Giles Milton unveils the wartime exploits of the covert sabotage unit – the Special Operations Executive

Last night, historian Giles Milton treated a packed audience in the Library’s Reading Room to a captivating talk from his book Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat. Helen O’Neill, Archive, Heritage & Development Librarian takes the opportunity to dip into life at the Library during the Second World War.

The Library started preparing for the Second World War in April 1939 by purchasing tarpaulins, blankets, black paint and sand “in readiness in case of necessity”. By October 1939 skylights had been protected with sandbags and the Library was closing earlier than normal to ensure the building was cleared by Blackout time. By 1940 the Librarian Christopher Purnell (1940-1950) and other staff were sleeping overnight in the Library basement so that they could, as The Times put it, “protect the books by night, that they cherished by day.”

Christopher Purnell, Librarian from 1940-1950, was awarded the CBE in 1950.

“I spend my nights here as well as days” Purnell wrote in a letter to the Boston Athenaeum in 1940, “sleeping in the basement.  Guns crash out and bombs fall.  One holds one’s breath when the whistling variety is coming, wondering where it will fall… The staff struggle home as best they can.  I wonder how the girls can stand it after six or seven hours in underground “Anderson” shelters in their gardens in the night, but they are very brave.”

The Library survived in a state of ready watchfulness experiencing several near misses that involved putting out fires on the roof with buckets of sand and extracting splinters of glass from books after one hundred panes of glass were shattered during the Blitz.

In May 1941 the Library reached its centenary. Celebrations were muted, but E.M. Forster, an active member of the Library’s wartime committee, marked the occasion with an article  in the New Statesman and Nation:

“In May 1841 the London Library was launched on the swelling tides of Victorian prosperity.  It celebrates its centenary among the rocks.  It is unharmed at the moment of writing …but the area in which it stands is cloven with the impacts of the imbecile storm. Buildings are in heaps, the earth is in holes.  Safe among the reefs of rubbish, it seems to be something more than a collection of books.  It is a symbol of civilisation…Perhaps the Nazis will hit it, and it is an obvious target, for it represents the tolerance and disinterested erudition which they so detest.  But they have missed it so far”

The Central stacks – five floors were severely damaged by the bomb strike in February 1944

The Library’s good fortune ran out at 10.30pm on February 23^rd 1944 when it took a direct hit from a high explosive bomb to its north-east corner.  The blast caused severe structural damage to five floors of book stacks, two reading rooms and the “exhibition room” (now the Art Room), designed in the 1930s by Mewes and Davis, architects of the Ritz Hotel.

Christopher Purnell and a long serving member of staff, David William Kelly, a veteran of the First World War, were on night watch duty when the bomb hit. Both were unhurt in the blast, but 16,600 volumes of biography, theology, periodicals and fiction were damaged or destroyed and a mass of masonry crashed through the roof of the Back Stacks, which damaged books in the science and history collections.

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The aftermath of the bomb was witnessed the following morning by French writer, Madeleine Henrey, a refugee in London during the War. In 坚果加速器官网下载 (1946), she gives a first-hand account of the scenes of devastation in the Library.  Her testimony records the attempts of twenty female members of staff to salvage the books amidst twisted girders, broken glass and debris:

“What had happened to the Library? … I pushed the door open and found myself in a terrible mess of broken glass and torn volumes.  The girls who had just arrived were standing around, too awed to speak.  Some of them looked like weeping …  When I returned later in the day I found nearly twenty of the girls already at work.  Eleanor Rendell, her hair clogged with brick dust, and her arms black with dirt, was climbing over the debris with no thought for her own safety. ‘For thirteen years I have put the biographies away,’ she said. ‘I must save what I can.’”

Purnell paid tribute to the volunteers who helped the staff sort and salvage books.  The volunteers included Library members calling into the Library to exchange books, passing Allied soldiers and a squad of schoolboys sent by the Headmaster of Marylebone Grammar School. Book loans to members were suspended for four months while the demolition squad removed debris and cut through broken girders, causing a fire in the Art Room in the process. Many books were temporarily housed in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery, who also provided a room for the Library’s Committee to meet, while the Library got back on its feet.

The Library was exceptionally busy during the War. 153,280 volumes were issued in a single year between 1942 and 1943 when the membership reached 5000: the largest number in its history up to that point.

E.M. Forster’s wartime article on the Library remains as pertinent today as it was in 1941. “Knowledge” he wrote in 1941 “will perish if we do not stand up for it, and testify.  It is never safe, never harvested. It needs to be protected.”

This week was the centenary of the 1918 Representation of People Act.  To mark the occasion, our Archive, Heritage & Development Librarian Helen O’Neill takes a look at some of the material in the Library’s collections, which tell the suffrage story.

This week, one hundred years ago, propertied British women over the age of thirty, and all men over the age of twenty-one, were granted the right to vote. On the run up to the anniversary, Radio 4 Today’s programme ran a series of interviews and a public vote to find the country’s “most influential woman”. Millicent Fawcett, President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and leader of the constitutional women’s suffrage movement, won the vote.

Mary Wollstonecraft author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

In her essay The Electoral Disabilities of Women (1872) Fawcett noted that opponents of woman’s suffrage looked upon “a woman’s rights woman as the incarnation of all that is repulsive; and a woman’s rights man… as bereft of his senses.”

Horace Walpole famously referred to Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the ground-breaking treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), as “a hyena in petticoats”. The philosopher John Stuart Mill (a founder member of The London Library and the first MP to stand on a platform that included votes for women) fared no better, being ridiculed in images, that depicted him in full female dress.

