A walk through Park with Jean

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Mary Grover

Jean Mercer was born in Sheffield in 1925 and has lived in the city all her life. In 1950 she married local boy Malcolm who became a teacher.

Above Sheffield Station lies an area called Park. Beyond it spreads the Manor Estate, built in the 1930s on the fields surrounding the Queen’s Tower, where the Earl of Shrewsbury guarded Mary Queen of Scots during her period of imprisonment in Sheffield. On the deer park of the castle was built in 1957 the austere Park Hill flats dominating the ridge above Sheffield station and ‘hailed universally in the technical press as a visually as well as socially satisfactory conception’ according to Nicholas Pevsner. As an architectural historian with a taste for modernist brutality, Pevsner admired the Council’s vision of a village in the air, but sadly, as he predicted, Park Hill soon became a slum.

Park Hill and Sheffield Station today

The partly-renovated Park Hill Flats today. Park Library is behind the flats, up the road on the left. (Creative Commons licence)

Jean and Malcolm Mercer have lived in this area all their lives. They grew up in the streets bulldozed to construct Park Hill. Then, after the Second World War they married and moved to the Manor Estate, then a thriving community when the working classes it housed were actually in work. When we interviewed them, they had moved off the estate and were living in a house in one of the Victorian terraces which are a remnant of the old Park district.

Since 1903, all the communities around Park have been served by a glorious complex of buildings which used to house public baths, a laundry, a swimming pool and a library, all heated by the furnace whose red brick chimney still rises against the hill behind it. The library has survived all this time, rather against the odds: in the 1930s it was almost closed because of its proximity to the splendid new Central Library; and now it is run, not by the Council, but by community volunteers.

Park Library now

Park Library then

Jean Mercer has been a member of Park Library since she was two years old. She remembers the delights on offer when she visited the library with her class from school.

When I was a girl they had story-time. We used to go from school. There was Miss Heywood. She was absolutely wonderful at telling stories. She would sit on the counter and tell these stories, and especially about Epanimondas. He was a little black boy and he was lovely. He never did anything right but Epanimondas was lovely. [Miss Heywood] she was wonderful at telling stories and I can still remember, I can see her sitting on the counter now, yes, it was lovely.

Though Jean passed the scholarship exam she was not able to take up a grammar school place. But there is no trace of bitterness or any sense of loss in the way she describes her secondary school education.

At Standhouse School and Prince Edward as well, I can remember the teachers now, and it was really a very good education – very good and reading was part of it and composition, it was composition then. If you could write a composition, it was absolutely wonderful and you were encouraged to and poetry was part of it.

Like many pupils from elementary schools, Jean treasures the poetry she learned by heart. Elementary schools seemed to set much more value on reading and reciting poetry than grammar schools. Elocution lessons were also part of Jean’s school experience.

Jean can’t remember a school library. Instead the children were marched down to Park Library and encouraged to use it regularly.

Park Library – all that it is left of the spiral stairs which used to lead to the first floor children’s library

Her parents also encouraged her reading. They were chapel-goers. Jean’s father’s health had been damaged in the First World War so he was found a job in the fruit market by his uncle. Though this was a physically Iess strenuous than a job in a steel mill, it did mean a very early start. So he would get home from work early and spend the early evening reading. She can remember him reading westerns by Zane Grey and then The Man in the Iron Mask.

As for her mother,

she did more crocheting but she loved to write. She loved recipes. I’ve got some of her books that she wrote recipes and poems in, didn’t she? She was always doing something like that, but Father loved reading.

The passion for reading that Jean shared with her parents prepared her for a life-time of supporting Malcolm while he wrote books of his own. Jean would field the phone calls and the children while Malcolm prepared his lessons, researched and wrote his histories of Sheffield schools. Like her mother, Jean took delight in the margins, always finding time to explore new novels and read to her own children.

Jean never bought the novels she read because Park Library was so handy.

And if there wasn’t a book if you wanted one, they soon found it for you. Well they are now, aren’t they? If you ask they’re still very helpful.

Poetry at Off the Shelf: White Ink Stains

Posted on October 29, 2016 by Val Hewson

Eleanor Brown

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

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

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

Honeymoon

Married in 1948. I had

the most exquisite nightdress, sort of like

a Greek goddess, and dressing gown to match.

