Jacey Bedford's Journal

Earlier this morning I listened to an item on BBC Radio4 about the importance of libraries, in particular about the importance of establishing the reading habit early and often. It's what I spent my early years pushing, firstly in Wakefield, freshly minted from Library School and then in Barnsley as Children's Librarian.

It's just come to my attention that despite a huge petition from users, Barnsley is about to close and demolish its central library - a building only opened in 1975. Apparently this is not because the library is not fit for purpose, but because it occupies part of the site, on Shambles Street, required for a new sixth form college.

When I first got the Barnsley job in 1972, the central library was housed in the Victorian Civic Hall (once the Public Hall), smack bang in the middle of town, on the main shopping street, just a blink from the bus station and a step or two from the market. Say Victorian and library in the same breath and you already know the sort of place. Monolithic entrance hallway (doubling up as the entrance for the theatre upstairs), polished wood, high ceilings, decorative plaster work, Victorian tiled floors. The scent of old paper permeated the whole building except when it was overtaken by the stench of decaying rat following the local council's annual purge with rat poison, which was sadly spread about without a scheme to remove the corpses from the heating pipe channels beneath the floor grills. (There are many interesting stories about the building from the Victorian disaster in which nine children were crushed to death on a staircase in a fire panic to the visiting circus which let a tiger escape in the back yard... but I digress...)

My department was the only one at the front of the building (top picture), occupying the space behind the arched windows on the first floor to the photographic left of the main entrance. There was no canopy over the front door in those days, so the huge arch was much more impressive. In truth I was comfortable in that space - it was the library I'd grown up using, never dreaming that it would eventually become mine to look after. But it was old-fashioned and we knew we could do so much better.

I worked at the old library in the Civic Hall for three years, and then the new one on Shambles Street for another three, and well remember the move from one to the other in February 1975. Because the council was too mean to pay for a proper specialised removal service the library staff had to do it (90% of us female) and we were only allowed to close for 2 weeks. We physically moved all the books in the first week (thousands upon thousands of them) and then spent the second week shelving and getting ready for the grand opening. Probably the most tiring two weeks of my working life. Those of us in charge of departments weren't exempt from hauling heavy boxes.

In case people forget - Barnsley's new library was - at the time - cutting edge. Just having a coffee bar in there and a children's story room, homework room, 'teenage' collection and an exhibition space, not to mention a music library and an archives section, may be fairly standard now, but it was all pretty new for libraries at the time.

I was given the opportunity to work on the design brief and floor-plan for the interior of the new children's library and though I didn't get everything that I asked for I did get most of it: my 'teen' section (in the very early days of Young Adult book publishing), a separate (quiet) homework room and an inviting shelf layout, though we all had to put up with the architect's doughnut-shaped counters. Whose bright idea was that, I wonder? (The thing about circular curved counters is that... books are square. Duh!)

Don't forget this was in the wake of the trauma of the massive Local Government Reorganisation in 1974 when Barnsley's library service had suddenly expanded from just three branch libraries to over 30 branches and a mobile service. We'd inherited a chunk of West Riding County Library Service buildings, staff and books in the local authority shuffle as Barnsley Borough had become a much bigger Metropolitan Borough with the loss of the West Riding and the creation of South Yorkshire. (Don't get me started on that one. Just dont...)

Never underestimate the amount of storage needed for books and materials. When we moved from the Civic all the books we had would not fit into the Shambles Street library due to the architects misinforming us about the dimensions of the bookshelves. We'd carefully calculated the mileage of shelves required on the information given - that the shelving bays were all a full metre wide with so many bays and so many shelves to a bay - but when we got into the new building, although the number of bays tallied, a considerable number of them were much less than a metre wide, some as narrow as 70 centimetres. That's a lot of shelf space to lose. The cumulative result being more books than shelf space. Big oops. (Thanks, Lanchester and Lodge, Architects.) Any new library building needs book space and people space - not only the public space, but behind-the-scenes work space, office space and 'stack' space for the books not on display. It needs vehicle access and a loading bay. (Hey, book deliveries are heavy!)

But apart from a few niggles, which we worked around, we did get our new library and it was mighty. We were only the 2nd library service in the whole country to computerise cataloguing and book issue (Oxford was the first). That was forty years ago. It's still fit for purpose, but now the council wants to demolish a built-to-order central library because it occupies a corner of a site they can redevelop to use for a new sixth form college. Thing is... they haven't made decent provision for a replacement. If I've absorbed the council's intentions correctly they are talking about moving their library service into what used to be the Co-op's Arcadian restaurant - another Victorian building entirely unsuitable for conversion to a library space and out on a limb on the edge of the town centre.

Hey, how about moving the library back to the Civic? At least it's nice and central. Barnsley would only be slipping back in time forty years instead of a hundred.

The Shambles Street library is a good facility, but it was always in the wrong place. The central library needs to be in the middle of town - not stuck in the old Arcadian buildings - which would be a doubly retrograde step.

I believe that petitions from library users have finally gained a promise that a new central library will be built 'in the town centre' in 'three or four years'. Well, jolly good - if it happens. When it happens. I lived through the building of the Shambles Street library. The late Tom Hayes, then Chief Librarian, fought for it in committees for years, then the job was put out to tender (architects first and then builders). I still have the brochure from the opening. It says the design brief was submitted to the architects in 1968 - so by that time the council had been persuaded, set aside funds, the land acquired and the architects selected. From the design brief being submitted to the library opening took 8 years. Therefore from inception to opening took closer to a decade or more. Three or four years is more than ambitious. Besides... have they even got a suitable site in the town centre? Perhaps they could pull down some other new purpose-built building to make way for it. The Market Hall perhaps. Yeah, right!

Epic FAIL, Barnsley.

Talk about not knowing what you've got.

Ally – a regular poster to uk.music.folk – posted a link to an old photograph of an Edinburgh character called John Codona, a one-man-band street entertainer in the 1950s and 60s. It immediately rang a faint bell at the back of my brain.

I'm the current custodian of photographs originally belonging to Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, the Yorkshire Dales dialect poet (1887 - 1967). They were given to me by her niece, Ludi Horenstein who has since died and there is no other family.

I've notified Leeds University that I have them but they seem supremely disinterested in doing anything with the other half of the collection which ended up with them after Ludi's death, so I figure it's better for me to make sure that they end up somewhere sensible. (flickr for starters, probably) and to keep them available for anyone who wants to come and take a look at them (which a couple of people have done already having found me via the relevant page on my artisan website http://www.artisan-harmony.com).

Anyhow, to cut a very long story short, because of the biographical research I've done on Dorothy, I was originally much more interested in the earlier family photos, but DUR's third husband was a professional photographer Alfred Vowles (later changed by deed poll to Alfred Vowles Phillips - another long and irrelevant story.) But part of my photo collection includes an album of black and white photos taken in Scotland, Ireland, the South West and Yorkshire. The ones from the 1950s are mostly Alfred's.

And sitting there in the middle of the 1950s album are some Edinburgh street photographs. Sure enough John Codona is in there but mis-labelled John Cadogan. It's definitely the same bloke as in Ally's 1960s picture, though. There are two photographs of him which I've put them on my new flickr site. Both are taken in Ann Street, Edinburgh 1955 where Dorothy and Alfred lived.

Looking through the photograph album I've got a chunk of social history in my hands - a fair bit of it is Scottish. There's everything here from photos of ancient stones to tinker camps, from groups of children (the Stout family) on the Fair Isles to fishing boats on the Fife coast. I've made a start on posting some of them. Take a look at my pics in the Dororthy Una Ratcliffe Gallery

I will gradually get around to posting more.