Issue 21: Autumn 2013

MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2013 / ISSUE 21

£3.50

the spy who loved the london library Peter Ettedgui speculates on the reading habits of James Bond

The English Gauguin Tanya Harrod on the life and work of the studio potter Michael Cardew in colonial West Africa

SIR ian anstruther Ysenda Maxtone Graham describes the life of a singular character

THE WONDERS OF LIFE James Le Fanu explores the Library’s natural history collections

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The London Library Magazine / issue 21

12 Ian Fleming’s novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service records that James Bond borrowed a book on genealogy from The London Library as a vital research tool on a mission to unmask the identity of his nemesis, Blofeld. Peter Ettedgui suggests that this episode shows the Library has played a more important role in the extraordinary career of 007 than has previously been suspected.

C ontents 5 FROM THE CHAIRMAN 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger (1959).

16 The studio potter Michael Cardew went out to West Africa with the dream of helping the local population develop their small-scale production of low-fired wares by setting up small workshops making stoneware pottery. The results of his utopian ambitions speak volumes about the nature of British colonial rule in the region, as Tanya Harrod explains.

11 bibliotherapy J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine offers Adam Foulds the means of escape from the demands of the world

12 THE SPY WHO LOVED THE LONDON LIBRARY Michael Cardew’s four-handled monumental jar, slipware, c.1930–3. Photo Stephen Brayne.

20 The London Library was one of Sir Ian Anstruther’s three favourite places. His great-niece, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, describes his unusual and fascinating life, from his formative childhood years that were subject to unwelcome surprises, to his adventurous adulthood, during which he developed a deep need for order as well as a weakness for Porsches.

Peter Ettedgui on the reading habits of James Bond

16 ENGLAND’S GAUGUIN The life and work of the potter Michael Cardew during his time in colonial West Africa, by Tanya Harrod

20 SIR IAN ANSTRUTHER Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s profile of a fascinating character

22 THE WONDERS OF LIFE

Sir Ian Anstruther as a boy.

22 James Le Fanu explores the Library’s natural history titles, many of which date from the subject’s golden age. They range from accounts from far-flung places, such as Joseph Banks’s journal of his trip to the South Pacific, to minutely observed records of the natural world closer to home, as in Philip Henry Gosse’s A Year at the Shore (1865).

The journal of a Massachusetts governor in 1645 was the inspiration for Adrian Tinniswood’s latest book, The Rainborowes, about a family of merchant-mariners

The natural history collections at the Library include some outstanding examples of the genre, as James Le Fanu discovers

26 THE LONDON LIBRARY ANNUAL LECTURE Tom Holland on the fall of the Roman Empire

30 MEMBERS’ NEWS 38 EATING OUT

Illustration from J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914).

p

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HENRY JAMES, autograph letter, signed, to Charles Hagberg Wright, Librarian of the London Library, May 1914 James writes to his friend after an attack on his portrait at the Royal Academy by a militant suffragette: ‘I … really owe the vicious hag & her ravage a good mark for having led to my hearing from you …’

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R e d Lo v e maxim leo ‘A wry and unheroic witness…an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists’ Julian Barnes ‘Tender, acute and utterly absorbing’ Anna Funder, author of Stasiland

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On the cover

John and Elizabeth Gould’s illustration of Trogon mexicanus (Mountain Trogon), from the 1955 folio edition of Mr Gould’s Tropical Birds, edited by Eva Mannering.

FROM THE CHAIRMAN A basic Library principle is that we prefer names (or at least words) to numbers, but my presence in this, Inez Lynn’s, space is a signal that our annual look at our own numbers is nigh. The Annual Report is now available, as always in advance of the Annual General Meeting, which this year will be held on 5 November. I hope to see many of you there, first for a glass of wine in the Issue Hall and then in fact (in formal terms) for two meetings: the AGM itself and an ‘extraordinary general meeting’ (EGM).

The business of the AGM will, as before, include a financial update from Mark Storey, our Treasurer. As background, we hope you will find helpful the analysis and explanation in Members’ News of our results for the financial year just ended, which were sound (pages 30–2).

The EGM is needed following a review of the Library’s governance in 2012 conducted by our then Vice-Chair, Sir Nicholas Underhill, which in turn was in response to concerns raised by the Executive about a perceived lack of continuity among the trustees. All of this led the Byelaws Committee to propose supplementing the current four-year term-limit for trustees with an option to be re-elected for a further four years. That maximum eight-year term would bring the Library more in line with other charities. Along with corresponding adjustments to the terms for the Chairman and Treasurer, and some modernising tweaks, these proposals were put before the Privy Council, which duly gave its approval subject to that of the members. Thus, they now come to you, in an EGM. Having used all those words, space will permit me now only to draw your attention to a few of the gems in this issue. There is a lovely piece on the distinguished member and benefactor who lends his name to the Anstruther Wing, Sir Ian of that ilk, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (pages 20–1), and we publish an abridged version of Tom Holland’s London Library Lecture on the Roman Empire, given in May to a packed house at the Hay Festival (pages 26–8).

Peter Ettedgui takes an intriguing look at a fictional member and his borrowings, a man whose name was Bond, James Bond, with a discreet glance at the new Bond novel, Solo, to be published this month by our real member, William Boyd (pages 12–15). Happy spying.

Bill Emmott Chairman

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 15 September 2013 © 2013 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.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Catherine Cartwright Picture research/ proofreading Sarah Bolwell

Editorial Committee David Breuer Aimée Heuzenroeder Peter Parker Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Emily Knowles 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library Chloë Brookes 020 7766 4719

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to development@londonlibrary.co.uk

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CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Ettedgui

joined the library in 1988

Peter Ettedgui’s film career is intimately bound to the Library. For director Ken Russell, he researched vampires, Wilde and Wagner in the stacks. The Reading Room was his writing base for several screenplays, including his adaptation of Pushkin’s Onegin (1999). Science & Miscellaneous shelfmarks ‘Factories’ and ‘Sex’ primed his production Kinky Boots (2005). Recently the Library was indispensable to the scripting of a feature documentary about James Bond, and his development work on the next 007 movie.

Adam Foulds joined the library in 2009

Adam Foulds’ most recent novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2009. His new novel, In The Wolf’s Mouth, will be published by Jonathan Cape in February 2014.

Tanya Harrod

joined the library in 1979

Dr Tanya Harrod is the author of the prize-winning The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century (1999).

Her most recent book, The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture (2012), was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She contributes regularly to the Burlington Magazine, the Guardian, Crafts, the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement.

Tom Holland

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joined the library in 1992

Tom Holland is the author of four books on ancient and early medieval history: Rubicon (2003), Persian Fire (2005), Millennium (2008) and In the Shadow of the Sword (2012). He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC, and translated Herodotus for Penguin Classics. He is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History, and has written and presented TV documentaries on subjects ranging from the origins of Islam to dinosaurs.

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James Le Fanu joined the library in 1988

James Le Fanu is a GP in South London and writes a regular column on medicine and science for the Daily Telegraph and on natural history for the Oldie.

His books include The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (2001), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and most recently Why Us: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (2009). He is married to the publisher Juliet Annan.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham joined the library in 1983

Ysenda Maxtone Graham read English at Girton College, Cambridge. Her book The Real Mrs Miniver (2001) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year Award; other books include Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School (2011); and An Insomniac’s Guide to the Small Hours (2012).

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Adrian Tinniswood joined the library in 1985

Adrian Tinniswood OBE is the author of 12 books of social and architectural history, including His Invention So Fertile (2001), his acclaimed biography of Sir Christopher Wren, and The Verneys (2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

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BEHIND THE

BOOK

‘

Historian Adrian Tinniswood was inspired to write his book The Rainborowes, published this month, after a chance discovery in the Societies shelfmark at the Library. He describes the volume that inspired him, along with other titles that aided his research.

Adrian Tinniswood’s The Rainborowes (2013).

’

The subject of The Rainborowes is a family of Puritan merchant-mariners, who left their East London homes in the seventeenth century in search of religious freedom and profit. Their remarkable journey, in the course of which they helped to found New England and to bring old England to its knees, took them to the forests of Massachusetts, the islands of the Aegean and the deserts of Barbary.  Winthrop Papers, Vol.5, 1645–1649, ed. Allyn B. Forbes (Boston 1947).

Societies, Massachusetts Hist. Soc. It was while leafing through the journal of Massachusetts governor John Winthrop about the beginnings of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that I came across a passage from 1645, three years into the English Civil War. Winthrop wrote that the previous winter, ‘our best military men’ left the state to enter the service of Parliament as officers in the regiment of the Leveller Thomas Rainborowe. That puzzled me.

Why should a bunch of New Englanders travel 3,000 miles to fight for Parliament?

Was the English Revolution nourished by radicalised Americans? The journal inspired my book on the Rainborowes.

Flawed, fragmentary and hopelessly one-sided, the letters of Winthrop and his clan form our single greatest source for understanding seventeenth-century New England. The Winthrops’ history is closely bound to the Rainborowes: John married one of Thomas’s sisters, and his son Stephen married another.  The Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peters, 1598–1660 by R.P. Stearns (Urbana, Illinois, 1954). Biog. Peters.

The English preacher Hugh Peters was minister of Salem, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell and the radical that royalists loved to hate (there was a rumour that

Peters was the masked executioner who chopped off Charles I’s head). He is well served in Stearns’ sympathetic biography, which flies in the face of 300 years of prejudice and shows Peters as a brilliant orator and an astute politician.  The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 by Ian Gentles (Oxford 1992). H. Army, English.

A miracle of research, and required reading for any student of the Civil Wars and their aftermath, Gentles’ account of the New Model Army is much more than a military history. It illuminates the divisions and the ideological struggles within Parliament’s army, and the role its senior officers played in leading, and ultimately betraying, the English Revolution.  Puritanism and Liberty, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse (2nd edn, London 1974).

H. England.

A handy commentary on the Putney Debates of 1647, where the high command of the victorious New Model Army met with elements of the rank and file to shape the future of England, and where Col. Thomas Rainborowe famously argued that the poorest in the country had as much right to the vote as the richest.  The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State, ed.

Michael Mendle (Cambridge 2001).

H. England.

I needed all the help I could get to make sense of the power struggle between and within the New Model Army and Parliament at the end of the first Civil War, a struggle that involved several members of the Rainborowe clan. This collection of essays was immensely useful.  Piracy and the English Government, 1616–1642 by David Delison Hebb (Aldershot 1994). H. Naval Hist.

I knew about this volume from researching for my last book, Pirates of Barbary (2010), and when I came to write about the pirate-hunting exploits in Morocco in 1637 of Captain William Rainborowe, I turned to it again. Hebb discusses English attempts to combat the sea-jihad of North African corsairs, an onslaught that saw Algerian raiders in the Thames and the Bristol Channel, and filled the slave markets of Tunis and Algiers with British captives.  The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution

by A.L. Morton (London 1970).

R. Heresies &c.

After the failure of the Leveller movement, William Rainborowe, Jr. joined the Ranters, an unconventional millenarian sect that was fond of group sex, nude dancing and heavy drinking. Morton’s discussion of this ‘mad crew’ is both informative and hugely entertaining.

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BIBLIOTHERAPY

Adam Foulds on the book he turns to when he wants to get away from people

THE PEREGRINE J.A. BAKER Sometimes the only therapy one needs is to get away from people, out of their clammy, complicated dramas, away from ego and noisy talk and even the claims of affection.

In the 1960s, J.A. Baker, a librarian from Chelmsford, undertook solitary walks out into the flatlands of Essex and eastern England to watch peregrine falcons and to leave the human world behind: ‘I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger.’

