MAGAZINE SUMMER 2019 ISSUE 44
£3.50
THE QUEEN AND I Daisy Goodwin on her research for the TV series Victoria
HIDDEN CORNERS The Library’s diverse collection of titles on Tibet is revealed by Andrew Duff
GLADSTONE AND THE LONDON LIBRARY Frank Lawton describes the politician’s crucial part in the early years of the institution
Backing our most precious resources: the arts For over 50 years we’ve been proud to support the arts across the UK. We partner with four world-class UK institutions; British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company. bp.com/arts
THE YOUNG VICTORIA DEIRDRE MURPHY A vivid portrait of Queen Victoria’s childhood, offering new insights into one of the most celebrated, but often misunderstood, monarchs in British history, 200 years after her birth. ‘An entirely new perspective.’ – A. N. Wilson Accompanies a new exhibition and semi-permanent display at Kensington Palace, opening 24 May. Available May 200 colour illus. HB £35.00 Published in association with Historic Royal Palaces Order online, or from your local bookseller
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HAND-STITCHED COLLAGE by the Poet
DEBORA GREGER T hur sday 11 th - Wednesday 31 st Jul y My collages begin in piles of paper - people, windows, planets, snakes, bugs - snipped from illustrated books. I use embroidery scissors made in Germany, found in my quest for a very fine, sharp point and blade. The idea for a collage begins in the images, which suggest possibilities I didn't expect. When I took up collage after art school, I glued though not as well as I cut. Glue showed, paper buckled, so I started sewing down the scraps with monofilament nylon thread, lighter gauge than fishing line. When I was six or seven, my mother taught me to sew. After her children were grown, she turned to making fabric kites and writing books about kite-making, which became best-sellers. In ways I could not have foreseen, I have become my mother's daughter.
ABBOTT and HOLDER 30 Museum S tree t, L o n do n WC 1A 1L H www.abbottandholder.co.uk | gallery@abbottandholder.co.uk
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p FROM THE DIRECTOR
On the cover
Detail of still from series 1 of the ITV series Victoria showing Jenna Coleman as Victoria. Image © Mammoth Screen Ltd; photograph by Gareth Gatrell.
Welcome to our summer magazine and another fantastic selection of articles written by our members. You will also find recent news from the Library, including the commencement of our new Emerging Writers Programme. The scheme gives aspiring writers access to the Library and various events so that they can develop their personal writing projects, as well as their professional networks. We were delighted to receive nearly 600 applications for the 38 places available on the programme, and are excited to see what this first cohort produce during the next 12 months and beyond. We have been enjoying more speaker events with members who have written their books at the Library. Tim Bouverie spoke on his brilliant debut book, Appeasing Hitler, while Hallie Rubenhold revealed the important yet previously untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper, the subject of her groundbreaking new book, The Five. We were treated to an insightful and hilarious discussion evening with Candice CartyWilliams, Ayisha Malik and Helen Lederer as part of our partnership with Cityread – the charity that gets all of London reading and talking about one book for one month each year. The last few months have also seen important additions to our digital collection. Our e-library now includes the 40 million newspaper articles available on the British Newspaper Archive and, through Early English Books Online, we can now offer free digital access to all the books printed in the UK up to 1700. And finally, a very big thank you to everyone who participated in our ‘Introduce a Friend to the Library’ evening in March. This, along with the many other membership initiatives we have been running, contributed to the Library’s first annual increase in membership since 2012. We are especially pleased to see so many young people joining – a very positive sign for the Library’s future. I look forward to celebrating this with members at the Members’ Summer Party on Wednesday, 26 June, and would be delighted if you could join us.
Philip Marshall Director
Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 14 June 2019. © 2019 The London Library. ISSN 2398-4201. The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.
Editorial Publisher Jane Grylls Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Catherine Cartwright
Editorial committee Julian Lloyd Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner
Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 Communications Department, The London Library 020 7766 4704
Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7
CONTRIBUTORS
Bodleian Library Publishing
MAP TREASURES
Talking Maps Jerry Brotton & Nick Millea This stunning volume shows how maps and stories are intimately entwined, with examples covering almost a thousand years.
Tim Bouverie JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2010
Tim Bouverie has recently published his first book, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (2018). Previously a political journalist for Channel 4 News, he read History at Christ Church, Oxford, and regularly reviews history and politics books for the Spectator, the Observer and the Daily Telegraph.
Andrew Duff
9781851245154 HB, £35
JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2012
Andrew Duff's first book, Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (2015), tells the true story of the last Buddhist king and the international intrigue behind Indira Gandhi’s annexation of the Himalayan state in 1975 at the height of the Cold War in Asia. He is a Fellow of the RGS.
Fifty Maps and the Stories they Tell Jerry Brotton & Nick Millea A treasure trove of cartographic delights spanning a thousand years. 9781851245239 PB/flaps, £12
Daisy Goodwin
Why North is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From
JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1990
Daisy Goodwin is a writer, journalist and BAFTA-winning TV producer. Her books include a memoir, Silver River (2007), and the novels The Fortune Hunter (2014) and Victoria (2016). In 2014, she was commissioned to write her first screenplay Victoria for ITV, which is now in its third series. She is a Trustee of The London Library.
Mick Ashworth An enlightening guide to the sometimes hidden techniques of map-making through the centuries. 9781851245192 HB, £20
Thom Keep
Thom Keep joined The Portico Library in Manchester in 2015 and became Librarian in December 2017. He currently oversees the Library’s transition to charitable status after two hundred years as a proprietorship institution. Before joining The Portico, Thom taught American and Environmental Histories at Durham and Sheffield universities.
The Selden Map of China: A New Understanding of the Ming Dynasty Hongping Annie Nie The enthralling story revealed by this seventeenth-century Chinese seafaring chart. 9781851245246 HB, £20
Frank Lawton JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2016
Lost Maps of the Caliphs: Drawing the World in Eleventh-Century Cairo
Frank Lawton is a Young Trustee of The London Library. He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and his writing can be found in the Spectator, the Guardian, the Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement.
Yossef Rapoport & Emilie Savage-Smith The first general overview of The Book of Curiosities and the unique insight it offers into medieval Islamic thought. 9781851244911 HB, £37.50
Sarah Shaw
Visit the Talking Maps exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1978
5 July 2019 – 8 March 2020 www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/whatson
FREE CATALOGUE publishing@bodleian.ox.ac.uk 8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
ORDER FROM bodleianshop.co.uk
Sarah Shaw worked at the BBC in the 1970s. She then switched to public and academic libraries, retiring in 2014 from the post of Librarian at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Portland Place: Secret Diary of a BBC Secretary was published in 2016, and she is currently writing a book about secretaries of the 1970s.
GUY PEPPIATT FINE ART LONDON ART WEEK 28th June to 5th July
Guy Peppiatt Fine Art One of twelve drawings by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. (1802-1873) formerly from the collection of the artist Frederick Richard Lee, R.A. (1798-1879)
Open weekdays 10am to 6pm, evenings and weekends by appointment, fifty yards from the back entrance to the London Library
6 Mason’s Yard, Duke St., St. James’s London SW1Y 6BU t: 020 7930 8813 guy@peppiattfineart.co.uk www.peppiattfineart.co.uk
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Square miles and circle lines. From the hidden history of the Underground to the Roman roots of the City, Martin Randall Travel’s London Days offer fresh perspective and deeper insight, whether you are a Londoner or a visitor. Spend the day getting to know a different side of the capital through special arrangements and visits to rarely-seen sites with our expert lecturers.
‘A wonderful day, I feel like I have been royally entertained, educated and exercised!’ ‘The route chosen revealed parts of London completely unknown to me and the unfamiliar vistas of familiar landmarks was a joy.’
Over 40 London Days itineraries including: Roman London Walk | Billingsgate, Mithraeum & Guildhall London’s Underground Railway | A History of the Tube The South Bank Walk | Between Waterloo & The Shard Interwar Interiors | Modernist, Traditional, & Art Deco Great Railway Termini | Paddington, King’s Cross & St Pancras
Contact us: +44 (0)20 8742 3355 martinrandall.com/london-days
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9
BEHIND THE BOOK
‘
Tim Bouverie describes the Library titles that were essential reference works when he was his researching his book Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War
’
Tim Bouverie’s Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (Bodley Head, 2018).
Appeasing Hitler (Bodley Head, 2018) is a narrative history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infighting that enabled Nazi domination of Europe. Although I spent many months in archives, almost every word was written in The London Library, where I also benefitted from its fantastic collection of memoirs and first editions. u Hitler’s Wonderland by Michael Fry (London 1934). Reflecting a significant (if minority) section of opinion within Britain, this slim volume is a panegyric on Nazi Germany by a right-wing journalist. The stories of Jewish persecution had been exaggerated, wrote Fry, while national socialism shone for having rejuvenated German national pride and returned over three million people to work. ‘Whatever the outcome of the conflict between a decayed liberalism and a vigorous national socialism, the luminous fact remains that the future of the entire civilised world is indissolubly merged in the future of the Third German Empire.’ u Our Man in Berlin: The Diary of Sir Eric Phipps, 1933–1937, edited by Gaynor Johnson (Basingstoke 2008). The second of Britain’s three ambassadors to Nazi Germany, Sir Eric Phipps was known for his wit as much as his warnings. When Hermann Göring arrived late for a dinner shortly after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ that took place from 30 June to 2 July 1934 (during which a number of senior Nazis had been murdered as part of a purge), he excused himself by explaining that he had been shooting. ‘Animals, I hope?’ replied Phipps.
