Kathleen Fidler | Reading Sheffield

Sheila was born in 1937.

She was interviewed by Alice Seed.

Sheila age 16 years.

Sheila cannot remember being read to and says her family had little interest in reading. She puts down her own love of reading to her position in the family.

It was company for me because my sister was quite a lot younger than me so she wasn’t really a companion … Perhaps I was a little bit of a loner anyway you know, so I just used to wrap myself up in books.

Sheila’s family had a subscription to Boots Library in the centre of town (‘there were a lot to choose from’) only a few hundred yards from the magnificent new Central Library which contained, as it still does, a vast Children’s Library in the basement.

So every Saturday she travelled down from the hills of Sheffield’s western suburbs to explore both libraries in the centre of town.

… in those days you used to go down on the bus and spend all Saturday there. I don’t remember Boots Library having tables where you could sit down but the Children’s Library did, so you know, it was somewhere to go and thoroughly enjoyable.

Sheila borrowed novels by Noel Streatfeild and Kathleen Fidler but has no memory of getting adult books from the Boots library so thinks that her subscription probably finished when she got to about fifteen years old.

Sheila read constantly and sought variety. She cannot remember returning to a favourite or re-reading with pleasure.

I had these certain authors and I used to wade through everything that they’d written and if I couldn’t find it on the library shelves then I would order it.

Enid Blyton and the magazine, Sunny Stories, were superseded by Georgette Heyer when Sheila was in her teens. Lately she did try reading Georgette Heyer but found they had lost their charm.

Sheila’s family also subscribed to a book club where she thinks she may have found the Nevil Shutes she remembers. Though Sheila has a sense of herself as the only passionate reader in the house, her family must have valued access to books by joining a book club and accepting the fact that on Saturdays their child found her way to two libraries that were not that near home.

Her taste is mainly for fiction and once she has exhausted an author goes on to another.

I do write down what I read now ‘cause, you know I’ve read so many, sometimes I forget how much I’ve read so I have a quick look through to see if I’ve read it before, so I’ve got a little book which I take out when I go to the library [just to prompt me] .

For much of her life reading was a solitary activity. It is still associated with delight, privacy and comfort. Bed is a natural place to read. Books give

hours of pleasure, puts me to sleep sometimes. I’m reading and I’ll suddenly find the book starts going down and I’ve nodded off, but yeah it’s good.

But once Sheila had her three children she and her husband, Geoff, created their own reading community.

There were three of them and [they] all had to have separate stories read every night so we started with the youngest and worked up, and then of course since then, I’ve had grandchildren and I get a lot of pleasure out of reading to them – there’s something very special I think about reading to children, … they all love books now probably because, you know, we started off like that. … I got rather disappointed when they began to get older and they used to say they would read the stories. I lost my job.

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Sheila’s transcript and audio here.

Kathleen Fidler (image by courtesy of her niece)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Val Hewson

Access Sheila Edwards’ transcript and audio here.