The London Library Magazine: Autumn 2019

MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2019 ISSUE 45

PETERLOO FROM PAGE TO SCREEN Jacqueline Riding on her historical research at the Library for Mike Leigh’s film

PULLING THE STRINGS William Simmonds and the art of puppetmaking by Jessica Douglas-Home

HIDDEN CORNERS Andrew Robinson explores the broad range of Library titles on Albert Einstein

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 45

14 The modernist Arts and Crafts sculptor William Simmonds was also a renowned puppetmaker whose productions entranced audiences around Europe. Jessica Douglas-Home places him within a rich tradition of puppetry which goes back thousands of years.

CONTENTS 7 FROM THE CHAIRMAN 8 CONTRIBUTORS William Simmonds’ last Columbine (now in Gloucester Museum), dressed by Eve Simmonds.

Photograph © David Mallinson.

18 English astronomers made Albert Einstein world famous in 1919 when they confirmed his general theory of relativity. In 1933, Einstein fled Nazi Germany to Belgium, then to a hut on a remote Norfolk heath. Through the titles on the Library shelves Andrew Robinson tells the story of the scientist’s relationship with England.

The Library titles that were essential aids to Adrian Leak’s research for Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top

13 MY DISCOVERY Simon Loftus describes a remarkable handwritten note in his ancestor’s seventeenth-century pamphlet in the Library

14 PULLING THE STRINGS The artistry of the puppeteer and sculptor William Simmonds is celebrated by Jessica Douglas-Home Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein at Chartwell, July 1933.

18 HIDDEN CORNERS Andrew Robinson on the Library’s collection of titles on Albert Einstein

22 The 1819 Peterloo Massacre was the brutal government suppression of a pro-democracy gathering in Manchester. Jacqueline Riding, who advised Mike Leigh on his film, recalls the experience and points out some rare finds in the Library that informed her research for the film and her book.

10 BEHIND THE BOOK

22 PETERLOO FROM PAGE TO SCREEN The Peterloo Massacre remembered by historian Jacqueline Riding

26 BROMLEY HOUSE LIBRARY Martin Stott on the history of this independent library in Nottingham Shooting factory exterior for Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo, released in 2018. Simon Mein © Thin Man Films.

27 MEMBERS’ NEWS

26 Bromley House Library in Nottingham was founded in 1816 and moved into its Georgian townhouse five years later. Martin Stott extols its qualities, which include a broad mix of titles, mahogany bookcases, a wrought-iron spiral staircase and, more surprisingly, a meridian line.

Spiral staircase in the main room at Bromley House Library. © Martine Hamilton Knight.

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

p FROM THE CHAIRMAN

With the Annual Report now available it is something of a seasonal custom for the Chairman to introduce the autumn magazine, and I am very pleased to welcome you to an issue that contains a fascinating showcase of the variety of our members’ work. Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, Jacqueline Riding offers her insights into the research in the Library that has underpinned her new book and the historical advice she provided for Mike Leigh’s 2018 film Peterloo. Simon Loftus describes a remarkable discovery made one sleepy afternoon in the Reading Room – a note scrawled in 1642 on the final page of the Library copy of his ancestor’s pamphlet written during the War of the Three Kingdoms.

Adrian Leak explores some of the Library titles that were an essential aid to his research for his book Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections. The artistry of the puppeteer and sculptor William Simmonds is celebrated by Jessica Douglas-Home, and Andrew Robinson browses the Library’s rich collection of titles on Albert Einstein, who is the subject of his latest book. We also welcome Martin Stott writing on Bromley House Library, as we continue our series on other historic independent libraries.

On the cover

Still from Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo, released in 2018, showing Mary Fildes, played by Dorothy Duffy, attacked on the hustings during the massacre.

Simon Mein © Thin Main Films.

In Members’ News we review performance against the first year of our 5-year strategy, which was launched to members in autumn 2018. Our targets are necessarily ambitious but we have made some encouraging progress in many areas, including reducing the core operating deficit by 14%. Perhaps the most notable achievement is that for the first time in 7 years the number of members of the Library increased in the financial year. It has been particularly pleasing to see so much of this growth coming from young people joining the Library, which bodes well for our future sustainability and is something we are very keen to see continue. We have also continued to receive generous support from our many donors; I thank them all for their generosity, which remains of vital importance to us. These are all very positive steps and, while we are still in the early stages of delivering our strategy, we have good reason to feel optimistic about the year ahead.

Howard Davies Chairman

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

Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 6 September 2019 © 2019 The London Library. ISSN 2398-4201.

The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publisher Jane Grylls Editor Mary Scott Design and production Catherine Cartwright Picture research Catherine Cartwright

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Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

CONTRIBUTORS

Jessica Douglas-Home

Mallams 1788

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2010

Jessica Douglas-Home trained at the Slade as a painter, etcher and theatre designer.

Her first book, Violet, a biography of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (1996), was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Jessica is also the author of Once Upon Another Time (2000), A Glimpse of Empire (2011) and William Simmonds: The Silent Heart of the Arts and Crafts Movement (2018).

Adrian Leak JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1999 Adrian Leak is an Anglican priest and journalist. He has contributed regularly to the Church Times, and occasionally to History Today, Theology and Country Life. His collection of essays, Nebuchadnezzar's Marmalade Pot, was published in 2017, and his recent collection, Archbishop Benson's Humming Top, in 2018.

The Library of the Late Eric Stanley, Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford Sale 25th September 2019 at 11am For more information: 01865 241358 or oxford@mallams.co.uk www.mallams.co.uk OXFORD

Simon Loftus JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1999

A former wine merchant, hotelier and brewery chairman, Simon Loftus has written several books on wine, travel and social history, including The Invention of Memory: An Irish Family Scrapbook (2013). His prizewinning Puligny Montrachet: Journal of a Village in Burgundy (1992) is about to be republished by Daunt Books.

Jacqueline Riding JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2014

Jacqueline Riding is an author and historical consultant. Her books include Jacobites (2016), Peterloo (2018) and a forthcoming biography of William Hogarth for Profile (2021). She was historical adviser on Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018), and Wash Westmoreland's Colette (2018).

Andrew Robinson JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1983

Andrew Robinson is the author of some 25 books covering both science and the arts, 6 of which are biographies.

They include The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2006), Genius: A Very Short Introduction (2011), Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity (2015) and Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist (2019).

Martin Stott JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2019 Martin Stott is a former BBC journalist who has made programmes for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service in 21 countries. He is CEO of the academic and financial services communications consultancy Bulletin PR. In his spare time he writes about garden history. Martin is a trustee of Bromley House Library in Nottingham.

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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BEHIND THE BOOK Adrian Leak reveals some of the Library titles that aided his research for his latest collection of essays, which were inspired by his wide and colourful experience of life as a country parson

‘

’

Adrian Leak’s Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections (Book Guild Ltd, 2018).

My recent book, Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections (2018), includes among other pieces 15 thumbnail portraits of churchmen and women over the centuries. For these I made extensive use of the Library’s collections. u Sidonius

Apollinaris and his Age by C.E. Stevens (Oxford 1933).

This book describes Sidonius Apollinaris, a fifth-century country gentleman born into the Romano-Gallic aristocracy. He held public office under his father-inlaw, the Emperor Avitus, and later under the Visigothic king, Theodoric II, before becoming Bishop of Clermont. He had a large library of classical authors and enjoyed a good read with his meal. u Bede’s Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. Christopher Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford 2013).

This edition of the Venerable Bede’s account of the foundation by Benedict Biscop of the twin monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, in 674 and 682 respectively, has a translation and introduction setting the historical context. Biscop’s abbey at Wearmouth (Sunderland) possessed one of the beststocked libraries north of the Alps; it was destroyed by Vikings. u Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Times, and Works, ed. Anne Lyon Haight (New York 1965).

Commissioned by the Hroswitha Club of New York, this title includes an informative account of Hroswitha, the tenth-century playwright, poet and nun of Gandersheim in Lower Saxony.

Influenced by the humanism of the

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

classics, she admitted an occasional preference for the polished elegance of Terence to the rugged Latin of the Vulgate. u Memoir of Richard Busby, D.D. (1606–1695): With Some Account of Westminster School in the Seventeenth Century by G.F. Russell Barker (London 1895).

In this slim volume the author gives an account of Richard Busby, the schoolmaster who taught Christopher Wren, John Locke and John Dryden. For much of the seventeenth century Busby was Headmaster of Westminster School.

