Pam Gibson’s reading journey

Pam was born in 1952 and has lived in Sheffield for 51 years. She was a teacher.  

Reading has always been extremely important to me, although I cannot remember how I got started or recall having stories read to me. I have vague recollections of Joyce Brisley Lankester’s Milly Molly Mandy and Noddy and Big Ears from Enid Blyton, but my clearest memories of reading and being read to come from school at the age of nine, when I had obviously become a very keen independent reader. Reading times were part of the school day (I remember reading Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did and finding it hard when I had to stop!) and we were read stories which I found gripping e.g. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis, and Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi from The Jungle Book.

Pam at the age of ten

Reading was encouraged at home; my mother was a great reader although she can’t have had much time when we were all little. I don’t remember possessing many books. I did have a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses which I loved, and Sunday School prizes were books of Bible stories. I had my own bookcase in my bedroom so it must have housed some books!  

From the age of seven I joined the local library – Wennington Road, Southport – and from nine was allowed to go on my own. I would be there most days during the holidays, having read my allocation of three books very quickly. I loved all Enid Blyton’s books (except The Secret Seven), the American Bobbsey Twins from Laura Lee Hope, and Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School. I’d read into the night with a torch under the covers. We all had a weekly comic, mine was the Judy, eventually moving on to Jackie. Disaster struck on one occasion when we were all suffering from chicken pox: somehow the librarian got wind of this and we were banned from the library for three weeks! I remember being devastated and extremely bored – we didn’t have a television and we were confined to bed; mother having been a nurse, she treated us like patients in a hospital! 

I’m not sure how much my reading was directed, apart from negatively. Certain books were considered ‘not suitable’ e.g. James Bond, and we were not allowed to use the adult section of the library (I can’t remember when that restriction was lifted). Needless to say, adult literature, especially if it contained sex scenes, became very attractive, and I remember taking paperbacks off the shelf in Woolworths and reading the juicy bits! I also read a lot of stories about young women in different careers – all very romantic of course! My ambition was to be an air hostess for a long while. Encyclopedia Britannica introduced me to non-fiction, and we also had the monthly Reader’s Digest at home. Mum’s medical books were a fascinating read and I remember spending ages poring over diagrams of the human body. I was also influenced by Bible classes and read a lot of Christian literature by authors like C S Lewis, David Shepherd and Richard Wurmbrand.

In my middle to late teens I read Mills and Boon stories obsessively! Mary Stewart, L M Montgomery and the Anne books, Georgette Heyer were great favourites. You can see that my taste in reading material was pretty lightweight and romantic! I don’t remember reading anything particularly weighty or classical except through school, for O Level and A Level English Literature, which I very much enjoyed. There was reading for pleasure (escapism) and serious reading (study).

At university I eventually decided to give up reading Mills and Boon books as I was virtually addicted to them and living in a world of unreality!  More variety was needed! However I’m struggling to remember what took their place! Maybe that’s when I discovered Mary Stewart – slightly better literature! I remember reading Lord of the Rings around this time, all three volumes in less than a week (once I’d got through the first 50 pages). There was a period when I read a lot of adventure and fantasy fiction/adventure books by eg Alistair MacLean,  Raymond Feist, gritty, daring, exciting reading. But I was frustrated that female characters were few and far between, and fairly insignificant. Were exciting women writers in short supply in the ‘70s and ‘80s? I was introduced to Winston Graham and Poldark in 1986 when I was on maternity leave, and was hooked. 

Since moving to Sheffield in the early ‘70s I’ve always used the local library. I first joined Walkley Library in 1973, moving to Broomhill a few years later, and now I mostly use Woodseats Library. When teaching I used the Schools Library Service regularly – what a fantastic resource that was! I have also made use of the Library’s Book Group loan service in the past. 

Walkley library
Broomhill Library
Woodseats Library (courtesy of Sheffield City Council/Picture Sheffield. Ref: a06117)

It was fortunate that my husband Alan also loved reading, so it was a companiable pastime for us both. In fact in those days, before digital readers, holiday reading books formed a very large (and heavy) part of our luggage. The thought of running out of reading material while we were away was horrifying! 

I’m happy to say that I managed to pass on a love of reading to both my children, who continue to spend time reading as adults. My daughter and I visited Prince Edward Island a few years ago, visited Green Gables and went to see Anne the Musical. Of course I re-read all the Anne books and appreciated L M Montgomery’s creation all over again, especially Rilla of Ingleside, a very powerful portrayal of the effect of WW1 on women, something I hadn’t appreciated on my first reading. 

The real Green Gables (© Pam Gibson)
Bedroom at Green Gables (© Pam Gibson)

I’m wary of watching screen versions of contemporary novels I’ve really enjoyed, especially if my imagination has been very fired; for me they rarely match up to the intensity or quality of the written word. I prefer to stick with the version created in my own head. There are of course exceptions: Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean and Brokeback Mountain from Annie Proulx, all of which worked really well for me. And interestingly I enjoy screen versions of the classics – Sunday afternoon serials formed part of my adolescence. However with e.g. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) or Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens), I couldn’t take the risk! I am more likely to be inspired to read the book after having seen the screen version. I expect there to be so much more depth to the text.

About 25 years ago I decided to keep a record of the books I read in order to pursue further works by authors I had enjoyed.  I also joined a reading group in 1999 which was instrumental in widening my reading material. It is also very interesting, challenging and informative. Talking with other people who have read the same book but who may have a very different understanding of it is fascinating and has added another dimension to my reading journey. 

