Christmas Past and Words of Winter

I am delighted to say that our November display of childhood memoirs (see last month’s blog post) has proved so popular, and there is such a wealth of diverse books in this category, that we are going to keep it going throughout December.

To mark the festive season, we are supplementing it with some unusual memoirs of Christmases past which we hope you will enjoy, as well as some on generally wintry themes.

Verily Anderson wrote a number of extremely funny memoirs, including of her life with a young family and a houseful of lodgers in Kensington after the Second World War.  She also devoted herself to the history of her forebears, the illustrious Quaker families of Gurney, Hoare and Buxton, which included the great prison reformer Elizabeth Fry and the anti-slavery campaigner Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton.  Her Scrambled Egg for Christmas is one of her memoirs – our 1970 copy has lovely illustrations and it’s worth getting past its old fashioned appearance as it really is a joy.

Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales is the definitive evocation of Christmas in a small Welsh town in the 1920s, but his fellow Welshman, the actor Richard Burton, also explored this theme with his A Christmas Story drawing on his own childhood memories of a Glamorgan mining community, where debates rage about religion and politics, chestnuts are roasted in the fire, and the child Richard dreads the humiliation of being given a second-hand Christmas present, the refurbished toy of a more privileged boy.

One of my favourite of the more idiosyncratic books in the Biography Collection is Crackers at Christmas by Hazel Wheeler, documenting the “Festive Trials of a Yorkshire Housewife” from the 40s to the 90s.  Wheeler recorded the whole of her life in great detail, and this volume brings together her reminiscences of Christmas in Huddersfield over six decades, characterised by unrelenting deadpan gloom.  From food preparation to family relationships, every subject is treated with the same acerbic pessimism.  This is the perfect book for anyone who is not a fan of Christmas cheer, and strangely Hazel’s pared down Eeyore-ish narrative ends up being very uplifting.

More than any other figure from the English literary scene, Charles Dickens helped shape our Christmas mythology with his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, and in Dickens and Christmas his great-great-great granddaughter Lucinda Hawksley explores his personal and artistic relationship to the season as it was celebrated during his lifetime.  (You can listen to an episode of our BioEpic podcast which looks at this in detail    https://anchor.fm/bio-epic/episodes/BioEpic—Episode-3—Charles-Dickens-etiaql  ). 

Expanding our view from Christmas to the winter season in general, we have some wonderful books looking at the cold and dark time of year, and how its challenges and beauty affect us.  For some the season is a real challenge to mood and wellbeing. Horatio Clare (The Light in the Dark, 2018) and Fraser Harrison (A Winter’s Tale, 1987) have both written rawly beautiful memoirs of marriage and fatherhood in rural settings during winter.  Clare struggles with seasonal depression, and both writers evoke the steely challenges of winter and the coming of milder days both internal and external; these are moving and enlightening books to curl up with on a dark winter afternoon.

One of the greatest works of art to deal with winter is Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) which he composed in 1828 and which is one of nearly 170,000 pieces of music available to stream through Naxos via our website In Schubert’s Winter Journey, the celebrated tenor Ian Bostridge examines the music, how Schubert conceived it and what it has meant to Bostridge himself to interpret it, as well as how it relates to its historical context – a fascinating read which will deepen the appreciation of those who are already familiar with this music, and open it up to those who are not.

Finally, the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ s Cold looks at how it feels to experience some of the most extreme conditions on earth and why the polar regions have gripped the imaginations of so many over the centuries.  Brrrrr!

Whatever you are doing over the festive season, I wish you warmth and happiness, and all the very best for further reading adventures in 2022.

Claudia Jessop, Kensington Central Library

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Holocaust Memorial Day

27th January is Holocaust Memorial Day, on which we remember the victims of the Nazi Holocaust and of the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The theme this year is “Be a Light in the Darkness”, with a focus on those people who risked their lives to resist evil. We have many books in our Special Collection of Biographies about rescuers, who took unimaginable risks on behalf of their fellow human beings, knowing that discovery meant death (you can see a selection of them in this picture).

One of our books about a rescuer has a special significance. It was donated by our very own Library Customer Service Officer at Kensington Central Library, Besart Zhubi, and is My Life Under the Nazi Occupation by Mimi Kahmi Ergas-Faraxhi (Shkup, 2018). I spoke to Besart about the book, and what it means to him:

CJ:  Can you tell us a bit about the background to this book?

BZ: I never knew my maternal grandmother well – she died before we had time. We escaped Sarajevo in 1992 when I was 6. A genocide was being planned to eradicate all those of Islamic heritage. A civil war was raging. The government considered us stateless. We arrived in London and the UK gave me a new home.

Nenedaja (Grandmother or literally the mother of my ‘maternal uncle’) died in 2001. But my mother kept her memory alive, often telling me stories of Mimi. Mimi was the woman Nenedaja would say was her Jewish friend in Albania. “Mimi had the most amazing voice. Mimi would sing so beautifully”.

Fast forward a few years and Facebook was ubiquitous. I set out on a mission to find Mimi. Mimi had died, but I found her daughter Drita (Ita) Bartova. Drita means light in Albanian. It amazed me to discover my mother’s history and mine too. Drita told us about this book! The North Macedonian Cultural department sponsored it as a recognition of the role Albanians played in protecting Jews.

CJ.  Can you describe the situation in Macedonia during the Nazi period and how it affected Jewish people?

BZ. Much of the Balkans had come out of imperial domination from the Ottoman empire. The interior was underdeveloped, and this was especially true of North Macedonia. By 1941 the Axis powers invaded. Collaborationists filled train loads of Jews for transportation to death. The only refuge was Albania, conquered and ruled by Italians. Italy – while thoroughly Fascistic – was less concerned with Jews earlier on in this period, though later this changed, and the Albanian government had a certain amount of lee-way to protect Jews.

The Ergas-Faraxhi family recognised that if they stayed in North Macedonia, they would die at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators. It’s also important to note that a resistance developed in Bulgaria later on, and in Serbia. However, Albania was the only country in mainland Europe to experience a rise in the population of Jews during the period of the war, due to the number who sought sanctuary there and were helped.

CJ. What can you tell us about your grandmother and her family?

BZ. My Grandmother, or Nenedaja, was a young girl from a wealthy family of many years standing, with an incredible history of trading with their own ship. She was a pioneer. In her community most women were illiterate. Her father forced her to go to school and join the anti-Fascistic league. She was to learn to read and write–and my mum tells me that Nenedaja was so ashamed of this! She cried for being forced to go to school. Traditional culture viewed women’s education as unimportant. But Nenedaja persevered. She became committed to the Partisan cause. She learned to read, write and use a typewriter. It sounds utterly trivial now, but there wasn’t a single woman in her home city of Ulqin that could read, write and type. She read widely, but mostly communist propaganda. She taught other women to read too.

CJ. How did your grandmother get to know the Ergas-Faraxhi family?

BZ. Under Ottoman rule, Jews could work in whatever business they wished, whereas they were traditionally forbidden to join guilds in Christian Europe, where many were desperately poor and were subject to regular pogroms and murder. This rampant and poisonous level of antisemitism was relatively absent in the Ottoman empire and so Jews were integral to life in Albanian cities. (Before WW2, King Zog – absolute monarch of Albania – was eager to encourage Jewish specialists to move to Albania to help develop Albania. King Zog would never return as Albanian Communists took power.)

Now, my grandmother spent much of her youth in her family’s compound in Shkodra, Albania. Mimi Ergas-Faraxhi, her husband and her daughter (Drita) moved in next door. My grandmother, naturally curious about the new family, visited and became friends with Mimi who posed as Albanian – but they were refugees from Macedonia and when they revealed they were Jewish my Great Grandfather promised them complete sanctuary and safety. Mimi and my grandmother became good friends and my Nenedaja and her cousins would try their best to cheer her spirits as news came of what was happening to Jews and to her family–in Macedonia. Mimi described being invited to a wedding at the ‘Shurdha’ household (my grandmother’s maiden name). Mimi described it as a lavish occasion with each table having its server. Mimi would have baby Drita over to my grandmother while Mimi took a rest. It was a close friendship formed in trying times.

CJ. Your grandmother’s family helped Mimi, her husband and baby daughter Drita to hide. Do you have any thoughts about what might have informed their courageous behaviour?

BZ. The Canon of Leke Dukagjini codifies Albanian custom in an ancient manuscript dictating how Albanians should behave. We treat guests with the utmost esteem. In Albanian custom, we treat a guest as a young king. The householder would rather die than hand over a guest to his enemy.

CJ. What kind of practical help did your grandmother’s family offer the Ergas-Faraxhis?

