A life in letters: Work - librarian at Carluke

(Click here to read about my previous role, as Trainee Librarian.)

Towards the end of my nine-month Post-Graduate course in Librarianship, in the spring of 1975, there was a major local government re-organisation in Scotland, which saw the former County Councils swept away, to be replaced by two tiers of local government comprised of District and Regional Councils. At the Regional Level, Lanarkshire became part of the much larger Strathclyde Region. Educational Libraries, formerly part of Lanark County Libraries, were administered by the region, and the old County Library building in Auchingramont Road became HQ of the Education Library Service of Strathclyde Region’s Lanark Division. Public Libraries, on the other hand, were assigned to the Districts to administer, so that where in the past there had been one County-wide service, there were now a number of smaller District library services, including that provided by Lanark District (later Clydesdale District) which included Lanark, Carluke and Forth Libraries, and the related mobile services.

Fortuitously from my point of view, when posts were being assigned in this new structure, there was no obvious candidate to fill the job of Librarian at Carluke Library, and Willie Scobbie, the former County Librarian, despite what he knew of my chequered record showed considerable confidence in me by putting my name forward for this post. And so it was that without as far as I remember filling in an application form or attending for interview, I found myself appointed as Carluke’s new librarian, responsible to the District Librarian.  It was a wonderful opportunity.

One week, at the end of May 1975, I finished my course at Strathclyde University which I passed with Distinction. I was awarded the Dunn and Wilson prize in Public Library Management which I think I can be proud of, for though the quality of learning on that subject we had been exposed to was very poor, my fellow-students were a very able group. The next week, I was back beneath the hyperbolic parabaloidal roof, librarian of a public library with a staff of three, including a library assistant with special responsibility for children’s services, and a budget of £5000 per annum. I remember it snowed on my first day in the job. I was to be there for just under two years.

Small town librarian

I had a sense of satisfaction in my role as small-town librarian. I was responsible for all aspects of managing the library other than staff selection. I enjoyed building relationships with the borrowers, selecting books with their interests in mind at the weekly key copy meetings in Lanark, helping them find the information they needed, and acting as a passionate advocate when this was required – for instance I tried unsuccessfully to get one elderly lady registered as visually impaired. Looking back, I can see that I was a good, committed, popular local librarian, but at the time I found it difficult to be so positive about my achievements.

What I felt weakest at was staff management. During my course we’d received no practical guidance on this subject, and no training of any kind was offered me when I took up my new post. Given my lack of self-confidence and my inability to be assertive, I found it difficult to build appropriate relationships with my colleagues.

I was on friendly terms with them – especially with one of them who, along with her boy-friend  played in a Christian band. When she and I were on the evening shift together, we sometimes read out the last few pages of Mills and Boon romances when the library was quiet just before closing time. I would take the male part, and my colleague the female, and we took it in turn to read the linking narration. We found this great fun, although of course it was thoroughly unprofessional.

But I found it difficult to give my staff instructions about changes in practice which I thought were necessary, or to point out when their commitment felt short of what it should have been.  I considered that while I was happy at any time to help re-shelving books returned by borrowers, this should not be regarded as one of the duties of the professional librarian, but I lacked the courage to put this view to my team. Nor did I have the confidence and common sense to discuss the issue with my managers and seek their advice. Instead, I simply got on with shelving armfuls of books shift after shift, resentful, and feeling bad about myself as I did it because of my cowardly silence. Whenever I did or said anything I thought might be even remotely controversial, and I saw my colleagues talking quietly together at the other side of the library, I was quite convinced they were talking about me and my confidence sank quickly into the quicksand of my heart.

Relations with the District Librarian

I didn’t find the District Librarian particularly understanding or supportive, although I realise that from his point of view it could not have been easy having an unknown and untried member of staff thrust upon him in a management position. At one point during my time at Carluke, it was decided by the Council (presumably as the result of a recommendation put forward by the District Librarian) that the post of library assistant with special responsibility for children’s services should be downgraded, so that the specialist dimension was lost. I have no recollection of being in any way consulted or involved in the process leading to this proposal.

I recognised what an excellent service we were offering to children and how committed Noreen Duddy, the colleague currently in post was in selecting and promoting good books for children, and interacting with kids in the library. So I tried to defend Noreen’s post as it stood without any real knowledge of local authority decision-making processes. I quoted to the District Librarian  (and to anyone else who would listen) the COSLA (Council of Scottish Local Authorities) Standards for the Public Library Service which, at least in my interpretation, was clear on the fact that a library the size of Carluke’s should have a staff member dedicated to developing children’s work. I also involved a local councillor, herself an enthusiastic reader, in arguing our case.

