“The Fifth Floor to Heaven” (28 December 1939)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Val Hewson

In the 1930s, Sheffield’s libraries were being reformed and developed, and the numbers of borrowers and books issued were both rising. One strategy to promote the library service seems to have been to seek coverage in local newspapers. Here is an example of this – an odd little anecdote in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 28 December 1939. Odd because it seems incomplete without the name of the teacher or details of the books she wanted and why these were unobtainable locally (there were established library services in Manitoba at the time). Today, when the story might at most have merited a tweet, we would have had a photo and a quote from her, but no doubt transatlantic communications three months into the Second World War were restricted. At this remove, we will likely never know who she was or whether she ever returned to Sheffield. At all events, the fact of this slight story appearing in the paper suggests the good links between the library and local media.

“The Fifth Floor to Heaven”

City Library Praised

Sheffield has just had a remarkable tribute to the efficiency of its library service.

A Sheffield girl who is teaching in a small town in Manitoba, Canada, required books of reference for a lecture she was preparing.

Being unable to get the books in the district and not knowing of any place near at hand where she could get them, she wrote to the Sheffield City Librarian (Mr J P Lamb) asking him to send books and offered to pay postage both ways.

In her letter she described the Sheffield Library as “the fifth floor to heaven”.

As it is scarcely possible to send books from Sheffield to Canada in this way, Mr Lamb has referred the request to the Chief Librarian of Toronto, suggesting that some regional library organisation in Canada might be able to supply the demand.

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.

From Acorn to Oak

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Val Hewson

By Mary Grover

Sheffield children owe a great deal to a woodcutter called John Eadon. He had five study sons who worked with him and each son might have spent the rest of his days being a ‘woodman of renown’ had not the men taken shelter from unusually heavy rain at an inn in the Ecclesfield area in the mid eighteenth century. This is how the story in the inn unfolded, according to Robert Leader, in his Reminiscences of old Sheffield, its streets and its people, edited by Robert Eadon Leader and printed in 1875:

Whilst drinking the “nut-brown ale” many were the topics of conversation. Some talked about themselves, others about their children – how clever Susan was, and what a sharp chap Tommy was; and as for Bill, the village schoolmaster had never had his like. Every man appeared to have a clever lad in some way or other; but old Ayton (Eden, now Eadon) heard all this with a sorrowful heart, and at length, breaking silence, he said, “See,'” pointing his finger, “there is a thickhead, that lad of mine is nineteen years of age and he does not know A from B.” This was enough. The shame of being exposed in public company, and by his father, too, raised the pride and kindled a spark in that young man’s breast which never went out till the spirit left his body. Whilst he sat in that room abashed amid his compeers, he determined that he would know not only A from B, but something more. He began next day, brought a penny primer, found out an old woman who knew the letters – these he soon mastered – made out little words, and soon he laid the foundation of all knowledge – the acquirement of the art of reading. He found someone to assist him in the art of arithmetic; and in this way his leisure time was spent, till he began to think he knew more than most people about him.

At this juncture the mastership of the Free Writing School became vacant. He offered himself and was elected, and held the post till his death. From the time of his publishing the ‘Arithmetician’s Guide,’ in 1756, to his death in 1810, would make his tutorship of that school fifty years, at least.

You can read more about the contribution of the Eadon family to schooling in our city if you download Reminiscences. The Arithmetician’s Guide mentioned by Leader, which you can see here, seems to have been a handbook to help teachers teach arithmetic. It contains all sorts of mnemonics and rhymes to help pupils remember arithmetical principles.

The Free Writing School was one of a number of schools founded and supported by grants from the Church Burgesses Trust, still very active today. The Trust was founded in the reign of Mary Tudor who was successfully petitioned by the citizens of Sheffield for the revenue of the Parish Church and other Church lands that had been confiscated by Edward VI following his father’s dissolution of the monasteries. Despite its name, the school aimed chiefly to train boys in mathematics and John Eadon was obviously devoted to this task and became a very well-read man. He also became grandfather to one of Sheffield’s most distinguished literary figures, Samuel Bailey, the poet, philosopher and radical liberal who was widely known as the ‘Bentham of Hallamshire’. So John Eadon’s father’s cruel jibe at the expense of his son not only produced a fine teacher, but also helped establish a dynasty which was vital to Sheffield cultural life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Domestic Goddess, 1930s Style

