Library memories from the Sheffield Forum (Part Two)

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Val Hewson

Here are more memories of local libraries from the online Sheffield Forum.

L recalls:

Courtesy Picture Sheffield

When I worked at Brown Bayley’s on Leeds road, Attercliffe in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I used Attercliffe library all the time. I remember on one occasion I wanted to reserve a book called “Sir you *******”. Feeling a little awkward at asking for the book, I whispered the title and author to the librarian. Unknown to me the librarian was a little bit hard of hearing and asked me to repeat the title again. I raised my voice a little and repeated the request, again she asked me to repeat the title of the book. I did so in a slightly higher voice ( but still quite low). She suddenly realised what I had said and almost shouted back at me ” Sir you *******” yes we do have it but it is out at the moment so do you want to reserve it?. The library was quite busy at the time and everyone turned round to see who was ordering a book with such a title.

If you still haven’t read the book, replies someone else, it’s available via Abebooks.

B remembers the library’s own reading clubs:

I remember Hillsborough Junior Library in the late 40s. They had a reading club.Which I seem to remember was run outside normal opening hours. The perk of this was that you could get first chance of reading any new books that had arrived. Which was a rare event at that time. The downside was you could only read them in the library, not allowed to take them home.

Yes, in the 1950s it was on Wednesday evenings – I think it was called the “Reader’s Circle”. (says H)

Hillsborough Library, with the children’s library extension

TW went to Walkley Library:

Walkley Library

Whilst at St Mary’s School, Walkley, in the mid 1960s, we used to gather in pairs just after lunch with the oldest at the front (add the year group of each child in the pair), and then be walked along South Road, past all the shops, until we reached Walkley Library on the end. We then had to replace our library books from the children’s section. Sometimes it was difficult to choose a new one in the time. I remember liking: the Cherrys (by William Matthew Scott), the Adventure Series (by Enid Blyton); Secret Seven (by Enid Blyton); Famous Five (by Enid Blyton); Jennings (by Anthony Buckeridge); Just William (by Richmal Crompton), Biggles (by W. E. Johns) and probably many more. At least one time we spent longer in the library (I think it was also over several weeks) and researched a topic. I chose (or was given) “History of Railways” as I thought at that time that my great great great grandfather (who was called Rockett) drove Stephenson’s Rocket when it won the Rainhill Trials. I remember taking great care to colour in a picture that I had drawn of the Rocket.

KK remembers fun at Firth Park Library:

Oh dear! I might be lowering the tone, but…I lived on Firth Park Avenue from 1960 age 5 to 10, don’t recall what age I was but, I loved to go in Firth Park library and play hide and seek around the great big bookcases, spent what seemed like hours in there and had lots of shushing and tutting from the librarians and stiffling the giggles made it even funnier. At age 60, I still immediately see the hide and seek potential in most big or ornate buildings I go into, before I see the architectural beauty of the place!!

More serious response to your question…I do remember paying the fine for late return and it going into the triangle shaped collection box on the high counter. I used to feel like a mini criminal. Also the sound of the date stamping in the book and the flicking through of the cards to put your library ticket into the index system. Hide and seek anyone? Lol

What are your memories of libraries in Sheffield? Use the Comments box to let us know.

Shirley Ellins’ Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

One of Shirley’s first memories of books begins at floor level – with the small, wooden bookshelf in the dining room which contained her mother’s library books. There were just 4 or 5 novels, whose titles she spelled out when she had learned to read (before she was 6 in 1942), but whose contents she ignored. These library books ‘came and went’, and Shirley didn’t open them. Much more to her taste was The House at Pooh Corner which she remembers – again from the floor – where she fell, helpless with laughter, from her miniature chair as her mother read to her.

But there are many bookshelves in Shirley’s reading journey. The three shelves of the bookcase in the family living room contained books belonging to both her parents, ‘our personal books’, some of which she read – reference works like Arthur Mee’s Thousand Heroes, biography like Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson, Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, her mother’s complete Shakespeare, won from Crookesmoor School for ‘Progress’, and her parents’ tune books from the Methodist church. As she grew older, her own books – given to her by family and friends at birthdays and Christmas – were added to these shelves, for reading was a downstairs activity, not allowed in her bedroom, which was for sleeping – ‘lights off’.