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u Ourselves and Germany by the Marquess of Londonderry (London 1938). The subject of a superb biography by Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler (2004), the Marquess of Londonderry was a ‘half-wit’ (Churchill’s words) who took it upon himself to build bridges with the Nazi regime, despite having been a Cabinet Minister between 1931 and 1935. In this book, published just after the German invasion of Austria, he made the case for an Anglo-German understanding, emphasising the ‘racial connection’ between the two countries and ridiculing the notion that Hitler was bent on war. u The House that Hitler Built by Stephen H. Roberts (London 1938). In this highly influential dissection of Nazism, published in early 1938, the Australian historian Stephen H. Roberts stated emphatically that ‘Hitlerism cannot achieve its aims without war’. Significantly, among the book’s many readers was Neville Chamberlain, though the Prime Minister decided to ignore Roberts’ warnings. ‘If I accepted the author’s conclusions, I should despair,’ he wrote to his sister in January 1938. ‘But I don’t and won’t.’ u Fallen Bastions: The Central European Tragedy by G.E.R. Gedye (London 1939).
G.E.R. Gedye was one of the greatest foreign correspondents of the inter-war years, and his decision to publish this hugely powerful description of the Nazi takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia cost him his job as the Daily Telegraph’s Central and Eastern European Correspondent. It was not Gedye’s indictment of the Nazis – who he said were responsible, among other things, for ‘an unbroken orgy of Jew-baiting’ in Vienna – that the paper objected to, but the violence of his attack on the policy of appeasement and its chief architect, whom he referred to as ‘Führer Chamberlain’. u The Reith Diaries, edited by Charles Stuart (London 1957). If anyone thinks that the BBC has always been an organ of the liberal left, a quick perusal of the diaries of its first Director General should disabuse them. Sir John Reith admired both fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany. He applauded Hitler’s actions during the Night of the Long Knives and, in March 1938, assured the new German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that ‘the BBC was not anti-Nazi’ and would fly the swastika from the top of Broadcasting House, the BBC’s headquarters in Portland Place, if a senior figure from the German propaganda ministry were to visit.
John Frederick Lewis
Facing Fame 9 July - 3 November
Watts Gallery - Artists’ Village wattsgallery.org.uk | Guildford, Surrey GU3 1DQ
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11 J F Lewis.indd 1
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THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF LONDON
ELEMENTS A RESEARCH SHOWCASE July 19, 2-8pm Do you have an interest in archaeology, historical clothing, book collecting or embroidery? Join us for a free fun-filled family day, offering our grant recipients the opportunity to present their recent research at Burlington House through table-top displays, talks, and interactive workshops. BURLINGTON HOUSE LATES This event coincides with the Burlington House Courtyard Late (6pm onwards), where visitors can see our courtyard like never before and discover the six learned societies that reside here, furthering the study of art, history and science. Each society has a unique programme to offer audiences of all ages, and great food and drink on offer too. Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BE | www.sal.org.uk/events DW London Library 83x112.5mm.qxp_Layout 1 26/04/2019 10:00 Page 1 Registered Charity no. 207237
T HE L IBR AR Y O F T HE L AT E
MARTIN WOOLF ORSKEY WEDNESDAY 26 JUNE Mallard House, Broadway Lane, South Cerney, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 5UQ
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T: +44 (0) 1285 860006 E: info@dominicwinter.co.uk
11 May–18 August 2019 Mezzanine Gallery
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University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ scva.ac.uk @SainsburyCentre facebook.com/sainsburycentre sainsburycentre
MY DISCOVERY This – is London by Stuart Hibberd (1950) A trawl through the S. Television &c. shelfmark led Sarah Shaw to a memoir about life as a BBC radio announcer during a fascinating period in the Corporation’s history The London Library’s collection of books on broadcasting is found under S. Television &c. I headed in that direction in search of works about the BBC, a little puzzled not to find a separate section for radio. My working life began in 1970 at the Corporation as a junior secretary and, having rediscovered my diary for 1971, which was published in 2016 as Portland Place: Secret Diary of a BBC Secretary, I was interested in other firsthand accounts. Thus I came across Stuart Hibberd’s memoir, This – is London (1950). Between the 1920s and 1940s, the peak years of BBC Radio, Hibberd’s was one of the nation’s most familiar voices. The ‘Uncle in the Next Room’ was born in Dorset in 1893 and became a choral scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge. After serving in the First World War, he joined the BBC in 1924, becoming their de facto Chief Announcer. His retirement in 1951 was preceded a year earlier by the publication of this memoir, under a title which means less now than it did in the days when it recalled the BBC announcers’ daily on-air identification. Hibberd’s recollections of the days when all radio programmes went out live, and consisted of news, talks and music, is a series of anecdotes in chronological order, presumably drawn from his diaries. Refreshingly free of today’s celebrity gloss, the account evokes the tweed, pipe smoke and calm assurance of a gentleman’s club, as if, with his precise BBC enunciation, he is telling you his stories in person. The book is full of thumbnail portraits of those who arrived at Savoy Hill, the BBC’s headquarters off the Strand between 1923 and 1932, and Broadcasting House, the purpose-built centre in Portland Place where it is still located, to fill the airwaves, from barely remembered radio pioneers to famous persons of the day. For example,
Stuart Hibberd’s This – is London (1950).
Stanley Baldwin when he was Prime Minister (1924–9), who spoke ‘slowly and deliberately … from a few headings written on a piece of folded paper … which he kept twisting and turning nervously around his fingers as he spoke’; Harry Lauder, the Scottish singer and comedian whose energy at the age of 61 Hibberd found ‘astounding’; and others, from presenter Derek McCullough to organist Sandy McPherson via composer Sir Walford Davies and gardening broadcaster C.H. Middleton. His avuncular tone reflects that of the BBC of his day: cautious, striving to avoid controversy, even patronising. Interestingly, there is no mention of George Orwell, who was a radio producer during the Second World War, and only one reference to J.B. Priestley, a regular broadcaster in 1940 and 1941, which makes one wonder what else he left out.
Hibberd clearly took his responsibilities as an announcer seriously, and was instrumental in setting up what later became known as the BBC Pronunciation Unit. He vents his frustration at those guests – many of whom were speaking ad lib – who failed to keep within their allotted time and crashed the news or, worse still, the Epilogue. Other targets are the speakers who never appeared: Lord Baden-Powell, held up somewhere in Hungary on the way to a World Scout Jamboree, and an ‘Amateur Handyman’ who left him to read aloud at sight, hopefully to an appreciative public, the ‘complicated instructions on the care and maintenance of lavatory cisterns’ . He refutes irritating press criticisms, for example a claim that composer Dame Ethel Smyth had been censored from speaking at her 76th birthday broadcast. Hibberd recalls it was simply that the preceding music had overrun; more cock-up than conspiracy. Books about the history of broadcasting are usually written by performers, academics or public figures, and Hibberd was well known enough to persuade a railway inspector to run a replacement train from London Bridge to Chislehurst after he and other passengers had been stranded there by mistake late at night. I found in his measured good humour and lack of artifice the encouragement to publish my own diary for 1971. Although my circumstances and the content of my diary were very different from his, the BBC of his time was still recognisable in the 1970s, from its values to its equipment, even if that cosy, patronising tone had gone. Some things have never changed, and I particularly liked his description of ‘the buildings on either side of Portland Place rising like the steep sides of a Norwegian fiord’ , as true today as it was when he wrote it, on 3 September 1939. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13
GLADSTONE AND THE LONDON LIBRARY Frank Lawton on the vital role played by William Gladstone in the early years of the Library
These days you’ll find him staring into the Ladies toilets. But between 1841 and 1892 you’d have been more likely to find him striding across the lobby of The London Library, quoting Juvenal to the Librarian, skimming the shelves of theology or nosedeep in a volume of Irish history. That is, when he wasn’t running the country. For long before he was deemed worthy of a portrait next to the toilets, four-time Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone was a founding member of The London Library, and would play a key role in its development over the next half century, something to which the great monuments of Gladstone biography have paid surprisingly little attention. Libraries bookended Gladstone’s life. Born into the small but curated library of his Scottish merchant father in 1809, he would lie in state in his own library, the aptly named Temple of Peace, 90 years later. In between, Gladstone read over 20,000 titles by 4,500 authors, and his hand can be found in the annals of not just The London Library, but the library at the British Museum, where he was an active trustee for 30 years; St Catherine’s College Library, Oxford, to whom he donated the books which would begin their collection; and St Deiniol’s Library in the village of Hawarden, which he founded, managed and stocked with 22,000 of his own books. But perhaps the greatest debt is owed by The Bodleian Library, since as a Trustee (and Chairman for 30 years) of the Radcliffe Trust it was he who in 1858 first suggested (and later authorised) the use of the Radcliffe Camera to the University of Oxford, who were in desperate need of library space. Gladstone’s concerns 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
with spatial economy even went so far as pioneering compact mobile shelving (which greatly increases book-storage capacity): on a trip to Oxford for a speech, Gladstone dropped by E.W. Nicholson, the Bodley’s Librarian, to sketch out his designs on a scrap of paper still held in the Radcliffe Camera. Nicholson was so impressed that he had the models made and installed, calling Gladstone’s ‘own invention’ a ‘masterpiece of simplicity and effectiveness’ . A significant technical advance in librarianship, this was a first – and presumably last – for a UK Prime Minister. A pathologically voracious reader and deeply religious man, Gladstone left Oxford with a Double First in Classics and Mathematics and a string of accolades for his debating prowess. But before affirming his move into public life he
had a serious near-turn to the clergy, going so far as to send a 4,000-word letter to his father explaining his desire for Anglican ‘ministerial office’ . As far as his father was concerned, this was the wrong type of ‘office’ to seek, and Gladstone tortuously came round to this opinion. But the conflict was real, and the question of whether his true vocation was as a religious scholar – hermetic, sedentary, private – or a politician – active, practical, public – was to dog Gladstone for much of his life. It is in the image of a library that Gladstone is best able to reconcile these competing identities, and he will come to rest implicitly on Thomas Carlyle’s rhetoric for his justification, as we will see. But why The London Library in the first place? In 1832, aged 23, Gladstone was elected to Parliament as a Tory, and his torrential eloquence and command of
Opposite, from left William Gladstone in 1843, an engraving by F.C. Lewis from a drawing by George Richmond, image © Athenaeum, Liverpool; Thomas Carlyle, c.1840s, by Samuel Lawrence.