Here and below pages from Pam’s reading journal

These days I continue to read widely and mostly for pleasure. I love losing myself in a good book, and always have a book on the go. Reading in bed is a huge pleasure! I enjoy crime fiction and have my favourite writers and investigators. I still read romantic fiction for a bit of escapism and every now and again re-read a Georgette Heyer. In addition to the monthly book group choice I will read an average of five or six books a month. I’ve also begun to re-read some of the classics, such as the Hugh Walpole Herries series, The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, and Jane Austen’s Emma. I find I read these much more carefully now, in order to appreciate the text.

Shirley L’s reading journey

Shirley L, born in North Wales in 1944, is an artist. She and her husband lived abroad and around the UK because of his work, before retiring to Sheffield in 2004. She is a keen member of a book group.

I have always read to my children, and grandchildren, and I enjoyed every minute of it, but I do not remember myself being read to as a child.

Shirley at the age of four

My home did not have bookshelves full of books. Looking back, I don’t think I gave it a thought, or felt that I was missing out. It may sound strange but it never registered with me until I started to think about it now, for this reading journey. I do remember having one book for Christmas when I was quite young, and it was all about film stars. This was most probably due to the fact I loved going to the cinema with my friends.

I was always encouraged to do well at school, so of course there was a lot of reading then. Later on, when I was about 11 or 12, I read What Katy Did, Susan Coolidge’s book about the adventures of a young American, Katy Carr, and her brothers and sisters. A lovely red hardback if I remember correctly. I really enjoyed it. I read Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven books too, I think when I was about nine or ten. Being an only child, friends were important in my life, so I loved reading about the children’s friendships and adventures.

Illustration, p. 8, What Katy Did, 1873, Addie Ledyard (public domain)

All this is a very long time ago, so please forgive me if I appear vague! I have little recollection where all these books came from, but I do know that I mainly read my books at home and that I did visit the library – Rhyl Library, on Wellington Road I think. It was actually within the Town Hall. The adult section was at the front and the children’s at the back. The building is still there but the library has been moved.

My friend Jill, who I’ve been talking to about our childhood reading, thinks that I most probably got the Enid Blytons from the library. This makes sense to me. Jill also says that when we started grammar school, aged 11, of course, for our first year we were told to read novels during the school holidays – three in the summer and obviously less during the smaller holidays. This was compulsory, hence my visits to the library. I was wondering if I had read Treasure Island and now I am sure I did.

Shirley in her school blazer, aged about 11
Shirley and her schoolfriends ‘goofing around’ at age 14.
Shirley is in the centre and her friend Jill is on the left.

Thinking about What Katy Did, I just feel it was my book, not the library’s, but I cannot be sure. It might have been a little present for passing the 11+ from someone or from Sunday School. My family wasn’t able to buy me books, any more than Jill’s could. Money was short in those days in our working-class homes.

As I’ve said, the cinema played a big part in my life. It was time spent with my friends, who were so important to me, and obviously a lot cheaper than buying books! When we returned home, we would act out what we had seen on screen. Books did not come into it. But writing this has reminded me that I did go to see Pinocchio, Walt Disney’s cartoon from 1940, and I have a feeling I read the book of the film. I was very young then so maybe I read the book later. I just don’t know.

As I’ve already said, I was always encouraged to do well at school. Reading to me was about enjoyment, but schoolbooks, especially when I went to grammar school, were there to give me a good education and hopefully a good future. I was never told reading was a waste of time. I never re-read books then, and I am not keen on it now, but there are no books I wouldn’t dream of not reading again.

I do still have one book, a Bible, from those days. It wasn’t new and had little pressed flowers in it, here and there. This was a present from our local grocer’s daughter for passing my 11+. Now the thing that has clicked in my head is this. Over the years, with my husband being in the RAF, we have moved a lot, overseas and around the UK. We have cleared our home out numerous times with each move, but I have the Bible, never lost, still by my bedside. I’ve never been an avid reader of it. I just pick it up now and again and open it up wherever, read a small amount and put it back. So for the last 57 years as we have travelled around, it’s always been there.

Shirley’s Bible

Have books changed my life? Looking back, growing up, books have played a big part in my life for lots of reasons. I have read fiction, non-fiction, all kinds of books. We can get lost in books – some make you laugh, cry, tell us things we never knew, things that help, make us think.

The joys of being read to – Margaret B’s reading journey

Margaret B, who was born in 1960, came to Sheffield in the mid-1990s because of her job. Reading has long been a love, and here, in the second post for our new Next Generation project, she reflects on being read to as a child.

Margaret and her twin brother in the back row, left and right respectively. Their younger brother and sister, also twins, sit in the front.

My parents read to us from when we were tiny. There were four of us children born within 27 months (two sets of twins!) and our bedtime ritual was always bath, story, prayers and bed. We loved having a story read to us even when we could read ourselves. We all had the same story as we shared a bedroom (two sets of bunks) and took it in turns to choose which book our parents should read.

The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, by Beatrix Potter. First edition (1905) (public domain)

I remember hearing all the Beatrix Potter books regularly in rotation. My brothers liked Jeremy Fisher and Peter Rabbit while I liked Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and my sister liked The Tale of Two Bad Mice. These were interspersed with the Thomas the Tank Engine books and again we had our own favourites. Both my parents were excellent readers (one was a literature teacher and the other a clergyman); they loved books and words. So they also read poetry and rhymes to us – When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A A Milne and soon we were reciting them. I can still recite many of them today, 60 years later, and have strong visual memories of the illustrations – especially Christopher Robin and Alice at Buckingham Palace.

They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace –
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
Alice is marrying one of the guard.
‘A soldier’s life is terrible hard,’
Says Alice.

Buckingham Palace, by A A Milne

When I was about three my mother taught my twin and me to recite the whole of the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech from Macbeth to keep us entertained. I hadn’t a clue what it was about but the rhythm and the words were wonderful.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Act V, scene 5, lines 16-27)

Even once we could read, the bedtime story was still a family ritual. We progressed to many other books including Swallows and Amazons and the Narnia books.