They were the loveliest things I’d ever owned.

During the weeks before the wedding I’d

unwrap them from their tissue paper, hold

them up against myself and slowly sway

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

a full length looking glass and didn’t dare

steal to my parents’ room to look in theirs.

We went away on honeymoon, the boat

to France and then by train to Switzerland.

I hadn’t brought enough to read. A kind

lady lent me a silly magazine:

the actress Lana Turner, 28,

was married for the fourth time, her trousseau

reported to have cost ten thousand pounds.

I gazed out of the window doing sums,

how many pairs of stockings must she have?

how many nightdresses and dressing gowns?

My husband hadn’t long been back from war

and – sort of totally exhausted – so

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

and I was very bored. But luckily,

luckily in this little Swiss hotel

there were a few English books. I was so

pleased to have them. I’d have read anything

(always somebody worse off than you

in a Thomas Hardy). Nobody says,

pack enough books to last the honeymoon.

In memory of Jocelyn Wilson 1926-2015

Jocelyn Wilson

Hybrid memories: Dorothy H’s reading journey

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Val Hewson

By Val Hewson and Mary Grover

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhett and Scarlett (public domain)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caricature of Edgar Wallace by Low (public domain)

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

In Miss Foyle’s Opinion

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Val Hewson

How did Reading Sheffield readers choose books? Was it largely by chance? (City Librarian J P Lamb once said that people generally just wanted ‘a book, preferably an attractive one’.) Or by favourite author? The next book in a series? Influenced by a film? (Gone with the Wind was often mentioned.) Or a recommendation by someone in the book trade? We have no definitive answer. Our readers were probably swayed, at different times, by all of the above.

Christina Foyle, by Bassano, whole-plate glass negative, 7 December 1936 (NPG)

But here, for what they are worth, are the views of a literary insider – Christina Foyle of Foyle’s Bookshop. She was speaking, with characteristic firmness, in Belfast in 1950, right in the middle of the Reading Sheffield period, and her remarks were reported in a local paper.

Publishers’ rejects that became best-sellers (Northern Whig – Friday 21 April 1950)

What makes publisher after publisher reject a book which later becomes a best-seller?

This was one of the questions posed yesterday by Miss Christina Foyle when she addressed the Belfast Alpha Club on “Writers of To-day and Yesterday.”

Some of the people whose books were turned down by publishers were Bernard Shaw, Jeffrey Farnol, Richard Llewellyn – Foyle’s were among the publishers who rejected his “How Green Was My Valley” because they did not think that readers liked dialect – Baroness Orczy – every publisher in London turned down “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” though it has now been translated into every language – and Edgar Wallace. Edgar Wallace had at first to publish his own books and find his own travellers to sell them.

Another book which was very nearly not published was “Little Women.” The publisher kept the manuscript in his home; he thought very little of it and intended returning it. Then one day he found his small niece sitting up reading the manuscript; he told her it was late and she must go to bed, but the child pleaded with him saying she simply must finish the story. So the publisher had second thoughts!

Books which had surprised the book trade by their popularity were Louis Golding’s “Magnolia Sweet”, “Fanny by Gaslight” and “The Egg and I”.

Although Miss Foyle is a young woman, she does not think present-day writers are as good as their forbears. Some who had been most promising and had written brilliantly, had turned to religion or politics, and thought that might have been a good thing for religion or politics it was not good for literature.

“Dorothy Sayers used to bring out wonderful detective stories, but is now more interested in religion; A. P. Herbert has turned from novel writing to politics; and Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Ethel Mannin have got themselves involved in mysticism,” she stated, and added:

“There is no writer today who can compare in wit to Philip Guedella or Humbert Wolfe. Peter Cheyney is the most popular thriller writer, but I don’t think he can compare to Edgar Wallace or Conan Doyle.”

Modern poets, Miss Foyle thinks, have committed suicide. They are difficult to read, and if the public reads poetry at all, it is the poetry of Wordsworth or Tennyson.

“The most popular cookery book is still Mrs Beeton,” she said.

