The London Library Magazine Issue 34 Winter 2016

MAGAZINE WINTER 2016 ISSUE 34

£3.50

hidden corners Louis Porter focuses on the Library’s collection of early photography titles

JOHN BUCHAN and british propaganda in the first world war

The Scottish novelist’s prodigious literary output promoting Britain’s cause, by Taylor Downing

the london bLUE PLAQUEs Scheme

Howard Spencer marks the 150th anniversary

VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando. A Biography.

New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928.

Presentation copy inscribed to Edward Sackville-West.

Estimate £8,000–£12,000

English Literature, History, Children’s Books & Illustrations Auction London 13 December 2016 Viewing 9 – 12 December 34–35 NEW BOND STREET, LONDON W1A 2AA ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7293 5296 JENNIFER.DELL@SOTHEBYS.COM 2 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE SOTHEBYS.COM/ENGLISHLITERATURE

The London Library Magazine / issue 34

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Contents

The celebrated novelist John Buchan wrote millions of words during the First World War in support of the military effort. His official role assumed increasing importance until he became Director of Intelligence in 1918, and his 24-volume publication Nelson’s History of the War (1915–19) offered a lively and wellinformed first draft of history that was widely read, as Taylor Downing recounts.

5 FROM THE librarian 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK Andrew Robinson on the key Library titles he used while researching his book Earth-Shattering Events.

Troops marching to the trenches, France, 1916 (detail). © IWM.

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11 MY DISCOVERY A pamphlet bound into an exhibition catalogue at the Library gave Franny Moyle an insight into the British art scene for her book on J.M.W. Turner

12 JOHN BUCHAN AND BRITISH PROPAGANDA IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Louis Porter presents an engaging guide to some idiosyncratic early photography titles in the Library, from books by police officers illustrated with ‘Rogues’ Galleries’ of known criminals, to one from 1882 about Eadweard Muybridge and his innovative photographic system that used 24 cameras to capture the actions of a horse travelling at speed.

Taylor Downing on the important contribution the novelist made to the war effort, both at home and overseas

16 HIDDEN CORNERS The Library’s early photography collection is admired by Louis Porter

20 the london bLUE PLAQUES scheme Alphonse Bertillon, from his Photographie Judiciaire (1890).

20

Howard Spencer selects a few notable examples of famous people and the buildings with which they are associated

24 MEMBERS’ NEWS

The blue plaques scheme began in 1866 with the aim of marking the houses in London which have been lived in by celebrated individuals. Howard Spencer looks back on the 150th anniversary and describes the enduring appeal of the plaques, citing many examples near The London Library, including those for Ada Lovelace, Isaac Newton and Napoleon III.

Blue plaque for Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, 12 (formerly 10) St James’s Square, London SW1.

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

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f rom the L I B R A R I A N

On the cover

‘Priam’s Treasure’ (detail), from Heinrich Schliemann’s Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer: Photographische Abbildungen (1874).

Over the years I have often been asked why on earth we keep our photography collection in Science & Miscellaneous, so I am delighted that Louis Porter has worked it out. He reveals in Hidden Corners that the core of S. Photography is formed of nineteenth-century technical manuals filled with the excitement of this new scientific discovery, while works containing early photographs will be found wherever their subject matter places them.

There are more discoveries to be made through Howard Spencer’s fascinating account of the blue plaque scheme and the careful research that goes into ensuring that they are fixed to the right buildings. While some of the local ones are very familiar to me (I have nodded in acknowledgement to Ada, Countess of Lovelace, several times a week for almost 30 years), others are a revelation.

Clearly I need to take that well-known advice: ‘If you want to know London, look up. ’ For those of us whose acquaintance with John Buchan is largely through film and television, getting to know the actual works can be surprising. Who would have guessed, for example, that there is not a single female character in The Thirty-Nine Steps? In this issue, Taylor Downing provides further surprises in showing us a largely forgotten side of Buchan, the man: his extensive contribution to the war effort during the First World War and to creating the first draft of its history.

Something of the creative process is always to be found in our Behind the Book and My Discovery pages. This time round we have Andrew Robinson enlightening us on his route to writing about the impact of earthquakes, and Franny Moyle tells us about her chance discovery of an eighteenth-century pamphlet by Humphry Repton – not on landscape, as we might nowadays expect, but on how to judge art.

And finally, could you help us to spread the word about the Library? Do turn to page 27 of Members’ News where Julian Lloyd, our Head of Communications, tells us how he approaches this vital task and invites your assistance.

Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 9 November 2016. © 2016. 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 Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Charlotte Burgess

Editorial committee David Breuer Emma Marlow Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Charlotte Burgess 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library 020 7766 4704

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

BRINGING HEAVEN TO EARTH Chinese Silver Jewellery and Ornament in the Late Qing Dynasty

by ELIZABETH HERRIDGE Fo rewo rd by D r. Fr an ces Wo o d

Taylor Downing JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1998

Taylor Downing is a bestselling historian and award-winning documentary producer.

His books include Breakdown: Shell Shock on the Somme (2016), Secret Warriors: Key Scientists and Propagandists of the Great War (2014), Spies in the Sky (2011) and Cold War (with Sir Jeremy Isaacs, 2008).

He also writes on film and media history; his book The World at War (2012) is a BFI TV Classic.

Franny Moyle JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2007 Franny Moyle is an author and TV producer.

Her latest book is The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner (2016).

Previously she wrote Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde (2011). Her account of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Desperate Romantics, became a six-part drama for BBC2 in 2009. Her most recent TV work, Nureyev: Dance to Freedom, was nominated for a BAFTA.

Louis Porter

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2013

Louis Porter is a photographer and artist based in London. His work is held in a variety of private and institutional collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum and the State Library of Victoria. He is also a member of the international arts collective, the Artists’ Book Cooperative.

Andrew Robinson JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1987

Andrew Robinson has written more than 25 books on the arts and sciences, including the award-winning Earthshock (1993) and Einstein (2005). He is also a regular contributor to magazines, such as Current World Archaeology, History Today and Nature. A former literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, he has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge.

Howard Spencer JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2004

IANTHE PRESS, in association with PAUL HOLBERTON PUBLISHING PAPERBACK, £40.00 200 PAGES, 150 IMAGES

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Howard Spencer is a senior historian at English Heritage, and has worked on the London blue plaque scheme for the last 12 years. He is the editor of The English Heritage Guide to London’s Blue Plaques, which was published in October 2016. Previously he was a research editor at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and worked on the official history of the UK Parliament.

In Association with Charleston

v

Vanessa Bell, Self – Portrait, ca. 1915, Oil on canvas laid on panel, Yale Center for British Art

Behind the

Book

‘

Andrew Robinson‘s recent book about earthquakes benefited greatly from titles across a wide range of the Library’s collections, from Horace Walpole’s letters to Japanese government reports

’

Andrew Robinson’s Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization (2016).

The complex impact of earthquakes on nations – the subject of my book ‘Earth-Shattering Events’ (Thames & Hudson, 2016) – involves not only history and archaeology, but also economics, philosophy, literature and art, as well as science and technology. I was surprised – and pleased – to find books in the Library relevant to every one of these fields and to all parts of the world, including even earthquakes in London

 The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin (London 1839). S. Science (Gen.).

In Darwin’s classic account of his global researches on HMS Beagle in 1831–6 the naturalist notes, remarkably, that an earthquake in Chile in 1835 was the most ‘deeply interesting’ sight of his entire journey. It led him to speculate graphically that a similar earthquake in Britain would inevitably destroy the nation’s prosperity.

This set me thinking about whether or not Darwin was right.  Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur with Dawn Burgess (Princeton 2008).

T. Archaeology (Gen.).

Amos Nur, born and brought up in Israel, became a professor of geophysics at Stanford University, located on top of the San Andreas Fault. Fascinated by the geological evidence for ancient earthquakes at sites such as Jericho and Mycenae, and biblical references to earthquakes, he aims to persuade sceptical archaeologists of seismicity’s cultural importance in this original book.  The Letters of Horace Walpole, vol.2, ed. Peter Cunningham (9 vols., Edinburgh 1906). Biog. Walpole.