Two of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome (image by Reading Sheffield)

As a family, we were given some beautifully illustrated books as presents. It was the 1960s so they were often quite ‘modern’ illustrations. I remember a stunning, huge, hardback book of Greek and Roman myths with wonderful stylised illustrations of the gods. Double joy – great stories being read to us and a wonderful picture on every page to look at. I also remember the Oxford Illustrated Book of Nursery Rhymes – no cute pictures but vibrant semi-abstract paintings. I am sure that is why I have always loved modern art. I also remember the colourful if more traditional illustrations of Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat. This was my sister’s book and I was very jealous of it.

Listen with Mother on the radio was a must-listen every lunchtime and then when we got a bit older, we raced home from school to watch Jackanory. This BBC TV programme, which ran from the 1960s to the 1990s, introduced me to so many wonderful books which I went on to borrow from the library and read myself. It is hard to imagine these days, that they would make a whole TV programme with someone just reading a story from a book with the occasional illustration if there were any in the book. So many memorable books: Michael Bond’s Paddington series, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and the Mary Plain books by Gwynedd Rae, to mention just a few of the ones I remember so fondly. We also always watched the BBC classic serial on a Sunday afternoon which introduced me to the classics. I can still recall so many scenes from Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield. And when I was older I avidly watched both The Pallisers and the Barchester Towers chronicles. I did go on to read a couple of Trollope books after that but much preferred the TV version.

And of course we had books read to us every afternoon all the way through primary school. They were undoubtedly my favourite times at school, sitting quietly while being read to from excellent books. The stories read to us at school often overlapped with Jackanory books but I didn’t mind hearing them again. Two I remember very clearly from our later years in primary school were The Weird Stone of Brisingamen, also by Alan Garner, and The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe. One male teacher read us She by H Rider Haggard, which I found exciting if somewhat terrifying.

When I was eight, we moved house and no longer all shared a bedroom so my parents stopped reading to us every night and we all read our own books. But whenever we went on holiday, my parents would read to us again in the evenings. Holidays were always in a tent and I have such strong memories of us four being wrapped up safe and warm in our sleeping bags top to tail (to stop us from squabbling) while my parents took it in turn to read under the popping Calor Gas light, often to the sounds of wind and rain outside! This would be for about an hour every evening and they would always stop just before the ten o’clock news on the radio. We would doze off to the sound of Big Ben striking. I remember all of the Borrowers series by Mary Norton and as teenagers we got through the R L Stevenson books and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. Eventually we graduated to Moby Dick by Herman Melville, though I don’t think we ever finished it!

When family camping holidays stopped, we still occasionally read aloud, this time taking it in turns to read a chapter. I discovered that I also enjoyed reading aloud as well as being read to. There was a memorable holiday in France with three generations of our family and we took it in turns to read from Great Expectations. Even my 12 year-old son took his turn and read his chapter fluently which surprised his proud mother! Dickens is a great author to read out loud.

Pip’s first encounter with Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Illustration by John McLenan (public domain)

It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine. ‘Look at me,’ said Miss Havisham. ‘You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?’

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (chapter 8)

For many years, my mother would read to her friend Jo who had severe cerebral palsy and could not physically hold a book or turn the pages. But Jo loved literature so my mother would read classics and Booker prize winners to her every week. Around Christmas, my mother would invite Jo, her husband, my partner and me for dinner followed by a communal book reading. One year we read A Christmas Carol by Dickens and the next year we all took different parts in Twelfth Night.

The title page from the first edition of A Christmas Carol (1843)

Surprisingly, I am now not that keen on audiobooks or TV and film adaptations. I do listen to or watch them occasionally but I usually prefer to read them myself. Maybe it’s because I tend to listen to an audiobook while I’m doing housework, cooking or clearing my email inbox. But I also wonder if it is because, as a child, being read to was a communal activity with my parents, brothers and sister or classmates. We enjoyed the stories together and could talk about them afterwards. It was also a legitimate time in our days when we were allowed and indeed encouraged, to stop doing anything else, to sit down as a family or class and listen to wonderful stories instead of worrying about the to-do list and the undone laundry!

A whistle-stop tour of my bookshelves

by Stephen McClarence

Journalist Stephen McClarence’s articles in the Sheffield Telegraph and Yorkshire Post helped promote our original oral history project over a decade ago. We are delighted that, with his reading journey, we are launching a follow-up: Steel City Readers – the Next Generation, 1955-1975. We are collecting new reading journeys based on experiences of reading in Sheffield starting in the years 1955 to 1975. If you’d like to contribute a reading journey, you’ll find more information here. And many thanks to Stephen.

On my first morning as a journalist – more than 40 years ago, when newspapers were still thriving – the news editor of the Yorkshire paper I’d joined as a ‘graduate trainee’ handed me a book. He reckoned it had ‘local interest’.

‘Do me a 250-word review of this,’ he said, and went back to his desk to allocate reporters to cover police conference, magistrates court and the day’s quota of Golden Weddings.

Fresh from ‘uni’, as no-one then called it, I set about reading the book. It was pretty dull, but I ploughed on. Half an hour later, the news editor came over again, looking puzzled. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Reading the book, like you told me to,’ I said.

‘I didn’t tell you to read it,’ he said tetchily. ‘I told you to review it.’

So that put reading into perspective.

The young Stephen already with a book in his hands

I grew up in Sheffield in the 1950s and 1960s. The front room of our terraced house in Sharrow had a bookcase featuring a blue-bound set of Odhams editions of Dickens. Below it was a shelf of popular Book Club issues – Nevil Shute, H B Kaye, Stella Gibbons – with their sometimes surreal dust-jacket illustrations and proud boast that they published books for 2/6d (13p) that would otherwise cost up to 12/6d (63p).