Right Inside The London Library, c.1890, before its St James’s Square premises were substantially redesigned in 1898.
detail fast marked him out as one of the rising stars of the party under Sir Robert Peel. Sure enough, he was given his first junior post in government aged just 25, but when the Peel government resigned in April 1835, Gladstone returned to the back benches. He used his sudden spare time to pen his first book, The State in its Relations with the Church (1838), which argued that the state should promote and defend the interests of the Church of England. An unfashionable position even then, it was received poorly by Peel, going as it did against the grain of Tory policy. His spell out of office, coupled with the critical reaction to his book, intensified Gladstone’s self-prosecuting doubts about his true calling. ‘How often, how daily, & this for how many years’ , he asked his diary in March 1839, ‘do I inwardly ask of Him in whose lap is cast the lot of my destiny … shall I ever be a man of study and of prayer, a man of the cell and of the lamp?’ It was in this context – one of doubt, of tension between the apparently disparate mindsets of a religious scholar and a public politician – that Gladstone first encountered Carlyle, a gruff, charismatic, hulking Scotsman, by turns fierce and cranky, a man with indefatigable energy, a touch of mysticism and a whip of a tongue. It would prove a fruitful, if increasingly fractious, relationship and one which would help shape The London Library in those early years. Carlyle and Gladstone first met at a boozy dinner party on 12 April 1838. The event seems to have left little impression on Carlyle but, the introduction having been made, Carlyle’s estimation of Gladstone grew rapidly, such that by February 1839 he was telling Ralph Waldo Emerson about ‘a certain W. Gladstone, an Oxford crack scholar, Tory MP and devout Churchman of great talent and hope … I know him for a serious silentminded man’ . In between dinner parties, Carlyle was becoming ever more frustrated at the
dearth of libraries in the capital and the subsequent difficulty in finding both the books and space conducive to serious ‘brainwork’ . In a much-quoted diary entry of May 1832, Carlyle lamented: ‘what a sad way I am in for want of libraries, of books to gather facts from! Why is there not a Majesty’s library in every town? There is a Majesty’s gaol and gallows in every one!’ He would have to wait until the Public Libraries Act 1850 for the first such library, but in the meantime he was dependent on the British Museum, a place he increasingly despised: never able to find a seat, he was reduced to perching on ladders and scavenging among the less-than-scholarly scraps selected by his nemesis, the ‘Keeper of Printed Books’ , Antonio Panizzi, a man who enforced his regime of silence with a series of barking shouts that echoed through the building. By 1840 Carlyle had suffered one ‘museum headache’ too many and, on 24 June, at a well-trailed and widely reported gathering of journalists, politicos and reforming intellectuals at the Freemason’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn, he set out his vision for a new London Library in a quasi-missionary language that would resonate with the young Gladstone. The library would be ‘a Church also – which
every devout soul may enter – a Church but with no quarrelling’ , a civilising force since ‘everyone able to read a good book becomes a wise man … a similar centre of light and order and just insight into the things around him’ . Such arguments were of a piece with those made in a remarkable series of lectures Carlyle gave only a month earlier, which were published in 1841 as On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, a volume Gladstone read and feverishly annotated in September that year. Carlyle’s argument that ‘in Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate, audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream’ , received Gladstone’s ‘NB’ mark of special notice in the margin. So, too, did his claim that the modern man of letters was the equivalent of the medieval priest – ‘He that can write a true Book, to persuade England, is not he the Bishop and Archbishop … of all England? … The writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country’ . Carlyle’s mixing of the missionary and the literary, the social and spiritual, provided a compelling vocabulary that Gladstone would echo in later years THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15
when essaying on books – ‘the voices of the dead … the main instrument of communion with the vast procession of the other world’ (‘On Books and the Housing of Them’ , 1890) – and in the rhetoric surrounding the establishment of St Deiniol’s Library. Perhaps most importantly it goes some way to explaining why Gladstone became involved in The London Library at such an early stage: at a time when he was undergoing a vocational crisis, the Library offered a way for Gladstone to marry the pull of the religious scholar with the pull of public duty. A Christian intellectual in politics, here he could be a politician in an intellectual church. Gladstone joined the Library’s first committee (alongside one Charles Dickens) and threw himself into the founding process. In February 1841 he was one of three who went to inspect the premises of a prospective first home for the Library, at 49 Pall Mall. As he surveyed its musty eighteenth-century rooms it is hard to imagine that the man whom Disraeli accused of not having one redeeming vice was fully aware of the building’s history. For 49 Pall Mall was the original 1759 site of Almack’s, one of the most fashionable (and notorious) gambling dens in London, whose members included Charles James Fox, William Pitt the Younger and Edward Gibbon. Either way, Gladstone evidently approved, because he recommended 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
taking on a seven-year lease, with a view to moving to bigger premises in the future. The committee agreed, the lease was signed and the Library was made manifest. But, before it opened on 3 May 1841, there was still one thing missing: books. Again Gladstone was at hand, scouring booksellers’ catalogues in order to select the Library’s founding stock of theology and ecclesiastical history (while his soon-to-be Liberal Party colleague in the Commons, John Stuart Mill, did the same for philosophy and political economy). While the Library was a platform for Gladstone’s administrative virtues, it also proved to be the stage for some nakedly political chicanery. Over the Library’s first decade, Carlyle’s opinion of Gladstone deteriorated. From a man of ‘great talent’ and the only ‘hope’ for the Conservative party, Carlyle now saw Gladstone as an opportunist with ‘no convictions’ , while Gladstone found Carlyle’s manner overbearing, his religion mere undercooked mysticism and his prose style interminable (which didn’t stop Gladstone still reading him extensively). The death of the first Librarian, John George Cochrane, brought things to a head in 1852. By this time the Library had moved to its current location at 14 St James’s Square and, with its increasing growth in membership and attendant professionalisation, the choice of the next Librarian was critical. Carlyle backed
William Bodham Donne, a scholar and a friend of William Makepeace Thackeray and Edward Fitzgerald. Gladstone proposed an unknown, charming Italian he had met on holiday, who had been in the UK but four months and who had virtually no experience as a librarian. He was, in other words, an odd choice. Gladstone had met Giacomo ‘James’ Lacaita in Naples in 1850 and immediately they hit it off, taking long walks quoting Dante to each other and picnicking together with their families. However, unbeknownst to Gladstone, the iron-fisted Bourbon King of Naples (‘King Bomba’) had been keeping Lacaita under surveillance, and found in the letters between the families a reference to their little band as a ‘glorious republic’ . This sounded dangerously like sedition and landed Lacaita in a Neapolitan jail. He was soon released but still had charges pending against him, and Gladstone, bubbling with characteristic righteous anger at the whole affair, sensed a chance of domestic political gain for taking a stand against the illiberal Bomba. Keen to build a strong case, he wrote to Lacaita promising that ‘on every ground, as well as on account of the effect that any hostile proceeding might have on you, I have sought in the first instance to go to work quietly’ . Gladstone’s ‘quietly’ amounted to publishing two pamphlets addressed directly to the Foreign Secretary which condemned the bombastic King’s regime as ‘an outrage upon religion, upon civilization, upon humanity and upon decency’ . While this proved popular at home, the result abroad was less happy, if equally predictable. Lacaita wrote to Gladstone telling him that he, Lacaita, was suspected of authoring the pamphlets, or at least of being Gladstone’s main source, and was in a whole lot more trouble. It’s not clear how Lacaita escaped Naples before being arrested again, but when he arrived in London in January 1852 he was understandably peeved, replying to a letter from Gladstone with: ‘I was delighted to see again and without any alarm your handwriting. Don’t write any more about Naples. ’ For his part, Gladstone saw Lacaita as a political refugee for whom he was at least partially responsible and, in light of Lacaita’s dwindling funds, proposed the librarianship. By this time Carlyle was no
GLADSTONE AND THE LONDON LIBRARY
Opposite Gladstone in his own library, the ‘Temple of Peace’, Hawarden Castle, 6 June 1884. Photograph © Flintshire Record Office. This page The Gladstone Library (formerly St Deiniol’s), Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales, now a residential library. Photograph © Melissa Cross.
