Librarians’ Voices: Alysoun Bagguley: ‘I can’t imagine doing anything more interesting.’

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Val Hewson

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. (Dr Johnson)

Alysoun Bagguley, born in Nantwich in the 1940s, worked for Sheffield City Libraries for over 40 years. She became Law Librarian, Business Librarian and, finally, Science and Technology Librarian and deputy head of the Commerce Science and Technology Department. Alysoun is the first of our Librarians’ Voices interviews.

‘No two days were ever the same,’ Alysoun says, looking back on the Commercial Science and Technology library. ‘You’d be jumping from one thing to another as one query followed another!’ The fascination was that ‘you are constantly learning.’ One hundred and fifty enquiries a day was the norm for this library in a city famous for steelmaking. An opening like ‘I’ve got this steel …’ was common, but Alysoun and her colleagues were asked everything from the weight of a cubic foot of sand to the recipe for making rose-hip syrup. Law, business, chemistry, cookery, birds – anything might come up. A particular pleasure was searching the wonderful Botanical Illustration collection – hand-coloured Victorian, Edwardian and 20^th century books (demonstrating incidentally the skill of librarians in choosing books). Less happily, a man once came in to ask advice about his pet spider, a tarantula, which he produced from under his jumper, making nearby schoolgirls scream in fright.

Alysoun’s first post was in Woodseats Library in the early 1960s. The staff knew their customers by name and got to know the books they liked. The male librarian in charge appeared very ‘old school’, fierce and bluff, but his approach was to ‘give the customers what they like’. So while the prevailing professional wisdom was to exclude pulp and escapist fiction from municipal libraries, he bought romantic fiction, known to borrowers as ‘luverly books’. At Christmas, these satisfied borrowers thanked the staff with sweets and cakes. ‘Libraries were always friendly places,’ Alysoun remembers.

While at Woodseats, Alysoun went, on her day off, to classes for her library exams. In 1963, she started a sandwich course at Liverpool College of Commerce, alternating six-month periods of study and work over two and half years. Back in Sheffield, the jobs varied. Alysoun worked in the Highfield and Attercliffe branches and on the enquiries desk/telephone service in the Commercial Science and Technology library. Sometimes, she did ‘call booking’, that is, calling on people who failed to return books, to ask for the book and money. Light moments included finding a slice of bacon in one book and in another, a pay packet.

In 1967 Alysoun became, to her surprise, the Law Librarian responsible for the Assize Court Library (later the Crown Court Library). ‘The personnel officer suddenly said one week, “Next Monday you will be in the Law Library”’. She was ‘terrified. Coming from basic fiction to look after the barristers and judges …. But you just get on with it.’ She remembers barristers’ clerks commenting, in the era of the mini-skirt, when librarians climbed ladders to reach high shelves. ‘They certainly knew you were there.’

(Law became important to Alysoun in other ways. Under the National Subject Specialisation Scheme, Sheffield Libraries specialised in company law. ‘This changed my life,’ when she helped someone with his law degree dissertation. She refused a date with him. Then ‘a member of staff invited me to a party and who should happen to be there but my enquirer. Things went on from there and I am still married to him!’)

In time Alysoun became Sheffield’s first Business Librarian, and then Science and Technology Librarian. Her job included SINTO, the Sheffield Interchange Organisation. SINTO was started by Sheffield Libraries in the 1930s, to exchange information about steel and related subjects between local businesses and research and academic organisations. In 1970, when fire almost destroyed the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, Alysoun unearthed invaluable information about Robert Stephenson’s original, Victorian construction for Husband & Co, the Sheffield consulting engineers helping re-build the bridge. Sometimes representatives from the metal industries would ask to ‘see the gaffer’ and were surprised to discover a woman, but Alysoun is clear that it was all about teamwork. The librarians were under pressure all the time and ‘people buckled to and did it. It was a mutual support.’

Promoted to Science and Technology Librarian, Alysoun ran the World Metal Index – ‘a joy, an absolute joy.’ The Index is a unique collection of British and international standards and specifications, trade and technical material on ferrous and non-ferrous metals. Enquiries came from Euro-Disney, the Royal Naval Dockyards, the team trying to re-create the computers used in cracking the Enigma Code and many others. There was, Alysoun recalls, huge satisfaction in ‘solving something’. Originally, the Index was compiled by hand from original documents. Before retirement Alysoun successfully secured EU funding to digitise the service, in partnership with a research organisation and various businesses. ‘I can’t imagine doing anything more interesting.’

When she gave notice, Alysoun was asked to stay on but decided not to. She notes wryly: ‘There was one year when 100 years of experience walked out of the door and that is happening again.’ But ‘I think that I was very lucky to have worked in such an interesting and useful department when the City Libraries were considered to be one of the leaders in their field within the UK.’

Library memories from the Sheffield Forum (Part Three)

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

A third set of library memories from Sheffield Forum.

S talks about Hillsborough and Broomhill libraries:

Broomhill Library

As a child, I used Hillsborough Junior Library; I think the children’s librarian at one time was Maureen Raybould (?). The Junior library was/is a single storey extension built on to the side of the enormous old house which housed the adult library. I used to go to Library Club and loved both the story time and, when older, the quiet reading sessions.
In the dark winter afternoons, when the park gates were shut, the only access to the library was down a fenced walkway entered from Middlewood Road. During the 1940s and 50s (and maybe into the 60s?), there was an infant welfare clinic on the top floor of the adult library building.

When I left school in 1966, I started working for Sheffield City Libraries. My first appointment was to Broomhill Library on Taptonville Road. Bruce Bellamy was the librarian in charge. I liked helping out in the children’s library, Mary Wilde was the children’s librarian. Each week, classes of boys from Birkdale Preparatory School came to change their books. One part of the job I really enjoyed was “call-booking”; this was going out to the addresses of people who had not returned their library books in an attempt to get the books back. Sometimes we were successful, often not, the borrower had a call booking fee imposed on top of the fines, needless to say, we hardly ever got any money, even if we got the books back. The left tickets file back at the library was stuffed with wodges of tickets belonging to people with fines owing (people weren’t allowed to borrow more books until all outstanding fines had been paid).

SD recalls a small, private library:

I used to frequent the Southey Green Library and Central library. I remember a private library on Snig Hill, not sure of the name maybe Red Circle.