From the family bookshelves

Across the room was a bureau whose glass-fronted bookcase housed several feet of World Books, an imprint with more serious literary ambitions than the Book Club – Graham Greene, Winifred Holtby, Somerset Maugham – and more sober dust-jackets.

I’m not sure how much my parents had read these books but, well, as Anthony Powell puts in his epic A Dance to the Music of Time, ‘Books do furnish a room.’

As a child, I naturally ignored this adult fare and read the regular children’s (actually boys’) books: Just William, Bunter, Jennings, all inhabiting a world remote from my own working-class experience. We didn’t, for instance, have ‘beaks’ at my grammar school.

The book that most resonated with my own upbringing was The Family from One End Street, Eve Garnett’s enchanting depiction of the working-class life of the Ruggles family. And every Christmas brought another Rupert Bear annual. All these years later, the illustrations seem almost psychedelically weird: just what was that little bear on?

All these books – apart from Rupert Bear – were available just down the road, shelves of them, in Highfield library.

What a wonder this imposing Victorian building was, what a massive ‘enabler’. Year after year, I climbed its stone steps up to a doorway topped by a quotation from Thomas Carlyle: ‘That there should be one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.’

Highfield Library today

Inside, in an atmosphere of sepulchral silence, were sturdy, highly polished tables where retired men in gabardine macs read the newspapers. A flight of alarmingly steep stairs led to the children’s library, with its seemingly endless shelves of Collins Classics and True Books (I longed for Untrue Books), all protected from careless young hands by sturdy transparent plastic jackets.

In school holidays, particularly on rainy days when there was no incentive to ‘play out’, I would sometimes visit the library twice a day: in the morning to choose a couple of books to last me until the afternoon, when I went back to exchange them for a couple more.

The newsagent across the road from us sold me comics (Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper). Plus the wonderfully engaging and informative Look and Learn. I duly looked and learned – about Arthur and Excalibur, The Story of a Seed and The History of the A4 (the road not the paper size).

Later, doing A Levels and grappling with Chaucer, Molière and the Thirty Years War, I had plenty of ‘free periods’ in the afternoons. Suddenly enthused by classical music, I regularly took a bus into the city centre to sit for hours reading The Stereo Record Guide in the Central Library. On reflection this seems a curious way to have spent my late adolescence.

Years before, my parents had bought me The Book of Knowledge, eight heavy red-and-cream-bound volumes (A to Bon, announced the spines, Boo to Cro, Crue to Gera…). Published ‘to provide the inquiring mind with accurate information told in an interesting style’, the series ranged wide.

The photographs on one double-page spread offered not merely a ‘Model of a Proposed German Monorail System’ but also ‘Haddock, Relation of the Cod’ (as though that was the haddock’s only claim to fame).

I’ve just flicked through one of the volumes (still on my shelves) and recognised many of the illustrations – ‘Humming birds on the wing’ on the left-hand page, ‘Hull Docks and wharves seen from the air’ on the right.

And there was Walt Disney’s Worlds of Nature, with its saturatedly coloured photographs of ‘the alert, intelligent raccoon’, a few pages after a gladiatorial photograph showing how ‘two queen bees, piping shrilly, battle fiercely to the death’ and the invaluable tip that ‘the bullfrog’s voice is the biggest part of him’.

On the flyleaf, I see I wrote my name rather hesitantly in ballpoint pen on my eighth birthday. And I’m afraid I subsequently committed my old news editor’s cardinal sin: I read the book.

Launching Steel City Readers

In June 2023, Liverpool University Press published Steel City Readers: Reading for Pleasure in Sheffield, 1925-1955 by Mary Grover, who founded the Reading Sheffield project. On 12 July, a special event to launch the book was held at the Central Library in Sheffield. The 90 or so guests included some of the 65 people whose interviews are at the heart of the book, along with their families and Mary’s own family, friends and colleagues.

Chris Hopkins, Emeritus Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University, who has supported Reading Sheffield and Mary’s work from the very beginning, welcomed everyone to the event.

Chris Hopkins

Mary described the experience of researching and writing Steel City Readers:

Writing is almost always a lonely process. Whatever you are writing, however supportive your colleagues and companions, you are alone with the next sentence. But, however confused or doubtful, I have never been involved in a writing project in which I have felt less alone. Never have so many people contributed to a book I have produced. … When I was, as a friend put it, ‘becalmed’, I would reread stories like Kath and Judith’s, and their energy and resourcefulness were an inspiration.

The stories Mary and her colleagues drew out of the 65 readers featured in Steel City Readers are fascinating accounts of the wonder of reading. The interviews ‘helped our readers create their own narrative structures and become eloquent narrators of their own lives’ – something they had rarely, if ever, known before.

Irene had gained a place at grammar school and was reading A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, but it was the annuals given to her at Christmas that helped establish her reading fluency. The reason why she cherished these annuals till the end of her life and the reason why my listeners lit up when they held one in their hands again after 70 years, is the part that annuals played in the narrative of their lives. Like no other book, an annual is a precise marker of development. We know the year, the month, the day when we read it, Christmas Day 1931 in the case of Irene’s Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. Its physical presence is associated with those who surrounded us when we read it and those who gave it to us, at some expense. Its inscription brings back the memory of a loved relative or friend, often an unmarried aunt.

Mary Grover

Here is Mary’s talk in full.

Chris then introduced Professor Dame Karin Barber, a friend of Mary’s. Karin, an anthropologist, spoke about reading the book in draft:

… I was totally gripped by it. It transported me into mid-twentieth century Sheffield – not just into the place, distinctive as it is, and the time, before and after the Second World War, but also – most importantly – the people: the 65 participants in the project talking about their memories of books and reading, their enjoyment of all kinds of literature, their practical strategies for getting hold of books to read.