“Miss Mill Joins the Ladies” Judy 25 November 1868

In her history of the women’s suffrage movement, Women’s Suffrage: A Short History of a Great Movement (1912), Fawcett identified texts of importance, at the outset of the suffrage movement. The most significant being Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, from whose publication,  Fawcett dated women’s demand for political equality in Britain.  She also highlighted the 1851 essay, The Enfranchisement of Women by Harriet Taylor and several works by John Stuart Mill, notably, Representative Government which, “with great force and vigour” made the case for women’s political rights.

Mill, who credited the influence Helen Taylor on his thinking on women’s rights, was elected MP for Westminster in 1865. On 7 June 1866, he presented the first mass petition for Votes for Women to Parliament, gathered by prominent women’s rights campaigners including Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett. During the Second Reform Bill in 1867, he called for an amendment to the bill to replace the word “man” with the word “person” and thus extend the franchise to women. Mill’s speech in the House of Commons was reprinted in The Westminster Review and, according to Fawcett, was “masterly … grave and high toned, [and] made a deep impression.” The amendment was defeated by 196 votes to 73. As Fawcett and Mill both noted however, the support for the amendment, greatly surpassed their expectations.

Perhaps the most striking image of Mill was published in 坚果加速器vip破解 on 25 November 1868.  It depicts him in full female attire, being (literally) shown the door after his defeat in the Westminster by-election. Undeterred, he published The Subjection of Women (1869) the following year.

The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst with the motto “Deeds not Words.” In its Special Collections, the Library has volumes of both 坚果加速器客户端 and The Suffragette which were issued by the WSPU between 1907 and 1918 and 1912-1915 respectively. The full page illustrative front covers of 坚果加速器安卓下载, are as eye catching, and challenging today, as they must have been when first published.

The Suffragette – edited by Christabel Pankhurst – October 1913

The Suffragette – December 1913

The Library’s lending collections are rich in suffrage material and the nature of some of the Library’s historic shelfmarks testify to the evolution of thought and writing on suffrage and women’s rights. Material can be found across the collections, in newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets, biography and biographical collections, drama, literature, art and in several shelfmarks in Science & Miscellaneous, including Political Economy, Suffrage and Women.

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In search for Millicent Fawcett in the London Library shelfmark S. Women, I was distracted by A Dictionary of Employments Open to Women (1898). A slight volume it is not only an alphabetical list of occupations open to women in 1898 but gives a specific picture of the challenge at hand by detailing the qualifications, salary and level within professions, women had, or were able to rise to. Thus the occupation of “Taxidermist, Bird Stuffer (See also Insect Setter)” held no barriers to entry apart from the need for “neat fingers” but there was only one women employed as a Labour Correspondent at the Board of Trade; no woman had yet passed all three sections of an examination to qualify as a chief librarian; and an Act of Parliament was required for women to practice as solicitors.  But if proof were needed that women, vote or no vote, were aiming for the stars, four women were employed as astronomical assistants in 1898, three at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich and one at the Cambridge observatory.

Cartoon from Votes for Women 1911

On 2 July 1928 when women finally got the vote on equal terms with men, Millicent Fawcett wrote in her diary “It is almost exactly 61 years ago since I heard John Stuart Mill introduce his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on May 20th, 1867. So I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning.”

One hundred years after the Representation of People Act and ninety after the Equal Franchise Act Millicent Fawcett will become the first woman to be commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square.

Helen O’Neill

Portrait of Mary Shelley from Mrs Shelley by Lucy Madox Rossetti. London. W.H. Allen, 1890.

Last night, novelist and biographer, Miranda Seymour, gave a fascinating lecture in The London Library’s Reading Room on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus – one of the most extraordinary novels of the 19th century. Here in honour of Frankenstein’s bicentenary, Helen O’Neill, Archive, Heritage & Development Librarian, takes a quick peek at 200 years of writing by and about Mary Shelley, all available from the shelves at the London Library.

“Most of the substances belonging to our globe are constantly undergoing alterations in sensible qualities and one variety of matter becomes as it were transmuted into another…The object of Chemical Philosophy is to ascertain the causes of all phenomena of this kind, and to discover the laws by which they are governed.”

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So opens Elements of Chemical Philosophy as Regards the Laws of Chemical Changes: Undecompounded Bodies and their Primary Combinations, by Humphrey Davy, published in 1812, and read by Mary Shelley as she worked on the manuscript of Frankenstein in October 1817. Davy, a British chemist, known for his experiments in electro-chemistry, was a chemistry lecturer at the Royal Institution, where his lectures attracted fashionable London society. The text provides a tantalising glimpse of the cutting-edge scientific thought Mary Shelley was digesting, as she worked on her extraordinary manuscript. Illustrated with thirty figures, Davy’s book depicts scientific apparatus used for conducting experiments with electricity, to isolate, detonate, fuse or distill chemical compounds and gases. One of the plates depicts “a gasometer by which a stream of oxygen may be thrown upon ignited charcoal, for the purpose of fusing or burning bodies.”

Illustration of dog drawn sledges in Siberia from Evert Ysbrant Ides, Three Years Travels from Moscow to China. London: W. Freeman, 1705.

Currently on display in the Library’s Reading Room, Davy’s book is joined by a travel account by Evert Ysbrant Ides: Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-Land to China, also read by Mary Shelley as she worked on her Gothic masterpiece, The Library’s 1705 edition of Ides’ work includes woodcut illustrations of the many countries, peoples and cultures encountered en route, including the use of dog-pulled sledges in Siberia.  It is a mode of transport Shelley deployed in the novel as Frankenstein pursues his creation across the deserts of the frozen north: