London Library Magazine - Winter 2017 Issue 38

MAGAZINE WINTER 2017 ISSUE 38

£3.50

1947: india, art and nationhood

The impact of the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Indian art 70 years ago is assessed by Cleo Roberts

The biographers’ library

The institution’s close links with the art of biography are explored by Jane Ridley

hidden corners

Travis Elborough strolls around the Library stacks in search of volumes about public parks

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13/01/2015 14:59

The London Library Magazine / issue 38

14

Contents

Jane Ridley celebrates the eclectic range of subjects – from literary figures to those in British public life – who feature in the Library’s Biography collection. She also remarks on the number of Library chairmen, presidents and vice-presidents who have been biographers, a further demonstration of the significance of the subject to the institution.

7 FROM THE director 8 Contributors 10 BEHIND THE BOOK The Library staircase showing the portraits of John Grigg (left) and Noel Annan (right).

18

Back issues of the Times and biographies of journalists were invaluable background reading for Will Wainewright’s account of British reporters in Nazi Germany

13 MY DISCOVERY Charles Saumarez Smith recalls his encounter as a Ph.D. student with Hobbes’s Leviathan in the stacks

The Library’s collection of titles on public parks are explored by Travis Elborough, whose finds include a set of The Gardener’s Magazine dating from 1826 in Periodicals, a 1937 manual on laying out municipal parks, and authoritative biographies of notable park designers such as Joseph Paxton and James Pennethorne.

14 The biographers’ library The Library’s historical connection with biography is explored by Jane Ridley

18 hidden corners Travis Elborough takes us on a tour of the Library’s wide-ranging collection of books about public parks Floral staircase, Bridlington, East Riding, 1920s.

Courtesy of the RHS Lindley Library.

22

22 1947: India, art and Nationhood Cleo Roberts examines the historical significance of the Royal Academy’s major exhibition of Indian art in 1947

26 MEMBERS’ NEWS

The Royal Academy’s exhibition of Indian art in 1947 was held at a critical time in the subcontinent’s history. Cleo Roberts examines the impact of the show in the context of Partition, and the lasting legacy this survey of India’s art history had on the country’s concept of its cultural heritage.

Illustration of Zafar Khan and his brother, Khorshid Nazar, reclining by a stream, from the Persian manuscript Kitab-i Mathnawiyyat-i Zafar Khan (1662–3). Courtesy Royal Asiatic Society Collection.

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

112 Jermyn Street

See London with a different Eye. Spend a day exploring the artistic riches of London in the company of one of our experts. Martin Randall Travel’s London Days focus on many fascinating themes.

Exclusive and special arrangements feature: visit Transport for London’s historic headquarters at 55 Broadway or enjoy a private organ recital in a West End church. Sip champagne at the Savoy or cocktails at the Walkie Talkie. Admire the Spanish Golden Age with Dr Xavier Bray or the works of Hogarth with Dr Lars Tharp.

Delve into hidden corners with Barnaby Rogerson, or large-scale landmarks with Professor Peter Rees cbe.

London’s Underground Railway A History and appreciation of the Tube 4 December 2017 & 11 April 2018 Led by Andrew Martin ‘Offering a cornucopia of delights – even to a Londoner’

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Choose from over forty unique itineraries, including:

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p from the director

On the cover

Detail of illustration of Shah Jehan, Dara Shikoh, Asaf Khan and four nobles on a terrace, from the Persian manuscript Kitab-i Mathnawiyyat-i Zafar Khan (1662–3). Courtesy Royal Asiatic Society Collection.

As the new Director of The London Library, it is a pleasure to introduce this latest issue of the London Library Magazine.

At the beginning of this year, when I was first approached about taking on the role, I immediately started to carry out my own research into the Library and what the job might entail. Going through the 37 back issues of the magazine proved to be one of the guilty pleasures of that research, and really helped bring home the sense of discovery and sheer variety that the Library has to offer.

Discovery and variety is very much in evidence in this issue. In Hidden Corners, Travis Elborough, author of A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, takes us on a fascinating tour of the Library’s collection of books about public parks and the people behind their development.

Charles Saumarez Smith shares his reminiscences about working as a Ph.D. student in the 1980s in My Discovery. A chance find in the Library led to him borrowing an early edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), an unforgettable experience for a young researcher. And in Behind the Book, Will Wainewright describes some of the Library’s newspaper and history resources that helped him to write Reporting on Hitler, his account of British correspondents working in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Jane Ridley, meanwhile, has been exploring our extensive Biography collection (which runs to 1.69 miles of shelves), and reveals the surprisingly long list of biographers who have been among the Library’s prominent officers. And in this 70th anniversary year of the Partition of India, Cleo Roberts looks back to a Royal Academy exhibition of Indian art held in 1947, and the significant role it played in establishing a coherent vision of Indian art.

In Members’ News I’m delighted to be able to introduce my colleague Felicity Nelson, who joined the Library last month as our new Membership Director. We also celebrate the awards and prizes given to our members this year. Kazuo Ishiguro becoming the tenth London Library member to win the Nobel Prize in Literature is particularly noteworthy, and underlines that the Library is not only a place of discovery and variety, but also one of extraordinary creativity.

Philip Marshall Director Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec.

Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 10 November 2017 © 2017 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 Helen O’Neill Peter Parker Philip Spedding Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 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 7

CONTRIBUTORS

Living with gods peoples, places and worlds beyond

Travis Elborough Joined the library in 2002

Described by the Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’, Travis Elborough's books include The Long-Player Goodbye (2008), a hymn to vinyl records; Wish You Were Here (2010), a survey of the British at the seaside; and A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution (2016). He edited Our History of the 20th Century: As Told in Diaries Journals and Letters, which was published in September.

Jane Ridley Joined the library in 1978

Jane Ridley is a biographer. Her life of Edwin Lutyens (2002) won the Duff Cooper Prize; she published Bertie: A Life of Edward VII in 2012; and she has written a biography of Queen Victoria for the Penguin Monarchs series. She is currently working on a biography of King George V. She is a Professor of History at Buckingham University, where she teaches an MA in Biography.

Cleo Roberts Joined the library in 2014

Cleo Roberts is an art historian currently curating Representing Partition: India and Pakistan, supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, at Wolfson College, Cambridge. She has lectured at Princeton University, the University of Cambridge and the Royal Asiatic Society, and writes for ArtAsiaPacific and ArtUK.

2 November 2017 – 8 April 2018 Members free

Charles Saumarez Smith Joined the library in 1977

Charles Saumarez Smith is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy and author, most recently, of East London (Thames and Hudson, 2017).

Book now

Will Wainewright Joined the library in 2016

Supported by

With grateful thanks to John Studzinski CBE

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Accompanies a BBC Radio 4 series with Neil MacGregor

Will Wainewright is a journalist. His first book, Reporting on Hitler, was published in February this year and tells the story of the British press based in Berlin between the wars. He has worked as a financial journalist in London and New York, most recently on the European hedge-fund beat for Bloomberg, and has written for the Times and the Guardian.

BOOK NOW 19 Oct –18 Feb www.ashmolean.org

"Unmissable… a fascinating journey through the art of religions from India to Ireland"

In partnership with

MARY BEARD

23 - 25 MArCH 2018 History: where fact meets fiction.

A refreshingly different book festival on the beautiful historic Channel Island of Alderney. www.alderneyliterarytrust.com/festival THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9

Behind the

Book

‘

Will Wainewright mined the Library’s newspaper and history resources to write his non-fiction account of the British press pack in Nazi Germany

’

Will Wainewright’s Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany (Biteback Publishing, 2017).

My work as a journalist and an ancestral connection combined to spark an interest in British correspondents who worked in Nazi Germany. My book Reporting on Hitler (2017) was the result. The Library’s historical and biographical titles, as well as the open access to back runs of the Times, aided my research process enormously.

 When Freedom Shrieked by Rothay

Reynolds (London 1939). H. German Republic.

This is an unstinting exposé of the brutality of the Nazi movement and a first-hand account of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, written by one of the first journalists to meet Adolf Hitler. Reynolds, an Englishman who first interviewed Hitler in 1923, ran the Daily Mail’s Berlin bureau between the wars and wrote this book after leaving Germany in 1939. He was also an ancestor of mine.  The ‘Times’ newspaper. Times Room.

Library membership gave me access to a range of newspaper articles in digital form, as well as enabling me to read copies of the Times in the Times Room.

It was fascinating to be able to read original reports from the newspaper, not least because its correspondent Norman Ebbutt was a highly respected foreign reporter in Nazi Germany. He was one of several British correspondents who were concerned that their warnings about Hitler were being played down by editors in London. They also felt that their employers were too sympathetic to the government’s appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s; indeed the Daily Mail had even supported fascist movements earlier in the decade.  Trail Sinister: An Autobiography by Sefton Delmer (London 1961). Biog.

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

While more experienced journalists tried to report objectively on Hitler, Delmer, who became the Daily Express’s Berlin bureau chief aged 24, caused a sensation by befriending the Nazi leadership. Supportive articles in the early 1930s gained him access to Hitler and other senior Nazis, to the irritation of his rivals. He proved his journalistic credentials in 1934, however, by writing bravely about the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler purged the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazis, and had senior lieutenants killed for supposed disloyalty. Despite many dark themes, Trail Sinister has some lighter moments, such as when Frank Foley, the MI6 station chief in Berlin, tried to recruit him in 1933. ‘Only very foolish newspaper men allow themselves to get mixed up with intelligence in peacetime, ’ was Delmer’s haughty response.  Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews

by Michael Smith (London 1999). Biog.

Although Foley was unsuccessful in his attempt to persuade Delmer to join MI6, his undercover work in Germany saved thousands of lives. As Smith explains in this biography, Foley used his cover role as British Passport Control Officer to give British visas to many Jews and others threatened by persecution. Many of these people would have been victims of the Holocaust had Foley not realised the full

threat posed by Hitler and saved them.

Several politicians and some newspapers opposed the arrival of Jewish immigrants on British shores before the war.  Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of Our Time by Edgar Ansel Mowrer (London 1970). Biog.

This was one of many memoirs and history books written by journalists working in Nazi Germany. These volumes, as well as their original newspaper articles, were the main sources for my book. Mowrer, a Chicago Daily News correspondent who in 1933 became the first foreign reporter to be expelled from Germany, was particularly brave. Scores more would follow in the years before the Second World War as Hitler and Joseph Goebbels cracked down on press criticism.  Nazi Germany Explained by Vernon Bartlett (London 1933). H. German Republic.

Bartlett was one of the first British reporters to write in length about the rise of the Nazis. Although this is not a sympathetic account – Bartlett noted early signs of the regime’s evil nature – it is interesting that he was prepared to give the Nazis a chance, as were many in Germany and elsewhere in 1933. Hitler was widely regarded as a small-town politician, an unserious and almost comical figure who could easily be dislodged from power.

Supported by

Salvador Dalí with the collaboration of Edward James, Lobster Telephone, (reproduced upside down), 1938. Telephone, steel, plaster, rubber, resin and paper, 18 x 30.5 x 12.5 cm.

West Dean College, part of the Edward James Foundation. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS 2017; Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 (1964 edition). Readymade: porcelain urinal, 36 x 48 x 61 cm. Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, by permission of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo. Photography: © Schiavinotto Giuseppe / © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and The Dalí Museum, St Petersburg, Florida, in collaboration with the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation and the Association Marcel Duchamp.

The Times

‘as riveting as it is playful and fun’

The Guardian

Free entry for Friends of the RA Buy the catalogue | roy.ac/shop

Until 3 January 2018

Events ‘I think the bees suspect something!’

– A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

at the British Library Bram Stoker and the Making of Dracula 3 November Ways of Hearing: John Berger in Words and Music 5 November Hogwarts, Poudlard, Rokfort: Translating Harry Potter 9 November

COMING SOON Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring A Classic 9 December 2017 – 8 April 2018 #WinniethePooh vam.ac.uk/ winniethepooh

Q. What do Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Joyce and Ivy Compton-Burnett have in common?

Even Stranger Things: A Night for Robert Aickman 10 November

Illustrating Harry Potter with Jim Kay and Olivia Lomenech Gill 17 November Magic in Medieval Manuscripts 20 November Baking with Kafka: Trends in Contemporary Graphic Novels 28 November

FIND MORE AT www.bl.uk/whats-on

A. They all received grants from the Royal Literary Fund.

Royal Literary Fund Registered Charity no. 219952

12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MY DISCOVERY

Leviathan

or the Matter, Forme and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by thomas hobbes (1651) Charles Saumarez Smith looks back to borrowing a valuable early edition of the philosophical treatise as a student

Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651).

I made most use of The London Library in the early 1980s, when I was a Ph.D. student at the Warburg Institute working on the history of Castle Howard. Quite early on in my research, Joe Trapp, the then Director of the Warburg Institute and its former Librarian, knowing that I was interested in working on two early library catalogues which survived at Castle Howard, took me to a meeting of The Bibliographical Society. He also encouraged me to join The London Library, realising that it would be much richer in early English books than was the Warburg.

What I was trying to do was to reconstruct the mental universe of not just John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor as architects, but of Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, who commissioned the house in 1699. What books would he have read? What did he know about architecture? How much interest did he take in the process of design? I had realised that by deducting the books listed in the first catalogue, which had been compiled in 1698 in his house in Soho Square, from the second catalogue which dated from 1715 in Castle Howard, it ought to be possible to find out exactly what books he was reading in the time that the house was being built. This gave me licence to spend a great deal of time combing The London Library stacks for

Of course, it would not be possible now, and should not be. Some time in the 1990s, there was a spate of thefts from private and institutional libraries (the man went to jail) and the librarians sensibly took the precaution of putting early and valuable editions into store, safe from temptation. Now, it can only be read under supervision in the Reading Room, but I still got a frisson from getting it out again one Saturday morning recently and finding that it had indeed been taken out on 3 JUN 1981 (renewed three weeks later), one of only three times it was borrowed between 1976 and 1985. That must have been me.

Now, my contact with The London Library is almost exclusively online, searching for periodical articles through JSTOR and using it as a convenient way of gaining access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Who’s Who, with only very occasional dashes from the Royal Academy to the new and magnificent Art Room. I remain a member out of a sense of deep loyalty and gratitude for the days when I was nearly the only person working in the Reading Room other than John Julius Norwich, and was able to roam the stacks from Topography in the basement up to Religion on the sixth floor; and because of the memory that it was possible to find rare books on the open shelves.

rare seventeenth-century books of poetry, history and travel literature.

My most vivid memory of this period of my research is that I thought I ought to read Hobbes’s Leviathan – which I had discovered was one of the sources for his interest in deism, and in which Hobbes discusses the basis of religious belief in famously ambiguous terms. I went into the stacks, found an early edition on the open shelves, borrowed it, took it home, and discovered that it was a first edition. (Or at least appeared to be, because I have since discovered that it was, in fact, a copy of the so-called ornaments edition, which was an early eighteenth-century reissue. The Library does, however, have copies of the 1651 edition.) It’s described in my cardindex file from the time as Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: A Crooke 1651).

It left a powerful impression on me that in the late 1970s it was still possible to go to a lending library and borrow a great work of philosophy, unannotated, with a large and legible typeface and heavy leather binding (although the spine had been rebound). Unlike the normally available, later Penguin edition, the volume provided a powerful sensation of what it would have been like to read at the time of its publication.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

THE BIOGRAPHERS’ Library A surprising number of biographers have held important posts at The London Library, which reflects the significance of the collection of volumes on the subject, as Jane Ridley observes Proust’s biographer George Painter once described The London Library as a tower, starting from the underground inferno of topography and history, rising through Middle Earth’s obscure wood of all sciences and all literature in all languages to ‘the mount of Purgatory of biography, where souls relive their sins and are pardoned’ , and then on up to the heavenly floors of philosophy and theology. To biographers,

Have asked Watts Gallery for a verison of this. Painting owned

by NPG will be £££

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

however, the Biography floors are not purgatory but paradise: home to what Lytton Strachey described as ‘those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’ and much else besides – diaries, memoirs, scholarly editions of letters. Readers use these floors a lot, but no one thinks much about them.

The Biography collection comprises 1.69 miles of books – that is how they

measure books here, in miles – and it represents roughly 10 per cent of the Library’s 17 miles of open stacks. To find out more I visited Gill Turner, Head of Acquisitions. We met in a small room next to her office, an eyrie high up in the Library opposite the Members’ Room on the sixth floor. Gill explained that exactly how many books there are in Biog. isn’t known, as online cataloguing is not yet completed. The staff estimate that there is a total of 100,000 volumes, probably more. The figures refer to volumes as opposed to titles, as many biographies are multi-volume works – an extreme example is Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography, which consists of eight volumes and seventeen Companion Volumes of Churchill documents, published between 1967 and 2014.

Biography is the third biggest openstack collection in the Library after History and Literature, both of which come in at

Far left Charles Hagberg Wright, Librarian 1893–1940.

Left Leslie Stephen, President 1892–1904.

Opposite Photograph on the staircase of T.S. Eliot, President 1952–65.

over two-and-a-half miles of open shelves.

History and Literature, however, are divided according to topic, country or period.

Biography, by contrast, forms one single section arranged simply by alphabetical order of subject.

There are a few idiosyncrasies. Ruling monarchs are shelved in History, not Biography. You will find The Queen in H. England, Kings &c. Lives of The Prince of Wales and other royals are shelved in Biography. One of the lesser-known changes that will attend the next reign is the removal from Biography of the books shelved under Charles, Prince of Wales, which will then be reshelved in History.

As consort The Duchess of Cornwall will come too, but the rest of the royal family will remain behind in Biography.

Arranging over one-and-a-half miles of books in the simplest way possible – alphabetically by subject – is a stroke of brilliance. It means that the Biography shelves are uniquely available for browsing.

The man responsible for making the Library as we know it today was Charles Hagberg Wright, who was Librarian from 1893 until his death in 1940. He commissioned the present steel-framed building, and also created the Library’s famous subject catalogue. It is thanks to him that the

Library is a super-resource for biographers.

Noel Annan, President of the Library from 1980 to 1996 and the biographer of Leslie Stephen (who was also a Library President as well as a biographer), described how ‘every time I mount the stairs, past the likenesses of those formidable Victorians who were past presidents of the Library, past the photographs of T.S. Eliot and Harold Nicolson, until I reach Eng. Lit. and turn the corner for Biog., my heart leaps up’ . Annan recalled sitting in the stacks, reading books which had nothing to do with what he was supposed to be working on: ‘People forget how important it is to be lazy in libraries. Not of course idle: idleness means daydreaming. Laziness means reading the books one ought not to be reading, and becoming so absorbed in them and following the trails along which they lead you so that at the end of the day you still have most of the reading to do that you had before that morning. Creative laziness broadens the mind. ’ One master of creative laziness was Isaiah Berlin, a Vice-President of the Library. While browsing the Russian Literature section he picked up the memoirs of Alexander Herzen (in Russian, of course), about whom he knew almost nothing. ‘I vaguely began reading it, leaning against a

shelf, and the first five pages appeared to me so fascinating that I took the volume out. ’ This was the start of a lifetime’s study of Russian political thought. ‘I think that I can truthfully say that my membership of The London Library eventually determined the direction of my interest – indeed in some sense it can be said to have formed me. ’ You don’t need to be Berlin to benefit from browsing. The Biography section is heavily used – more so, no doubt, as public libraries disappear. According to figures collected by the Library, 95 per cent of the biographies bought in the last five years have been taken out. No one knows more about borrowing patterns than members of the Library staff, who take their turn at reshelving the trolley-loads of volumes returned by readers. Top of the list are the diaries of James Lees-Milne – himself a lifelong Library member who helped in the rescue operation after the building was bombed in 1944, reportedly holding the novelist Rose Macaulay out of the building by her ankles so that she could retrieve books. I picked up Ancestral Voices: Diaries 1942–3 (1975) and Caves of Ice: Diaries 1946–7 (1983), which are both rebound in green cloth. Each book has 8 pages of issue stamps glued into the first page, which works out at roughly 160 loans.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

Library cataloguer Natasha West looked through the section of the Biography stacks from F to M, and made a list for me of the most borrowed subjects (not authors).

Here it is: F.S. Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, S. Freud, Gandhi, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, Edward Heath, Ernest Hemingway, Nicholas Henderson, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler, Michael Holroyd, A.E. Housman, David Hume, Christopher Isherwood, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, James Joyce, William Joyce, John Keats, John Maynard Keynes, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Kitchener, Osbert Lancaster, D.H. Lawrence, Laurie Lee, James Lees-Milne, John Lehmann, Primo Levi, C.S. Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, David Lloyd George, R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Thomas Macaulay, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Macmillan, Katherine Mansfield, the Marlboroughs, Somerset Maugham, the Mitfords, Nicholas Mosley, Oswald Mosley, the Mountbattens, Iris Murdoch, Benito Mussolini.

To judge from this eclectic assortment, publishers are premature in pronouncing that literary biography is dead; it seems by far the most popular genre. Nazis and fascists are still in demand, and so are twentieth-century politicians, but not Victorians – no Gladstone. Most striking is the small number of women. The only ones here are members of the Mitford family, Katherine Mansfield and Iris Murdoch.

Some of the Library’s readers, it seems, still agree with E.C. Bentley that ‘Geography is about maps/ But Biography is about chaps’ .

The strength of the Biography section of the Library lies in British public life.

There are over 150 volumes on Churchill and nearly 100 books shelved under Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of.

They are well ahead of the writers, who come in next, with 60 volumes on Virginia Woolf, over 50 on Charles Dickens and over 60 on T.S. Eliot (though of course there is more to be found on writers in Literature).

Biographers feature disproportionately among the Library’s past office holders, and fittingly perhaps the latter include some of the greatest chroniclers of public lives. For much of the second half of the twentieth century biographers acted as chairmen of the Library Committee. The role of chairman was created in 1952; before that the President of the Library was also the Chairman of the Committee.

16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Above Photographs on the staircase of, from left to right, John Grigg, Chairman 1985–90, and Noel Annan, President 1980–96.

Left Isaiah Berlin, a Vice-President 1968–97, in 1978. Image Geoff A. Howard/ Alamy Stock Photo.

Of the six Chairmen who served between 1952 and 1990, four were biographers: Harold Nicolson, Rupert Hart-Davis, Philip Ziegler and John Grigg.

Harold Nicolson was elected to the Committee in 1931; he considered it to be the most intelligent and formative of the many on which he sat. In 1927 he published Some People, a brilliant collection of biographical sketches, irreverent and witty (to be found shelved under Fiction; I would have expected to look for it in Biog. Colls., but still). The story

Opposite, top left Harold Nicolson, Chairman 1952–8, in 1935. Image Pictorial Press Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo.

Opposite, top right Philip Ziegler, Chairman 1979–85, in 2013. Image GL Portrait/ Alamy Stock Photo.

Opposite, bottom left Rupert Hart-Davis, Chairman 1958–69, on the right of the picture, with his wife Comfort and Hugh Walpole, outside the Hart-Davis’s house in Stormont Road, Hampstead, in 1937.

about Lord Curzon told through his valet Arketall is a comic masterpiece. In 1952, however, when Nicolson was appointed Chairman of the Library Committee, he was hard at work on the life of King George V. This was an authorised biography, and Nicolson was writing to a brief – he was given full access to George V’s papers, but in exchange he was expected to leave out anything that was discreditable. The result was a stately royal biography which was more an official history of the reign than a personal life of the monarch.

‘

THE BIOGRAPHERS’ library

The Library’s past office holders include some of the greatest chroniclers of public lives

’

Philip Ziegler, who chaired the Committee from 1979 to 1985, is the author of 12 biographies (as well as many other books) and is still writing.