Steel City Readers, she continued, was ‘a highly original and valuable contribution to social history’.

Oral history, done like this, reaches parts of the past that no other research can. It preserves and re-activates historical memories that would otherwise be lost – but which illuminate big themes of social change, class, cultural history, with unique vividness. The Reading Sheffield project – and the book that came out of it – are pioneers. It’s to be hoped that they will have started a movement and that more projects as exciting as this one will follow.

Here is Karin’s talk in full.

Karin Barber

Reading Sheffield celebrated the publication of Steel City Readers by presenting copies to all the interviewees or their families. This was made possible by the generosity of those who donated to the project, including Sheffield-based Gripple and The James Neill Trust Fund, the broadcaster, Robin Ince, who did two fundraisers, and many individual supporters.

Mary Grover and the Reading Sheffield committee would like to thank Sheffield Libraries – in particular, Library Manager Alexis Filby – for hosting the launch in the Central Library. Given the importance of public libraries in Steel City Readers, this was the perfect venue.

Alexis Filby of Sheffield Libraries

Thanks to Lizz Tuckerman and Val Hewson for the photos of the launch, and to Karin and Mary for permission to include their speeches.

Flowers for Mary

The paperback of Steel City Readers is available from all good booksellers. The e-book can be downloaded free from Liverpool University Press.

Shelagh Dixon: A reading life in Upper Walkley

By Mary Grover

Shelagh, aged four in 1958

Shelagh Dixon tells us how reading has shaped her life from childhood onwards.

I was introduced to Shelagh by Kathryn Austin whose mother, Winnie Lincoln, was interviewed for the Reading Sheffield project. Shelagh, like Kathryn, has worked to improve literacy among Sheffield adults so it was no surprise to hear how important reading has been to her from a very young age.

Shelagh was born in 1954 and grew up in Upper Walkley, a suburb of Sheffield. She loved the view from her bedroom, looking down into two valleys, to the confluence of the Rivelin and the Loxley rivers. In 1875 John Ruskin had chosen Upper Walkley to establish St George’s Museum, his collection of natural objects and art designed to lift the artistic sensibilities of the skilled metal workers toiling in the polluted valleys below. The objects are now to be found in the centre of Sheffield but Shelagh used to play in the gardens of what had been Ruskin’s museum.

Shelagh feels that Walkley was a transitional place. Lower and Upper were rather different. Upper Walkley was only developed after the tannery was closed, in the middle of the 19th century. Walkley Tan Yard originally lay between Walkley Bank Rd and Bell Hagg Rd and was at one time the property of the resident of Walkley Old Hall. At the beginning of the 19th century it had been the dominant industry on the hillside, its foul smell deterring residents. We can still find a few of the early 19th century farms scattered among the terraces of Upper Walkley. It was when the air was cleaner that John Ruskin established his museum.

Shelagh remembers the community as very diverse. Most people were connected with manufacturing or retail work and were well paid enough to rent or own a Victorian terrace house, or a 1930s semi. There was little council housing in 1950s Walkley.

Shelagh went to Bole Hill County School, like her mother and grandfather before her. In the 1930s amd 1940s, before she met Shelagh’s father at English Steels, Shelagh’s mother had worked in an upmarket department store on the Moor, learning to abandon her Sheffield accent when she tended to her wealthy clients. She familiarised Shelagh with this kind of speech.

Shelagh herself was able to mix with everyone, knowing when to use ‘teeming’ and when ‘pouring’. A friend commented that ‘We had our own language in Upper Walkley.’ The colour mauve was ‘morve’. But Shelagh’s mother always corrected her when she used traditional local grammar. Teachers did the same. Shelagh remembers a friend telling the teacher ‘There i’n’t no green cotton left’ and being firmly corrected: ‘There isn’t any green cotton.’ ‘Mum made sure we didn’t speak like many of the local children.’

Once Shelagh learnt to read, between the ages of four-and-a-half and five, she acquired a new set of words. When she tried to use them in conversation, she found that some were understood by nobody but herself. She gradually learnt that there were no such words as ‘grot-es-cue’ or ‘ank-cious’. Because she was partly self-taught her phonics were not great.

Shelagh would probably not have become a great reader if she hadn’t been so ill as a child. She had flu when she was three, a very bad attack of measles when she was five, with maybe a touch of encephalitis, then recurring tonsilitis. She missed many of her early years of infant school but by five she was reading most things that came her way.

Janet and John: Here we go (1961) by Mabel O’Donnell

When she was able to go to school, Shelagh had a wonderful reception teacher who would hold up flash cards to the children on the coconut matting in front of her. She soon allowed Shelagh to read whole books. The little girl was enchanted by Janet and John books – the kittens and the little dog and the lovely garden. ‘But I never realised there were actually children who had a life that was actually like that. I thought of it like Alice in Wonderland – fantasy.’ It was only later that she realised they were depicting a real world. Shelagh didn’t have many children’s books but she got some from an aunt who was a primary school teacher in Doncaster. Two of them she never forgot. The Little Lorry was a basic early reader but Little Redwing was even more thrilling. It was in colour, in big print and about a little Native American boy. She read it over and over again, entranced by the boat he journeyed in, the little ‘canó’.

Little Red Wing (Enchantment Books) by Dora Castley, Kathleen Fowler and Sheila Carstairs

The school didn’t have a library but it did have a little library bookcase in each junior classroom. When Shelagh had gone through all the ‘girls’ books’, she moved on to the boys’ section, to books like The Gorilla Hunters. The children were meant to write a review when they had finished a book from the library shelf but Shelagh never did because she always wanted to move on and read the next title. Shelagh learnt to use the local Walkley Library, funded in part by the American philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. The whole family ‘read library books like anything.’ When she was five she was reading Enid Blyton.