In early 1750, London experienced a significant earthquake, followed by a mildly destructive one. A rumour then spread

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

of a third earthquake that would destroy the city. Many Londoners decamped to the country or spent the night outdoors; preachers called for repentance; natural philosophers started the science of earthquakes. The most reliable witness – and the most entertaining – was Horace Walpole in his letters to a country friend from his house near St James’s Square.  The Lisbon Earthquake by T.D. Kendrick (London 1956). S. Volcanoes &c.

For a century or so after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 – which provoked Voltaire to write Candide – the catastrophe was as resonant an image as the destruction of Pompeii by Vesuvius.

Then memories of it began to fade. This book, written by the director of the British Museum for the earthquake’s bicentenary, is still the most informative account.  Writings 1902–1910 by William James (New York 1987). Philosophy.

The world’s most famous earthquake, in San Francisco in 1906, started a fire that destroyed three-quarters of the city. Yet within a decade San Francisco made an extraordinary recovery. This resilience and creativity is not easy to explain, but I think a clue lies in the writings of psychologist William James, an east coaster who experienced the earthquake by chance.

Instead of fear, ‘[My] emotion consisted

wholly of glee and admiration … “Go it,” I almost cried aloud, “and go it stronger !” ’  The Great Earthquake of 1923 in Japan by the Bureau of Social Affairs, Home Office, Japan (Tokyo 1926).

S. Volcanoes &c.

The devastation of Tokyo and Yokohama by earthquake and fire in 1923 was comparable with that caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But, like San Francisco, Tokyo was rebuilt within about a decade. This official report poignantly documents the disaster and the recovery, while also offering ominous hints of Japan’s path to war in the 1930s.  The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China

by James Palmer (London 2012). H. China.

In China, the appalling Tangshan earthquake in 1976 literally shook the death-bed of Mao Zedong in Beijing.

Mao’s death about a month later prepared the way for the economic transformation of China. Although his death was the proximate cause, the earthquake was the catalyst, as the government’s incompetence in dealing with the earthquake catastrophe exposed Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a sham. China-based Palmer’s pioneering research includes interviews with earthquake survivors.

G U Y P E P P I AT T F I N E A R T S T E P H E N O N G P I N F I N E A RT

alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), The Letter, pen and ink wash, 6 1/4 by 8 1/4 in.

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My DISCOVERY

A chance find of a pamphlet within an eighteenth-century art catalogue offered Franny Moyle a contemporary perspective on British art during the period

The Bee: a Critique on Paintings at Somerset House by HUMPHRY REPTON (1788) One of the great pleasures of research is to embark on a hunt for one thing, and then discover something else in the process. Such a moment occurred in The London Library while I was researching my latest book, The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner (2016). Turner embarked on his career in an era when a fiery debate raged about how best to apply professional standards for painters in a country that had only just founded its Royal Academy of Arts. Should British art take its cue from the Continental old masters, or might our home-grown artists establish their own school of art, with a distinct style and unique qualities?

The key participants in this debate have been well recorded by art historians. But the writings on the subject by a pamphleteer who adopted the pseudonym of ‘the Bee’ were new to me, at least. I came across the Bee by accident. I had requested The London Library’s copy of the original Royal Academy exhibition catalogues dating from 1769 to 1800. A beautifully bound volume was presented to me, which I leafed through in the futile hope that perhaps

those scholars who had examined the volume before me might have missed a key reference to Turner. Of course, they hadn’t.

Interleaved with the catalogues, however, were pamphlets commenting on the annual RA exhibitions. Among these, one called ‘The Bee: A Critique on Paintings at Somerset House’ seemed newly revelatory. I learned from further research that this commentary from 1788 had been written by Humphry Repton, who would eventually make his name as a landscape designer. In the guise of a small furry insect he was encouraging ‘every painter [to] become a BEE of the same hive, working to the same great end – the advancement and perfection of his Art’ .

The Bee’s argument provided me with a fresh, vivid and unfamiliar voice expressing new thinking about British art. The piece criticised the aristocratic connoisseurs who constantly found British painters lacking when compared to their Continental counterparts, and offered the British public an independent guide on how to judge a picture, using five criteria: composition, drawing, colouring, expression and

J.M.W. Turner’s Landscape with Water, c.1840–5. © Tate, London 2015. Currently on display at Turner Contemporary’s exhibition J.M.W. Turner: Adventures in Colour (until 8 January 2017).

finishing. His words could not have been more pertinent to Turner, who would go on to explore new forms of art with a bravery that would mark him out for ridicule and admiration in equal measure.

There is a twist in this tale of the Bee. When I returned to the catalogues once more to write this article, I noticed the name of the woman who had originally collected them: Mary Boydell. Her signature is on each one, and in 1793 it changes to Mary Nicol. I wondered if Mary was part of the Boydell family of eighteenth-century publishing entrepreneurs. John Boydell had famously commissioned the greatest British artists of his day to produce a series of prints illustrating the works of Shakespeare, which were published from 1792 to 1803.

On reacquainting myself with the Boydell story, I discovered that the bookseller and publisher George Nicol, who had been heavily involved in the Shakespeare venture, had married John Boydell’s niece, Mary. Apart from the fact that she was a talented writer and print collector, she was also the victim of an attempted murder. On 9 July 1787 Mary had been walking near Leicester Square when she was shot by a rejected suitor, Dr John Elliot. Mary suffered nothing more than bruises and a burned cloak since, as was revealed at Elliot’s subsequent trial, his pistols were not correctly loaded. Elliott was therefore acquitted of attempted murder and sent to Newgate Gaol for assault. Here, however, he starved himself to death, expiring two months before Nicol and Mary Boydell married in September 1787.

I have come away from studying the Library’s collection of RA catalogues not only with glimpses into the state of eighteenth-century art, but also into the life of a young woman living at the time. While one proved useful for my book on Turner, perhaps the other will serve a future project.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

John Buchan and British Propaganda In

the first world war Taylor Downing tells the largely forgotten story of Buchan’s role as a war propagandist

In August 1914, the War Office had a thoroughly antiquated view about the need to inform the public as to what was going on, and most generals held journalists in utter contempt. The appointment of Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War was immensely popular, but he was used to small-scale wars on the fringes of empire that were usually over quite quickly. He took the view that reporters were a nuisance and it was far better if people were not told much about what was happening; just a few paragraphs about troop movements here and there released through an occasional official communiqué. So the press was not informed that the British Expeditionary Force was even preparing to go to France until three days after it had arrived.

Journalists and photographers were banned from going anywhere near the front and were threatened with being shot as spies if found in military areas. In the war pictorials that were published to cater for the enormous popular interest in the war, artists had to try hard to imagine what the first encounters with the enemy looked like. But with no photographs and only bland communiqués from the front, the publications came out more like boy’s own comics than as considered journalism.

This attitude could not last and, as the 12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

war continued and the realisation dawned that it would not be ‘over by Christmas’ , a growing awareness developed of a ‘Home Front’ in which public opinion and morale were going to play an important role in sustaining the fighting front. So in 1915 a small number of correspondents were accredited to the army’s General Headquarters (GHQ) in France. One of

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Penguin Classic edition 2007.

them was the 40-year-old Scottish novelist John Buchan, who during that same year published one of his most successful novels, The Thirty-Nine Steps, a gripping thriller with a central character named Richard Hannay. Buchan began to write regular articles for the Times and the Daily News that were soon highly regarded. Leo Amery, the Conservative MP and journalist, wrote that his articles in the Times were ‘excellent’ , and that Buchan ‘can sense a situation quickly and can with the minimum of effort make a vivid story of it’ .

