There is a small but significant book in the Library’s collections calledTommy’s Tunes: A Comprehensive Collection of Soldier’s Songs, Marching Melodies, Rude Rhymes, and Popular Parodies, Composed, Collected and Arranged on Active Service with the B.E.F., by F.T. Nettleingham, 2nd Lt. R.F.C.  This comprehensive collection of soldiers’ songs was collected and arranged while on active service during the First World War and published in October 1917.  It was acquired by the Library on 1 January 1918 and has been in action on the Library’s shelves ever since.  The songs bristle with camaraderie, irreverence and poignancy.The social history and cultural significance of the book was fully realized in the hands of Charles Chilton in 1961 in his groundbreaking BBC Radio 4 radio documentary The Long, Long Trailwhich told the story of the First World War through soldiers’ songs. This forgotten radio masterpiece packed a powerful cultural punch and inspired the stage musical Oh! What A Lovely War. It is the richly deserved subject of an Archive on 4 BBC Radio 4 programme (also called The Long, Long Trail) which will be broadcast on 4 January at 8pm in which Roy Hudd and Ian Hislop, among others, consider its significance and during which many of the soldiers songs are sung.  Charles Chilton’s game-changing original documentary will also be broadcast on Radio 4 Extra on Sunday, 5 January 2014, at 1.30pm.

Also from the archive on the theme of the First World War the joining forms to the Library of Laurence Olivier, Ford Madox Ford and Siegfried Sassoon.  Olivier joined the Library in 1945 and won a BAFTA award for best supporting actor for his portrayal of British Expeditionary Force Leader General Sir John French in the film Oh! What A Lovely War in 1969.  Both Sassoon and Madox Ford channeled first-hand experience of the First World War in their work. Between 1924 and 1928 Ford published a masterpiece with the War at its core: a tetralogy known as Parade’s End. In the Preface to No More Parades the second novel in the tetralogy Ford wrote: “All novels are historical, but all novels do not deal with such events as get on to the pages of history.  This No More Parades does.”

Siegfried Sassoon joined the Library in 1922 nominated by E.M. Forster and gave at that time his occupation or position as “None”. One of the most acclaimed of the First World War poets, known as “Mad Jack” for his feats of bravery in the field Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry” saving men under heavy fire. His open criticism of the War printed on the pages of The Times and discussed in the House of Commons was a considered and calculated counter-attack to Establishment ignorance and complacency about the human cost of the War.

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.”[1]

It is often said that there is no town or village in Britain that was left untouched by the First World War and this is also true of the Library.  Hagberg Wright, Librarian from 1893 to 1940 was involved in the Books For Troops Scheme and the Library was a dropping off point for books for distribution through the Red Cross War Library. Advertisements instructed those sending books to the Library for this purpose to label them clearly “For Wounded”. On July 30, 1916 a short piece in The Times reported that 15 members of London Library staff were on active service.  The search is currently underway to discover who they were and how they fared. We will announce and acknowledge them on Remembrance Day 2014.

© Helen O’Neill             Archive, Heritage and Development Librarian

For more on Archive on 4 BBC Radio 4 The Long, Long Trail see:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2014/01/r4-archive-on-4-saturday.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008hvwk

We join Helen O’Neill for the last time before Christmas as she opens the final window on the Library’s archive advent calendar.

I reserved the last window on our archive advent calendar for one of the greatest poets of the English language: T.S. Eliot. A London Library member from 1918 and the Library’s President between 1952 and 1965 T.S. Eliot exerted a towering influence on the literary landscape during his lifetime and left a lasting legacy to Literature and to the Library after his death.

Eliot joined the Library a year after the publication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and four years before The Waste Land first appeared.  T.S. Eliot’s joining form dates from 1918 when he was still working at Lloyd’s Bank before he made the move to Faber and Faber.  He lists his occupation as “Lecturer and journalist” though the Lloyds Bank address at 17 Cornhill is given on his form.

The Waste Land appeared in The Criterion in October 1922 and in The Dial (in America) the following month. It is regarded as the most influential poem of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf handset the poem and published a limited run of 500 copies at the Hogarth Press in 1923.

In 1948 T.S. Eliot was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature for Four Quartets. Comprised of four poems: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding, Four Quartets is an undisputed poetic masterpiece.