‘Half a recollection of a bookshelf in a classroom’ in Shirley’s junior school reveals The Pigeons of Leyden, a historical novel about the siege of Leiden, a book which inspired her at a very young age to become a history teacher. Then there were trips every Saturday by the ‘ladies of the household’ – Shirley, her mother and grandmother – to Sheffield’s Central Library, where the children’s and adult libraries provided Shirley with shelves of Biggles, Arthur Ransome and John Buchan, and the historical novels of G. K. Henty, D. K. Broster, and the huge output of Baroness Orczy.

At the same time, a whole room of bookshelves gave her pleasure at her secondary school – High Storrs School – where she would go to the school library and ‘sit and read there, a bit for pleasure, before I had to go down to the classroom’. There she read the Greek myths, and pursued an interest in poetry, Kipling in particular. Her taste was shaped by exposure to the school’s set texts, some of which she ‘mercifully seem[s] to have forgotten’, while some, like Paradise Lost, offered her rewards she would have missed had they not been required reading. But also chance played its part in moulding her preferences – catching chicken pox, for example, meant she had the leisure to read ‘the whole of Jane Austen, one after the other, to take my mind off the itching’.

At Bedford College, where Shirley read History, she managed to keep borrowing novels from the library and buying poetry – Donne, Kipling and Betjeman were favourites. And as a teacher of history, she filled her bookshelves with history books, and also history and guidebooks related to the holidays abroad she started to take now she could afford it.

Later, Shirley’s marriage was ‘a marriage of two minds and the marriage of two libraries too when we got together’. So her bookshelves, like those of her parents, continued to tell the story of interests pursued, preferences arrived at, and choices made. And there will be many of her students, in Sheffield and elsewhere, whose own bookshelves now bear the imprint and influence of Shirley’s voracious reading and her generous life as a teacher.

by Loveday Herridge

Noel’s Reading Journey

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

By Mary Grover

Born in that catastrophic year, 1939, Noel’s imagination was fired by the factual: Meccano magazines and stamp albums. Reading was a way of acquiring knowledge, especially historical knowledge.

I’ve always said oh, to hell with the computer, my knowledge came from reading, listening to the radio and collecting stamps. The history of stamps has geography, history and everything else.

Noel remembers spending his pocket money on stamps or Aeroplane and Flight magazines stamps rather than comics. He can’t remember being read to but explored Biggles and Gimlet when he became an independent reader. Both by W E. Johns, the Gimlet commando books were perhaps even more full of derring-do than the chronicles of the famous aviator.

But his mother was the greatest influence on the young boy’s reading. She was a Sheffield town councillor, a Conservative. It was her engagement in politics that led him to read the newspapers, political periodicals and history books often found in Hillsborough Library. Though he did well in literature at grammar school it was history that Noel loved.

I met Jock Hamilton, a dour Scot, he was a qualified barrister by his own efforts, but he taught history, he made history live. He didn’t just give you the facts, but what he did with it, he analysed the facts, and he made history come alive to me.

Noel’s school boy reading reflects that interest: Tale of Two Cities, Alexannder Dumas’ Marguerite de Valois and Kidnapped and unsurprisingly a history play, Richard II. More surprisingly perhaps, given the conservative commitments he shared with his mother, the history book that still grips his imagination is Eric Hobsbawn’s The Age of Revolution.

The Latin language made a great impression on Noel and upon the way he talked. Robert Bailey, the Latin master said to Noel, in his first year at High Storrs Grammar School,

‘The trouble with you, lad, is you’ve got to learn to speak English properly and also get your grammar correct, verb, subject, object.’

But there was the literature as well: ‘Sallust’s Cataline, which was marvellous – that made history live again. Oh, I read, yes, Livy going over the Alps’. In the 1950s Noel’s time in the National Service led him to discover a book, D J Holland’s The Dead, the Dying and the Damned which contained a fictionalised portrait of one of the soldiers Noel worked with in Aden. This period provoked an interest in thrillers with connections to political events – some of Fleming’s novels, and Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal.

Also remembered, and in a way treasured, was a book that Noel could never bring himself to finish.

A lady who lived in one of the cottages in the block where my grandmother was living gave me a very old edition of Dombey and Son, I mean old. I don’t think it was a first edition. And I got through, I think, the first chapter.

Because it was so old Noel held on to it and it only recently left the house. It joins the ranks of books that our readers treasured but did not read, books that find a place in the bookcase for all sorts of reasons: its giver, an inscription, its antiquity or because there was a story attached to rather than contained within it.

Access Noel’s transcript and audio here