Walkley Carnegie Library

And there were always her parents’ books on motherhood and marriage. ‘All my sex education, initially, came from that.’ And she was much better informed about the facts of life than her friends.

She did, however, struggle with the Walter Scott on her parents’ shelves.

Shelagh was bought copies of the Collins children’s classics: Black Beauty, Little Women and The Children of the New Forest. ‘Before that, someone had given me a copy of Alice in Wonderland but I couldn’t get past the caucus race because there were so many hard words. I have an abiding memory of the day when I got past the caucus race.‘

Shelagh read all the time, even when she shouldn’t have. When she had measles, she was not allowed to read with the curtains drawn back or by electric light in case she went blind. She got into trouble when she tried to read under the bedclothes. The fluorescent toy sea creatures that were given away through her cereal box (a common marketing ploy at the time) provided her with light. She powered them up under the electric light and they cast a gentle light in the cave under the bedclothes. 

Shelagh read books by daylight as she walked back and forward between home and school. She was in a class of about 45 children so could always get away with opening the lid of her desk unnoticed and reading the book inside it. Sometimes the book was perched on her knee. One day, having found herself comfortably tucked away at the back of the classroom and engrossed in an illicit book, she was dismayed to find that the headmaster had entered and had stopped behind her. But instead of telling her off, he just smiled and passed on. Shelagh thinks her obsession with reading made her friends think she ‘was a bit of a freak’ but because she was so bad at maths, they ‘let her off.’

The headmaster helped Shelagh a lot. He knew she was very good at subjects requiring reading and writing but her (as yet undiagnosed) dyscalculia was a barrier to passing the 11+. She later learnt that he had been her advocate at the meeting of teachers which followed the exam. It was he who pitched her case, helping her gain a place at High Storrs Grammar School. He was committed to fostering social mobility.

Many years later, in the 1970s, when Shelagh was training to be a primary school teacher, she was dismayed to visit one particular school. The headteacher had been there for many years and said ‘not much could be expected from these children, academically.’ So the school focused on fostering good manners. Shelagh said, ‘I was very glad I had not been sent to that school.’ It is that kind of attitude that makes Shelagh in favour of SATs which, in her opinion, force teachers to be ambitious for their pupils.

Shelagh feels she was lucky to get a good education both at her primary and grammar school. She went on to do a degree in education, with English as her second subject. In spite of her difficulties with maths she liked science and got a biology ‘A’ level.

Shelagh continues to read. When I asked her what books made an impression on her in her adulthood, she was unable to list them, because ‘there were so many.’

Shelagh’s reading journey is based on our notes of her interview. There is no verbatim transcript or audio recording.

Val’s Reading Journey: Word Games

Another instalment of my reading journey, in which I confess my affection for dictionaries and grammar books.

Forty years ago, I was a student at the University of Leeds, studying Latin and French. I was, then as now, rarely without a book in my hand and a spare in my bag: set texts and academic studies for my courses and novels for fun. With all that, it intrigues me that I have very clear memories of the reference books I used. I even feel affection for them.

The Parkinson Building

On most Saturday mornings back then, I would be found in the Brotherton Library. I used to climb the white stone steps into the Parkinson Building, cross the court to the library entrance with its creaky turnstiles, and walk into the main reading room. Turning sharp left, I went upstairs to the gallery, where Classics was shelved. The main undergraduate library was then the South Library, long renamed the Edward Boyle. But I always preferred the Brotherton, opened in 1936 and since 1950 peacefully hidden behind the Parkinson.

hic haec hoc
hunc hanc hoc
huius huius huius
huic huic huic
hoc hac hoc

I came to the Brotherton to work on my Latin prose. Every Friday we got a passage of English to turn into Latin – something philosophical, a political speech or maybe military history. Burke, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay are the names that come to mind. I think there may also have been occasional old leaders from the Times. Writings by women never featured. Whoever the author was, I would in theory have done a rough draft at home on the Friday afternoon. Saturday morning in the Brotherton was for polishing, looking up words and phrases in Lewis and Short, and checking out, say, the optative subjunctive in Bradley’s Arnold or, if I was desperate, in the small print of Gildersleeve and Lodge. These are, respectively, a Latin dictionary and two grammar books. I have my copies still, shelved about six feet away from the sofa where I am typing this.

Written in 1867 by the grandly named Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) and revised by him and Gonzalez Lodge (1863-1942) in 1895.

These books are always known not by their titles but by their authors. Our prose tutor never mentioned Bradley’s Arnold, quoting instead from Mountford. We were all mystified, and it was only by chance, halfway through the term, that we found out he meant Bradley’s Arnold all along. Theologian Thomas Kerchever Arnold (1800-1853) wrote it in 1839. Then, you see, George Granville Bradley (1821-1903), Master of Marlborough, later master of University College, Oxford and Dean of Westminster, revised it in 1885. Finally, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, Sir James Mountford (1897-1979), revised it again in 1938. Impressive chaps.  

Mountford’s Bradley’s Arnold

Ut, Ne, Introducing a Noun Clause: One of the main difficulties in translating English into Latin is to know when to represent the English infinitive by a Latin infinitive, and when to use  a subordinate clause containing a finite verb. (Bradley’s Arnold, para. 117, p.83)

As well as these august publications, I found that I still relied on my school books: Latin Sentence and Idiom (1948) and Mentor (1938) by schoolmaster R A Colebourn. Comfortingly familiar, they were a gift from my Latin teacher when I left school. ‘In memoria temporum beatissimorum cum benigna tua magistra’ (‘remembering the happiest of times with your kind teacher’), she wrote inside the cover. Why I don’t have Civis Romanus, the companion book to Mentor, I just don’t understand. (Mem to self: check Abebooks).