These walks took place one autumn, through the purifying austerities of winter, to the following spring. The larger part of the book is the journal of this period, day after day, alone, watching and walking in long trances of observation. The repetition with variation becomes hypnotic. This is part of the book’s immersive quality, something that is immediately evident in its opening section, a short essay about the biology of peregrine falcons. The writing is as hallucinatory as it is objective, at once scientific and almost shamanistic as the reader is compelled to enter the being of another animal, its body and perceptions: ‘The peregrine’s view of the land is like the yachtsman’s view of the shore as he sails into the long estuaries. A wake of water recedes behind him, the wake of the pierced horizon glides back on either side.

Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water.’

J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), 2005 paperback edition published by New York Review Books.

Here, imaginatively, one is released from the state of being human at all.

I am struck, as I type this now, by the Buddhist overtones to the phrase ‘world of no attachment’ . This seems entirely appropriate to the book’s meditative quality, its eager, Zen-like absorption in the present moment. As much as the book’s language is extraordinary – and it is a great achievement of prose style – it is

not so for its own sake. It is purposeful. It is to see: ‘Turning through a hedge-gap, I surprised a wren. It trembled on its perch in an agony of hesitation, not knowing whether to fly or not, its mind in a stutter, splitting up with fear. I went quickly past, and it relaxed, and sang. ’ This is poetry in the very best sense of the word, the language fresh and precise, the rhythm of the writing controlled and expressive. As in the poetry of Ted Hughes, the natural world Baker describes is violent, thrilling, always changing, always present. Like Hughes, Baker often makes shocking word choices in order to create images that are strange, charged and completely convincing in their arrest of appearance: ‘Jackdaws charred the green slopes to the north with black. ’ Or here, in one of the many descriptions of flight in The Peregrine : ‘He glided over stubble, and a wave of sparrows dashed itself into a hedge. For a second, the hawk’s wings danced in pursuit, flicking lithe and high in a cluster of frenzied beats that freeze in memory to the shape of antlers. ’ That wave of sparrows dashing itself out of sight, those rapid aerial movements crystallising in a single recollected shape.

Writing doesn’t get more entranced or entrancing than this.

Little is known about Baker and personally I don’t want to know any more.

I am happy to be with him out there, in silence, watching, forgetting myself, and finally, when I’ve finished rereading, to return with him ‘to the town as a stranger’ .

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THE SPY

WHO LOVED

THE LONDON LIBRARY Any links between the Library and the world’s most famous secret agent have hitherto being subject to the Official Secrets Act. Now, on the 60th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, and the publication of Solo, William Boyd’s chronicle of 007’s adventures, all can be revealed, as Peter Ettedgui explains.

On a melancholic afternoon towards the end of 1962, St James’s Square carpeted with snow, it appears that a copy of Burke’s General Armory (1962 edn) – a standard work for scholars of heraldry – was borrowed from The London Library.

Franked 10 December, the hefty tome was duly slipped into the luggage of secret agent (and, we may infer, Library member) James Bond as he packed for his new mission in Switzerland. Burke is not perhaps the kind of reading matter one immediately associates with 007, but it was essential to the business at hand, for Bond was about to assume the guise of a genealogist investigating a dubious claim to the medieval French title, ‘Comte de Bleuville’.

On arrival at the pretender’s alpine retreat, Bond would unmask him as none other than his great nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and foil an insidious plot to unleash biological warfare on the UK. Which is all very well, but what – members might reasonably enquire – of the Library’s copy of Burke’s General Armory? Perusing the catalogue half a century later, I’m afraid I must report that there is no record of it ever having been returned. Judging from the official chronicle

of the mission (which, unlike Burke, is still available to members, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming, 1963, Fiction), it seems that Bond, his cover blown, was unable to retrieve the volume from his guest quarters in Blofeld’s mountain-top complex before making good his escape on skis. In mitigation: the book surely would have weighed him down, perhaps fatally, on that perilous descent, under heavy gunfire from the thugs in hot pursuit. We can only assume that the General Armory was, like much of the ordnance with which Bond is equipped by his Quartermaster, a casualty of the mission. Quite possibly, it was incinerated when 007 later returned to Switzerland with a fleet of helicopters to blow up Blofeld’s alpine retreat.

Bond’s apparent failure to return Burke notwithstanding, this episode implies that the Library has played a more significant role in his extraordinary career than previously suspected. Whereas more than one critic has suggested that Bond, entirely lacking an inner life, would have no use for books, I beg to differ. The routine nature of his acquisition of Burke suggests this was nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, every self-respecting 007 scholar knows that

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Bond has whiled away many an afternoon (and a considerable proportion of his civil servant’s wages) in the environs of St James’s Square: lunching at Scott’s before visiting his tailor on Savile Row and running the gauntlet of his favourite Jermyn Street emporia (Lock & Co. Hatters, John Lobb Bootmaker, Turnbull & Asser and Floris). Is it really a stretch to imagine him paying a visit to the Library between a shopping spree and the first Martini of the evening at the discreet bar of Dukes Hotel (where, incidentally, one can still order Bond’s classic ‘Vesper’ recipe, shaken over ice – not stirred)?

With this in mind, let’s imagine Bond stalking the stacks, from the subterranean bowels of Topography to the lofty heights of Religion, picking out the books (referenced

by Fleming) that he may well have borrowed from the Library’s collection, either for professional research or personal recreation.

In Topography, West Indies, we find Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree (1950). ‘This extraordinary book had been recommended to Bond by M. “It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about,” he said. “This isn’t medieval black-magic stuff.

It’s being practised every day”’ (Live and Let Die © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1954).

Heeding M’s tip, Bond began to read Leigh-Fermor’s masterpiece of travel literature in a New York hotel room, while preparing for a new mission that would take him to the Caribbean, setting of The Traveller’s Tree and that most iconic of Bond locations. Riveted and appalled by the tales of voodoo sacrifice recounted by Leigh-Fermor, Bond ‘was glad to put the dreadful tale aside and re-enter the world of normality. But it took him minutes to

‘

Every self-respecting 007 scholar knows that Bond has whiled away many an afternoon in the environs of St James’s Square

’

forget the atmosphere, heavy with terror and occult, that had surrounded him as he read.’

However, it might be said that the sinister atmosphere evoked by Leigh-Fermor would never entirely disappear from Bond’s world; not only does it hang heavy over the mission at hand (Live and Let Die, 1954, Fiction), but it presages an entire rogue’s gallery of Bond villains with their almost supernatural ability to bend the world to their dark and twisted stratagems. Such is the influence of The Traveller’s Tree on Bond, indeed, that a copy recently sold for £1,700 at an auction of 007-related first editions.

Leigh-Fermor was great friends with Fleming, whose own travel writing, collected in a superb anthology, Thrilling Cities (1963), is located at Topography, Europe (& Gen.). We can’t be sure if Bond himself ever borrowed or read this book, but when I recently embarked on my own ‘mission’ to develop story background for the next

Opposite Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

Above, left to right Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964), The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), From Russia with Love (1957).

two Bond films, Thrilling Cities was one of the first books I pulled down from the Library’s shelves, and it directly inspired how I researched and plotted potential travel itineraries for 007. In this jaded era of no-frills, low-cost aviation, Fleming’s evocation of the excitement and glamour of the early days of air travel may seem quaintly nostalgic, but it remains today a key ingredient of Bond mythology.

Fleming’s modus operandi as a travel writer is to eschew any pretence at traditional tourism; as he instructs his guide in Tokyo, ‘No museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies’. In their place, he seeks out more visceral and sybaritic pleasures: a Sumo wrestling match, an afternoon shopping in the Ginza, a consultation with a soothsayer, ‘the most luxurious Japanese bath’, consumption of ‘large quantities of raw fish for which I have a weakness’, ditto sake (in order to find out ‘whether it was truly alcoholic or not’). Oh, and ‘an evening with geishas’ (Thrilling Cities © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1963).

Although Bond stuck pretty closely to Fleming’s itinerary when he visited Japan, he also unexpectedly engaged with Japanese literary culture, developing a keen interest in the 17-syllable haikus of Matsuo Bashõ, a seventeenth-century poet who, according to the chief of the Japanese secret service, is the equal of Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes or Goethe. Having familiarised THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

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himself with the structure of haiku (which he possibly dug up in Bashõ’s works in Literature, Japanese), Bond even had a ‘bash’ (sic) at his own composition, which gave Fleming the title for 007’s Japanese mission (1964, Fiction): ‘You only live twice:/ Once when you are born/ And once when you look death in the face’ (You Only Live Twice © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1964).

Bond’s credible effort may run two syllables over-length, but its intimation of mortality surely belies the image of an action hero with no inner life, and hints at a more contemplative aspect to his character. Tatiana Romanova, a beautiful Soviet agent sent to seduce him in From Russia with Love (1957, Fiction), intuits this before she even meets him. As M records to Bond, ‘“You reminded her of the hero of a book by some Russian fellow called Lermontov. This hero chap liked gambling and spent his whole time getting in and out of scraps”’ (From Russia with Love © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1957).

Bond may well have looked up the book in question in the Library (A Hero of Our Time, first English edn 1853, Fiction). If so, he would indeed have found a near mirrorimage of himself in the story’s protagonist.

Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin’s seductions of the ravishing habituées of a spa resort in the Caucasus are interwoven with his daring exploits as an army officer in the Georgian mountains.

But for all the glamour of this life, Pechorin is plagued by ennui, that almost existential sense of life’s futility that afflicted

Russian anti-heroes from Pushkin’s Onegin to Chekhov’s Vanya. Bond undoubtedly suffered from this ailment himself, even if he chose to identify it by the Latin equivalent, accidie. During longueurs between missions, waiting for a new call to adventure from M, he would be afflicted by this wretched, debilitating torpor, which ironically seemed to cause him more genuine anguish than any number of ingenious and sadistic deaths planned for him by his various antagonists in the field. Schooled in the Classics at Eton and Fettes College, Bond deftly adapted a Euripidean proverb to describe his malaise: ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.’

A visit to the stacks of Science & Miscellaneous may have helped Bond dispel his accidie. These shelves contain a cornucopia of subjects to aid and abet the secret agent preparing for a high-stakes mission – inter alia, Atomic Theory &c., Cards, Fear, Gold &c., Human Sacrifice, Pain, Poisons, Sex, Smuggling, Wine, and Women. From the section devoted to Military Science, he may well have leafed through a copy of On War (1832), referred to in Moonraker (1955, Fiction): ‘Bond had achieved Clausewitz’s first principle. He had made his base secure’(Moonraker © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1955). A few shelves away, Spies &c. is home to The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Welsh Dulles (1963).

Bond perused this survey of the world’s second oldest profession while recovering from abduction and brainwashing by the KGB (events recorded in The Man with the

Left to right James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies (1960), revd edn of Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies (1947); Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities (1963); Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (first English edn 1853), 1958 edn.

Golden Gun, 1965, Fiction). Written by the CIA’s longest-serving director, this guide to the history and tradecraft of espionage presumably helped to ‘unbrainwash’ Bond (M’s coinage). One can speculate that he must have been surprised and flattered by the book’s description of him as ‘the unique James Bond’. Dulles, it transpires, was a huge admirer of Bond and would parse his adventures for any useful information on gadgetry. The homing device issued to Bond to keep track of Auric Goldfinger, for example, inspired an entire CIA project.

Alas, this came to nought, as Dulles later recounted, because his team of boffins could not work out how to keep track of a surveillance subject after they entered a crowded urban zone (a problem that the NSA and GCHQ recently appear to have solved).

Before we leave Science & Miscellaneous, one last book is worthy of the Bond scholar’s attention. Among the ornithological works collected under the shelfmark Birds is a slim, elegantly illustrated volume entitled Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies (1947). Fleming, an avid birdwatcher, counted this as one of his bibles at his Jamaican home. When seeking a name for the protagonist of his first novel, he simply stole that of the guide’s author: James Bond: ‘It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name

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THE SPY WHO LOVED THE LONDON LIBRARY

‘

Science & Miscellaneous contains a cornucopia of subjects to aid and abet the secret agent preparing for a high-stakes mission: Atomic Theory &c., Cards, Fear, Gold &c., Human Sacrifice, Pain, Poisons, Sex, Smuggling, Wine, and Women

was just what I needed – and so a second James Bond was born’ (reproduced with permission from the Ian Fleming Estate).