I had an uncle, Reg, who had an industrial accident. With the money he got in the settlement he purchased a mobile library from someone. It consisted of a pile of books and a wooden hand cart. I remember visiting my Aunt in the late 40’s and seeing all the books on shelves in the living room.

O knew the library at Highfield:

I used to go to Highfield Library in the early 60’s every Friday afternoon with my mum. The squeaky floor amused me more than the books. It must have made an impression somewhere as I could read before I started school, and am still an avid reader now.

Highfield Branch Library

AB worked as a library assistant:

I was a Library Assistant at Handsworth Library and Central Library from 1968 until 1973. They were interesting places to work, with lots of variety and lots going on ‘backstage.’ like hunting for reserved books, repairing books, processing new releases and shifting books round in the underground ‘stack,’ Plus plenty more. As well as the many branch Libraries and the mobile Library unit, I don’t know if most people realised the many different Libraries housed in the Central building. There used to be the Central Lending Library, and the Children’s Library, but there was also the Music Library, the Library of Science and Technology, The Business Library, Central Information Library, The Local History Library, the Reading Room, and the Picture Library up by Graves Art Gallery on the top floor. There was also the massive two storey underground ‘stack’ for keeping overflow and specialist books and vaults in the basement where the valuable and rare books were kept in their own little padlocked cells. It was such an extensive network that they even used to run tours round all the different departments. It was a brilliant service for the people of Sheffield. I love libraries, what they represent, and what they can do.

I am so disappointed that some branches and services have had to close in Sheffield. Even in this digital age there’s nothing like real books, real Librarians and real libraries.

What do you remember about libraries?

‘A really brawny old building’ – Sheffield’s Central Library

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Val Hewson

But I remember going with my mum to the main library. It was quite daunting because it’s a really brawny old building isn’t it? I think it’s a lovely building … (Judith G)

… when we used to go out in the afternoon we used to watch them building the new library. … we used to watch the cranes, the big stones. Very interesting that was. I was with that library right from the beginning. … I think it’s a fine building that is.’ (Ted L)

Here is Sheffield’s Grade II-listed Central Library and Graves Art Gallery, now over 80 years old. In his 1959 West Riding volume, Pevsner was concerned that the building was:

… in an incomprehensibly insignificant position. However, the plans for a civic centre, not yet in a final form at the time of writing, are to incorporate the building and provide a better context for it.

The 2004 Pevsner Architectural Guide for Sheffield says rather more. The ‘dignified Beaux-Arts’ Central Library and Graves Art Gallery, ‘steel-framed, faced with Portland stone, with giant Ionic pilasters and a high parapet wall around the top-lit galleries’ and ‘oak fittings with restrained Art Deco details’ were ‘intended to form one side of a grand civic square, first proposed in 1924 by Patrick Abercrombie’s Civic Survey as the setting for civic offices, law courts and a college’. This square, never built, was presumably where the Millennium Galleries and Winter Gardens are now. The result was that the library was ‘never really seen to best advantage’.

This is true enough, and the situation is made worse now by the brutality of Arundel Gate just below the library. This major thoroughfare cruelly – Pevsner might have said ‘incomprehensibly’ – exposes the back of the building. At one time, there was a plan for a ‘Peace’ mural by Edward Bawden here but sadly it came to nothing.

The library and gallery, designed by City Architect W G Davies in collaboration with Joseph Lamb, the City Librarian, were opened in July 1934 by the Duchess of York (better known to us as The Queen Mother).

They were a reason for civic pride. Local diarist G R Vine was among many invited to view them and wrote: ‘Magnificent! The arrangements are wonderful.’ There was considerable coverage in local papers, with the Sheffield Telegraph saying in a special feature that the building ‘resembles no other in the country’. .

Home of Sheffield’s first public library (public domain)

The music hall, looking like an illustration from Jane Austen (public domain – {{PD-US}} – published in the U.S. before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.)

The old and woefully inadequate central library had been on more or less the same site in Surrey Street, housed in a former Mechanics’ Institute and an old music hall next to it. Neither could be re-modelled or expanded. They perfectly illustrated the poor condition of Sheffield’s library service in the early 20th century. ‘Revoltingly dirty, both externally and internally’, with dust ‘nearly an inch thick with the accumulated filth of years’ and staff ‘long used to repression and neglect’, says the library’s official history (p.29). The new building, which in the end cost £141,700, symbolised the reformed, improved and expanded service and, less tangibly, cultural and educational aspirations. It housed lending, junior, reference, science and commercial libraries, a basement stack, study cubicles for students, rooms for archives and special collections, offices and staff facilities and a theatre/lecture hall.

The old one was cramped. There were smaller rooms and these lines of shelves up all close together. Quite a lot of people all mugged up sort of thing. When this new one opened everything was beautiful and spacious, art gallery upstairs, and I think they’ve got a theatre underneath … (Ted L)

Over the next 20 or so years, Sheffield City Libraries became nationally respected (for example, for its scientific and technological information exchange scheme for local businesses). Issues rose from 1.2 million in 1922-23 to 3.7 million in 1945-46. This was due largely to the imagination and expertise of the two City Librarians of the period, Richard J Gordon (1921 – 1927) and Joseph P Lamb (1927 – 1956) and a committed Council committee.

But all this success might never have happened as the Council was originally uneasy about this major project at an estimated cost of £95,000. Happily, one of their number, Alderman J G Graves, offered to help. John George Graves (1866–1945) was a pioneer of the mail order business and a local benefactor. The original plan had been for a library alone but in 1929 Graves offered a generous donation if a gallery was added:

… I am willing to defray the entire cost of the Art Gallery Section, and also to contribute £10,000 to the cost of the Free Library portion, making altogether a contribution of £30,000 …

Graves donated part of his art collection to the gallery, where it can still be viewed. The librarians and Council committee had doubts, as the gallery significantly cut down the library’s space, but it was too good an offer to miss, and so Sheffield got its new library.

Even so, the depression of the 1930s saw cuts in book and publicity budgets and issues fell accordingly for some years. The official history of Sheffield Libraries says sharply: ‘so much easier is it to destroy than to build’. (Words worth bearing in mind today perhaps.)

The library was fortunate in World War II. The worst air raids, known as the Sheffield Blitz, were on 12 and 15 December 1940* and there were huge fires across the city. The building was at one point ‘bracketed in lines of flame from the Moor and High Street’ (Raiders over Sheffield, the official history of the Sheffield Blitz). But the damage was relatively light – windows blown out and, more seriously, a long crack across the marble floor of the entrance hall, caused by a bomb in nearby Fitzalan Square.

Blitz damage, thought to be in Sheffield

Today, the building is now showing its age a little. Library services have changed a lot since the 1930s, and so layouts and systems have altered. Funding is still, of course, an issue – today more so than for many years. So it is interesting to reflect on those 1930s aspirations, revealed in the fine carvings by local stonemasons, Alfred and William Tory, on the outside of the building. As the 2004 Pevsner guide says:

… around the main entrance medallions representing Literature, Music, Drama, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Mathematics, Chemistry and Astronomy. High up on the splayed corner a figure of Knowledge holds the ankh and asp to represent the choice between good and evil.

And as a library user said:

As soon as I was eight, I was allowed to catch a bus into town and go to the Central Library which I thought was wonderful, just to have a thousand books rather than perhaps fifty to choose from. But I think that it was significant, the Central Library in Sheffield. I know a lot of people went to that rather than a local library. (Diane H)

* 660 people were killed, 1,500 injured and 40,000 made homeless.

The Reading Journey of John Y

Posted on January 8, 2016 by lizz

By Mary Grover

There was just room for a boy, his bed and a bookcase. In the early thirties there were few boys in Sheffield who were able to go to sleep looking at a full set of naval encyclopaedias and a set of hymn books. But John’s family had rich connections. His father had been an engine room artificer on the HMS Achilles so ‘he must have got some books somewhere to study or do some studying’. And then he returned to Hadfield’s works and spent his days grappling

with these huge castings and things like that, yet his hobby was repairing watches. So I’m thinking he had some, he must have had some reading knowledge about things like that.

And then there was the Wesleyan Reformed church on John’s mother’s side. Many of his mother’s relatives had been ministers. The book that John has read ‘more than anything’ is a book he came across, by accident, at a friend’s house: One Hundred Years of the Wesleyan Church, published in 1949, a book that contains an etching of his great grandfather.

Few of us have ancestors who made it into history books. Stories of his grandparents and meetings with Methodists from all over the country, gave John a fascination with the way events could be mapped and our personal journeys directed. The one book he would never be without is a ‘road map’.

But, having said … ‘a road map’, there are a lot of maps, or books that can act as maps if you want directions in life. And also which way not to go, you know.

Hymn books also served this mapping function, with the added advantage that the words remain when precious information has slipped away.

Why I like the hymn books, is because things like that you remember better, because my memory’s very bad now, so I can’t remember things. I remember this one verse in particular: ‘I am not skilled to understand/What God had willed and God has planned/I only know at God’s right hand/Stands one who is my saviour.’ And things like that you remember, and it makes you remember them. This is what I try to do now, to sort of stoke up my memory.

Buildings too ‘stoke up the memory’. The Sheffield church that John attended is now a mosque but when John enters one of Derbyshire’s two remaining Wesleyan Reform churches ‘the memories flood up there’.

Because John has memorised so many hymns, hymn books are not the ones he has at hand.

My favourite book, if you like, is the Derbyshire street guide, because this is Derbyshire, and you can find your way all around Derbyshire by this street guide. It’s the most well-thumbed book I’ve ever had, you know; too soon does it fall to pieces and I have to purchase a new one.

During the war John’s mother worked at The Book Room, the Wesleyan Reform Bookshop in Sheffield. It was to his mother that John feels he owes much of his absorption in history. He feels that his mother would have been a fine minister herself.

John met Meg, his wife, at the Manor Library where Meg had been one of the first librarians. I interviewed them together and he looked guiltily at Meg, as he recalls the use he made of the book case that stood at the foot of his bed when he was a boy. He uses it not only to connect with his relatives but to create a hiding place were they could not enter.

The other thing about the bookcase was one I probably shouldn’t admit to, because I know how Meg is, that I used to create a secret cupboard in here, in amongst the books. And I made a door and pasted the ends of books, the title pages, just to hide it and confuse you. Desecration I suppose it was, of a book.

Access John Y’s transcript and audio here

Delia’s Reading Journey

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Val Hewson

Delia was born on 5 October 1942 in Stannington, near Sheffield, where she grew up. She was educated at Stannington County Primary School and, after the 11-plus, at Ecclesfield Grammar. She married and moved to Rotherham, where she had her children. Later she went to night school to study literature.

I just used to live in the books, you know, I was always reading, well, as I am now.

Early on in her interview, Delia comments on the impact of books – of fiction – on a child’s imagination. As she talks, book after book, author after author, come back to her, often not thought of in years but now vivid and clear, like set pieces.

‘About the first book [Delia] can remember’ was a Christmas present about a ‘pig called Toby Twirl, and his friend, I think, was a penguin’. Delia is right. In these 1940s and ‘50s picture books by Sheila Hodgetts, Toby was a pig who looked rather like Rupert the Bear and had a penguin friend called Pete.

After Toby Delia learned to read. She particularly enjoyed books set in the countryside, all handed down from her elder sister:

The Twins at Hillside Farm … It was lovely, that. It was about two children, twins, living on a farm in some country place and it would tell things about milk separators and things like that. And there was one called Ranch on the Plain, which was about cowboys. And The Girl from Golden [sic]. Oh, and another one that I really liked they called it A Pair of Red Polls, and it was about two red-headed children who lived on a farm. But I couldn’t tell you any of the authors. But that was between … I’d say I read those between five and seven years old.

Delia says she ‘used to like these books about children who lived on farms for some reason’. Perhaps this was because the countryside was all she herself knew and so a lasting connection was made:

No, it was really countrified around Stannington in those days. I mean, not like it is now. It was very much … It seemed miles away from Sheffield, miles. You had to go on one bus to Malin Bridge, and then catch a tram into Sheffield town centre. So I think I must have been about five before I even went into the town centre.

And the interest in the countryside stayed with her. In her early 20s, Delia started reading Thomas Hardy, whom she still loves: ‘I read all his books because I liked the Dorset theme to them.’

As a teenager, Delia read a book called The Secret Shore, by Lillie Le Pla. Why she remembers this so well she doesn’t say, but 60 years later she can describe it in detail. The images or characters in some books simply take up permanent residence.

Oh, and I remember reading one by a lady called Lillie Le Pla and it was called The Secret Shore and I think it was probably about the Channel Islands, which is somewhere that I love now. I remember reading that one, it just came to me, it had a blue cloth back. And it was about some … It was about a girl who would … I’m not sure if her dad had died, but they lived in this house and she found this tunnel through the cliff and there was a gate in it. And that led up to this man’s house, and she used to go straight on and it led down to the secret shore. And I remember this man, I think he must’ve been some connection of her mother’s because he bought her a lovely watch for her birthday. I just remembered. And then I think in the end there was a happy ending where they got married, where he married her mother. I can’t remember all the circumstances, but it was about this shore that she used to go down to and be on her own and find shells and things, you know.

In her later teens, in the early 1960s, Delia was working her way through popular authors like Elizabeth Goudge, Anya Seton and Agatha Christie.

Anya Seton, it was Katherine, she wrote. Yes. I remember reading that and The Herb of Grace, Elizabeth Goudge. And Agatha Christie of course, I used to read all the detective books. I used to love detective books.

The mention of Anya Seton sparks something:

… Dragonwyck, that was another Anya Seton one. Have you heard of that one? It was a film as well, an old film. Foxfire, that was another one. And My Theodosia, that was another one. Yes.

Now that she was older, Delia started getting her books from the Central Library in Sheffield, going there with a friend after work. It was amazing, she agrees, to have that much choice after small school libraries and the like, and so she started with the familiar.

I made for the authors that I knew. I started with Elizabeth Goudge and Anya Seton in the school library and I sort of went for those books again when I went to the main library. And then with Agatha Christie as well, they’d always got the latest one. And I can remember one that I never read but was advertised in Sheffield Library. It was Frank Yerby – The Old Gods Laugh. And I used to see it advertised on the counter and, you know, I never borrowed that book and I still don’t know what it was about.

Asked about Frank Yerby, Delia admits she knows nothing about him. But the image of his book – Sheffield Libraries always did lots of displays – has for some reason stayed with her, buried deep in her memory, and has been retrieved during the interview. ‘Came back to me when I was talking to you, you know, about Sheffield Library. I just remember that one.’ For the record, Frank Yerby (1916-1991) was the first African-American writer to become a millionaire and the first to have a book, The Foxes of Harrow, made into a movie. Here is a review of The Old Gods Laugh, which is not encouraging. Perhaps it is best that Delia never read it.

A little later, reading came to mean respite, with Delia borrowing books from the library in Rotherham where she now lived:

No, I’ve never dropped off reading because in 1963 I got married and immediately became pregnant with my first child and books were a wonderful escape from housework and crying babies.

The urge to read became an urge to study. When she had had all her children, Delia ‘went to night school for English Literature’ and has now read widely among classics and older novels. ‘Yes, I’ve read most of those classic ones.’ She readily lists: Charles Dickens (‘I liked David Copperfield’), Mrs Henry Wood (‘Victorian melodrama-type thing’), Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Gaskell, Evelyn Waugh (‘Oh, Evelyn Waugh, I love those’), Iris Murdoch (‘I can’t get on with [her]’), Gustave Flaubert, Anthony Trollope, Arnold Bennett, the Brontës (‘I liked Jane Eyre’) and Jane Austen.

But – another impression – school almost destroyed Jane Austen for Delia (as it has other authors for other people).

Pride and Prejudice we had to do at school … We did it for O level. And, uh, the way you do it at school, you’re bored to tears by it, absolutely bored to tears by it. … Yes, we had to go back and forth over it and I got fed up with it. But I’ve read it since and enjoyed it. I’ve read all the others as well.

Pride and Prejudice: Mr Collins proposes

At one point in the interview, Delia is asked:

‘Were you what they describe as a bookworm? Did you immediately take to it?’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ she replies, ‘I was one of the first in the class to do what they called silent reading. So once I’d mastered silent reading, I just never stopped.’

The Reading of Fiction (Sheffield City Libraries, 80th Annual Report, 1936-37)

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Val Hewson

We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the thought of our day. (Joseph Conrad, 1924)

The benefits of reading novels (and even of reading in general) have long been debated. For some fiction is a clear waste of time, but for others an education, an entertainment, an escape. There are people who have never touched a novel, at least since leaving school, and there are people who always have at least one close at hand.

For Reading Sheffield, we asked our interviewees if they were ever made to feel guilty about reading. The majority said no, with many talking about encouragement from parents and teachers. But some became readers against the odds:

If I picked a book up to read she’d say, ‘Put that down and come and help me do so-and-so. You’re wasting your time and my time’. You know. So she’d always find me a job to do. (Doreen Gill)

‘Did anyone make you feel that reading was a waste of time?’ ‘Uh, yeah, I think so. My mum was a very practical person, she were always busy doing something.’ (Dorothy Norbury)

And some liked reading but preferred fact to fiction:

I’ve always preferred fact over fiction. Fiction is, in my opinion, very nice and you can lose yourself in fiction, but at the end of the day, you come back to fact and it’s nice to read about people who have started and had an influence on the world one way or another, whether they’re famous or not so famous. (Peter Mason)

I liked History – I’ve always slightly thought that novels are a waste of time in that … I suppose, indirectly, you learn things but … I got more out of biographies and history books. (Peter B)

In Sheffield, the City Librarian, J P Lamb, and the Council’s Libraries, Art Galleries and Museums Committee had their say about reading novels in the annual report for 1936-37.

There are many misunderstandings about the place of prose fiction in the work of a public library, and it is felt that an examination of some of them might suitably be made in this report. Prose fiction today provides one of the most common means by which social, political, religious, and other ideas and beliefs are given to the people. The novel also offers a suitable framework for the presentation of history, and there are many cases of books issued during the past few years which have given such clear and vivid pictures of political and social events that they are used as historical and social source books. Indeed, so valuable is the novel form for work of this kind that many biographies are now written in a style which makes it difficult to decide whether they should be classed as biography or fiction. Even the least pretentious novel gives ideas and mental pictures to the reader, and to this extent allows him to project his mind beyond his limited environment. If, as some people seem to wish us to believe, the reading of novels is not a good thing, this should surely also be true of other imaginative literary forms such as poetry, drama, and essays. But as all educational institutions, particularly those concerned with higher education, give considerable time in their curricula to attempts to train young people in the appreciation and understanding of imaginative works in all these forms, it would appear that these are considered by educationists to be an important part of the process of education. It is difficult then, to see why the intellectual value of the issue of fiction from libraries should not be looked upon as equal, if not superior, to much of what is classed as non-fiction.

It may be that those who decry the issue of fiction believe that public libraries issue only the more popular type. A test of this was recently made in the Central Lending Library. All the fiction stock was divided into two groups – 1. Classic and standard literature; 2. Semi-standard and popular; – and a test of issues was made on this basis. No less than 41.38 per cent. of the fiction issued from this library was found to be in the first group. If the system of classification were based on the quality instead of the form of such books, these issues would have been recorded in the literature class. The division of fiction into such groups is by no means an easy task, and probably no two persons would agree about the placing of certain modern writers. The semi-standard and popular group includes such novelists as H. E. Bates, Hans Fallada, Winifred Holtby and G. B. Stern. The quality of the work of some of the writers included in this group might be considered by some critics to be high enough to justify their inclusion among the standard writers. H. E. Bates, for example, steadily gains in reputation among discerning people, and his writings already have a high place in the regard of good judges of literature.

Despite the difficulties attendant on any attempted classification of values in the writing of novels, it is felt that this experiment has been worth while because it has made possible an authoritative statement of a fact already known to the [Council] Committee – that a very considerable proportion (approaching 50 per cent.) of the fiction issued from the libraries is definitely of a high standard. It should not be assumed, however, that the remaining items are of poor quality. The semi-standard group includes, in addition to those mentioned above, scores of modern writers of considerable literary gifts – Vera Brittain, Ethel Mannin, Russell Green, P. Bottome, E. Boileau and W. Greenwood – for example. There are, of course, works by writers of action and problem stories in this group. These books have a definite, if limited, place in the library organisation. They give mental refreshment to highly intelligent and well-read library borrowers, they are “introductory readers” to those newly finding an interest in reading, and they are “escape” literature to those who are mentally and physically jaded. They widen vocabulary, extend horizons, stimulate ideas, and often add factual knowledge, and there is a good deal to be said for a well-known lecturer’s remarks at a library lecture, that “even Edgar Wallace may be discovered and hailed by a literary critic of 100 years hence as having possessed gifts of characterisation, humour, and literary skill which give him a secure place in the literary text-books of the future.”

I have not (yet) discovered what prompted this outburst in an official report. Had some august person expressed disquiet in the national press perhaps? Or had a local councillor muttered something after finding novel-reading in his household? Or was there research showing that fiction was generally a bad thing? (At all events, these all sound like openings for novels to me.)

Whatever the reasons behind it, the statement of support is fascinating for:

its conclusions that (i) ‘the intellectual value of … fiction from libraries [is] equal, if not superior, to much of what is classed as non-fiction’; and (ii) novels which are not, in the terms used here, ‘classic’ or ‘standard’ can still have considerable merit and may one day be acclaimed
the experiment dividing the fiction stock into classic/standard and semi-standard/popular. 41.38 per cent of fiction issued came from the first group, suggesting a taste among ordinary readers for great literature (or at least a willingness to try it). But we have no details of this experiment, to indicate scale etc. A librarian friend, by the way, says that similar experiments have been attempted – something else to look up…
the assessment of authors of the day as ‘semi-standard’. Perhaps now we would say ‘middlebrow’. Who is included, how selected and how viewed today (if at all) are all intriguing:

H E Bates, described here as ‘steadily [gaining] in reputation among discerning people’ but perhaps best known now for television’s Ma and Pop Larkin

Hans Fallada, the German novelist who is enjoying a revival for novels such as Alone in Berlin and The Drinker but who also attracts controversy for staying in Nazi Germany

Winifred Holtby, the Yorkshire writer whose most famous novel is South Riding. She has been praised by our Reading Sheffield interviewees for describing a Yorkshire they recognise

G B Stern, whose novels were often apparently partly autobiographical. Try The Matriarch

Vera Brittain: her novels are now forgotten but the non-fiction Testament of Youth is a classic. She gave one of Sheffield’s ‘Celebrity Lectures’, on ‘The World Today’, on 13 February 1936, in what is now called the Library Theatre, to an audience of 470

Ethel Mannin, the novelist and travel writer. Perhaps she came to mind because on 16 November 1936 she had visited Sheffield to open the local exhibition for Sheffield Book Week

Russell Green: perhaps the least remembered of all this list, he wrote several novels and edited Coterie and New Coterie, early 20^th century journals championing modernist poetry

Phyllis Bottome, best known now for the novel, The Mortal Storm. This was filmed in 1940, with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and is an early anti-Nazi film

Ethel Boileau, a favourite of the mother of one of our interviewees, Sir Norman Adsetts. Furrowed Middlebrow quotes some reviews and adverts here, including this for The Map of Days: ‘Romance novel of a modern Lancelot, a giant of a soldier, an ardent lover—destined to live and love greatly, and to have a strange power over women. Includes elements of second sight, mysticism, and the First World War.’

Walter Greenwood, author of Love on the Dole (1932) about working-class life in Salford in the early 20^th Working class life in Sheffield was probably not much different.

Edgar Wallace, the prolific writer of thrillers including the Four Just Men and Mr J G Reeder series. Seventy-eight years after the annual report (‘even Edgar Wallace may be discovered and hailed by a literary critic of 100 years hence’), Edgar Wallace is remembered but not yet celebrated.

Alma’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Val Hewson

Alma was born in Rotherham, near Sheffield, in 1928, and lived there until she married around 1950 and moved to Sheffield. She trained at an art school and then, fulfilling an ambition, went to teacher training college.

We always ask our interviewees how reading changed their lives. A question which some, including Alma, find difficult to answer. In Alma’s case, it may in part be because reading has been such an important part of her life. At first Alma says:

It hasn’t … changed? Now that’s a big question and I’m going to need time to think about that … I’ve just loved reading. I’ve just loved reading and whatever book I read it becomes part of me really, I think. But I can’t think of anything it has specifically changed.

Alma was born into a working-class family in Rotherham in 1928 and grew up in the town. She cannot remember learning to read or being read to as a child, but her family set store by reading. There were books in the house, along with comics, magazines and newspapers.

Well, I had this lovely aunty Alma who bought me a Peter Pan book … and I wanted to read it and I just read it! So I must have been able to read. And I can remember loving that book because of the tissue paper pictures. So that was my very first book … I had another auntie, Rosie, who bought me another present but it was a Dickens book and I didn’t really like that one, I didn’t like that one. But I loved Peter Pan, I remember that.

We had books in the house! We had books in the house. We had a bookcase! … Well there was a set of Wonderland of Knowledge books which we used to get down and look at those. I can remember looking at those. There was a bound copy of Shakespeare’s plays which I remember had sort of vellum covers, we looked at that. A book I did love, it was called A Century of Humour and that was full of short stories, short humorous stories. I remember reading that, I do remember that.

Dad had a lot of political books. They were all bound with brown paper, they were … we didn’t touch his books … Oh he [read them], yes, he was very politically-minded.

I had a Chips comic every week … which I must have read from cover to cover. And we [had] a Picture Post every Friday and I used to sit on the settee, I remember looking at pictures – I loved the Picture Post we had on a Friday and there was a daily newspaper but I don’t remember reading that. It was a News Chronicle. So that was my reading at home.

When she was older, Alma turned to the local library.

So off I went to Rotherham Library which I loved going to. It was like a cathedral. It was all hushed and quiet and wooden floors and everything cleaning [sic] and polished and nobody spoke to you and all the books were still hard-backed books, you know, with the covers, no fancy covers like they are today. And I loved it …

Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables (Credit: Library and Archives Canada / C-011299)

In those days Alma says she dreamed of being a librarian. She easily recalls books she enjoyed, like Anne of Green Gables (‘I loved Anne of Green Gables’), the Pollyanna books and J B Priestley. His novel The Good Companions was a particular favourite:

The best book, the best book which I read over and over again … I did love that. In fact I read it so much that when I travelled to school on the bus I used to look at people on the bus and fit them into the characters.

Years later, Alma did the same with Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood: ‘that one would be that one, and that one would be that one’.

Given this habit of casting characters, it is perhaps not surprising that Alma enjoyed reading plays too – she mentions Priestley and George Bernard Shaw. Later this led to performing. ‘I loved the plays and I was in a drama society that I acted in some plays. I love plays, yes.’ She even had a go at writing her own play based on Jane Eyre:

I can remember writing a play, the one where she made her stand on a chair because she went out in the rain walking around a yard or something. I can’t remember it very well but I do remember that.

Education was a mixed experience for Alma. From the age of nine, she went to Rotherham Central School (a ‘very good school’) and enjoyed it. Her ‘really wonderful’ English teachers ‘introduced us to lots of poetry: Walter De La Mare, John Masefield’. But Alma failed her 11+ exam and had to leave at the age of 14. The usual option was a job but Alma chose – on impulse – to do something else:

There were three things you could do. You could go and work in an office … Or you could go to be a nurse … and, as my aunties had all been nurses, they all thought I was going to be a nurse. Or you could go and apply for an art school. Now I’d got these three choices. Now, as my best friend was going to an art school, I decided I would go to an art school so I went for the interview and I got accepted to go to art school for two years. So from 14 to 16 I was at Rotherham Art School.

Alma says that she was not particularly good at drawing but she was learning and loved it, and she was able to continue her reading in the nearby library. After two ‘lovely’ years, it was time to leave again. A teacher asked Alma what she wanted to do.

‘Well really I want to be a teacher.’ I’d always wanted to be a teacher and the fact [was] that I had failed my 11+ and I hadn’t got to high school and I hadn’t been able to do my School Certificate or anything. I thought that had gone. I said, ‘I really always wanted to be a teacher,’ and to my surprise he said, ‘But you still can.’ And it was just as if a light had gone in my world; I thought it was wonderful! Wow, I could be a teacher!

Alma could transfer to Rotherham High School, but she would have to get her School Certificate in a year. ‘And I ran home. I remember running home to my parents and saying, “I can go. I can be a teacher! I can go to the high school!”’

The new school was daunting at first, but Alma seems to have relished the challenge.

I was the only girl in the whole school who hadn’t got a uniform. Of course, it didn’t matter. I did have to go for an interview and I did have to do an English test and a maths test but, because the art school used to do maths one morning and English one morning, I was ok with that and so I got in. So I was in with all these very clever girls, feeling very, very much the odd one out but taking in every word and writing everything and learning like goodness-knows-what and, when we did have the exam, I passed with flying colours. I did. I got a distinction in everything. I don’t know why but I did.

When Alma wonders why she succeeded, is it fanciful to think that, alongside good teaching and her own determination, her reading habit had helped? Here surely is proof of the power of libraries.

So Alma went to teacher training college, with the enthusiastic support of her family (‘they backed me a hundred per cent … and I know it was a hardship’).

Despite the demands of college, reading for pleasure continued. ‘When I was at home, I can remember reading in bed a lot.’ All this seems to have helped Alma set standards without realising it:

What I can remember is going to my Grandma’s and seeing a little magazine called Peg’s Paper and it was a gaudy cover of a girl hiding behind a door or something and I thought, ‘What’s that?’ and I started reading it, little short stories, and I thought, ‘This is rubbish’. I never looked at it again, I don’t know who got it, who was having this Peg’s Paper. I thought I’m not wasting my time reading that rubbish.

Authors she enjoyed include: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Jerome K Jerome, Dylan Thomas, T S Eliot and Francis Brett Young. Of these, Jerome K Jerome still has a special place in her affections: ‘I still like Three Men in a Boat and, if I’m feeling a bit miserable, I read Three Men in a Boat.’

Jerome Klapka Jerome, published by Ogden’s. Cigarette card, published circa 1894-1907. 2 1/4 in. x 1 3/8 in. (56 mm x 36 mm) overall. Given by Terence Pepper, 2012. Photographs Collection NPG x136534

Marriage in 1950 changed Alma’s reading habits. At first, she read less, as she was living with her in-laws who were not readers, and the move to Sheffield meant starting anew in a new library (‘it was very big and I didn’t like it so I didn’t go’). But when they got their own house in 1952, Alma and her husband both read. Alma started reading real-life adventure like Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki because her husband liked them, and she also remembers biographies, books about ballet which interested her, and classic detective fiction by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham.

And so to the question about reading changing lives.

It hasn’t … changed? Now that’s a big question and I’m going to need time to think about that … I’ve just loved reading. I’ve just loved reading and whatever book I read it becomes part of me really, I think. But I can’t think of anything it has specifically changed.

But perhaps it fed your imagination, suggests the interviewer. And Alma nails it.

It has fed my imagination, yes. I know very well that I couldn’t live without books. That’s a dead cert. I need books, yes.

by Val Hewson

Access Alma’s transcript and audio here.

‘Children Keep Author Writing’ (Sheffield Telegraph, 10 April 1951)

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Val Hewson

Kathleen Fidler (image by courtesy of her niece)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Val Hewson

Access Sheila Edwards’ transcript and audio here.

The Reading Journey of Norman Adsetts

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

Norman was born in 1931.

He was interviewed by Mary Grover on the 17th April 2014.

Though Norman was born in Manchester his father was from Sheffield and returned when Norman was four years old. In 1935 he left his job in London as a highly successful salesman of office equipment to open a sweet shop at the bottom of Derbyshire Lane. Attached to the sweet shop was Abbetts’ Library, the kind of of library of popular fiction, often known as a ‘twopenny library’.

Ronald Batty’s superb guide, How to Run a Twopenny Library, was to come out three years later, in 1938, but Norman’s father would have endorsed Batty’s advice that a twopenny library seldom paid its way except as a ‘sideline to another business’. And shrewd salesman that he was, Mr Adsetts had found a perfect pitch for the library attached to his sweetshop. The terraced houses of Meersbook, with their modest gardens, were the other end of town from the mammoth steel works which had created the industrial city of Sheffield. The families that lived in Meersbrook probably had a little more income to spare than those who lived in the more densely packed and smokier areas on the east and north of Sheffield. Enough to cover a weekly payment of 2d (53p in today’s money) to ensure a constant supply of the kind of popular fiction insufficiently improving to pass muster on the shelves of the municipal libraries. W. H. Smith filled the shelves of Mr Adsetts’ library changing the stock regularly.

It was in this library, surrounded by delectably long runs of Nat Gould, Zane Grey and Ethel Boileau (a favourite of his mother’s), that the four year old Norman learned to read and to acquire his life-long passion for reading of every kind. He cannot remember reading any children’s books or indeed being taught to read.

We lived over the shop and so I would be able to go down to the shop and the shelves were in the corner of the shop and I would simply take whatever was available. I read everything. I had a completely untutored and uncritical choice of reading and I have still got a few books which have the frontispiece of the library. The ones that I have, the ones I remember reading first were by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

These were the Martian series by Burroughs, science fiction that would have been written for the young. But Norman read indiscriminately amongst much more serious authors as well. Norman is unique amongst our readers in having sought out early editions of the novels he read as a child recreating the shelves which towered above him as a child. Norman’s study is today lined with 1930s editions of Sexton Blake, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other treasures. He holds out one with particular care.

The book that had the most impact on me was this one; it is called Cities of Refuge. I notice from this copy which I bought later that it first came out in 1937 so it must have been one of the first books to be put into the library; Cities of Refuge is by a man called Sir Phillip Gibbs who had been a famous war correspondent and a pretty prolific writer of romance and adventure stories built around the conditions of the time. And I didn’t know from Adam what it was all about but I read it with fascination. It was all about the lives of a group of aristocrats from Russia who were displaced by the revolution and then wandered across the world living in various ‘cities of refuge’ where they were welcomed or thrown out, found work or starved.

Though the book was in many ways ‘beyond’ the little seven year old who read it, it shaped him and brought home the fragility of the world which was, in 1938, about to be plunged into another apocalyptic struggle.

That was a grown up book. It was grown up in all kinds of ways. There was sex in it, there was murder and killing in it. There was everything in it, most of which I didn’t understand but I read it and shared in the sadness of it all.

But there were yards of less harrowing tales. Though Norman’s father had had to leave school at eleven and had not had as much schooling as his mother, he obviously had an infectious delight in narrative and the power of the word which served him well as a salesman of every sort. He put these gifts to work in entertaining his two children, making up stories at bedtime which derived probably from the films of westerns that he had seen rather than the volumes of Zane Grey that his son was discovering on his shelves. However, Norman’s passion for reading was a solitary one.

My father had some understanding but he didn’t share my obsession. He was not a big reader at all. He had difficulty in reading a book because he hadn’t had either the training or the opportunity.

Because of the solitary nature of his reading adventures, Norman often heard in his head words that were quite different from those the author intended.

I would read words that I didn’t know how to pronounce but I would gradually work out what they meant. There was a word ‘avalanche’ which I never, not till five or six years later, knew how to pronounce. In my mind I used to call it ‘avahlahis’

By the time Norman had won his scholarship place at King Edward VII School, he had already galloped through most of the English novels that the school introduced him to. However, the Latin and Greek classics were a revelation.

When he left school in 1949, having gained a place to study biochemistry at Oxford, Norman had a ten week stretch of time in which he thought he would extend his reading further and revisit old favourites. He read out the list of the twenty five books he had read in those ten weeks.

The first was The Red Prussian, which was a remaindered biography of Karl Marx which I picked up from Boots: wonderful book, I have still got it; then Pattern of Soviet Domination, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, whatever. Introduction to Comparative Biochemistry; The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell; for a school trip to Denmark I read a guidebook; Half a Million Tramps by W.A. Gape; The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck; The Man who was Thursday by Chesterton; The Loved Ones by Evelyn Waugh; Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester; Chad Hannah by Edmunds; The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald; Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim; Prester John by John Buchan; Happy Return by C. S. Forester; They Found Atlantis by Dennis Wheatley; The Commodore by C. S. Forester; Prince of the Captivity by John Buchan; The Saint in Miami by Leslie Charteris; Good Companions by J. B. Priestley; Jenny Villiers by J. B. Priestley; Let the People Sing by J. B. Priestley; All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque; The Story of St. Michel by Axel Munthe and Behind the Curtain by Phillip Gibbs.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that once the boy arrived in Oxford he decided to change from bio-chemistry to Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Nor is it surprising that he became one of the city’s leading business men, endowing the university library in the centre of Sheffield that now bears his name.

by Mary Grover

Access Sir Norman Adsetts’ transcript and audio here

Jocelyn’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Val Hewson

Jocelyn Wilson was born in Sheffield in 1926. She was educated, in wartime, at boarding school in Kent and was evacuated to Cornwall. In 1948 Jocelyn married and in time had children. In the 1970s and ‘80s she was a social worker.