Miss Foyle considers that income tax has had a terrible effect on writers. An author might take four years to write a book but is taxed as though he spent only one year on it. The sales of Trevelyan’s “Social History” amounted to £15,000 but he received only £3,000.

Yet Miss Foyle feels that the present is a good time for writers , and she told the meeting that there is a great demand for books in every field and: “If you can write yourself or you know anyone who can write you should tell them of the opportunities.”

By any reckoning, Christina Foyle was a Personality. Born in 1911, she started in the family bookshop on Charing Cross Road when she was 17, and took it over in the 1960s. The way she operated was notoriously odd (shelving books, for example, by publisher) but Miss Foyle did know everyone who mattered. The literary lunches she started in 1930 alone ensured that.

For the record, many of the writers mentioned by Christina Foyle were quoted by Reading Sheffield readers. So how much influence did someone like her have on readers?

Lady Chatterley (and her Lover) in Sheffield

Posted on October 1, 2016 by Val Hewson

Today, Saturday 1 October, sees the end of Banned Books Week, the annual American campaign for the freedom to read. (These are the top titles challenged in the USA this year, and here are some classics which have been attacked.) So here are Reading Sheffield readers’ memories about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, perhaps one of the most famous banned books of all. (Coincidentally, a dramatisation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is on at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre until 15 October 2016.)

D H Lawrence’s novel was first published in Italy in 1928, and in an abridged version in the UK in 1932. The full version was published in the UK in 1960 by Penguin Books. Penguin was prosecuted for obscenity and won the case. The trial made headlines, and Penguin’s victory liberalised UK publishing.

As it happens, the Reading Sheffield readers were not all impressed with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But what is important is that, thanks to the 1960 challenge by Penguin Books, they had the chance to read it and make up their own minds.

Licenced by Twospoonfuls under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence

For Mary Robertson, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was ‘the most boring book I’ve ever read!’ Her memories are vivid:

Oh yes! It was banned and then it went to court. Before that we would get it and we would pass it round and it was one you would read under the bedclothes. … The part that was thumbed was the part with the gardener. That’s the only part. I mean now it would be nothing, would it? Oh we laugh about that. … It was [sharp intake of breath] ‘I shouldn’t be reading this’, yes. I didn’t get the D H Lawrence books. They were too gritty, they were too real. I quite like some of his plays [sic] but not the books.

Eva G was also unimpressed. ‘I didn’t think it was shocking! I did think what all the fuss was about!

Anne B was younger – 14 or 15 – when she read it. She was shocked: ‘Oh yeah because I was totally innocent in those days.’ She got hold of the novel by chance:

I found my dad reading surreptitiously, which was totally…I mean it was when it was all in the papers about the …[laughing] I remember he pushed it under the pile of newspapers in the cupboard and I found it one day and I started doing the same thing and reading it surreptitiously. There was always a half hour part of the day, when I got in from school before they came back from work, that I’d got to myself and I used to read it. I worked my way through it. That was the only time and I knew I shouldn’t be doing it so I never let on. I don’t think my mother knows today that I ever read it.

Discretion was not unusual. Nurse Betty R said:

Yes, sister on the ward was reading it and she said “Would you like to read this Betty?” And she said “Keep the brown cover on it.”

Peter Mason illustrates what often happens with challenged books:

… we weren’t meant to read his [Lawrence’s] books so we read it and, looking at it now, I don’t know what all the fuss was about, because you see more about it on the TV and the news these days.

He thinks that Lady Chatterley’s Lover only ‘became famous because they banned it, I don’t think it would have…’

Alan B studied Lawrence for his Open University course and concluded that he preferred the poetry to the novels:

… he is one of these people who makes some very insightful…observations on life but you have got to read through a lot of stuff to get to them [chuckles] whereas his poems are more punchy.

Peter B read Lady Chatterley ‘even before copies were generally available’. He thinks it is now ‘a bit dated’. But Lawrence:

advanced literature in the sense that it was the first time that sort of thought had been attributed to the working class. You had to be either a business man or a lawyer or something to be written about.

