Dr Robert James, Senior Lecturer in History, has recently published an article in the journal Cultural and Social History on the role of public libraries in the naval town of Portsmouth, UK during the Second World War. See below for the abstract, and if you want to read the article, click here.
Abstract: In 1942 a library official in Portsmouth, UK appealed to the city’s inhabitants to ‘read for victory’, believing that they had a duty to use their reading time productively as part of their wartime activities. This article argues that long-standing desires among the country’s political and civic elites to encourage the nation’s readers to spend their leisure time prudently intensified during the Second World War. The public library service was utilized by civic leaders, library officials and publishing trade personnel to aid the country’s war effort. The article argues that negative attitudes regarding mass reading tastes remained largely static, despite recognition that the conflict drew people to the written word for relaxation and escapism. Using the naval city of Portsmouth as a case-study, this article charts the activities of the city’s public library authorities and the borrowing habits of its readers to reveal that while many people borrowed books in order to distract themselves from the conflict, the city’s strategic importance ensured that many citizens also read in order to facilitate their preparedness for war service, whether that be on the home front or overseas. The article argues that while, in common with national trends, many of Portsmouth’s citizens used libraries to obtain books to help distract them from the war, many remained eager to make use of the service for educational purposes, unlike the majority of the nation’s library users, whose interest in this aspect of library provision rapidly waned as the war progressed. The article concludes that the public library service was viewed as a central plank in the war effort and that library officials worked continuously to ensure that it remained so.
Rory Herbert, final year History student and President of the History Society at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog on the 1980s AIDS crisis and the homophobic behaviour it triggered. Rory is a Gale Ambassador at the university and contributes to The Gale Review Blog. The role of the Gale Ambassador is to increase awareness of the Gale primary source collections available to students at their university. The University Of Portsmouth Library hosts a large collection of Gale primary sources which History students can use when undertaking archival research for their dissertations and other research projects.
During the early 1980s, AIDS became an ever-growing concern in the minds of Americans, and brought to the fore the deep-seated tensions and homophobic tendencies that plagued the nation’s media and political institutes. Gale’s Archives of Sexuality & Gender provides access to a wealth of sources that help us to understand the issues and struggles experienced by these long-oppressed and ignored members of society during a particularly trying period.
Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, recently worked with a local community group, Portsdown U3A, on a Heritage Lottery Funded project that sought to find out the impact of the Battle of Jutland on the people of Portsmouth and the local area. With the help of research assistant and PhD student John Bolt, and a team of Online Course Developers at the University, Dr James created an online map using the data collected by members or Portsdown U3A. One of the most interesting findings made by the U3A when conducting their research was that one celebrated V.C. holder – Commander Loftus William Jones – was born in Portsmouth, not Petersfield, as had been originally claimed.
Historical ‘facts’ are always open to question. This has never been more evident than in the research uncovered by Portsdown U3A, a local community group based just off Portsea Island. Members of Portsdown U3A, keen historians of the Battle of Jutland – the most famous sea battle to take place during the First World War – had always believed that Commander Loftus William Jones, who served on the destroyer H.M.S. Shark during the battle, had been born in the leafy market town of Petersfield, Hampshire. They had very little reason to doubt this. The town had long-celebrated ‘their’ war hero. Loftus William Jones’ parents, Admiral Loftus Francis Jones and Gertrude (née Gray), called Petersfield ‘home’ and it was long-believed that this was the town where Commander Jones was born. Documentary evidence supported this. The UK’s official public record, The Gazette, recorded that Jones was born in the town on 13 November 1879. The UK Victoria Cross Medals 1857-2007website similarly documented Petersfield as his place of birth. In 2014, The Telegraph repeated the claim, and as recently as 2016 a biography of the Commander was published carrying the title Commander Loftus William Jones: Petersfield’s Only VC. A brief internet search undertaken while writing this blog still throws up a series of entries claiming Petersfield as the town in which Commander Jones was born.