Asked how he and the school survived the turbulence of the Commonwealth, he said, indicating Parliament next door: ‘The fathers rule the country, the mothers rule the fathers, the boys rule the mothers and I rule the boys. ’ After the Restoration the school’s link with the Church was restored and remained as strong as ever; Busby claimed to have birched 16 future bishops. u Onward Christian Soldier: A Life of Sabine Baring-Gould, Parson, Squire, Novelist, Antiquary, 1834–1924 by William Purcell, with an introduction by John Betjeman (London 1957).

A dedicated country parson, folklorist, historian and all-round polymath, Sabine Baring-Gould had a huge literary output, much of which is in the Library.

William Purcell’s biography provides a

fascinating account of this ‘squarson’ , who had little time for bishops and once described William Thomson, the officious Archbishop of York, as possessing ‘an autocratic temper such as was naturally bred in a man rapidly advanced from a breeches-maker’s shop in a small provincial town’ . u Things Past by Michael Sadleir (London 1944).

This most readable collection of essays by the publisher, art collector and author Michael Sadleir contains a piece about the bibliophile and country parson Francis Wrangham (1769–1842), whose library contained over 15,000 volumes. u Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life by Georgina Battiscombe (London 1981).

In Max Beerbohm’s caricature an exasperated Dante Gabriel Rossetti asks his sister: ‘What is the use, Christina, of having a heart like a singing bird and a water shoot and all the rest of it, if you insist on getting yourself up like a pew-opener?’ Christina Rossetti, now best known for her poem In the Bleak Midwinter, was afflicted throughout her life by self-doubt, which would probably be recognised now as clinical depression.

Georgina Battiscombe’s sensitive biography shines a light on the life and work of this troubled poet and – obliquely – on the world of the Pre-Raphaelites.

EinstEin On thE Run How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist

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MY DISCOVERY

‘

Simon Loftus came across some intriguing marginalia in a political pamphlet at the Library

’

While researching the history of Ireland as seen through the eyes of my family for my book The Invention of Memory: An Irish Family Scrapbook (2013), I was constantly waylaid by alluring digressions. I immersed myself in the blizzard of paper that poured from the presses during the War of the Three Kingdoms in the 1640s and 1650s – tens of thousands of violently polemical tracts, the invention of propaganda as an instrument of revolution. At times the thing itself, the physical object, told more intriguing tales than the printed text. Here is a story of one such discovery at The London Library that made it into my book.

On a sleepy afternoon at The London Library I was consulting various obscure seventeenth-century pamphlets, as a gentle susurration of snores rose from the leather armchairs at the far end of the Reading Room. The archaic language and complex phrases of what I was studying had a similarly somnolent effect. Even when I turned to Joyfull Newes from Ireland, written by my forebear Edward Loftus in 1642, my eyelids continued to droop. Then I noticed that a brief and urgent note had been scrawled on the final page: ‘Sr. Tho Bedingfield ye Reccorder of London committed to ye Tower, for refusing to Pleade for Mr Attorny gnrall. This news comitted by ye Lord[s]. ’ Suddenly I was wide awake, because I knew that this particular copy had originally belonged to James Stuart, Duke of Richmond, a cousin of Charles I. This was his writing, scribbled in haste, on the first piece of paper that came to hand.

Six months earlier this rich young Scotsman had loaned the enormous sum of £30,000 to his perennially indebted monarch, been rewarded with a dukedom and posed for his portrait – face like a whippet, sitting at his ease in a billowing white shirt, his hand on the neck of a favourite hound. It was one of those extraordinary images of a doomed generation of young cavaliers, immortalised by Anthony van Dyck.

Glamorous, haunting, superfluous, they strutted like fashion models in silk and ribbons and lace that would soon be torn, dragged in the mud, and stained with blood.

Death was foreshadowed when the Duke received a crucial message from

From top Simon Loftus’s The Invention of Memory (Daunt Books, 2013); James Stuart’s note found in the Library’s copy of Edward Loftus’s Joyfull Newes from Ireland (1642).

the House of Lords, on 9 March 1642, and jotted a note on my ancestor’s pamphlet. The news was bad, for the political skirmishing between King and Commons had at last found its focus with

an extraordinary tactical blunder by King Charles – the affair of the ‘Five Members’ .

England was on the brink of civil war.

Stubborn conceit was at the heart of things, because the Stuarts as a family almost completely lacked that essential attribute for royal survival, a true instinct for politics, and it was Charles I’s misfortune that he was opposed by one of the most brilliant political opportunists in English history, John Pym. Eventually Charles was so goaded by Pym’s cleverness that he tried to arrest him, together with four of his closest allies, within the supposedly privileged walls of the House of Commons – only to find that ‘the birds had flown’ , warned by their friends at Court. Parliament and the City combined in demonstrations of outrage. Within a week the King had fled London and Pym was carried in triumph back to Westminster in a procession of barges along the Thames.

George Digby, a close ally of the King, was impeached by Parliament for his part in this affair and so too was the Attorney General, Sir Edward Herbert. Digby fled to Holland but Herbert was committed for trial, and the House of Lords appointed Sir Thomas Bedingfield as counsel for his defence. The Commons saw no place for legal representation in a case of privilege and Bedingfield himself was reluctant to act. The Lords sent him to the Tower, to reflect on the realities of politics, and someone rushed to the Duke of Richmond to tell him what had happened.

The urgency with which he scribbled this news, as soon as he learned it, underlines its significance. This was an omen of all the disasters to come.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

PULLING THE STRINGS Jessica Douglas-Home explores the entrancing and transitory art of puppetry through the practice of the early twentieth-century sculptor and artist William Simmonds William Simmonds’s life after the First World War coincided with the second wave of the modernist Arts and Crafts movement.

His fame as a sculptor was then at its height, and his impact on the art world was greatest during this period, as was the interest of critics and serious connoisseurs in his work.

But second in importance to him after his work as a sculptor, and little known today, was his work on the art of the marionette – stringed puppets – and his position as one of Europe’s greatest puppet masters. This ancient form of theatre is one of the most magical forms of art, but it is ephemeral, similar in its transience to early opera, ballet and theatre before the arrival of recordings and film.

Simmonds’s expertise in this field came in part from his art-school training, 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

but his interest in it arose to some extent by accident. As he sat by his dying father’s bedside in 1912, he reminisced about being taken as a child to the Old Windsor Music Hall. He remembered a trick puppet which walked around with its head in its hand while another, a fairy, paved the way for a spellbinding transformation scene in which the head came off to make way for a cheese, then a second cheese, then a third, until the grotesque figure had ten cheeses in place of one head. To illustrate for his father the puppet’s movements, grip and traction, he found a piece of wood and carved the figure for him.

Later, delving into books, he discovered that the marionettes’ pedigree could be traced back thousands of years, and that puppet theatre could claim to be the oldest

form of dramatic art. Street-kiosk theatres had thrived in many different civilisations.

Puppet showmen are recorded in India, Tibet, Burma, Africa, Persia, China and Japan. The ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians had their puppet shows. These stringed puppets had existed in one form or another for centuries throughout Europe, but Simmonds was most influenced by those found in medieval Italy.

Records describe small, elaborately dressed and bejewelled carved images set up in the naves of churches for special occasions. These figures would perform episodes from the Old and New Testaments, and could be moved by an intricate mechanism. In the church of the Carmine in Florence, Giorgio Vasari describes a woodwork Christ leaving his disciples

on the Mount of Olives and being borne upwards, surrounded by innumerable angels in a cloud (made of well-prepared wool), ascending to a beautifully depicted Heaven. Towards the end of the eleventh century, marionettes began to be denounced as idolatrous by prelates and bishops. After the Decree of the Council of Trent two centuries later, they were forced out of churches.

But the little figures were never eradicated. From the sixteenth century onwards, Italian showmen were generally to be found roaming the countryside and giving performances on public roads, in marketplaces and at fairs; the puppet shows were equally popular with audiences from all walks of life. A librarian at the Vatican stopped every night to watch and admire them; the celebrated mathematician Girolamo Cardano wrote that ‘an entire day would not be sufficient in which to describe these puppets that play, fight, shoot, dance and make music’ . In Florence, Cosimo I ordered marionette shows at the Palazzo Vecchio, Francesco I at the Uffizi, and Lorenzo de’ Medici at his palace.