The notion of the second James Bond exploring the top-floor stacks of Religion may seem somewhat incongruous, but Fleming records that 007 once packed a copy of Ernest Sutherland Bates’s The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature (1937, Religion, Bibles), in his luggage on a mission to Miami (Goldfinger, 1959, Fiction). In this instance, one can only hope that Bond did not borrow the book from the Library, for it was later revealed that its pages had been hollowed out in order to secrete his Walther PPK handgun (presumably by an overzealous atheist in Q Branch).

More typically, the books Bond chose to read for recreation on his travels are located in the shelves of Fiction. We learn, from close reading of Fleming’s chronicles, that he is keen on Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Special mention is given to Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), although Bond never quite gets round to finishing the thriller during a long train journey on board the Orient Express in From Russia with Love: ‘His concentration was going. He was too tired. He laid the book down on his lap and closed his eyes …’ (From Russia with Love © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1957). For this lapse, one must surely blame the nervepoison slipped into Bond’s Chianti, now working its way through his body, rather than any page-turning deficiencies in the novel (after all, Ambler’s writing was ‘the source on which we all draw’, according to John le Carré). Perhaps in return for this piece of literary product placement,

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Fleming asked Ambler in 1959 to introduce James Bond to Alfred Hitchcock. Ambler duly obliged, but the Master of Suspense declined the opportunity to direct a first 007 film, and Bond’s cinematic debut would have to wait until 1962.

More than 50 years later, the twentyfourth Bond film in the most successful franchise in cinema history is now in development. The world may have changed beyond all recognition in that half-century, but the adage coined by Cubby Broccoli to keep Bond alive and kicking has remained as relevant as ever: ‘Always go back to Ian Fleming.’ The James Bond books, penned

by Fleming and located on the Library’s Fiction shelves, remain the touchstone not only for Bond’s cinematic exploits, but also for his continuing literary adventures.

Fellow Library member William Boyd is the latest author assigned to chronicle 007’s adventures. Boyd began his mission by reading each and every Bond book and constructing a timeline to which he rigorously adheres in Solo, which is published this month, 60 years after the appearance of Casino Royale (1953, Fiction), Fleming’s first book. Boyd is also of the opinion that James Bond is much more of a literary creature than previously acknowledged. ‘Fleming refers to Bond’s book-lined sitting-room,’ he muses when we meet to discuss the secret agent’s reading habits. ‘Bond even recalls some lines of poetry in one of the novels; that surely indicates he is a cultured man, if not quite an intellectual.’ Boyd is referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Brahma (1857, in Emerson’s Complete Works, 1866, Eng. Lit.), which is indeed quoted from in Diamonds are Forever (1956, Fiction):

From top Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948); William Boyd’s Solo (2013).

‘Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into Bond’s mind that most sinister line in all poetry: “They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings”’ (Diamonds are Forever © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1956).

James Bond, 007. Secret agent with a licence to kill – and a London Library membership card. Although sworn to secrecy about the mission recorded in Solo, Boyd does reveal that Bond will be travelling with a copy of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948, Fiction) in his luggage. He also tells me that Bond’s choice of reading matter offers a clue to his destination in Solo.

We can only wish 007 bon voyage and pray that The Heart of the Matter makes it back from West Africa to the Library’s stacks in one piece.

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ENGLAND’s

GAUGUIN Tanya Harrod’s research into the life and work of the studio potter Michael Cardew during his time in Ghana and Nigeria gave her a fascinating insight into the strangeness of the British colonial project in West Africa

Working in the National Archives on Yacuba Gowan Way, Kaduna, is one of life’s pleasanter experiences. The archive is housed in an elegant 1950s building, concrete and glass with steel-framed windows and brise-soleil. The reading room is presided over by Mrs Onyeskesi Ebere Leticia, a formidable lady whose underlings sit patiently in the corridor awaiting orders. At the top of the building the Deputy Director of the archive, Chief Emmanuel Nsoro, has his office. He is courteous but melancholy. Funding is in short supply. However, broken panes of glass in the reading room are the only visible sign of endemic financial worries. Warm air circulates. Outside, the call to prayer drifts across the rooftops. In the summer of 2005 all was peaceful in Kaduna, even if driving at night was not to be contemplated anywhere in Nigeria and propping up the bar in every four-star hotel were ‘security consultants’ , invariably ex-British army, offering ‘workable solutions’ to the wealthy.

Their presence and the pre-independence papers I had come to consult reminded me of the strangeness of the colonial project in West Africa. The papers, in folders held together with green Treasury tags, were perfectly preserved.

The story that I ended up telling about the last days of British colonial rule in Ghana and Nigeria turned out to be both sad and funny, and certainly rich in irony.

West Africa was not occupied by colonies of settlement, as was British East Africa.

There were no white farmers, no Happy

Above National Archives in Kaduna, Nigeria, 2005.

Photograph by Tanya Harrod.

Right Calabash carvers selling their wares in a Northern Nigerian market, 1960. Photograph

by Doig Simmonds.

Opposite page Achimota School and College, 1942.

Photograph by Margot Lubunski.

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West Africa was not occupied by colonies of settlements, as was British East Africa. There were no white farmers, no Happy Valley high jinks.

Valley high jinks. In the context of Empire it is possible to argue, just, that the British were, from the 1930s onwards, trying to do their best in West Africa. But it is difficult not to see their activities as a peculiar mixture of the practical and the fantastical.

The detailed minutes, reports, accounts, surveys, projected plans and radio broadcasts still carefully stored at Kaduna and in other archives from Accra to Lagos attest to industriousness and some good intentions. In the 1940s and 1950s textile officers, fish farmers, canning officers, mill engineers, archaeologists, geologists and foresters arrived in West Africa in force, on the initiative of a post-war Labour Government. The Gold Coast became independent, as Ghana, in 1958, and Nigeria followed in 1960, but meanwhile there was much to do: mosquitoes to be eradicated, schools, colleges and dams to be built, national treasures to be protected, roads to be maintained, museums to open, time running out. But something else floats up: a strong sense of having got it wrong, of having spoilt everything by foisting on to West Africa the worst of European culture.

Some joined the colonial service to get away from civilisation and its discontents.

They were a recognisable type, publicschool educated, ill at ease with the modern world, fluent with the Latin and Greek aphorisms that litter their reports, caring little for money, preferring the country to the city, impatient with desk work, happiest

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on tour camping out at Government Rest Houses, at ease in a hierarchical society under the supposedly indirect rule of chiefs and emirs. In many instances these colonial servants were beguiled by the beauty of everyday life, by the textiles, the carvings, the indigenous architecture and the pottery they saw around them. Among the teachers and administrators were artists, some inspired by modernism and some by arts-and-crafts ideals. In spirit many were natural anti-industrialists and anticapitalists. Most arrived almost by chance but when the time came they did not want to leave, conscious that they had received more than they could ever give.

One of them became my biographical subject. The studio potter Michael Cardew (1901–83) arrived in the Gold Coast in 1942 aged 40 and departed, most unwillingly, from Nigeria in 1965. He didn’t leave much behind him in West Africa. There are traces of a tile-works and a pottery in a slum of shacks outside Accra, a handful of buildings and a kiln at Vumë, a small village on the banks of the Volta, and the remains of his Pottery Training Centre at Sulega outside the Nigerian capital of Abuja, still with a handful of employees waiting for Government funds that never quite arrive. West Africa went on without him and Cardew’s dream of setting up small workshops making wood-fired stoneware pottery – as a kind of bridge between the local low-fired wares mostly made by

women and full-scale industrialisation – was never realised. It had failed as an idea even before he left in 1965. But it is easy to see why he hoped that Ghana and Nigeria might seem the last redoubt of the handmade. Driving around Northern Nigeria today there are endless roadside workshops, some making furniture in every conceivable style, from Bauhaus to Tudor-bethan, some making ornate metal grilles, doors and gates. All that ambient creativity tells us that Cardew’s story was largely irrelevant to West Africa and its immense capacity for crafts. His time as a colonial servant tells us more about Englishness and English problems, and about a man who found his own country cold and repressed and who tried to escape.

When Cardew first arrived in West Africa in 1942 he joined what seemed to be a particularly hopeful wartime colonial initiative, grandly named the West African Institute of Arts, Industries and Social Science. It was based in the Gold Coast, and attached to the elite Prince of Wales College and School, known as Achimota, just outside Accra. The school sheltered a nest of gentlefolk, many of them conscientious objectors, and the sense of things having gone wrong aesthetically was strong among the staff. Their concern, though surprising, was understandable. Imperial rule aside, what had the British brought to the Gold Coast: corrugated iron roofs, cement-block construction and imports of cheap enamel THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

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and, soon to follow, plastic.

In 1942, in autocratic charge, the Institute at Achimota believed it was possible to rejig colonialism to create a paradise of small industries, a tropical version of the society set out in William Morris’s utopian work News from Nowhere (1891), with most of the population either farming or making beautiful things for everyday use. Ironically, however, the exam-based education system already set up by the British Government militated against these goals. Achimota School, for instance, was turning out highly educated boys (and girls, for it was co-educational) who were distinctly averse to becoming potters and weavers. Enter Cardew, the product of the four-year Classics course at Oxford, the nephew of the Rector of Lincoln College, who had turned his back on a career as a lawyer, a civil servant or an army officer, the professions taken up by most of his numerous relatives.

At Winchcombe in Gloucestershire in the late 1920s and 1930s, Cardew had made some of the most beautiful slipware of modern times and had been hailed as a neo-primitive ceramic Paul Gauguin, living in simplicity and semi-poverty. To Cardew the Gold Coast seemed an escape from the ‘tame, constricted life of a small potter in England’ . Yet to his disappointment his young apprentices were less than keen on creating clay bodies from scratch, prospecting for glaze materials and learning to knead clay the Japanese way, taught to Cardew by his inspirational teacher Bernard Leach at St Ives in Cornwall.

Cardew refused to make the kinds of objects wanted by the expatriate community: “Articles not made at the Centre are: Posy Rings, Toby Jugs, et hoc genus omne”

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Cardew was charismatic enough to persuade some of his Gold Coast pupils that the potter’s life was worthwhile. One of the strangest encounters I had in Ghana was with Reynolds Reginald Amponsah. I had heard that he had been one of Michael’s pupils, and over the phone when I was arranging the interview I asked if he still made pots. He laughed and said, ‘No, no – that was all a long time ago’ . This is his story. He was a clever young boy who managed to get a place at Achimota School, planning to study law or perhaps to train as a teacher. He soon formed friendships

with some of the most interesting members of staff – the sculptor Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz, the force behind the West African Institute, his wife the anthropologist Eva Meyerowitz, and of course Cardew.

Between the three of them they decided he should become a potter. First he worked as Cardew’s apprentice, remembering that Cardew used to pin up instructions in Latin for his students, and then he was sent to the art school at Stoke-on-Trent. There he impressed his tutors and went on to the Royal College of Art in London, where he became Student President. Perhaps that was a sign of things to come. Back in the Gold Coast he became involved in the independence movement and, later, as an opposition MP, was imprisoned for seven years by Kwame Nkrumah (another old Achimotan) and only released when Nkrumah was toppled by a CIA-backed coup. When he next visited London to look up old friends from the Royal College he came as Ghana’s Minister of Education.

Cardew and Amponsah liked and respected each other and agreed on the importance of good pottery. But Amponsah wanted his country to go forward while, in truth, Cardew dreamt of prelapsarian stasis.

In 1945, at the end of the war, the West African Institute was closed down in a typically pragmatic colonial move.

But Cardew did not go home to his wife and three sons. He did the strangest thing.