Commander Loftus William Jones
However, research by members of the Portsdown branch of the U3A has uncovered startling new evidence: that Commander Jones was not born in Petersfield as originally believed, but in Southsea, Portsmouth! While undertaking their research into the casualties of the Battle of Jutland who had been born in Portsmouth, one of the Portsdown U3A researchers decided to look into the life of Commander Jones because he had been awarded a posthumous V.C. It was while doing this research that they went through the census from 1881-1911 and found a record showing that Commander Jones was born in Southsea. Astonished to discover this, the U3A researcher investigated further at the Portsmouth History Centre. Here they discovered that a ‘Loftus William Jones’ had been baptised at St Jude’s Church in Southsea on 7 December 1879, and that his parents were Captain Loftus Francis Jones RN and Gertrude Jones, residing in Southsea. Finally, they managed to uncover a copy of Jones’ Birth Certificate at Portsmouth Register Office, and this demonstrated without doubt that he was born in Portsmouth on 13 November 1879. [1] A long-believed ‘fact’ had been shown to be a falsehood!
It is no surprise that the life (and death) of Commander Jones has garnered such interest. He had an illustrious career in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Eastman’s Royal Naval Academy in Fareham, near Portsmouth, and rapidly rose through the ranks. On 30th June 1914 he was promoted to Commander, and from October of that year he was appointed as Commander of the destroyer HMS Shark. Later that year HMS Shark led a flotilla of four ships along the east coast of England against a number of German light cruisers and destroyers. This action culminated in the Scarborough Raid in December 1914, for which the work of Commander Jones was commended by the Admiral of the Fleet, David Beatty. [2]
On 31st May 1916 Commander Jones led HMS Shark at the Battle of Jutland. The ship came under heavy enemy bombardment in the battle, and shells hit the bridge and main engines, causing major damage. Commander Jones was wounded but attempted to carry on despite facing significant enemy fire. After the Shark was struck by a shell Commander Jones lost most of one of his legs but continued to command the vessel by giving orders to his gun’s crew. Finally, a torpedo struck the Shark and the ship rapidly sank. There were only six survivors. Commander Jones was not one of them. Despite being helped onto a raft by two of his crew, his injuries were too severe and he died, along with 7 other officers and 79 men. [3]
Commander Jones was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, the highest award of the honours system in the UK, because of his brave actions. It is no wonder Petersfield wanted to claim him as one of its own. However, thanks to the diligent work of the Portsdown U3A the birthplace of Commander Jones can be settled once and for all, and the community group can rightfully state that ‘Portsmouth has another V.C.’! [4]
Notes
[1] ‘The Battle of Jutland: Don’t believe everything you read’, The Battle of Jutland Exhibition, Exhibition panels produced by the Portsdown U3A Jutland Research Project 2016-2017.
[4] ‘Battle of Jutland: Don’t believe everything you read’.
The online map and full details of the project undertaken by Portsdown U3A and Dr James is available to view on the Port Towns and Urban Cultures website http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/.
Daniel Millard, a second year History student at the University of Portsmouth, wrote the following blog entry on how historians can use oral history testimony to reflect on Britain’s attempts to enter the ‘space race’ in the late-1950s for the Introduction to Historical Research Unit. The unit is co-ordinated by Dr Maria Cannon, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Portsmouth.
In 1957 Britain entered the space race with the launch of the Skylark sounding rocket. Conceived at a time when the nation was seeking to develop ballistic missile capabilities Skylark quickly positioned itself as a valuable research tool with which to help scientists unlock secrets from above the Earth’s upper atmosphere. [1] So successful was it in this civilian role that it went on to be flown for nearly fifty years making it one of the longest and most successful rocket programmes of all time. [2] Yet few in Britain have ever heard of Skylark and its presence within the documentary record remains sporadic. For this reason, space historian Matthew Godwin has openly acknowledged that, for Skylark, ‘the importance of oral history is clear’. [3]
The launch of Skylark
In 2001 Godwin helped organise a Skylark witness seminar held at London’s Science Museum. [4] Ten years later the Museum’s former Director, Professor Chris Rapley, was interviewed as part of the British Library’s An Oral History of British Science project. [5] Within his testimony Rapley describes the development of Skylark’s on-board experiments whilst working as a young PhD researcher at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey. The interview, whilst offering insight in to the challenges faced by researchers working at the vanguard of British space science in the 1970s, also highlights several important issues that have dominated the oral history debate since it emerged as ‘an international movement from the end of that decade’. [6]
