Memories from the 1950s

The heavy canvas-bound accession volumes

 

I joined the staff at the beginning of 1953 as a 17year-old straight from College. I was ‘the Accessioner’ in the Catalogue Department which was upstairs in the corner room facing Hill Street.  I recorded all books in huge and very heavy ledger books which was fine for the new books but when I had to alter information on books in earlier volumes it was difficult to lift them down from the shelf.  Soon after I started I had to accession The Kinsey Report. I remember being constantly watched by the chief cataloguer to make sure I didn’t read anything that would harm my supposed innocence!  I  progressed to typing catalogue cards and of course filing them in the catalogue downstairs.  Eventually I went downstairs and did all the ordering of new books.

My six years working in the General Assembly Library were very happy ones.

 

My best wishes

Margaret Beauchamp (Mead)

 

What MPs read

EP, 11 March 1958

From time to time the reading habits of MPs become the subject of public scrutiny. The library used to keep publications prohibited as being of an immoral or seditious nature. These were kept behind a curtain in the Chief Librarian’s office, to be issued to MPs on request. Flamboyant Labour MP and Minister Mabel Howard seemed to have a peculiar fascination for this, having been mischievously shown some by fellow Labour members. In the mid 1950s she threatened to expose this collection and its readership in the House.

 

In 1958 she alleged that nineteen out of twenty books in the parliamentary library were murder stories. Truth blew up the story by surveying issue cards and suggested that she herself had a personal interest in ‘ghost stories and tender romance’. It published photos of previous Prime Minister Holland captioned ‘Gin and Lilies’ and of Hilda Ross by ‘Lovers Disturbed’ – titles which they had borrowed. Holyoake obviously enjoyed crime thrillers as indicated by ‘Fingers of Fear’, ‘Shroud of Darkness’ and ‘Give Me the Knife’. The Library Committee excluded Truth’s reporters from the library for a year.

 

The library is no longer required to keep prohibited literature. It is understood that it was quietly removed from the shelves and buried at the rubbish tip!

Open or Closed to browsers?

I wonder if someone can answer this one: Currently the only areas of the Library in which clients can freely browse are the Reference and Reading Rooms, but this wasn’t always the case. Exactly when and why did the other collections become closed access?