In France the sacred figures in the cathedrals and churches had an equally chequered history, culminating in a ban in 1443, when the priests finally put their foot down during the annual ceremony in Dieppe to celebrate the victory of the Dauphin over the British. The place had become invaded by burlesque episodes from the mitouries, as they called the marionettes. Like the Italian showmen – who as a result of crossing the borders had influenced their French and German counterparts – the travelling acts moved into the French countryside, gradually integrating real people into the scenes. The lead character, modelled on the classical figure, Polichinelle, from commedia dell’arte, was metamorphosing into Guignol, a good-humoured, clever, courageous and generous fellow. The caustic and witty plots satirising life in French villages and small towns invariably ended with the triumph of good over evil, a sense of justice always prevailing. By the sixteenth century the shows were welcomed into Paris, settled themselves firmly into parks including the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, and were even summoned to perform at the court of Louis XIV. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the golden age of the French

marionettes. The showmen developed their techniques with ever-increasing ingenuity and skill. Puppets slid on rails, they were held upright with disguised weights and counterweights, and the mise-en-scène became more elaborate, imitating and competing with the magnificence of larger theatres. Not only were the general public passionate advocates of marionette shows, but artists and writers such as Voltaire, JeanJacques Rousseau and George Sand, and musicians including Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet, also revelled in their magic.

Traditional theatres were losing their public to puppet shows to such a degree that the directors and actors called for their closure. As many had written over the centuries, and as was famously suggested by the actress Leonora Duse, puppets could be far more effective than living actors.

This view was supported by many of Duse’s contemporaries, including George Bernard

Shaw and Edward Gordon Craig.

It was perhaps Louis Lemercier de Neuville’s rare and exquisite puppets, performing in the tiny Erotikon Theatron on Rue de la Santé in Paris in the 1860s, which came nearest to Simmonds’s genius. But in contrast to Simmonds’s single-handed performances, de Neuville’s wooden dolls were backed up by a large group of artists, writers and musicians who looked after the lighting, the stage sets, dialogue, costumes and choice of music. According to the French press, de Neuville’s puppets were ‘modelled with unsurpassed refinement and animation … in the working and making he had lavished his heart … his most charming of all marionettes, Pierrot Guintariste … in his gesture and bearing was a masterpiece of mechanical and plastic art … the most highly perfected puppet ever created’ . And another remarkable doll would ‘enter, bow in one hand, instrument

Opposite Columbine and Harlequin dance to the ‘Greensleeves’ overture in William Simmonds’s new version of Harlequinade, first performed in public in 1916.

Above Simmonds carving a puppet in his workshop in Oakridge, Gloucestershire, c.1930.

Right Scene from the Teatro dei Piccoli’s production of Ottorino Respighi’s opera The Sleeping Beauty, which Simmonds saw in London in 1923.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

in another, seat himself, tune up and play’ .

It was not the French but the Italian marionettes that Simmonds researched with most care. The wandering showmen had reached London soon after Charles II returned from France to regain the monarchy. Samuel Pepys mentions the commedia dell’arte and its star character, Pulchinello, after watching a marionette show in Covent Garden. One can hardly name a single English poet, writer or dramatist, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Milton, through Pepys, Lord Byron and William Hazlitt, who did not somehow incorporate these stringed puppets into their works. William Shakespeare is said to have taken the idea of Julius Caesar from a puppet play of the same title performed near the Tower of London. Dr Johnson considered a fantoccini (jointed string puppet) performance of Macbeth to be no less satisfactory than when played by actors. Ben Jonson included a famous contemporary showman in his troupe for Bartholomew Fair (1614). In Jonathan Swift’s first, brilliant prose parody A Tale of a Tub (1704), puppets delve into the morals and character of the English. Some claim that Milton drew his ideas from Paradise Lost from an Italian marionette production he had once witnessed. Byron was said to have found the model for his poem Don Juan (1819) in the popular play of Punch.

Incrementally, over the decades, Italian puppets’ characters were transformed in Britain from the dashing Pulchinello into the merry, wicked, aggressive, anarchic, cackling Punch who beats up his wife, Judy, and their child. But the crude rough and tumble that dominated fairgrounds in

Simmonds’s day bore no resemblance to the performances he was to give Wiltshire villagers in 1912. In his Harlequinade, a finely sculpted, delicate-costumed trio danced from scene to scene, with Harlequin (Arlecchino) eloping with his mistress Columbine (Colombina), pursued by the girl’s foolish father, Pantaloon (Pantalone), who, together with a Clown, tries to separate the lovers.

When the First World War broke out, Simmonds, now aged 36, was ineligible to enlist, and so moved to London in search of war work. In an interview with the electrical engineer Colonel Crompton, he submitted sketchbooks with his technical drawings of carts, wagons and eighteenth-century windmills. They so impressed the colonel that he signed him up immediately to work on the development of the military tank.

But at night Simmonds worked on serious pieces of sculpture, and also found time for his growing troupe of marionettes. He created scenes from classical mythology, village life, a seaside town, moving from gentle satire to shows that were pure poetry. Music had always played an important part in creating the scenes, as a stimulus to the audience’s imagination. This was true of all marionette performances. Mozart’s puppet opera Bastien and Bastienne (1768) was revered; Manuel de Falla’s first masterpiece was a chamber opera with puppets taken from an episode in Faust; Haydn composed a singspiel for marionettes in Philemon and Baucis and Der Götterath, and from 1847 the French novelist George Sand dedicated her theatre at Nohant to puppets’ music and plays.

Simmonds’s choice of music was a combination of Cecil Sharp’s English folk-song discoveries, and early music pieces which the German scholar Arnold Dolmetsch had recently uncovered in British museums and libraries. Each made technical demands as complex as those of an operetta, albeit in miniature.

Song, dialogue, libretto, choreography, the building of the stage and the design of the sets – all this Simmonds had to control as he transmitted emotions through the strings into the responsive figures. His wife, Eve, made all the costumes, and accompanied each skit on a Dolmetsch spinet, virginal or clavichord.

In 1915, Emery Walker, a close colleague of William Morris, offered Simmonds his first public show at the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square in London – an endorsement of Simmonds and confirmation of his stature in the Arts and Crafts movement.

The audiences were bewitched. The performances sold out. The Times theatre critic A.B. Walkley, who had come across Simmonds’s marionettes in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s International Theatre Exhibition and had devoted his whole column to the brilliance of the puppets, weighed in again six months later with another effusive review. His fascination with the ‘tiny figures’ had grown: he described one skit as ‘a Chaucerian play of mythological nymphs, fauns and hamadryads – which suggested a picture by a cinquecento artist illustrating a short story from his medieval legend series by Anatole France’ .

After the war Simmonds and Eve moved to the Cotswolds. The marionette performances now cast their spell in country houses, village halls and, less often, in London at the Grafton Theatre. In 1927, Simmonds took his marionettes to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, where the Theatre de Guignol puppets were still firmly installed, exuding vitality and charm.

Simmonds had seen the spectacular Italian Teatro dei Piccoli at the London Coliseum in 1923. The scale of the production was astonishing. The company had brought 500 marionettes, each 4 feet high, with 12 people to operate them at any one time on stage. They opened with a play Scene from Richard Teschner’s 1929 production of Der Drachentöter (The Dragon Killer).

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PULLING THE STRINGS

Left Simmonds’s puppet Estella, dressed by Eve Simmonds, on Snowball in the play Circus, first performed in public after the First World War.

by Shakespeare. Then there was ballet, and several operas with music by Richard Wagner, Gaetano Donizetti and Henry Purcell.

Simmonds had missed out on seeing the centuries-old German shows which were still playing in repertory until the war, such as The Public Beheading of the Virgin Dorothea, or the mass of variations on Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (1592). The young Goethe had written a Faustus satire for his own puppets in 1769, and is said to have drawn inspiration for his masterpiece Faust from a peripatetic Geisselbrecht production.

In Germany after the First World War puppet shows had become so numerous that those running them had formed a guild, with their own customs and regulations; no written scripts were allowed, even for the prompters. A puppetry apprenticeship could last several years and would involve memorising the words, songs and noises.

Only after this training were puppeteers entitled to present their own shows and to wear the special attire – a large black cloak and a broad-rimmed hat. But German marionette productions in the Berlin theatres were by this stage predominantly slapstick and held less interest for Simmonds.

However, when the film of the AustroCzech Richard Teschner’s marionettes came to the London Film Society in 1932, Simmonds was interested. Born in

Prague, Teschner had been a painter and sculptor before devoting his life to puppetry and had moved to Vienna to explore new techniques, much of which he derived from ancient Javanese rod puppets. He, like Simmonds, designed and made the stage, props, scenery, puppets and lighting, and wrote the dialogue and songs. Instead of projecting shadows on a screen, Teschner put his figures on an ordinary stage, and manipulated them with thin sticks from below. Sometimes he gave them German folk characteristics and made them resemble comfortable German bourgeoisie. In other scenes he created misshapen animals similar to the deep-sea monsters in paintings of the Temptation of St Anthony or in early Christian conceptions of the Inferno. At other times he looked to the East, producing a strange musician with an Assyrian headdress, or an enchantress in gorgeous stiff robes, with menacing eyebrows.