Leaving his wife to support the family, he started a small pottery at Vumë some 70 miles from Accra, explaining to her that he was now of an age ‘to make potters as well as pots, to build a tradition; and I can do much more with Africans than with the English … at least they are not mean in spirit, they have got the stuff, the instinct, only waiting to be guided, helped and developed … the flower of their sense of form had never been crushed by the slavery of Puritanism’ .

He took a small workforce with him but significantly none had attended Achimota School. From then on he chose to work with less well-educated young men whom he deemed unspoilt. Things were difficult at Vumë. He was received kindly by the village chief who allowed him to build a house and a pottery on his land. But money was in short supply and he had many disastrous firings.

The pots that did survive were beautiful, with a curious iridescent sheen. He often fell ill and became dangerously emaciated. He

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ENGLAND’s GAUGUIN

Opposite Michael Cardew graffitoing lettering on to a pot, c.1928. Photograph Seth Cardew archive.

Clockwise from above Volta Pottery, Vumë, 1948, photograph Seth Cardew archive; Tanko Ashada Mohammed and Danjuma Kiln with a newly fired Ladi Kwali pot, 1956, photograph by Donald MacRow; stoneware Gwari casserole, 1957–7,

by Michael Cardew, photograph by Stephen Brayne.

liked to read to his right-hand man Clement Kofi Athey, William Blake and Shakespeare sonnets mostly: ‘So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,/ Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth. ’ He wanted to make Kofi the Gold Coast potter, writing to his wife: ‘if it means leaving at the end of 5–7 years at a loss to me it will still have been worth doing, and some day, by somebody, it will be recognised as such. ’ When he was old, teaching students at his pottery at Wenford Bridge in Cornwall, Cardew honed the experience of the sorrows and triumphs of his time in Vumë into a cycle of retelling in which ceramics became something crucial and elemental, something one might (conceivably) die for.

The second part of Cardew’s time in West Africa, as a senior pottery officer in Nigeria from 1950 to 1965, was, in colonial terms, even odder. We might wonder why a pottery officer was needed in a country that produced some of the most beautiful ceramics in the world. Cardew himself knew this to be a paradox, but he had discovered happiness in West Africa and felt this was the place to make his best pots. His reports and memoranda, there in their entirety in

the archives at Kaduna, make for strange reading, as he set out to defy all attempts to make his Pottery Training Centre balance its books. His monthly reports, which run right up to 1965, were masterpieces of obfuscation, overflowing with technical detail but simultaneously beguilingly vague. In Nigeria Cardew re-invented his own ceramic style through the study of indigenous pottery, through creative interaction with his workers and trainees and through the use of local materials, for he found Northern Nigeria to be a clay and glaze mineral paradise.

He sought to protect his trainees from the stresses of commerce, explaining that he was not running a factory. He refused to make the kinds of objects wanted by the expatriate community: ‘Articles not made at the Centre are: Posy Rings, Toby Jugs, Bird & Fish ornaments et hoc genus omne’ . Amazingly he got away with it and created his own cell of good living, an artistic community within the colonial system.

Cardew hated the idea of colonialism.

In his twenties and thirties he had been a New Statesman-reading man of the Left.

But in West Africa he sought to create a new national art in which geology would have

‘intellectual and moral uses’ and in which, as he wrote mysteriously to the colonial administrators at Kaduna, ‘all beautiful work is the work done by the work itself’ . Only after independence did the auditors and accountants arrive in force, and in January 1965 the Department of Trade and Industry at Kaduna advised that Cardew’s contract should not be renewed. It’s an outcome that serves to underline that Cardew’s project in Nigeria – his attempt at ‘beautiful work’ – only made sense in terms of upper-class British anti-industrialisation and arts-andcrafts values. The African years were just a part of Cardew’s biography. But they remain anomalous and they were the hardest for me to articulate when writing my book about him, The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew, Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture (2012), without sounding like a revisionist apologist for Empire. And now, in Nigeria, there are young scholars like Ozioma Onuzulike and Aliya Adamu who are taking a serious interest in the artistic and literary legacy of colonialism. They are working with scrupulous detachment and ultimately it is they, writing from within, who will give us the definitive analysis.

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SIR IAN

ANSTRUTHER Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks back on the extraordinary life of her great-uncle

I always say hello to the charmingly smiling man in the cloth cap on the landing just outside the Gents’ – that spot in The London Library where the smell of wood polish and the smell of disinfectant come up against each other with sudden force.

The photograph is of Sir Ian Anstruther (1922–2007), benefactor and Vice-President of The London Library, whose father Douglas Anstruther was the brother of my grandmother Jan Struther, the author of Mrs Miniver (1939). The photograph was taken by Anstruther’s son-in-law, the photographer Henry Bourne, in one of Anstruther’s three favourite places in the world.

Those three favourite places were: his country estate, Barlavington, tucked under the South Downs in West Sussex, where he lived when he wasn’t in London; The London Library, to which he donated the funds for the building of the Library’s rarebooks wing in the 1990s; and his house in Provence, Les Aumarets. The garden of the last is the setting for the photograph. ‘It was taken the Easter before he died, ’ the third of his four daughters, Harriet, recalled, ‘and he was so relaxed and happy, in his favourite spot where he had his breakfast and read his paper each morning. He really loved it there. ’ Anstruther had a deep need for calm and order in adulthood. This sprang from a childhood of unwelcome surprises.

For twelve years, from the age of five to seventeen, he was fought over in the courts by his mother Enid and his mother’s sister, his aunt Joan Campbell. His youngest daughter, the writer Eleanor Anstruther, is working on a fictionalised account of this relationship and the extraordinary story of her father’s childhood. She recounted to me some of the distressing details.

Anstruther’s parents, Douglas and Enid, were married in 1914 and spent their honeymoon in a barracks in Edinburgh

Sir Ian Anstruther, 2006, in the garden of his house, Les Aumarets, Provence. Photograph by Henry Bourne.

before Douglas went off to the war: an inauspicious start to what turned out to be an unhappy marriage that broke down in 1925. There were three childen: Fagus, born in 1917, Finetta, born in 1920, and Ian, born in 1922. Fagus, a sweet-faced boy, fell down the stairs at Strachur, the family house in Argyllshire, when he was four, which blinded and crippled him. He was sent off to a home where he died at the age of 15.

Unsuited to motherhood, Enid had the two-year-old Ian taken off her hands when the marriage broke down. He went to live with his grandmother Sibyl and his unmarried aunt Joan, partly at Strachur and partly in Bryanston Square in London.

Finetta stayed with her mother. ‘At some point, ’ Eleanor said, ‘it was decided that Ian would be the heir’ .

The heir to what? Well, the heir to a large fortune. Ian’s aunt Joan Campbell had inherited a sizeable chunk of South Kensington, the Alexander Estate, which includes Thurloe Square and

Alexander Square. (Not that she visited South Kensington much; it was in an unfashionable part of London compared with Bryanston Square. It was as if someone living in central London today owned a sizeable chunk of New Malden.)

With the Alexander Estate went the large estate in Argyllshire; whoever inherited all this would be a wealthy man. Having no child of her own, Joan set her heart on Ian being the Little Lord Fauntleroy figure, whom she would bring up in a suitable way to prepare him for his life as a wealthy laird and landlord.

Ian adored his aunt Joan as much as she adored him; she was a much warmer, more motherly person than his real mother. ‘Enid should perhaps never have been a mother at all, ’ Eleanor said. ‘She liked to “moon about writing poetry” , and after her divorce she became an ardent Christian Scientist’ .

Ian was much happier away from her, in a loving, woman-heavy household with his grandmother Sybil, his aunt Joan, and Joan’s female companion, Pat Dancey.

One day in 1927, when he was five, Ian’s nanny took him round to tea with his mother who was living at 39 Evelyn Gardens, off the Fulham Road. (If Thurloe Square was unfashionable, red-brick Evelyn Gardens was seen as shockingly down-at-heel.) There, his mother kidnapped him. ‘Nanny arrived back at Bryanston Square after tea, ’ Eleanor said, ‘without Ian, and with a note saying, “Ian is going to come and live with me” ’ .

This was when the 12-year court case began. Through all those years, Ian was shunted between his mother’s household and his aunt’s. The only possession he took with him wherever he went was his beloved golliwog. His poor sister Finetta didn’t get a look-in. Being a girl, she was not to be groomed for heirdom, and had no choice but to live with her mother. Every now and

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then Finetta would slip pathetic notes to Joan into Ian’s suitcase, begging ‘Please can I come and live with you? Don’t tell my mother I wrote this. ’ All to no avail.

Joan was distraught, contemplating her beloved young heir cooped up in Evelyn Gardens with his depressed Christian Scientist mother. She feared for his physical safety. ‘Enid’s eldest son had already fallen down the stairs, ’ Eleanor said, ‘and Joan knew that Enid was totally unfit to bring him up. His mother dressed him in his older brother’s old ragged clothes, and he caught an eye infection, and became very nervous. ’ Through all these years, Enid did keep him for the majority of the time; he spent the weekends and part of the holidays with Joan.

When he was eight, his mother sent him to a Christian Science boarding school.

Joan eventually lost her court case. It was decided in 1936, when Ian was 14 (and by now at Eton), that Enid should have him.

Strangely enough, at that very moment, Enid decided she no longer wanted him anyway. And now comes the mystery of the cheque. ‘At some point during those weeks, ’ Eleanor said, ‘Joan wrote Enid a cheque for £500. That money definitely changed hands.

And my father remembers Joan saying to him, “The court case is over and your mother has sold you for £500. ” My father remembered going back to Eton for the new term thinking, “Now I know how much I’m worth” . ’ The cheque may of course just have been a gesture of kindness on the part of Joan towards her sister, who was short of cash. Enid disappeared to a Christian Science community in Warminster, and Ian did not see her until the year of her death in a Christian Science nursing home in 1964.

Anstruther’s early adulthood was adventurous and refreshing. After going to New College, Oxford, he joined the Royal Corps of Signals in 1942, landing in France a few days after D-Day, where he was in charge of a team of signallers. This is vividly described in a short book he wrote at the end of his life, Postcards From the Front (2007). After the war, he happened to be on a London bus next to an old friend who had just been made the British Ambassador in Washington, D.C. He asked Anstruther whether he’d like to be his private secretary, and he jumped at the chance. Thus began five liberating years in the United States.

Anstruther’s son Toby provides a vignette of this time in his father’s life. ‘He had a fantastic time in the States. A really

Left to right Anstruther as a young boy; his mother Enid on her wedding day, 1914; his aunt, Joan Campbell.

important friendship he made was with a man called Gene Leggett, whose mother ran a shop in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., called the Swap Shop. People could bring in a piece of antique furniture and walk out with something else. My father found it extraordinary that people bought furniture.

There was suddenly this sense of freedom and choice. If you could buy your own furniture, you could choose other things in your life. ’ So when Anstruther did inherit the Alexander Estate, and Strachur, in the mid-1950s, he did not feel compelled to keep it all. He sold the Argyllshire estate, but kept hold of most of the chunk of South Kensington, only selling a small part of it to the west where it extended towards Gloucester Road. With the money from that, he bought not a large stately home, but a 4,000-acre country estate in West Sussex that contained many small, pretty houses and cottages, one of which he lived in. He was first married to Honor Blake, with whom he had one child; that marriage was dissolved, and in 1963 he married the architect Susan Walker, and they had five children. Aged 82, Susan is still a busy architect running her firm in South Kensington.