Mavis was, she says, too young when she found D H Lawrence and so she ‘could not understand why it was banned’:

… I had no idea what I was reading. The sex scenes went right over my head. In fact somebody lent me a forbidden copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I could only have been about fourteen. Somebody got it from her sister who was much older and I didn’t notice why it should be banned, I couldn’t understand! (Laughs) And I look back now and think how could I possibly not have noticed what that was all about.

But Mavis does think that Lawrence changed things for her:

It both led me on to a different level of adult fiction even if I didn’t always pick up on the nuances but as I did pick up the nuances I think it made me see how people adapt, grow up, fall in and out of love – I think it went along with my development at the right age.

James Green’s reading journey

Posted on September 4, 2016 by Val Hewson

James was born on 27 April 1936 in Darnall, Sheffield. He is married to Barbara, whose interview is here.

As a boy, James enjoyed stories, excited and caught up in the adventure. As an adult, he looks back at the boy, half amused, half amazed, with the man’s knowledge and experience.

James’ parents were readers, borrowing their books from a library, and he remembers:

… going with my mum and dad to the local library, and coming back with picture books, and they’d come back obviously with adult books. And even though I couldn’t really read at that stage, we used to sit on a Saturday night in particular when my dad was at home, they’d be reading books and I’d be pretending to be reading.

James thinks he ‘graduated in two to three years from sitting on a settee pretending to read with my mum and dad to actually reading’. When he was about seven years old, he got a book for Christmas. It was an omnibus of abridged versions of Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, Gulliver’s Travels and a couple of others.

… it was my own book, probably the first book I’d really owned, you could go through it and you could go through it again, and so it was with me for quite a long time. And at that stage, I probably wasn’t all that good at reading, so it’d take me a long time, and it was quite a hefty book.

James is conscious that his younger self missed a lot. Robinson Crusoe can be seen, for example, as the march either of civilisation or of cultural imperialism but, James says, ‘… to a kid at seven on a desert island [it] is an adventure book, isn’t it really?’

James enjoyed popular adventure novels. He was a ‘big fan’ of Sherlock Holmes and ‘used to love’ Biggles, the intrepid air ace created by Captain W E Johns. He ‘read an article years and years later that he was actually a fascist, so…’. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Biggles books were often condemned by teachers and librarians.* But this was all beyond the James of the 1940s:

No no, it were just an adventure. Algie and Biggles and Ginger, very gung ho I suppose. Patriotic. Really patriotic weren’t he?

It was much the same with another popular hero of the period, Bulldog Drummond.

I read Bulldog Drummond … who were again a bit of a fascist, I found out later. In fact I only read the other day, it said Bulldog Drummond – it were talking about Sapper – it were a pseudonym for I can’t remember the name – he were a lieutenant colonel retired. So you can guess how he wrote. It was ‘Bulldog Drummond was six foot six (or something) in his stockinged feet, excellent shot … Extremely fit, a really good boxer, and as dim as a Toc-H lamp’ … Someone taking the mickey out of that type of writing, but when you were a kid, you just read it, don’t you, you know.

James wouldn’t read this type of book now, he thinks.

I’ve more insight – and not just because it’s a boy’s… It was written for boys. But there’s an underlying propaganda that I didn’t get at the time, that was there. … Course a lot of stuff we read in those days, I mean I was still at school when the map on the wall was half pink at that time. And there were loads of books with heroes that went out to quell the natives and hook all their values of Great Britain you know, and all the rest of it.

Orwell, whom he first read when he was about 15 or 16, helped form James’ adult beliefs and attitudes.

George Orwell

Well – I think – I don’t know when it started, or when I were aware of it, but you started getting writers who condemned that outlook. George Orwell for instance. Very critical of a lot of what we were doing and what we did and critical of this country as a whole.

… through reading newspapers you’d get writers and critics that would dissect a certain book or books or a genre, and make you see things that you hadn’t seen before. And you think, well that’s not right, you know. But at thirteen you … propaganda. And very gung ho. And I did think we were the greatest nation on this earth anyway. ‘God is an Englishman.’

… But Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier – really opened my eyes, you know. Because living as we did, we were living as he were describing, the conditions he was born into. And the first dawnings in my mind were this ain’t right. We shouldn’t be living like this, and we’ve no need to live like this.

You can find James’ story in full here.