Simmonds found them finely carved, subtle and beautiful. He had met his match.

It was not until 1936 that Simmonds came across another innovative and clever showman, the German puppeteer Harro Siegel. His repertoire was designed according to the trends of the emerging German musical movement of the time.

Siegel had been touring with his troupe around Europe, and asked if he could visit the Cotswolds to pay homage to Simmonds – and see his puppets at work. He must surely have cribbed Simmonds’s white

Above The German puppet master Harro Siegel carved his Horse and Rider after seeing Simmonds’s puppets in Gloucestershire in the early 1930s.

horse, Snowball, so similar is the fine, prancing animal to the one that Siegel made later.

What was it in Simmonds’s performances that so entranced Siegel, the English poets, the artists and musicians of his day – not only Shaw and Gordon Craig, but the poet John Drinkwater, the composer Ethel Smyth, the Russian prima ballerina Lydia Lopokova, the musician Violet Gordon Woodhouse and countless others? Few today watch this beautiful art form. Most of us have tolerated the second-rate Punch and Judy performances which appear sporadically at village fêtes.

Perhaps some recall the lightweight televised nonsense of The Muppets in the 1970s and 1980s.

But dig deeper and the old art is still there, at Stephen and Lyndie Wright’s Little Angel Theatre in Islington and the Curious School of Puppetry. In London theatres, puppets played a central role in two National Theatre productions – His Dark Materials (2003) with Michael Curry’s puppets, and War Horse (2007) with puppets

by Toby Sedgwick and Handspring – and at the Old Vic, where the production of Wise Children (2018) featured Lyndie and Sarah Wright’s puppets. In Wiltshire, Devon and Cornwall, ingenious small puppet performances can be found. Go further west to Wales, and north into Scotland, and here, too, shows are waiting to be discovered.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

HIDDEN CORNERS: EINSTEIN & ENGLAND

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This year marks the centenary of the confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity by English astronomers. Andrew Robinson explores the Library’s collection of titles on the scientist.

We generally picture Albert Einstein in relation to Germany, where he was born in 1879; Switzerland, where he first became a physicist around the turn of the century; the United States, where he settled in Princeton during his last two decades until his death in 1955; or Israel, to which he willed his massive archives, kept at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Less often considered is Britain. Yet it would be no exaggeration to say that Britain is the country that made Einstein into the worldwide phenomenon he is today. My new book, Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist, is the first to be devoted to his relationship with Britain.

Naturally, I began my research at The London Library. Its extensive collection of titles by and about Einstein ranges from the Biography and Physics shelf marks to History, Philosophy and Religion – and even in Fiction we find the physicist Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams (1992). Inevitably, the collection forms only a fraction of what has been published – more than 1,700 individual books on Einstein at the latest count – although most of the really significant publications are included, some of which are highly technical. Top of the list for importance – if not always for readability – is The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, a monumental project launched in the United States in the 1980s by Princeton University Press, which in 2018 published volume 15, The Berlin Years: Writings and Correspondence, June 1925–May 1927, leaving nearly three decades of Einstein’s papers still to appear in print (and online).

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“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself”

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Using the Library collections, one gradually comes to appreciate why Einstein is one of the most widely quoted people of all time, and probably the most quoted figure from the twentieth century.

Beyond science, Einstein was an avid commentator on education, marriage, money, the nature of genius, musicmaking, politics and more. ‘To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself’ , he joked in an aphorism written for a friend in Germany in 1930. That same year, at a speech in Einstein’s honour in London, George Bernard Shaw (who knew Einstein personally) memorably remarked of him: ‘I rejoice at the new universe to which he has introduced us. I rejoice in the fact that he has destroyed all the old sermons, all the old absolutes, all the old cut and dried conceptions, even of time and space, which were so discouraging. ’ To which a humble Einstein humorously responded (in German): ‘I, personally, thank you for the unforgettable words which you have

addressed to my mythical namesake, who has made my life so burdensome, ’ yet who, ‘in spite of his awkwardness and respectable dimension, is, after all, a very harmless fellow’ .

Einstein’s personal relationship with Britain began in 1919, exactly a century ago. Until then, his name was known only to a handful of British physicists chiefly in Cambridge and Oxford, almost all of whom discreetly or openly distrusted Einstein’s theory of relativity – not least because it was in conflict with the physics of Isaac Newton, which had been generally accepted since the seventeenth century.

Einstein’s ‘special’ theory, published in 1905, introduced a new understanding of space and time, including the equation that linked energy, mass and the speed of light: E = mc². It was followed 10 years later by the ‘general’ theory, in which Einstein extended the concept to include accelerated motion and gravity, based on a highly sophisticated mathematical conception of ‘space-time’ . According to Newton’s theory of gravity, light rays are attracted by gravitational forces because light is made of tiny particles that Newton called ‘corpuscles’ . On their journey from a distant star to our eyes on Earth, the trajectory of these particles would be very slightly curved or ‘deflected’ by the gravity of the sun. Einstein agreed with Newton’s idea, but in 1915–16 he used his general theory of relativity to recalculate the deflection of light and found that it would actually be twice the amount predicted

by Newton. If the magnitude of the actual deflection could be measured, it would

Left Drawing of Einstein

by William Rothenstein in 1927, made in Einstein’s study in Berlin.

Below Einstein with astronomer Arthur Eddington at the Cambridge Observatory, 1930, photographed

by Eddington’s sister, Winifred.

show whose theory of gravity was correct, Newton’s or Einstein’s. ‘The examination of the correctness or otherwise of this deduction is a problem of the greatest importance, the early solution of which is to be expected of astronomers, ’ wrote the relatively obscure Einstein in wartime Berlin.

Then, in November 1919, Einstein suddenly became world famous when his general theory was confirmed in London

by British astronomical observations of a May solar eclipse. These observations were led by Arthur Eddington, a Cambridge astronomer, whose life and work are described in fellow-astronomer Allie Vibert Douglas’s accessible biography, The Life of Arthur Stanley Eddington (1956), and more recently in Matthew Stanley’s up-to-date but academically oriented Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington (2007). Eddington’s first study, Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation, published in 1918 prior to the eclipse, and intended for the mathematically trained, is in the Library’s Physics section of Science & Miscellaneous. So, too, is the first book in English about relativity for the non-scientific reader, the Oxford physicist Henry Brose’s The Theory of Relativity: An Introductory Sketch Based on Einstein’s Original Writings including a Biographical Note (1919). Though the book is long forgotten, its imprint page shows that Basil Blackwell published the book in Oxford in December 1919 and promptly reprinted it four times in four months, such was the sudden British public interest aroused

by Einstein and relativity. Readable as it THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

Blackboard used by Einstein at Rhodes House, Oxford, in 1931. His calculations describe the density, size and age of the expanding cosmos, and contain a mathematical error.

Preserved by Oxford dons against the wishes of Einstein, the blackboard is today the History of Science Museum in Oxford’s most famous object.

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is, Brose’s book was soon overtaken by Einstein’s own account (also in Physics), Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920), written in collaboration with a physicist (and gifted populariser), Robert W. Lawson. This book was an immediate bestseller, and remains in print.

Einstein’s entanglement with Britain was both intellectual and emotional. On the walls of his apartment in 1920s Berlin, and later in his Princeton house, Einstein hung portraits of three British physicists: Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell – and no other scientists. In 1927, he wrote from Germany to a British physicist in Oxford, Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell): ‘in England … my work has received greater recognition than anywhere else in the world. ’ He escaped from Europe and the Nazis to the United States in 1933. In 1937, he told Max Born – a Nobel laureate like Einstein, and a fellow refugee now settled in Edinburgh – that Britain was ‘the most civilised country of the day’ . The comment appears in The Born-Einstein Letters, a classic work in Biog. Einstein. The book first appeared in 1971 just after Born’s death, with a 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

“In England my work has received greater recognition than anywhere else in the world”

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foreword by Bertrand Russell and an introduction by Werner Heisenberg, both of whom had known Einstein personally, if from very different angles: Russell as a philosopher and pacifist, Heisenberg as a physicist who attempted to build an atomic bomb for the Nazis.

A relatively unfamiliar fact, even to some Einstein biographers, is that in autumn 1933, before he settled in America, Einstein took refuge in England.

The key text about the subject is probably The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror (1933), a pioneering if now seldom mentioned

volume, in H. German Republic.

Compiled anonymously by a Stalinist secret agent, Otto Katz, using anonymous eye-witness accounts from Germany, and illustrated with horrendous photographs of victims of Nazi terror, it was officially published by the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism on 1 August in German, and appeared a month later in an English edition published in London by the Communist sympathiser Victor Gollancz, with an endorsement by Einstein. Although he had nothing at all to do with the book’s writing, Einstein’s praise convinced the Nazi regime that he was in fact the book’s author – as openly declared by the Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, in late 1933. It commented furiously: ‘In this book, in the foulest way, [Einstein] incites people against Germany, appeals for a preventive war and demands that this country, from whom the whole world has received only benefits, be manured with the blood of its people. ’ Immediately, Einstein became public enemy number one of the Nazi regime, as arrestingly described by the Einsteins’

HIDDEN CORNERS Nazi view of Einstein, published in the Deutsche Tageszeitung on 1 April 1933, Germany’s first national day boycotting its Jews. It shows Einstein being booted out of the German embassy in Brussels. Soon after, he applied for release from German citizenship, having relocated his residence from Germany to Belgium.

Polish friend Antonina Vallentin, who was present in their exiled home in Le Coq on the coast of Belgium at the time.

Her book Einstein: A Biography (1954) is an eyewitness account that has been somewhat neglected by later Einstein biographers. ‘Belgium was dangerously near Germany, ’ recalled Vallentin after a visit to the Einstein house in August 1933.

‘There was a rumour that [Hermann] Göring’s brother had come to Le Coq. Men with foreign accents asked too many questions about Einstein. Suspicious individuals roamed around the house. ’ One such approach started with a letter from an unknown man urgently requesting an interview with Einstein: an incident related by Einstein’s wife, Elsa, to an Austrian physicist, Philipp Frank, who also visited the Einsteins in Belgium, and described the story in Einstein: His Life and Times (1948). Elsa refused the man for fear of trouble, but when he repeatedly insisted, she agreed to see him alone without her husband. The man informed her that he was a former Nazi storm trooper who had fallen out with the Brown Shirts and was now opposed to them. He

was willing to sell Einstein all the secrets of the paramilitary organisation for 50,000 francs. ‘Why do you assume that Professor Einstein is interested in the secrets of your former party?’ asked Mrs Einstein.

‘Oh, we all know very well that Professor Einstein is the leader of the opposing party throughout the entire world, and that such a purchase would therefore be very important to him, ’ the stranger ingenuously replied, as a deeply worried Elsa reported to Frank.

Belgian policemen, on instructions from the Belgian king, protected Einstein night and day. But he was plainly at risk, especially after the murder by Nazi agents in Czechoslovakia on 30 August of an Einstein associate, the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing (much of whose work appears in German in the collections).

On 8 September came international press announcements that a secret Nazi terror organisation, the Fehme (associated with the murder of Germany’s foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in 1922), had placed a price on Einstein’s head: £1,000 according to the London Daily Herald; 20,000 marks, said the New York Times.

‘Whether the story is true or not we do not know, ’ warned the Sunday Times on 10 September, but if it were, ‘the Nazi hotheads’ should ‘take fair warning and think twice of this folly before it is too late.

If they should commit this crime against humanity the conscience of the whole civilised world will rise against them, and the German Government will find itself execrated and isolated as no German Government has been before or since the war. ’ By the time this comment appeared, Einstein was in England. As discussed in Ronald W. Clark’s biography, Einstein: The Life and Times (1971) – a deeply researched study including many interviews with people personally involved with Einstein – on 9 September, at his wife’s insistence, Einstein had packed a few bags with vital books and papers, and caught a boat and train from Belgium to London. He settled in England – but not in Oxford, whose university had welcomed him in 1931 and 1932, then sheltered him as a refugee in May and June 1933, as vividly recalled by the Oxford economist Roy Harrod in The Prof: A Personal Memoir of Lord Cherwell (1959). Instead he stayed in a secret holiday hut on a remote heath in Norfolk.

There, under the armed protection of Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, a Conservative MP and First World War veteran, he could supposedly concentrate on theoretical physics, away from prying eyes.

Yet although Einstein felt deep gratitude to, and admiration for, England – for inspiring his love of physics as a teenager in the 1890s; for confirming his immortal theory of relativity in 1919; and for saving his life in 1933 – he did not settle in England and instead went to America, never to return to Europe, even after the Second World War. There, attached to the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Einstein enjoyed – exactly as he chose – both perfect solitude in his study at home and also interaction with the world’s leading physicists at the Institute. For Einstein, throughout his life, personal freedom and scientific research always took precedence over human relationships. In Einstein Lived Here (1994), the physicist Abraham Pais, who knew Einstein well at Princeton, wrote: ‘If I had to characterise Einstein by one single word, I would choose apartness. ’

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

PETERLOO

FROM PAGE TO SCREEN Jacqueline Riding looks back at her experience as historical adviser to Mike Leigh on his film about the Peterloo Massacre, the 200th anniversary of which has been marked this year I began working with Mike Leigh in 2011 after responding to a job advertisement in the Guardian for an experienced researcher and specialist in British art. The film, at that stage referred to as ‘Untitled 13’ , was released in 2014 as Mr. Turner. I soon discovered that the historian working on a Mike Leigh movie was required to advise on and provide detail about an extraordinary breadth of subject matter.

For Mr. Turner my work covered every aspect of the artist’s life and, more broadly, his times, from the physical appearance of the Royal Academy of Art’s Annual Exhibition and, specifically, the exhibits in 1832, 1845 and 1850 (covering the three sequences seen in the film), to early nineteenth-century housekeeping and cookery, including recipes involving a pig’s head, and the contents of a physician’s medical bag in the 1830s and 1840s. The

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role involved working very closely with Mike himself – being his ‘extra brain’ , as he described it – as well as with the producers, assistant directors, departments covering costume, make-up and hair, production design, and alongside the cast, whether in groups (by character type, ‘artist’ , for example) or individually.

Given the sheer scale and variety of information needed, I turned to The London Library. I had experienced the huge benefits of membership when I was assistant curator at the Palace of Westminster in the 1990s, and I continued to consult the collections throughout the two-year period from pre- to post-production. Coupled with the ability to take books home and the range of online resources (including the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, 19th-Century British Library Newspapers and the Times Digital Archive

1785–2010, which are, for me, invaluable), browsing the open shelves provided many discoveries – and distractions – on the way.

When Mike announced at the end of 2014 that the focus of his next project was the Peterloo Massacre, an event which, historically, occurred just before the opening scene of Mr. Turner, I returned to the Library. Here I can only offer a hint as to the diversity of the research covered for this film, which then underpinned my accompanying narrative history, published in 2018 as Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre, and the richness of the Library’s collections on the topic. But before I continue on the research, I will set out briefly the events in Manchester on 16 August 1819.

On that day, at an area of open ground known as St Peter’s Field, local yeomanry cavalry – an amateur citizen regiment who were, from the evidence of most eyewitnesses, desperately ill prepared, some drunk – supported by British-army regulars, including the 15th Hussars, tore through a pro-democracy meeting of 60,000 people. At that time around 2 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population could vote and Manchester had no Member of Parliament (the entire county of Lancashire had only two MPs), so they had gathered to demand universal male suffrage and equal representation in Parliament. The event itself lasted less than half an hour, but in that short time at least 15 of the people present, including an infant and 2 women, were killed or died later from their injuries, and over 650 were beaten, sabred and maimed. This was the British state, only four years after the defeat of the ‘tyrant’ Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo, turning its forces against the people – artisans,

tradesmen, women, children – as they peaceably exercised their time-honoured right to demonstrate. For the authorities charged with keeping the King’s Peace, whether the Home Office in Whitehall or local magistrates, such a vast gathering (the equivalent of half the total population of Manchester at the time) appeared to signal imminent revolution. They had some justification to be wary, given, for the region, the unprecedented scale of the event, and were expected by the government to prepare for any acts of sedition, violence or riot, including calling on the military to assist the civil powers. But the response on the day was (to put it mildly) ham-fisted and, as no illegality was displayed by the organisers, speakers or crowd, totally unwarranted.