Before 1979 he published lives mainly of early nineteenth-century figures – Melbourne, Addington and King William IV. During his time as Chairman, he was commissioned to write the life of Lord Mountbatten. This confronted him with a dilemma – how to sympathetically record, as official biographer, the life of one of the most self-aggrandising figures

of the age – and he resolved it by quoting both the criticism and the praise about his subject and writing a wonderfully readable narrative. Mountbatten (1985) was the first of Ziegler’s important lives of twentieth-century public figures. He followed it with a major royal biography of Edward VIII (1990), which was far franker than Nicolson’s book, and lives of Harold Wilson (1993) and Edward Heath (2010).

John Grigg, who succeeded Ziegler as Chairman (1985–90), was also the authorised biographer of a major twentieth-century public figure: Lloyd George. By the time he sat in the chairman’s seat he had just published the third of four projected volumes of the biography. Grigg admired his subject, and felt no conflict in his role as official biographer, but he was defeated by the sheer vastness of the material, and his sparkling biography remained unfinished.

Rupert Hart-Davis, Chairman from 1958 to 1969, was a publisher by trade, but also a biographer. He wrote a wellreceived biography of Hugh Walpole, published in 1952, but is best known for the witty, gossipy letters that he exchanged with his old Eton master George Lyttelton between 1955 and 1962, which he edited and published in six volumes between 1978 and 1974 (shelved in Biography under Lyttelton). As well as being a vital source for writing about literary society, these letters chronicle the history of the Library.

Hart-Davis contributed to Biography

in another way, too. In 1960, as part of a fund-raising campaign to save the Library – which, as usual, was having money troubles – he organised a sale by Christie’s of literary treasures given by members.

The highest prices were commanded by manuscripts. Lytton Strachey’s MSS of Queen Victoria fetched £1,800. The two stars of the sale were E.M. Forster’s manuscript of A Passage to India, which went for £6,500, then the highest price ever paid for a twentieth-century literary manuscript, and a copy of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, the Library’s President, which made £2,800. All three of these manuscripts were bought by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and they can be read in that superb collection today, a treasure trove for literary biographers – the Library could hardly have hoped to find a more appropriate buyer.

After beginning page one of his book on George V, Nicolson wrote in his diary: ‘I gaze at the sentence in wonder, realising what a long journey I have to go before I reach his death. It is like starting in a taxi on the way to Vladivostok. ’ If anywhere can ease the loneliness of the longdistance biographer, it is the Biography floors of The London Library.

The London Library has recently formed a reciprocal relationship with the Biographers’ Club. See the Member Offers section in the Members’ Area of the Library website for details.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

HIDDEN CORNERS

Park life Travis Elborough rambles through the Library’s collections in search of books about public parks

As a cursory thumb through the OED in The London Library’s own Reading Room confirms, the etymological origins of our word ‘park’ derive from the Old French parc, meaning ‘an enclosed tract of land reserved for keeping and hunting deer and other game’ , or ‘beasts of the chase’ , as some earlier editions rather more colourfully phrase it. Writing non-fiction books has always seemed to me akin to quarrying a prey. The subject, once chosen, needs to be pursued doggedly, with books, articles and interviewees, winkled out of its hiding place, and trapped, snared and filleted for information. All of that research – and the subsequent composition – invariably involves a good deal of equally metaphorical wading through long grass, often to modest ends.

But a real pleasure of working on A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, my history of public parks and green spaces, was the excuse it gave me to leave my desk and go quite specifically and purposely wading through acres of long grass, as well as ambling over neatly trimmed lawns and up serpentine paths. Another was, of course, the opportunity it provided for me to roam, like a literary big-game hunter armed with a MacBook Air rather than a rifle, on a search for books of a horticultural bent, through the stacks and shelves of the Library, an institution located on land that once formed part of a great royal hunting park. St James’s Park’s own colourful history of verdure, animal slaughter and foppish aristocratic sport can be read about in two books found in Topography, London: The Royal Parks of London (1978) by Guy Williams, and Neville Braybrooke’s London Green: The Story of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

and St James’s Park (1959).

The roots of such hunting parks are deep. Anyone wishing to go right back to the beginning would be advised to head to History. Assyria & Babylon, since the earliest known description of a park-type landscape appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh.

This ancient Sumerian poem is believed to have been written around 2000 BCE, and the text was preserved on stone tablets from the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh, near today’s Mosul in Iraq. It tells the story of two friends – Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk, one-third human and two-thirds deity, and Enkidu, a wild man of the woods previously given to consorting with animals – and their quest to discover the secret of immortality. The search leads them to a sacred cedar forest, forbidden to mortals.

Well-tended, with winding trails and beautiful flowers, tall trees, sweet-smelling

plants and exotic beasts, it is – to all intents and purposes – a park. It even has its own keeper, an ogre named Humbaba, whose breath is said to be ‘like fire’ , and whose jaws are ‘like death’ . The Library possesses a few translations of the epic, including the original 1960 Penguin Classics edition

by N.K. Sandars, and its successor in that series, the more recent and highly readable 1999 version by Andrew George.

But public parks as we know them today, with their familiar benches, flowerbeds, sports pitches and band-stands, arguably owe more to the Metropolitan Board of Works and other similar civic bodies across the nation than to ancient Mesopotamia. Like the Library, they are largely mid-nineteenth-century inventions.

The degree to which they were inventions is emphasised in the title of another London Library volume, The Invention of the Park:

Opposite Engraving by Storer after E. Dayes’ drawing of A View of the Queen’s Walk, Green Park, 1797, from Neville Braybrooke’s London Green (1959).

Right Plan of Middleton Park, Felpham, West Sussex, from W.W. Pettigrew’s Municipal Parks: Layout, Management and Administration (1937).

Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney’s Magic Kingdom (2005).

This informative, eclectic, one-stop primer on parks of all stripes by Karen R. Jones and John Wills lives at S. Garden. Inevitably this shelfmark, along with its capacious sibling, S. Garden, 4to., provides the happiest hunting ground for material on parks, park gardening – and park gardeners for that matter. Among its jewels are two of the most rightly esteemed general histories of Britain’s parks: The English Park: Royal, Private and Public (1991) by Susan Lasdun, and Hazel Conway’s People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (1991). Interestingly both were published in the early 1990s, when many of our public parks were in a rather poor state, having been abused by visitors and government policies alike for a couple of decades. Accordingly each of these books offers somewhat pessimistic views about the future of parks, predictions which, thanks to a substantial injection of cash for parks from the Heritage Lottery Fund from 1995 onwards, fortunately failed to materialise. But reading them more recently, with parks again in the midst of another funding crisis due to the curtailing of council budgets, there’s a depressingly eerie sense of déjà vu.

The fact that we have free access to so many wonderful pockets of greenery in our towns and cities at all is largely down to the campaigning zeal of enterprising figures of the Victorian age, such as John Claudius Loudon and Octavia Hill. Hill was closely involved with the Kyrle Society established by her sister Miranda in 1876, many of whose aims became the founding principles of the National Trust created 20 years later.

Hill had seen her beloved Swiss Cottage Fields buried under ‘a sea of brick’ by a property developer. She therefore became involved in the ultimately successful battle by the Commons Preservation Society to ensure that London’s few existing open green spaces – the historic commons of Hampstead Heath, Blackheath, Epping

Forest and others – were retained for public use. Her contribution to urban greenery and much else is told in Gillian Darley’s vivid biography, Octavia Hill (1990), the updated 2010 edition of which resides at Biog. Hill, where it shares shelf space with the no less invaluable period piece, Life of Octavia Hill: As Told in Her Letters,

‘

The fact that we have so many pockets of greenery in our cities is largely down to the campaigning zeal of enterprising figures of the Victorian age

edited by C. Edmund Maurice (1913).