This was not Buchan’s first contribution to the war effort. For ten years he had been a director of the Edinburgh publishing house Thomas Nelson and Sons, for whom he edited a set of popular encyclopaedias and commissioned contemporary writers for a series called Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics. Soon after the declaration of war, Buchan suggested to his partners at Nelson that they should publish a History of the War. Although he realised that the full story would not be known for years, Buchan felt it was possible to write an intelligent narrative to come out in several volumes roughly three to six months after the events. Both Arthur Conan Doyle and Hilaire Belloc were approached but were too busy. So Buchan ended up writing the History

himself and brought his remarkable energy to the project. Published between February 1915 and July 1919, it eventually ran to 24 volumes and more than one million words. Buchan was supremely well suited for the commission. He summarised vast amounts of information including a great deal that he picked up and learned at GHQ. Reading the volumes today, they are lively, convey a real sense of the fighting and have a cracking narrative drive. They present a well-informed first draft of history.

The situation with regard to supplying information to overseas countries, particularly to neutrals like the United States, was totally different. Before 1914, no British government had ever felt the need to launch a large-scale propaganda campaign overseas. Yet within a month of the declaration of war, a top-secret organisation was established ‘to inform and influence public opinion abroad and to confute German mis-statements and sophistries’ . Formally titled the War Propaganda Bureau, it was better known by the name of its base at Wellington House in London. It was led by the reforming Liberal MP Charles Masterman. He had a sophisticated view of the way official propaganda should work. He did not want to spread unconfirmed rumours about dreadful German atrocities against women and children, but instead wished to promote Britain’s cause and its commitment to the war in the guise of press articles and literature by wellrespected figures, apparently written independently and without government backing. This was the best way, he believed, to influence opinion overseas.

The literary establishment rallied round and in September most of the leading authors of the day pledged their support for Wellington House. They included Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield and H.G. Wells. By the end of 1914, Wellington House had produced dozens of learned articles and books about the war for distribution overseas. It was all pretty highbrow and not directed at the public at large, but was an attempt to get Britain’s point of view across to the sort of people who influenced popular opinion abroad: newspaper editors, writers and politicians.

Buchan’s multi-volume Nelson’s History of the War was the sort of project

John Buchan. Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/ Alamy Stock Photo.

that appealed to Masterman. He offered a welcome subsidy to Nelson, which was struggling with difficult wartime conditions and the high cost of paper. In return, he asked Buchan to write various spin-offs from his History that could be translated into different languages and distributed internationally. Although the books were government-sponsored, no one reading them would imagine that they were anything other than an objective account of the war describing the massive effort of the entire British Empire on land and sea, written by a leading author and published by an independent publishing house.

This was just the type of ‘propaganda’ that Masterman wanted. Buchan moved seamlessly from imparting informed news to the Home Front to writing official propaganda for the international market.

In early 1916, after Sir Douglas Haig became Commander-in-Chief in France and Belgium, Buchan’s status changed again. Haig, a fellow Scot who had been to the same Oxford college as Buchan, knew and admired the author’s work, so Buchan was invited to join the team that wrote official army communiqués. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps and joined GHQ just in time for the start of the Battle of the Somme. He prepared communiqués and wrote weekly summaries of the battle that were sent out by Wellington House to British embassies around the world. Later, when he came to write up the full story of the battle, he did so not only for his Nelson’s History of the War but also in the form of two separate volumes for Wellington House, simply titled The Battle of the THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Somme First Phase and Second Phase, also published by Nelson. These subsidised volumes were then translated into Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

The books convey a good sense of the battle and its horrors. They certainly do not come across as obvious propaganda.

On the other hand, they are not critical of any senior officers who repeatedly sent men in human-wave assaults against wellentrenched enemy machine guns. Reliant upon casualty figures supplied by GHQ, they repeatedly underestimate British and exaggerate German losses, but are still consulted today and remain an excellent read.

When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister at the end of 1916 he decided to shake up the whole propaganda effort. He created a new Department of Information and, in February 1917, Buchan was appointed as its Director reporting directly to the Prime Minister. He now had influence over all aspects of reporting the war. Immensely gifted though he was as a writer, however, Buchan was not attuned to the role of a 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

‘

In 1917 Buchan was appointed Director of the Department of Information. He now had influence over all aspects of reporting the war.

’

bureaucrat. There was constant sniping from the Foreign Office, which regarded the supply of information abroad as their territory. The War Office created a new department, MI7, to keep strict control over the release of military information.

Now Buchan found himself also in charge of Wellington House, with Masterman reporting to him. He decided to give

priority to the distribution of news, and Roderick Jones of Reuters was put in charge of a new service that sent out daily news cables in French and English. An office was opened in America to try to better present Britain’s position there.

But it was not a happy time for Buchan. He was increasingly attacked in the press for not doing more. Because so much that he was doing was secret he felt he could not properly defend himself.

It also turned out that Lloyd George was always too busy to see him. In the summer, Sir Edward Carson joined the War Cabinet with the task of supervising the Department of Information. He was a powerful figure but was too preoccupied with the affairs of his beloved Ulster to have time to defend the propaganda team.

The attacks continued. Buchan replied: ‘We welcome such criticism when it is not merely ignorant gossip, for propaganda is not an occult science … Moreover, there is no finality to it; it may be improved but it can never be perfect. ’ In January 1918, Carson resigned from the Cabinet. Lloyd George decided on

john buchan and british propaganda in the first world war another reorganisation and created the last new ministry of the war, the Ministry of Information. He put Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron, in charge. Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, the Times and a host of other publications, was brought in to run propaganda directed at the enemy. This marked a complete turning of the circle from the start of the war when Kitchener saw the newspapers as little more than an irritation. Now the greatest press moguls of the era were in charge. A vigorous campaign was started to tempt soldiers from the different ethnic groups within the Austro-Hungarian army to desert. Film was used with great effect to communicate the government message to the twenty million people in Britain who went to the cinema each week. From the summer of 1918, tens of millions of leaflets were dropped over German lines and in Germany itself, pointing out how hopeless their struggle had become and that the war was as good as won by the Allies.

In the reshuffle, Buchan was made Director of Intelligence and put in charge of processing information for the propaganda departments. He was also responsible for inviting foreign journalists

to tour British war factories. One American journalist he met was Lowell Thomas, who was searching for an individual whose dramatic wartime story could be promoted to help lift morale. Buchan put him in touch with General Edmund Allenby’s headquarters in Palestine where stories were beginning to circulate about a young intelligence officer who was leading an Arab Revolt in the desert. Thomas went to the Middle East with a cameraman, where he met Colonel T.E. Lawrence and wrote up his story in a series of illustrated lectures and in two films entitled With Allenby in Palestine and With Lawrence in Arabia. They proved hugely popular and made the reputation of both Thomas and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ . Buchan had helped to give birth to one of the enduring legends of the war.

After the war, the Germans were in no doubt about the effectiveness of British propaganda. Field Marshal Hindenburg wrote: ‘The enemy seeks to poison our spirit … He bombards our front, not only with a drumfire of artillery, but also with a drumfire of printed paper. Besides bombs which kill the body, his airmen throw down leaflets which are intended to kill the

Opposite Soldiers marching to the front, Battle of the Somme. Buchan had to write about massive casualties without making the Battle appear a disaster. © IWM. Left Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief in France and Belgium from December 1915. As a fellowScot he was a great admirer of Buchan and his writings.

World History Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo.

soul. ’ General Ludendorff, Commanderin-Chief on the Western Front in 1918, wrote in his memoirs: ‘We were hypnotised

by Allied propaganda as a rabbit is by a snake. It was exceptionally clever and conceived on a grand scale … many people were no longer able to distinguish their own impressions from what enemy propaganda had told them. ’ The lessons were not forgotten in Germany. When Hitler came to power 15 years later, Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry held a central place in the Nazi state.

In Britain, Information was the first wartime ministry to be closed down within days of the Armistice. Buchan supervised the process and passed on tens of thousands of its assets, including all the official films and photographs, to the newly established Imperial War Museum.

Somehow, despite the pressures of war, writing his mammoth History and countless weekly news digests, as well as running the Department of Information and playing a senior role in the Ministry, Buchan had still found time to write two novels. The most successful of these, Greenmantle, published in 1916, again centred on the exploits of Richard Hannay, who is described tracking down Muslim extremists inspired by Germany into organising a jihad against British rule in the Middle East. The book was informed by much that Buchan had learned in office and was so successful that it outsold The Thirty-Nine Steps.