Opinions today differ regarding the long-term historical significance of the Peterloo Massacre. Dominic Sandbrook, writing in the Sunday Times (14 October 2018), considered the story ‘fascinating and moving’ but ultimately judged the events, in the greater scheme of things, as ‘a pin prick’ . By contrast Tristram Hunt believed it to be ‘one of the defining moments’ of modern Britain, a sentiment echoed by Professor John Bew, who characterises it as one of the ‘greatest scandals’ in the political history of the nation. The subsequent clampdown, with the introduction of draconian parliamentary legislation, against such meetings and against the radical press which had encouraged the mobilisation of people across the country, was devastating to the cause for reform of Parliament in the short term. Yet if one battle for reform and parliamentary representation was lost on St Peter’s Field, ultimately the reformers and radicals won the war, as history reveals.

Bringing this extraordinarily rich and pertinent story to the screen, specifically the lead-up to the event and the massacre itself, was a daunting prospect. It encompasses local, regional, national and international history; the function and personnel of the Home Office and the magistracy; royalty, government and Parliament; the military – professional and amateur – the Industrial Revolution (or revolutions) and the living conditions and experiences of the urban and rural labouring class; folk music, culture and traditions; the religion of the state and nonconformity; education and literature; the reform movement, including female participation; the press and political publications, and much more. The Library’s

Opposite An engraving depicting the forcible dispersal of the reform meeting in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, 16 August 1819. Published 27 August 1819 by J. Evans and Sons, West Smithfield, London.

Image © Alamy Stock Photos.

Above Still from Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo, released in 2018, showing Samuel Bamford, played

by Neil Bell, and the Middleton Marchers. All film stills in this article, Simon Mein © Thin Man Films.

Left Henry Hunt, played by Rory Kinnear, speaking to Hampden Club reformers.

extensive and diverse collections were essential. A basic search of the Library holdings revealed most if not all of the core texts published on the subject, from R.J. White’s Waterloo to Peterloo (1957) and Donald Read’s Peterloo: The ‘Massacre’ and its Background (1958) to E.P. Thompson’s ground-breaking The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Robert Reid’s eminently readable The Peterloo Massacre (1989). The famous, or infamous (depending on your view), Peterloo: The Case Reopened (1969) by Robert Walmsley, an attempt to exonerate his relative William Hulton, the chairman of the assembled magistrates who ordered the troops on to the field, is also in the collection. The fact that no narrative

history had been published since 1989 covering the whole subject, aimed at the general reader and integrating the gamut of eye-witness accounts and archival material alongside the fresh scholarship and new perspectives which had arisen over the subsequent decades, was surprising – it was an obvious gap that demanded to be filled.

For military history, particularly looking for information on the 15th Hussars and the Yeomanry Cavalry, I scoured the H. Army, English and H. Reg. Hist. shelves, alighting on John Mollo’s Waterloo Uniforms: I: British Cavalry (1973) and Frederick Leary’s The Earl of Chester’s Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry: Its Formation and Services, 1797– 1897 (1898). For the customs of Lancashire, THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

including the community parades known as ‘rush bearings’ which influenced the behaviour of the marchers who, from far beyond Manchester, converged on St Peter’s Field, I browsed the S. Folklore &c. section. There I discovered the brilliant work of John Harland and Thomas Turner Wilkinson, including their Lancashire Legends, Tradition, Pageants, Sports (1882). The Biography shelfmark proved vital for key publications on some of the high-profile protagonists. The former Speaker, Prime Minister and in 1819 Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, played in the film by Karl Johnson, is described in Philip Ziegler’s Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (1965).

The life of the famous radical Henry Hunt, who was the great attraction on the day, played by Rory Kinnear, is recounted in John Belchem’s ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (1985) and in Memoirs of Henry Hunt (3 vols., 1820), penned in his prison cell. The Middleton silk weaver, poet and ardent reformer Samuel Bamford, played by Neil Bell, wrote a wonderfully rich and informative autobiography, Passages of the Life of a Radical (1844).

On the subject of the female reformers, who publicly supported the demand for universal male suffrage, gaining notoriety

and abuse in newspapers and satirical engravings as a result, Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1997) in H. England, Social &c. presented an excellent overview. The Manchester Man (1876), the novel by Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks (also known as Isabella Banks), is the source (in an endnote) of what happened to the most prominent woman on the day, the President of the Manchester Female Reform Society, Mary Fildes (played by Dorothy Duffy), who was standing on the hustings, alongside Henry Hunt, when it was attacked by the yeomanry cavalry: ‘Mrs. Fildes, hanging suspended by a nail in the platform which had caught her white dress, was slashed across her exposed body by one of the brave cavalry. ’ In order to bring Regency, and specifically post-Waterloo, Manchester to life, a perusal of the shelves in the sections T. England, S. Industries and S. Cotton revealed some gems, including A Picture of Manchester (1816; the Library also has a third edition of c.1826), a contemporary guide to the town and its sister township of Salford by local lad, journalist and playwright Joseph Aston (1762–1844). His pithy descriptions of the key cultural, charitable, legal and governmental institutions and buildings

provide a wonderful snapshot of a town in transformation. Using the 1816 edition was particularly important, as central Manchester underwent significant change in the 1820s, including street widening, demolition and major building work. At the time of the massacre, St Peter’s Field, on the southern edge of the town, was in the process of being cleared for new streets and residences, including Lower Mount Street (where the magistrates watched as the terrible events played out), Windmill Street and Peter Street. As described by Aston in 1816, Manchester was an interesting mix of medieval and Tudor buildings, with elegant modern Georgian additions. Aston’s maps and vignette illustrations were immediately sent to the production designer, Suzie Davies, and her team. Additional information was gleaned from John Aikin’s A Description of the Country from Thirty and Forty Miles Round Manchester (1795).

Using such literary resources, alongside the superb visual material at Chetham’s Library in Manchester, the production design team and location managers were armed to scout for suitable locations. In the event, not one second of film was shot in Manchester itself, as a great Victorian and modern city has emerged since the massacre, yet – although the Midland Hotel and the Free Trade Hall (also, now, a hotel) Left Film still showing workers’ housing in Ancoats.

Opposite The labouringclass radical John Johnston, played by Johnny Byrom, addresses a political meeting on the moors.

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occupy the site of St Peter’s Field – the street plan would still be familiar to Aston and his contemporaries. Instead, with the skill of Suzie and her team, central Chester and Lincoln, the magnificent Old Hall at Gainsborough and the Historic Dockyard at Chatham were transformed into early nineteenth-century Manchester, and Tilbury Fort in Essex was used for St Peter’s Field itself. Regarding the latter, additional façades were built around the parade ground and CGI did the rest.

But this was only part of the story.

Manchester (and more broadly Lancashire) was also the centre of textile production and by 1819, in areas of the city such as Ancoats and New Islington to the north, the modern age in the form of the industrial revolutions had already transformed the townscape, with multi-storey factories and streets of terraced back-to-back workers’ housing rising at an astonishing rate. For this subject I turned to the sections S. Industries, S. Cotton and, again, Biography, and publications such as R.S. Fitton and A.P. Wadsworth’s The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830: A Study of the

Early Factory System (1958); C.H. Lee’s A Cotton Enterprise, 1795–1840: A History of M’Connel & Kennedy, Fine Cotton Spinners (1972); and the translated journal of the Swiss engineer and industrialist J.C. Fischer in J.C. Fischer and his Diary of Industrial England 1814–51, edited by William Otto Henderson (1966). Fischer hints at the social impact the new technology had had on the handloom weavers and spinners of Lancashire, who were to come in their droves on 16 August 1819, in his comment: ‘when one sees these power looms for oneself it is easy to appreciate the bitter feelings of the men who have been thrown out of work [by them]. Fifty of these looms – operated by one and the same steam engine – stood in a medium-sized room. Each was no more than about 4 feet in height, length and width. They were operated by 15 artisans and one foreman. ’ Peterloo is demonstrably an important milestone on the journey to democracy in the UK, yet it is a piece of the nation’s history which, at best, has been studied ad hoc across the country, and the majority of British citizens, who have benefited from

the determination and sacrifice of their forebears, knowing little or nothing about it. Worse still, judging from recent election turn-out, the right to vote and achieving equal representation in Parliament are sadly undervalued by a significant proportion of the electorate. Peterloo received its UK premiere in Manchester in October 2018, and although in itself the film cannot be expected to raise participation in general and local elections, if nothing else it heralded the imminent arrival of the 200th anniversary. Nearly a year on from its release, we can say that cinema-goers and online viewers, at home and across the world, are much better informed about why and how we in the UK possess the rights that we do. With the bicentenary commemoration in full stride, involving events organised across the country throughout 2019 but with the focus, rightly, on Manchester and England’s north-west, now even more of us are wiser still. Through my research undertaken for the film and accompanying book, the Library has played an important part in helping to bring this crucial story back into national prominence.