Words were a stock-in-trade for the Lanarkshire-born John Claudius Loudon, who was not only an inventor, engineer, furniture designer, horticulturalist, building and landscape architect and park maker, but also a magazine editor, publisher and prolific author. He made and lost at least one, possibly two, fortunes due to the vagaries of the book trade, and found love after reading his future wife Jane Webb’s science-fiction novel, The Mummy. Her tale of life in the twenty-second century – a world which is plagued by an Egyptian pharaoh’s curses but one where houses also move around on rails and farm equipment is steam powered – had been published anonymously in 1827. Loudon was impressed enough by the book to seek out its author, presuming it was a man. He was pleasantly surprised to find the writer was a vivacious young woman of 23. The couple married within a year of meeting and Jane was to become his confidante and literary collaborator, as well as a distinguished horticulturalist in her own right. She went on to produce many popular gardening manuals, among them Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1841) and My Own Garden, or, The Young Gardener’s Year Book (1855), both in S. Garden; Bea Howe’s THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

biography, Lady with Green Fingers: The Life of Jane Loudon (1961, Biog.), is also in the Library. Unsurprisingly the Library has a rich store of the volumes written and edited

by Loudon, sometimes with his wife, among them the 1850 edition of An Encyclopædia of Gardening, ‘improved’ by Mrs Loudon and ‘illustrated with many hundred engravings on wood, by Branston’ , located in R.R. Dicts., Gardening & S. Garden, a book to delight in leafing through for hours.

The Library’s near-complete set in Periodicals of The Gardener’s Magazine and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement for Gardening, the journal that Loudon edited (or ‘conducted’ , as the masthead had it) between 1826 and 1843, is particularly significant in the history of

20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

public parks. Loudon used its illustrated pages to survey almost every aspect of the state of contemporary gardening, hailing, for instance, innovations like Mr Budding of Norwich’s ‘lawnmower’ of 1830 and promoting his own design for a glass hothouse. More importantly, its editorials, review pages and diagrammatic spreads offered him the opportunity to advocate the creation of hygienic suburban cemeteries, the planting of plane trees in London, and even, in an illustrated article entitled ‘Hints for Breathing Places for the Metropolis’ , a ‘green belt’ for the capital.

In various numbers he called again and again for the laying out of public parks and gardens where the English hoi polloi might freely avail themselves of health-giving

‘rational recreation’ , as he termed it. Loudon was finally able to put his ideas about parks into practice, initially with a long-since-lost public garden at Gravesend in Kent, and then subsequently in 1840 in Derby where, at the bequest of the enlightened local philanthropic industrialist, Joseph Strutt, he created an arboretum for the city. Composed of a collection of more than 1,000 trees, each of them individually labelled, the park was laid out over the re-landscaped grounds of Strutt’s former summer house. The Derby Arboretum endures to this day, and is widely credited as the nation’s first proper public park, although that title is much disputed, especially if we define public parks as fully publicly funded and freely open to the public. The main sticking point was that Derby was initially only open free to the public on two days a week, and charged admission fees to meet its maintenance costs at other times. Nevertheless, its model, and especially its faintly pedagogical planting, was much imitated in the next generation of truly public parks. Loudon’s immense contribution to the greening-up of our cities is admirably examined in Loudon and the Landscape: From Country Seat to Metropolis, 1783–1843 by Melanie Simo (1988, Biog.). In the wake of his death, the creation of new public parks, aided by fresh legislation on sanitation and the expansion of local government with new powers to levy rates to fund civic amenities, would come on in leaps and bounds. More than 20 new parks were created in England and Scotland by 1860.

London’s first purpose-built public park was to be Victoria Park in London’s East End, designed by John Nash’s ‘favourite pupil’ , James Pennethorne, and opened (if not quite finished) in 1845. A landscaper, planner, architect and civil engineer, Pennethorne would also provide the capital with New Oxford Street, Commercial Road and another park in Battersea. His role in reshaping the city is the topic of Geoffrey Tyack’s Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London (1992, A. Architecture, 4to.). Outside London, Pennethorne collaborated with Joseph Paxton on Prince’s Park in Liverpool, laid out in 1842. Paxton was head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and creator of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition. His first solo foray into public park-making was just across the Mersey at Birkenhead (laid out 1843–7),

hidden corners

Opposite, top Avenue and boating lake, Victoria Park in London’s East End, c.1910. The park was designed by James Pennethorne and opened in 1845. Photograph courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives.

Opposite, below An example of carpet bedding in Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, 1912.

Photograph courtesy of the RHS Lindley Library.

Right Battersea Park’s cascade, constructed using Pulhamite, a form of fake rock widely used in urban parks until the 1930s. Photograph © Phil Whitehouse.

and is described in Kate Colquhoun’s exemplary biography, A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary life of Joseph Paxton (2003, Biog.). But Birkenhead Park has a bigger claim to fame than being designed by one of the giants of the Victorian era. It also helped inspire one of the world’s greatest parks: New York’s Central Park.

Frederick Law Olmsted – who together with the English architect Calvert Vaux won the competition to design Central Park in 1857 – had undertaken a tour of Britain in 1850 and visited Birkenhead Park at the insistence of a local baker. He was astonished by the quality of its landscaping and the fact that the park was open to all classes for free, in contrast to the private and commercial pleasure gardens that then still predominated in American cities.

Olmsted always cited Birkenhead as a major influence on his thinking when it came to designing Central Park. That park’s development and eventful life is described in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar (1992, T. America, Gen.), while the rare Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (1870, Pamphlets 220) supplies a neat précis of some of Olmsted’s ideas about park-making.

One area in park design where Olmsted parted company with Paxton was the latter’s enthusiasm for so-called carpet beds. These are the elaborate displays of colourful bedding plants which are often arranged to form patterns, shapes like crowns or borough crests, or even to spell out messages and names. Brent Elliott’s Victorian Gardens (1986, S. Garden) gives a sense of their extraordinary variety and popularity in the age of steam and iron.

Under the watch of J.J. Sexby, the London County Council’s first Chief Officer of Parks, the beds at Brockwell Park in south-

east London, for example, displayed in floral form the opening verses of ‘God Save the Queen’ . Sexby subsequently wrote a guidebook to the capital’s parks, The Municipal Parks, Gardens, and Open Spaces of London: Their History and Associations (1898, T. London).

Sexby’s book is just one of several volumes the Library holds written by one-time park employees. These range from a practical manual, Municipal Parks: Layout, Management and Administration (1937, S. Garden), by Manchester’s former head of parks W.W. Pettigrew, to Gill Brason’s memoir of swapping the rat race and a dull 9 to 5 office job for a stint with Islington’s parks department, The Ungreen Park: The Diary of a Keeper (1978, Biog.).

Similarly, Iain Sinclair, author of Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997, T. London), once tended King George’s Field in Mile End as a municipal gardener.

What Sexby’s book shows us is how much parks have changed, offering as it does a comprehensive snapshot of London’s facilities at a time when quoits grounds were still considered almost mandatory, and many lakes effectively served as washrooms for the poor.

The vogue for rock gardening was also seemingly at its peak when the volume was written, with Sexby waxing lyrical in particular about Battersea Park’s ‘entirely artificial’ cascade. He describes

this ersatz-Swiss water feature as looking like ‘a mountain-side … rent asunder by some volcanic eruption’ . That such an unlikely edifice could be erected in an urban park is thanks to the ingenuity of the Boxbourne-based family firm of James Pulham and Son. Former cement merchants turned landscape artists extraordinaire, they perfected the manufacture of ‘Pulhamite’ , a form of fake rock that could be coloured and moulded to replicate the jagged fissures of the Eiger, or whatever else in the geological line was required. Their services were sought by park authorities up and down the country until the 1930s but, rather like Polaroid film, the original recipe for Pulhamite has since been lost. The London Library possesses the definitive book on Pulhamite, Claude Hitching’s magnificent Rock Landscapes, The Pulham Legacy: Rock Gardens, Grottoes, Ferneries, Follies, Fountains and Garden Ornaments (2012, S. Garden, 4to.). It is a book illustrated with many curious wonders, and a reminder that some of the most naturallooking elements in our parks are, like the parks themselves, entirely man-made.

Parks should by their very nature compel us to think more communally, encouraging as they do the collective over the individual experience. They remain free and open to all, and we must use, cherish and fight for them to enable them to survive and thrive.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

1947: india, art and nationhood

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Cleo Roberts looks back to a Royal Academy exhibition of Indian art in 1947, and the significant role it played in consolidating the country’s connection with its artistic heritage From the top of the entrance stairs to the Royal Academy of Arts in the winter of 1947, visitors were confronted by an imposing sandstone sculpture of a bull.