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Val Hewson

As Theresa May settles into Downing Street and Hilary Clinton campaigns for the White House, anyone travelling in time from the early 1930s would be surprised by the changes in women’s lives. In the UK of the 1930s, after all, the vote had been extended to all women aged over 21 as recently as 1928*; women in the professions were relatively rare; and marriage was still the usual destination (despite the shortage of men after the slaughter of the First World War). Women were routinely expected to stop working on marriage (why, supported by their husbands, would they need jobs?) and in some cases, such as teaching and the civil service, were required to do so#. Looking after husband, children and home was the norm.

It seems that, whatever else has changed, the provision of advice on home-making is a constant. Today, the main channel tends to be television, with Kirstie, Nigella, Sarah and the rest appearing on our screens and producing tie-in books etc. In the 1930s, women may have looked for advice to books from the local library if the following (to us, rather patronising) paragraph from Sheffield Libraries’ occasional magazine, Books and Readers, is anything to go by.

Is the housewife paying greater attention to details in the home nowadays? It is difficult to say as we have no comparative details on which to base a statement. But it is revealed from the issue of 12,632 books on domestic economy from the Libraries last year that the women of Sheffield are not ashamed to confess that they find need for help and guidance in domestic affairs. It is very gratifying to think that even in the prosaic details of housekeeping the Public Library is having a very considerable influence. “Feed the brute” has always been a fairly popular maxim, but “feed the brute intelligently and in improved surroundings” is better still.

The books on offer included, for example: Dinners Long and Short (1928) by A H Adair; What Shall We Have Today (1931) by X M Boulestin; and Feeding the Family: Hints for the Intelligent Housewife (1929) by M L Eyles. ‘Feed the brute’, by the way, was a well-known phrase from Don’ts for Wives (1913) by Blanche Ebbutt.

(Licensed under Creative Commons)

What was the life of a 1930s housewife? It depended on your place in society. Working class wives and mothers had no help, other than perhaps their daughters (not sons – they were generally exempted from household chores). In the Depression of the 1930s, many such women were struggling to keep their families together. Middle and upper class women, who were perhaps the only ones who had the time or energy to borrow books about housekeeping, had it better, managing the household and directing servants or perhaps just a daily. The servants doing housework were usually women, of course.

A wartime housewife (1941) (public domain)

But, whoever did the work, it was hard grind, without the labour-saving devices and products we take for granted. When, in 2011, Proctor and Gamble challenged some bloggers to live the life of a 1930s housewife for a day, they commented on: the length of time it took to make three meals from scratch; the drudgery of the laundry without a washer-dryer or even a spinner; and using vinegar and newsprint to clean windows and lemon and baking powder to clean floors. Here is a typical account. Or if you want read some (roughly) contemporary accounts, there is: Love on the Dole (1933), by Walter Greenwood, about the Salford slums; South Riding (1936), by Winifred Holtby, where the Holly family struggle to survive; or House-bound (1942), by Winifred Peck, about a middle-class woman who struggles to do her own housework during WWII.

* From 1918, women over 30 and property owners could vote, but this excluded about 60 per cent of the gender.

# In the UK, the marriage bar for teaching was abolished in 1944, for the Home Civil Service in 1946 and for the Foreign Service in 1973. Equal pay was a dream until the 1970 Equal Pay Act, and for some women it still is.

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.

Havoc in a Sheffield Library (The Daily Independent, Monday 2 September, 1935)

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Val Hewson

In the middle of the 20^th century, Sheffield readers got their books from the public library, bookshops and ‘circulating libraries’. These last were private libraries lending books for a small fee or subscription. In Sheffield, they included: Boots the Chemist’s Booklovers’ Library, the local Red Circle and small libraries run out of shops such as newsagents.

Between 1934 and 1935, there was the private Novel Library at 36-38 High Street, on the corner with Mulberry Street and just a few doors away from Walsh’s department store, a Sheffield institution. On a Sunday morning in September 1935, the Novel Library had two unusual visitors. Here is how the Sheffield Daily Independent breathlessly reported the story:

Cattle Amok in City: Windows Shattered: Girls in Terror; havoc in a Sheffield Library.