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BROMLEY HOUSE LIBRARY Our series on independent historic libraries continues with a profile of a haven for bibliophiles in Nottingham by Martin Stott, a trustee of the institution

Left Inside Bromley House Library, Nottingham. © Martine Hamilton Knight. Above Rear door from the members’ garden.

It has always been easy to miss the heavy wooden door nestled between the grimy windows of a Barnardo’s charity shop and a newsagent. It is even easier at the moment as the building is buried in scaffolding.

Behind that doorway, and up the decorative, lead-covered stairway, lies the room at the heart of Bromley House Library in Nottingham. It is magical – mahogany bookcases, a grandfather clock, books from floor to ceiling and a wroughtiron spiral staircase that entices you further upwards (‘one person at a time please’) to a balconied gallery. Glass doors to the side lead into one of those library rooms you see in stately homes – the kind that are roped off, leaving you staring wistfully at the shelves and teasing armchairs beyond.

This is Bromley House Library. It was created in 1816 and moved into this gorgeous Grade II* listed Georgian townhouse five years later. It has just won a much-needed £386,000 grant from English Heritage to replace the 267-yearold roof, hence the web of scaffolding.

For years a heavy downpour has had staff running around the attics with buckets and calling in the roofer to do another urgent patch job. When the new roof is 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

completed the bookcases in the attics will be modernised and lighting updated.

Children’s books will be moved up here into a room with a Narnia wardrobe leading to a small chamber of books behind. It should become a draught-free space for more of the soft armchairs that are currently dotted around the building, encouraging people to rest and read.

There are around 50,000 books here, including some rare treasures and particularly good selections of early travel books and theology. Around a thousand new books are purchased each year.

These are a broad mix of publications recommended by members – from a history of the Opium Wars to poems about cats.

This balance between popular and ‘intriguing eclectic’ may help explain why membership has more than doubled in the past decade to nearly 1,700. You constantly stumble on pleasant surprises among the shelves. An annual household membership cost of just £104 may be another contributory factor in the library’s success. Credit also goes to the knowledgeable and welcoming staff, who will enthusiastically introduce readers to

new authors and who organise stimulating talks on a wide variety of topics.

Like many of Britain’s subscription libraries, Bromley House promises a sanctuary – a place of precious calm ­– in a cacophonous world. But there is one thing it offers that no other library can: a meridian line. A brass strip runs from the foot of the window in the newspaper reading room, diagonally across the floor.

The observant might notice that one of the panels in the window has been boarded with a piece of thin wood out of which has been cut a hole the size of a two-pence coin.

This means that on a sunny day, towards midday, a disc of light is cast on to the floor. As noon strikes, the disc hits the middle of the brass strip. When the mathematician George Green and his fellow Bromley House members were first using this building in the first half of the nineteenth century, this was how they kept accurate time. Today, a chart on the wall helpfully warns us that midday at Bromley House is 4 minutes 36 seconds behind Greenwich mean time.

This is a place where it feels comfortable to be behind the times.

MEMBERS’ NEWS ‘NEW FOUNDATIONS’ – THE STRATEGIC PLAN FOR THE LONDON LIBRARY In the autumn of 2018 the trustees approved a new 5-year strategy which sets the overall direction and key aims of the Library up to 2023. Encouraging progress has been made during 2018–2019.

The aim of the strategy, which was introduced to members at the 2018 AGM, is to expand the Library’s reach and impact, while restoring its finances to balance, creating ‘new foundations’ for the future. A difficult task, certainly, but necessary if the Library is to continue to inspire and support writers, thinkers, scholars and artists in the creation of works and ideas that touch the lives of many millions and help shape the intellectual history of the nation and the world.

Based on the overall aim of the strategy the two principal goals are as follows: Goal 1 To substantially increase awareness of, access to, and engagement with the Library The first goal is rooted in the desire to deliver increased public benefit, enhancing the fulfilment of the Library’s charitable purpose and its founding principles.

Goal 2 To remove the core operating deficit by the end of 2022–2023 In the past few years the Library’s Treasurer has used these pages to detail the challenging financial situation the Library faces. Income from membership, commercial activities and ongoing revenue fundraising does not cover the day-to-day costs of running the Library and maintaining its premises and collections. In order to become financially sustainable, the strategy has the aim of removing this core operating deficit by 2023. This will require an increase in membership numbers, revenue fundraising providing an increased proportion of the Library’s annual income, and tight cost control. Compared to the previous year the core operating deficit reduced by £123k to £737k for the year ended 31 March 2019, so although the deficit is still significant, progress is starting to be made.

In order to achieve these goals the following 8 objectives were identified and the progress against each in 2018–2019 is detailed below:

The Times was one of several major news outlets covering our discovery of Bram Stoker’s source books for Dracula.

Objective 1 Raise our public profile to drive increased awareness, use and membership of the Library. We will give an additional focus to attracting and welcoming younger people to the Library.

Much has been achieved in moving the Library from ‘hidden’ to ‘renowned treasure’ status. The Library has featured in a series of print and radio interviews and articles during the year, including interviews with BBC radio during the Henley Literary Festival and a feature on miniature books in the Guardian.

In early 2019, in collaboration with Creation Theatre, we staged an extremely successful sell-out run of 22 performances across 6 weeks of the stage play Dracula. This followed on from the discovery by Philip Spedding, the Library’s Development Director, that the Library’s shelves were home to 26 of the 32 original books that Bram Stoker used to research his eponymous novel, published in 1897. The discovery, and the subsequent staging of the play, resulted in media exposure on television and the radio, and in a number of national and international newspapers.

Recognising the importance of young people to the future of the Library, the maximum age for Young Person Membership was increased from 24 to 26 and we started a Trustee placement scheme to add the voices of two young people to board-level discussions. Our Young Person Membership increased by 40% THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

Twelve new reader spaces with views over the square were added to the St James’s stacks during the year. Plans are currently being developed for ways in which other spaces within the Library could be improved, providing new facilities for members and allowing more outreach activities to take place.

Objective 4 Find a new model for our library collection that allows for continued acquisition and maintains the accessibility and usefulness of the collection, while working within the twin constraints of available storage space and cost.

Our public events programme has continued to attract new audiences to the Library.

during the course of the financial year and overall membership of the Library increased by 83, the first increase since 2011–12.

Objective 2 Create new ways to access and engage with the Library including: a high-quality programme of events and outreach activity at the Library and other venues, and new ways to join or use the Library aimed at less frequent visitors and those for whom the membership fees are a major obstacle.

The Library has put on a fascinating and varied speaker events and panel discussions programme, which has proved highly successful in attracting non-members into the Library as well as building general awareness. Speakers have ranged from historian and author Joshua Levine and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri to bestselling novelist Jessie Burton. Many events have sold out and half of the audience have been nonmembers. Through its partnerships with the Henley Literary Festival and the Bloomsbury Institute, the Library also staged a number of talks at other venues.

The trustees created a new Collections Committee to oversee the work on the collection-capacity management strategy, which is ongoing. Following an extensive review of the use of the collection over the past 6 years, the rate of acquisition of foreign-language materials was reduced, although a designated budget has been retained for foreign-language requests by members. Spending on online and electronic resources has been increased.

The collection remains at the heart of the Library’s appeal, and over 5,600 volumes were added to the collection during the year.

Objective 5 Increase our revenue fundraising, making fundraising a bigger proportion of our overall income.

Some generous single gifts enabled the Library to exceed its revenue fundraising target by over £150,000. The Library also successfully encouraged smaller donations through its annual appeal, with the St James’s Windows Appeal raising £116,000 and allowing the replacement of the windows as well as the addition of 12 new reader spaces. The Founders’ Circle, a group of patrons who give regular donations, remains central to the Library’s annual fundraising. We are very grateful to all who gave during the year – something that is particularly important as the ongoing fundraising income plays an increasing part in covering the costs of running the Library.

Although launched just after the 2018–2019 financial year, the Library has introduced two new tiers of membership, Remote Access and Associate. These provide attractive and affordable options for those who want access to the collection and online resources but do not need to use the Library’s building on a frequent basis. We have worked with schools to improve our offering and created London Library Schools Partnerships, through which individual schools can give pupil groups full access to the Library.

A programme for emerging writers was launched in January receiving 600 applications. The programme is fully supported by donations and the cohort of 38 writers joined the Library in May 2019.

