Issue 29 - Autumn 2015

MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2015 ISSUE 29

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BLACK LIVES IN GEORGIAN LONDON Tracing individual stories within a thriving community by Michael Bundock

THE TRACKS OF OUR YEARS

David Kynaston’s search for rich source material for his history of post-war Britain

T.S. ELIOT, POETS AND LIBRARIES

The Annual London Library Lecture by Robert Crawford

Le Carré (John) A Murder of Quality, 1962, first edition.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 29

13

David Kynaston aimed to make his multi-volume history of post-war Britain different from comparable accounts. He describes how his efforts to track down unmediated material in the form of unpublished diaries and sociological fieldwork helped him gain a fresh perspective on the subject.

CONTENTS 7 FROM THE CHAIRMAN 8 CONTRIBUTORS RMS Empress of Britain under construction in Glasgow, January 1955. Herald & Times, Glasgow.

18

London’s black community in the eighteenth century was substantial, largely as a result of British families returning to the city from the colonies with their servants. Michael Bundock describes the remarkable stories of former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano, Francis Barber and Ignatius Sancho.

The Library resources, both old and new, that Nicki Faircloth used to research her dictionary on Shakespeare’s plants and gardens

13 THE TRACKS OF OUR YEARS David Kynaston’s hunt for interesting and unusual sources for his history of Britain

18 BLACK LIVES IN GEORGIAN LONDON Etching by James Bretherton after Thomas Orde’s High Life Below Stairs, 1774 (detail).

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

22

The Library’s Roman history titles are scattered across the collection, and cover a wide range of volumes, from Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) to the Victorian humorist Gilbert à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome (1851). Philip Parker surveys the rich pickings to be found in the holdings.

10 BEHIND THE BOOK

The relatively undocumented stories of individuals in the black population and Michael Bundock’s attempts to bring them to life

22 HIDDEN CORNERS Philip Parker’s quest for Roman history titles across the Library shelfmarks

26 THE LONDON LIBRARY ANNUAL LECTURE Robert Crawford on ‘T.S. Eliot, Poets and Libraries’ Cartoon by John Leech, from Gilbert à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome (1851).

31 MEMBERS’ NEWS

26

T.S. Eliot, who died 50 years ago, treasured the privilege of roaming the shelves of The London Library.

Robert Crawford, Eliot’s biographer and himself a poet, describes the way poets across the centuries have fallen in love with libraries.

T.S. Eliot and Valerie Eliot, 1957, by Angus McBean. © Harvard Theatre Collection.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

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6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

London Library Yale September 2015.indd 1

07/08/2015 11:35

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On the cover

Joshua Reynolds, A Young Black (detail), c.1770. Reproduction courtesy The Menil Collection, Houston.

FROM THE CHAIRMAN One of the many inspiring aspects of the Library is the extraordinary variety of the collections and, more especially, of what members find in them. That feels very much like the theme of this issue, and is also one of the reasons why our celebrated President T.S. Eliot loved the Library so much – as Robert Crawford so eloquently described in the annual lecture at the Hay Festival in May, an abridged version of which appears in this magazine.

Crawford’s piece is a fitting tribute to Eliot in the year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death.

Stray plums for the pudding. That is what David Kynaston calls the many fruity morsels he found on the Biography shelves for his multi-volume history of post-1945 Britain, while the use he has made of published and unpublished diaries also whets the appetite. The latter might also be said of Nicki Faircloth’s discoveries about the plants and gardens that appear in Shakespeare’s works, although as many of the plants were medicines, poisons and elixirs, they need rather more careful handling. Moving forward to the eighteenth century, Michael Bundock opens our eyes to an overlooked but fascinating feature of London, namely the presence of a black community, not simply as the servants that appear in contemporary paintings, but also as participants in a thriving social life in the city.

Throughout its near-175 years, the Library has offered members the chance to look far back into history – as Philip Parker outlines in his article about the highlights of the Roman collection – partly for pleasure but also to help them think about the present day. With the AGM approaching and thus the end of my term as Chairman, I have similarly taken a valedictory indulgence in Members’ News of looking back over the past decade at the Library’s finances as a way of discovering clues about the future. I look forward to seeing you for a drink in the Issue Hall on Tuesday, 3 November.

Bill Emmott Chairman

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 11 September 2015 © 2015 The London Library.

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.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

11:35

A Mind of Winter (2015). 14 porcelain vessels in a wood and plexiglass vitrine 90 x 50 x 15 cm. © Edmund de Waal. Photographer: Mike Bruce

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Bundock

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1995

Michael Bundock is a director of Dr Johnson’s House Trust. He has published extensively on eighteenthcentury history and literature, and is the author of The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (2015). He is a barrister, specialising in maritime law, with a firm of solicitors in the City of London.

Robert Crawford

Robert Crawford’s most recent collection of poems is Testament (Cape, 2014). His biography, Young Eliot: From St Louis to 'The Waste Land', was published in 2015 by Jonathan Cape and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. At present he is editing an anthology of poems and stories about Iona. He is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews.

Nicki Faircloth JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2009

white

Nicki Faircloth is a freelance writer. She became interested in garden history while involved with Strawberry Hill, and took an MA in Garden History at the University of Bristol. Her co-written Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary (2014), which will be published in paperback in 2016, combines two longstanding interests.

She is currently working on a more expansive narrative about gardens and Shakespeare.

David Kynaston JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1974

a project by Edmund de Waal

Photo Michael Burns.

David Kynaston has been a professional historian since 1973. In addition to his ongoing 'Tales of a New Jerusalem' series on post-war Britain, he has written a four-volume history of the City of London, 1815–2000, and three books on cricket history. He has also written or co-written five corporate histories (most recently of HSBC), and is currently engaged on a singlevolume history of the Bank of England.

Philip Parker JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2005

26 September 2015 – 3 January 2016 The Library and Print Room royalacademy.org.uk #RAwhite 8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Philip Parker is a historian specialising in the classical and medieval world. He is the author of The Empire Stops Here: A Journey Around the Frontiers of the Roman Empire (2009), The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World (2014) and general editor of The Great Trade Routes: A History of Cargoes and Commerce Over Land and Sea (2012).

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13/01/2015 14:599 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

BEHIND THE

BOOK

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From sixteenth-century publications on herbal remedies to online resources via JSTOR, Nicki Faircloth found some invaluable research material at The London Library

‘The Maner of Watering with a Pumpe in a Tubbe’ (detail), from Paula Henderson’s The Tudor House and Garden (2005), originally in The Gardener’s Labyrinth (1586 edition).

’

John Gerard wrote in 1597 that ‘any herbe or plant may be … fit for meate or medicine’, and it is clear that references in Shakespeare’s plays to herbs and flowers would have had a meaning to contemporary audiences that has largely been lost. My research for Shakespeare’s Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary, co-written with Vivian Thomas (2014, paperback scheduled for publication in 2016), took me to unexpected parts of the Library, including the back stacks.

 The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

by Paula Henderson (London and New Haven 2005). A. Architecture, 4to.

This comprehensive study of architecture and the designed landscape is an essential starting point for researching the Elizabethan garden. Given the great popular interest in gardens at the time, Shakespeare – perhaps surprisingly – included no references in his works to such ‘trophy’ gardens with which the nobility competed for royal favour.  John Hall and His Patients: The Medical Practice of Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law by Joan Lane (Stratford-upon-Avon 1996).

S. Medicine, Hall.

Hall’s medical notebook includes advice on which Shakespeare might have drawn, and illuminates the wide range of plants in common medicinal use. Hall supplied eringoes to his wife – what should be read into this is impossible to know, but the candied root of Eringium maritimum L. or sea-holly was used both medicinally and as an aphrodisiac. The latter meaning was probably intended when the plant was cited by Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor.  ‘Thy Bankes with Pioned, and Twilled Brims’: A Solution to a Double Crux by John Considine (Shakespeare Quarterly, vol.54, no.2, Summer 2003, pp.160–6, JSTOR).

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Previous lengthy analyses of a scene from The Tempest have suggested an identification of the peony for ‘pioned’ , but neither the locale nor the date of introduction could be botanically correct. Considine’s thoroughly researched article shows that the term ‘pioned’ has been used into the twenty-first century in Warwickshire to indicate ‘dug’ or ‘excavated’ , both of them meanings appropriate to a river bank: a distinctly vernacular word used by a local man.  Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, and London 1992), S. Population; Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA, and London 1997), S. Population; Goddesses, Elixirs, and Witches: Plants and Sexuality Throughout Human History (New York 2010), S. Botany. All by John M. Riddle.

Riddle’s books on sexuality and contraception offer evidence of the widespread and common use of plants as both contraceptives and abortifacients in Shakespeare’s time, which was of particular use in putting together a picture of the flowers Ophelia hands out before her death.

Was she mad, or possibly pregnant, and rejected by Hamlet?  The Anatomie of Abuses by Philip Stubbes (London 1836 reprint of the 1585 edition, ed. William B.D.D. Turnbull).

L. English Lit.

This Puritan rant against any form of enjoyment highlights the common currency of some of Shakespeare’s language.

Stubbes writes of ‘the caterpillers … that massacre the poore’ , recalling Bolingbroke’s vow to weed away the caterpillars of the commonwealth who still supported Richard II in the eponymous History play. Stubbes’s suggestion that garden houses were used for illicit sexual liaisons echoes references in Measure for Measure, describing the progression through a contemporary walled garden, via a gate into a vineyard, and on to the garden-house, which is central to the deception of Angelo, and his ultimate humiliation.  A Treatise of Melancholie by Timothie Bright (London 1586), Ant.; A Niewe Herball, or, Historie of Plantes by Rembert Dodoens (1578, trans. Henry Lyte), Ant., 4to.

Both these works list the contemporary uses of many of Shakespeare’s plants.

Dodoens suggests one function of the herb marjoram was to treat urinary infections, joints and ulcers, while Bright considers it alleviated melancholy, so its inclusion in Perdita’s gift of flowers to Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale as being suitable for ‘men of middle age’ could refer to either problem. Contemporary audiences would have recognised the herb’s medicinal possibilities, while a modern one might think primarily of its culinary function.

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ATOL PROTECTED

THE TRACKS OF OUR YEARS David Kynaston offers an insight into the wide-ranging nature of his research for his multi-volume history of post-war Britain

Durham Miners’ Gala, 23 July 1949. Photograph Gilesgate Archive.

It all began with Margaret Thatcher’s third election win in June 1987. Various things struck me, in roughly descending order of obviousness: that she had been in power since 1979; that she was likely to remain in power until the 1990s; that Britain under her sway was already changing rapidly and would presumably continue to do so; that 1979 was therefore a line in the sand of modern British history; and, finally, that 1945 (ushering in the post-war settlement

under Clement Attlee’s Labour government) through to 1979 (the start of the Thatcherite counter-revolution) was accordingly a period in its own right, with its own natural curve – or, in that well-known definition of the novel, a beginning, a muddle and an end.

It was another 15 years before I could start serious work on the project, as a one-volume history of the City of London turned into an all-consuming four-volume

affair. But by 2002 I was ready to start focusing on ‘Tales of a New Jerusalem’: in conception, a multi-volume history of Britain between 1945 and 1979 that would certainly have a political edge, but would be a predominantly narrative-driven and broad-based social history, inevitably with a cast of thousands. Now, in 2015, I have reached the halfway stage, with the three volumes, Austerity Britain, Family Britain and Modernity Britain, taking the story up THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

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to 1962. All things being equal, I hope in due course to press on. But at this point, I thought it might be interesting to reflect on my research so far.