Donald A Ritchie tells us that ‘the ultimate value of oral history lies in the substance of the interviewee’s story,’ and what Rapley offers up is first-hand reporting of the instrumentation developed to investigate the presence and origins of x-ray sources in deep space. [7] What immediately strikes is the challenge oral history finds in adequately representing ‘the role of visuality in the construction of scientific knowledge’. [8] It is a problem Tom Lean, an interviewer on the Oral History of British Science project, has acknowledged. Humans, he tells us, express meaning as much through bodily action as spoken language and this is never more evident than when talking about complex technical subjects where ‘hand movements and gestures reinforce words, conveying speed, scale, movement’. [9] Whilst Rapley proudly recalls SL1203 being the first rocket to ‘align itself on the earth’s magnetic field and use moon sensors to orient its roll’ it would be valuable, as historians, to know whether his arms were gesticulating at the same time to help illustrate the achieved motion. [10]
Skylark was ‘cutting-edge science’ and Rapley hints as much when he states ‘we were really pushing the limits, they didn’t always work’. [11] What surprises is the matter-of-factness of his oral response. There seems no evidence here of A. J. P. Taylor’s ‘old m[a]n drooling about [his] youth’. [12] This may be explained by the fact that Rapley is a scientist of long-standing, a person who has spent his distinguished career actively seeking to be ‘objective’ not ‘subjective’ – a man highly trained to steer away from Alessandro Portelli’s acknowledged journey into ‘imagination, symbolism, desire’. [13] His answers equally support Thompson’s theory that oral responses differ depending on where the recording is made – whether that be at home, in the workplace or down the pub. Rapley’s interview was recorded at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London where, as historians, we must assume ‘the influence of work conventions and attitudes’ prevail. [14]
For John Tosh it is important for any user of oral recordings to remember that they are ‘as full of pitfalls and difficulties as any other sort of historical material’. [15] Neal R. Norrick agrees, reminding us that ‘forgetfulness often occur[s] in oral history interviews’. [16] Rapley shows that even scientists conversant in dealing with hard facts can fall victim to faulty memory. His testimony is full of forgotten information, dates and names, with his acknowledged warning ‘it’s a long time since I’ve thought of this, I’m struggling now’. [17] This is not, in itself, unusual for ‘narrators often experience difficulties in recovering names and details during stories’. [18] Whilst historians once believed the fallibility of recall justified steering clear of ‘individual memory’, many now agree with Lynn Abrams’ interpretation that while ‘some details might fade […] the broad contours of the memory remain throughout life’. [19]
Perhaps most frustrating in Rapley’s narrative is the presence of reticence – conscious forgetfulness on the part of the interviewee ‘to limit dialogue on particular matters’. [20] Take his refusal to be drawn further on the link between his co-workers and communal living where he tantalisingly hints at the educated origins of 1970s commune life as outlined by social psychologist, Michael Argyle. [21] Yet Rapley is not alone in his refusal to answer the interviewer’s question in full for, as Lenore Layman reveals, ‘oral histories are peppered with examples of reticence presenting historians with both a methodological and interpretive challenge’. [22] Reticence, she goes on to explain, occurs most often where ‘the conventional bounds of social discourse’ are breached, with interviewees reluctant to divulge personal detail about others. [23] Rapley substantiates her claim when he declares that ‘many of them are still alive I think I’d better not’. [24] His reticence is understandable when one appreciates that ‘part of what is communicated in the oral history interview is a view of […] one’s place in the group [or] community.’ [25]
Rapley’s ‘family’ at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, we learn, consisted of some of the most high-profile names working in British space research today – from Peter Wilmore to John Zarnecki. This was Skylark’s over-riding legacy for it helped train a generation of space scientists who went on to work on larger orbital programmes including Ariel 1 the world’s first international satellite. [26] Rapley himself moved on to NASA’s solar maximum mission taking his knowledge of bent crystal spectrometry to help investigate solar flares and the Sun’s active atmosphere. Here the offered testimony is again, noticeably brief with the interviewee admitting ‘[I] could tell you a huge amount about it’. [27] In this, Rapley offers the strongest affirmation of Portelli’s widely-acknowledged belief that oral history ‘always has the unfinished nature of a work in progress’. [28] For Skylark, Britain’s little-known rocket, this, for now, is as good as it gets.
Notes
[1] Harrie Massey and M.O.Robins, History of British Space Science, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16-17.
[2] Robin Brand, Britain’s First Space Rocket: The Story of Skylark, (Fordingbridge: New Forest Electronics, 2014), viii.
[3] Matthew Godwin, The Skylark Rocket: British Space Science and the European Space Research Organisation 1957-1972, (Paris: Beauchesne, 2007), 36.