Objective 3 Deliver new spaces at the Library to accommodate our growing programme of events, outreach activity and private venue hire, more reader spaces and comfortable, catered spaces where members can meet, share ideas and work in a less formal environment.

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The St James’s Windows Appeal has funded restoration of the windows and installation of new desks in the St James’s stacks.

Objective 6 Launch a major appeal to ‘re-found’ the Library, consisting of a capital fundraising campaign to finance the creation of new spaces, and a longer-term campaign to deliver a substantial endowment for the Library.

Planning is progressing well in respect of both the capital and endowment campaigns and these will be launched in 2019– 2020.

Objective 7 Develop new ways to increase our income from other sources, such as private venue hire.

The opening hours were changed from January 2019 to allow Wednesday evenings to be available for venue hire, with extended opening hours on Monday and Tuesday to compensate for the earlier Wednesday closure. Venue hire has been increasingly popular and bookings have included thirdparty film showings, book launches and receptions. The Library has also been increasingly promoted as a film location and has featured in numerous TV and film productions, including the BBC TV thriller Killing Eve and a range of BBC documentaries.

Objective 8 Restrict cost increases, finding more ways to work more efficiently and seeking to minimise the impact on members.

All departments carried out a review of costs during the year, with savings and efficiencies being identified and implemented, while seeking to maintain the level of service to members.

Overall cost increases were limited to well below inflation levels, which has contributed to the reduced operating deficit detailed above.

The full 5 years of the strategy will be needed to achieve the principal goals but, as can be seen from the progress made in the year, awareness and membership of the Library is increasing and the operating deficit, though still uncomfortably high, is heading in the right direction.

The very challenging journey is only at its early stages, but the end result – The London Library fulfilling its potential at the centre of the UK’s cultural landscape, benefiting many more users and standing on a firm financial footing – will be a tremendous reward.

ANNUAL REPORT The Library’s Annual report and Accounts 2018–2019 is downloadable as a PDF from our website at londonlibrary. co.uk/about-us/agm-annual-reports In the interests of supporting the environment and keeping printing and mailing costs to a minimum, we now use a print-on-demand system for those members wishing to receive a physical copy. If you would like a printed copy of the Annual Report to be posted to you, please request one by email (director@londonlibrary.co.uk) or telephone (020 7766 4712).

TWENTY IN 2020 The London Library is proud to announce a new partnership with Jacaranda Books’ Twenty in 2020 initiative for promoting black British writing. Twenty in 2020, launched by Jacaranda earlier this year, sees the UK publishing house exclusively dedicating a year of publishing output to 20 black British writers, publishing new works from each of them during 2020.

The project has won acclaim from across the publishing world and recently won the London Book Fair International Excellence Award 2019 for Inclusivity in Publishing.

Jacaranda has now teamed up with The London Library to announce a partnership that will provide a package of support for the 20 authors on the Twenty in 2020 programme. The partnership was launched on 18 July at an evening event in the Library’s famous Reading Room, with industry leaders, influencers and press joining with the 2020 authors to celebrate this exciting new stage in the Twenty in 2020 project.

About the Partnership The London Library will be providing the Twenty in 2020 authors with two years’ free membership to the Library. They will have full access to our extraordinary collection of 1 million books, and extensive online resources, as well as use of the Library’s unparalleled spaces which have been an inspiration for writers for nearly 200 years.

Some of the authors on the Twenty in 2020 programme at the Library launch.

The Library also aims to incorporate the Twenty in 2020 initiative into its popular events programme, providing a high profile platform for Twenty in 2020 authors and ambassadors at speaker events.

Philip Marshall, Director of The London Library, commented: ‘From the moment we heard about the Twenty in 2020 project we knew this was an initiative we wanted to be involved in.

The London Library is a centre for literary creativity and we are delighted to be supporting a programme that is doing so much to help black British writers get greater publishing recognition.’

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

THE LONDON LIBRARY AT HENLEY LITERARY FESTIVAL The London Library will be taking part in the Henley Literary Festival again this year. We’ll have a stand in the Festival Hub, and during the festival fortnight – which takes place from Saturday, 28 September to Sunday, 6 October 2019 – the main festival venues will be hosting the following exciting series of London Library talks: ANTONIA FRASER IN CONVERSATION WITH KATE WILLIAMS Sunday, 29 September 2019 2pm

Best-selling author Lady Antonia Fraser discusses her life in literature and her latest book, The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights 1829, which brings colour and humour to the vivid drama of the Catholic Emancipation, with historian Kate Williams.

SONIA PURNELL & CLARE MULLEY THE WOMEN WHO SPIED Monday, 30 September 2019 2pm

We bring together two awardwinning biographers to discuss what it took to be a woman at the heart of the war effort, focusing on Britain’s first female special agent of the Second World War and the Gestapo’s most wanted Allied spy. The event will be chaired by historian Rick Stroud.

GILES MILTON D-DAY: THE SOLDIERS’ STORY Thursday, 3 October 2019 4pm

on the experiences of survivors, Giles Milton’s bold new history tells the story as never before.

THE LONDON LIBRARY: A TREASURE TROVE Friday, 4 October 2019, 2pm A panel of renowned members discuss how they use the Library to work, offering a valuable insight into how to go about the delicate business of researching and then turning that research into literary gold.

Author and broadcaster Travis Elborough, novelist Victoria Hislop, and Abi Daré who is a participant on our 2019 Emerging Writers Programme, speak to chair, Giles Milton.

Tickets can be booked via the Henley Festival website (henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk).

We look forward to welcoming you for a fascinating few days of literary conversation.

SIR TIM RICE IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMES RUNCIE Monday, 30 September 2019 6.30pm NOW SOLD OUT London Library President Sir Tim Rice discusses his extraordinary life, the inspiration for his awardwinning work, the partnerships which have underpinned his career and what it takes to pen some of the best-known lyrics from the biggest stage and screen musicals of all time. He’ll also talk about

Sir Tim Rice.

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his love of books and The London Library. Sir Tim will be interviewed by Radio 4’s Commissioning Editor for Arts, James Runcie.

The desperate struggle of 6 June 1944 was, above all, a human story of individual heroics – of men driven to keep fighting until the German defences were smashed and the precarious beachheads secured. Drawing

To get advance notice on all our events, and to keep up to date with the latest news about the Library, sign up to our newsletter at londonlibrary. co.uk/newsletter-signup

‘A Treasure Trove’ – The London Library is the subject of one of the 5 Library events at this year’s Henley Literary Festival.

ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE DONATE TO As reported in the summer issue, Bob Matthews and Mark Harris are currently undertaking a 12-month Artists’ Residency at The London Library, drawing on their expertise in the processes of print production and the history of the printed image. Bob, an artist and exhibition organiser, has taught on the MA Print course at the Royal College of Art since 2002; Mark is Associate Professor of Fine Art at Kingston University and has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally.

The Artists’ Residency runs until spring 2020 and forms the first stage of a larger project for Bob and Mark that reimagines the notion, purpose and form of libraries generally. From July 2019, six new artworks – three paintings

by Bob and three collages by Mark – have been on display on the Green stairs between the Reading Room and the Members’ Room. All have been created and displayed free of charge to the Library and we look forward to seeing more of their work in coming months.

THE LIBRARY FUND Earlier this summer the Library launched the Library Fund, an annual fundraising campaign focused on improving the Library in ways that directly impact its users. The funds raised this year will go towards the refurbishment of the toilets on the red staircase which are in desperate need of a major overhaul.

The 2019 Fund will enable a complete refurbishment of these facilities, while ensuring they remain in keeping with the style of the historic building. The improvements will include work to the floor, pipework, fixtures, lighting and more.

The budget for the project, and target for this year’s Library Fund, is £75,000, with costs in large part dictated by the particular requirements of refurbishing a Grade II-listed building.

All funds raised will go towards this project, and should more than is needed be donated the excess will be applied to next year’s project.

Every year supporters donating to the Fund enable the Library to carry out work that can’t be funded through normal operating income and which help enhance the Library’s amazing building and its even more extraordinary collection. You can donate via our website (londonlibrary.co.uk/support-us/donatelibrary-fund) when you’re next in the Library, or by text message by texting LIBRARYFUND to 70085 to donate £10 (this costs £10 plus a standard-rate text message).

New paintings by Bob Matthews (see above) and new collages by Mark Harris (see left) are now on display in the Library.

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CHARLES DICKENS Great Expectations First edition, first impression, 1861 Estimate £50,000–70,000*

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