* There have been more recent calls for Biggles’ rehabilitation.

Anne’s Reading Journey

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Val Hewson

Anne was born in the north of Sheffield on 5 August 1944. Her parents owned a bakery in Hillsborough. Anne has been a keen reader from an early age and has remained so. She trained as a Religious Education (RE) teacher at college in Leeds and was also involved in the Girl Guide movement for many years, as both a Guide and a Guider. She has two daughters and grandchildren.

Here Anne remembers how she encountered that most notorious book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Licenced by Twospoonfuls under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence

Anne read well from an early age: ‘I was away ahead,’ she says. At first it was fairy stories and nursery rhymes, and then books familiar to most people growing up in the mid-20^th century.

I was well into Enid Blyton at a fairly young age and then as I got older I sort of went more on to the classics. I remember reading The Children of the New Forest when I was about 13 and that became one of my top favourites. … The Chalet books in my early teens were my passion and I owned practically every single one at some point. I’ve still got a lot of them up in the loft.

Of the classics, David Copperfield and Jane Eyre were the ones Anne liked best, but although she tried, Jane Austen wasn’t for her. ‘I just couldn’t stick it,’ she says.

Membership of the public library and her school and college studies kept Anne reading, although she doesn’t sound as if she needed much persuasion (‘I just read anything I could get my hands on’). She belonged to Sheffield Libraries from an early age, walking there alone and choosing her books without any help from the librarians. When, at the age of 15, she transferred to the City Grammar in the centre of Sheffield, she joined the Central Library, encouraged by a friend, Kath. Kath ‘was doing literature and so was very much more into proper books, adult books’. Anne dates her transition to ‘grown-up novels’ from her friendship with Kath. In those days Anne usually looked for books which had some relevance to her history and RE courses, such as Jean Plaidy’s books on the Tudors and novels like Lloyd C Douglas’ The Robe.

No-one ever made Anne feel that reading was a waste of time. Both parents were busy with their business, but were happy for their daughter to read:

…Oh no, I mean [my mother] was an intelligent person, she knew the value of reading, she just didn’t do it.

Then our interviewer asked if Anne was ever made to feel embarrassed or guilty about reading. Only when she came across D H Lawrence, Anne replied. And the story came out.

I found my dad reading surreptitiously, which was totally…I mean it was when it was all in the papers about the …[laughing] I remember he pushed it under the pile of newspapers in the cupboard and I found it one day and I started doing the same thing and reading it surreptitiously. There was always a half hour part of the day, when I got in from school before they came back from work, that I’d got to myself and I used to read it. I worked my way through it. That was the only time and I knew I shouldn’t be doing it so I never let on. I don’t think my mother knows today that I ever read it.

Perhaps your father didn’t think he ought to be doing it either, suggests our interviewer. Probably not, Anne agrees, saying ‘he probably kept it out of sight from me’.

This happened around 1960, when Anne was a teenager. This was the time of the famous trial under the Obscene Publications Act, when Penguin Books re-published Lawrence’s novel (for the first time since its initial publication in 1928) and challenged the Director of Public Prosecutions to prosecute. The book was a huge success, with copies selling out as soon as they arrived in bookshops.

The trial, that was why everybody read it! Everybody knew about it. I did some more D H Lawrence as well.

Anne, however, did not particularly like the Lawrence novels she read. ‘ I read them but I wouldn’t say I’d want to read them again.’ She was shocked by Lady Chatterley, she says, because she was ‘totally innocent in those days’. But she

didn’t know what the fuss was about for most of it.

Here is Anne’s full interview.

The Reading Journey of Florence Cowood

Posted on June 28, 2016 by lizz

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

Florence was always passionate about reading:

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

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

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

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

Her mother also loved reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She read Jane Eyre but

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However she still managed to keep on reading.

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

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

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

Different books stimulated interest in different parts of the world:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve travelled the world twice over,

And met the famous saints and sinners,

Poets and artists, kings and queens,

All stars and hopeful beginners.

I’ve been where no one’s been before,

Drawn secrets from writers and cooks,

Always with a library ticket

To the wonderful world of books.

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

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

Written by Sue Roe

Access Florence’s audio and transcript here

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.