BZ. Italian and later German soldiers raided and interrogated the wealthier families; soldiers extorted the local population through raids to find weapons and hidden Jews. These raids were the norm – to seek Jews and the resistance. My grandmother’s father often paid off soldiers. In terms of physical help it was mainly financial. Milk, flour, food, and babysitting. Baby Drita was looked after by my grandmother and when raids happened they didn’t betray a single person, though if their complicity had been discovered they would also have been killed.

CJ. Did you grow up being aware of the story of what your forebears had done during the Nazi occupation?

BZ. No. I had no idea what my grandmother did during WW2. I became aware from relatives in Albania that she was in fact a spy for the Communists, giving the location of Italian, and then German troops who were being terrorised by Albanian partisans. Italy was invaded by the allies and Mussolini’s regime collapsed. Marshal Tito gave Nenedaja a medal in recognition of her efforts.

CJ.  It is fantastic that your research led to you and your mother actually meeting Drita, who was a baby when your grandmother helped make sure her family survived – can you describe what you felt? Can you tell us about the meeting with her in Israel, and about the inscription she wrote in the book?

BZ. It was incredible. I felt such a deep connection to my grandmother by meeting Drita. Drita kindly sent us the wonderful and heartbreaking tale written by her mother. She inscribed her mother’s memoir of her experiences, including being helped by our family, saying “Meeting you has been an incredible stroke of luck, and very special for me. Our mothers would have been glad to know….and perhaps somewhere they are.”

CJ. What do you think is the significance of this story, and why do you think it is important to remember stories like this?

BZ. Well, it’s a story unique to its time and place. But, ultimately it’s a universal story because it’s about friendship, survival and the capacity for human kindness and barbarity. It’s a story that Jews, Muslims, and Christians can live happily side by side together. It’s a story of courage in the face of barbaric crimes, and of survival. It’s interesting for me, but there are countless other tales of bravery. History has erased Albanians. It’s a source of great disappointment. I fear that history repeats: first as tragedy, then as farce.

Extra ordinary lives from our Biography Collection

This month’s Biography Collection display at Kensington Central Library gives us a holiday from the famous, the illustrious, the eminent, the idolised, the household-named, the great, the infamous and the notorious that inhabit our collection.

As well as housing many books about those we are likely to have heard of, the collection is also home to many memoirs of ordinary people with no special claim to being remarkable.  Often the only publication of a person who, perhaps looking back on a childhood in a long gone age, feels moved to record what everyday life was like back then, these books are fascinating records of the lives of ordinary working men and women.  Families, school, industry, war, immigration and emigration – all of these subjects are examined by a multitude of voices.

We can find evocations of particular times and places preserved for ever by those who, without ever intruding into the public eye, shared the lives of the man and woman in the street (or in the field, or on the mountain).

Location is often important in these kinds of books, with the authors striving to recreate a very specific corner of the world. Many London neighbourhoods feature – Lambeth in Mary Chamberlain’s record of the lives of working class women from 1913 to 1989, Bethnal Green whose atmosphere of the 1920s-40s was described by Doris M. Bailey, Blackfriars where Bella Burge ran a boxing ring from 1910, Islington where Gill Brason’s stint as a park keeper in the 70s shows us a neighbourhood on the brink of huge change.  Many regions of the UK, both rural and urban, are also given a voice – John Ackerman’s South Wales, Ralph Glasser’s Gorbals, Arthur Barton’s Jarrow, J. J. Bagley’s three centuries of Lancashire diaries; Anne Burling’s East Anglia, James Maggs’s Southwold, to name just a small sample.

 

We can also eavesdrop on ordinary lives around the world – a boyhood in Sierra Leone in the early 20^th century is hauntingly described by Robert Wellesley Cole, Iris Gioia and Clifford Thurlow interview the people they meet on a trip to Eastern Europe at a pivotal moment in the history of the region, in 1990; the Dar family describe how their lives as carpet sellers are impacted by the tumultuous history of Kashmir; Forrest Carter leaves a unique record of Cherokee life in 1930s Tennessee, and Glückel of Hamelin recounts the highs and lows of her days in the Jewish community of Hamburg with such immediacy that it is hard to believe she was writing almost 400 years ago.

As usual, we have no shortage of local interest – read about Joe Nixon starting up a youth club in 1950s Notting Hill, Mary Wylde a 1930s Kensington housewife, and life at Holland Park School in the 80s as recounted by John-Paul Flintoff (I can vouch for the accuracy of that particular account, being an ex-Holland Park pupil of exactly Flintoff’s vintage)!