longer officially on the committee, but remained an influential presence. What he thought mattered, and Gladstone seems to have sneaked Lacaita on to the shortlist with some sweet-talking: ‘from Gladstone’s own account to me, ’ recalled Carlyle, ‘I figured him as some ingenious bookish young advocate, who probably had helped Gladstone in his pamphlets underhand’ . However, as Carlyle learned more about ‘the Neopolitan’ , his position toughened, calling the proposal ‘quite inadmissible’; ‘the post ought to be given to an Englishman’ . Nevertheless, as the days rolled on, things looked to be going Gladstone’s way. One committee member wrote to Carlyle telling him how Gladstone was ‘stirring Heaven and Earth’ to get Lacaita elected, and that the committee members were ‘a clear majority of malleable material, some of it as soft as butter under the hammer’ of Gladstone’s political might. Carlyle was despondent, and resented the Library being used for what he saw as personal political expediency. Gladstone
will ‘probably succeed, ’ he wrote to his brother, ‘but he shall not do it without one man at least insisting on having Reason and common Honesty, as well as Gladstone and Charity at the other men’s expense, satisfied in the matter; and protesting to a plainly audible extent against the latter amiable couple walking over the belly of the former’ . Carlyle was no political naïf, and this ‘audible extent’ involved plotting behind Gladstone’s back to have himself re-elected to the committee to bolster the vote. In the weeks before the formal selection, furious lobbying went on behind the scenes, and the tide began to turn on Lacaita. When the day of the election came, Gladstone and Carlyle stood up and made their respective cases, with Carlyle responding to Gladstone’s impassioned speech by snidely thanking him for descending like Apollo to address them all. With positions by now entrenched, a vote was called as ‘they were not convincing one another’ . Amid a heavy stillness, the result was called: Carlyle had prevailed, Gladstone
defeated. Donne was made Librarian. Gladstone would shrug off the result, going on to steer the Library to the crucial purchase of the St James’s property outright in 1877, and would stand for President of the Library in 1892. Then nearing 85 and in his fourth spell as Prime Minister, Gladstone lost out to the younger Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf. It would be the last election Gladstone took part in, an appropriate final act for a man who, as he put it in an 1888 speech, had grown to see the library as ‘a rich treasure-house of all that can fertilize the human mind and enable men to devote themselves either wholly or partially to the high pursuit of politics’ . In recasting the library as a transformative marriage of scholarly seclusion and public action, Gladstone replicated his own negotiation between competing visions of himself. That such visions could be played out at The London Library speaks of an older political culture where our leaders were known as readers too. Older, but, as long as the Library remains, not quite lost. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17
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HIDDEN CORNERS READING ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD In the depths of the Back Stacks, the T. Tibet and H. Tibet shelfmarks are stocked with tales of exploration by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Westerners, and include some remarkable photographic records of the period, as Andrew Duff explains
In 1997 Tibet was the subject of two major Hollywood films. The film adaptation of Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet (1953), starring Brad Pitt, centred on Harrer’s life in Lhasa in the 1940s after he escaped from a British internment camp and made his way across the Himalayas. Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, with a screenplay by the late Melissa Mathison, told the story of the 14th Dalai Lama’s early life before his flight into exile in 1959. Orville Schell travelled to both film sets for his book Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (2000). Scorsese’s team chose the Atlas Mountains in Morocco for Kundun. Brad Pitt spent three months in the Argentinian Andes, where the Seven Years in Tibet crew built 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
a replica of Lhasa. Schell was struck by the sight of young exiled Tibetan actors, who had never seen Lhasa, visibly moved by these recreations. A man in his thirties told Schell that one scene, a re-enactment of a key event that took place in Beijing but had been transferred to Lhasa for the movie, ‘felt so real we all cried’ . Both sets, Schell pointed out, were the latest examples of a kind of myth-making that has long lain beneath the West’s complicated relationship with Tibet. The Library’s collection of Tibet books are an excellent way to explore the roots of that relationship. The subject of my first book, Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (2015), was a small Indian state perched on the Tibetan border between Nepal and
Bhutan, which had survived the British Empire only to be annexed by India in 1975. Understanding Sikkim required understanding Tibet, so I went to the Library. A staff member directed me to the furthest corner of the Back Stacks, past the lift shafts, to the T. Tibet section. Here, in a few shelves, were books that I had been reading about for months, vivid accounts of exploration in the region, alongside more pallid but equally useful memoirs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries written by British Political Officers sent to Sikkim’s capital, Gangtok, to administer relations with Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Karl Ryavec’s Historical Atlas of Tibet (2015) in the H. Tibet section (also in the depths of the Back Stacks) is a good starting point for understanding the ‘Tibetan cultural region’ . In 49 maps Ryavec explores many different Tibets – political, geographical, historical, cultural – all with different boundaries. Himalayan kingdoms – like Sikkim – had strong links with Tibet but often did not refer to themselves as Tibetan. Today’s Chinese-named Tibetan Autonomous Region further illustrates the complex development of political and religious traditions across the region. The TAR is a legacy of the Lhasa-based Tibetan political system known as the Ganden Phodrang, which had existed since the 17th century and was centred around the Dalai Lamas and the Gelugpa sect of Buddhism. This historical context means that books on Tibet have spread out like a diaspora
into various corners of the building. You are likely to find a book related to Tibet in T. Asia Central, H. Central Asian Question, R. Buddhism or S. Refugees, and of course many books will be found in the various China sections. A few particularly valuable items are held in the safes. Rarer books the Library does not hold are often accessible online via the HathiTrust digital library. In the T. and H. Tibet sections, books spill out beyond the usual Standard, Quarto and Folio into the Large and even XL Folio sections. The modern period in Tibet began in the 1640s when the Gelugpa sect took administrative control of Tibet thanks to support from the the Qoshots, a local Mongol tribe who had converted to Tibetan Buddhism. The Lhasa Atlas (2001) tells the story of the development of Lhasa and its commanding Potala Palace, built in 1645 on a hill overlooking the city. Although Marco Polo mentioned Tibet briefly, the first commonly acknowledged Western visitors were the Jesuits in the 1660s. Over the next half century, both Jesuits and Capuchins established missions in Lhasa. The most famous of these visitors, Ippolito Desideri, wrote An Account of Tibet: The Travels of Ippolito Desideri of Pistoia, S.J., 1712–1727
edited by Filippo de Filippi (1932). Tibet held little charm for the Jesuits and, while Desideri celebrated the Tibetans’ ‘vivacious intellect’ and ingenuity, he inevitably found it impossible to accept the beliefs of such ‘pagans and idolaters’ . The information and mapping brought back by the Jesuits proved invaluable to Western Europe’s intellectuals. In Paris, Jean d’Anville in Paris was able to compile his Nouvel atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise et du Thibet (1735). A few years later in Rome, Antonio Agostino Giorgi consolidated the records of the missions in his Alphabetum Tibetanum (2 vols., 1762) intended as ‘a kind of handbook for future missionaries to Tibet’ . The Library holds a remarkable 1737 edition of d’Anville’s map and a copy of Giorgi’s work, both kept in the safes, which can be viewed under supervision. Around the same time, the British East India Company, based in Calcutta – only 500 miles due south from Lhasa – began to recognise the strategic potential of Tibet. In 1774 Warren Hastings, who had recently become the first Governor-General in India, dispatched the diplomat George Bogle on a mission to ‘explore an unknown region for the purpose of discovering … [by]
Opposite Members of the Maxim gun detachment during the Younghusband mission’s march to Lhasa, Tibet,1903, by John Claude White. Above The British invasion forces somewhere in Tibet during the Younghusband
mission, 1903, by John Claude White. Both images from Kurt Meyer and Pamela Deuel Meyer’s In the Shadow of the Himalayas (2005). Images © Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur, Nepal.
