket-load’ from W.H. Smith, a few from newsagents

I did like to go around antiquarian bookshops and see what they’d got. Old books used to fascinate me; if nothing else the writing used to get me but I never kept any of those I must admit, I used to part with them.

Though Peter describes himself ‘disappearing into a book’, whether it be detective novels or P. G. Wodehouse’s comedies about that ‘lovable idiot’, it is clear that he also reads to connect with others (his grandchildren for example) and with new developments in the world (computer technology being a recent interest). ‘I like to read about the new things that are coming on the block’.

I like to read about life in general because I think it’s important that I know how the other half live, whether it’s the other half that are extremely wealthy or the other which are extremely poor, because I think it’s part of my duty to know exactly where they are.

Though Peter usually reads for a purpose he is adamant that he never reads a book because someone tells him that he should.

I’m not led. I’m not led by convention. I read what I want to read. If somebody tells me I’ve got to read it then my instant attitude is, ‘No, I don’t want to read it’. I want to read because I want to read and I choose what I want to read. I don’t now read anything because I consider that it’s not my views because I feel that I should embrace everybody’s views so I know what they’re thinking as well as what I’m thinking.

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

Librarians’ Voices: Alysoun Bagguley: ‘I can’t imagine doing anything more interesting.’

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Val Hewson

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. (Dr Johnson)

Alysoun Bagguley, born in Nantwich in the 1940s, worked for Sheffield City Libraries for over 40 years. She became Law Librarian, Business Librarian and, finally, Science and Technology Librarian and deputy head of the Commerce Science and Technology Department. Alysoun is the first of our Librarians’ Voices interviews.

‘No two days were ever the same,’ Alysoun says, looking back on the Commercial Science and Technology library. ‘You’d be jumping from one thing to another as one query followed another!’ The fascination was that ‘you are constantly learning.’ One hundred and fifty enquiries a day was the norm for this library in a city famous for steelmaking. An opening like ‘I’ve got this steel …’ was common, but Alysoun and her colleagues were asked everything from the weight of a cubic foot of sand to the recipe for making rose-hip syrup. Law, business, chemistry, cookery, birds – anything might come up. A particular pleasure was searching the wonderful Botanical Illustration collection – hand-coloured Victorian, Edwardian and 20^th century books (demonstrating incidentally the skill of librarians in choosing books). Less happily, a man once came in to ask advice about his pet spider, a tarantula, which he produced from under his jumper, making nearby schoolgirls scream in fright.

Alysoun’s first post was in Woodseats Library in the early 1960s. The staff knew their customers by name and got to know the books they liked. The male librarian in charge appeared very ‘old school’, fierce and bluff, but his approach was to ‘give the customers what they like’. So while the prevailing professional wisdom was to exclude pulp and escapist fiction from municipal libraries, he bought romantic fiction, known to borrowers as ‘luverly books’. At Christmas, these satisfied borrowers thanked the staff with sweets and cakes. ‘Libraries were always friendly places,’ Alysoun remembers.

While at Woodseats, Alysoun went, on her day off, to classes for her library exams. In 1963, she started a sandwich course at Liverpool College of Commerce, alternating six-month periods of study and work over two and half years. Back in Sheffield, the jobs varied. Alysoun worked in the Highfield and Attercliffe branches and on the enquiries desk/telephone service in the Commercial Science and Technology library. Sometimes, she did ‘call booking’, that is, calling on people who failed to return books, to ask for the book and money. Light moments included finding a slice of bacon in one book and in another, a pay packet.

In 1967 Alysoun became, to her surprise, the Law Librarian responsible for the Assize Court Library (later the Crown Court Library). ‘The personnel officer suddenly said one week, “Next Monday you will be in the Law Library”’. She was ‘terrified. Coming from basic fiction to look after the barristers and judges …. But you just get on with it.’ She remembers barristers’ clerks commenting, in the era of the mini-skirt, when librarians climbed ladders to reach high shelves. ‘They certainly knew you were there.’

(Law became important to Alysoun in other ways. Under the National Subject Specialisation Scheme, Sheffield Libraries specialised in company law. ‘This changed my life,’ when she helped someone with his law degree dissertation. She refused a date with him. Then ‘a member of staff invited me to a party and who should happen to be there but my enquirer. Things went on from there and I am still married to him!’)

In time Alysoun became Sheffield’s first Business Librarian, and then Science and Technology Librarian. Her job included SINTO, the Sheffield Interchange Organisation. SINTO was started by Sheffield Libraries in the 1930s, to exchange information about steel and related subjects between local businesses and research and academic organisations. In 1970, when fire almost destroyed the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, Alysoun unearthed invaluable information about Robert Stephenson’s original, Victorian construction for Husband & Co, the Sheffield consulting engineers helping re-build the bridge. Sometimes representatives from the metal industries would ask to ‘see the gaffer’ and were surprised to discover a woman, but Alysoun is clear that it was all about teamwork. The librarians were under pressure all the time and ‘people buckled to and did it. It was a mutual support.’

Promoted to Science and Technology Librarian, Alysoun ran the World Metal Index – ‘a joy, an absolute joy.’ The Index is a unique collection of British and international standards and specifications, trade and technical material on ferrous and non-ferrous metals. Enquiries came from Euro-Disney, the Royal Naval Dockyards, the team trying to re-create the computers used in cracking the Enigma Code and many others. There was, Alysoun recalls, huge satisfaction in ‘solving something’. Originally, the Index was compiled by hand from original documents. Before retirement Alysoun successfully secured EU funding to digitise the service, in partnership with a research organisation and various businesses. ‘I can’t imagine doing anything more interesting.’

When she gave notice, Alysoun was asked to stay on but decided not to. She notes wryly: ‘There was one year when 100 years of experience walked out of the door and that is happening again.’ But ‘I think that I was very lucky to have worked in such an interesting and useful department when the City Libraries were considered to be one of the leaders in their field within the UK.’

Judith G’s reading journey

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Val Hewson

The third of five children, Judith was born in May 1939. As a child, she lived off Ecclesall Road in Sheffield. Although she passed the 11 plus, her parents could not afford grammar school, and so she went to Greystones Secondary School and left after O Levels. Judith tells two stories in her interview: her own and her mother’s. Judith’s mother loved reading and shared this with her daughter. ‘I just took to it because my mother read a lot.’

The first library in Judith’s life was the private Red Circle at the bottom of the Moor. Her mum used to borrow ‘what they called “bodice-rippers”, romantic novels and stuff’ every week. ‘I think it cost tuppence a week, or every time you took a book out or fourpence – something like that.’* Then her mum joined the public library and Judith went along too, to the imposing Central Library in Surrey Street. ‘I thought at first she wouldn’t be allowed in that one, you know, and then of course once she got there, there were more books than she could … and it was free as well.’ In those days, the public library service in Sheffield, under City Librarian Joseph Lamb, was rapidly becoming one of the best in the country, with a reputation for responding to the interests and needs of its members.

From before she left junior school, Judith was allowed to go alone to the central children’s library. She recalls joining with her friend Sheila:

… she wanted to join the library and we ran up all the way up there after school and my mother played pop with me because she didn’t know where we were. Her name was Sheila Thompson … and I said, “If you come with me, we can come and join.” … They gave you a little round ticket which you kept and slotted the book’s name in that, God, I remember that.

Judith spent a lot of time in the children’s library. For her, it meant not only interesting books, but also warmth and peace ‘until they closed at five o’clock’:

I used to bring books home, but on a Saturday afternoon I’m afraid I spent a lot of time in that children’s library because you could sit there with any book you liked, encyclopaedias, because at home it was, you know, hustle and bustle, we didn’t have much because we had no money and there weren’t a television in those days, this is the ’50s, coming up to the ’50s, and I just used to go to the library for a bit of peace on my own. Because there was four of us and my grandmother and father and mother all rattling round one house …

The children’s librarian was Mrs Scott, who sounds formidable. Young borrowers’ behaviour was expected to meet the standards of the day.

She was really nice, you know, because in those days you couldn’t run around like they do nowadays, you had to sit reading quietly … she was quite stern, you know, you couldn’t racket round – mind you, nobody did in those days.

Having joined, Judith ‘read and read’.

I think it was my Aunty Marjorie, she used to say, “Doesn’t that child do anything? She’s always got her nose in a book.” And “What’s the matter with you, child, why don’t you go out to play?”

A book which made a lasting impression was Joey and the Greenwings#, ‘about this young boy and these things that came from outer space or something’. Almost 70 years later, the memory is strong:

Dear Lord, how your memory comes back! There was a little song in it about this little lost chick. What was it? Little lost chick sang cheep in the night, cheep in the night, and the moon stretched her arms out shiny and bright, to the little lost chick that sang cheep in the night!

