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

The Reading Journey of Mary S

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Mary Grover

Mary didn’t have to travel far to find the magazines and books she loved. They came to her and surround her in the house that she has lived in since she was a girl: her first book, Chuckles, a book of little poems with drawings to be coloured in, and given to her by ‘Father Christmas’; her copies of Girl’s Own Paper delivered to the door; her mother’s Woman’s Pictorial magazines, one containing the coupon for a cut-price set of Dickens that was never ordered, and the volumes from The Travel Book Club subscribed to by her father.

Mary treasures all the family’s books, not always for the reading pleasures they brought. Mary’s daughter Frances ponders how Mary’s mother could have delighted in the pious A Peep Behind the Scenes, ‘absolutely ghastly’. But each book, loved or not, had been shared or handed on. She reflects that the only things she has given away, and that comparatively recently, are her piles of Magnet comics.

Both Mary’s parents worked in the book trade. Her father was a master printer who built up his own printing press. He did well and was able to move the family to the outer suburb of Bents Green and sent Mary to a little private school in the early 1930s. Before she was married, Mary’s mother worked in the market on a family stall selling ‘books and things’, which was subsequently bought by Mary’s in-laws and renamed L. and A. Wilkinson.

So she was encouraged to read bits of the books so that she could discuss them with customers, you know … and they used to sell books and stationery and all that kind of thing, and when gramophones first came in they sold those too.

In the 1920s Mary became a member of the Sheffield Star ’s Gloop Club which offered outings to the theatre and other sorts of entertainment for children. Then came the Depression. The printing business, like many other small printing businesses, struggled and in 1935 Mary left school at 14 to train as a secretary. By 16 she was typist for a tax expert in town.

Mary and her mother would set out together to find books: first from the Green Circle tuppenny library half way into town at Hunters Bar, and then the municipal libraries – two of them, the local down the Ecclesall Rd and the Central Library near Mary’s work. There, she found a new borrowing companion. After work, two or three times a week, she and the office boy used to make a joint expedition to the Central Library to borrow books to read on the tram on the way home. ‘You got through quite a few books that way. When the buses came in it was a bit bumpy!’ But she never took one of her own books on the journey to work: ‘If they’re your books you keep them at home, don’t you?’ You only read Penguins and library books on the tram.

Gradually Mary’s social circle widened and her friends were all required to help her create her own book. In Mary’s Confessions, compiled in the late 1930s, each friend had their own page on which they answered the questions Mary proposed, in particular, ‘Who is your favourite author?’ A lot could hang on the answer. John Lee, with his ‘nice writing’, liked Oswald Mosley. Edward Bedford enjoyed the swashbuckling romances of Raphael Sabatini. William Olivant was more up-to-date with his taste for Leslie Charteris. Kenneth Hutton must have been into scouting because his favourite author was F. Haydn Dimmock. However it was Philip who won Mary’s heart, with his admiration of ‘David Hulme’ unknown to any library catalogue we have consulted. When war was declared Mary and Philip went separate ways but the husband who found his way to Mary’s door also arrived with books.

Mary, who just before the outbreak of war was the major wage earner in the family, had been looking out for a lodger to supplement the family income when she spotted an advertisement in the paper, ‘Respectable young man requires lodgings’. Maurice was a young engineer at Firth Brown Tools.

and I remember him coming I think it was one Saturday morning, and my friend and I who lived across the road, was across the road, and we saw him pull up in his little Morris 8 that he had in those days, you could get petrol before the war. And we looked at him, and he decided that he’d stay and so he almost became one of the family. He taught us to play bridge. Mother and father were quite keen on whist, they used to go to a lot of whist drives, and he taught us to play bridge and we used to do that in the evenings. And he was quite good company. And we used to do the Telegraph crossword sitting on that settee.

A few years after his arrival, Maurice bought Mary a complete set of Kipling for her 21^st birthday because he knew Kipling was one of her favourite authors.

Throughout her life Mary compiled a list of all the books she read. Her teenage favourites, Anne of Green Gables and Daddy-Long-Legs, were not in her grandmother’s glass bookcase behind her because they had been borrowed and reborrowed from the public libraries throughout her life.

It was Mary’s daughter, Frances, who, at a Reading Sheffield talk told us about her mother’s book-filled life, her precious booklist and her book of Confessions. Thank you Frances.

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Mary S’s transcript and audio here