After the war and the dismantling of the Ministry of Information, Buchan collapsed in exhaustion. He decided to turn away from public affairs and bought a house in Oxfordshire where he wanted to cut himself off and concentrate on his writing. He had lost several of his best friends along with his youngest brother during the war. For years he lived in the shadow of the Great War and wrote books of remembrance and tribute. Along with many others of his generation in the 1920s, he felt an overriding sense of guilt that he had survived when others had not.

But Buchan’s contribution to the war effort, although largely forgotten today, had been great. In a total war, it is not just bullets and shells that bring victory, it is words and pictures as well. Buchan had brought his prodigious energy to the war effort and had proved himself again to be a supreme master of words.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

HIDDEN CORNERS

early PHOTOGRAPHY in focus The Library’s collection includes some rare and interesting landmarks of photographic history, as Louis Porter has discovered Hunting for books on early photography in The London Library requires the appetite and alert faculties that I assume come naturally to a truffle pig. The back stacks, like the dark oak forests of Périgord so loved by French truffle hunters, conceal the greatest treasures, and the best of these can generally be found away from the designated areas. For example, Alex Richardson’s remarkable Vickers Sons and Maxim, Limited: Their Works and Manufactures (1902) can be found on the folio shelves of S. Engineering. Photographs of artillery demonstrations conducted by men in pristine white uniforms, views of cavernous factory workshops assembling the ‘Maxim’ and ‘Pom-Pom’ guns that would soon churn flesh and soil on the fields of Europe, and scientific images of armour plating tests, are all rendered with extraordinary clarity.

One afternoon, hunting in Topography, I discovered a copy of Heinrich Schliemann’s Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer: Photographische Abbildungen (1874, T. Asia Minor, Troy, folio), which details Schliemann’s discovery of, among other things, ‘Priam’s Treasure’ . The two volumes of albumen prints include photographs of drawings, dig sites and collections of silver vases, goblets, copper lance-heads and a variety of other artefacts from ancient Troy arranged neatly on shelves, with object numbers carefully inscribed into the glass photographic plates. These arrangements are both scientific records and spectacles of plunder, a nineteenth-century precursor to the Haul videos that proliferate on YouTube today.

The prints themselves in Schliemann’s book are surprisingly crude. The albumen 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

print was the first truly mass-produced form of photography, finding its way into millions of homes throughout the world.

Despite the scale of production, albumen prints were hand made, a sheet of thin cotton rag coated with salted egg white and silver nitrate. When pasted into books the prints were often part of sumptuous editions, frequently sold in instalments by subscription.

The Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer, however, is an exercise in how not to make a photographic book, a mess of wonky, mis-trimmed and poorly coated prints, as if Schliemann in an attempt to save money had done the job himself, at night, in the

dark. Although poorly realised, the book has a sense of authenticity that a more pristine creation lacks. I wonder, briefly, if the black soot that clings to the pages of these volumes has come from an ancient terracotta amphora and is not just dust dislodged from the top of one of the veins of mysterious piping that run through the back stacks.

The S. Photography section itself spans a respectable six shelves in Science and Miscellaneous (one more than its neighbour, S. Petroleum). Pedagogic manuals on photographic techniques, encyclopaedias and numerous works of cultural theory dominate the shelfmark.

Opposite Artillery demonstrations, from Alex Richardson’s Vickers Sons and Maxim, Limited: Their Works and Manufactures (1902).

Left ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, from Thomas Byrne’s Professional Criminals of America (1886).

Some works by photographers and artists do poke through, but the more visually inclined browser is better served by heading straight to the heavily illustrated and often lavish works of S. Photography, 4to. From the technical aficionado’s point of view, though, S. Photography contains some superb early photography manuals and, as a rule of thumb, the longer the title the better the book. Robert Hunt’s verbosely titled Photography: A Treatise on the Chemical Changes Produced by Solar Radiation, and the Production of Pictures from Nature, by the Daguerreotype, Calotype, and other Photographic Processes (1851) is, for example, a fascinating treatise offering

workable instructions in the methods of some the medium’s pioneers. It also features possibly the shortest complete history of photography, at fewer than five pages.

For much of the nineteenth century, photography was a febrile mix of innovation and possibility. Almost every corner of the physical and mental world was in some way influenced by the new medium, and the shelves of the Library are a fascinating expression of this influence. Shelfmarks such as S. Movement, S. Crime and S. Ethnology present ample evidence of a time in photography’s history when the work of photographic scientists, artists and charlatans mingled frequently and at times seamlessly.

Occasionally I give a visiting friend or family member a tour of the Library, during which I like to show them the copy of Thomas Byrne’s Professional Criminals of America (1886) that can be found in S. Crime, 4to. Byrne, chief detective of New York City, was famed for his rough interrogation style and for his ‘Rogues’ Gallery’ , a collection of photographic portraits of known criminals on display at police headquarters.

The book is an overview of the gallery and features around 200 portraits of New York’s less elusive bank sneaks, burglars, hotel thieves and confidence tricksters. The gallery was designed to serve as a tool for detectives in identifying criminals, a fact not lost on the sitters themselves who often did what they could to evade the camera, contorting their faces and closing their eyes but, in Bryan’s words, ‘the sun has been too quick for them’ . Some were more reluctant than others, and the portrait of the prolific bank robber and burglar Edward Lyons features an unconscious Lyons recovering in hospital from gunshot wounds received during a botched robbery. The ‘Inspector’s Model’ , a theatrical image towards the beginning of the book, shows the supposed struggle of an unwilling subject. Byrnes himself looks on as his detectives, like retail assistants restraining an apoplectic department-store Santa, set to work preparing the sitter for his portrait.

The ‘Rogues’ Gallery’ of Professional Criminals of America was published before the standardisation of police photography and, despite its serious intent, the volume feels like a Central Casting look-book for Gangs of New York. Around the same time, Parisian police officer Alphonse Bertillon was developing an anthropometric system for use in law enforcement, and his work laid the foundation for the modern mug shot. His rare Photographie Judiciaire (1890) contains some fascinating images, including an innovative use of cut-outs to demonstrate the misleading effect of facial hair on accurate suspect identification.

Like Byrne’s book, Photographie Judiciaire features an ‘Inspector’s Model’ photograph; instead of a chaotic dungeon scene, however, we find an ordered, THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

well-appointed police-department photographic studio. In the sitter’s chair, Bertillon, his head held in place by a metal rest, stares fixedly at the camera.

This image serves as a powerful rebuke of the unrefined methods of earlier police photography. Bertillon was one of several nineteenth-century professionals who saw in the camera a perfect prism through which to view and interpret the social body.

The British polymath and father of eugenics Francis Galton developed a form of ‘composite portraiture’ which, through superimposing individual portraits, would by a process of formal accumulation highlight any mutual physical characteristics between groups of people. Galton’s first published description of the process can be found among the Library’s periodicals, in an 1878 edition of the journal Nature. Probably the best reproductions of Galton’s technique can be found in volume 2 of Karl Pearson’s exhaustive The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1924, Biog. Galton, 4to).

Although in Nature Galton suggests that the process could be of use to amateur genealogists, the subjects of his own experiments included criminals, the sick and, forebodingly, ‘The Jewish Type’ .

The Library has several copies of

Galton’s half-cousin Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, including the 1872 first edition (S. Psychology, Darwin). At only 30 photographs the historical significance of Expression can be easily overlooked, but on further examination the menagerie of peculiar portraits reveals an interesting early collaboration between scientist and photographic artist. The Swedishborn Oscar Rejlander produced many of the photographs for the book. The illustration for ‘sneering’ features his wife Mary and, with varying degrees of credibility, Rejlandler himself enacts fear, disgust, indignation, indifference and surprise. Rejlandler was a well-regarded photographer of children and, of the ten child emotions he photographed for Expression, one took on a life of its own.