A bullock and a heifer, which dashed into a library in the centre of Sheffield yesterday, created havoc, smashed large windows, and terrified two girl assistants.

The two beasts – Hector and Harriet – and two other cattle from a farm in Well lane, Sheffield, were being driven down Norfolk street on their way to the Sheffield Abbatoir about 10.30 yesterday morning when, it is understood, the rustling of some paper on the road scared them.

The four beasts made a mad dash, followed by their drover.

Two of them continued straight down Norfolk street, but the others, Hector and Harriet, turned along Mulberry street into High street.

Mulberry Street today, along which the cattle ran towards the High St

Scattering people on their way to church, they turned up High street, where Harriet noticed the open door of the “Novel” library.

Their entry into the library scared the two young assistants in charge and caused both of them to make a rush for their lives.

One ran out into the street and the other made her escape into the cellar below the shop.

Smashed to Atoms

One of the cattle became wedged between a bookshelf and the plate-glass window and the other – Harriet – suddenly ran wild.

As she turned round, she smashed a side window to atoms. She then dashed into the opposite side of the front window to that in which the bullock was stuck, and kicking about frantically smashed it all along the side and finally took a header through it into the High Street.

The site of the Novel Library on the corner of High St and Mulberry St

The site of the Novel Library on the corner of High St and George St

Meanwhile the drover, who had recovered his other two beasts, together with the police, and a large number of other people, had arrived on the scene. They caught Harriet, who was still charging about wildly, and then led the bullock docilely out of the window into the street.

A flock of sheep following the four cattle to the abbatoir seemed entirely unperturbed at the wild dash of their four companions.

Miss Kathleen Connolly, of [36] Windmill street, Sheffield, one of the two assistants who were in the “Novel” library at the time, told a “Daily Independent” reporter of her dash for safety.

“I was seated at the ticket table at the far end of the library facing the open door when I thought I heard a customer enter,” she said. “I looked up and saw in my horror that the bullock was making straight for me.

“It was then only about a yard away. I leapt for the entrance to the basement and ran down the stairs. Then I heard the animals dashing about the library and the smashing of the windows. I thought I should never get out alive.”

Narrow Escape

Miss H. Vallans, of [19] Oak street, Sheffield, her colleague, said, “I had just opened the door wide a few minutes before they entered. I was at the counter just by the door and after I saw them dash past me I ran as fast as I could into the street.

“It is a wonder I was not killed by them, for had they come just a few minutes sooner they would have caught me in the window fixing books on the shelves.”

She pointed to the portion of the window that was then just a [mass] of shattered glass. “I was in that window only a short time before they dashed in,” she said.

The bullock was “unwedged” from the window in which he was stuck without causing any damage.

The shop was in complete disorder after the beasts had [got] away. Books lay strewn on all parts of the floor. Neither of the animals was much the worse for its escapade.

We have not been able to find out much about the Novel Library. It does not appear in local trade directories after 1935, so perhaps the ‘bullocks in the bookshop’ episode sent it out of business.

If you have heard of the Novel Library, please let us know.

‘A great wealth’: the reading journey of Julia Banks

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Mary Grover

Julia was born in Chesterfield in 1939 and moved to Woodhouse on the east of Sheffield in 1945. In later life she became a primary school teacher.

Though there were not many books in the house, Julia’s home always had a bookcase and ‘books around’. Julia was read to by both her mother and her aunt. The local library was the family’s chief source of books: ‘I was always taken to the library with my mother.’ Her mother’s favourite was Naomi Jacob. Books were Julia’s favourite presents – Enid Blyton, for example: ‘I could never wait to get the next one. Mmm … Valley of Adventure and the Malory Towers series.‘

Aunt Lil, on her father’s side ‘bought books from Boots library, in town, when they were selling them off.‘ She bought history books and read them ‘avidly’. ‘She could talk about Elizabeth the First as if she were a neighbour, you know.’

I’ve still got Black’s Elizabeth that she gave me that I used to queue for at school or use from the reference library.