In time Judith moved up to the adult library. ‘ … you’d go in there and think, you know, posh.’ Books by popular authors of the day like Georgette Heyer, Mazo de la Roche, Rider Haggard, Mary Webb, Conan Doyle and John Buchan drew her in, although she got into trouble with Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber. Her mum used to ‘keep an eye on what I read’ and ‘made me take it back – she thought it was a bit racy! And it wasn’t.’ (Judith has less happy memories, as many of us do, of her set texts, like Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, ‘the most dreary book I’ve ever read’.)

Over 60 years later, Judith remains a keen member of the public library. In this, she is like her mother, who in old age ‘used to come in with four or five books’ from Highfield Branch Library. In her turn, Judith has influenced her daughter, Lindsey, who works in a bookshop and has #enough books to start a library’. In fact, you can trace reading through four generations: from Lindsey, through Judith and her sister who talk together about books, to their mother and even their grandmother who was ‘always on about books and that, she’d been well educated’.

Two readers – Judith and her mum

‘It’s interesting, isn’t it, how libraries are places where people feel comfortable,’ says our interviewer. Judith agrees. These days she goes to the Ecclesall branch, but still occasionally visits the Central Library:

It still is the biggest library, isn’t it? And plus, the fact it has all the other things, you know, the reference library and the art gallery and whatnot. Because we used to go and have a cup of tea up there and look around the art things, and I used to think, “This is fantastic, it’s free, it’s a public library …” that was the whole point of going there. And … when they have an open day, and I’ve been down in the bowels where all the old books are – you might find my Joey and the Greenwings down in that bottom bit!

Sheffield Central Library, opened in 1934, not long after the establishment of SINTO

* Tuppence (2d) and fourpence (4d) are roughly equivalent to 1p and 2p, but worth about £1 to £2 today.

# Joey and the Greenwings (1943), by Augustus Muir

Judith’s mum’s reading journey

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Val Hewson

Our interviewee Judith G was born on 5 May 1939. In her interview (which you can read here), Judith reveals not only her own reading journey but also, at one remove, her mother’s. It was while she accompanied her mother on her reading journey that Judith started her own: ‘I just took to it because my mother read a lot.’

Here is Judith’s mum’s story.

Judith’s mother was born in Sheffield around 1906. She married a much older, ‘aloof’ husband who had been married twice before and who worked as a joiner at Chesterman’s Bow Works off Ecclesall Road*. They had five children, one of whom died as a baby. In time, Judith’s ‘demanding’ grandmother came to live with the family. There was little money for luxuries in a working-class area during the war and the austerity that followed. ‘I think she took to the libraries as an escape from looking after us and, you know, not having much.’ There were some books and newspapers at home, and when Judith’s grandmother came to stay, she ‘was always on about books and that, she’d been well educated’.

Judith’s mother ‘started with the private Red Circle Library’ between Ecclesall Road and the Moor, with its books ‘written for somebody who didn’t want … you know, stir your brain kind of thing’. We have no titles or authors, but she liked ‘what they called “bodice-rippers”, romantic novels and stuff’ and used to go to the Red Circle every week:

… my mother used to walk me down there I think just to get me out of the house and give her a break from four kids and my father … I can still see it with the red circle on the front and it was just like two shop windows with books in. Circulating library they called it, which I think is a lovely name. I always used to think it might revolve! … I think it cost tuppence a week, or every time you took a book out or fourpence – something like that.

Although she is pretty sure that her mother never borrowed it, Judith vividly remembers one particular book cover:

… there was a skull and there were pearls rolling down its face – I must have been a macabre child! – and it was called Devil’s Tears and that’s stuck in my mind for 60-odd years.#

Then Judith’s mother

decided to join the library, the big library in town, the main library. Because my mother was quite timid and I thought at first she wouldn’t be allowed in that one, you know, and then of course once she got there, there were more books than she could … and it was free as well.

Sheffield Central Library, opened in 1934, not long after the establishment of SINTO

This was Sheffield’s Central Library on Surrey Street, opened about 15 years earlier and then recovering from wartime privations.

Judith’s mum found pleasure in reading all her life. When she was older and lived in Sharrow Vale, she used to go to local Highfield Library.

I can still see her, she used to come in with four or five books, and … she still used to toddle up and down to the library, which was not far from her in those days, with those books. Because she used to say, “Oh, they were ever so nice at Highfield Library.” At Christmas they used to give them a cup of tea and a mince pie.