what means it might be most effectively converted to advantage’ . Bogle’s mission – and a subsequent mission by Captain Samuel Turner a decade later – were both focused on finding trade routes to Central Asia and China’s interior. Turner’s An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, in Tibet (1806) is held in the safes, along with Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet, and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (1876), edited with notes by Clements Markham, the key figure in the expansion of the Royal Geographical Society in the late nineteenth century. Neither Bogle nor Turner made it to Lhasa, but both reached Shigatse, the seat of the Panchen Lama, substantially closer to the Himalayan border than Lhasa. Bogle developed a particularly strong relationship with the Panchen Lama, the second most revered reincarnated lama in Tibet, who acted as a mediator between THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19
Bogle and the Lhasa-based authority. Bogle found the Panchen Lama to be ‘open, candid and generous’ , ‘extremely merry and entertaining in conversations’ , and able to tell ‘a pleasant story with a great deal of humour and action’ . Until Markham’s book was published in 1876, no one knew that Lhasa had in fact been reached by an Englishman in 1812. The eccentric sinologist Thomas Manning bluffed his way all the way to the Tibetan capital, had an audience with the seven-year-old 9th Dalai Lama, but then declined to publish any record of his travels. Manning’s remarkable story is beautifully told in one of the chapters of John Keay’s Eccentric Travellers (1982). Over the course of the nineteenth century the British expanded their presence in the Himalayan region. They established a ‘Resident’ in Kathmandu in Nepal, and built a sanatorium in Darjeeling (at that time part of Sikkim), eventually establishing a Political Officer in Gangtok in the 1890s with responsibility for relations with Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. By 1900 Tibet was becoming something of an obsession for men like George Curzon, the newly appointed Viceroy of India, who was convinced Britain was in a race with the Russians for influence in Lhasa. Curzon dispatched the Army officer and explorer Francis Younghusband on a mission to Lhasa in 1903–4, ostensibly to build relations with the Tibetans. Younghusband’s huge military escort soon encountered resistance. The mission was 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
an early example of embedded reporting – correspondents from various newspapers accompanied Younghusband and his escort, sending back breathless accounts via the telegraph line they trailed to Lhasa, and racing to publish their accounts afterwards. In one particularly vicious encounter, over 500 Tibetans were mown down by the British with Maxim guns as they retreated from an encounter that was almost certainly staged for the purpose of teaching the Tibetans a brutal lesson. ‘There was no fighting – only the slaughter of helpless men, ’ wrote Times correspondent Perceval Landon in his account, Lhasa (1905). In The Unveiling of Lhasa (1905), the Daily Mail journalist Edmund Candler recounted the sight of the Tibetans walking rather than running away while the shooting continued from all sides. Younghusband’s hastily drawn-up Anglo-Tibetan Treaty passed the cost of the mission on to the Tibetans in the form of ‘reparations’ , which gave the British a political foothold in Tibet. The Library has a number of accounts of this expedition, the best being Charles Allen’s Duel in the Snows: The True Story of the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa (2004), which exposes this dark chapter in Britain’s imperial history. But something else was happening too. A more romantic attitude towards Tibet began to take hold. Explorers and adventurers drawn to this ‘hidden land’ began to mythologise it. Younghusband himself claimed to have undergone a mystical experience on his return journey from Tibet to India. The Library holds
many books with titles reflecting this new fascination: In the Forbidden Land by H. Savage Landor (1898), Lhasa and its Mysteries by Laurence Austine Waddell (1905), and Tibet the Mysterious by Col. T. Holdich (1906), In Secret Tibet by Theodore Ilion (1937) and Fosco Maraini’s Secret Tibet (trans. Eric Mosbacher, 1952). At the same time remarkable feats of exploration were taking place in and around the region, such as the journeys of the Swede Sven Hedin, recounted in his book Southern Tibet (1917), which includes intricately drawn maps by Col. H. Byström; a copy was presented to the Library by the author in 1918. Shortly before the Younghusband expedition, Charles Hagberg Wright (Librarian 1893–1940) had begun the great reclassification of The London Library’s collections. It was obvious that Tibet demanded its own classification in Topography, but its subsequent political importance was underlined when it was given a separate classification in the History shelfmark a few years later in 1907 (a distinction not conferred on either Nepal or Bhutan, both UN members). The H. classification for Tibet reflected what was happening on the ground. Younghusband’s mission had led to the establishment of a more permanent British base in Sikkim to solidify relations with the region, and a succession of Political Officers began to engage more seriously there. Alex McKay’s book Tibet and the British Raj – The Frontier Cadre 1904–1947 (1997) tells the story of these men, some of whom had accompanied the Younghusband mission. They assiduously established relations with both the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama, taking advantage of the chaos in China during the 1920s and 1930s to influence political developments in Tibet and championing the idea of a modern independent Tibetan state. The Frontier Cadre was a fascinating group, and included well-known characters such as Colonel F. M. Bailey (whose exploits were recorded in his 1946 book Mission to Tashkent) and explorer and soldier Freddy Spencer-Chapman. Frank Ludlow, who ran an English-language school in Gyantse between 1923 and 1926, later joined the long tradition of plant-hunters in Tibet such as Frank Kingdon-Ward and George Sherriff. Kingdon-Ward’s fascinating account of his most famous expedition, Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges (1926), shows
HIDDEN CORNERS
Opposite Nuns of the Tatsang Nunnery by John Claude White, 1903, from Kurt Meyer and Pamela Deuel Meyer’s In the Shadow of the Himalayas (2005). Image © Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur, Nepal. Left Chushi Gangdruk guerrilla fighter Tashi Dorjee, from Birgit van de Wijer’s Tibet’s Forgotten Heroes (2010). Photograph © Birgit van de Wijer.
how adventurous horticulturalists often pioneered exploration of the farthest corners of the Tibetan plateau. Two of McKay’s Frontier Cadre took a genuine scholarly interest in Tibet. Charles Bell hosted the 13th Dalai Lama between 1910 and 1912 in and around Darjeeling after he fled from troops advancing from China, and subsequently took a keen interest in Tibetan language and culture. He photographed the country and its people – the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford holds a collection of his images – and wrote a biography of the Dalai Lama, published a year after Bell’s death in 1946. But it was Sir Hugh Richardson who became a leading Western scholar of the region. In 1936 Richardson was established, by sleight of hand, as a Head of the British Mission in Lhasa. It was an appointment that transformed his life. When the Union Jack was lowered in 1947 and replaced by the new flag of the Indian Republic, Richardson chose to stay on, only leaving in
1950 when the Chinese troops arrived once more. Nine years later, when the British representative at the UN declined to support an independent Tibet, Richardson was ‘profoundly ashamed’ that his government had ‘sold the Tibetans down the river’ . Just three years later Richardson published Tibet and its History (1962), one of a number of scholarly works on the region. The increased British engagement with Tibet from the 1890s onwards coincided with major developments in the portability of photographic equipment, resulting in some remarkable visual records of the period. John Claude White, the first Political Officer to Sikkim, was a pioneer in field photography. Kurt and Pamela Meyer’s In the Shadow of the Himalayas (2005) is a remarkable collection of his work, and includes some extraordinary images from the Younghusband mission. Michael Aris produced a wonderful exhibition catalogue of the photographs taken by AustrianAmerican explorer Joseph Rock on his
voyages into the Tibetan borderlands, Lamas, Princes and Brigands (1992). In Seeing Lhasa (2003), Clare Harris and Tshering Shakya focus on British photographs of Lhasa taken between 1936 and 1947. The way the West views Tibet was changed forever by the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959. The country’s complex modern history is captured in The Dragon in the Land of Snows (1999) by Tibetan historian Tshering Shakya, written when he was a research fellow at SOAS. In Orphans of the Cold War (1999), J.K. Knaus tells the little-known story of the CIA training of Tibetan guerrillas in the Colorado Mountains in the 1960s. More recently, Birgit van de Wijer’s Tibet’s Forgotten Heroes (2010) collected interviews with many of the men who fought for the Chushi Gangdruk, the guerrilla organisation that resisted Chinese rule. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight. He is now 83 years old. For those interested in pondering what might happen on his death – an event that will undoubtedly spark off a new wave of fascination with Tibet – Isabel Hilton’s The Search for the Panchen Lama (1999) might offer some clues as to the likely conflicts to come. When a group of Tibetan religious leaders identified a reincarnation in 1995, they were promptly arrested. The Chinese then ‘engineered a sort of politico-religious charade’ to promote their own candidate. In the case of another important reincarnated lama, the Karmapa, there are three disputed candidates, aligning with various factions. The Chinese have shown they have every intention of manipulating the affairs of Tibetan Buddhism to suit their own narrative. Lastly, one of the most remarkable books on Tibet in the Library is the Englishlanguage edition of the French naval doctor and ethnographer Victor Segalen’s Equipée (1929), beautifully translated by Natasha Lehrer as Journey to the Land of the Real (2016). Segalen delves into the heart of what it is to travel and write, tracing the thin line between the real and the imagined as he recounts his own journey from Peking to Tibet. He asks: ‘Is the Imagination weakened or reinforced when it comes face to face with the Real?’ It remains a deeply complex question for today’s exiled Tibetans. The book is, perhaps appropriately, classified under T. China.
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21
THE QUEEN AND I This May marked the bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth. Daisy Goodwin recounts writing her ITV series on the Queen and acknowledges her indebtedness to The London Library. When I was a child growing up in London in the 1970s Queen Victoria was everywhere. Her stern marble features gazed at me when I played in Kensington Gardens, or passed Buckingham Palace on the way to school, or when I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. The word ‘Victorian’ conjured up a world of red brick, dark furniture and stifled feelings. To call someone Victorian was to say that they were stern, sexually repressed and out of touch with the modern world. Victoria to me was an old bag in a bonnet, permanently dressed in black, who took no pleasure in anything. Her most famous saying was ‘We are not amused’ and, to my childish self, she did not look amusing at all. But a few years later I was at the University of Cambridge reading History. My special subject was Queen Victoria and the media, taught by the great scholar David Cannadine. I picked the topic because I had heard what a good teacher he was rather than because the subject appealed, and when I looked at my first reading list, which included several volumes of Victoria’s diaries, my heart sank. I remember sitting in the reading room of the university library and looking at the red leather-bound volumes in front of me. Reluctantly I opened the first one and found a page at random. Friday, 1 November 1839; Victoria was 20 – virtually the same age as me. I started to read: ‘A horrid day, cold, dreadfully blowing, and in addition, raining hard when we had been out a few minutes; I was obliged to put on my cape. It however ceased when we came on the ground. I rode alone down the ranks, – and then took my place, as usual with dearest Albert near me, on my right, and Sir J. McDonald on my left; and we saw them pass by; they afterwards manoeuvred. The Rifles look beautiful. It was piercingly cold, and I sat in my cape, which dearest Albert settled comfortably for me. He was so cold, dear Angel, being in grande tenue with tight white cazimere pantaloons (nothing under them) and high 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
boots. We cantered home again. ’ I let out a hoot of laughter, to a chorus of shushes around me. This was not at all the Victoria of my childhood. As I read on I discovered not a grumpy old bag at all, but a passionate teenager who liked dancing, music, dogs and, last but not least, men. She was a girl after my own heart. ’ This was the beginning of what has been a 30-year relationship with the Queen. I have read all the biographies, but found in the end that they were no substitute for Victoria’s own inimitable voice. She kept diaries all her life; someone has calculated that she wrote a total of 62 million words in her lifetime. No other monarch has been such an indefatigable recorder of her own life, or as entertaining. Victoria is very observant and interested in the kind of detail that brings the past to life. Here she is talking about a trip through the coal-fields in the Midlands when she was about 14: ‘The men, women and children, country and houses are all black … the grass is quite blasted and black. Just now I saw an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engine flaming, coals in abundance, everywhere smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children. ’ It’s clear that even as a little girl she noticed things. As you read her early diaries you get the sense of a girl who was intensely curious about the world, a world she was not allowed to see by her over-protective mother, the German-born Duchess of Kent. This was a girl who was completely controlled by her mother, and her mother’s adviser, John Conroy. Victoria’s father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, had died when Victoria was eight months old. The young Alexandrina, as she was then known, never had a moment to herself. She had no friends of her own age, was forced to sleep in her mother’s bedroom and wasn’t even allowed to walk down the stairs by herself in case
she fell and broke her neck. The Duchess of Kent and Conroy wanted to protect their investment. When Victoria was about ten it became clear that she would inherit the throne, and they planned to rule through her. It was a start that might have broken a lesser character, but the morning that Victoria became Queen, on 20 June 1837, the first thing she did was to send everyone away and spend an hour alone, for the first time in her life. It was this spirit of independence that made Victoria so irresistible as a character. I started writing about her about seven years ago. She made an appearance in my second novel, The Fortune Hunter (2014), having a middleaged queen-off with Empress Elizabeth of Austria. I found her voice came very easily to me and I realised she was going to be the heroine of my next book, whether I liked it or not. But as I started rereading the diaries, I saw that the young Victoria would not only make a good subject for a novel, but that her early life was definitely the stuff of drama. This notion came to me the morning that I had a particularly ferocious row with my teenage daughter. Like Victoria, my daughter is small but mighty. As she yelled at me for daring to suggest she might do her homework, it struck me with some clarity that a world where a teenage girl suddenly became the most powerful woman in the world would be an exciting one, to say the least. So I set aside the novel and started to write Victoria the screenplay. I should say at this point that I wrote most of the screenplay in the gloriously Victorian confines of The London Library. Every time I felt lacking in inspiration I would just walk through the open stacks and inhale. In the Topography section, from Maori to the Sandwich Islands, you can smell the empire-building autodidacticism of the nineteenth century. The Victoria section is a delight; it has almost every biography available, but also rare gems like A Diary of Royal Movements and of
Still from series 1 of the ITV series Victoria showing Jenna Coleman as Victoria. Both Victoria stills in this article © Mammoth Screen Ltd; photographs by Gareth Gatrell.
Personal Events and Incidents in the Life and Reign of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria Compiled From Official Documents and Public Records (1883), which lists all Victoria’s engagements for the first ten years of her reign. This unassuming book was full of tantalising snippets overlooked by biographers, such as the time that Albert went skating on the lake in Buckingham Palace Gardens, fell through the ice and was rescued by Victoria. Or the bizarre churching ceremony that took place after the birth of Victoria’s first child, during which she was blessed so that she could take her place again in society. Judging by the fact that there were no subsequent ceremonies after the birth of the following eight children, I think we can guess how Victoria felt about this very peculiar ritual. I spent a lot of time in the Library’s newspaper archives while writing the screenplay for Victoria, trying to find out what people thought at the time of their new teenage Queen. Now of course we know that Victoria married her cousin Albert and had nine children, but in 1837 when she came to the throne, no one had any idea that the diminutive queen – she was less than five foot tall – would one day become a bastion of domestic virtue. The
gossip rags of the day were as frenzied in their speculation about the Queen’s matrimonial plans as their counterparts are about the royals today. The rumour went around that the only man who tickled the young Queen’s fancy was her first Prime Minister, the urbane and charming Lord Melbourne. He might have been nearly 40 years older than her, but he was still handsome (the dropsy came later) and was famously charming. The Secretary to the Privy Council, Charles Greville, who had frequent opportunities to see Victoria and Melbourne together, wrote in his diary that the ‘Queen is quite besotted. Her feelings for him are clearly sexual if she but knew it. ’ If you read her diaries of the time, it is clear that Greville is not exaggerating – every page, nearly every line, contains a reference to the wit and wisdom of the man she soon came to call Lord M. And these are diaries that had already been censored by her youngest daughter, Beatrice, after her death. 1 July 1837 Talked with Lord M about many important things. He is indeed a truly honest, straightforward and noble minded man … a man in whom I can
safely place confidence. There are not many like him in this world of deceit. 17 July 1837 Lord M stood quite close to me on the left-hand side of the throne and I always feel a satisfaction to have him near me on such occasions, as he is such an honest, good, kindhearted man and is my friend, I know it. And here is her description of the coronation. It’s clear that she really has eyes only for one man: ‘When my good Lord Melbourne knelt down and kissed my hand, he pressed my hand and I grasped his with all my heart, at which he looked up with his eyes filled with tears and seemed much touched, as he was I observed throughout the whole ceremony. After the Homage was concluded I left the throne, took of my Crown and received the Sacrament; I then put on my Crown again, and re-ascended the Throne leaning on Lord Melbourne’s arm. ’ Some critics in Britain have taken exception to the way in which I have portrayed the relationship between Victoria and Melbourne on screen, but I make no apology for showing Melbourne as Victoria’s first love, and Victoria as Melbourne’s last. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23
Coleman as Victoria and Rufus Sewell as Lord Melbourne in the TV series Victoria.
Greville wrote about Melbourne, whose beloved only son had died the year before Victoria came to the throne: ‘I have no doubt that he is passionately fond of her … the more so because he is a man with a capacity for loving without anything to love. It has become his province to educate instruct and inform the most interesting mind and character in the world.’ Of course he knew it must be an unrequited love, but that didn’t make his feeling any less strong. Who knows whether Victoria actually proposed marriage with Melbourne as she does in my series, but I am certain that it crossed her mind. When Albert came along, Victoria discovered that having a crush on an older man can’t compare with having the handsomest prince in Europe in your bed. It is the ultimate irony that the woman who gave her name to a century of prudishness was a deeply passionate woman, who enjoyed sex with her husband. Here is her rapturous description of their wedding night: ‘We had dinner in our sitting room; but I had such a sick headache that I could eat nothing and was obliged to lie down in the middle blue room for the remainder of the evening, on the sofa, but ill or not, I never never spent such an evening!!! My dearest dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before. He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again! Oh this was the happiest day of my life. ’ 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Some of the crossest entries in her diaries refer to the nights where for some reason or another Victoria and Albert had ‘no fun’ . It was the great tragedy of this sensual woman’s life that she had no access to contraception – and so was forced to endure what she called ‘the shadow side’ of marriage (childbirth) no less than nine times. As for Albert, I think he may have been almost as keen as his wife. At Osborne House, where he designed every detail of the house, he installed a gadget in their bedroom which meant that when the royal couple felt amorous they were able to lock their bedroom door by pressing a button next to the bed, which meant they would not be disturbed by children, servants or dogs. Albert really did think of everything. Victoria was not always likeable. There are times when reading her diaries I have longed to give her a good shaking. She was an unreasonable and demanding mother, for example. She found breastfeeding repellent, and was horrified when she discovered that her daughters Vicky and Alice were nursing their babies. ‘You are princesses, not cows,’ she told them. And she was monstrously unfair to the greatest politician of his generation, William Gladstone, refusing to acknowledge his lifetime of service when he retired at the age of 94, saying only, ‘and how is Mrs Gladstone?’ But to a modern audience she has refreshing virtues: in the age of Empire she was surprisingly free of colour prejudice – indeed the last love of her life was her Indian servant, Abdul Karim.
Nor was she a snob; in fact she was much kinder to her servants than she was to the aristocrats who made up her court. She was also without vanity – I love the shocked tone of a French witness to the arrival of Victoria in France, who was astonished that she was carrying a handbag embroidered with a golden poodle. At her Golden Jubilee in June 1887, her Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, implored the widowed Queen to wear a crown at her public appearances. She refused, saying that her people knew that she was a poor widow woman, and she wore her widow’s cap. But there was no doubt of her majesty. On one occasion Victoria went to the opera with the Empress Eugénie, who was was married to the French Emperor Napoleon III. They stood in the box while the orchestra played the Marseillaise and then God Save the Queen. Afterwards both women sat down, but while Eugénie looked over her shoulder to check that there was a chair, Victoria sat down without looking round. She knew that the chair would be there. Victoria had, to use a modern term, a keen sense of her own brand. When she came to the throne she rejected the various names by which English queens had been known in the past – Elizabeth, Mary, Anne. She didn’t like the name her mother called her, Alexandrina, and instead chose to be called Victoria, which was an anglicisation of her mother’s name, Victoire. Nobody then was called Victoria. But the teenage queen deliberately chose a name that was about winning. Historians can argue about how much power Victoria actually wielded, but no one can deny that in this one crucial respect she moulded the nineteenth century in her own image. After finishing the screenplays, I went back to the novel and decided to finish it. It’s a testament to my ongoing relationship with Queen Victoria that I really enjoyed writing it. I love writing screenplays because you never get lonely – there is always an actor who wants to tell you how their part could be improved, or a producer who wonders if we could replace the household cavalry with a lone bugler. Writing the novel meant that I could have as many crowd scenes as I wanted, and describe the vistas of Victorian London to my heart’s content.
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This is an abridged version of a talk Daisy Goodwin gave to The London Library Founders’ Circle.
THE PORTICO LIBRARY Our series on independent historic libraries continues with a profile of The Portico Library in Manchester by the institution’s Librarian, Thom Keep You can always tell when someone visits The Portico Library for the first time. They enter and for a brief moment they become transfixed by the beautifully painted glass dome and ornately bound books carefully arranged on the Georgian bookshelves. A volley of questions often follows: How did I not know about this? Are the books real? Can you buy the smell of old books here? Why are the words ‘Polite Literature’ written on top of the bookcases? Where do you keep the impolite literature? How do I become a member? The Portico Library, designed by Thomas Harrison of Chester, opened in 1806 and is still housed in its original premises, a Grade II* listed building on Mosley Street in central Manchester. The Portico was established by two businessmen, Robert Robinson and Michael Ward, who wished to establish an institution that provided up-to-date news and literature, and was ‘free of political, professional or religious affiliations’. An early cultural destination for visitors to the city, the Library stood at the heart of the Manchester enlightenment. Many leading thinkers, scientists, engineers, businessmen, political and religious figures were members of The Portico, including twice Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, chemist John Dalton, Radical politician Richard Cobden and Peter Mark Roget, compiler of the eponymous Thesaurus. Dalton, who pioneered research on atomic theory and colour-blindness, was given honorary membership in 1806 in return for ‘superintending the going of the clock’ . More recent members include Val McDermid and Eric Cantona. The Portico’s collection includes over 25,000 printed volumes and a growing archive, with a strong focus on travel literature, biography, natural philosophy, poetry, fine arts, history and maps. It provides a tangible insight into the Georgian and Victorian culture of industrial Manchester, reflecting the literary, intellectual and cultural mindset of its early members. The Library also has a fine
The Portico Library Reading Room, 2017. Photograph by Jill Jennings.
representative selection of fiction, including many first editions, most notably of Elizabeth Gaskell, whose husband William was The Portico’s longest-serving Chairman. The Library completed its digital catalogue in 2018 and the whole collection is now searchable online through our website. In December 2017 The Portico became a registered charity. This has been achieved through a decade of transition in which the Library has become a more inclusive and ambitious organisation. While The Portico remains a subscription Library, its exhibition space and café are now open free to the public. Through our eclectic programme of events, exhibitions and educational workshops, we have been able to reach new communities and cultivate a broader audience. Beginning in June, for example, the Library will join venues across Manchester to host bicentenary commemorations of the Peterloo Massacre, exploring themes of protest, democracy and freedom of speech. The Portico is one of the only remaining buildings to have witnessed Peterloo, and its members at the time included liberal founder of the Guardian newspaper, J.E. Taylor, and Captain Hugh
Hornby Birley, who led the fatal cavalry charge. Working with international partners, we will use the Library’s history and collection to bring the significance of the events of 1819 to twenty-first-century audiences. In 2018, Manchester became a UNESCO City of Literature, and The Portico played an important role in the city achieving this status. Alongside our events and exhibitions we run two literary prizes: The Portico Sadie Massey Awards for young readers and writers; and The Portico Prize for Literature. The latter was established in 1985 to celebrate the strong regional and literary identity of the North of England with the aim of raising awareness of the diversity of its cultural, literary and historical heritage. It has been described as the ‘Booker of The North’, with previous winners including Anthony Burgess, Val McDermid and Sarah Hall. The next round of the competition launched this May. Whether you’re a reader, researcher or simply a lover of arts and literature, be sure to visit us to see the Library and its collection, and have a coffee and a slice of cake, the next time you’re nearby. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25
MEMBERS’ NEWS SUPPORTING EMERGING WRITERS At a reception held on 2 May in The London Library’s historic Reading Room, a range of well-known authors and figures from the literary world were on hand to welcome the 38 successful writers who have been selected to participate in the Library’s newly launched Emerging Writers Programme for unpublished writers. The candidates were chosen from a field of over 600 applicants by a panel of judges chaired by screenwriter Daisy Goodwin, novelist Nikita Lalwani, poet Raymond Antrobus, Director of A.M. Heath Bill Hamilton, and Head of Prizes and Awards at the Society of Authors, Paula Johnson. The group of Emerging Writers includes performance poet Anna Kahn, Mónica Parle, former Executive Director of First Story, and Swithun Cooper, who works in the British Council’s Literature Library. Of the 38 writers selected, 6 are poets, 5 write for screen or stage, 5 are planning non-fiction books and the rest are planning to write fiction. A total of 13 of the writers are under 28. The writing projects they have underway already are diverse and varied in genre, setting and topic – from present-day Siberia, wartime Ukraine, colonial India, and Antarctic exploration to
Mayan folklore, activism, taxidermy, the joys of clubbing, the care system and even an imaginary rodent underworld. The Library’s Emerging Writers Programme is geared towards supporting writers at the start of their careers and helping them develop their work. Participants will benefit from one year’s free membership of The London Library alongside a programme of writing development and networking opportunities, peer support and guidance in use of the Library’s resources. The Emerging Writers Programme has been established with the help of Library supporters including A.M. Heath, The Garrick Charitable Trust and the Julio and Maria Marta Núñez Memorial Fund. Speaking at the Programme’s launch, Philip Marshall, Director of The London Library, commented: ‘We are thrilled to have had such an enthusiastic response to our Emerging Writers Programme and to be able to engage with such a talented and diverse group of participants in the early part of their writing careers. For nearly 180 years, the Library has been a great source of inspiration and support to writers of all different kinds, and we look forward to seeing how this wonderful group of new writers will use the Programme to develop their respective projects.’
The recently announced participants in the Emerging Writers Programme in the Reading Room.
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NEW ONLINE RESOURCES NOW AVAILABLE We are excited to be adding the British Newspaper Archive and Early English Books Online to the already extensive collection of e-resources that come as part of London Library membership.
The British Newspaper Archive
subscribes to over 300 online versions of the journals it offers in print form, and thousands more periodicals are available online through the archive services that we provide free to Library members, such as JSTOR and Cambridge Humanities Journals. For further details of the extensive range of periodicals and databases that can be accessed online see our eJournals pages.
The BNA is a partnership between the British Library and findmypast to digitise up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library’s collection, which contains most of Accessing the new services the runs of newspapers published EEBO and much of the content of our Screen shot of the British Newspaper Archive website. in the UK since 1800. The project eJournals is directly accessible through has been scanning millions of pages of historical newspapers the Library’s online catalogue service, CATALYST. and making them available online. The resulting digital archive Access to the BNA is through the link on our eLibrary page. currently contains around 3 million pages of newspaper content In addition to being signed in on the Library’s homepage, you and allows you to search hundreds of millions of articles by will need to register separately on the BNA website in order to keyword, name, location, date or title. view your search results. On your first visit, simply click on the Register button on the menu bar at the top of the screen, fill in your name and email address and choose a password. You Early English Books Online will receive an email to confirm that the registration process is EEBO is a full-text database containing digital facsimile page complete. On subsequent visits you will need to use the email images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, address and password you chose to sign in to view your search Scotland, Wales and British North America, as well as works results. Please note that The London Library will not be able to in English printed elsewhere from 1473 to 1700, from the first reset your password for this site should you forget it. book printed in English by William Caxton, through to the age of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare and the English Civil War. The collection covers over 130,000 titles and contains New Interface for Catalyst more than 17 million digitally scanned pages. The EEBO project is Members using our online catalogue and e-library service will also currently scanning 100,000 more pages to add to this collection. notice a new interface for Catalyst in the coming weeks as we move to the latest version of the Primo software on which Catalyst The new services add to the extensive range of online resources is based. The content and search functionality is unchanged, and that come with London Library membership. The Library already there will be full online guidance to help you find your way around.
ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE We are delighted to welcome artists Bob Matthews and Mark Harris who have begun a 12-month Artists’ Residency at The London Library, and will be drawing on their wide knowledge of the processes of print production and the history of the printed image. Bob, an artist and exhibition organiser, has taught on the MA print course at the Royal College of Art since 2002; Mark is Associate Professor of Fine Art at Kingston University and has exhibited widely. Bob and Mark intend to use the residency to explore the Library through a purely visual lens, encouraging members to reconsider obscured and unexpected areas of the collection and their encounters with the Library’s material and spaces. Over recent months they have been researching the collection and developing the concepts they would like to take forward: low-impact visual artworks will start appearing in situ in the Library from mid-2019 to early 2020 and will involve no disruption to members once installed. Once in place, the new works will mean that there will be even more to discover and
explore as members use the Library and browse the shelves. The residency aims to act as a bridge to create stronger links between the Library and the Bob Matthews (left) and Mark Harris (right). contemporary art world, and to reflect the Library’s links with many significant artists who have been associated with the Library’s past. It forms the first stage of a larger project for Bob and Mark that reimagines the notion, purpose and form of libraries generally. They are interested in exploring how artists work with the materials within libraries and how those institutions can better utilise the skills set of artists. The findings from the Library will be used either directly or to develop ideas for new artwork. THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27
MEMBERS’ SUMMER PARTY We are looking forward to welcoming Library members to this year’s Members’ Summer Party, which takes place in the Reading Room on Wednesday, 26 June. Guests will be able to celebrate summer in style with a range of delicious alcoholic and non-alcoholic cocktails provided free by Teatulia, the tea brand and London-based tea bar owned by Library member Ahsan Akbar. The Teatulia tea bar, in the heart of Covent Garden, is a tea shop like no other, providing a unique space for conversation and contemplation, delicious teas and an amazing range of cocktails based on their tea range. As well as enjoying the Teatulia drinks free at our Summer Party, members will also be able to get 15% off all drinks and teas at Teatulia’s Covent Garden tea bar. This event is always very popular – visit londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on for information on availability and booking details. Further details about Teatulia can be found at teatuliabar.com.