The capital of one of a pair of Ashokan pillars from Rampurva in Bihar dating from 224 BCE, the bulbous creature was expertly carved with exquisite life-like detail, and introduced an exhibition of over 1,500 artworks that was to influence the historiography and perception of Indian and Pakistani art. Already foreshadowed in September by an exhibition of Indian painting at the British Museum and the reopening of the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Exhibition of Indian Art Chiefly from the Dominions of India and Pakistan, 2400 BC to 1947 AD confirmed London’s position as a showcase of India’s 4,000-year visual history.

The exhibition was spread across the RA’s entire first floor in 15 galleries, following the model of popular surveys of Persian and Chinese art at the institution in 1931 and 1935, which had attracted 259,000 and 450,000 visitors respectively.

Visitor numbers for this new exhibition were, despite the RA’s best efforts, considerably lower, comprising a total of 100,000 people over its duration. Designed

by Alfred Munnings, President of the Royal Academy, Richard Winstedt of the Royal Society of Arts, and Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

the show was intended to dazzle and overwhelm. After the initial encounter with the Ashokan bull in the Central Hall, visitors progressed through galleries that were arranged chronologically as far as possible, beginning with sculptures of the Maurya (322 BCE–185 BCE), Sunga (185–73 BCE) and Kushan periods (c.second century BCE–third century CE). Designed to create what Basil Gray, Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum and a member of the exhibition committee, described as a ‘microcosm’ of Eastern life and civilisation, the galleries included bronzes, manuscripts, miniatures, jewellery, ivories, carpets and textiles, and modern Indian art, along with a room dedicated to the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artists in India, which featured East India Company textiles and furniture.

Of particular note and appeal to critics were an early 1000 CE Bodhisattva torso in sandstone on loan from the V&A, and a moulded Buddha head from Gandhara (1300–1400) with a prominent hair-knot modelled in a Graeco-Roman style and elongated earlobes alluding to his former princely status when he wore earrings.

Miniatures were another spectacle, their delicate brushwork and intense colour pigments attracting close analysis.

Wilfrid Blunt, reviewing the exhibition in the Burlington Magazine, singled out

Producing a coherent narrative with numerous artworks from a vast and diverse subcontinent was an intensive curatorial process

’

a painting of cranes of c.1800 after Ustad Mansur for its intriguing resemblance to Ming aesthetics in its detail and vivacity.

An illustration from the manuscript of the Gulistan of Sa’di (1581), lent by the Royal Asiatic Society, although diminutive in size, also stood out. Dusted with gold, this Persian volume of poetry and prose featured delicate gold-painted borders, and the illustration was an intriguing joint portrait of the calligrapher, Husain Zarin Kalam, and the painter, Manohar b.

Basawan. Miniatures from another Persian manuscript, the Kitab-i Mathnawiyyat-i

Left Photograph of the Ashokan bull being installed at the Royal Academy exhibition, 1947. Photographer unknown. © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Zafar Khan (1662–3), also from the Royal Asiatic Society’s collections, were similarly admired, in particular a representation of Shah Jahan, the fifth Moghul emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal.

Navigation of these galleries was assisted by an accompanying short catalogue containing texts on ‘Sculpture and Bronze’ , ‘Painting’ and ‘The Minor Arts’ , which explained the derivation of the schools of art and the techniques employed. An additional note on iconography provided a guide to Hindu and Buddhist symbolism. Unsurprisingly

these texts drew parallels with European art and viewed the trajectory of Indian art as a reflection of this canon, with the Gupta age (c.320–550 CE), for example, being seen as a classical period from which other aesthetics developed, and artworks from India’s medieval period being equated with the early Renaissance Italian sculptor Agostino di Duccio.

Constructing this exhibition and bringing it to the galleries of the Royal Academy at Burlington House could only have been a fraught and lengthy endeavour.

Producing a coherent narrative with

Below Head of the Buddha, c.1300–1400, limestone, from Gandhara, near Peshawara, north-west Pakistan. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

numerous artworks from a vast and diverse subcontinent was an intensive curatorial process, not helped by delays following the interruption of the Second World War and the unanticipated relinquishing of India by the British under Clement Atlee’s Labour Government. The transfer of power and the creation of Pakistan in the immediate leadup to the opening threatened the story; the territorial changes somewhat skewed the show’s remit and demanded a change in the exhibition’s title to include a reference to the new nation. As Munnings stated in his preface to the exhibition’s accompanying THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

catalogue, ‘all kinds of difficulties – especially in obtaining materials for an effective display of the exhibits – have been faced and largely overcome’ .

It was this rigorous process of selection and loan that gave the exhibition its value and significance. The planning took well over a year and was orchestrated by a British committee – including Winstedt, Gray, and Kenneth de Burgh Codrington of the Victoria and Albert Museum – and a group of experts in India. These Indian arts professionals were led by Mrs Sarojini Naidu, a Congress Party activist. Although the two groups were ostensibly working together, it was quite clear that the British deputation, sent to India on an eight24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

week sourcing trip in February 1947, had the final word. It returned with lists of approved examples of art, and it was from the Royal Academy that reams of correspondence, securing permissions and organising subsequent loans, emanated. As Gray made explicit in a lecture to the Royal India and Pakistan Society a week after the show’s opening , the arbiters of Indian art seemingly operated from Burlington House: ‘I think it should be known that the selection is ours; not, therefore, what India and Pakistan wish to represent them to the West, but what the delegation judged to be the most representative of their art. ’ This authoritative rhetoric set the tone for the exhibition, and was as much

a part of the show as the final artworks chosen for display. These British tastemakers felt that their expertise justified their role of educating both British and Indian audiences. This was described by the scholar Hugh George Rawlinson as a generous gesture that would guide the taste of the public and the critics, and of Indians themselves, who had apparently ‘almost entirely lost sight of their own priceless cultural heritage’ .

Despite elevating Western scholarship and acknowledging the work of the pioneering scholars E.B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the presentation and interpretation of artworks in both the show and catalogue remained heavily generalised, with emphasis on the spirituality of the pieces and their cumulative impact. Together the works were ‘key to the comprehension of what that country has stood for through the ages’ , and provided access to ‘Indian people as a whole’ , as Percy Brown explained in an article written for the Royal India Society before the show opened.

Although Pakistan was included in the subtitle of the show (which had required approval from India’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Pakistan’s Governor-General, Muhammad Ali Jinnah), the exhibition texts and lectures did little to recognise this new state.

The lack of acknowledgement was compounded by the exhibition poster, which used such small typography for the subtitle that it was barely visible.

Minimising the relationship of Pakistan to the show was no mistake. Sir Frank Noyce confirmed the politics behind this attitude, blatantly omitting any reference to Pakistan when he said in a lecture that ‘Those of us who have known and loved India will hope that that spirit of co-operation will become ever more apparent in other and wider fields’ .

This attempt to expand British influence was in part realised when the show closed in February 1948. The curatorial process had created a network of experts who contributed to the exhibition and projected a coherent vision of Indian art. Perversely, this surveyview proved attractive for export back to India, where it provided a ready-made narrative sympathetic to a nationalist historiography. Temporarily overlooking tensions over the return of items loaned

1947: india, art and nationhood

Opposite Painting of a pair of Tibetan cranes, after Ustad Mansur’s original of 1605–27, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, Mughal school, c.1800. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

from the museums of Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar, cities which had been in India but now were part of Pakistan, in March 1948 the RA sent a total of 239 crates from London to Government House in New Delhi. Between November and December 1948 a modified version of the exhibition was reconstructed there. The exhibition layout followed that of the rooms at the Royal Academy, maintaining a unity between the diverse artworks, but Hindu sculpture and indigenous creativity was elevated so that, unlike the RA selection, modern Indian artists were excluded.

For the Government Department of Archaeology who organised it, the exhibition was understood as a seminal

event that enabled the country to consolidate and reflect on its heritage.