‘Did your parents ever say, “Don’t waste your time reading a novel”?’ ‘Oh no, never. Nobody ever said that.’

How do we choose books? How do we decide what to read? And how do we judge our choices?

Looking at her interview, you feel that Jocelyn W, who read widely and had excellent recall, was confident in her opinions and happy to defend them. The quality of books, her own and others’ perceptions and the value of reading all lie just beneath the surface of her story.

Jocelyn was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Sheffield in 1926. Her first books were typical for that background and period – Alice in Wonderland, The Enchanted Forest, Cecily M Barker’s Flower Fairies and other fairy stories. Predictably, they were chosen by her mother and a ‘very dear nanny who was into reading herself’. Later, Jocelyn’s older sister helped her find books too. Nanny and Jocelyn’s parents all read aloud to the children. Jocelyn didn’t say so directly, but her first books seemed to have all the impact any parent could have hoped for: Jocelyn described them as stories ‘that made your imagination race’ and remembered them clearly 80 years later. The Flower Fairies for example, she said, were ‘part of one’s history’.

After this promising start, things went less well. Books were in short supply in Jocelyn’s life. At first this was because her family lived ‘on the fringes’ of Sheffield and ‘it was quite a journey to go anywhere where there were books to be lent’. Then World War II intervened and Jocelyn, by now at boarding school, found herself being evacuated to remote Cornwall.

And I remember after a birthday having a book token and having great difficulty in going to a bookshop in Newquay, Cornwall, to find something to buy. And in the end The Heir of Redclyffe. I can’t remember who wrote it but it was a pretty frantic book, I remember. But there was so little choice. And I think that’s one of the things we forget now ‘cos there are so many books of every kind, good and bad. And then there were very, very few.

This early experience seems to have had a lasting effect. Jocelyn said:

But of course it’s difficult for people nowadays to realise how few books came out and they were rare beasts and you waited for your birthday to get a copy. Now there’s so much; you go to a bookshop and I’m overwhelmed. I can hardly ever choose anything ‘cos there’s too much to choose from and it’s difficult to find what you really want.

Another effect of this shortage was that Jocelyn ended up reading what was available – the books on the family bookshelves – just because they were there. She considered herself lucky. ‘I think people forget now that it was like that. You could be in a situation where you hadn’t anything new to read. It seems incredible now, doesn’t it?’

Jocelyn’s family continued to influence her choices and judgments. Her mother was ‘interested in books. And so there was a good wide variety of classics’. Jocelyn remembered reading, for example, Precious Bane and Mary Webb’s other novels. ‘My mother was very sensible; she never said, ‘Don’t’. She was very good; she was highly intelligent and we valued what she thought.’ (Jocelyn’s father tried too, but was rather less successful: suggestions like G A Henty were rejected as ‘boy’s own stuff’.)

School was the next big influence on Jocelyn, and it was there that her own judgment began to emerge.

… I did a project on keeping a notebook of all the things I’d read … I know that it was criticised by the person who taught English at school, saying, ‘I can’t think why you read all this rubbish when you’re capable of reading something so much better.’ You see, it had gone through the whole range. But that was important in order to learn what was rubbish and what wasn’t.

What was this ‘whole range’ that formed Jocelyn’s taste? Over the years, there were:

classics like Jane Austen (‘she writes with such a deft touch’)
literary fiction, as we might say today, with authors like Marghanita Laski (Little Boy Lost ‘tore everybody’s heart to pieces’) and Rumer Godden (‘very delicate in her writing, sensitive and she touched one’s heart’)
popular, middlebrow authors of the day: Nevil Shute (‘wonderfully good stories’); Daphne du Maurier (‘anything she wrote was grist to the mill’); Queens of Crime like Dorothy L Sayers and adventure writers like John Buchan; Mazo de la Roche (whose Jalna books were the ‘original soap opera’)
‘rubbish’ like ‘Oh Baroness Orczy and that sort of thing, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Oh good old rubbish, that’.

Rubbish was not, however, as clear-cut as it might seem. For one thing, Jocelyn was becoming confident enough to reject other people’s opinions:

Oh yes, but I don’t count [Georgette Heyer] as rubbish … Of course she was a great storyteller, wasn’t she? And of course historically very accurate. There were things to praise about her. Even though the stories were romantic fiction in the very highest level.

And sometimes rubbish could be the thing: ‘And if you’re not feeling very well, rubbish is what you want!’ If it was what you needed, could it be rubbish?

What Jocelyn would not accept was the badly or carelessly written.

I think that now I can only read things that aren’t badly written. Sloppiness is what really gets me; and I think a lot of writers nowadays are very sloppy; they don’t do their research properly.

So Jocelyn developed her approach: reading widely; making her own assessments but open to influence; seeking out high quality but understanding the worth and pleasure in lower quality. This seemed to stand Jocelyn in good stead throughout her life.

… I didn’t read George Eliot until much later on; I came to ‘Middlemarch’ as a grown-up person. It’s a wonderful book, isn’t it? They’re very raw, some of those books by George Eliot.

…I still can read Arthur Ransome books. When I was laid low with a back injury two years ago. the thing I chose to read was Winter Holiday and I loved it and it took me back. It’s well-written and that’s the key, isn’t it?

I [chose Dracula for book group] and the men sort of withdrew in horror. A lot of them wouldn’t read it. It was quite interesting. The women mostly did. But I think it’s a marvelous book. I keep turning the pages to find out what’s next. I can’t believe it … It’s not even particularly well-written; it’s a most ridiculous story. So why are we fascinated with Dracula? I’m jolly glad I read it. [But the men] weren’t going to waste their time reading ‘rubbish’ … I said, ‘I know it’s rubbish.’