Anstruther was a generous landlord; if any friend or family member was in any kind of trouble, he would lend them a house or cottage or flat to live in for as long as they needed it. Every morning he woke early and walked on the Downs and round the estate to see how things were looking, before sitting down to his research and writing. He was never happier than when burrowing into the archives of a little-known nineteenthcentury character or event. Not needing to write for commercial gain, he was free to immerse himself in subjects and characters he found interesting, and many of his books were published by the small Haggerston

Press based at Barlavington. He wrote eight books, including The Scandal of the Andover Workhouse (1973), a tale of misery and cruelty behind closed doors in the 1830s; The Knight and the Umbrella (1963), a chronicle of the rain-drenched re-enactment of a medieval joust held in Ayrshire in 1839; and Dean Farrar and ‘Eric’ (2002), which was a reissue of Eric, or Little By Little, the classic story of the decline and fall of a Victorian schoolboy who succumbed to temptation, with an introduction by Anstruther in which he described the life and inner turmoil of its evangelistic author.

Anstruther’s daughter Harriet, the interior designer, recalled her father’s love of an orderly, timetabled, panic-free existence. In a drawer of the treasured inlaid desk that had belonged to him, the pack of tiny screwdrivers lined up in size order is still kept as it was when he was alive. ‘My father used to say, “I am the president of the Ever Ready Club” . He liked to be ready for any eventuality: torches and spare fuses in the cupboard; boots in the hall; candles and matches; spare shoelaces; packets of charcoal biscuits to calm him; a lemon in his wardrobe so he could still have his Martini if there were none left in the kitchen. Before travelling he used to pack days in advance, and make lists. In adulthood, he didn’t leave anything to chance. ’ Anstruther lived modestly and quietly but he did have a weakness for Porsches, of which he owned a few, and he used to whizz off in them to do research across the country. Later in life he became scared of Porsches because they went so fast, and bought a Smart car instead. In this, he liked to drive round West Sussex very slowly, seeing how long a traffic jam he could cause to build up behind him. He installed a back-window sticker that read, ‘Actually, I do own the road’ .

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HIDDEN CORNERS

THE WONDERS OF

LIFE

Most of the natural history titles have dwelt on the Library’s shelves for many years, an evocative reminder of the golden age of exploration and discovery of new species of flora and fauna. James Le Fanu delves into a few key titles in this fascinating collection, some of them beautifully illustrated.

The immense enthusiasm for natural history throughout the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries extended beyond the scientific, the close observation of the myriad forms of the living world, to encompass an aesthetic appreciation of its beauty and harmony.

‘Take a butterfly into your hand, ’ urged the Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, ‘words cannot do justice to its surpassing beauty. What brilliant hues!

Note the burnished metallic gloss, look at the distribution of the colours … the whole surface is a mosaic, the most minute, the most elaborate and the most perfect that can be conceived. ’

And it was spiritually uplifting, too, offering the most compelling evidence for many of the creative power of divine providence. ‘The study of nature, ’ observed the philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes, ‘is truly inexhaustible. We may begin where we please, we shall never come to an end, our curiosity will never slacken. ’ That inexhaustibility is reflected in the Library’s impressive collection on natural history and related themes. But time passes and fashions change, and now those serried ranks of volumes in Biology, Birds, Botany, Ferns, Fishes &c., Insects and Reptiles and so much else besides that seem to occupy an almost disproportionate amount of space in Science and Miscellaneous, remain for the most part firmly on the shelves, opened only rarely, if at all, over many long years.

My first intimation of the riches concealed behind those fading titles came when, browsing in the Library shelves, I chanced upon J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914, Mod.). Thomson, Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University from 1899 to 1930, was famous in his day – his books selling in the hundreds of thousands – but The Wonder of Life is his great work, a magisterial survey, elegantly written and superbly illustrated, of the near Above Two-wattled cassowary, from J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914).

Left Colour plate of marine animals, from J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914).

infinite diversity of the living world.

He opens with the chapter ‘The Drama of Life’: ‘To many observers of living creatures it has seemed as though they were being allowed to see just a little of a complex and long-drawn-out drama, ’ he writes. ‘All the world is the stage, on which, without any fall of curtain, scene has succeeded scene since life began. ’ And sure enough, as the reader progresses through ‘The Haunts of Life’ , ‘The Insurgence of Life’ , ‘The Web of Life’ and ‘The Cycle of Life’ , so that glimpse becomes a grand Olympian view of its multifariousness and interconnectedness, permeated with a sense of astonishment at the extraordinariness of the phenomena he describes – of the ant-milking mosquito and the fish that fishes, the flight of gossamer spiders and the starfish with 200 million eggs.

This happy if fortuitous stumbling on The Wonder of Life prompted inevitably a search for its provenance, similarly neglected masterpieces from the preceding one hundred years that would have inspired it. The Library’s collection of books from this golden age of natural history falls into two distinct but related categories: first, the accounts by intrepid naturalists of their epic journeys that would result in the discovery of the stupendous variety of never previously described species of trees and plants, fish, birds, insects and mammals; and, second, the seemingly more prosaic

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the Druidic monuments which I have seen in England’ .

There are exotic creatures aplenty in the next great work of this novel literary genre, Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804 (trans. Thomasina Ross, 3 vols., 1852–3), with its memorable passage of his being kept awake at night by the nocturnal cacophony of the jungle: ‘The

‘

Illustration opposite title page of J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914).

but intellectually more compelling close observations of the natural world in the tradition of Gilbert White’s legendary The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (first published in 1789; the Library’s earliest edition is 1813).

The golden age begins, appropriately enough, in the furthest reaches of the basement, the ultima Thule of Topography (Voyages), with Joseph Banks’s pioneering botanising expedition from 1768 to 1771 to the South Pacific on Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour, at a time when the world was so much bigger than our own, its

oceans wider, mountains higher, full of the promise of marvels ‘beyond imagining’ .

Banks’s first encounter with the kangaroo, in his survey of the flora of Australia, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771 (2 vols., ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 1962), conveys the surprise and excitement of it all. ‘In gathering plants today I had the good fortune to see the beast so much talked of, ’ he recalls in his journal for 25 June 1770. ‘As large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour and very swift – what to liken him to I could not tell, nothing that I have seen at all resembles him. ’ A couple of days later a species of white ants commands his attention; their six-foot-high pyramidal dwellings, he notes, ‘very much resemble

The white ants’ pyramidal dwellings, Banks notes, “resemble the Druidic monuments which I have seen in England”

wild cries of animals rung through the woods … the monotonous, plaintive cry of the howling monkeys, the whining, flutelike notes of the small sapajous, the grunting murmur of the striped nocturnal ape (which I was the first to describe), the fitful roar of the great tiger … and a host of parrots, parraquas and other birds … if one asks the Indians why such a continuous noise is heard on certain nights, they answer, with a smile, that “the animals are rejoicing in the beautiful moonlight” . ’ In Humboldt’s wake many followed, their literary efforts filling the shelves of Topography (America, South): H.W. Bates’s (of Batesian mimicry fame) Naturalist on the River Amazon (2 vols., 1863); John Ball’s Notes of a Naturalist in South America (1887); W.B. Stevenson’s A History and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825) and a legion of others. Open any at random and within a couple of pages there will be some striking novelty; Stevenson describes a species of vulture ‘the size of a hen’ that feeds on venomous reptiles – ‘Opposing its wing to them as a shield, it seizes the reptile near its head and soaring aloft lets it fall’ – or Charles Waterton’s brilliantly observed description in his Wanderings in South America (1825) of the sloth’s ingenious THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

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Dahlia Wartlet, from Philip Henry Gosse’s A Year at the Shore (1865).

adaptations to its life in the canopies of the forest: ‘He moves suspended from the branch, he rests suspended from it, and he sleeps suspended from it. To enable him to do this, he must have a very different formation from that of any other known quadruped … if we examine the anatomy of his forelegs, we shall immediately perceive by their firm and muscular texture, how very capable they are of supporting the pendent weight of his body, both in climbing and at rest; and, instead of pronouncing them a bungled composition … we shall consider them as remarkably well calculated to perform their extraordinary functions. ’ Throughout Topography there are many further variations on the theme of ‘A naturalist in … ’ , but the apotheosis of this genre is undoubtedly Charles Darwin’s The Voyages of the Beagle (introduction by H. Graham Cannon, 1959) in S. Science (Gen.), and a 1922 edition of Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise (first published in 1869) in T. Malay Peninsula &c. Both are, to be sure, repeatedly anthologised, but read in their entirety they are quite brilliant, as when Wallace, almost incapacitated by painful ulcers on his legs from septic mosquito bites, describes the mating ritual of a species of bird of paradise, in a passage notable for his attention to the detail of the colouring of its feathers: ‘The long plumy tufts of golden orange feathers … are raised vertically over the back … and expand till they form two magnificent golden fans striped with deep red at the base … the whole bird is then overshadowed

by them, the crouching body, yellow head, and emerald green throat forming but the foundation and setting to the golden glory which waves above. ’ Wallace’s inventory of his 8-year long, 16,000-mile journey through the Archipelago included more than 8,000 birds which, together with the examples of mammals, reptiles and insects and butterflies he collected, would add up to a staggering 125,660 ‘specimens of natural history’ .

Five floors up from Topography, in the fertile browsing grounds of S. Natural History, the inexhaustibility of Wallace’s tens of thousands of novel species is paralleled by the very different, more intimate knowledge of the natural world exemplified

by White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, its enduring popularity reflected in a dozen editions (there are 200 in all) that fill an entire shelf. His vivid and sympathetic portrayal of the lives and habits of bats, swallows, owls, mice, worms (and his ‘old tortoise’ Timothy) would transform natural history into a national obsession, so that by the mid-nineteenth century there was scarcely a middle-class drawing room in Britain, it has been remarked, that did not have its aquarium or butterfly cabinet or collection of sea-shells.

The Revd White’s spirit pervades S. Natural History, taken up and elaborated by two prolific Victorian naturalists, Philip Henry Gosse and John George Wood. Gosse travelled widely in Canada and Jamaica before returning to England and settling in Dorset, where his pioneering descriptions of the curious and endlessly fascinating forms of life teeming in tidal pools – including no less than 34 hitherto undescribed species of sea-anemone –

converted successive generations of seaside holidaymakers into aspirant naturalists.

Gosse may be remembered (if at all) for his fundamentalist and (even at the time) eccentric creationist views, as described in his son Edmund’s memoir Father and Son (1907), though there is no escaping the metaphysical implication in his lyrical portrayal of the beauty and bizarreness of the living world. Here he is, in A Year at the Shore (1865), waxing enthusiastic about the form and colour of a ‘magnificent species’ of sea-anemone, the Dahlia Wartlet, so-called because of its striking resemblance to the flower of the same name: ‘crowding one upon the other … or seated in single majesty … we see them flaunting the most gorgeous colours … the column may be olive, or deep green, or purple-crimson, or light green splashed and streaked with scarlet like an apple; the disk is equally varied, but generally displays diverging bands of rich red … while the tentacles, short, stout, and conical, may be white with pellucid rings [or] deep crimson … with a broad ring of lilac. ’ Or what is one to make of the minuscule marine worm, Euryelpta vittata, whose mouth is ‘situated most strangely in the very midst of the belly’ , and ‘if an individual be cut to pieces, every portion continues to live and feel, from whatever part of the body it may be taken … and begins to move in the same direction as that in which the entire animal was advancing, as if the body were actuated throughout by the same impulse; and, moreover, every division, even if it is not more than the eighth or tenth part of the creature, will become complete and perfect in all its organs. ’ When the tenth part of an obscure marine worm could reconstitute itself in its entirety then Nature could, or so it seemed, do virtually anything it wanted, as the supreme synthesiser of Victorian natural history, John George Wood, expounded in half a dozen or more influential books including the whimsically titled Homes Without Hands: Being a Description of the Habitations of Animals (1865) and Nature’s Teachings: Human Invention Anticipated by Nature (1877). They could scarcely be more comprehensive, each running to around 600 pages, infused throughout with a sense of charm and wonderment. How many types of burrowing mammal can one think of ? The Revd J.G. Wood cites 18 in Homes Without Hands : the mole, weasel, badger,

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HIDDEN CORNERS

prairie dog, armadillo, etc., and the same for burrowing birds, burrowing reptiles, burrowing molluscs, spiders, insects and beetles, each scrutinised with the same perceptive eye for the unexpected and telling detail. ‘Dull and sombre as the mole appears to be, it is by far the fiercest and most active mammal within the British Isles … full of life and energy actuated by a fiery activity’ , not least when constructing its underground fortress of straight and interconnecting tunnels. It is ‘not an easy problem’ to explain how he does so when blind and living underground for, as Wood observes, even for ‘eye-possessing animals’ like ourselves, ‘to walk in a straight line with closed eyelids is almost an impossibility’ .