The process began with a general reconnaissance, lasting some 15 months and involving travel to most parts of Britain: looking in record offices, local studies libraries, university libraries and elsewhere for potentially fresh and rich material and sources; getting close up to such iconic post-war developments as the Red Road flats in Glasgow (1969) or the streets-in-the-sky Park Hill development in Sheffield (1961); above all, reminding myself that there existed a world beyond the capital. But in London itself, my main beat was floors three and four at 14 St James’s Square – ‘Biography’ . There, I steadily worked my way along the shelves, looking particularly for the vivid or the unexpected.

Steven Berkoff being mercilessly thrashed with a cane by the PT master in Stepney in 1948 (‘Mum was shocked, but thought it was something to do with grammar school discipline’), Joyce Grenfell on tour in Glasgow complaining to a friend in 1952 (‘one sees so many spivs, toughs and undersized cripples, tarts, pansies and flotsam and jetsam that it tends to get a girl down’), Rupert Hart-Davis not much happier on a broiling day in Oxford in 1960 (‘bearded youths naked to the waist, negresses and other exotics, all sweating and jostling’) – these were shelves full of stray plums for the pudding.

Outside London, my moment of

Diarist Judy Haines, 1944. Photograph courtesy Pamela Hendicott.

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Through diaries – that most naked and unvarnished of sources – I could perhaps get

’

closer to the activities and concerns of

“ordinary” people

epiphany came early on, at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester, where I was reading the diary of Jennie Hill. Middleaged, unmarried, living with her despotic mother in a village near Winchester and working long hours in a bakery, she began keeping a quite detailed daily journal at the start of 1955. Almost ten months later, on 31 October, she mentions for the first time an event outside her immediate situation: the announcement on the Home Service’s 9 o’clock news that Princess Margaret was not going to marry the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend. ‘I feel so depressed & sorrowful for them both, ’ she wrote. And then in her entry next day: ‘Dreamt about Princess Margaret, that I was outside Clarence House crying my eyes out for her. ’ Two things hit me: that through diaries – that most naked and unvarnished of sources – I could perhaps get closer than any other way to the activities and concerns of ‘ordinary’ people; and that also through diaries, though of course not exclusively, it might be possible to tell my larger story in an unusual and compelling way.

So the hunt was on. One way and another, I tracked down some 40 unpublished diaries, of varying timespans and varying degrees of usability. Three diarists especially stand out in my mind from that process. One was Henry St John, a civil servant living in Acton whose diary (which I encountered at Ealing Local Studies Library) is the record of a deeply unsympathetic, yet somehow impressively dogged, misanthrope. It is hard to find an entry conveying an iota of human feeling towards anyone else. Yet without that dogged self-recording, if seldom self-

knowledge, one would not know that three days after Hiroshima, while briefly on secondment in the north-east, he returned to a public lavatory in Spennymoor ‘to see if I could masturbate over the mural inscriptions’ , only to be thwarted because ‘there was no lock on the door’ . An altogether more generous voice belonged to Judy Haines, a Chingford housewife with two daughters and keeper of a diary (which I came across at the University of Sussex) that, unlike most diaries, saw life’s glass as half-full, not half-empty. ‘Still pegging away at Pamela’s frock, ’ she notes on the day in 1957 that Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister (a fact not mentioned by her). ‘As my kitchen curtains are in ribbons, spared time to cut out material from new bought yesterday. I feel more confident with measuring since Dressmaking lessons. ’ Finally, there was Phyllis Willmott, widow of the sociologist Peter Willmott. A friend, Kate Gavron, tipped me off about her diary (now at Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge), and for a year or so I paid regular visits to Phyll’s home in Highgate, taking notes and asking questions. She had the liveliest of minds, was a perceptive and often pleasingly tart observer of the passing scene, and it was a thrill to be able to quote from her May 1962 verdict on Doris Lessing’s just-published The Golden Notebook – ‘an unnecessarily prolonged, involved and chaotic feat of imaginative usage of biographical material, ’ with nevertheless ‘some good good good stuff in it’ .

Overall, I think the diaries have worked pretty well for me, though they are not the key to all the mythologies. They are very good for instant reaction to events (such as the big freeze of 1947 or the Suez Crisis of 1956); they give one an arguably unrivalled sense of the quotidian; they help to redress the gender balance by giving a prominence to women’s voices at a time when the overwhelming majority of public figures were men; and in terms of the overarching project, a sort of non-fiction roman-fleuve, they provide a continuity of foreground characters through the unfolding years. At times one wishes they were more reflective, at times one wishes they took less for granted. But, to put it mildly, I would not be without them.

Diaries also form an integral part of the Mass-Observation Archive, though unfortunately with only one exception

THE TRACKS OF OUR YEARS

VE Day celebrations in Lambert Square, Coxlodge, Newcastle upon Tyne. Photograph NCJ Media Ltd.

(the Barrow diarist Nella Last) the historian quoting from them is compelled to give a fictitious name, which I found myself unwilling to do – somehow it felt inauthentic and wrong. Instead, during what were some extraordinarily exhilarating days dipping into other parts of the M-OA at Sussex, I concentrated on the observers themselves and their unique body of evidence. Accordingly, Austerity Britain opens with grumbling ‘overheards’ recorded by an M-O investigator in a central London newsagent’s on the morning of what was being belatedly announced as VE Day (‘Stood up to all wot we’ve stood up to, and then afraid to tell us it was peace, just as if we were a lot of kids’); a few pages later is a description from that evening of a crowded Chelsea pub listening to George VI’s stuttering broadcast (‘When the King says “Of just [long pause] – of just triumph”, several women’s foreheads pucker and they wear a lacerated look’); and on the February morning in 1952 when news came through

of George’s death, an M-O volunteer was on hand in Hammersmith to ask passers-by how they felt (‘Well, not at all pleased – it’s a funny question’).

By this time the classic M-O period was ending. Given that its particular strength lay in capturing working-class voices at a time when Britain was still an overwhelmingly working-class society, and given also that most of ‘my’ diarists were middle-class, this was a significant headache. The answer, meeting much but not all of the gap, was sociological fieldwork. The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of British sociology, still deeply empirical rather than, as became the case, wedded to theory and jargon. Some fine sociological studies appeared during these years, but on forays to the Qualidata collection at the University of Essex, I came to realise that for me the pay-dirt lay in the original fieldwork, providing unmediated, richly textured and real-time access to the first-hand material. Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden on the Huddersfield

working class, John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood on the affluent workers of Luton, Ray Pahl on settlements neither urban nor rural – these were pioneers, and I became grateful for all the interview transcripts that they so conscientiously helped to generate and preserve.

A further front, involving some of my most enjoyable research, has been the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, near Reading. There, reflecting my general prioritisation of the consumer over the producer, I have especially focused on the voluminous audience research material, based on panels of viewers and listeners giving their responses to programmes.

The Cocktail Party? ‘T.S. Eliot! Prepared for the worst but pleasantly surprised. ’ Dixon of Dock Green? ‘Pleasant, and suitable for family viewing. ’ Dr Kildare? ‘Perhaps when I get used to the extraordinary way they go about things in American hospitals it will grow on me. ’ Reading through the reactions of these panels, there have been THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

Redevelopment in Everton Heights, Liverpool, 1959. Photograph courtesy of the Liverpool Echo.

moments when I have had the illusion of getting tantalisingly close to that fabled beast we know as ‘middle England’: not ungenerous in its instincts, but almost congenitally suspicious of anything smacking of the unusual or – worst of all – highfalutin.

The final main part of the jigsaw has been newspapers. As a boy I spent hours reading my grandparents’ back issues of the Shrewsbury Chronicle ; in my thirties I took on the centenary history of the Financial Times not least in the vain hope that it would cure my addiction; and for this project I have spent many hours at Colindale, home of the British Newspaper Library – that is, until its still regretted closure in 2013.

In my attempt to drill down as close as possible to people’s lives, my emphasis has been on local papers, though not without frustrations. Very seldom if at all does, say, the Salford City Reporter feel the need to evoke to its readers the 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

experience of walking down the main shopping street in 1954, or having a drink in the pub, or standing on the terraces.

Even so, there is still a rich haul to be had from the local press, for me particularly in relation to my increasingly key theme of urban redevelopment – in other words, that fundamental transformation between the late 1950s and early 1970s of most of our cities and towns. The Western Daily Press’s Bill Beckett found in 1962 that the residents of Frome’s rundown Trinity Street area, about to be cleared, ‘would rather stay than have their roots torn up to be transplanted on a modern foreign housing estate’ . Or as Mrs Gwen Latham told him: ‘The council want it, and they’ll have it. Nobody wants to move but we’ll all be uprooted and that will be it. ’ So where does that leave the jigsaw as a whole? Researching and writing the history of a country of some 50 million inhabitants is essentially an impossible task, involving conscious decisions as well

as many unconscious choices. A historian (this historian anyway) is only as good as his or her sources, and my privileging of the contemporary written word has inevitably led to a certain downgrading of the retrospective, including oral history.

Interestingly, in terms of post-publication letters to me correcting facts, it is clear that the flakiest type of source I use is newspaper obituaries: often fascinating, especially obits of those below the top rank, but very much a first and highly provisional draft of history. The other incorrigible problem with retrospective evidence is nostalgia. Almost all of us, myself included, feel nostalgic about the time and place we grew up in; but I try constantly to remember that the 1950s or 1960s will one day become as remote as the 1850s or 1860s are to us now. Put another way, the past is not feel-good territory. And frankly, there is little point being a historian unless one is tackling the real past, not the past as we might wish it to have been.

.

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The Book of the Hunt was written by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix and expert huntsman. For many years this treatise was famous for both the quality of its hunting lessons and its extraordinary illuminations: a masterpiece of early-fifteenth-century manuscript production in Paris, and one of the very few educational books to be illustrated as lavishly as a Bible.

Besides the lessons it contains, this treatise also presents hunting as a redeeming exercise enabling hunters to go straight to Heaven by endowing them

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BLACK LIVES IN GEORGIAN LONDON Michael Bundock explores the remarkable story of black men and women in eighteenth-century London and describes the challenges he faced as a biographer in bringing individuals to life On 18 February 1764, alongside the reports of a fire at a mast-maker’s yard and an escape from the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, the London Chronicle reported a social event: ‘Among the sundry fashionable routs or clubs that are held in town, that of the Blacks or Negro servants is not the least. On Wednesday night last no less than fiftyseven of them, men and women, supped, drank and entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments, at a public-house in Fleet Street, till four in the morning. No Whites were allowed to be present, for all the performers were Blacks. ’ It is a striking account, an occasion when a group of exclusively black men and women came together in the heart of London for an evening of food, drink, music and dancing. The gathering was obviously considered newsworthy, but the report suggests that it was not a one-off event.

This news item provides a snapshot of the London black community in the mid-eighteenth century. There are other reports of similar entertainments: John Baker, Solicitor-General for St Kitts, recorded in his diary an occasion when, returning to his London home late at night, he found that his black servant Jack Beef was not there, having ‘gone out to a ball of blacks’. Not all such gatherings were for social purposes, at 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

least if their critics are to be believed: in a diatribe against the black population the pro-slavery writer Philip Thicknesse complained in 1778 that ‘London abounds with an incredible number of these black men, who have clubs to support those who are out of place’ . Some saw such meetings as being more political than charitable – in 1768 the magistrate

Sir John Fielding expressed his concern at the number of slaves being brought from the colonies who ‘enter into societies and make it their business to corrupt and dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England’ .