Again as always, our  Biography Collection yields a rich harvest – Isobel Charman’s “The Great War, the People’s Story” looks at the impact of that huge conflict on ordinary citizens, R. J. W. Selleck’s “Not so Eminent Victorians” finds 19^th century immigrants to Australia building an education system to transform people’s lives, and there are socio-cultural studies of a typically progressive kind from the 60s, taking a sample of 14 year old school children or of young people in care and interviewing them about their hopes and dreams.  Many people have chosen to write about their working lives – so we have a survey of working people from Hackney in the 1930s, and stories of countless professions including taxi driver, station master, nurse, teacher, miner, shop assistant and cowboy.

It’s not quite true to say that all of the writers featured are people you’ll never have heard of.  Some of the people featured in these books later became famous, sometimes through the books themselves – Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie, for example, is a classic of rural British memoir, and Jennifer Worth has become familiar to all through her “Call the Midwife” books and their enormously successful TV adaptation.  But all of them are accounts of life before fame or fortune had visited, when they were deep in the obscurity of ordinary life.

What is proven by these commonplace, everyday memoirs is that, in fact, there is no such thing as an ordinary life.  These writers are visited by extraordinary and sometimes deeply strange turns of events. Some go on to do unusual things that take them far from their beginnings. They are caught up in epic moments of world history.  But even if they simply live out their lives in relatively uneventful ways, they show that every life is in its own way remarkable, and that the voices of those who have never sat at a high table or stepped on a red carpet are often the voices that tell us most about who we were and are.

Claudia, Kensington Central Library

Edited to add –

If you’re interested to read more about some of the people mentioned in this post, do take a look at the eResources we have on biographies such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. These are free to use with your Kensington and Chelsea library card.

Victorian diaries in our Biography Collection

Our special Biography Collection at Kensington Central Library is home to many different kinds of biographical book, and that includes a large number of diaries.  These provide a very special kind of insight into a people’s lives.

Some diaries have become vital parts of the world’s heritage and have been read by millions, like those of Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys.  Some are the private jottings of ordinary people, whose experience of key moments in history have made them invaluable witnesses.  Others, kept by the famous, may have been written with at least one eye on posterity, or may have been intended to be private, and now afford a glimpse behind the public mask.

Diaries can mix records of hugely significant events and musings on enormous philosophical questions with the minutiae of everyday life – so the Pre-Rapahelite artists documented by William Michael Rossetti debate the meaning of art one minute and complain about faulty stovepipes, sore throats and toothache the next (many diaries reveal the chronic discomfort of life in earlier periods), and George Bernard Shaw meticulously records the prices of the train tickets, newspapers and ginger beer he purchased on the way to lecture engagements at which he speculated about the future of humanity.

This year’s Cityread London showcased the fictional London diary of a young Muslim woman in Sofia Khan is not Obliged by Ayisha Malik.  We wanted to plan an event to link our Biography Collection to this, and were also mindful of the fact that it was the bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth, down the road at Kensington Palace, on 24 May.  The idea of having a look at some of the diaries in our collection that were kept by diverse London residents and visitors during Victoria’s reign gave me a great opportunity to dip into some wonderful examples of one of my favourite kinds of biography, eventually selecting thirteen different voices to try to give some snapshots of London life between 1837 and 1901.

Given that most diaries in this period – and certainly most of those published – were kept by the well-to-do, it was a challenge to find the voices of those in more humble circumstances, but the diary of Hannah Cullwick gives a unique insight into the life of a domestic servant, and the struggles of the destitute were shockingly recorded by minister’s daughter Helen G. McKenny as she made philanthropic visits in the Old Street area.

I was fascinated to read about Keshub Chandra Sen’s visit to London to promote links between British and Indian social reformers, and to discover that Leo Tolstoy’s visit to a school in Chelsea as part of research into setting up schools for the peasant children on his Russian estate, left a legacy of 24 individual school boys’ accounts of a single day in 1861, on which they studied, played, fought, had boating accidents and acted as fences for stolen goods, amongst other things.