Two more books on my shelves are Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer (1888) and Meissner’s Latin Phrase Book. I never liked Kennedy much but it is the book perhaps most often associated with learning Latin. It turns out that it was not written by schoolmaster Benjamin Hall Kennedy (1804 – 1889) but by his daughters Marion and Julia and two of his former students. The Phrase Book is an English translation by H W Auden, a master at Fettes College, from the original German by Carl Meissner (1830-1900), and my battered copy dates from 1924. It helpfully runs from the philosophical to the practical.

Choice – Doubt – Scruple: unus mihi restat scrupulus (one thing still makes me hesitate) (p.83)

Victory – Triumph: victoria multo sanguine ac vulneribus stetit (the victory was very dearly bought) (p.269)

The king of all dictionaries was Lewis & Short, first published in 1879. I never knew until now that Short lived down to his name: he supplied only the letter A and Lewis did the other 25. At first I used one of the Brotherton’s copies but in 1981 I got my own. In a medieval Latin exam we were allowed to take in our dictionaries and, while the Latin of the Middle Ages is not difficult after you’ve done Cicero or Virgil, I carried in all 2.7 kg of my Lewis & Short, just for the pleasure of having it on the desk. ‘Really?’ said my Latin tutor, eyeing it up as we started. 

The Brotherton Library naturally had a set of Loebs, those blessed books with the Latin or Greek text and the English translation side by side. Red covers for Latin and green for Greek. The translations were often pedestrian but so very useful when you got stuck. The older editions of the naughtier poets are said to have passages translated into French, rather than English, presumably on the grounds that if you understand French, you must be pretty immoral anyway. 

Unbound – and hard to keep in good condition

Being happiest with dead languages, I also studied Old French and Old English. In Old French, it’s really the texts I remember: unbound and uncut editions of the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes from the French publisher Champion. ‘The idea,’ said my supervisor, ‘is that you get them bound yourself.’ A pause. ‘I always have my own books bound in episcopal purple.’

Cil qui fist d’Erec et d’Enide,
Et les comandements d’Ovide
Et l’art d’amors an roman mist
Et le mors de l’espaule fist
Del roi Marc et d’Yseut la blonde
Et de la hupe et de l’aronde
Et del rossignol la muance,
Un novel conte rancomance
(Cligès by Chrétien de Troyes, ll. 1-8)[i]

(I did have to look up a couple of words in my Larousse Dictionnaire d’Ancien Français to translate this quotation just now.)

For Old English, it’s all about Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and his Anglo-Saxon Reader. Henry Sweet (1845-1912) was a philologist said to have been an inspiration for Bernard Shaw’s Henry Higgins.

Ælfred kyning hateð gretan Wǣrferð biscep his wordum luflice ond freondlice; ond ðe cyðan hate ðǣt me com swiðe oft on gemynd, hwelce wiotan iu wǣron giond Angelcynn, ǣgðer ge godcundra hada ge woruldcundra… (King Alfred, On the State of Learning in England, Anglo-Saxon Reader, p. 4)[ii]

I also have a little book, An Outline of Old English Grammar (1976), especially written for Leeds’ English students. ‘Old English is a fairly fully inflected language,’ it starts. Quite.

Eth, thorn and ash – letters lost between the Anglo-Saxons and us

I don’t know if Sweet, Kennedy, Bradley’s Arnold and the rest are still standard texts. Perhaps they are somewhere. Dead languages don’t change. But the way of teaching them may well have. Mountford, Sweet and the rest are, well, a little dry and can seem almost as old as the texts they teach. The books I relied on may therefore by now have been carried down into the Brotherton’s stacks. Forty years ago, for me they unlocked epics, romances, speeches, philosophy and histories.

A few years ago, when I needed access to a university library, I travelled back to Leeds, to the Brotherton, to get a graduate library membership. I walked from the railway station, along Park Row, across the Headrow, past the Town Hall and the Central Library on the left, and up Woodhouse Lane to the university. Then up the Parkinson steps, across the court and into the reading room. I could see many differences. In my day, there was usually a porter on duty at the turnstiles, and now of course there were computer terminals everywhere, and they seemed to have moved the Classics books. But much was as I remembered: the huge circular room with wooden tables radiating outwards like spokes, the dome supported by green marble columns and, at the centre, wonderful Art Deco lighting known, I learn, as an electrolier. As I arranged my ticket, I mentioned to the librarian that I used to do my Latin prose in the Brotherton most Saturday mornings. ‘Welcome home,’ she said to me, as she handed me my new ticket.

Image by Cavie78, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike

[i] He who wrote of Erec and Enide, he who translated the commands of Ovid and the Art of Love, he who wrote of the shoulder bite. of King Mark and the fair Yseult and of the transformation of the hoopoe, the swallow and the nightingale, he is starting a new story…

[ii] King Alfred orders greetings to Bishop Waerferth with his words in love and friendship. I want you to know that very often I think what wise men there used to be throughout England, both in the church and out in the world…

Mary Robertson’s Reading Journey

Off to Brid in 1927

Mary was born in 1923. She has lived all her life in the suburbs to the west of Sheffield, far from the smoke of the factories in the east side of the city where her father worked as an industrial chemist. There were books in the house and it was her sister who read them to her before she could read herself.

Mother seemed to be too busy. Father would read after Sunday lunch until he fell asleep but my sister was the one who read to me. She was two and half years older and she would always read to me when I was little.

And this was despite being taunted by the tiny Mary when she was reading. ‘Reader reader!’ was the insult hurled to drag her sister back into her world to pay her some attention. She left her brother alone with his Beanos. Though reading was encouraged, the chores came first. Then the girls could retreat to their bedroom where Mary’s sister read to her.

Mary and her sister on Bridlington sands in 1927. Mary on the right.