‘Mental Distress’ would become known as ‘Ginx’s Baby’ , and Rejlander would go on to independently sell over 300,000 copies of the photograph.

The jewel of the Library’s collection of early photographic portraiture is arguably The People of India, edited by J. Forbes Watson and John William Kaye and located in the Safe, an 8-volume compendium of 468 albumen prints and descriptive texts, which depict bird catchers, acrobats,

potters, grass-cutters, charcoal carriers, horse dealers, fruit sellers, minstrels, barbers, rulers, soldiers, courtesans, families and other members of the castes and tribes that inhabited British India.

Published by W.H. Allen & Co. for the India Office between 1868 and 1875, The People of India was a failed attempt to produce a methodical and statistically informed photographic analysis of a vast cultural and social landscape. Of the eighth and final volume, only 200 copies were ever made and, through lack of subscription, the project was wound up, well short of completing its task.

The photographs vary widely in their quality and mostly adhere to the formal conventions of Victorian studio portraiture.

There are, however, some superb group portraits, in particular of the various professions. What is more consistent is the tone of the textual comments that accompany each photograph, a blend of cultural superiority, revulsion and suspicion. For example we learn that ‘Khunjurs are liars, dacoits, thieves’ , and that Changars are ‘repulsively mean and wretched’ . Individuals fare no better: of Shair Ali Syud the author declares, ‘It is hardly possible, perhaps, to conceive features more essentially repulsive’ . Not

Alphonse Bertillon in the sitter’s chair in a police-department photographic studio in Paris, from his Photographie Judiciaire (1890).

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hidden corners

Oscar Rejlander’s photographs of children’s emotions, in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Aminals (1872). Number 1, ‘Ginx’s Baby’, went on to sell 300,000 copies as an individual print.

even Afghan fruit escapes disdain: ‘none of it has the juiciness or flavour of English fruits of the same description. ’ The rebellion of 1857 casts a heavy shadow and, for all its ethnographic intent, the work has much in common with Byrne’s Professional Criminals of America.

The descriptions of northern-frontier tribes dedicate much attention to military strength, tactics, arms and their loyalty to the empire. Groups who took sides against the British in the rebellion often receive the harshest attention; the Goojars, for instance, ‘are dishonest, untrustworthy, and lawless in a high degree; and require constant and unremitting supervision’ .

The analytical eye of the nineteenthcentury camera was not confined to

studying human subjects. In 1882, The Horse in Motion: As Shown By Instantaneous Photography (Higginson Collection, 4to.) was published at the behest of Leland Stanford, an industrialist, politician and keen horse breeder, who set out to answer a question that preoccupied many equine enthusiasts: ‘When galloping, do a horse’s hooves ever simultaneously leave the ground?’ To answer this question the photographer Eadweard Muybridge was employed to develop a photographic system to freeze the actions of a horse travelling at speed. Using a series of 24 cameras arranged at linear intervals and triggered by trip-wires, Muybridge not only proved that a horse’s hooves do indeed leave the ground at the same time

but, by projecting the stills in sequence at the California School of Fine Arts in 1880, can lay claim to producing the first motion-picture screening. Other animals are depicted in the book, including oxen, deer, dogs and a boar – although unlike its fellow quadrupeds the boar requires the encouragement of a farm-hand with a whip to cross the trip-wires of Muybridge’s cameras. The photographer’s collaboration with Leland ended acrimoniously, but Muybridge would go on to use the multicamera technique to produce his hugely popular volume Animal Locomotion (1887), which echoes in the work of artists including Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon.

At around the same time, French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey was conducting similar experiments with purpose-built equipment. In his book Movement (1895, S. Movement), Marey describes some of the most intriguing experiments in the history of early photography, and his subjects included horses, athletes, rubber balls, tortoise hearts and pigeons. His work on camera shutters and methods for winding film on to bobbins form essential parts of the technical matrix from which cinema and modern photography would soon emerge.

Muybridge and Marey were direct contemporaries, both lived between 1830 and 1904 and their work was often discussed within the same public forums.

But on closer inspection radically different approaches emerge. Muybridge, the showman and professional photographer, had a penchant for attractive naked human subjects, never let the truth get in the way of his work and on many occasions edited his sequences for aesthetic appeal. Conversely, Marey was a scientist to the core, and the beguiling quality of his images was simply a by-product of a deeper investigation. For a short time, propelled by the wonderment of the new technology of photography, a peculiar cross-pollination between science and art emerged, not always with positive results. Regardless of its effect, one of the most intriguing places to explore this relationship must surely be a library whose history, almost to the year, spans that of photography itself.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

THE LONDON BLUE PLAQUES scheme

Then and Now This year marks the 150th anniversary of the London blue plaques. Howard Spencer selects some interesting stories behind the distinctive roundels and the famous people they honoured, in St James’s Square and beyond

Just around the corner from The London Library is a small, round piece of history: London’s oldest surviving blue plaque. It commemorates the stay of Napoleon III, the French emperor, at 1c (formerly 3a) King Street in 1847–8, and was put up by the (not yet Royal) Society of Arts in 1867.

This was the second ‘official’ plaque to be installed and, a century and a half later, blue plaques of a broadly similar design are still going up in London. The roundel – usually blue, a colour that shows up attractively against brickwork and stucco – has been widely copied in other places too, both in Britain and the wider world.

The plaques scheme in London has been celebrating its 150th anniversary.

It was on 7 May 1866 that a Society of Arts committee first met to look into ‘memorial tablets to deceased individuals’ , picking up the gauntlet thrown down three years earlier by William Ewart, MP. Ewart – best known as a leading promoter of public libraries – asked in the House of Commons, on 17 July 1863, if ‘it may be practicable to have inscribed on those houses in London which have been inhabited by celebrated persons, the names of such persons’ .

Appealing to national pride, Ewart went on to note that ‘Other nations were in the habit of preserving memorials of their great men, and there was no reason why we should not follow their example’ .

William Cowper, later Lord Mount Temple and at that time First Commissioner of Works, sprang up to give the obligatory ‘yes, but …’ speech from the government benches. He was sure that ‘as much interest was felt in England 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Above Plaque for Napoleon III at 1c (formerly 3a) King Street, St James’s, SW1.

Opposite Agatha Christie’s plaque, 58 Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, W8.

for departed greatness as in other countries’ , but reminded the House that an Englishman’s home was his castle: ‘It was the right of the owner or occupier of a house to write upon it what he pleased, and it might not be desirable to compel a man to place upon his house the name of a person who did not then live there.

Some persons liked to put their own names on a brass plate upon their doors, and might not wish to have the name of an eminent departed person also there. ’ Ewart now has two blue plaques; Cowper has none, though he did sit on the committee that decided who should get them, and his points were fair. In the plaques scheme that emerged, no coercion has ever been employed to induce building owners to accept a blue plaque. Most are only too pleased to have them, but even today objections to them

as distractions from commercial signage are not unknown. Owner permissions are not, however, always easily won, and lately the task of gaining them has been made more difficult by the increasingly complicated nature of property ownership in London.

When, after some correspondence in its journal, the Society of Arts first addressed the task of marking the personal associations of London’s buildings, an early suggestion was to mount portraits in mosaic; iron was mentioned as a possible material, too, but the Society eventually settled on circular inscribed ‘memorial tablets’ made of encaustic ware. The first to go up was to mark the birthplace of Lord Byron, in Holles Street (off Oxford Street), at some point in late 1866 or early 1867. It was blue, but the manufacturers, Minton Hollins, found difficulties with producing this colour, and most of the early plaques were terracotta or brown.

As beginnings go, the Byron plaque was not particularly auspicious. In his recent work for the Survey of London, the street-by-street history of the capital now hosted by UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, Peter Guillery has noted that not only was the Society incorrect in believing that Byron’s birthplace at 16 Holles Street had been renumbered 24, but – more fundamentally – there was no solid evidence as to which house in the street the poet had been born in. This means that neither the original plaque – which was lost by 1899 – nor the three privately erected replacements put up since, have marked anything more than an

‘

approximate location of where Byron first drew breath.