Highfield Branch Library

Looking back, Judith understands her mother. She never talked much about how she met her much older husband, but ‘no, I don’t think that mum, bless her, had a good marriage’. Books were:

… the only sort of rest she got from the lot of us. Don’t forget, my grandmother lived with us, she died when I was fifteen, and she was always demanding, my poor old mother was easily … cowed, shall we say?

Oh yes, [escape’s] what I think it was. She’d not much in her home, kind of thing, apart from keeping us four in check, and I think that’s it, she sort of buried her face in books.

* The splendid Bow Works are now occupied by Aviva Insurance.

# We think that this book might have been Edgar Hale’s Devil’s Tears (1946), although the cover shows a face rather than a skull. You can see the cover here.

Jean W’s Reading Journey

Posted on February 26, 2016 by lizz

Jean was born in 1933 and grew up in Sheffield. After leaving High Storrs School she married and had a family. Later on she trained as a teacher of English and French.

Jean’s recollection is that when she was small her parents were very busy and therefore didn’t read to her much. However, she still became an enthusiastic reader.

I learnt to read when I was… I think five, almost as soon as I started school, and got very bored because there wasn’t any stimulation in school.

So at the age of seven she joined the Children’s Library in Sheffield and from then on made weekly trips in search of suitable books. In addition her parents bought her Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, ‘all twelve volumes which I devoured.’Also from that time Jean remembers Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Anderson.

The library trip was very important. Jean and a friend would go into town for music lessons and then go to the library and also to Andrew’s, a shop in Holly Street which had a lot of children’s books. They saved their pocket money and bought books which they shared.

Jean Wolfendale at High Storrs School 1950

Once at High Storrs School she began to read classics like Walter Scott and Jane Austen as well as lighter books, such as The Forsyte Saga, Little Women, W.E Johns’ Biggles books and Malcolm Saville. She remembers getting from the library all Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna novels,

I absolutely loved them. I couldn’t wait to find the next one in the series from the library.

She also read Hugh Walpole and some Dickens and began to move towards adult books. She recalls enjoying the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes, ‘very meaty, very long novels’. Also Dornford Yates whose books she found ‘screamingly funny’.

I shouldn’t find them funny now but I did then…I used to annoy my parents by sitting in the corner and laughing at the books and they couldn’t understand why. They were fascinating.

Jean’s parents always encouraged her reading and as she puts it

The only other thing to do in the evenings,apart from school work,was to listen to the radio, which obviously we did as a family, but, yes reading was very much encouraged.

The Red Circle Library on Snig Hill,which Jean’s mother belonged to was another important source of books. This stocked popular fiction,such as crime fiction and westerns, not found in the public libraries. By contrast Jean described the latter as ‘very much more erudite’. She read widely and was aware of reading both high- and low-brow books. School was a

very, very strong influence and it was very much, ‘Children, girls, you must read uplifting books’..we were very much discouraged from having, for instance, comics or anything like that. I had something called Girl’s Crystal which was quite a decent comic but you couldn’t possibly have mentioned that in school because that wasn’t the done thing as it were.

She remembers Geoffrey Thorne for light reading and John Buchan, who was seen as ‘more approved of,much more literary’.She and her father shared a liking for Nevil Shute’s books. He also liked Denis Wheatley’s novels but didn’t think they were suitable for Jean; however, she read them on the quiet.

She enjoyed historical fiction, for example, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, D.K.Broster and Anya Seton.She tried Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy but didn’t particularly enjoy them.She has fond memories of A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, ‘That was one that absolutely fascinated me as an early teenager.’

But she devoured all kinds of literature. She belongs now to a group of ex-teachers who swap and talk about books. Of the importance of reading to her, she says,

I can’t imagine a life without it and in fact at the moment I’m beginning to have some trouble with my eyes and I can’t read for long and that is a real hurt, you know.

Wynne’s reading journey

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books beat television, in Wynne’s opinion:

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

Whereas reading:

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

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

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

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

Library memories from the Sheffield Forum (Part Three)

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

A third set of library memories from Sheffield Forum.

S talks about Hillsborough and Broomhill libraries:

Broomhill Library

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

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

SD recalls a small, private library:

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

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

O knew the library at Highfield:

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

Highfield Branch Library

AB worked as a library assistant:

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

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

What do you remember about libraries?

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By Mary Grover

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