Bedtime was reading-time for ‘the children’s books of the day’. First there were nursery rhyme books followed by Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan and the stories of Mabel Lucie Attwell. As a school girl she treasured What Katy Did and the Girl’s Own annuals she was given at Christmas. None of these books was borrowed. All came into the house as gifts because the children were not taken to the library and were certainly not allowed to go on their own: ‘we weren’t allowed out of the end of the road you know’. But the family nevertheless encouraged reading. ‘Oh yes that was our main means of entertainment. Going to the cinema and reading’.

On Sunday we always had the roast lunch, Sunday lunch time and the fire would be [lit] … they were biggish houses down on Westwood Road. And we always read after Sunday lunch. We had lots of armchairs and that is where we always read. Mother, my sister and I – I don’t think my brother did.

One Christmas Mary’s father bought his two daughters the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica, about 12 volumes.’That was our greatest source of delight. We learnt everything we knew.’ When Mary took her first independent steps to find books, it was on behalf of her mother. In 1939, having just left school, Mary was living at home and waiting to be called up.

So I used to go to the library for mother and she liked Mary Burchell, Ethel M Dell. And I used to go to the local Red Circle library … and I’d get some books for her when you paid tuppence a time to join and I would read very light romances. I always felt guilty because, you know, you didn’t read those kind of things then.

When an Ethel M Dell got a little ‘spicy’, Mary would read it hidden under the bedclothes by the light of her torch. Later on Forever Amber and Gone with the Wind would also be read by torchlight.

Mary went to a fee-paying convent school. The nuns were interested in poetry, ‘gentle things’. ‘Poetry was the great thing. Poetry, singing, music.’ So like the children at Sheffield’s elementary schools, Mary and her contemporaries learned a lot of poetry off by heart. But not much else. ‘They were the happiest years of my life but I didn’t learn much! But that’s me, a lot of them did’ so The Red Circle Library on the Moor was the institution from which she ‘graduated’ –  to the Central Library which was to become her ‘greatest delight’. Until she couldn’t walk, Mary went there every fortnight: ‘I loved it’.

Mary looks back in amusement at the thrills she and her mother got from the romantic novels of Ethel M Dell and E M Hull. ‘They got as far as the bedroom door, “and then the door closed”, and that was it.’ She also enjoyed the cowboy books of Zane Grey. ‘It was war days, very dull days and you escaped, as you do now. You escape into another world when you read.’

But her choices from the Central Library were more serious and ‘gritty’: Nevil Shute, Alan Sillitoe, A J Cronin, Howard Spring, H E Bates and John Braine. The novel by H E Bates she remembers is The Purple Plain, describing the survival of three men in Japanese-occupied Burma. Though Bates is more usually associated with his rural novels about the rollicking Larkin family, Mary preferred the ‘stronger’ war novel to the more ‘frivoty’ Darling Buds of May. She also became a serious reader of historical novels. She and her sister shared a taste for Anya Seton. ‘I realised that I liked history far more than I ever did when I was at school.’ When Sue, the history teacher who was interviewing Mary, commented that this didn’t say much for the teachers who taught her, Mary acknowledged this but defends them.

Nuns, you know – bless ‘em, they were lovely, it was a lovely school but I don’t think I learnt a lot. As I say, the war was coming up and it was a very bad time. I left in 1939 as the war started and it broke into anything you were going to do.

Mary was called to serve in the NAAFI shop in a detention camp ‘for the fliers who had flipped their tops a bit with their terrible job. And they were sent to us for three weeks and they used to pile into my shop. Quite an exciting time’, so there was not much reading.

When Mary became a mother, she was on her own with her first baby because her husband was away a lot. It was difficult to travel down to the Central Library with the baby so, in the early 1950s, Mary returned to using a twopenny library in a newsagent’s shop at the bottom of her road. Both this and another she used were simply a couple of shelves full of novels but the stock must have changed regularly because she always found something to read in the evenings when she had ‘got the baby down’.

She was quite discriminating about the degrees of seriousness she would go for. She was absorbed by Jack London’s White Fang and The Call of the Wild but was never attracted to adventure books. Though John Braine was depressing ,his books were well written. She never developed a taste for ‘Galsworthy – the heavier ones’. She definitely ruled out ‘these great novels where it starts with, “She’s the kitchen maid, terrible hard life…” You know very well she is going to marry the Lord of the Manor!’

While Mary is enthusiastic about the authors she loves, like P G Wodehouse, she is absolute in her condemnations too.

I did not [with emphasis] like American books. I still don’t. I think it is the language. . . .  It’s not so much the swearing, it’s the style.

Mary shared a love of reading with her husband but when the children were small, it was the cinema that was the greatest treat. It was a pleasure they shared but not in each other’s company.

Well when we lived down Carter Knowle Road, I mustn’t keep you but when Andrew was a baby I would get him washed or whatever and then run all the way to the Abbeydale and watch the first house and run all the way back and then David would have got Andrew to bed and then he would go to the second house.

File:Abbeydale Cinema - Abbeydale Road 26-03-06.jpg

Mary is clearly open to any suggestion about what she might read. She described the taste that her husband had for Dickens and asked Sue whether or not we had found that Dickens is more of a man’s book.

Sue: I do like Dickens. He is my favourite.

Mary: Do you really? I should have given him a go, shouldn’t I? Given him a go. I think it is a bit too late now.

The Lord Mayor visits In Praise of Libraries

 

The Lord Mayor of Sheffield, Councillor Anne Murphy being greeted by Mary Grover,  founder of Reading Sheffield.

Chatting with historian Loveday Herridge, Reading Sheffield treasurer.

With Val Hewson, Reading Sheffield social media editor.

Visitors to the exhibition perusing the books. A selection of children’s annuals, novels and factual books, pamphlets and magazines published in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Listening to the Sheffield Readers voices.