Other early plaques were more successful and long-lived, and their presence, in several cases, has clearly been an aid to building conservation.

This was an explicit aim from the outset: Ewart, as we know, spoke of ‘preserving memorials’ , and the first convenor of the Society of Arts committee wrote of saving historic London from ‘the ruthless hands of modern destroyers and improvers’ .

The earliest plaques predate the system of the listing of buildings by 80 years; even the first legislation to protect ancient monuments did not reach the statute book until 1882.

However, plaques can only raise awareness and encourage preservation.

The early roundels on the former homes, on and around Leicester Square, of Joshua Reynolds and Isaac Newton did not stop them falling to the march of progress. There are still occasional losses: in 2009, Air Chief

Agatha Christie’s recollection that she lived at number 48 Sheffield Terrace was at variance with all the written evidence

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Marshal Lord Dowding’s old house in Wimbledon was demolished, and there was no other building in Greater London on which his plaque could go instead. At one time plaques were put on replacement buildings but this was always controversial, and vulnerable to the charge of ‘false history’ .

False history was definitely made

when, in 1869, the Society of Arts placed a tablet to Benjamin Franklin at 7 Craven Street, in Charing Cross. Unfortunately, the street had been renumbered since Franklin’s sojourn – twice. The house he stayed in is the present number 36, now preserved as the Benjamin Franklin House; a bronze London County Council (LCC) plaque marks its façade, while the original roundel from the ‘wrong’ house – long demolished – is now on display inside, at the bottom of the basement stairs. Numbering and renumbering is still a bear-trap; so too is reliance on human memory and ‘local tradition’ . Agatha Christie’s plaque is at 58 Sheffield Terrace in Campden Hill; her own recollection that she lived at number 48 was at variance with all the written evidence, electoral registers and directories being a vital source.

The importance of thorough research is further underlined by the case of the architectural draughtsman Joseph Michael Gandy, who was long believed THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

Left Home of Isaac Newton, 87 Jermyn Street, SW1, demolished 1913. © London Metropolitan Archives, City of London (collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk).

Above Plaque commemorating three prime ministers, William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Derby and William Gladstone, at Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square.

to have lived in a particular house in Grove Park Terrace, Chiswick, on the not-entirely-unreasonable assumption that the original Georgian terrace of ten houses would have been numbered 1 to 10. It was, in fact – for no clear reason – numbered 3 to 12.

In the research that underpins the plaques today, The London Library plays an important role. There is almost a full run of Who’s Who, a resource discarded by many other libraries. There are London directories, too. Most of all, there is the large collection of biographies in the stacks, many of which contain much valuable address information, and also inform work on the ‘first sift’ of plaque suggestions from the public – the shortlisting, undertaken by a panel of experts, of the candidates to go forward for full address investigation.

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Having put up 35 plaques in about as many years, the Society of Arts – which had always hoped, in line with its general ethos, to set the ball rolling and then stand aside for others – bequeathed the scheme in 1901 to the 12-year-old LCC. Responsibility for ‘official’ plaques passed to the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1965, a development that allowed them to go up for the first time in outer metropolitan districts such as Barnet, Croydon and Wimbledon. In 1986, on the abolition of the GLC, the blue plaques scheme devolved to English Heritage, a government agency. English Heritage split last year, and the part that retained the name – and the London plaques scheme – became a charitable trust.

Public suggestions for plaques have been a feature of the selection process – at first via letters to learned journals –

since the earliest days, but it was under the LCC’s stewardship that recognisable parameters for the plaque scheme were set, including the convention of waiting a decent interval after the death of an individual before considering them for commemoration (the ‘20 year rule’ now in place was first referred to as early as 1912, although not applied with consistency until much later). The LCC’s chief clerk, Laurence Gomme, set high standards for researching plaques, and oversaw a marked increase in their number.

Someone at the council – probably Gomme – also understood that plaques could say more than simply what was on the inscription. The early LCC plaques not only made prominent mention of the council itself – whereas the Society of Arts had diffidently hidden its name in an ornate border – but featured a laurel wreath, emphasising that, more than a mere statement of fact, a plaque was intended to honour an individual, and grace a building. A good example of this wreathed design may be seen close to The London Library at 87 Jermyn Street, commemorating Isaac Newton, and dating from 1908. Newton, incidentally, was one of the deserving cases cited by Ewart in that first oration, along with Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Thomas Macaulay.

Another early LCC plaque is at 10 St James’s Square – Chatham House – and

the london BLUE PLAQUES scheme commemorates three prime ministers: William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Derby and William Gladstone. It is an oversized roundel – the usual size is 495mm, or 19½ inches – so as to fit all these names, and the laurel garland is set on surrounding tiles. When the plaque went up in 1910 the chatelaine of the house, Alma, Lady Kinnaird, complained of its ‘very ugly bright blue colour’; she was assured that it would tone down, as seems to have been the case.

The stipulation of one plaque per person was proposed in the early years of the LCC’s stewardship and is strictly adhered to today, but less so in the past: Gladstone is one of a select band to be mentioned on three plaques. The one he has to himself lies not far from St James’s Square, at 11 Carlton House Terrace.

Dating from 1925, it is a fine example of the beautiful, glazed Della Robbia plaques made by Doulton, with a raised, coloured wreath on its border.

The present standard plaque – wreathless, with a narrow white border, allowing for longer inscriptions and enhanced legibility – dates from 1938. An unnamed student from the Central School of Arts and Crafts designed it, and the first plaques made to this template were brown. After the war, blue again returned to favour and, apart from a few tweaks to the font and the increasing use of lower case, not much has changed since. Among the GLC plaques of this design within a short stroll of The London Library are those to Lord Curzon (1976) at 1 Carlton House Terrace, and Charles De Gaulle (1984) at 4 Carlton Gardens, where the General headed the French government in exile.

An earlier plaque on the same building commemorates Lord Palmerston, whose main contribution to the built environment was a chain of forts – ‘Palmerston’s follies’ – constructed to repel the French. Was the allocation of the building to de Gaulle a dark Churchillian joke?

Byron may have lost his official plaque but his daughter, Ada Lovelace, has one two doors away from The London Library, put up by English Heritage in 1992. Five years earlier, Nancy Astor was commemorated directly opposite the Library at number 4, the current premises of the In and Out (Naval and Military) Club. Recognition for these famous women was, surely, long overdue

Top Margaret Sarah Carpenter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 1835. © Government Art Collection, Pictorial Press Ltd/ Alamy Stock.

Above English Heritage’s plaque for Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 12 (formerly 10) St James’s Square.

– though the redoubtable Gomme made an early gesture of ‘affirmative action’ in 1907, writing a long report about famous women for the LCC to consider.

Over the years, the range of figures commemorated by plaques has both

grown and shifted. From the outset, writers and artists were well represented; so were political figures, who were invariably described as ‘statesmen’ . This is an area in which the volume of suggestions has noticeably fallen off. In parallel, more figures from popular culture have been put forward; the GLC, in particular, made a concerted effort to celebrate stars of the London music halls. Architects feature strongly – as perhaps is natural for a medium that celebrates the link between person and building – whereas professionals in medicine, science and particularly engineering make, relatively speaking, less of a showing. Nor did sporting figures feature much among London’s blue plaques until recently. And while the plaques reflect London’s diverse ethnic mix better than they once did, the number that commemorate non-white figures is still relatively small.

There are now over 900 plaques across Greater London and – although it is true that in certain areas, further additions will need to be managed with care – there is little sign of saturation. A significant development is that the scheme is now commemorating figures active in the 1960s and later – the era of mass culture, and of being ‘famous for 15 minutes’ .

The sheer number of names that could be commemorated – especially in various branches of the entertainment industry – is daunting. Care is going to be needed to define, refine and maintain standards, and to keep the plaques interesting and eclectic, but the flow of inspiring ideas of people and buildings to commemorate seems unlikely to dry up any time soon.