For these activities – and especially for the latter – I found myself in trouble with the boss. In my ignorance, I may have gone about things the wrong way, but the District Librarian should surely have appreciated the passion which motivated me. I particularly disliked the threat with which the wrist-slapping was accompanied. In those days, you became a Chartered Librarian not, as now, by writing a ‘professional development report’ demonstrating and evidencing your evolving knowledge and skills, but simply by getting your line manager to vouch for your competence on an official Library Association form. In the aftermath of my failed attempt to prevent the downgrading of Noreen’s post, My boss reminded me that if I were to charter, I would require his support, and that that support would not be forthcoming if there were any further instances of insubordination. Again, I lacked the gumption to make clear to him that I thought this threat was inappropriate, or perhaps the truth was that with my low professional self-image I felt it was only what I deserved.

In the event, he did sign the appropriate form when I’d served the requisite number of months on his team at Lanark District, and I posted it off to the Library Association. There was a space on the form where I could indicate whether I wanted the Chartership document to be sent direct to my home address, or to my line manager – I guess the expectation was that your boss might want to arrange an appropriate presentation ceremony. Assuming this was the standard practice, I asked for my Charter to be sent to Head Office.

One day as I walked into his office in Lanark, the District Librarian held out a cardboard tube to me. ‘Why on earth did you get this sent to me for?’ he grunted, with no sense of occasion whatsoever. This insensitivity marked all aspects of his relational style: he failed to connect with me, and to provide the encouragement and leadership which would have helped me overcome my weaknesses and value my strengths.  Instead, afraid to be real with him, I buried even more deeply the sense of desolation I often felt.

I remember one day Fred Bell, a colleague from Lanark roared into the car park at Carluke Library on his motor-bike. As he stood in the staff room peeling off his gloves and yellow jacket and unstrapping his helmet I felt what I imagined the kids in Enid Blyton novels must have felt when their current adventure was going pear-shaped, and they’d reached the end of their own resources and their parents turned up and there was someone to lean on. As Fred appeared from under his bikers’ gear, I could have flung my arms around round him and hugged him.

Special Activities

Apart from all the routine work of managing a library in those days before computers were widely in use, when loan statistics had to be counted manually, and notifications of overdue books written out by hand each day, I organised some special activities.

Library events were less common than they are today but I was determined to see what I could achieve. I set up a painting competition with prizes: it was judged by myself, a local councillor and a reporter from the Carluke and Lanark Gazette. I’m pleased to say my boss supported this initiative, and I think allowed me to use money from the book-fund for prizes. I sent publicity material about the competition to all the local schools, and, in a somewhat over-the-top fashion to anyone else I could think of (including church ministers) asking them to encourage children to take part.

Thus we managed to impact the whole community, and received masses of entries which were duly judged before the planned awards ceremony. My colleagues and I sellotaped all the entries to the glass walls lining the library, in the hope that those children who had taken part would drag their parents into the building to see their work on display, and perhaps be inspired to use our services.  The success of this event even rated a mention in the local Council Minutes and won the District Librarian praise, although he was less than pleased that he had to enlist the services of cleaning contractors to remove the remains of the sellotape from the glass.

This was just one of several occasions when I worked fairly closely with the local paper. After my time as a trainee in the library, I had written a four-part series for the paper on a local Victorian ‘boy poet’, whose work had been published posthumously, and who was a curiosity rather than being in any real sense a remarkable writer. The local reporter used us when necessary as a source of information for stories – we were, for example, able to help her when she was doing a piece on the suspicion that their might be valuable archaeological remains on the site of the planned new Carluke High School building. We confirmed that some remains had been unearthed in the vicinity of the new building, although this evidence did not in the end prevent the development from going ahead.

On one occasion, I realised that in my enthusiasm for helping journalists (I had a less than balanced enthusiasm for what I saw as the glamour of the press) I was on the point of acting unprofessionally by using my contacts with library members as a means of uncovering information which was not already in the public domain.

One day, a perky little stuffed bear was left behind in the library, we assumed by a child. I sat him where he could be clearly seen, above the shelf behind the counter where we kept reserved books awaiting collection by borrowers. It occurred to me that the bear could generate some library publicity, and so he appeared on the front page of the next issue of the Gazette accompanied by plaintive details of his inadvertent abandonment among the bookshelves. And (with a little help from myself) the bear, signing himself “Browsin’ Bruin” wrote a letter which was published in the following Friday’s paper extolling the kindness of library staff in providing him with temporary accommodation and assuring the worried populace that he was now back home, having been claimed by the children of the local Baptist minister who was a keen library user.

