Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal August 2007 Volume 5(4)

Endpiece

Ship shop books

Brian Osborne says that there’s no harm in a quick look back as we steam ahead with CILIPS/Scottish Library Association Centennial celebrations.

It was a reference to Alan Hasson as our Centennial President that reminded me that CILIPS/Scottish Library Association would be 100 years old in 2008. I have never quite understood why being 100 years old gets you the message from the Palace, whereas being 99 just gets you a card and a birthday cake if you are lucky, but undoubtedly round numbers do encourage retrospection and so my mind turned to the Scotland of 1908 and the Scotland of 2008 – the Scotland, if you like, of F. T. Barrett, our first President and the Scotland of A. R. C. Hasson, who will preside over our Centenary.

Francis Barrett was the City Librarian of Glasgow, and had been, in 1877, one of the founders of the Library Association. He was also, fortunately for this column, a member of a small Glasgow dining and discussion club – The Thirteen Club. The connection will emerge shortly, I promise you.

Scotland in 1908 was, of course, very different from Scotland now although some of the concerns were the same. Perhaps the most striking difference was that the Glasgow of F. T. Barrett boasted dozens of shipyards turning out vessels of all sorts for owners of all sorts. A writer in 1907 described the Clyde as the ship shop where the world came for its ships. The writer noted: “Clyde steamers, since the marine engine came to being, have had a cachet like Sheffield cutlery or the buns of Bath, so that praise of them is a convention of English literature, and Kipling and Conrad, voicing the sentiments of the seaman, credit their heroic ships, their shrewdest engineers, to the Clyde.”

If the Scotland of 2008 is largely post-industrial, with just two shipyards surviving within the Glasgow boundaries, then many of the concerns of our age find their echoes in Barrett’s Scotland of 1908. One of these is the care of the elderly and the appropriate pension provision. In 1908 the Liberal Government introduced old age pensions – at the rate of five shillings a week for single people over 70 and seven shillings and sixpence for married couples.

These pensions of course attracted a variety of responses and in a short story, Pension Farms, Neil Munro has Para Handy tell how: “Up in the islands now, the folks iss givin’ up their crofts and makin’ a kind o’ a ferm o’ their aged relations. There’s a friend of my own in Mull wi’ thirteen heid o’ chenuine old Macleans. He gaithered them aboot the islands wi’ a boat whenever the rumours o’ the pensions started... It wassna every one he would take, they must aal be Macleans, for the Mull Macleans never die till they’re centurions.”

My excuse for dragging Neil Munro into this column, is that Munro was a contemporary of Barrett in the Thirteen Club, joining shortly after Barrett was elected to its ranks. Munro was also the author of the quote about the ‘ship shop’ which comes from his 1907 travelogue The Clyde, River and Firth. Barrett’s successor as City Librarian, Septimus Pitt (SLA President 1927-28) also was a Thirteen Club member and, nearer our own time, the late Henry Heaney, the Glasgow University Librarian (SLA President 1990) was a Thirteen Club member.

In 1908 as in 2008 the role of libraries was a matter for debate. Another of Munro’s characters, Erchie Macpherson, Glasgow waiter and Kirk Beadle, and his friend Duffy, in Duffy on Drink, published in 1908, discuss various ways of passing leisure time. Erchie suggests the value of books as a means of keeping the working man away from drink. Duffy however was having none of it: “There’s naething worse for spilin’ the eyes; look at the lot o’ folk you see wi’ specs since Carnegie started a’ them fancy libraries.”

That Carnegie’s and Barrett’s libraries had made an impact on society was unquestionable. Earlier Erchie had observed: “There’s libraries scattered a’ ower the place, I ken, for I’ve seen them often, and the brass plate at the door tellin’ ye whit they are.”

Although this hardly suggests that Erchie was a regular user of the City’s libraries in A Bet on Burns he does speak of the “…Free Leebrary to provide him wi’ books to keep him in the hoose at nicht…” as one of the blessings of the age.

Francis T. Barrett might not recognise much of Glasgow’s landscape or of Scottish librarianship 100 years on but perhaps he and the CILIPS members of today have more in common than might appear at first glance and it surely will do no harm in our Centenary year to indulge in a bit of retrospection as well as the necessary planning for the future of libraries and of our professional body.
Brian D Osborne e:brian@bdosborne.fsnet.co.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 5(4) August 2007

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