Delivering his inaugural address as the Library’s President four years after the Nobel award T.S. Eliot made what he called “a testament of faith” in the Library:

“I am convinced that if this library disappeared, it would be a disaster to the world of letters, and would leave a vacancy that no other form of Library could fill”.

Over the last two weeks we have opened small windows onto the Library’s literary past and it is against this historical backdrop that T.S. Eliot’s “testament” should be seen.  I hope you will come with me next year as my PhD journey through the archive and the Library’s 172 years of extraordinary institutional history continues.

© Helen O’Neill

Archive Advent calendar: 19 December

Today we open another window on the Library’s archival advent calendar to find four poets laureate closely clustered in the membership records.

Alfred Lord Tennyson was the Library’s President between 1885 and 1892 and was poet laureate from 1850 until his death.  He became laureate in the year In Memoriam was published anonymously: it rapidly became one of the most spectacular publishing successes of the Victorian era.

The poet Alfred Austin joined the Library in 1866 and became poet laureate after Tennyson holding the position from 1896 to 1913.

The poet and novelist John Masefield joined the Library in 1909 and became poet laureate in 1930 holding the position until 1967 when he was succeeded by Cecil Day Lewis who held the position until 1972.

© Helen O’Neill        Archive, Heritage and Development Librarian

We join Helen O’Neill for today’s posting from the Library’s archive and open another small window onto the Library’s literary past with the joining form of the writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966).

This is the second of Evelyn Waugh’s joining forms to the Library and dates from 1944. Waugh’s Library membership was suspended in 1941 – a common occurrence in the archival membership records for men on active service during times of war.

The date of the form in which Waugh resumes his membership is richly revealing. In December 1943 Waugh broke his leg in parachute training and was given leave without pay – he resumed membership of the Library on January 18th 1944.  The following  year Brideshead Revisted was published in London by Chapman and Hall.  It was well received at home and an almost immediate best seller in America.  Lauded during his lifetime it was filmed to great acclaim after his death. The ITV eleven part adaptation of the novel in 1981 starred Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, Diana Quick, John Giulgud and Laurence Olivier and was nominated for a raft of awards scooping up both BAFTA and Golden Globe accolades.

Join me tomorrow for another archival peek into the Library’s literary past.

© Helen O’Neill        Archive, Heritage and Development Librarian

Archive Advent Calendar 17 December 2013

The iconic fin de siècle illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) joined the Library in 1896 when he was 23 years old. Closely linked in the popular consciousness with Oscar Wilde, Beardsley’s iconic and risqué illustrations for Wilde’s illustrated edition of Salome were commissioned when he was just twenty-one and caused a scandal when published.

Beardsley’s art and public persona are indelibly stamped on the short-lived but hugely influential avant-garde magazine The Yellow Bookpublished by John Lane at the Bodley Head between 1894 and 1897. The first volume appeared with a cover illustration by Beardsley and included four additional drawings. Beardsley’s artistic vision was key to the impact and profile of the magazine.

The Yellow Book and Beardsley’s association with it became inextricably, if inaccurately linked with the arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel in 1895 as the Press reported that Oscar had a copy under his arm. It resulted ultimately in Beardsley’s dismissal from the Bodley Press as John Lane withdrew Wilde’s plays from further publication.

Note the address Beardsley gives on his form – 10 St James’s Street.  When Beardsley joined the Library he was occupying rooms Wilde had used.at Geneux’s Hotel 10-11 St James’s Place. Beardsley died when he was twenty-five years old but left a lasting mark on fin de siècle art and illustration.

The publisher John Lane (1854-1925) joined t he Library in 1895.  He was an innovative entrepreneur who turned a second-hand bookshop called the Bodley Head at 6B Vigo St in London into a distinctive publishing house with a stellar list of new literary talent. Like Beardsley he was introduced to membership of the Library by the scholar and writer Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) whose major work The Symbolist Movement in Literature was hugely influential on early modernist writers including W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.

The Library’s membership records are impossible to view in isolation: in combination they reveal rich interlinked literary, social and artistic networks which intersect with literary and cultural life in unique and compelling ways. Building on the work completed for my MRes the Library’s membership records, in their historical entirety, are one of the building blocks in my PhD research which will apply big data text mining and network visualization technologies to examine the relationships between the Library’s membership, book collections and the nation’s published oeuvre.

© Helen O’Neill        Archive, Heritage and Development Librarian