Once during my time at Carluke Library we attracted the attention of a wider-circulation paper, the Glasgow-based Daily Record. One of our library users claimed to take exception to a small picture book by the artist John Burningham called The dog. It was a thoroughly innocuous little book about the daily doings of a puppy. On one spread, the pup is portrayed balancing precariously on three legs while relieving himself in a corner of the garden, and the accompanying text reads ‘The dog peed on the flowers.’  Our customer claimed that her young child had been shocked by this explicit language, and contacted the Record.  They ran a two-page feature with a photo of the allegedly disturbed child, the mother, and the offending two-page spread.  The accompanying article included a brief comment from me. I’ve no idea whether the woman received any payment for the story, but the general impression locally was that she had made rather a fool of herself over the issue, and certainly no-one thought any less of the library service as a result.

Another special event I organised at Carluke was a talk entitled Lanarkshire in the beginning given by W. D. Ian Rolfe a Glasgow University geologist. Back in the 19^th century, one of the leading Carluke citizens of was the polymathic Daniel Reid Rankin who published a history of the town, and after whom the Town Hall (now demolished) was named. His passion for geology led him to amass a collection of local fossils which eventually found a home in the Hunterian Museum, where Dr Rolfe was a curator. It occurred to me that there would be a certain resonance in bringing some of the fossils back to Carluke after a century, and Dr Rolfe agreed to give a presentation on the geology of the local areas, and to bring with him some items from Rankin’s collection.

I promoted the event as widely as I could, personally choosing the title. I felt that in settling on Lanarkshire in the beginning I was being very daring, as I was aware that some of my friends in the Brethren believed that Dr Rolfe’s account of ‘the beginning’ would be decidedly at variance with their conviction that the conventional explanation of the fossil record was misleading. On the day the geologist came to tea with my parents and myself before the talk, which was attended by a small (but respectable) audience - I don’t know why I had ever imagined that such an event would be a crowd-puller!

A selection of Dr Rankin’s fossils was laid out on a table for people to inspect after he’d finished speaking: to my mortification a particularly minute specimen was purloined, possibly by one of the small boys who were in attendance. But if Dr Rolfe was upset by this, he didn’t let it show, and I judged the event to have been a success.

I also had the idea of inviting the previous County Librarian, the avuncular Willie Scobbie (who was working towards his retirement as the Lanark Division Education Librarian) to come and play Santa Claus at a Christmas party for children at the library. To my surprise, when I wrote to him proposing this, he replied accepting the invitation – which left me in perplexity, wondering how you go about hiring Santa suits. However word of my plans must have reached the District Librarian, presumably via whoever typed Willie’s reply, and one day he said to me ‘What I’m hearing about Willie Scobbie playing Santa at your library can’t be true, can it?’ His tone indicated that if this were the case, then my plans would meet with his severe disapproval, and lacking the courage to stand up to him I lied. ‘No,’ I said. In a secret place I guess I was relieved since this gave me an excuse not to wrestle with the complexities of organising reindeer and worrying about the health and safety issues involved in landing a sledge on a hyperbolic parabaloidal roof.

I can see that I was looking for a way of building my sense of significance through my work, and that in pursuit of this goal, I was prepared to go down any route which presented itself, be it quarrying local history resources to write articles, or setting up library events. Making information widely available, awakening people’s interest in the history of their community, helping meet peoples reading and information needs – these were not for me so much ends in themselves as vehicles which I used in a desperate quest for personal significance. I used to beat myself up about what I saw as a. deeply flawed attitude to serving society - getting involved not primarily because promoting change is good in and of itself, but because it helped me feel more comfortable with myself - but I realise now that we all act from mixed motives, and that what matters is not so much the imperfection of your motives as the impact for good which your actions have on the lives of others.

Librarians' Christian Fellowship

During these two years at Carluke Library I became involved with the fledgling Librarians’ Christian Fellowship as Scottish Representative, organising events, producing and circulating publicity material to attract new members, and attending committee meetings.  Perhaps the chief issue which exercised my mind was the question of censorship in libraries. Should we as librarians, and specifically as Christian librarians, provide material on all subjects of interest to our readers, or should we exclude from our shelves books on controversial or politically sensitive subjects or books presenting in an appealing light belief systems with which we personally were not in sympathy?

