Eric Heath, Dominion, 25 Nov 1977
In 1977 for the first time in its history the library had to close its doors during the session. An infestation of fleas in the basements required the fumigation of the building. Do you have any stories concerning ‘wildlife’ in the building?
March 3, 2008 at 11:51 am |
In the early 80’s I used to spend half a day filing United States documents in the attic. It was a pretty lonely spot apart from the company of the odd sparrow.
March 6, 2008 at 11:42 am |
Way back in 1988 a cat had kittens in a hole in the wall of the main basement. The cat and/or kittens got stuck and died. It was just over the Christmas break and when we all returned after Christmas, the basement was full of blowflies.
March 9, 2008 at 9:30 pm |
Silverfish were a problem at one time especially in the Lockwoods and the staff had to leave propmtly at 5.00 on a Friday evening so the fumigators could deal to them.
March 14, 2008 at 5:18 pm |
Mice : within the lining of the lovely old brown, leather, buttoned, couch which was in the old tearoom, lived a family of mice. They would run up and down inside the couch and squeaked and made their presence felt when one sat on the couch. The pest control people were called to deal with these rodents and laid little boxes of blue/green, poisoned grain, which did the trick. It also got rid of the rats, though never seen, these were around and would go off to die inside the walls leaving a terrible pong, which we had to put up with until it finally faded away. Phew!!!!!
April 2, 2008 at 9:50 am |
This memory has been posted on behalf of a former staff member :
Take your mind back to the orange basement. If one went down the stairs behind reception, passed the old coal bunker where the classic fiction was stored and around the corner you would end up in the Newspaper Basement, known as the “orange” basement, due to the concrete floor being painted this colour.
One day while getting newspapers out for a client, I noticed a very scrawny tabby cat hiding at the rear of the stacks. My friend, a Reference Librarian at the time, also saw “her”. We felt sorry for this poor wee animal so took it a saucer of milk from the tea room. Next day we bought it some cat food. It wasn’t long before the Parliamentary Librarian became aware of the little creature that we were feeding, and he insisted that this practice cease
Well we found this difficult to comply with so we secretly continued doing so.The cat became fatter and fatter, we were proud of the way she seemed to be plumping up, until one day the number of cats had increased to three, she had given birth to two kittens. The SPCA were called and set up a humane cat trap, and she and her kittens, were happily taken off to be rehoused, I hope. She didn’t go without a hiss and a lot of fuss however.