[4] Ibid, 7
[5] Professor Chris Rapley, National Life Stories: An Oral History of British Science, interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant, 27.04.11, British Library, London, C1379/40, Track 3, 68-79.
[6] Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History”, The Oral History Review, Vol. 34, Issue 1, (2006): 52.
[7] Donald A Ritchie, Doing Oral History, A Practical Guide, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13.
[8] Martin Hewitt, “Beyond Scientific Spectacle: Image and Word in Nineteenth-Century Popular Lecturing”, in Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship edited by Joe Kember, John Plunket and Jill A Sullivan 79-96, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 80.
[9] Tom Lean, “But of Course Your Little Box Can’t See What I’m Doing, Can It?”, National Life Stories, (London: British Library, 2010), 13.
[10] Rapley, National Life Stories, 73.
[11] Ibid, 70.
[12] A J P Taylor quoted in Brian Harrison, “Oral History and Recent Political History”, Oral History, 3, (1972):46.
[13] Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History”, History Workshop Journal, Volume 12, Issue 1, (1 October 1981): 100.
[14] Paul Thompson and Joanna Bornat, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 4th Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 213.
[15] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th Edition, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 254.
[16] Neal R Norrick, “Talking about Remembering and Forgetfulness in Oral History Interviews”, The Oral History Review, Volume 32, Issue 2, (1 January 2005), 2.
[17] Rapley, National Life Stories, 70.
[18] Norrick, Talking about Remembering, 12.
[19] Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 89.
[20] Lenore Layman, “Reticence in Oral History Interviews”, The Oral History Review 36, no. 2 (2009): 207.
[21] Michael Argyle, Cooperation: The basis of sociability, (Hove: Routledge, 2013), 82.
[22] Layman, Reticence, 236.
[23] Ibid, 240.
[24] Rapley, National Life Stories, 78.
[25] Neal R. Norrick, “Humour in Oral History Interviews “, Oral History, Vol. 34, No. 2, War Memory (Autumn, 2006), 86.
[26] Brand, Britain’s First Space Rocket, 601.
[27] Rapley, National Life Stories, 75.
[28] Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, (Albany: New York State University Press, 1991), 55.
Every year, the History team at Portsmouth organise a series of research seminars that take place across the autumn, winter and spring terms. Historians are invited from a range of institutions, both in Britain and abroad, to talk about their latest research projects. The subjects presented cover a broad historical timespan and offer insight into a diverse range of topics. This winter/spring there will be talks on the 1924 Pageant of Empire, women’s history, black abolitionist campaigners, neighbourliness and gossip in the Tudor period, and convict workers in Britain’s imperial dockyards. All are welcome to attend.
Winter 2018
Wednesday 17th January, 4:00-5:30pm. Room: Burnaby Building 1.25
The 1924 Pageant of Empire: Modernity, spectacle and re-imagining space
Deborah Sugg Ryan (University of Portsmouth)
Wednesday 14th February, 3:30-5:00pm. Room: Burnaby Building 1.25
‘A Glass Half Full’?: Women’s history in the UK
June Purvis (University of Portsmouth)
Spring 2018
Wednesday 14th March, 3:30-5:00pm. Room: Burnaby Building 1.25
Mapping black abolitionists from Portsmouth and beyond 1835-1895
Hannah-Rose-Murray (University of Nottingham)
Wednesday 25th April, 3:30-5:00pm. Room: Burnaby Building 1.25
Neighbourliness, gossip and resistance in early Tudor Norfolk: Walsingham and Fincham, 1537
Simon Sandall (University of Winchester)
Wednesday 16th May, 3:30-5:00pm. Room: Denis Sciama Building 1.09
In this blog Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, looks at the growth of reading as a leisure activity among the working classes in Britain during the early twentieth century and considers how broader society viewed this expansion. Rob specialises in researching people’s leisure practices, and teaches a number of units that focus on one of the most popular leisure pursuits of the first half of the twentieth century, going to the cinema.