As a teenager, it was non-fiction that inspired Julia too.

Because I was at that stage when I was learning anyway and there wasn’t really time for just fiction. There wasn’t a lot of spare time to do nothing. If you’re at school you’ve got homework and you’re quite busy. But I can remember using it as a tool, really, the library.

The first adult fiction book Julia remembers reading was a book she borrowed from Woodhouse Library, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. It fascinated her because the life of the Chinese farming family was so alien but the feelings universal.

The library in Woodhouse was a great influence because they had a story hour for children in a lovely part of the building.

There was a fire place, benches and a carpet and you could sit there and listen to stories. That was in the children’s library … it was good to have something that could teach you something and lift you.

Story-telling corner at Woodhouse Children’s Library

A lot of Julia’s friends had homes in which there were no books. The presence of books in a home made her aware of ‘an outside … you were not just so concerned with the immediate’. At some time she realised they were also a ‘ladder to social mobility’.

Julia went on to Bingley to train as a primary teacher. She and her friends tended to pass round books and share them. They studied ‘Anna Karenina, you know, Henry James, and you know all the … normal … things’. She likes the fact that these books were not chosen by her.

I didn’t choose them and I think that’s good. Through school or through college you’re given prescripted books. Otherwise you would never get the chance to read them would you? As with Shakespeare you need to be taught how to read it and you should be, in my opinion, because it’s a great wealth to have. So I’m glad that I did read them but I wouldn’t go to the library and pick up Tolstoy.

But her favourite reading was Bertrand Russell: ‘you know the really hard stuff. You think, “well yeah, I never thought about that before but yeah”. You know? It was that you were learning something new.’

In 1965, when her husband’s job took the family to Holland, Julia came across a completely new source of books: the British Women’s Club Library in the Hague which was filled with paperbacks. She and her friends would run through series after series, author after author.

Mm … oh… the Poirot series, Agatha Christie, and I read through Agatha Christie like I’d read through Enid Blyton as I was a girl and loved it. And eventually you realise they’re all the same don’t you? So you’d go onto something else. One friend, she read, oh the historical one, Georgette Heyer. So we went through all those. You know, that sort of reading. Again, because we’d not got a television and because you did have time; you’re in at nights, you’ve got children

‘And so you read,’ says our interviewer.

The other legacy of her time in Holland was a knowledge of nursery rhymes in Dutch. She learned these to prepare her two children for nursery school. ‘My Dutch is based on nursery rhymes.’

During her years as a mother of young children reading time was in short supply. Julia snatched time whenever and wherever she could, as she still does.

So, I read in bed at night, I read on the bus if I go into town on the bus which I often do. I never drive into town, I go on the bus. I’ve always got a book in my handbag, that’s why the size is more important than the content.

Julia connects the experience of reading, the process of writing and the role of prayer.

Reading takes you into different situations; it puts different questions, scenarios before you. … I think very often if you read, just as if you write something, if you have a problem and you write it down it helps you to sort it out. Which I think the role is that prayer has, if you put something before somebody else really it’s like writing it down, you’re seeing it for what it really is rather than from a subjective point of view in a way.

Nowadays, Julia is more selective than she used to be and some books fail the ‘Darnall test’.

If I’ve not got into a book by the time I’ve got to Handsworth Church I very often shut it. … It passed the test if it got me through Darnall. Very often I’ve said ‘no’ and closed it before I’ve got to Darnall.

Julia looks back with gratitude on the people and libraries that helped her find the books she loved. But she concludes that, though she would have found some way of reading, because of the person she is, it would have been harder without her Aunt Lil and her wonderful books, without the trips to the library with her mother.

I would still have gone because I’m me, so I would still have gone to do my research from school and I would still have joined the reading group and got great joy from it. I would have still read and got the books from the British Women’s Club in the Hague. But perhaps a bit later on. I was lucky, you know, I had a family that gave me books and encouraged me to read. And I do think it’s a great wealth to be able to read and enjoy literature.

You can find Julia’s interview here.

Arnold Bennett? Really? Most popular novelist?