There are many visual reminders of black Londoners of the time, in the form of paintings, sketches and caricatures. In

John Collett, May Morning, c.1760. © Museum of London.

‘

“On Wednesday night, 57 of them supped, drank and entertained themselves with dancing and music

’

at a public-house in Fleet Street till four in the morning”

John Collet’s May Morning (c.1760), the group of Londoners celebrating May Day includes a milkmaid, a soldier, a hurdygurdy player and a black servant, dressed in his livery and clutching a broom.

William Hogarth, in Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin (c.1745), shows Graham attended at his table by two servants, a white cabin boy bearing a tray of food and a black musician with a fife and drum, accompanying a singer.

Joshua Reynolds included black figures in a number of his paintings. In most cases this is an anonymous black man – a servant at the side of the picture, a groom holding a horse – providing a contrast to the named subject. He did, however, paint a striking portrait of a black man, A Young Black (c.1770).

The sitter cannot be identified with certainty, but the most likely candidates are Reynolds’ servant (whom he painted on several occasions) or Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s manservant, whose story I tell in The Fortunes of Francis

Etching by James Bretherton after Thomas Orde’s caricature High Life Below Stairs, 1774, inspired by the eponymous farce by James Townley, which was first performed on the London stage in 1759. The farce included Kingston, a black servant. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (2015). The original of this portrait is now in The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, but a copy can be seen in Dr Johnson’s House in London’s Gough Square.

There had been black Britons long before this time, but the growth of slavery in the colonies from the late seventeenth century onwards resulted in a significant increase in the size of the black population in Britain, especially in London. Many of those who lived and worked in the West Indies or America became accustomed to being served by house slaves, and it was natural to bring one or two back when they finally returned to England. This was in part just for convenience – it was useful to be attended by a familiar servant on the voyage home and afterwards, and of course a slave cost only board and lodging. But it was also a matter of display: white servants were commonplace, but a black servant dressed in an exotic

costume sent a conspicuous signal of financial success.

There are a number of contemporary estimates of the size of the black population at this time, ranging from 1,400 to 20,000, but they are of doubtful value as they are usually derived from polemical literature generated by the slavery debates in the late eighteenth century. In any event, there was no objective source for such information, so any figures were mere guesswork. The work of historians such as Norma Myers in Reconstructing the Black Past (1996), and Kathleen Chater in Untold Histories (2009), suggests that there were a few thousand black people in London in the early 1770s. (The population of London is thought to have been about 675,000 in 1750, rising to about 959,000 in 1801.)

Thanks to such writers as Myers and Chater we know a lot about aspects of the black community in eighteenthcentury Britain, and issues that affected its members: historians have explored THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

patterns of work and residence, and the legal status of slavery in Britain. But what has proved much more difficult is to bring to life individual black men and women of the time.

The reasons for that difficulty are not hard to identify. Biographies require sources, and inevitably these are richer and more plentiful for the lives of those who have attained a degree of celebrity, which very few black men or women did.

A further problem is caused by the fact that most had been slaves. The records of slavery are those of slave-owners, not of their chattels. Slavery was destructive of anything resembling stable family life – partners might be in separate ownership, and parent and child could be separated by sale. Naming patterns resulted in slaves having a single name which gave no indication of their parentage, making the tracing of origins near impossible.

When Michael Craton set out to record the oral histories of numerous Jamaicans, in order to learn more about slavery and plantation life, he found the results to be so meagre that he titled the resulting book Searching for the Invisible Man (1978).

The handful of lives of black Britons that have been written are of people who, for one reason or another, came to public notice. The most significant figure is Olaudah Equiano, famous in his lifetime as the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written

by Himself (1789). In his Narrative he recounts the story of his upbringing in Africa, his capture and enslavement, and his voyage on a slave ship to America. These stories, together with his subsequent experiences of slavery and freedom in America and England, of seeing action in the British Navy, of his Christian conversion and his anti-slavery convictions, combine to make this a work of enormous power and significance.

Even so, Equiano became almost a forgotten figure in both the UK and the US in the nineteenth century. His book was out of print for over a hundred years, and he only emerged from obscurity on its republication in the 1960s, at a time of growing interest in black and African history. Today the Narrative is available in many editions, including a Penguin Classic. But it was not until 1998 that a detailed account of Equiano 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

was published, with James Walvin’s An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797, the first full-length biography of a black figure of the eighteenth century. This was followed in 2005 by Vincent Carretta’s Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. The titles indicate something of the difference in approach: Carretta’s discovery of records which indicated that Equiano may have been born, not in Africa, but in South Carolina, changed our understanding of the nature of Equiano’s work, though not the appreciation of his achievement.

One remarkable life story that has yet to be told in full is that of Ignatius Sancho. Born to a slave on board a slaveship bound for the West Indies in around 1729, he stayed there for only two years before being taken to England. There he was given to three sisters who lived in Greenwich, but his time with them was so wretched that he fled, and was taken in by Mary, Duchess of Montagu. She employed him as her butler – somewhat surprisingly, as it was a sought-after position. When she died in 1751, she left him an annuity. Clearly Sancho had made a favourable impression with the Montagu family, as the Duchess’s son-inlaw, the next Duke, employed him as his valet, and later arranged for Sancho to be painted by Thomas Gainsborough.

After eight years in the Duke’s service, Sancho, by now married, set up a grocery shop at 19 Charles Street, Westminster.

He also composed music, and became a prolific letter-writer, much influenced by the style of Laurence Sterne, with whom he corresponded. After his death in 1780, his letters were published in two volumes, and more than 1,200 people subscribed.

His correspondence is by turns affecting, humorous and revealing about the daily lives of black men, women and children: after a visit with his daughters to Vauxhall Gardens he recorded that they were ‘gazed at – followed … but not much abused’ .

Francis Barber was not so well known in his lifetime as Equiano or Sancho, but he did attain a degree of celebrity through his association with Johnson. It was this connection that made possible my account of his life. Barber was born a slave in Jamaica, and brought to London in 1750 when he was about eight years

Above, from top Engraving of Olaudah Equiano, from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), 1794 edition, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.; engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi of Ignatius Sancho, 1802, after Thomas Gainsborough’s painting Sancho of 1768, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917, www.metmuseum.org.

BLACK LIVES IN GEORGIAN LONDON

William Hogarth, Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin, c.1745. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

old, becoming Johnson’s servant two years later. Many of Barber’s subsequent experiences – domestic service, a period in the Navy during the Seven Years’ War, and marriage to a white woman – were shared by other black men, but their lives have been forgotten. Barber is different: because he lived within the orbit of the best-known man of letters of the time he appears not only in the many accounts of Johnson, but also in letters, diaries and other sources that have been preserved principally because of the general interest in the writer.

Such sources are invaluable for a biographer, not least for what they reveal about attitudes towards Barber, his wife and their children. Contrasting examples are provided by two of Johnson’s biographers. James Boswell’s account of Barber is brief but friendly in tone, and he maintained a supportive

relationship with Barber after Johnson’s death, corresponding with him and lending him money. But Johnson’s action in making a black man – and a former slave at that – his heir was not universally welcomed. John Hawkins, Johnson’s first major biographer, added to his Life of Samuel Johnson (1787) a seven-page postscript devoted to denigrating Barber, ‘an exceedingly worthless fellow’ .

Barber himself became a minor celebrity and his name often appeared in the papers, especially once the fact of his inheritance became public knowledge.

His fame was great enough to make others want to cash in: a spoof life of Johnson was published by one ‘Francis, Barber’ .

(The writer solemnly assured his readers that he was in fact a hairdresser, and that the crucial comma would prevent any confusion of identity.) After Barber died in 1801, some of his fame was passed on to

his children. This has helped me to trace seven generations of Barbers, down to the present day.

Was Barber one of those present at the night of revelry reported by the London Chronicle in 1764? It would hardly be surprising, as he was then living in Johnson’s household in Inner Temple Lane, just a few steps from Fleet Street. But we do not know: the account tells us nothing about the identity of the 57 black servants who ate, drank and danced into the small hours. The contrast could hardly be greater between the obscurity of these lives and the wealth of information available about the famous London figures of the period – Johnson, Boswell, Burke, Reynolds and others. But two hundred and fifty years later, the life stories of black Londoners of the time are gradually being rediscovered, and a new perspective of Georgian London revealed.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

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HIDDEN CORNERS

ALL SHELVES LEAD TO ROME Philip Parker discovers that the Library’s books on Roman history are dispersed widely among the shelfmarks, and often in unexpected parts of the collection The London Library’s Roman collection might appear at first sight to be, like Gaul in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (58–49 BC), divided into three parts, H. Rome (Ancient), H. Later Roman Empire and L. Greek & Latin Lit. The Literature stacks, where originals and translations of Tacitus, Horace and Ovid jostle with lesser known authors such as Corippus, Zosimus and Abronius Silo, seem an entirely different world, but even the main History shelves cannot contain the subject’s imperial ambitions, with outlying garrisons reaching into almost all parts of the Library, in Art, Archaeology, Topography and Science.

Samuel Johnson, in reviewing Thomas Blackwell’s Memoirs of the Court of Augustus in 1753, commented that the Romans ‘have scarcely left behind them a coin or a stone, which has not been examined and explained a thousand times’ . Fortunately for scholarship (and the Library’s collection), subsequent writers roundly ignored Dr Johnson’s suggestion that there was nothing more to be learned. Foremost among them, and the doyen of Roman studies in Britain, was Edward Gibbon, whose majestic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is available in some 20 editions in the collection. A voracious reader in his youth, Gibbon was inspired in his later interest in Roman affairs by authors such as Laurence Echard, whose The Roman History: From the Building of the City to the Perfect Settlement of the Empire by Augustus Caesar (1719–20) is also in the Library’s holdings. Gibbon was known for his polished prose and assiduous attention to the original sources, and the wealth and 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Illustration from Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas’s Un An à Rome et dans ses environs (1823).

often the length of his footnotes became legendary. The opening words of his work are amongst the most famous of any book on Roman history: ‘In the second century of the Christian Era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. ’ Gibbon’s history was not universally popular and prompted some vigorous polemic, including Letters to Edward Gibbon Esq.: Author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by George Travis, Archdeacon of Chester (1784), a 500-page long explosion of indignity provoked by a footnote in

Gibbon’s third volume concerning the authenticity of a verse in St John’s Gospel.

So numerous and heated did the attacks upon him become that the historian issued a Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapter of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779), one of the earliest of his works in the collection. It was never wise to offend such a master of prose as Gibbon, who holds nothing back in his fulminous defence. ‘His title page, ’ the offended historian thunders about an earlier attack

by Travis, ‘is a declaration of war, and in the prosecution of his religious crusade, he assures a privilege of disregarding the ordinary laws which are respected in the most hostile transaction between civilized

men or civilized nations’ . The hapless Travis should have realised he had met his match, but the fact that the Letters made it to at least a third edition suggest that wounded pride trumped wise counsel.

The Library has a German edition from 1805 of The History of the Decline and Fall, which is testament to the extremely strong tradition of Roman studies in Germany.