As the small catalogue produced in both English and Hindi explained, the show was conceived as an important tool for strengthening the country’s future cultural programmes.

The New Delhi show proved to be an effective force. As anticipated, it provoked public discussion and the combination of different objects brought together in a survey display stimulated the foundation of India’s first National Museum. This opened in August 1949 and, with its stated intention of promoting India’s impact on human civilisation both nationally and internationally, it seemingly realised one

Above Poster for the exhibition. © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Left Illustration from the manuscript of the Gulistan of Sa’di, Mughal school, 1581, by Muhammad Husain al-Kashmiri. This joint portrait depicts the calligrapher, Husain Zarin Kalam, and the painter, Manohar b. Basawan.

Courtesy Royal Asiatic Society Collection.

of the original aims of the Royal Academy show: to reconnect India with its heritage.

In the wake of Partition, which had ripped the subcontinent apart, the assertion of a composite Indian art history was relevant for the construction of national identity, and the RA show and curatorial work of the exhibition’s two committees provided the contours of this historical narrative. For Basil Gray the assimilation of the exhibition in Delhi would perhaps have been seen as the show’s ultimate achievement. As he revealingly said in his address to the Royal India and Pakistan Society: ‘May this exhibition open our eyes to the qualities of a great civilisation. ’

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

MEMBERS’ News Philip Marshall, the new Director of The London Library, and Felicity Nelson, its new Membership Director, both started in their roles this September. Here they look at some of the priorities they’re focusing on and the surprises the Library has thrown up during their first few weeks.

Philip MarshalL I am delighted to have taken up the position as Director of The London Library; it’s a tremendous privilege and I’m relishing the unique set of challenges and responsibilities this role brings with it.

My first few weeks here have provided the opportunity to see more of the Library at first hand and the people involved in making it the extraordinary place it is. I am extremely grateful for the warm welcome I have received from all the trustees, staff, members and supporters that I have met so far. I’m looking forward to meeting many more of you over the coming weeks. In reflecting on these first few weeks I remain indebted to Inez Lynn, who has given enormous amounts of her time and energy to preparing my induction and a smooth handover. Her support has been invaluable and I am deeply grateful for it.

When I accepted this position back in May I already understood the Library to be a very special place with a remarkable history. I recognised it as an organisation that was much loved by its members and highly respected as a place of learning and creative endeavour. But I think it is only when you start to explore the Library every day that you truly realise what an extraordinary institution it is. Where else could we find such a wonderful collection, with the choice of freely accessing it in excellent working spaces or having it delivered to our homes?

It is a place that has been inspiring and supporting readers and writers of different types for 176 years and continues to do so every day.

There are many ways in which the Library helps its members in their creative work and through this it is well connected to contemporary cultural life. Last week, for example, I had the great pleasure of introducing a Reading Room talk by Daisy Goodwin, a member of the Library for 27 years and the writer and creator of the hugely successful television series Victoria.

Daisy researched and wrote the series here at the Library, and her talk gave us a fascinating insight into her creative process and the significant part the Library played in supporting her work. I hope that we shall have many more opportunities in the future for members to share and discuss their work, their ideas and the areas of interest that have been inspired by the Library.

The Library is often described as a hidden treasure and, once discovered, I am sure that any bibliophile must instantly fall in love with it. But the fact that it is not well known beyond our 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Philip Marshall.

immediate circle of friends is part of our challenge. As you are probably aware, our membership has fallen from 8,500 to 6,500 over the last 17 years, leaving us with an annual operating deficit of over £1m. Reversing this position and ensuring a sustainable future for the Library is our immediate priority.

To this end I am delighted that we have been recently joined

by Felicity Nelson in the newly created role of Membership Director. We welcome her on board.

Growing our membership base is clearly critical, but the generous support of all our donors is equally vital. So I want to end with a particular thank you to all of you who have already contributed to the Tom Stoppard Innovation Fund. All gifts are very gratefully received and shall be put to excellent use as we continue to develop and improve this magnificent Library.

Felicity nelson A member I met in my third week at the Library enthusiastically described to me her experience of joining as ‘a series of exciting firsts’. The first visit to the building; the first adventure into the stacks; the first time taking books home. I really love this way of looking at it, probably because it has somewhat mirrored my experience, which started in April when I saw the job advertised.

It was the first time I had heard of the Library and it has triggered my own series of ‘exciting firsts’.

Having worked in membership organisations for my entire career, however, there are many aspects of this role that are not firsts to me – such as the importance of understanding the membership offering and value proposition, and planning how to ensure the sustainability of a prestigious institution through membership growth. These have been part and parcel of what I have always done, and I think I go into this role well aware of the challenges to come as we set about returning the membership levels to previous highs.

A priority now is to understand the needs of potential members and encourage support, engagement and retention in our current membership. Although there will be a challenge in achieving growth, the 700 or so new members we attract each year and the satisfaction score of 94 per cent from current members paint a picture of optimism and are a clear sign that the Library has much to offer.

I have had the pleasure of meeting a number of members in my short time here – they range from those who, after waiting years since reading about the Library while living abroad, have just joined to those who have been members and frequent visitors for longer than they wish to disclose. And I hope to meet and hear from many of you, especially if you have comments or suggestions about the membership, so please feel free to get in touch by email (felicity.nelson@londonlibrary.co.uk).

Felicity Nelson.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

members’ PRIZES and awards Our congratulations go to Kazuo Ishiguro, who in October of this year was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017.

The award citation describes how ‘in novels of great emotional force’ he has ‘uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’.

Ishiguro has been a member of The London Library since 1985 and is now, remarkably, the tenth London Library member to have been awarded the Nobel Prize since it was launched in 1901. Previous London Library winners have been: Rudyard Kipling George Bernard Shaw T.S. Eliot Bertrand Russell Winston Churchill W.B. Yeats John Galsworthy Harold Pinter V.S. Naipaul The year 2017 has also seen London Library members well represented in a wide range of national literary awards shortlists. The following is not intended to be a comprehensive list but gives a good indication of the recognition our members have received for their work. Our apologies if we’ve missed anyone, and do let us know if you win or are shortlisted for an award. We love to keep track of our members’ successes.

Kazuo Ishiguro.

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Naomi Alderman, The Power, winner of the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction; longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Book Prize; shortlisted for the 2017 Books Are My Bag Popular Fiction Award.

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, shortlisted for the 2017 PEN HessellTiltman Prize.

Christopher de Bellaigue, The Islamic Enlightenment, shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction; longlisted for the 2017 Cundill History Prize.

Jessie Burton, The Muse, shortlisted for the 2017 Edward Stanford – Specsavers Fiction (With a Sense of Place) Award.

M.J. Carter, The Devil’s Feast, shortlisted for the 2017 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger; longlisted for a 2017 HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown.

Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven, winner of the 2017 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award for Contemporary Fiction.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Seven: the Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic, shortlisted for the 2017 Orwell Book Prize.

Lara Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich, shortlisted for the 2017 HWA Non-Fiction Crown.

Robert Harris, Munich,

shortlisted for the 2017 Books Are My Bag Popular Fiction Award.

Anna Keay, The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth, longlisted for the 2017 HWA Non-Fiction Crown.

Gideon Rachman, Easternisation, longlisted for the 2017 Orwell Book Prize.

Michael Ridpath, ‘The Super Recogniser of Vik’, from Motives for Murder, shortlisted for the 2017 CWA Short Story Dagger.

Gwendoline Riley, First Love, shortlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction; shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize.

Simon Schama, Belonging, shortlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Douglas Smith, Rasputin, shortlisted for the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.

Andrew Taylor shortlisted for the 2017 CWA Dagger in the Library; The Ashes of London longlisted for the 2017 HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown.

Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and the Crisis that Shook the World, shortlisted for the 2017 HWA Non-Fiction Crown.

Jenny Uglow, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, longlisted for the 2017 Baillie Gifford prize for Non-Fiction.