As for Nature’s Teachings, there is scarcely an aspect of the vast range of human ingenuity that is not just anticipated but surpassed by nature – whether War and Hunting (the club, sword, spear and dagger, projectile weapons, poisons, the hook, defensive armour) or Architecture, Tools, Optics and Domestic Comforts.

Two floors below S. Natural History, in S. Botany, the art critic John Ruskin’s Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (2 vols., 1879–86) confronts another profound truth of nature – its unimprovable aesthetic perfection. It seems entirely plausible reading Ruskin on the poppy (‘all silk and flame like a burning coal fallen from heaven’s altars’) to see evidence of some divine artistry: ‘We usually think of the poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the field. The rest – nearly all of them – depend on the texture of their

Above Three closely related species of Cyclops, from J. Arthur Thomson’s The Wonder of Life (1914).

Below Illustrations comparing the forms of lobster, armadillo, pichiciago and chiton with a suit of armour, from J.G. Wood’s Nature’s Teachings (1877).

surfaces for colour. But the poppy is painted glass ; it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it is seen – against the light or with the light – always, it is a flame, and warms the wind like a blown ruby. ’ Three stacks over finds S. Insects, and the works of the retired French schoolmaster turned entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. His many brilliant insights into these remarkable

creatures were grounded, like those of Philip Gosse, in the most painstaking and detailed observation, typified by his account in Souvenirs Entomologiques (10 vols., 1907) of an episode when sitting on a stone at the bottom of a ravine studying the behaviour of the ‘Languedocian Sphex’ (sand wasp, Sphex languedocian): ‘Three women, vine pickers, pass in a group on the way to their work. They give a glance at the man seated, apparently absorbed in reflection. At sunset, the same pickers pass again carrying their full baskets on their heads. The man is still there, sitting on the same stone, with his eyes fixed on the same place.

My motionless attitude, my long persistency in remaining at that deserted spot must have impressed them deeply. As they pass by … all three made the Sign of the Cross. ’ The fruits of Fabre’s patience fill an entire shelf, exemplified by his description in Social Life in the Insect World (1913) of the mating ritual of the male mantis, unaware of the terrible fate that awaits him. ‘He throws himself timidly on the back of his corpulent companion; he clings to her desperately … and the embrace will sometimes last for five or six hours … Finally the two separate, but they are soon to be made one flesh in a much more intimate fashion … During the day, or at latest on the morrow, he is seized by his companion, who first gnaws through the back of his neck … and then devours him, mouthful by mouthful, leaving only the wings. ’ There is, of course, so much more.

My indebtedness to Professor Thomson for prompting this quest is matched only by that I owe to The London Library for having so many of the great works from this golden age in its collection, which must, on reflection, be among the most comprehensive and certainly most readily accessible anywhere in the world. This all-too-brief survey certainly clarifies why Thomson’s The Wonder of Life should have made so powerful an impression, its magisterial scope and sense of astonishment informed by living in an era when the inexhaustibility of the natural world, whether in the forests of the Malay Archipelago or the tidal pools of Dorset, had only so recently been revealed. And what a truly amazing story it is, as Walt Whitman observed: ‘Praised be the fathomless universe, for life and joy and for objects and knowledge curious. ’

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A LONG AND WINDING ROAD

when did the roman empire fall?

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The London Library Annual Lecture, delivered at the Hay Festival on 31 May 2013

by Tom Holland The question I want to ask today might seem a very simple one: when did the Roman Empire fall? If you look the question up in an old-fashioned textbook, you are likely to find a very precise answer.

The Roman Empire ended on 4 September 476, when Romulus Augustulus, an ineffectual young man who had been made Emperor by his father just a few months before, was unceremoniously deposed and packed off to an early retirement by a Gothic warlord named Odoacer. After Romulus Augustulus, you don’t get any more Roman Emperors in Italy. It’s as though a light switch has been turned off, the ancient World is at an end, and the Middle Ages have begun.

Putting the answer in these bald terms reveals, I think, its fundamental inadequacy. Even on the most basic level, Romulus Augustulus was not the last Roman Emperor in the West. Julius Nepos, an aristocrat from the Balkans, who had been the Emperor before Romulus Augustulus, was still alive when Romulus Augustulus was deposed, and maintained his claim to the purple. Meanwhile, in Rome, people had no idea that the Roman Empire had fallen; they just carried on living their lives as before. Consuls continued to be elected, the Senate to sit, chariot races to be held in the Circus Maximus. Most significantly of all, the imperial order in the East continued to survive, even as it was disintegrating in the West. There remained a Roman capital – Constantinople – which would continue to flourish for many centuries to come.

In a way, then, the fall of the Roman Empire is to human history what the end of the dinosaurs is to natural history. It serves as the prime example of an extinction which, when you look at it more

Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

closely, turns out to be slightly more complicated than you might think. Many palaeontologists today accept that dinosaurs, far from becoming extinct, have in fact survived into the present in the form of birds. Similarly, the notion that Romanitas, or Roman-ness, survived into the Middle Ages, upsets the categorisation we probably all of us have in our heads of the Roman Empire as a phenomenon of antiquity.

I don’t want to push revisionism too far, however. In both cases – dinosaurs and Romans – it’s clear that there was a sense in which both of them really did come to a devastating end. A wren, after all, may be a kind of dinosaur, but it’s certainly not a triceratops. Bearing in mind what did happen to the Roman Empire in Western Europe in the fifth century – the collapse of an imperial order that had lasted for centuries; the founding amid the rubble of Roman provinces of Barbarian kingdoms; the end, for a millennium and more, of paved roads, central heating and decent drains – it’s not unreasonable to characterise the fall of the Roman Empire in the West as the nearest that history boasts of an asteroid strike.

The measure of that fall, I think, is the degree to which it was indeed, in the words of one historian, ‘The greatest catastrophe ever experienced in the history of civilisation. A rupture of incalculable proportions’ . The degree to which this judgment is true can be measured by the way in which, even today, the fall of the Roman Empire colours how almost everyone in the West understands the very notion of Empire.

We have it in our heads that powers which rise must inevitably fall. It’s like a law of nature, a law of physics. The result is that every Western country that has ever won itself an empire has lived with a consciousness of its own likely mortality. Today in Washington, D.C., familiar anxieties are being expressed. The former Comptroller General of the US, David Walker, recently gave a bleak analysis of the future of the American imperium. America, he claimed, was afflicted by the same challenges and problems that he saw as having contributed to the fall of Rome’s Empire. ‘Declining moral values and political servility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. ’ Nevertheless, those who assume the inevitability of decline and fall, that all empires will sooner or later come to share the fate of Rome, need only look at America’s chief rival for the title of twentyfirst-century hegemon to see that it ain’t necessarily so. The Peoples’ Republic of China, unlike the various states of the modern West,

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Every Western country that has ever won itself an empire has lived with a consciousness of its own likely mortality

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recognisably stands in a continuous, unbroken line of descent from an ancient empire. The Chinese have always lived with an awareness of the sheer antiquity of their civilisation. Dynasties may have come and gone; waves of Barbarians may have broken and washed across it repeatedly; the Emperor himself may have been replaced by a General Secretary – but no such rupture as divides Barack Obama from the time of imperial Rome divides Xi Jinping from the founding of the Chinese Empire.

All of which prompts an intriguing question: what about Rome in her heyday? Did the Romans, in their imperial pomp, have the same kind of confidence in the permanence of their Empire, the presumption that it would just go on and on, which the Chinese always seem to have had?

When we look back at antiquity, it’s clear that people in the Near East and Mediterranean were well aware that, just as empires could rise, so also could they fall. It is, in a sense, the great geopolitical theme of the Bible. The Greeks too had the example of an empire’s ruin always before them: that of Troy. When the Romans, in their turn, stepped up to the imperial plate, they signalled their arrival as the Mediterranean superpower by putting their greatest rival, Carthage, to the torch. It was an exultant moment – and yet the Roman General in charge of the capture of Carthage wept. ‘I have a terrible foreboding, ’ he confessed, ‘that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my country’ .

But the Roman state, despite almost tearing itself to pieces in the first century BC, when rival warlords fought one another for supremacy, did not perish. The decades of civil war were brought to an end. A new and universal era of peace was proclaimed. Augustus, the man who presided over it, was the first of what was to be a long line of Imperatores, ‘victorious generals’ , who came to be called emperors.

Two centuries and more on from the time of Augustus, by AD 248, when the city of Rome celebrated its millennium, the assumption had bedded down that the rule of the city was eternal, that Rome was the Eternal City. A Greek-speaking Pontic, from the borders of the Black Sea, hailed her in remarkable terms. ‘Everywhere you have made citizens of those who rank as the noblest, most accomplished and powerful of peoples. All the world has been adorned by you as a pleasure garden. ’ In the event, of course, there’s a peculiar poignancy to these words. They are being delivered just before what we now recognise as the process that will lead to Rome’s ultimate fall gets underway. We know that this garden, the garden of the Empire, will run to brambles

and weeds, that intruders are going to smash down the fences, that new tenants are going to carve much of it up between themselves.

Even so, the dream of Rome did not fade. Its potency, by this point, was too strong for that. That was recognised even by the Barbarian conquerors themselves. ‘A Goth on the make wishes to be like a Roman, but only a poor Roman would ever wish to be a Goth. ’ So spoke Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, and heir to the Odoacer who had established his rule in Italy in the wake of the deposition of Romulus Augustulus. Theodoric essentially ruled Italy as a Roman emperor would. He spoke to the Roman citizenry in the Forum; he supplied money for the building of monuments in the city; he even annihilated Barbarians north of the Alps. He was certainly not the first or the last Barbarian to find in the inheritance of Rome – the splendour of her monuments, the vastness of her sway, and the sheer global conceit of her pretensions – the only conceivable model for an upwardly mobile king.

There’s a sense, perhaps, in which the whole history of the early medieval West can best be understood as a series of attempts by various warlords to square the grandeur of their Roman ambitions with the paucity of their resources. The most celebrated example of this was Charlemagne, the King of the Franks who, in the eighth century, carved out a huge, rather ramshackle empire for himself.

The greatest moment in his reign was when, on Christmas Day AD 800, he ended up in Rome itself and had himself crowned Emperor of a revived Western Empire by the Pope. Charlemagne himself may have pretended that he didn’t want this ceremony, but it’s clear that he was delighted to rank as a Caesar; when he returned to his capital, Aachen, he took with him pillars that had been stripped from the temples of Rome and Ravenna.

It wasn’t long before Charlemagne’s Empire began to splinter and then ultimately collapse. The Empire in the West was reborn, though, in the tenth century by Otto I, the great warrior King of the Saxons, who in 962 was crowned, as Charlemagne had been, in Rome by the Pope. This established a line of emperors that lasted unbroken until 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire, as it had become known in the thirteenth century, was terminated by Napoleon. The famous joke about the Holy Roman Empire was that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Certainly by the time that Voltaire made this quip in the eighteenth century, it was true enough. But there had been a time, during the reign of Otto’s grandson and namesake, Otto III, when it had been all three. Otto, after having himself crowned in Rome in 996, really went to town on the whole business of being a Roman Emperor. He established himself on the Palatine Hill, where Augustus had lived and the huge complex of buildings Augustus of Prima Porta, founder of the Roman from which the Roman emperors Empire in 27 BC, first century, Vatican Museums.