This was recognised when the second ever Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded in 1902 to Theodor Mommsen, whose career ranged from war correspondent to law professorships at Leipzig, Zurich and Berlin.

Mommsen’s Nobel citation acclaimed him as ‘the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome. His Römische Geschichte (1854) set a new standard for the use of inscriptions, epigraphy and linguistics, which took the study of Roman history well beyond the dry retreading of classical sources.

The critical examination of those sources, however, was not a novelty dreamed up by Gibbon or Mommsen, and the question of the reliability of the accounts by Roman historians was raised as early as 1767 by Louis de Beaufort in his La République Romaine. It was perhaps the kind of professional rivalry with which twenty-first-century historians and classicists might be familiar that led the Danish-German diplomat Barthold Georg Niebuhr, one of Mommsen’s predecessors, to remark acidly of Beaufort in the preface to his own History of Rome (1828) that ‘one or two sections in his treatise are very ably and satisfactorily executed, while others are on the contrary exceedingly weak and shallow’ .

Gibbon’s predecessors, whom Dr Johnson so feared had already mined all the richest seams of Roman history, are mainly found in the Safe. Many of their works represent a continuation of the Renaissance preoccupation with making texts available in the vernacular. One of the very earliest, a 1609 translation into English of Ammianus Marcellinus’s Roman History, is dedicated to the Mayor of Coventry by Philemon Holland, ‘doctor in Physicke’ , who laments, with all the loneliness of a pioneer, ‘the want of others to tread out the way before me in other languages’ and includes copious endnotes explaining a mass of classical terms which will be unfamiliar to his readers.

Although today’s historians may be dependent on the vagaries of the

‘

Samuel Johnson commented that the Romans “have scarcely left behind a coin or a stone which has not

’

been examined

and explained a

thousand times”

publishing industry, their seventeenthcentury counterparts were almost entirely creatures of their patrons, meaning that obsequious and flowery dedications were commonplace. John Davies’s Roman History of Florus (1669) is dedicated to the Duke of Buckingham with a curiously mathematical flourish: ‘May your Grace be pleased to entertain this tract and in the micro-micrography of the Roman affairs, imagine the Iliad of that vast Empire represented as it were upon a Medal … so may it be inferr’d from this obscure and remote addresse that the many upon that account forever recommended to your Grace’s notice, amount to a square Root of those who, unknown, and at a distance send their earnest wishes for your Grace’s prosperity. ’ A decade before, Edward Leigh, whose Select and choice observations concerning all the Roman and Greek emperors (1657) is one of the first pieces of true historical writing in the Library’s collection, had shown due filial piety in dedicating his work to his own father, Henry Leigh: ‘Since Aristotle commandeth children to requite their parents … I shall endeavour (God assisting me with his grace) to pay that threefold debt of reverence, obedience and gratitude which all children owe their parents. ’ Leigh’s work rather predates any notions of scientific analysis of

Frontispiece of John Davies’s Roman History of Florus (1669).

sources and his haphazard choice of texts is justified by the fact that he ‘chiefly followed Suetonius because my worthy Tutor … made choice especially (of that history) to read to his pupils’ . The preoccupations of an England still convulsed by the last stages of the Civil War, meanwhile, are betrayed by his description of the assassins of Caesar: ‘All stood condemned and by one mishap or another perished; some by shipwreck and others by battle and some again with the very same danger, wherewith they had wounded Caesar. ’ Leigh himself had fought for parliament, but was among those who voted in 1648 that Charles I’s concessions should not be rejected, thus avoiding the taint of regicide.

By the eighteenth century, the scattered vanguard of historians of Rome had grown into a legion, among whom William Wotton, who wrote a History of Rome from the Death of Antoninus Pius to the Death of Severus Alexander (1701), is typical. Wotton was breathlessly disapproving of the scandalous third-century Emperor Elagabalus, who ‘kept tame lions and leopards which were disarmed, having their claws and their teeth broken; these he would let in on the second and third course to frighten [his guests] and to make himself sport’ . With almost Victorian prudishness, though, he moves more quickly over the allegations THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

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The sheer breadth of the Roman collection allows readers inclined to pursue static travel

’

to engage on a virtual tour of John Leech’s cartoon of Hannibal in Gilbert à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome (n.d.).

of transvestitism and marriage to a Vestal Virgin which have so enlivened (or dogged) Elagabalus’s reputation. A genuinely Victorian, if off-beat, take on Roman history is provided by Gilbert à Beckett’s The Comic History of Rome (n.d.), whose opening sentiment might have been shared, at one time or another, by all who write on the subject: ‘The origin of the Romans has long been lost in the impenetrable fog, the mist of ages, which, it is to be feared, will never clear off, for it unfortunately seems to grow thicker the more boldly we try to grope about in it. ’ À Beckett’s humour can seem stodgy to modern tastes, the forced need to be ‘comic’ often obscuring rather than enlivening his narrative, although his unsporting jibe at Remus (murdered by his twin and Rome’s founder Romulus) that he ‘showed as much spirit after his decease as in lifetime, and took the form of the deadly nightshade, springing up at the bed-side to poison the existence of his brother’ , conjures up the most unusual imagery.

Later Roman, or Byzantine, history is not neglected in the collection, from the Histoire de Bas-Empire (1824) by Charles Lebeau, who rejoiced in the splendidly sounding title of Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions, to more familiar works such as J.B. Bury’s A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene (1889) and A.H.M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (1964), both still widely cited today. Most venerable of all, however, is the Histoire de Constantinople 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Depuis le régne de L’ancient Justin jusqu’á la fine de L’Empire, by Mr Cousin, President of the Cour des Monnaies (1685), a translation of a collection of Byzantine historians.

The sheer breadth of the Roman collection allows readers inclined to pursue static travel to engage on a virtual tour of the Empire. András Mócsy’s Pannonia & Upper Moesia: A History of the Middle Danube Provinces of the Roman Empire (1974, T. Danubian Provinces) reminds us of the Roman presence along the Danube and the Balkans, while Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East 31 BC–AD 337 (1993, H. Middle East) is but one of a raft of fine titles covering Rome’s expansion and 600-yearlong presence in the Levant. Turning west into North Africa, City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt by Peter Parsons, published in 2007 and located in H. Egypt (Ancient), gives an account of the discovery in 1896 at Oxyrhynchus of a trove of papyrus scrolls that provided a precious insight into life in Roman Egypt (and a reminder that half the Empire spoke Greek, rather than Latin). The town derives its name ‘sharp-nosed’ from the pointy snouts of the sacred fish worshipped in the region, and its high point came in 273 when the Emperor Aurelian, fresh from his victory over the rebel Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, visited it and celebrated the ‘World Capitoline Games’ , for all the world as if Queen Victoria had decreed the Olympics be held at Balmoral.

The way through from Libya to Morocco might be smoothed by Susan Raven’s

the Empire

Rome in Africa (1969, H. Africa, North) or, to understand the religious complexities of the region in the early Christian Era, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa by W.H.C. Frend (1952). It is to be hoped that the reader venturing up to R. Heresies &c. on the sixth floor to consult Frend will not be too perturbed by descriptions in his book of a religious landscape which featured armed enforcers known as circumcelliones who encouraged obedience to their heterodox church with clubs and staves, or by a certain Donatist relish for martyrdom which saw groups of them leaping lemming-like off cliffs, having taken the precaution of first inscribing prayers for their salvation on pottery sherds.

Unsurprisingly, Roman Britain has a huge representation in the collection, from fine summaries such as Sheppard Frere’s Britannia: A History of Roman Britain (1999) to analyses of its ending seen through the prism of contemporary geopolitical preoccupations, including Stuart Laycock’s Britannia – The Failed State: Ethnic Conflict and the End of Roman Britain (2008), both in H. England. For those with a more industrial interest, John Robert Travis’s Coal in Roman Britain (2008, S. Coal, 4to.) or David Sim and Isabel Ridge’s Iron for the Eagles: The Iron Industry of Roman Britain (2002, S. Iron & Steel) may be worth a browse. For those with an eye on the aesthetic, Lindsay Allason-Jones’s Ear-Rings in Roman Britain (1989, A. Gems &c., 4to.) could be just the thing.

HIDDEN CORNERS Hadrian’s Wall, built in the early second century to mark the dividing line between Roman Britannia and the unconquered lands of the north, even has its own shelfmark, T. England, Roman Wall.

Antiquarian interest in the great stone barrier began with William Camden who visited it in 1599, and whose remark that ‘Within two furlongs of Carvoran, on a pretty high hill the Wall is still standing fifteen feet in height, and nine in breadth’ is a reminder of a stage when Britain’s Roman monuments were far more complete than their current ruinous state. Camden was followed 200 years later by the antiquarian, Quaker and Birmingham paper merchant William Hutton who, as well as popularising the habit of bathing in the sea, took it into his head to walk the whole length of the Wall (which, despite his many acute observations, he mistakenly attributed to the Emperor Septimius Severus, some 80 years later). In his pioneering History of the Roman Wall (1801), Hutton probably won few friends north of the border with his jibe that ‘our old historians always term the Scots Barbarians: to this I assent’ .

Hutton was also wrong in his imagining that ‘I am the first man that ever travelled the whole length of this wall and probably the last that ever will attempt it’ , for countless thousands have done so since, none more illustrious than the Revd John Collingwood Bruce, who tramped it for three long years to produce The Roman Wall (1851). Collingwood Bruce’s approach was much more scientific than Hutton’s, assiduously cataloguing all the Wall’s turrets, milecastles and forts, but he still allowed himself a hint of emotion, suggesting that ‘The stones are indeed inanimate, but he who has a head to think and a heart to feel will find them suggestive of bright ideas and melting sympathies’ . He also began a habit of ‘pilgrimages’ to the Wall, which have taken place every 10 years since his first visit in 1849, many of them inspiring books that sit alongside his own original on the Library shelves.

Somewhere along the reader’s traverse of the Roman frontiers, it would be as well to pause and sample the Library’s works on more specialist Roman subjects. Almost every aspect of Roman life is covered in Tenney Frank’s magisterial An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (6 vols., from 1933), from which we learn that Roman spending on the military in the period 150–90 BC was around 60% of total expenditure (a figure

to make any Cold War dictator blush), while the sum received by the Roman playwright Terence for a single play was 2,000 denarii, just enough to buy two of the most expensive women’s dresses. A phenomenon familiar enough to moderns since the 2008 financial crisis was decried

by Livy, that of bankers selling on the debts of honest Roman citizens to foreigners, who then upped the rate of interest on the loans to extortionate levels.

Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (2014) examines an aspect of history all too often overlooked: what made people laugh in the past. Beginning with an account of how the historian Cassius Dio had to restrain himself from exploding into laughter at the brutal Emperor Commodus’s antics play-acting as a gladiator in the arena (an outburst liable to have proved fatal) by stuffing leaves into his mouth from the laurel wreath he was wearing, Beard also tells us that, according to some followers of Aristotle, the lips were considered the most ticklish part of the body, while, if Pliny is to be believed, the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster was the only baby ever recorded to have laughed on the very day of its birth.

