‘Tyneside has never since loomed so large in the library map as it did then [in the 1880s]. London was awakening to the call of the public library and the North-East rained librarians on the opening posts. Inkster at Battersea – appointed in July 1887 – Burgoyne at Lambeth, Welch at Clapham, Everett at Streatham, all, curiously enough, neighbours, formed a sort of settlement on that side [of the] Thames, with much social to-and-froing amongst the members of it.’ (1)
The impetus behind this informal cross-regional professional network can be traced back to the influential figure of William Haggerston (1848-1894), chief librarian of Newcastle Public Library in the north-east of England from 1879 to 1894.
By the 1890s, Haggerston was viewed as an energetic chief librarian with a particular aptitude for training promising junior librarians, some of whom went on to enjoy long and successful careers outside the North East:
‘Mr Haggerston was very helpful to his assistants, and about a dozen of them hold prominent positions in libraries in London, Birmingham, Croydon, Norwood, Belfast, Darlington and other places. Many of these gentlemen have testified to the valuable assistance which the…librarian had rendered them. It was well known by his assistants that Mr Haggerston was always ready to speak a good word for them, and whenever his influence would benefit a young librarian…[the Newcastle chief] was never averse to giving the needful aid.’ (2)
I have blogged about the so-called ‘Haggerstonian Geordies’ for the Four Nations blog. Following a research trip to Newcastle last year, I have also started to document my library findings on pinterest as part of an ongoing programme to reconstruct and analyse the careers of around fifty chief and deputy librarians in late-Victorian Britain, with an emphasis on the London experience.(3) The occupational lives of the first generation of library managers in the capital reveal much about wider trends; for example they provide an opportunity to explore social and geographical mobility among the working and lower middle classes at a micro- or human scale, including the informal and submerged professional network that stretched from Haggerston’s Newcastle library in the North East to London libraries such as Lewisham, Battersea and Clapham in the South East.
The Libraries Act of 1850 had allowed local authorities or vestries to establish free libraries using moneys from the rates; but as the quotation at the start of this post suggests (‘London was awakening to the call…’) London was slow to respond to this opportunity and only began to open rate-assisted libraries in meaningful numbers in the 1890s. Newcastle and, to a lesser extent, other major metropolitan centres such as Birmingham and Liverpool were able to ‘rain librarians’ on London by this time because they had already trained up dozens of young librarians in their better-established library services. Put simply, London’s new free libraries were able to fish for qualified managers from a well-stocked national pool and a significant majority of the capital’s first chief and deputy librarians were both born and trained outside the city. Here were ‘incomers’ from Swansea, Worcester, Liverpool, Wigan, Weymouth, Hereford, South Shields and elsewhere. The implications of this for our understanding of cross-cultural exchange between British regions c.1900 are intriguing – and will be explored another time, along with the above-mentioned ‘social to-and-froing’ that took place between the cohort of Newcastle-trained chief librarians who had seemingly formed a sort of settlement on the south side of the Thames.(3)
(1) ‘Obituary of Laurence Inkster’, Library Association Record, July 1939, p.398
(2) ‘Death of Mr W. J. Haggerston,’ 5 May 1894, Newcastle Library Cuttings, Volume 1, p.45, Newcastle City Library.
(3) This research trip was funded by a James Ollé Award from the Library and Information History Group, part of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
(4)I have previously written on one pairing within this cohort.