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MEMBERS’ News UNDERSTANDING THE LIBRARY’S FINANCES THE LIBRARY’S CHAIRMAN, BILL EMMOTT, REVIEWS THE FINANCIAL YEAR 2012–2013 WITH THE TREASURER, MARK STOREY, AND THE LIBRARIAN, INEZ LYNN BE On the face of it, the 2012–2013 result looks like another solid performance – a £265,000 surplus on core funds compared with £277,000 the year before. But we ought to look more closely at how this was achieved. Mark, give us an insight.

MS Some things are easier to control than others, so we need to build a degree of flexibility into our plans while sticking to the core principles we’ve agreed. We’ve kept tight control of costs so as to sustain the savings achieved by the restructuring two years ago, and in terms of member recruitment the last three years have been the most successful in the Library’s history. This year we signed up over 800, but total numbers still fell slightly because of the number of withdrawals. On the fundraising side it’s also been a tough year.

The Founders’ Circle held steady but didn’t grow as we hoped, although there are now signs that the new US chapter is gathering momentum. Meanwhile the corporate sector partnerships we hoped for have failed to come to fruition in spite of encouraging early signs.

But there are plenty of positives as well. Our investments have continued to deliver reliable returns. We secured the balance of capital funding we needed to undertake the redevelopment of the main Reading Room and North Bay. And we were delighted that Lewis Golden, a highly distinguished predecessor of mine, has set up an endowment fund for the Library in memory of his wife Jacqueline. I see this as a vote of confidence in the Library and its future. Over the last few years we’ve used a simple investment management framework that has served us well, but we will be looking to see whether an external manager might be able to add value in relation to the endowment element of our funds.

It’s worth mentioning also that this year, unlike the last, we had a substantial amount of legacy income. We typically receive a total of around £20,000 a year from smaller legacies and treat this as part of our core budget, but we know better than to rely on it for large amounts. So when we do get a windfall this is earmarked (or ‘designated’ in the jargon) for special projects or initiatives.

In 2012–2013 we received £280,000 from the estate of Betty Kathleen d’Alton (with more since the financial year-end), which will be used for the building project, and £50,000 from the estate of John French Slater, which is paying for two extra members of staff to work on Retrospective Cataloguing for one year. There may be times when projects like these are a better ‘hook’ for our fundraisers than general running costs. If so, we can then choose to allocate income from major legacies to the core budget and look to our Development Team to raise the money for special projects.

BE That’s one example of the flexibility you mentioned. But clearly

there have been some disappointments with the fundraising results, particularly as regards companies. Inez, perhaps you could say more about what happened and the lessons we’ve learned?

IL The reason we were interested in corporate sponsorship was that it seemed to offer a very substantial return on the investment of staff and other resources to develop it. The Library was always going to be something of a niche organisation in the eyes of potential sponsors, and we knew it would not appeal to everyone. But exploratory meetings with one or two major financial institutions suggested that they were impressed by the Library’s cultural prestige and that the Library could make a good fit with their own corporate style. We fully expected that it would take time to conclude a mutually acceptable deal but felt confident that it could be done, so we persisted with our cultivation efforts. Unfortunately towards the end of the year it became clear that what the potential sponsors were minded to offer fell some way short of the Library’s own expectations, and reluctantly we decided to discontinue the initiative. Now rather than offering an exclusive deal to a single sponsor we will revert to offering venue hire to members of the Founders’ Circle only, as we did previously, while looking at other ways to engage corporate supporters that don’t need specialist staff. We also have a number of our own fundraising-related events planned, and we hope the newly refurbished spaces will form a springboard for recruitment as they did after Phase 2.

BE Let’s hope so. But mention of events raises the familiar question of opening hours. This is a thorny issue and some members have strong views on it, but what’s the latest thinking?

Membership changes by month, April 2008 to March 2013

new or reinstated withdrawals net

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2012 Core Income (Total £3,230,600)

2013 Core Income (Total £3,435,530) Investment Income £271,242 7.9%

Investment Income £241,450 7.5% Events and Merchandising £13,335 0.4%

Events and Merchandising £7,685 0.2%

Legacies £50,750 1.6%

Legacies £348,880 10.2%

Revenue Donations £349,812 10.8%

Revenue Donations £310,354 9%

Membership income £2,575,253 79.7%

IL Given the complexity of the staffing arrangements and the communications and signage requirements, any changes to opening hours need very careful planning. Our membership is increasingly diverse and we will not be able to please everyone all the time, so we need to work out the best achievable compromise. Since the introduction of the new proximity cards in January we are starting to build a clearer picture of how members use the Library, and this is one of the things that will inform our decision-making later this autumn.

BE It certainly is a difficult balancing act, and we need to get it right if we want to hang on to members. Perhaps you’d like to say a bit about membership trends.

IL Essentially we’re seeing a continuation of last year’s story. Through our marketing activities we’re continuing to attract new members in high numbers, but as Mark mentioned earlier these are barely enough to replace those who drop out of membership for a variety of reasons.

Core Income 2012-2013.indd 1 This is something we may just have to live with but our chur n rate is a good deal better than many other membership organisations and we are working hard to improve retention. Meanwhile a gradually increasing proportion of our members pay less than the full fee rate, be they Young Persons or Spouse members or Carlyle members who benefit from grant assistance. This enhances the diversity of our membership and helps us discharge our Public Benefit obligations as a charity, but we always have to balance that against the need to secure sufficient income from subscriptions to remain financially viable.

BE Some members have suggested linking membership fees to actual usage, for example with a reduced rate for those who want to borrow books but not to use the buildings and facilities on site. Is there any mileage in this?

IL It would be nice to think that we could improve member recruitment and retention by making our offer more responsive to individuals’ changing needs. But the big constraint is that we have high fixed costs, so we need reliability in our income to match. To a

Membership income £2,496,969 72.7%

large extent the cost of keeping the Library open and running is the same no matter how much or how little individual members choose to use it in any one week, month or year. Introducing a usage-based fee structure would not only be an administrative headache, but it could also undermine our financial stability.

BE Mark, I notice the pension fund deficit has increased further, although not by as much as last year. Would you like to say a bit more about this?

MS The statutory rules allow very little lee-way in the reporting of pension obligations. They’re based on market conditions at the reporting date, although these may not be representative of longterm expectations. Over the year there was only a slight reduction in the corporate bond rate used to discount future pension liabilities back to present values, but when rates are this low even a small change can have a significant effect. Inflation has also remained stubbornly high.

The pension fund’s investments have performed well but once again this has been outweighed by the increase in liabilities. Of course the current results are disappointing, but we have to remember that the pension liabilities will take several decades to mature and there are good reasons to believe that market conditions will improve during that time.

This year the fund is also due for a full triennial actuarial valuation, which involves a more comprehensive review than the exercise done for the accounts. Although the basis of the calculations is slightly different, the big picture will be similar. The pension fund trustees have obligations towards the members of the scheme but are aware of the Library’s own constraints, so they will not expect a large increase in contribution rates.

BE That’s reassuring. Inez, what do you see as the major achievements of the last year and the major challenges for the next?

IL Well, it’s going to sound strange but one of our major achievements was actually a failure! Senior staff across all departments spent many THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

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months working on an application to the Arts Council for the Library’s Special Collections to be ‘Designated’ as a collection of national and international significance. This involved completing a 22,000-word form describing our collections, their quality and significance, and submitting it along with our Strategic Plan plus another 30,000 words in various formal policy documents, and testimonials from 41 experts as to the veracity of our claims about our collections and services.

As you might imagine, compiling all of this took six months of hard work but in the process we learned an enormous amount about our collections.

In the end, our application was unsuccessful because the panel of assessors struggled with the essentially miscellaneous nature of our Special Collections, which simply represent in microcosm the range and depth of the Library’s entire collection. (Frustratingly we had been advised not to apply for designation of the whole collection because the Designation Scheme is largely confined to closed-access, reference-only collections.) So it was a failure in one sense but it has left us with the necessary depth of knowledge to be able to present

READING THE LIBRARY’S ANNUAL REPORT The Library’s Annual Report for 2012–2013 will be downloadable as a pdf from the ‘About Us’ section of the website from late September. If you would prefer a printed copy of the Report, please request one by contacting the Development Office (email: development@londonlibrary.co.uk; tel. 020 7766 4719).

A printed copy will then be posted to you.

the value of our collections to potential donors effectively, and some key policy documents that we had long needed, including a Collection Development Policy and Collection Care Policy.

Work on the Strategic Plan itself formed another important strand this year, involving discussions about strategy at every level of the organisation. Building on the data from our Membership Survey in 2011, trustees and staff debated every aspect of Library strategy – from collections to services and access to them; from the wider role of the Library to the development of our archives. The Plan is now available for members to read on our website (in the ‘About Us’ section, from a link in ‘The Future’ box) and its principles will inform our annual planning over the next five years.

As to challenges, the major ones remain financial: how do we raise the funds necessary to achieve our ambitious plans to develop the Library’s electronic resources alongside the printed collections, to open up our institutional archive, and to invest in the technology and staff development we need to remain up to date with what members increasingly expect of a twenty-first-century library service?

Reminder Join us at The London Library 2013 AGM The 172nd Annual General Meeting of The London Library will be held in the Reading Room on Tuesday, 5 November 2013 at 6pm. Please feel free to join other members, staff and trustees in the Issue Hall for a glass of wine from 5.30pm.

RHINE – MAIN – MOSELLE – DANUBE – RHONE – SAONE – DOURO – ELBE – VLATAVA – GANGES

NO BR W OC AV HU AI R LA E BL E

Exploring the World by River A Comprehensive Guide to River Cruising for 2014

We have been operating river cruises for over 20 years and our portfolio continues to grow each year. For 2014 we are offering journeys along 22 of the world’s rivers including some of the most undiscovered waterways of the world. From the historical waterways of Europe to the atmospheric Mekong River in Cambodia, the Irrawaddy and Chindwin in Burma, the Brahmaputra and spiritual Ganges in India to name just a few, we pride ourselves in offering the most diverse range of river cruises available from any tour operator.

Call us today 020 7752 0000 for a copy or visit www.noble-caledonia.co.uk 2 Chester Close, Belgravia, London, SW1X 7BE

BRAHMAPUTRA – AMAZON – PO – ODER – MISSISSIPPI – MEKONG – IRRAWADDY – CHINDWIN – DNIEPER – VOLGA – TISZA – SAVA 32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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MEMBERS’ NEWS

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 2013

DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND Double Atlas Folio Mrs T S Eliot Elephant The Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement Folio Peter Jamieson Quarto Dr Penelope McCarthy Clive Richards OBE Octavo Rosemary James Duodecimo Dr Richard Barber Trevor Coldrey The O J Colman Charitable Trust The Roland and Vanessa Everington Trust James Fisher The J P Jacobs Charitable Trust The Viscount Norwich Joan Rees Lord Runciman Sir Roy Strong Jeremy White Sextodecimo David Aukin Sebastian Brock Margaret Buxton Paul Calvocoressi Cambridge University Development Curtis Charitable Trust Jane Falloon

Richard Freeman Michael Gainsborough A D B Gavin Professor Isobel Grundy John Madell Barbara Minto Xuan Nguyen W G Plomer Sonia Prentice Janet Rennie Peter Rowland Sir John Sainty The Lady Soames DBE Christopher Swinson Ann Williams Anthony J T Williams Reverend Anthony Winter ENDOWMENT FUND During the year the Library received a generous donation from Lewis Golden, a distinguished former Treasurer and Chairman, to create an endowment in memory of his late wife Jacqueline. This was supplemented by a donation from another donor who wishes to remain anonymous.

FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE UK Dickens Len Blavatnik* Debby and James Brice* Kate Bucknell and Bob Maguire Adam and Victoria Freudenheim Miles Morland Elisabeth Murdoch Basil Postan Mark Storey Naomi Zimba Davis Thackeray Molly and David Borthwick

Bill Emmott Anthony Fry Tim Sanderson Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE Philip Winston Martineau Marcia Brocklebank Consuelo and Anthony Brooke Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey S and D Chatto Raymond Duignan Sir John Gieve Louis Greig Victoria Hislop Louise Hobbs Philip Hooker Sarah Ingham Rosemary James Hugh Johnson OBE Alan Keat John Knight Patricia Lennox-Boyd The Countess of Lichfield His Honour Humphrey Lloyd, QC The Mackintosh Foundation Alexis and Jane Maitland Hudson Kamal Mehta Philip Percival Maria and Eric Rhode Alan Russett Sir John Scarlett Dasha Shenkman James Stainton Marjorie Stimmel Paul Swain Harriet Tuckey Guislaine Vincent Morland John C Walton Clive Wright FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE US Dickens Louis and Gabrielle Bacon*

Thackeray Wilson and Mary Braun* Tim Collins* Robert and Gillian Steel* Martineau Carey Adina Karmel* Anne H. Bass* Jerry and Jane del Missier* Montague and Mayme Hackett* Mr and Mrs James L Johnson* Patricia and Tom Lovejoy* Leonard and Sally Michaels* Mr and Mrs John C Michaelson* Judith Goetz Sanger* Hank and Sarah Slack* Douglas Smith* Mr and Mrs Robert Taubman* Mrs Charles Wrightsman* *donation received via the International Friends of The London Library, a registered 501(c)3 charitable corporation BOOK FUND Canon Mark Storey Great Primer John Barney Barnabas Brunner The L E Collis Charitable Trust Norman Franklin Dr Catherine Horwood Joan Rees Sybil Sheen Logos Charitable Trust Cicero Dr John Burnam Andrew Hine THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

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Henry McKenzie Johnston CB James Myddelton

John C Walton Hugh Whitemore

Nonpareil Philip Bovey Penelope Byrde Rupert Christiansen Latymer Upper School Ashley Huish Miriam Mahemoff Dr Jeanne Moore The Viscount Norwich John Perkins Professor Henry Roseveare Faith Raven Ann Saunders

GENERAL FUNDS Barbara Minto

Brilliant Neville Bass Dr Polly Bird Sebastian Brock Robert T Gwynne London Appreciation Society Anthony McGrath John Symons Dr Susan Wallington ADOPT A BOOK John K Hoskin Lady Catherine Manning Dr Bernard Palmer Mrs S A Van Velden ADOPT MY FAVOURITE BOOK John K Hoskin BOOKBINDING Neville Bass James Anthony V Collett Virginia Surtees SUPPORTED MEMBERSHIP The A H J Charitable Trust The Marquess of Anglesey Nicolas Barker OBE Thomas Bean Darren Bird John Crawley Patrick Drysdale Inez T P A Lynn R D Macleod The Revd Ann Shukman Richard Shuttleworth A Sokolov 34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

LEGACIES The Library received bequests from the following deceased members and friends to whom the trustees are most grateful: Betty Kathleen D’Alton The J P W Erhman Charitable Trust George Girling Grange Annie Gwendolen Hinde Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor Rosemary Norah Leach John French Slater Rosemary Hildegarde Syfret Charity Frances Thorpe Thomas Christopher Benjamin Timmin A substantial grant was also received from the trustees of the Mrs R M Chambers Settlement.

ROYALTIES The literary estates of 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 listed below: Academie Royale de Belgique Professor Jeremy Adler Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Göttingen D S Allin Professor Michael Alpert The Angela Thirkell Society

The Anglo-Hellenic League The Anthony Powell Society The Antique Collectors’ Club Neal Ascherson Paul Ashton Melanie Aspey Anthony Astbury Claudia Azzola Mark Baczoni Sir Jack Baer Peter Bagwell Purefoy Phil Baker Nicolas Barker OBE Barbara Barnett John Barney Andrew and Jen Baster in memory of Kathleen Odell Simon Beattie Chris Beetles Ltd Antony Beevor Alan Bell Marjatta Bell Lady Rachel Billington Sophy Bland in memory of Paul Dinnage Professor Jeremy Bourne Taylor David Boyd David Boyle Sue Bradbury Melissa Brady-Dant The late Dr Peter Brandon The British Library The British Sociological Association Roger Broad Pete Brown The Browning Society Robin Buchanan-Dunlop Dr D W Budworth MBE Professor Victor BulmerThomas CMG, OBE Diana Busby in memory of Christoper Busby Chris Bush Robert Calasso Michael Carlson Jennifer Carnell Lesley Chamberlain Josephine Chambers Tony Charles The Charles Williams Society Rupert Christiansen Christie’s Christ’s College Library, Cambridge

Mark Cohen James Collett Adrian Collier in memory of Mrs H E Collier Artemis Cooper Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles Dagmar Cyrulla Dr Richard Davenport-Hines Charles de Chassiron Anne de Courcy Archibald Lowry de Montford Andrea Del Cor nò Felix Dennis Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Local History Section Jessica d’Este F M Dineley Taylor Downing Downside Abbey Professor Christopher Duffy Peter Duncombe Julian Duplain Edmund Green in memory of Dr Maria Dowling Dr Brent Elliott Embassy of the Republic of Kosovo English Heritage Carolyn Ezekiel The Fabian Society Nicki Faircloth Michael Fardell John Fareham Dr Jill Fell Matthew Fletcher Benedict Flynn John Fonte Nigel Fountain Julian Francis The Francis Brett Young Society Friends of Canterbury Cathedral Friends of Dymock Poets Richard Gapper Michael Gifford Georgina Gill Dr Emelyne Godfrey Robert Gomme CB Charles Gordon Clark John E H Grieve Stephen Grosz Robert T Gwynne Tom Hampson Nick Hartley

MEMBERS’ NEWS Sir Max Hastings John Havard Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox Gill Hedley Helion and Company Nigel Henson Hertfordshire Association of Local History High Commission of the Republic of Cyprus Tanis Hinchcliffe Peter Hitchens Desmond Hogan Peter Holt Denise Hotchkiss in memory of Christine Sutherland Jolyon Hudson John Hussey OBE Iconoclast Press Noel Ing CBE The Institute of Linguists Virginia Ironside The Isis Press The Italian Bookshop Patrick Ivory Patrick Jackson CB Dr William Jacob Judith Jedamus Dorothy Jenkinson John Buchan Society Hugh Johnson Ted Jones The Joseph Conrad Society (UK) Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Doug Kemp Michael Kendall The Kipling Society Professor Rebecca Knuth Kongeligt Danske Videnskabernes Selskab Dr David Lawson Nicholas Le Seelleur Dr Daniel and Katharine Leab Michael Leapman Michael Lee Professor Andrew Lees R L Leonard The Library of Congress Simon Loftus Oliver Gyles Longley Dr R T Longstaffe-Gowan Professor John Vernon Lord Robert Low Peter Lucas

Inez T P A Lynn Macmillan Nadine Majaro Marina Majdalany John Man François Marcognet The Massachusetts Review Dr Russ McDonald Henry McKenzie Johnston CB Michael Meredith Françoise Mobbs The Moretti Gallery Simon Morris The Morris Museum of Art Le Musée Chagall Museo Vincenzo Vela Jeremy Musson Charlotte Nassim The National Arts Collection Fund The National Gallery The National Trust New Statesman Dr Marco Niada Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset Sean O’Connor Sean S O’Connor Richard Oldfield Helen O’Neill Stephen Ongpin The late Robert Oresko Professor Eric Or msby Österreichisches Akademie der Wissenschaften James Owen Oxford Film and Television Jeremy Paxman Penguin Group UK Michael Peppiatt John Perkins Phaeton Christopher Phipps Dr Peter Pickering Marco Pizzo Nicholas Poole-Wilson Rosalind Porter Dr Cecilia Powell The Powys Society Dr Debra Pring Mary Ann Prior Pro Helvetia Richard Proctor Proquest Prospect Books Pushkin Press

Paul Quarrie Simon Rae Random House Sir David Ratford Rath Eanna Research Peter Ratzer Piers Paul Read Susan Reynolds Neil Rhind MBE Ian W Roberts Andrew Robinson William S Robinson Nigel Rodgers Susan Ronald The Hon Ms Hannah Rothschild The Royal Academy Royal Academy of Arts Library The Royal Anthropological Institute The Royal Artillery Institution The Royal Collection The Royal Horticultural Society The Royal Society Royal Society of Literature Claudia Rubenstein Lord Runciman The Rupert Brooke Society Joseph Rykwert Giampaolo Salice Professor Patrick Salmon Samuel French Ltd Jem Sandford Michael Sar ni Clive Saville Karsten Schubert Christopher J Schuler Lord and Lady Scott The Countess of Selborne Thomas Seymour Eric Shanes Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship William Smith Lady Soames DBE Società Bibliografica Toscana The Society of Antiquaries of London The Society of Authors The Society for Psychical Research The Society of Women Writers and Journalists Stacey International Nicholas Stanton

Louise Stein Timothy J Stevens Nicholas Stogdon Richard Stoneman Virginia Surtees Lord Thomas of Swynnerton Sydney Smith Association The Revd Anthony Symondson John Symons Audrey Tate Jonathan Taylor Robert Thorne Dr Anne Thwaite Malcolm Tozer The Trollope Society Stewart Trotter J P Trower Sir Michael Tugendhat QC Barry Turner Gill Turner Sir Nicholas Underhill The University of Dublin Clive Vaisey Peter Vassallo Petar Velnic Virago Margaret Voggenauer Jeanne Vronskaya Christopher J Walker Rupert Walters Ian Warrell Wartski Veryan Warwick-Pendarves Kathy White Sir Christopher White CVO Derek Winterbottom The Wolfson Foundation Ramsay Wood Stephen Wood David Worthington Dr Christopher J Wright The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Andrea Wulf Norman Wyke

LONDON LIBRARY GIFT MEMBERSHIP Give a year of bookish joy this Christmas.

Gift vouchers also available. www.londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

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Phase 3A

The Reading Room and Writers’ Room unveiled After three months of hard (and often noisy!) work, the Library’s refurbished Reading Room and Writers’ Room are, as we go to print, almost ready to reopen to members. Those of you who have been inconvenienced by the unavailability of these rooms, the temporary closure of the main St James’s Square entrance and the din of building works should now be settling in to your comfortable new surroundings. Our thanks for your patience over what has been a particularly busy summer.

The Reading Room is now lighter, brighter and more comfortable, and has increased capacity, making it easier for you to find the reader space you need. Those who like to relax in the Reading Room will also be delighted to find two very comfortable new armchairs to accompany six of the original armchairs, four of which have been sensitively restored using traditional methods and materials.

In the Writers’ Room – formerly known, rather less poetically, as the North Bay – you will find much-needed new furniture, equipment and lighting, and a widened gallery with four additional reader spaces.

The next issue of the Magazine will bring you images of both rooms in all their refurbished glory. In the meantime, the Library’s AGM on 5 November presents an excellent opportunity for members to see the spaces for themselves, while hearing about the Library’s work during the past year and its plans for the future.

What’s new in the Reading Room and Writers’ Room?

The Reading Room

The Writers’ Room

•

•

• • • • • • •

9 additional reader spaces (bringing the total number of reader spaces to 40) 2 new armchairs (the total number of armchairs remains 8) new desks and chairs new lighting, including adjustable task lights new periodical racks improved ventilation a display case in which to highlight treasures from the collections sensitive redecoration and refurbishment of the Victorian interior

• • • •

• •

8 additional reader spaces, including 4 new spaces at gallery level (bringing the total number of reader spaces to 25) new desks and chairs new lighting, including adjustable task lights new space-saving all-in-one touchscreen PCs a video magnifier to aid readers with visual impairment, which will also prove useful for anyone wanting to study material in closer detail improved ventilation interior decoration and refurbishment

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