Equally diverting is the Library’s extensive collection on Roman religion, including The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic by W. Warde Fowler (1908), which reveals how surprisingly primal Roman religious practice really was. Among the festivals he describes are the Parilia, or Rome’s birthday, whose rites involved leaping three times through the flames caused by smoking bean-straw to which had been added the ashes of unborn calves, and that of Anna Perenna in March, during which Romans would retire to grass tents outside the city and pray for as many extra years of life as they could swallow cups of wine (a practice which, for those beseeching the gods for great longevity, was likely to have had precisely the opposite effect).

For readers sated with works on medicine (Roman Medicine by John Scarborough, 1969, S. Medicine), education (Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to Pliny by Stanley Bonner, 1977, S. Education), on the Roman army (COHORS 2: The Evidence for and A Short History of the Auxiliary Infantry Units of the Roman Army

by John Spaul, 2000), or even bathing habits (Bathing in Public in the Roman World

by Garrett G. Fagan, 1999, S. Baths &c.),

a fine place to end a Roman odyssey is T. Rome, the resting place of books about the mother-city itself. The nineteenth century saw a particular flowering of these, from the Revd Edward Burton’s A Description of the Antiquities and Other Curiosities of Rome (1828) – a work in which the author was so keen to temper the ‘overheated imagination’ of those whose imaginings of the ancient city were too fevered, that he began with a description of the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s sewer and hardly the most obvious place to begin a tour of the ancient city – to J. Henry Middleton’s more comfortingly encyclopaedic Ancient Rome (2 vols., 1892) in which, amid a mass of description, he tells us of lapis Gabinus, a type of building stone that contains fragments of lava which give it a fire-retardant quality and led Nero to enact that it be used for the frontages of all houses in Rome to prevent a recurrence of the great fire of AD 64. More venerable than either of these are the works contained in Five Early Guides to Rome and Florence (2000), which include Francesco Albertini’s Opusculum de mirabilibus novae & veteris urbis Romae (1510) and Andrea Palladio’s Descrizione de le chiese de Roma (1554), precious testaments to the state of the city during the Renaissance. It is an apt place to pause and consider that, in a sense, at The London Library all shelves lead to Rome.

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Illustration from Edward Leigh’s Select and choice observations concerning all the Roman and Greek Emperors (1657).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

T.S. ELIOT, POETS AND LIBRARIES

‘

The London Library Annual Lecture, delivered at the Hay Festival on 31 May 2015

by Robert Crawford

T.S. Eliot’s first published thoughts on libraries were a young man’s grump. The thirty-one-year-old who had moved from his native America to England five years earlier complained in 1919 that for people who were ‘regularly occupied’ during the day the opening hours of the British Museum Reading Room made it ‘useless’ . For such folk, he contended, there was ‘one resource’: The London Library – its terms ‘generous’ , its ‘manners gracious’ .

Graciousness and grace are sometimes in short supply in libraries, but Eliot treasured these in The London Library. He had become a member the previous year, registering his occupation on the application form as ‘lecturer and journalist’ . An assiduous immigrant book-reviewer, he was, as the speaker of one of his Francophone poems puts it, ‘En Angleterre, journaliste’ . If it was as a journalist that Eliot joined The London Library, then his membership was part of his increasing assimilation into English literary life. The Library’s members at the time included Bruce Richmond (for whom Eliot would soon start reviewing at the Times Literary Supplement) and Edmund Gosse (who had publicly rebuked Eliot for arriving late from his day-job at Lloyds Bank to read his verse at a London poetry event). The Library was rapidly expanding when Eliot joined in 1918, and was widely used by people from the governmental, academic and literary communities.

Joining was surely part of Eliot’s social networking, his participation in Eng Lit’s old-boy network, though women, including his friend and publisher Virginia Woolf, were members too.

By 1921 – just as Eliot was completing The Waste Land – The London Library prided itself on having become what the Times called a ‘national institution’ , offering readers ‘the privilege of roaming among the shelves, with or without a guide, and of browsing upon anything to which they have a mind’ . Like the library of the Harvard Union that Eliot as a student had preferred to the more official University Library, The London Library was ‘free from the irksome regulations and red tape characteristic of public institutions’ . More than that, readers like Eliot and Woolf could take books home. The Library was then building an extension, remaining both book-hoard and refuge. With the closure of the old British Museum Reading Room as a library in 1997, today The London Library brings us closest to the literary culture of Eliot’s London, and remains the reading room in England that is most writer-friendly. As Eliot, who was for much of his life the Library’s champion and most famous member, put it in his 1952 London

26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

T.S. Eliot in the dining room of his Marylebone flat at 18 Crawford Mansions, Crawford Street, July 1916. Reproduced with the permission of the T.S. Eliot Estate.

‘

Just as Eliot loved The London

’

Library, so poets over the

centuries have repeatedly

fallen in love with libraries

Library Presidential Address, this Library represents ‘serious readership’ . Solemnly, he even suggested that ‘the disappearance of the London Library would be a disaster to civilisation’ . That note of preaching-to-the-converted hyperbole signals the depth of his love for the institution. And just as Eliot loved The London Library, so poets over the centuries have repeatedly fallen in love with libraries.

Whether it’s Kathleen Jamie in the 1990s showing how the Queen of Sheba with her ‘bonny wicked smile’ in Edinburgh ‘desires the keys/ to the National Library’ , or Les Murray in the previous decade admiring ‘The softly vaulted ceiling of St Gallen’s monastic library’ glimpsed as ‘beautifully iced in Rococo butter cream’ , poets love libraries as temples of books. Often, from medieval cathedral libraries to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library (opened in 1921), these buildings have been designed to invoke the sacred. In his poem ‘El guardián de los Libros’ (The Guardian of the Books) Jorge Luis Borges, greatest of modern poet-librarians, portrays Hsiang, a heroic but ageing and perhaps blind librarian, guarding his rescued book-stock in a noble high tower, contemplating a city that is turning into a desert. Elsewhere Borges is fascinated by ‘something/ essential and immortal’ that his poem’s speaker has ‘buried/ somewhere in that library of the past’ . Yet in his 1939 essay ‘The Total Library’ Borges, who died just as the Internet was born, had imagined an impossibly enormous library in terms of ‘horror’ and ‘a delirious god’ .

Not all libraries are book-temples, but to be a poet or a librarian should be a calling: libraries often signal as much in their physical as well as in their intellectual design, and some – including Glasgow’s Mitchell Library with its Burns Room or The London Library with its T.S. Eliot wing – have a poet as genius loci. Libraries are places, though not the only places, where poets want their collections of verse to find a home; but they are also sites that, as in Eliot’s case, shape poets, educating us and giving us sustenance.

Almost all libraries have a place for poets, and many are places to which, over the centuries, poets have wished to pay tribute.

Charles Bukowski in his poem ‘they arrived in time’ sums up an excited love that modern poets feel for libraries. They’re places of transformational opportunity. Bukowski details the librarians with their serious stares and the hardcover library books he devoured as a young man; he ends by saluting all those people – poets and librarians – who contributed to his imaginative and intellectual education and who, in doing so

T.S. Eliot’s joining form for The London Library, 10 October 1918, giving his address in Crawford Street W1.

at a time when ‘there was no chance/ gave me one’ . Another American poet, Rita Dove, paying tribute to the British-accented ‘improbable librarian’ with her ‘impeccable blouse’ in the poem ‘Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967’ , sees the library as a gateway, a portal to knowledge, book by book by book, so that the poem’s speaker, encouraged to borrow volumes, comes to realise that she can consume even ‘an elephant/ if I take small bites’ .

Such a sense of the library as offering incremental excitements – book after book after book – is also why poets want to join the library. They seek both to enrol and, perhaps even more ardently, they are eager for their works to become further accessions to the library’s collection. So the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley, penning an ‘Ode’ which features ‘Mr Cowley’s Book presenting it self to the University Library of Oxford’ , has his collection of poems exclaim at the start, Hail Learnings Pantheon! Hail the sacred Ark Where all the World of Science do’s imbarque!

Which ever shall withstand, and hast so long withstood, Insatiate Times devouring Flood.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

Here is a book that wants to be acquisitioned. It longs to be received as one of the ‘Sacred throng’ of chosen volumes of ‘the mysterious Library,/ The Beatifick Bodley of the Deity’ . For Cowley the library is not just a temple of books; it is heaven with shelving. For his volume to live there is for it to pass beyond the world in which its poet ‘woo’d’ . Cowley’s book woos the library, seeking the best chance of immortality.

Death and sex come to dominate the presentation of libraries in English-language poetry, though books and the naming of them are certainly to the fore. Whether those books are the poet’s own, as in Cowley’s ‘Ode’ , or other people’s, as in Don Paterson’s late-twentieth-century ‘The Alexandrian Library’ (whose ‘bookclogged’ shelves seem to be groaning with titles such as ‘16 RPM – a Selective Discography’ and ‘Urine – The Water of Life’), repeatedly what those volumes offer is something tinged with mortality, with what Emily Dickinson in her poem ‘In a Library’ terms a ‘mouldering pleasure’: A precious – mouldering pleasure – ’tis – To meet an Antique Book – In just the Dress his Century wore – A privilege – I think – His venerable Hand to take – And warming in our own – A passage back – or two – to make – To Times when he – was young – The implication in this poem is that the author of that ‘Antique Book’ is dead; yet when we and the poet take his hand and feel it ‘warming in our own’ there’s that sense of immediate contact which poetry is so good at communicating and which carries here, surely, just a hint of erotic thrill.

Early references to libraries in English poetry are often glancing. What’s hard to deny is that it is later in the eighteenth century, around the period when women for the first time become librarians and when libraries become social spaces that admit both sexes, that the library becomes more prominent in anglophone poetry. Strikingly, the first extended ‘library poem’ in English is a flirtatious, mischievous one in which a woman (as well as a host of male readers) plays a prominent part. The woman in question, however, is more barmaid than librarian, and Charles Shillito’s The Country Book-Club, published in 1788 with a comic frontispiece by Thomas Rowlandson, gets markedly lively when, after its Club’s members have done a good deal of drinking in their reading room, they start to hurl the book-stock at each other: 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Now books are made their missile force to try; Swift as artill’ry balls, huge volumes fly.

Satirically, decades after Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704), Shillito depicts his Book-Club as ‘meeting to dispute, to fight, to plead,/ To smoke, to drink, – do anything but read –’ .

More sympathetically bookish, John Holland’s ‘Elegy on the Death of Esther Caterer, Librarian of Surry Street Book Rooms’ takes from the tearfully grinning Scots tradition of ‘Standard Habbie’ its sometimes unstable mixture of affection and mockery.

Dated ‘Sheffield, January 19, 1818’ , it begins by urging ‘Ye book worms’ , the readers of Esther’s library, to ‘a’ wi’ sorrow meet’ , bewailing this librarian’s passing: The books are grievin, ’mang themselves, From folios fat down to lean twelves, As if sad ghaists and wailing elves

A clamour spread; And sighing a’ alang the shelves:

Auld Esther’s dead!

If her library had a ‘poet’s nuik’ – a poetry corner – then Esther’s legacy was not forgotten. An almost uninterrupted lineage of female librarians from 1777 until the end of the nineteenth century makes Sheffield unique in British librarianship, as well as notable in verse. Today Sheffield Central Lending Library remains headquartered on Surrey Street, close to the site where Esther Caterer worked.