Initially, I was in favour of such censorship. In particular, I believed that books on say witchcraft, occult forces and atheism could damage people spiritually, and I was both repelled and naively attracted by explicit descriptions of sex. In those days my convictions were very black-and-white and unsubtle – it didn’t for instance occur to me that portrayals of opulent materialism could be equally spiritually damaging. And it troubled me that since I was responsible as librarian for the stock on my shelves it was logical to assume that I was morally accountable for any negative affect of that material on folk who borrowed it. And so I was tacitly supportive of censoring materials, although I can’t in fact actually remember refusing to stock any book – my convictions, when faced with the challenge to action, were clearly not sufficiently strong.

Over the years however, I have come to realise that the Christian who is called to be librarian is called to be a good librarian, and that being a good librarian involves providing access to books and information published within the law on all subjects, with the proviso that the books stocked should be the best-written and best-designed of those available on the subjects in question. The Christian librarian’s responsibility is to provide the material which he or she is contracted to supply – what the reader makes of it is their own responsibility. 

Trade Unionism

The other issue which exercised me during my two years at Carluke was the question of Union membership and industrial action. In those days, a ‘closed shop’ operated in local government, and so I had to join the union NALGO (National Association of Local Government Officers), now UNISON. At that time, I was implacably opposed to striking, and the calling of a one-day strike intensified my sense of alienation from my colleagues. My view was simply that it was to God, and not to my employers that I was, in all my actions, ultimately accountable. It was my responsibility to provide a service and my obligation to my God and to my customers in my mind outweighed any obligations to support fellow union members in industrial action. I published an article along these lines in the Brethren monthly The Witness and let some of my colleagues see it.  As it happened, I had a job interview in Edinburgh on the day of the strike and so I didn’t have to make any awkward decisions about passing colleagues on a picket line and opening the library alone.

I’m not sure how much I knew at that time about the Christian origins of the labour movement, and it simply hadn’t occurred to me that where there is a genuine injustice then action is appropriate, and in that case supporting colleagues is every bit as much of a Christian duty as serving customers. 

Conflagration

Late one evening in the early months of 1977, I was lying in bed reading one of Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ sermons when the phone rang. It was the police – the library was on fire! I got there as quickly as I could – the familiar car-park was bustling with police and fire-fighters, who already had the outbreak under control. The interior of the staff-room at the front of the building was black and smouldering, and in the heat the tiles above the front desk in the public area were showering down dripping globules of molten plastic. There was no physical damage to the rest of the building, but the space under the arching roof was heavy with acrid smoke. With the fire officer’s permission, I went into the building, and as every good librarian would have done in those pre-computer days, I carried the precious wooden trays of green cards to a relatively safe place.

Within a few days, we were in business once again. The District Librarian arranged for the commercial cleaners to come back to deep-clean the undamaged part of the building; my colleagues and I washed the covers of all the books with soapy water; and we set up tables in the centre of the library and worked from there. (This left us in a rather exposed position – one day I was threatened by a man, high on drink or drugs and brandishing a broken bottle. The tables didn’t give as much security as I would have wished when I took refuge behind them!)

In the library office, one wall had been lined with deep shelves. Most of them were filled with books, one was packed with folded back-issues of the Carluke Gazette, and one housed a Baby Belling cooker. It was plugged in to a socket on the wall at the back of the shelf, so that to switch it off at the mains you had to reach behind the appliance. It appeared that the fire had been caused by the cooker being left switched on at the mains switch, and presumably at the unit itself. The heat had set fire to the newspapers on the adjacent shelf, and the blaze had rapidly spread.

When I was discussing with the District Librarian the need to employ contract cleaners to get the library back to a state where we could open to the public, he pointed out that the fact that the cooker had been left switched on was my responsibility, and that if I made it difficult for him by insisting on a higher quality of cleaning than he was prepared to fund, then I might find myself facing the consequences of my mistake. This felt like the ultimate betrayal, but I lacked both the courage and insight to argue back. I can’t in fact remember whether I had been the one locking up the library on the evening of the fire, but I would have thought that the design of the office, with a cooker in such close proximity to flammable material, was at least as much to blame for the consequences as the people who accidentally left the appliance turned on, and didn’t notice before leaving the building.

I was only in Lanark District Council’s employment for a few weeks after the fire before I left to join Scripture Union. And so I stepped from under the hyperbolic parabaloidal roof before the fire damage was repaired and I don’t recall ever being back.  That library has now been replaced with a new building.