Perhaps one key to the enduring popularity of blue plaques is the link they provide to the ordinary, domestic lives of those commemorated; there is nothing of the vainglory of statues about them. Vivid, sometimes tragic, stories flow from the cold ceramic: in Savile Row, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s plaque marks the house where the playwright and statesman died in poverty: the final entry for him in the rate book there reads ‘Goods distrained [seized].

Distraint resisted. Dead and Insolvent. ’ Going back full circle, Napoleon III’s departure from King Street – in September 1848, to return to France when political opportunity knocked – had less finality but greater haste. His landlord recorded that he found ‘the Prince’s bed unmade and his marble bath still full of water. ’

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

MEMBERS’ News MAKE AN ENDURING DIFFERENCE TO THE FUTURE OF LITERATURE Strongly independent and with no government funding, the Library has been reliant on generations of philanthropists to help provide for its future.

Leaving a legacy in your will is one of the most personal ways of giving. All legacy gifts – no matter what size – are immensely important to us. Your legacy will be remembered long into the future in the fabric and collection of this remarkable place, and will play a vital part in allowing further generations of users to benefit from the unique resources found here.

There are different ways you can remember the Library in your will. Unrestricted legacies – the applications of which are left to the discretion of the Library’s trustees – are exceptionally valuable as they can be used wherever the need is greatest.

Alternatively you might wish to direct your bequest towards a key area of the Library’s work that you particularly cherish.

We guarantee we will use your legacy where it is intended and would be very happy to discuss this with you.

It is important to remember that charitable bequests can also be tax-efficient ways of giving. They are not subject to inheritance tax and can, in some circumstances, reduce the tax rate due on the remainder of the estate.

Wills are private matters but if you let us know that you have remembered the Library, we would like to thank you through our special Prevost Chapter group of legacy supporters. We are extremely privileged that over 80 individuals are already involved.

We will be holding an event in the spring at which you can learn more about leaving a legacy. To register your interest, or for a confidential discussion about your own intentions, please contact Alexandra Davis in the Development Office at alexandra.davis@londonlibrary.co.uk or 020 7766 4719.

OTHER WAYS TO SUPPORT THE LIBRARY There are many other ways to support the Library. For more information, please visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ support-us or contact the Development Office at development@londonlibrary.co.uk or 020 7766 4795.

175th Appeal

Trusts and Foundations

Our Anniversary Appeal enables Library supporters to make a celebratory donation marking 175 years of our history and looking towards the future. Donations will be put towards the fundamental activities of the Library, including developing the collection and ensuring it remains accessible and usable.

Grants from trusts and foundations, both large and small, are very important. Support for the capital project has been instrumental to the work completed so far, and grants from trusts also help our specialist teams carry out projects such as book conservation and retrospective cataloguing that may otherwise not be possible.

The Founders’ Circle

Carlyle Membership

The Founders’ Circle is a group of literary enthusiasts whose support provides a vital foundation for the Library.

Membership ranges from £1,500 to £10,000 per year and members receive a range of benefits, including a programme of exclusive events with writers and literary experts and an annual lunch with the Chairman.

Carlyle Membership helps researchers and writers who need access to the Library but cannot afford the full membership fee. It is funded by an endowment, built largely through contributions from Library members, but the annual income is now insufficient to meet all the applications and we rely on new donations to ensure this support remains available.

Book Fund

We are tremendously grateful for this support, and welcome any opportunity to speak to any individuals, trusts and foundations or organisations that may be interested in supporting the Library.

The Library acquires 8,000 new volumes a year, keeping our collection relevant and up to date. The cost of each acquisition goes beyond its purchase price; cataloguing and preparing each book for the shelf requires time and materials. The Book Fund allows us to take care of and develop the collection with new resources.

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MEMBERS’ AWARDS & prizes Congratulations to the following London Library members who have recently won or been shortlisted for major awards and prizes. If you have been shortlisted for or received an award, please email to let us know (prizewinners@ londonlibrary.co.uk) Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, winner of the 2015 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize.

William Boyd, Sweet Caress, shortlisted for the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People, shortlisted for the 2016 Longman History Today Book Prize.

Alix Christie, The Dacha, shortlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

David Hare, The Blue Touch Paper, shortlisted for the 2016 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Sarah Helm, If This is a Woman – Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women, winner of the 2016 Longman History Today Book Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

John Hurt, winner of an Outstanding Contribution Award for his roles in Radio 4’s War and Peace and Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, at the 2016 BBC Audio Drama Awards.

Lucy Inglis, Crow Mountain, winner of the Young Adult Romantic Novel category in the 2016 RNA’s Romantic Novel of the Year Awards.

David Lough, No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money, shortlisted for the 2016 Longman History Today Book Prize.

Elisabeth Luard, winner of the 2016 Guild of Food Writers’ Lifetime Achievement Award.

Joan Morgan, The Book of Pears: The Definitive History and Guide to Over 500 Varieties, winner of the 2016 Guild of Food Writers’ Food Book Award.

Ferdinand Mount, The Tears of the Rajas, shortlisted for the 2016 Orwell Prize for Books.

John O’Farrell, There’s Only Two David Beckhams, shortlisted for the 2016 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.

Gideon Rachman, joint winner of the 2016 Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Julia Rochester, The House at the Edge of the World, shortlisted for the 2016 Desmond Elliott Prize for a first novel written in English published in the UK. Hannah Rothschild, The Improbability of Love, joint winner of the 2016 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction and shortlisted for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life, shortlisted for the 2016 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and for the 2016 Longman History Today Book Prize.

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, winner of the 2016 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize.

MEMBERSHIP SURVEY We hope that by now all members will have received a membership survey from the Library. In 2011 The London Library undertook a major survey of the membership. The information it provided was invaluable and told us what you valued about being a member of the Library and how you rated the services and facilities we offer, as well as information about the age, profile and geographical location of our members. The Library has used the information the survey provided in many ways over the past 5 years, from informing the daily running and planning of services to the recruitment of new members.

Five years on, it is time to conduct another survey and update the information we hold. The results will help inform the Library’s plans over the next five years, provide an upto-date demographic profile of the membership, and allow us to compare results from the last survey to assess what may have changed since 2011.

We hope that as many of you as possible will complete the questionnaire to provide us with as representative a view of the membership as we can.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

Comus – A Masque in Honour of Chastity by John Milton The Little Matchgirl and Other Happier Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen, written and adapted by Joel Horwood and Emma Rice

All the Angels by Nick Drake The White Devil by John Webster Othello by William Shakespeare

1 26 Bodleian_Odes_Advert_AW.indd THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

#WonderNoir

13/10/2016 11:08

‘I HAD NO IDEA THIS PLACE EXISTED’ With a constant need for new members and supporters, one of our greatest challenges is ensuring that all those who might need or enjoy what the Library has to offer get to hear about it in the first place. In this issue we asked Julian Lloyd, who joined us as Head of Communications in June 2015, to explain how he goes about spreading the word and how members can help.

The London Library is sometimes described as London’s best-kept secret. That sense of stumbling upon a secret Narnia is often expressed by visitors arriving for the first time: ‘I had no idea this place existed.’ At one level, the task of Communications at The London Library is to ensure that this sort of comment never gets made. We need to create wider awareness about what the Library is and what it has to offer, so that subsequent marketing and fundraising messages land in an environment of familiarity.

Traditional print is a very important avenue for us. Recent features in the Spectator, Country Life and the Irish Times, for example, have included affectionate portraits of the Library.

For our 175th anniversary this year, Simon Schama wrote passionately in the Financial Times about the Library as a source of serendipitous learning. Broadcast is equally important, from Tom Stoppard and John Julius Norwich talking recently about

Top, right Simon Schama’s article about The London Library in the Financial Times.

Above A typical day on the Library’s Twitter feed.

the Library on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking to BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme’s interview with Helen O’Neill about our miniature books collection.