From Allan Ramsay’s eighteenth-century Edinburgh circulating library to Robert Burns’s Monklands Friendly Society, a community ‘circulating library’ promoting ‘improvement’ among ‘the lower classes’ in south-west Scotland, poets could turn librarian. Mostly, though, they preferred to contemplate the books. George Crabbe’s The Library (1781) features a place of weighty tomes where ‘ladies read the work they could not lift’ and ‘the poet meets his favouring muse’ . Further afield, later poets were more assertive in seeking admission to the shelves.

Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass is sure that he is just what the library needs:

Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries, For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring; Forth from the army, the war emerging – a book I have made, The words of my book nothing – the drift of it everything; A book separate, not link’d with the rest, nor felt by the intellect, But you, ye untold latencies, will thrill to every page.

ANNUAL LECTURE

Cambridge Literary Festival Winter 2015 28/29 November

Opposite, from left Label inside Heinrich Maier’s Die syllogistik des Aristoteles (1896), donated to the Library by Eliot; the poet’s handwritten inscription on the flyleaf of the Library’s edition of On Poetry and Poets (Faber and Faber, 1957).

In partnership with

Often, though by no means always, poems involve a sense of the library as a place where men and women meet and sometimes bond. New Zealand-raised poet and librarian Fleur Adcock remembers a book given to her by her first husband and inscribed ‘“To Fleur from Pete, on loan perpetual!’ ” Her elegiac poem, playing on the strangeness of the phrase ‘permanent loan’ , turns to lament; but for the biblioholic Glaswegian poet Frank Kuppner in A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty there may be a sense of resigned ruefulness in the observation, ‘Not many girls here in the library today, I see’ .

Sometimes the library in modern poetry remains sepulchral, deathly, melancholy (in the ‘bowels of the Sterling Library’ at Yale the poet Susan Howe detects ‘loud sobbing’), but, more enliveningly, it is also a place for sexual liaisons. For male poets the increasing success of female librarians can spur unmitigated lust. Eyeing one librarian, Bukowski swerves aside from reading library copies of the Kenyon Review and learning there about poetic composition, to wanting to ‘grab her panties’ . Similar thoughts of sexual harassment seem to have occurred to modern England’s greatest poet-librarian, Philip Larkin, at least in his poem ‘Administration’ . If all this tends towards what Thom Gunn calls ‘wet dreams, in libraries congealing’ , then there is an excited but gentler erotics at play in such poems as Jackie Kay’s ‘Biography’ with its love letters hidden in books in a ‘so hot ’ library, and a wittily mischievous one in J.V. Cunningham’s ‘I, Too, Have Been to the Huntington’ , where that palatial book-hoard is one among whose surrounding statuary ‘David equally with Venus/ Has no penis’ .

Some poets, like England’s Sean O’Brien, author of The Beautiful Librarians, are positively haunted by book repositories.

Many poets refer to the famously cremated Library at Alexandria.

Edwin Morgan even writes with disconcerting post-Futurist glee about an imagined ‘conflagration/ that laid the new British Library in ashes’ – a spectacle his poem’s speaker finds ‘unusually riveting’ .

If Larkin and Alastair Reid imagine bad behaviour in libraries, then Douglas Dunn (a former librarian) offers in his poem ‘In Praise of Libraries’ ‘prayers to the Nine Muses’ , as well as remembering the less inspiring ‘Scottish Association of Assistant Librarians’/ Weekend Conference at The Covenanters’ Inn’ .

Yet Thomas Stearns Eliot recalls us to higher things. His poem ‘Animula’ (1929) contains an image of a vulnerable, fledgling reader, curled up behind a hefty book. However death-haunted, the poem ends not with the expected word ‘death’ , but with the surprising and enlivening word ‘birth’ . For, as it was in the case of T.S. Eliot, so for each poet the library, that place where tradition is hoarded and guarded, given and lent, is not just a necessary destination; it is also many a poet’s richly metaphorical birthplace and, in the case of the greatest poets, a place with the potential for continuous imaginative rebirth.

This is an abridged version of the lecture. A full version appears as ‘The Library in Poetry’ in Alice Crawford (ed.), The Meaning of the Library (Princeton University Press, 2015).

’

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engaging challenging rewarding THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29 30/07/2015 12:55

AUTHORS’ FOUNDATION GRANTS AND AWARDS AND

K BLUNDELL TRUST AWARDS

The Authors’ Foundation gives grants to authors whose project is for a British publisher.

Additional grants Grants in memory of Taner Baybars, Roger Deakin, John Heygate, John C Laurence, Elizabeth Longford, Michael Meyer, Arthur Welton, and by the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation are also available.

Further details are given in the guidelines.

The K Blundell Trust gives grants to British authors under the age of 40 whose project is for a British publisher. The project must aim to increase social awareness, and can be fiction or non-fiction.

Next closing dates – September 30 2015 and April 30 2016 Full guidelines available from www.societyofauthors.org 020 7373 6642

MEMBERS’ NEWS FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE NEWS AND EVENTS On 24 May 1840 the Literary Examiner printed a letter from someone signing themselves ‘Indagator’. The main purpose of the letter was to complain about the proposed membership pricing for the new London Library, a year before it had even opened.

Indagator questioned whether it was ‘advisable to call for a payment of £7 down and £2 per annum afterwards? Five pounds down and one pound per annum would yield £4,000 … With the aid of select donations, £4,000 would supply nearly 20,000 new and second hand books.’ In other words, from the beginning it was being suggested that donations should be encouraged to ensure that The London Library could achieve its objectives.

Everyone who is a member of the Library is contributing to its present and its future. The Founders’ Circle, however, brings together those people who are able to make a significant financial contribution to the Library over and above membership, to help ensure that Thomas Carlyle’s vision remains a reality. As the Chairman highlights in his article (pp.34–5), the income derived from the Circle plays a hugely important role in ensuring that the Library is able both to meet the challenges of its day-to-day operations and to embrace new opportunities as they arise.

To thank those who have made these extra contributions the Library prepares a special programme of events, lectures and tours, as well as access to expertise on book collecting and care, to help donors explore their interests in books and libraries.

The programme for this autumn gives a flavour of the range of events we offer. There will be a couple of lectures in the Library: one by Robert Sackville-West on the remarkable residents of his family home, Knole, and the other by writer and Library Trustee David Lough on Churchill through the prism of his tangled personal finances. We have also arranged for private visits to two libraries: the House of Commons and the recently renovated Library at Lambeth Palace. There are curator-led visits to other cultural organisations, the Rothschild Archives in October and the Victoria and Albert Museum, to view the Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition, in November. Finally, we have organised two memorable events: a special performance of works by T.S. Eliot in October, and our renowned Donors’ Christmas Party (last year the readings were generously given by Vanessa Redgrave, Emilia Fox and Tom Hollander, who memorably read an extract from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales).

There are three levels of annual membership of the Founders’ Circle, named after three Library Founders: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Harriet Martineau.

Membership starts at £1,500.

If you would like to know more, the Library is inviting interested potential members to join us for the David Lough lecture on 1 October 2015. For more information on this or the Founders’ Circle programme in general, please see the Support Us section of the website (londonlibrary.co.uk/support-us) or telephone Scarlett Millar (020 7766 4719).

The Library in the Great Hall, Lambeth Palace. Photograph courtesy of Lambeth Palace Library.

LITERARY PRIZES Congratulations to the following London Library members who have recently won or been nominated for literary awards and prizes. If you have been shortlisted for or received an award, please email to let us know (prizewinners@londonlibrary.co.uk).

Jonathan Beckman, How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne, winner of a 2015 Somerset Maugham Award.

Ben Fergusson, The Spring of Kasper Meier, winner of the 2015 Betty Trask Prize.

Jane Gardam, winner of the 2015 Charleston-Chichester Award for a Lifetime’s Excellence in Short Fiction.

Andrew Taylor, The Silent Boy, shortlisted for the 2015 CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger (for the best historical crime novel).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

BOOKS AND THE BLITZ THE LONDON LIBRARY AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR Archive, Heritage & Development Librarian Helen O’Neill describes the personal risks taken by Library staff to protect the building and collection from the wartime attacks on the capital

The bomb that hit the Library in 1944 caused severe structural damage to the building and the loss of or damage to over 16,600 books.

On 7 September this year it will be 75 years since the first night of the Blitz in London. During the course of the Second World War Christopher Purnell, Librarian (1940–50), slept in the basement of the Library along with other library staff so that they could, as the Times reported, ‘protect the books by night, that they cherished by day’. In a recent discovery of letters written by Purnell to the Boston Athenaeum (for whom he selected English fiction titles), he describes the garish sight of fires across London 32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

during the Blitz, visible from the roof of the Library. Unearthed by a keen member of the Library’s American Founders’ Circle, and kindly copied for us by the staff of the Boston Athenaeum, the letters provide an absorbing social history of life at the Library during the Blitz and give voice to the Librarian at the helm during the most perilous years of the Library’s history.

The Library’s Committee Minutes in April 1939 record the purchase of tarpaulins, blankets, black paint and sand ‘in readiness in case of necessity’. By October 1939 skylights had been protected with sandbags and Purnell given permission to close early to ensure the Library was cleared by Blackout time.

In July 1940 the Committee instructed that two members of the Library’s staff should sleep on the premises overnight to be on hand in case of emergency. In September 1940 Purnell wrote to the Boston Athenaeum: ‘I spend my nights here as well as days, sleeping in the basement. Guns crash out and bombs fall.

One holds one’s breath when the whistling variety is coming, wondering where it will fall … The staff struggle home as best they can. I wonder how the girls can stand it after 6 or 7 hours in underground “Anderson” shelters in their gardens in the night, but they are very brave.’

In November 1940 Purnell described tackling five incendiary bombs on the Library roof and one inside the building which came in through a skylight, ‘but we got them out without damage being done with buckets of sand’. By March 1941 Purnell reported that while the Library had escaped further damage and the staff personal injury, ‘organising firefighting squads should find a place in future manuals of library management’. On 19 April 1941 the Library was again ‘in the thick of it but mercifully escaped structural damage’. Purnell reported that it would take a long time to ‘free the books from splinters of glass’. Five days later his letters record that the Library had lost another 100 panes of glass due to enemy action but considered itself lucky: ‘You will have seen from the papers,’ he wrote, ‘that Christie’s auction rooms were burnt out. They are close to the back of the Library. It was a trying night, but one is more than thankful that the Library escaped a direct hit.’

It was at this time that the Library reached its centenary.

E.M. Forster, a member of the Library’s Committee during the war, marked the occasion with an article in the New Statesman and Nation which captured the essence of the Library within the context of the war: ‘In May 1841 The London Library was launched on the swelling tides of Victorian prosperity. It

MEMBERS’ NEWS celebrates its centenary among the rocks. It is unharmed at the moment of writing … but the area in which it stands is cloven with the impacts of the imbecile storm. Buildings are in heaps, the earth is in holes. Safe among the reefs of rubbish, it seems to be something more than a collection of books. It is a symbol of civilisation … Perhaps the Nazis will hit it, and it is an obvious target, for it represents the tolerance and disinterested erudition which they so detest. But they have missed it so far.’

The Library survived relatively unscathed in a state of ready watchfulness until 10.30pm on 23 February 1944, when it took a direct hit from a high explosive bomb to its north-east corner.