An early British lending library
Do you ever think about how other people view the books you choose to read? Over the course of the last hundred or so years, people’s reading habits have been subject to intense scrutiny, particularly the habits of working-class readers. A wide variety of individuals, including cultural critics and public librarians, wanted to shape working-class people’s reading habits to ensure that they only read the ‘right’ type of fiction. Of course, relaxing with a book, particularly a work of fiction, was well-established as a popular leisure activity within British society from the nineteenth century onwards. It was, however, an activity that was mainly enjoyed by the country’s more leisured classes up until the early-twentieth century. After the First World War, though, changes to the publishing industry’s working practices, coupled with the growth of the ‘open access’ system in public libraries in the 1920s – when people could choose books freely from the shelves as they do today – and the spread of cheap lending libraries in the 1930s, created a new type of reader, drawn principally from the country’s working-class communities. This spread of the working-class book reading habit raised much concern among people higher up the social ladder, and there was lots of discussion about it within the publishing trade.
The wide-scale commercialization of the book trade was believed to be one of the reasons for the growing interest in reading by the working classes. After the First World War publishers began to use modern, aggressive marketing techniques to advertise their wares. As one contemporary noted, the publisher ‘now elaborately prepares the ground for any new book, plans a campaign for it, advertises much more largely, and vies with his competitors in the use of every legitimate means of publicity.’ [1] Many of the publishing trade’s heavyweights were very critical of this trend towards commercialization, however, and in 1933 a leading article in the trade paper The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record pointedly noted that: ‘Books are not in the same category as soap, chocolates and cigarettes.’ [2] Cultural critics were equally dismissive of the mass marketing of books, and in 1932 the literary critic Q.D. Leavis argued that: ‘The effect of the increasing control of Big Business […] is to destroy among the masses a desire to read anything which by the widest stretch could be included in the classification ‘literature’. [3] It was this aspect, the effects of commercialization on the reading habits of ‘the masses’ that was really at the heart of the matter. Time and again, it was the working classes’ desire to consume, as Leavis disapprovingly put it, ‘fiction that required the least effort to read,’ that attracted most criticism. [4]
An example of ‘good’ fiction
Many public librarians were equally disapproving of their library users’ reading practices. For example, Edward Green, who was chief librarian of Halifax public libraries observed: ‘In recent years a vast army of new readers – the product of the elementary school – has been recruited from a lower mental strata, and the intelligent use of the printed page needs more encouragement and direction.’ [5] Manchester’s chief public librarian, Charles Nowell likewise noted that the library’s principal aim should be ‘to maintain a healthy public interest in the novels and romances which are worth reading.’ [6] Other public librarians were less concerned, however, and one of the most vocal supporters of including fiction in public libraries was chief librarian of Swinton and Pendlebury library service, Frederick J. Cowles. Despite making it known that he preferred readers to borrow ‘good’ fiction, Cowles championed the public librarians’ right to include all types of fiction, for all classes of reader, in their libraries. This led to a long-running debate being played out in The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, and Cowles attracted much criticism. However, some librarians did jump to his defense. Arthur E. Gower, for example, who was librarian and secretary in Grays, Essex, defended the public library’s practice of stocking all forms of fiction by stating that librarians were merely the ‘servants of the public.’ [7] Indeed, Gower claimed that he wanted ‘no higher office,’ concluding that ‘Pleasure in reading is the true function of all books.’ [8]
Despite these concessions to the working classes’ reading tastes, the mutual improvement ethos – which had been so central to the setting up of public libraries in the first place – continued to hold sway well in to the twentieth century, particularly due to the large numbers of readers from that social class choosing to turn to the written word for entertainment and relaxation. So when you next sit down to read a book, perhaps you’d like to think about what these public librarians and cultural critics would have had to say about your reading tastes. Would they be nodding approvingly as you read through the works of Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, or would they be shaking their heads with despair as you browsed the pages of the latest ‘trashy’ novel? [9]
Notes
[1] Frank Swinnerton, ‘Authorship’, in John Hampden, ed. The Book World: A New Survey (London, 1935), pp. 12-35: p. 14.
[2] Anon., ‘Books as commodities’, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 22 April 1933, p. 395.
[3] Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), p. 17.
[4] Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 27.
[5] Edward Green, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 3 June 1933, p. 605.
[6] Charles Nowell, ‘The Public Library’, in John Hampden, ed. The Book World: A New Survey (London, 1935), pp. 181-194: p. 188.
[7] Arthur E. Gower, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 26 March 1932, p. 327.
[8] Ibid.
[9] The novels of Dickens and Hardy were repeatedly mentioned as the types of ‘good’ fiction that the working classes should be encouraged to read.
To read the article that examines these issues in more depth, published in the Journal of Social History, click here.