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MEMBERS’ NEWS
NEW CHAPTER FOR RARE TORAH SCROLL On 9 April 2019, The London Library hosted a special reception to mark the latest chapter in the journey of a rare Czech Torah scroll. Created in 1898 and a remarkable survivor from the darkest days of the Second World War, the scroll is a sacred relic from the Jewish community of Domažlice in Czechoslovakia, which was eradicated by the Nazis. The Domažlice Synagogue was destroyed but many of its documents and ritual objects survived, as was the case with many other objects of worship from other Jewish communities across Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. The Memorial Scrolls Trust has been central to safeguarding over 1,500 of these Czech scrolls that somehow survived in Prague throughout the war and subsequent Soviet era repression. They were eventually rescued by leading members of the UK Jewish community – including London Library Treasurer Lewis Golden – who arranged for them to be shipped to London in 1964. The Library has been looking after the Domažlice scroll for the past 40 years and is now passing it into the care of the Memorial Scrolls Trust. Their Knightsbridge Museum will now house it alongside the many hundreds of other scrolls that are catalogued, conserved and displayed there.
Jeffrey Ohrenstein, Memorial Scrolls Trust Chair, examines the Domažlice Scroll with Rachel Chapman from the Collection Care team.
The full story of how the scrolls came to London can be found in the book Out of the Midst of the Fire (2005) by London Library member Philippa Bernard.
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
TRUSTEE EFFECTIVENESS REPORT
May 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Remains of the Day by London Library member – and Nobel Prize winner – Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s a book that has a special connection with the Library as it was partly inspired by the chance discovery Ishiguro made on the Library’s shelves. Ishiguro recounts how, aged 32, he immersed himself in intense spells of writing over a fourweek period – a process he called ‘The Crash’ – in order to get something down on paper to provide a framework he could subsequently refine. ‘By the time I embarked on the Crash, I’d consumed a substantial amount of “research”: books by and about British servants, about politics and foreign policy between the wars, many pamphlets and essays from the time.’ He describes how he ‘discovered Harold Laski’s The Danger of Being a Gentleman [1939] when I was here [at the Library]. It led to The Remains of the Day.’ Just one of many chance discoveries on our shelves that have triggered big ideas.
Last year, in accordance with best practice, the Board undertook a self-assessment process to evaluate its effectiveness as a Board and identify areas that could be improved. Every member of the Board independently and confidentially completed a Trustee Effectiveness Questionnaire containing 32 questions addressing different aspects of the Board’s performance. Questions dealt with issues such as the size and make-up of the Board, the use of sub-committees, strategy, target-setting and regulation. The Board as a whole felt that they were fulfilling its principal obligations although there were three areas for improvement: • Skills Audit. The Board recognised that it did not carry out a regular Skills Audit. A separate questionnaire was developed for this and a skills audit was duly carried out. The results of that audit were passed to the Nominations Committee for use in determining the membership of sub-committees and the recruitment of new trustees. • Reviewing and discussing Board performance. It was recognised that the Board did not have a regular process for reviewing its achievements and effectiveness (this being the first time it had undertaken this form of review process). It was agreed that this form of Effectiveness Questionnaire would be used to conduct future, regular reviews. • Public Benefit. By a much smaller margin, the Board felt that there needed to be a greater demonstration of the Library’s impact in relation to public benefit. To this end, the Director was charged with preparing a paper on Public Benefit, which was delivered to the Board and discussed.
Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph © Jeff Cottenden.
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29
SIR JOHN RICHARDSON KBE We were saddened to hear of the death on 12 March of Sir John Richardson (1924–2019), celebrated art historian and a Vice-President of The London Library since 2014. During his long life Richardson became celebrated as a leading authority on Pablo Picasso and the avant-garde. The first volume of his acclaimed biography of Picasso was published in 1991 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. Two further volumes were published in 1996 and 2007 respectively. The fourth was still in progress when Sir John died. His two-volume memoir, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper (1999) and Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters (2001), recorded Richardson’s life with the art critic Douglas Cooper, as well as the many connections he developed with the avant-garde in the South of France after the Second World War, and then with a range of artists and contacts in the art world in Britain and the US. In 1994, he presented Richardson on Picasso, a BBC TV series of half-hour programmes related to the Tate Gallery’s exhibition Picasso: Painter, Sculptor. He also hosted a Channel 4 TV series on Picasso in 2001, and contributed to a range of TV programmes about Picasso and other artists. In the post-Cooper years (the pair separated in 1958) Richardson lived in New York, where he had access to most of the big American collectors, worked for the American office of Christie’s and contributed to a range of international journals
Sir John Richardson (right) with Sir Tom Stoppard.
including the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and the Burlington Magazine. From 2008 he also worked as a consultant for Gagosian Gallery in New York, where he organised six Picasso exhibitions, the last of which took place in 2017. He was knighted in 2012, and in 2013 The London Library presented him with their Life in Literature Award. In 2014 he became a Vice-President of the Library, a position he held for the rest of his life.
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POETRY The Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize was set up at King’s College London in memory of Cosmo Davenport-Hines, who died in June 2008, aged 21. He was also the youngest life member of The London Library. We are pleased to publish this year’s winning poem, written by Penelope Quinton. Imperial voyages of discovery – rich chancers manning expeditions almost always equipped with the following: (1) pith helmet (ivory coloured), (2) expensive English public–school education, (3) penis. (the third item made compulsory by the second – although this item is now seen as optional at more progressive fee–paying educational establishments). Kitted out with none of the above am on ethnographic fieldwork in an area that remains afflicted by British civilisation – introduced rather like myxomatosis – by General Allenby – and its ill effects are apparent in every home, in every positive test result for hyper tension or early onset diabetes – diseases that are the heirs of uncertainty and stress – I discover an abandoned pith helmet in the British Archaeological Institute guest house, coated in a gritty layer of limestone – next to two and a half dented bamboo canes and four torn parasols that could not be opened – a British voyeur of past Britons abroad – I am (1) biologically female and (2) descended from a long line of Bethnal Green heathens, (poor ones – boot stitchers and hat trimmers, women who never went anywhere not even to the West End for a night out who were stuck home doing piece work): Bethnal Green like the colonies was a voyage of discovery for socially minded public school boys embarking on their first missions simply by taking the trolley bus from more affluent zones to convert or fuck my ancestors out of their alleged moral misery – before heading off to India or Timbuctoo or somewhere. I hate watching British films on the aeroplane – why does everyone live in a mansion and even if they don’t – still speak like they do – I watch the Godfather, rejecting a well–spoken world war two drama about a book club on Guernsey. Have left as much of my English language as I can afford to be without in the suit case reserved for the journey home and sans penis is also helpful as my work takes place in the dwellings of women on the rough end of this century long conflict– that leaves a slender twenty one year old woman, who while holding onto the hand of her little daughter identifies fragments of her former home from among an anonymised heap of ruptured debris. ‘That was my bathroom’ her voice breaks on the word bath and shoots up an octave as she points out a lump of concrete shaped like Australia with a mosaic of tiny gold and bronze tiles on one side. I meet women who allow me to discover them making the best of it, saying ‘here at least we have freedom from the eyes of our neighbours in the town – here we can do what we like apart from the soldiers and the settlers’ – women getting by weaving small livings from embroidery and cheese making. A tiny girl standing in front of her tent home laughs at a donkey, she clutches a rock in her fist, ready to hurl it at the creature’s white flank, she does then seizes my hand and says take me to the Weeee – she calls the NGO donated swings, the Weeee, after the sound foreign volunteers make when they push her and her best friend. ‘Yalla, come to the Weeee with us. Three– and four–years old they jump from rock to smooth rock, pause to discover purple autumn crocus appearing like miracles out of dry earth and snap the v shaped heads thrusting soggy petals into my palm and struggle onto black plastic swing seats too high for them – we count pushes in Arabic, French and English, shout snatches of rhymes across the hills. Their Dads drive up the track away from the village in illegal cars. I discover how women don’t buy themselves menstrual pads but customise a baby’s diaper, I discover how women endure cystitis for a fortnight because the mobile clinic appears irregularly and anyway, they say camomile and thyme work better than antibiotics. I discover my imperial legacy so carefully avoided in British state curriculums and discover I am no better than I ought to be.
Penelope Quinton is a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London in the department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Her research examines the impact of Israeli house demolitions on Palestinian women’s perceptions of their capability for well-being. She also works as a freelance journalist and has published articles and photo essays with Al Jazeera, the Guardian, and the Saatchi Gallery’s Art & Music magazine.
Penelope Quinton
THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Two autograph manuscript poems 1931, 1937 Estimate £20,000–30,000*
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