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Val Hewson

Yes, that’s right. Arnold Bennett was the most popular ‘classical novelist’ with Sheffield Libraries borrowers in 1931. His competition included the likes of Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and Charles Dickens.

Arnold Bennett – Project_ Gutenberg_etext_13635.jpg

Librarians have long been numbered among those who worry about fiction. Are novels worthwhile or a frivolous waste of time? Do they have anything to teach us or are they doing us harm?

One of the justifications for the free public library movement of the 19^th century was self-improvement (of the working class in particular). Irritatingly, however, many borrowers persisted in preferring books of the imagination over books of information, leading librarians to denounce them.

From the hysterical:

…undoubtedly novels are the most dangerous literature of the age: they dissipate the attention; they appeal to the lazy feelings; sensation and novelty are all that are required from them … better would it be that these lending libraries should cease to exist than that they should disseminate evil influences. (J Taylor Kay, the librarian of Owen’s College Manchester, now the University of Manchester, in 1879).

To the patronising:

It may be that the library authorities of the future will maintain that the business of the library is to supply what the public wants to read irrespective of quality in much the same way that cinema proprietors supply films. (William Berwick Sayers, chief librarian, Croydon, in 1931).

But there were always public libraries which welcomed fiction. They took the view that good novels spoke to the human condition, and that popular fiction could refresh people. Sheffield was one of them. In 1931, the following article appeared in Sheffield’s Books and Readers bulletin:

Who is the most popular classical novelist?

Public Libraries are often criticised on the score of the amount of fiction issued by them. It is too readily assumed by these critics that fiction is all of one standard, and that a poor one, and to these Jeremiahs we point out the result of a recent test made of the popularity of twelve English novelists whose works may be definitely classed as literature. The Librarians at each of the Lending Libraries in the City were asked to report the number of books by certain authors available for loan and actually on loan to borrowers, with the following results:-

Author	Stock	On Loan	%
Barrie	127	69	54
Bennett	352	314	89
Conrad	261	176	67
Dickens	395	218	55
Galsworthy	288	203	71
Hardy	270	183	68
Kipling	266	132	50
Meredith	146	45	31
Scott	362	105	29
Stevenson	152	89	58
Tennyson*	135	34	25
Wells	532	337	63

An examination of these details reveals that there is no reason to feel ashamed of the quality of the fiction read in Sheffield. The high percentage for Bennett is perhaps too flattering. It may be partially explained by the fact that the test was made soon after his death, but allowing for this factor, his popularity is remarkable.

It is fascinating to review this list 85 years on.

They are all men. They are all white men. They are all British (yes, I’m counting Conrad, born in Poland, but naturalised in 1884). Eight out of the twelve were dead by 1931, and the four still alive were all well over 60 in 1931.
Literary reputations change over time. Not all of the twelve authors be considered ‘classical’ today. Only half of them appear in Robert McCrum’s 2015 list of the best 100 novels written in English (a list which generated criticism, as all such lists do – this one not least because male authors heavily outnumbered female).
The very fact of the test and the language used (‘no need to feel ashamed’) perhaps indicate the scale of the debate about fiction.
We don’t know much about the context. Which titles were borrowed? Out of the 532 books by H G Wells, say, were some more popular than others? The article speculates that Arnold Bennett’s popularity was due to his recent death. There may have been other contributory factors such as the author’s work appearing on the radio. Wells, for example, took part in three radio talks between 1929 and 1931. Then there are the borrowers themselves. Were there more men than women, older than younger people? Finally, who were the popular novelists (we can speculate that they included the likes of Edgar Wallace and Ethel M Dell) and how would they compare if included? We can’t answer any of these questions, although we do know that a survey about five years later showed 40 per cent of the fiction borrowed to be ‘classic and standard’ and the rest ‘semi-standard and popular’.

‘Prose fiction today’, wrote Sheffield’s City Librarian in the 1930s, ‘provides one of the most common means by which social, political, religious and other ideas are given to the people’, while action stories had a ‘definite, if limited, place… They give mental refreshment to highly intelligent and well-read library borrowers, they are “introductory readers” to [new borrowers] and … “escape” literature to [the] mentally and physically jaded.’

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

Blue Bird, by Seiko Kinoshita

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Val Hewson

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