High-profile features in the national media can be a direct driver for membership, but will never be daily occurrences. Social media, by contrast, especially Twitter and Facebook, present the opportunity to engage with tens of thousands of committed book lovers every day. Using the hook of anniversaries of famous writers and their work, we can generate a daily diet of highly illustrated stories about the Library and its holdings that would never appear in a regular form in the national press.

For the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire, for instance, we could display our 1818 first edition of John Evelyn’s Diary; for William Morris’s birthday, our Kelmscott Chaucer. We can tell the story of chance finds – the first book ever borrowed from the Library in 1841 (Goethe’s Theory of Colours); Siegfried Sassoon’s application to join the Library in the 1920s which was seconded by E.M. Forster; and the first editions of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis which sit on our shelves. On their own, none of these stories would reach the threshold of meriting national news coverage but, delivered on a day-in, day-out basis, they convey an image of the Library as a place of endless literary discovery. These media efforts have been strongly reinforced by the regular endorsements we get from leading authors, and we also benefited enormously from social-media support given by the speakers who participated in our Words in the Square celebrations in May. We now have 15,200 followers on Twitter THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

What beneficiaries say*

The Royal Literary Fund 

he ‘One of trs of a quiet pill lity.’ our civi

‘A miracl e.’

‘An increasingly noble, and increasingly necessary, endeavour.’

‘A ray of lig shining thr ht ough a dark cloud.’

ers.’ t i r w o t ft ‘A life-ra *quotes from RLF beneficiaries during 2013-14

The Royal Literary Fund has been supporting published writers during hard times for over 200 years.

If you need help e-mail eileen.gunn@rlf.org.uk or go to www.rlf.org.uk All enquiries are treated with sympathy and in the strictest confidence.

Registered Charity No 219952

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Make a career of your writing City’s 10-week short course, The Authorpreneur, can turn your passion for writing into a business.

Starts Tuesday 17th January 2017. cityshortcourses.com/writing Engaging, challenging, rewarding.

MEMBERS’ NEWS Left The Library’s 1840 edition of Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), the first book ever borrowed from the Library.

Below, right Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, comprising his Diary from 1641 to 1705/6 (1818) illustrated our socialmedia story about the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire.

Below, left Alex von Tunzelmann, photographed in the Library’s Times Room for an interview in the BBC History Magazine.

we are also trying to get as many people as possible to see the Library at first hand. Every fortnight, we run free public tours for up to 18 people. These are immensely popular and are fully booked months ahead. Open House (which took place on 17 September) is just as popular. Seven tours on a single day enabled a hundred people to see the Library. The word-of-mouth effect – including social media – can be important, and this year we were able to get the added benefit of BBC Culture conducting a live interview on Facebook about what these tours involve.

The Library is frequently contacted about its availability as a location setting for filming, whether TV, advertising,

who have signed up to receive every message we send; during the first nine months of 2016, these messages have been viewed over 1.1m times, a six-fold increase over 2015. Our follower base is growing by some 400 to 500 per quarter, and we have tens of thousands of recipients engaging further with our messages and retweeting them to their followers. Using social media our members can play a vital role in helping to spread the word about the Library: relaying the Library’s media messages on to their own followers and alerting them to stories we are putting out means that collectively we can reach hundreds of thousands of people at any one time, which can make a real difference to raising our profile.

If social media is proving an ideal channel for generating a very regular drumbeat of stories about what’s on our shelves,

documentaries or corporate videos. This provides a good source of revenue and the Library occasionally receives a direct on-air mention and shots of the interior are seen by millions of people.

From our hosting of an episode of BBC One’s The Apprentice to the recent BBC Two’s Newsnight interview with Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally, the visual message gets through that there is something spectacular lurking behind the Library’s discreet façade.

We try to schedule all the filming to take place outside Library opening times, and run our tours during quiet periods to reduce disturbance for members.

Ultimately, generating awareness requires a regular stream of stories, constantly and consistently reinforced. Library member and Vice President Winston Churchill made the point in characteristic fashion: ‘If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.’ We’re endeavouring to take a leaf out of his book in promoting all of ours.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

Pushkin Press • The London Library

‘FOUND ON THE SHELVES’ Twelve perfect stocking fillers for wine lovers, bike lovers, travel lovers and any and all book lovers “A heavenly little series” Observer’s Best Holiday Reads 2016 All discovered in The London Library, £4.99 each, out now 1. Cycling: The Craze of the Hour 2. The Lure of the North 3. On Corpulence: Feeding the Body and Feeding the Mind 4. Life in a Bustle: Advice to Youth 5. The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports 6. On Reading, Writing and Living With Books 7. Through a Glass Lightly: Confession of a Reluctant Water Drinker 8. The Right to Fly 9. The Noble English Art of Self-Defence 10. Hints on Etiquette: A Shield Against the Vulgar 11. A Woman’s Walks 12. A Full Account of the Dreadful Explosion of Wallsend Colliery by which 101 Human Beings Perished!

www.pushkinpress.com

Member Events Member events are free, but places are limited so must be reserved in advance at londonlibrary.co.uk/ memberevents MEMBERS’ CHRISTMAS DRINKS Thursday, 24 November 2016 6.30pm – 8.30pm Reading Room Start off the festive season with a glass of wine in the Reading Room with your fellow Library members, at the popular annual members’ drinks party. Please note the Library will be closed to members before the event between 5.30pm and 6.30pm.

LITERARY HIGHGATE Isabel Raphael Monday, 6 February 2017 6pm – 7.30pm Members’ Room Join Library member Isabel Raphael for a gentle literary tour of Highgate Village without leaving the comfort of the Library. Discover the remarkable collection of writers from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to John Betjeman who have made Highgate their home, in a talk illustrated with pictures from the archives of the Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution (HLSI).

Isabel Raphael lived in the heart of Highgate for 23 years when she was Headmistress of Channing School and later the first woman President

of the HLSI. She runs adult reading groups in Latin and Ancient Greek at the HLSI and in Hammersmith.

Ph.D. Members’ Group First Wednesday of every month, 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room A meeting is held at the Library on the first Wednesday of every month for any members currently studying for a Ph.D. These informal gatherings provide an opportunity to share information on a variety of subjects including research and funding opportunities, as well as informal networking.

Contact Library member Cleo Roberts (cleoetic@gmail.com) for more details.

Do you have a subject you are passionate about which would make an interesting talk or event for other members? Do you have professional experience in an area that you would be happy to share in a ‘Howto’ session? Or perhaps you work somewhere interesting and would be able to offer a tour to members? If you are interested in contributing to the members’ events programme, or have ideas for a future event, please email marketing@londonlibrary.co.uk

LONDON LIBRARY GIFT MEMBERSHIP Give a million books this Christmas Gift vouchers also available. londonlibrary.co.uk

CHRISTMAS CARD 2016 The specially commissioned London Library Christmas card is now on sale.

This year we are delighted that the card has been illustrated by Sue Macartney-Snape. She has been described by John Julius Norwich as a ‘master of caricature’ whose paintings ‘illustrate the English social scene more brilliantly and with greater accuracy than those of any other painter working today’.

The message inside reads ‘With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year’. £5.00 (pack of 8 cards & envelopes) All proceeds from sales raise vital funds for the Library.

On sale online at shop.londonlibrary.co.uk, in person from Reception, or by post (please complete and return the form below)

ORDER FORM I WOULD LIKE TO ORDER: ______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack Postage & packing costs: UK £1 per pack; Europe & Rest of World – please enquire for details.

TOTAL £………… (including postage) Please make your cheque payable to The London Library Please return this form to: The London Library, Christmas Card Orders, 14 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LG

YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE) _________________________________________________________ ADDRESS ________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ __________________________POSTCODE ____________________

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS Wednesday 1 March 2017 Knightsbridge, London Entries now invited

MARX (KARL) Das Kapital First Edition, Author’s Presentation Copy to Johann Georg Eccarius, Otto Meissner, 1867 Sold for £218,500

bonhams.com/books Prices shown include buyer’s premium. Details can be found at bonhams.com

ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7393 3828 books@bonhams.com Closing date for entries Friday 13 January 2017