A Tale of two libraries Founded in 1807, the Boston Athenaeum has been one of the sorry your people have had trouble with the Zeppelins. I hear from closest organisations in the world to The London Library in terms of those who have been in London that they are no humorous affairs, purpose, function and facilities. A few years ago, the Athenaeum’s and I am sorry that good librarians are subjected to such ruthless conservator, Carolle Morini, invited John Spurdle (Director of the measures. The most vigorous remarks about the Germans that you International Friends of The London Library) and Mark Storey (The would like to make in private you will hear echoed over here.’

London Library’s then Treasurer) to see some documents from their During the prolonged bombing and deprivations of the Second archives. Laid out was a correspondence between the Library and World War, letters continued between Purnell, appointed Librarian the Boston Athenaeum that spanned over 30 years from 1913 to on Hagberg Wright’s death in 1940, and the Boston Athenaeum’s 1945. No one at The London Library had any idea that this existed.

Librarian, Elinor Gregory, appointed in 1933. In November 1940 Earlier this year the Library and the Athenaeum decided that Purnell wrote: ‘I spend my nights here as well as days, sleeping in these letters deserved a wider audience and so turned to Jesse the basement. Guns crash out and bombs fall. One holds one’s Marquese, a New York director who had staged a wonderful breath when the whistling variety is coming, wondering where celebration of T.S. Eliot for us, to create an evening of readings it will fall, but in spite of it all, I got 8 hours’ sleep last night. We titled A Tale of Two Libraries. With a cast comprising Simon Jones are still issuing a lot of books, especially to country members by (who played Bridie in the 1981 ITV series of Brideshead Revisited post.’ By March 1944 America was itself feeling the effects of three and Arthur Dent in the 1981 BBC Two TV series The Hitchhiker’s years of war. Gregory observed: ‘Your problems are becoming ours Guide to the Galaxy) alongside Julian Elfer, Michael Frederic and increasingly. Paper and binding are difficult to buy, replacement or Peggy J. Scott, performances were given at the Boston Athenaeum additional copies of books are less certain to be found available. and in New York in September.

More of our readers are receiving books by mail, in part we The correspondence on which A Tale of Two Libraries is based think that this is caused by employment with war jobs, volunteer started in 1913 with a letter from the Athenaeum’s Librarian, work in one’s own house, and in part by the lack of gasoline Charles Knowles Bolton, to The London Library, with a request to which facilitated library visits. The recent bombings have left you send regular packages containing the latest books being read in personally, and officially, unscathed I hope.’

London. Charles Hagberg Wright from The London Library agreed From a humble request for books, the correspondence evolved to do this, and so began a steady stream of packages from London to become a sort of 84 Charing Cross Road about libraries, and sent by either Hagberg Wright or C.J. Purnell, his deputy. They A Tale of Two Libraries captures snippets of this extraordinary would often include a hand-written note discussing the books and moving transatlantic conversation. Our hope is to restage the being sent, providing a fascinating insight into volumes now long reading in London in the spring. forgotten that were at the time considered noteworthy, such as E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913), Henry Sydnor Harrison’s V.V’s Eyes (1913), and Thomas Burke’s book Twinkletoes: A Tale of Limehouse (1918), all of which are still available on the Library’s shelves.

The relationship developed and during the First World War became increasingly cordial. In October 1914, for example, Purnell observed: ‘We have had a sample of Zeppelins here as you have seen in the papers.

One of the Library assistants had his flat gutted by a bomb, though fortunately he and his mother were out when it fell. We are hoping for further good news Above Librarian Charles Right One of the many from the front, but the cost will Hagberg Wright in letters from Purnell to his discussion with his then counterpart at the Boston be terrible in lives. Please let me assistant C.J. Purnell, left, Athenaeum, Librarian know if I am sending too many who succeeded him as Elinor Gregory. Courtesy Librarian in 1940. novels.’ Bolton replied: ‘I am of the Boston Athenaeum.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

agm 2017 The London Library’s 176th AGM took place on 5 November 2017 and considered the following agenda:

• • • •

Approval of the Minutes of the 175th Annual General Meeting held on 9 November 2016.

The adoption of the 2016–2017 Annual Report and Accounts.

The trustees’ proposals to appoint MHA MacIntyre Hudson as the Library’s auditors for the financial year 2017–2018.

Election of trustees (Anthony McGrath and Sophie Murray were put forward for re-election).

•

Confirmation of the trustees’ appointment of Sir Tim Rice as President and Alexandra Shulman as VicePresident.

• Confirmation of the trustees’ proposals for membership fees, subscriptions and charges. The trustees proposed to increase the ordinary annual fee by £1.25 per month in 2018. This represents an increase of 2.9 per cent, which is broadly in line with expected inflation. Similar increases were proposed for the other membership categories and life membership.

The results of the meeting can be found on our website (londonlibrary.co.uk/about-us/agm-annual-reports).

A GOTHIC CHRISTMAS We are proud to unveil this year’s London Library Christmas card, which has been specially designed for us by renowned children’s illustrator, political cartoonist, library champion and 2015–17 UK Children’s Laureate, Chris Riddell.

The card features one of Chris’s most famous characters, Ada Goth, star of the classic Goth Girl children’s book series, now into its fourth volume and the winner of multiple awards, including the Costa Children’s Book Award.

Ada, the only child of Lord Goth, normally resides in spooky Ghastly-Gorm Hall, but this Christmas she has sneaked out to The London Library to carry out some essential seasonal research in the Reading Room.

The unique card is available in packs of 8 (costing £6 per pack, including envelopes). Price excludes postage (£1.20 per pack within the UK; please enquire for rates to Europe and the Rest of the World).

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

All proceeds go to support The London Library.

And don’t forget – as a London Library member you can also get 10% off the Goth Girl book series from our partner Hatchards.

ORDER FORM I WOULD LIKE TO ORDER: ______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £6.00 per pack Postage & packing costs: UK £1.20 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 ____________________

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MEMBERS’ NEWS

Member Events We are pleased to welcome members to the following events over the next few months. Member events are free, but places are limited so need to be reserved in advance on our website (londonlibrary.co.uk/ member-events).

the

HOUSE HISTORIES UNCOVERED With Melanie Backe-Hansen Tuesday, 28 November 2017 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room FULL but waiting list in operation Author of House Histories (2011) and Historic Streets and Squares (2013), Melanie Backe-Hansen researches the social and often secret history of houses. Revealing

the tricks and useful sources that she uses in her work, Melanie will describe some of the stories she has uncovered, including a Nottinghamshire house where Byron engaged in amateur dramatics and a London mansion block used by the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. MEMBERS’ CHRISTMAS DRINKS Thursday, 30 November 2017 6.30pm – 8.30pm Reading Room Join fellow members and staff of The London Library and raise a glass to celebrate the festive season. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance via the Library website.

Christmas Party in The London Library Reading Room.

THE DANDY AT DUSK With Philip Mann Wednesday, 23 January 2018 6pm – 8pm, Members’ Room Philip Mann chronicles the relationship of dandyism to the emerging cultural landscape of modernity via portraits of Regency England’s Beau Brummell – the first dandy –

and six twentieth-century figures: Austrian architect Adolf Loos, the Duke of Windsor, couturier Bunny Roger, writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp, French film producer Jean-Pierre Melville, and New German Cinema enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Book Collector

Gift membership to The London Library is a perfect Christmas present for anyone who loves books.

We publish quarterly in print. Our online archive from 1947 is there the moment you sign up. n $125, € 90 or £60 for a year of wit, pleasure and knowledge from www.thebookcollector.co.uk

Covers the Globe

With 17 miles of shelves to explore, over a million books to borrow, historic reading rooms and extensive electronic resources, The London Library offers booklovers endless inspiration.

Visit www.londonlibrary.co.uk/gift2017 or ask at reception

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION

Wednesday 7 February 2018 Knightsbridge, London

HURLEY (FRANK) “A Cavern beneath the Coastal Ice Cliffs”, (1911-1914) £10,000-15,000 plus buyer’s premium and other fees *

ENTRIES NOW INVITED

bonhams.com/travel * For details of the charges payable in addition to the final hammer price, please visit bonhams.com/buyersguide

ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7393 3817 books@bonhams.com Closing date for entries Friday 1 December 2017