This wrecked five floors of the Central Stack and caused severe damage to the Art Room, the Prevost Room (now the Sackler Study), the north bay of the main Reading Room (now the Writers’ Room) and part of the Issue Hall. Purnell and David William Kelly, another long-serving member of staff (and veteran of the First World War), were both on the premises when the bomb hit but were unhurt. Book loans to members were suspended for four months while the demolition squad removed debris and cut through broken girders (causing a fire in the Art Room in the process), and staff and members salvaged, cleaned and moved affected books. Over 16,600 volumes of biography, theology, periodicals and fiction titles were damaged or destroyed and the repairs to the building would take six years to complete. Forster’s wartime article on the Library is as pertinent today as it was in 1941. ‘Knowledge,’ he wrote, ‘will perish if we do not stand up for it, and testify. It is never safe, never harvested. It needs to be protected.’

CHRISTMAS CARD 2015

The specially commissioned London Library Christmas Card will be on sale from October 2015 £5.00 (pack of 8 cards & envelopes) Proceeds from sales raise vital funds for the Library On sale from reception, or online at shop.londonlibrary.co.uk A postal order form will be printed in the Winter issue of the magazine

Image © Kate Forrester 2015

MEMBER EVENTS NEW MEMBERS’ DRINKS RECEPTION Thursday, 24 September 2015 6.45pm – 8.45pm Reading Room Any member who has joined or rejoined The London Library this year is warmly invited to come along to the Reading Room for a special drinks reception on Thursday, 24 September.

This is an opportunity to meet Library staff and other members, and find out more about the collections and how to use them. If you have ever wondered about the challenges of preserving the Library’s collection of books and periodicals, the book conservation team will also be on hand to talk about some of their work, which will be on

display, and discuss how they keep the Library’s 1m books in circulation. This is a free event. If you haven’t already received your invitation, please contact membership@ londonlibrary.co.uk.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING Tuesday, 3 November 2015 6pm – 8pm Reading Room The Library’s 174th AGM will be held on Tuesday, 3 November. This is an opportunity for members to meet the incoming Chairman of Trustees, and offer thanks to the outgoing Chairman, Bill Emmott. All members are invited to attend. Drinks will be served in the Issue Hall from 5.30pm.

A DATE FOR YOUR DIARY MEMBERS’ CHRISTMAS DRINKS PARTY Thursday, 26 November 2015 6.45pm – 9pm Reading Room Kick-start the festive season and enjoy a glass of wine with your fellow Library members. Tickets are free, but numbers are limited so must be reserved in advance at londonlibrary.co.uk/ memberevents.

PH.D. MEMBERS’ GROUP First Wednesday of every month, 6pm – 8pm Members’ Room For members studying for a Ph.D., there is an informal monthly meeting held in the Members’ Room, offering a chance to share information on subjects such as research, funding opportunities and networking. Email Library member Cleo Roberts for details (cleoetic@gmail.com).

Do you have a subject you are passionate about that 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 ‘How to …’ session? Or perhaps you work somewhere interesting and would be able to offer a tour to members? If you would like to contribute to the members’ events programme, or have ideas for a future event, please email us (marketing@londonlibrary.co.uk).

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

THE LONG (FINANCIAL) VIEW ‘The further back you can look,’ wrote Churchill, ‘the further forward you can see’. Our soon-to-retire Chairman Bill Emmott applies the maxim to the Library’s finances.

At this time of year, when the Annual Report is published and the AGM looms, these pages have often looked back at the Library’s finances over the previous year. Longer-term trends often tell a more helpful story, however. So as my term as Chairman of the Trustees ends this November after nearly seven years, I am prompted to ask for the valedictory indulgence of looking back, not just over seven years but the past decade, with the help of the Bursar, Paul Hamlyn.

This is not, be assured, meant to imply that the Library is all about money. Far from it: if I have learned anything from my time in the chair, it is that The London Library is above all defined by the staff and the service they provide, by the members who use the Library in all their different ways, and by the ideas that are thereby set free. The numbers and the money are mere servants to those masters, but necessary ones, of course.

A cliché about non-profit organisations that is nevertheless true is that, if anything, they have to work harder than profit-orientated businesses to maintain their solvency and keep the books in balance, because they cannot borrow money or issue new equity based on future hopes. They have to live in the here and now. And for this Library as well as many others, and for charitable organisations of all kinds, the financial climate has been tough here and now in recent years.

I asked Paul to produce the charts that surround these words, to provide a financial picture for us all of the past decade. They provide, I think, several important messages. The first, from the ‘core income and surplus/(deficit)’ chart is simple: the Library’s finances have been a lot healthier in recent years than they were a decade ago, when recurrent and rather substantial deficits were eating into reserves.

By ‘core’ is meant all the operations of the Library excluding the building development project, which we will come on to later.

Naturally, the important questions are ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ This brings in a second message: that membership fees are by far the

CORE INCOME AND SURPLUS/(DEFICIT)

most important source of income, and that since the controversial and painful hike of the fee in 2007–2008 membership revenues have risen to what has proved to be a new plateau of £2.5m a year, more than £1m higher than in 2006. Expanding membership, which means retaining existing members for longer as well as recruiting new ones, will clearly be one of the most important tasks for the Library over the next few years. Over the past year, we have lost a net 300 members or so, which is disappointing. To reverse that trend, various Library teams are working together on new ways to retain members, while the development staff are relaunching their marketing effort to attract new ones.

The bumpiness of the ‘core expenditure’ chart reflects the big restructuring in 2010–2011, which produced a particularly tough period for Library staff. The fact that we came through this in a very disciplined, professional way, with a new emphasis too on staff development and performance, is a great credit to the Librarian and her team.

There is a further message in these numbers that is most obvious in the chart about general donations and legacies, which shows how the roughly £1m gap between membership revenue and core costs has been filled. This is that, far from relying like Blanche DuBois on the kindness of strangers, the Library has benefited hugely from the kindness of its members, especially through legacies and, since 2011, through annual donations made by the Founders’ Circle, a group which it is certainly hoped will develop and grow further.

To be appreciated in members’ wills is anyway a great compliment to the Library and especially to the staff who may have worked with such legators over many decades. But it is also a terrific fillip for our finances. The Library doesn’t depend on legacies to the same extent as, for example, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, but support in this way is nonetheless immensely valuable. I rather hope it will become more so.

CORE EXPENDITURE

£3,000,000

£4,000,000

£2,500,000

£3,500,000

£2,000,000

£3,000,000

£1,500,000

£2,500,000

£1,000,000

£2,000,000

£500,000

34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

Legacies Surplus/(deficit)

£0

2007

Membership fees General donations

2009

£500,000 2008

(£1,000,000)

2007

£1,000,000 2006

(£500,000)

2006

£1,500,000

£0

MEMBERS’ NEWS

GENERAL DONATIONS AND LEGACIES £800,000 £700,000 £600,000 £500,000 £400,000 £300,000 £200,000

General donations

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2006

£0

2007

£100,000

Legacies

CAPITAL DONATIONS £4,000,000 £3,500,000 £3,000,000 £2,500,000 £2,000,000 £1,500,000 £1,000,000

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

£0

2007

£500,000 2006

Some legacies, especially in years when the finances have allowed, have been earmarked for special projects, such as retrospective cataloguing, or in rare cases as contributions to the building development project. For the most part, however, that project has been financed by capital donations dedicated especially to that purpose.

As the chart on such donations shows, large sums were raised for this in 2007–-2012, when the first phases of the refurbishment were under way. Members, or foundations related to former members such as the Old Possum’s Practical Trust, were a main source of these generous donations, while there were also valuable contributions from other foundations, wealthy philanthropists and friends of the Library.

Since then we have had a lull, as thankfully the builders have been absent, as has been the box of ear-plugs once seen on the reception desk. From this year on, the drive to raise capital donations is being resumed so that the building project can be completed – without, we hope, the same need for ear-plugs.

The completion of the building will be the main target for that campaign, especially during what in 2016 will be the Library’s 175th anniversary year. New floors, more reading spaces and a new members’ room all need to come off the drawing board and into reality. Beyond that, though, there will be another important goal: the further rebuilding of the Library’s endowment and reserves.

At its peak in 2000, the Library held a combined sum of more than £14.5m in reserves, endowment and donated funds restricted to specific purposes. A chunk of these, £5m, was used in 2004–2005 to buy what is now T.S. Eliot House, and needs to be replaced. As the chart shows, such funds were further depleted by operating deficits in 2006–2008 and then by the financial crash of 2008–2010.

The reserves and endowment have since then been not just stabilised but successfully rebuilt to more than £7m, which produces a helpful annual investment income even with today’s depressed yields. For the longer term health of the Library, however, the endowment really needs to be much larger, so as to create not only the security of rainy-day funds but also a fairly reliable income from investments to supplement the other sources.

That task will not be easy. But of this I have no doubt. The London Library makes such an extraordinary contribution to literature and to the cause of free ideas and free expression that the money will be found, both from us members and our legacies, and from outside sources who support what we stand for and want the Library to continue to flourish.

RESERVES AND FUNDS (£000)

Free reserves

Restricted funds

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

The Library’s Annual Report 2014/15 will be downloadable as a pdf from the About Us section of the website (londonlibrary.co.uk/about-us), available from mid-September 2015. To reduce the economic and environmental implications of printing and mailing, the Library now uses a print-ondemand system for those members wishing to receive a physical copy. If you would like a printed copy of the Annual Report to be sent to you in the post, please request one by email (librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk) or telephone (020 7766 4712).

2006

ANNUAL REPORT

Endowment funds

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

DONATIONS AND BEQUESTS The trustees thank the following supporters, and our anonymous donors, for their generous contributions to The London Library received during the year ended 31 March 2015 DEVELOPMENTAL APPEAL FUND Dr Richard Barber Brian and Sheila Boocock Sebastian Brock Margaret Buxton Trevor Coldrey The O J Colman Charitable Trust Jane Falloon Richard Freeman Michael Gainsborough Alastair Gavin Professor Isobel Grundy Baroness Hilton of Eggardon QPM The J P Jacobs Charitable Trust Rosemary James Peter Jamieson John Madell The Viscount Norwich Janet Rennie Peter Rowland Lord Runciman Sir John Sainty Sir Roy Strong Christopher Swinson Jeremy White Ann Williams Reverend Anthony Winter FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE UK Dickens Debby and James Brice* Miles Morland Basil Postan Sir Timothy Rice Mark Storey Philip Winston (with matching gift from Capital Group Companies) Thackeray Katherine Bucknell and Bob Maguire Clore Duffield Foundation Jerry and Jane del Missier Bill Emmott Adam and Victoria Freudenheim 36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

David Lough Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE Martineau Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor Consuelo and Anthony Brooke Sir John Gieve Louis Greig Geraldine Harmsworth Maxwell Elizabeth Bennett Herridge Andrew Hine Philip Hooker Dr Sarah Ingham Hugh Johnson OBE Christopher Kandel* Alan Keat Patricia Lennox-Boyd Leonora, Countess of Lichfield His Honour Humphrey Lloyd QC Alexis and Jane Maitland Hudson Kamalakshi Mehta Barbara Minto Charles Morgan Philip Percival Peter T G Phillips Alan Russett Sir John Scarlett KCMG OBE Marjorie Stimmel Paul Swain Harriet Tuckey John C Walton Professor Elizabeth Wilson Clive Wright OBE FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE US Dickens Louis and Gabrielle Bacon* Wilson and Mary Braun* John and Keindl Gordon* Dr William Van der Kloot* Thackeray Patricia and Tom Lovejoy* Robert and Gillian Steel* Martineau Anne Bass*

Montague and Mayme Hackett* Patricia Holloway Boyd and Nicholas Cary Ruffin* Judith Goetz Sanger* Douglas Smith and Stephanie Ellis-Smith* Mr and Mrs Robert Taubman* Marta Barbeosch Varela* The Founders’ Circle has received significant additional support in the US from: Graydon Carter Kate and Gerald Chertavian Tom and Leslie Freudenheim Carey Adina Karmel Sir John Richardson Hank and Sarah Slack Cynthia Warren Spurdle *donation received via The International Friends of The London Library, a registered 501(c)(3) charitable corporation.

BOOK FUND Great Primer John Barney Barnabas Brunner The L E Collis Charitable Trust Dr Catherine Horwood Logos Charitable Trust Sybil Shean Nonpareil Anonymous donation in memory of John A B Townsend Dr John Burman Ashley Huish James Myddelton The Viscount Norwich Susan Reynolds Brilliant Philip Bovey Sebastian Brock Jody Butterworth in memory of Ian Butterworth

John D R Lloyd Professor Henry Roseveare Penelope Ruddock ADOPT A NEW BOOK Jody Butterworth in memory of Ian Butterworth Dr Bernard Palmer Dr Julian Pattison and Dr Neil Swindells in memory of Dr Carl Ericson BOOKBINDING Michael Erben John Havard Virginia Surtees SUPPORTED MEMBERSHIP A H J Charitable Trust Clore Duffield Foundation Jun Ho Kwon Inez T P A Lynn R D Macleod G T Severin The Reverend Ann Shukman A Sokolov GENERAL FUNDS Richard Carter through Populus Research & Strategy Rupert Christiansen Ronald Cohen Richard Freeman Mary Hilson in memory of John A B Townsend Ronald Lightbown Barbara Minto Basil Postan Hannah Rothschild Trust Tim Sanderson Mark Storey LEGACIES Paul Calvocoressi Betty Kathleen D’Alton Mabel Dorothy De’Ath George Girling Grange Dr Anthony Hobson Joan Macalpine

p

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The Royal Literary Fund  ‘A mi e quiet racle.

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21/08/2013 16:56

Society of Antiquaries of London

22 September (1-2.00 pm) ‘The Dublin King’ John Ashdown-Hill, FSA 27 October (1-2.00 pm) ‘Agincourt’, Anne Curry, FSA 24 November (1-2.00 pm) ‘Folk Carols of England’ Yvette Staelens, FSA Public lectures take place (Tuesdays, 1-2.00 p.m.) at the Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE. Free, but space is limited and booking is recommended to avoid disappointment.

Henry V (1386–1422).

Artist unknown.

Oil on panel.

16th century.

w w w. s a l . or g . u k THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 37

Lady Judith Marshall Kenneth Rose CBE Sheila M Streek John A B Townsend During the year the Library also received a grant from the trustees of the Mrs R M Chambers Settlement.

ROYALTIES The literary estates of Ian Parsons, Robert McNair Scott and Reay Tannahill have provided income from royalties.

DONATIONS OF BOOKS Thanks are also due to various government and official bodies, learned societies, institutions and firms, and other libraries and publishers who have given their publications, and to the many donors of books and other items who are listed below: Académie royale de Belgique Adelphi Edizioni Jeremy Adler Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz Akbank Sanat David Alexander Khalid Alireza David Allin The Angela Thirkell Society The Anglo-Hellenic League The Anthony Powell Society The Antique Collectors’ Club Murray Armstrong Art World Magazine Neal Ascherson Paul Ashton Asian Cultural History Program, Smithsonian Institution Associazione Mazziniana Italiana Anthony Astbury Helena Attlee Claudia Azzola Peter Bagwell Purefoy Marion Baker Dr Phil Baker 38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Bernd Ballmann Nicolas Barker OBE Z W Bates Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution George Baugh Thomas Bean Lucy Beckett Antony Beevor Alan Bell Lord Bingham Daniel Blau Eva Bosch Mark Bostridge Dr Susan Bracken Dr Simon Bradley Dr Tom Brass Vanessa Brett The British Sociological Association The Browning Society Professor Victor Bulmer Thomas CMG OBE Dr John Burman Christian Busby Cambridge University Library Annette Carson Sir Charles Chadwyck Healey, Bt The Charles Williams Society Chris Beetles Ltd Andy Christian Rupert Christiansen Christie’s Andrew Clayton-Payne James Collett Adrian Collier in memory of Mrs Héloïse Collier Dr Philip Conford Geoffrey Cook Artemis Cooper The Reverend John Cooper Marion Coutts in memory of Tom Lubbock Daunt Books Dr Richard Davenport-Hines Howard Davies Sir Howard Davies Gregory Dayton-Mohl Celia Dearing Anne de Courcy Dr Sara Delamont Diana Delbridge Count Peter-Gabriel de Loriol Chandieu Derbyshire Archaeological & Natural History Society Rodolph de Salis

James Downing Downside Abbey Elizabeth Drury Diana Duckworth Professor Christopher Duffy John Duncalfe Tessa Dunlop Julian Duplain Dr Brent Elliott Jonathan Elphick English Heritage Michael Erben Estorick Collection M Jane Evans The Fabian Society Michael Fardell Film Finances Ltd Dr Michele Finelli James Firth Judith Flanders Margaret Fleming-Markarian Benedict Flynn Rebecca Ford in memory of Douglas Ralph Fothergill Rebecca Ford in memory of Jean Maud Fothergill Nigel Fountain The Francis Brett Young Society John Freeman Richard Fremantle Friends of Canterbury Cathedral Friends of the Dymock Poets Margaret Garlake The Gentle Author Mick Gold The late Robert Gomme CB Jonathon Green Antony Griffiths Edward Gurvich Robert Gwynne Rosalind Hadden Dr Seán Haldane Hampshire County Council Sir Max Hastings John Havard Margaret Heffernan Helion & Company Ltd Richard Heller Hertfordshire Association for Local History Stephen R Hill Diana Hillier Victoria Hislop Terence Hodgkinson Dr David Holohan Richard Howard Jolyon Hudson

Professor William Hughes Dr Sarah Ingham The Institute of Linguists Institute of World Literature, Moscow John Buchan Society Simon Jervis Hugh Johnson Denis Jones The Joseph Conrad Society (UK) Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Janet Kennedy in memory of Mrs Nellie Clothier Mary Kenny The Kipling Society Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab A C Koning Dr Susanne Krejsa Professor David Kynaston Alastair Laing Lambeth Palace Library Michael Lee Professor Andrew Lees Denis Lenihan David and Howard Lewis Philippa Lewis The Library of Congress The Library and Museum of Freemasonry Libris David Lock Gill Longmate in memory of Norman Longmate Dr R T Longstaffe-Gowan Professor John Vernon Lord The Lost Club Journal Michelle Lovric Dr Peter Lucas Inez T P A Lynn in memory of Jack B Lynn The late Joan Macalpine Macmillan Jonathan Manns Sheila Markham Andrew Martin Julian Mash The Massachusetts Review The Matthiesen Gallery David McFetrich The late Ian William McInnes Philip McNair Kinn McIntosh Sara Menato Professor David Metz MIH Sylvia Mingay

MEMBERS’ NEWS Francoise Mobbs Dr Lina Molokotos-Liederman Russell Molyneux-Johnson Simon Morris Edwin Mullins Dr Thomas Munch-Petersen Lt Col Norman Murphy Museo Vincenzo Vela Museum of the Order of St John Jeremy Musson Charlotte Nassim The National Art Collections Fund The National Trust New Statesman Den Norske Klub Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset Dr Kaori O’Connor Richard Oldfield Edward and Michael O’Neill Helen O’Neill in memory of H N O’Neill Stephen Ongpin The Oscar Wilde Society Österreichisches Akademie der Wissenschaften Oxford Film & Television Ltd Dr Christopher Paley Gabriele Pantucci Dr Brian Parsons Dr Barrie and Mrs Susan Paskins Antony Peattie The Peel Society Penguin Group UK Michael Peppiatt John Perkins Stephen Phelps in memory of George Phelps Christopher Phipps Dr Peter Pickering David Platzer The Plymouth Athenaeum Polish Cultural Institute Sir Oliver Popplewell Dr Cecilia Powell The Powys Society Pro Helvetia Proquest Prospect Books David Pryce-Jones Frederic Raphael Isabel Raphael Random House Nicholas Redman Peter Reed

Susan Reynolds Eric Rhode Deki Rhodes Philip Ridd Kevin Rogers The Rothschild Archive Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Anthropological Institute Royal Collection Trust Royal College of Physicians Royal Horticultural Society The Royal Society Royal Society of Literature Christine Rüge-Cope in memory of Karl Ernst Rüge-Cope The Rupert Brooke Society Russian Presence UK Dr Yvonne Ryan Jem Sandford Michael Sargent Camille Saville Michael Schmalholz in memory of Heinz Schmalholz School of Slavonic & East European Studies Lord and Lady Scott Mary Scott Ruth Sebag-Montefiore Victor Sebestyen David Sherlock English Showalter Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Jacob Simon Smithsonian Institution Society of Antiquaries of London The Society of Authors Society for Psychical Research The Society of Women Writers and Journalists Rowan Somerville Antonia Southern J Martin Stafford Nicholas Stanton Louise Stein Neil Stratford Rick Stroud Malcolm Sutherland Sydney Smith Association Jean Symons Susan Symons Andrew Taylor Hazhir Teimourian Neville Teller MBE David Thomas Lord Thomas of Swynnerton

Robert Thorne Lucy Trench The Trollope Society Gill Turner Unicorn Press William Van der Kloot Margaret Voggenauer Michael Voggenauer Wendy Wallace Dr Dafydd Walters Andrew Ward Professor Dame Marina Warner DBE Ian Warrell

Jeremy Warren David Watson Sir Christopher White CVO David K L White Jerry White Dr Paul Williamson Adrian Wilsdon A N Wilson Professor Elizabeth Wilson Dr Michael Wilson Susie Wilson Professor W Daniel Wilson The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain

OPEN HOUSE LONDON 2015 The London Library will once again be participating in the Open House London weekend (19–20 September 2015), a hugely popular celebration of architecture and design that allows access to buildings and spaces which aren’t normally open to the public. On Saturday, 19 September the Library will run hourly tours for the public throughout the day between 10am and 4pm. We will aim to keep the disruption to members to a minimum but apologise in advance for any inconvenience the tours may cause. openhouselondon.org.uk

INSPIRE A LOVE OF LEARNING IN A YOUNG PERSON Gift membership of The London Library makes a wonderful graduation present for young people who no longer have access to a college library or electronic resources such as JSTOR. Annual Young Person’s Gift Membership is £243 (for the under 25s) London Library Membership Gift Vouchers can also be purchased (£50 & £100 vouchers) www.londonlibrary.co.uk/join

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 39

FINE BOOKS, ATLASES, MANUSCRIPTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS Wednesday 11 November 2015 Knightsbridge, London Closing date for entries Friday 11 September 2015 ENQUIRIES +44 (0) 20 7393 3810 books@bonhams.com

WAGNER (PETER CHRISTIAN) Abbildungen der seltensten und schönsten Stücke des Hochfürstlichen Naturalienkabinets in Bayreuth, first edition, 1762-4. £10,000 - £15,000

bonhams.com/books