Local Kensington detail gave Marion Sambourne’s diaries an especial charm, and the fact that Malik’s Cityread book continues the genre of the humorous fictional diary which has given us Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones, allowed me to look at a Victorian fictional diary – Happy Thoughts by F. C. Burnand – which graced the pages of Punch 20 years before its more famous successor The Diary of a Nobody, (which Burnand edited), and which is still laugh-out-loud funny over 140 years later.  Of course, Queen Victoria herself was a prolific diarist, and extracts from her own writings revealed a remarkable juxtaposition of the stately and the intimately domestic.

The bulk of our Biography Collection dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (although of course it comes right up to date with some very recent publications, and our oldest book dates from the early seventeenth century), so this was also a good opportunity to look at some of the physical aspects of our Victorian books.  The late Victorians loved the glamorous glitz of gilding on their bindings, and many biographies of this period sport beautifully detailed medallion portraits of their subjects.

It’s always very evocative to look at the handwritten inscriptions, personal bookplates, school prize labels and typically ornate library stamps of this period – in the spine of one book I found part of a Victorian newspaper advert, and the wonders of the Internet allowed me to reconstruct the full text.

This unique collection contains a treasure trove of insights and knowledge, not only in the content of the books, but also in their physical fabric, which gives a fascinating sense of the Victorians who wrote, published, bound, decorated, inscribed, catalogued and kept them, preserving them in private and public libraries until they found their way to our collection, where we can enjoy them today.

Claudia, Kensington Central Library

Great names of British comedy

It’s fifty years since the first broadcast of that classic of British comedy, Dad’s Army, and this month our Biography Collection display at Kensington Central Library showcases the life stories of some of our funniest men and women. We have a truly enormous number of books celebrating the comic genius of stand-ups and sitcom stars. With intimate glimpses of the highs and lows of their real lives, we find that the tears of a clown are often a real phenomenon, while some stars have brought their comic talents to their own memoirs so that their trials and tribulations cause tears of laughter as we read.

The vintage funny business is all here – from the Victorian double entendres of Marie Lloyd and the silk dressing-gown cool of Noel Coward, to the surreal capers of ITMA (It’s That Man Again), Round the Horne and The Goons and the even more surreal and subversive – and perhaps also quintessentially British? – comic kaleidoscope of Monty Python.

I wonder if I am alone in finding Private Frazer’s mournful cry of “We’re doomed!” strangely reassuring – it’s interesting that over the years we have loved so may characters who express comic despair at life’s frustrations, with a special place in our collective psyche for the hapless melancholy of Tony Hancock, the car-thrashing frenzy of Basil Fawlty, the tightlipped defeatism of Victor Meldrew and the wailing lament of Steptoe junior as his father greets another faux pas with a malevolent toothless grin. There’s that traditional strand of social competitiveness, snobbery and one-upmanship to relish in many of our best loved characters too (Fawlty and Steptoe’s anguish has a lot to do with this, and think also of Hyacinth Bucket, Rigsby,and Margot). The “saucy” humour of the seaside postcard resonates in the Carry On era and Benny Hill, and British comedy has also always had a healthy disrespect for the institutions of authority, taking the wind out of the sails of power in Yes, Minister and of the criminal justice system in Porridge.

Through the alternative scene of the 80s, shows like The Kenny Everett Video Show, Not the Nine O’ clock News, The Young Ones, The Comic Strip Presents and Three of a Kind all represented seismic shifts in comedy styles and pushed the boundaries of what made us laugh.

More recent faces feature in our display too, like Walliams and Lucas, Mitchell and Webb, Miranda Hart, Michael McIntyre, Sarah Millican and James Corden – and there is no shortage of hilarious women – Wood, Windsor, and Walters; Lipman, Tate, French and Saunders, and many more.

There are so many, many great names of British comedy, that I am already wondering how I could have written this blog piece without mentioning by name, for example, Tommy Cooper, Kenneth Williams, Spike Milligan or June Whitfield – and you will doubtless have your favourites who you can’t believe I have not included! I am glad to say this embarrassment of comic riches is reflected in our Biography Collection, with our display representing the tip of an iceberg of hundreds or comic biographies. If you can’t find your favourite, just ask.

The Biography Store Team, Kensington Central Library

Civil rights movement: leaders and activists

On 4 April it will be 50 years since the world was shocked by the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis, Tennessee. Our display of books from the Biography Collection at Kensington Central Library this month is about the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in which he was one of the key figures.

When the movement began there already existed certain civil rights for black people in the US at a federal level; an issue was ensuring their enforcement by the federal government against the wishes of state governments in the South controlled by (rich) white people. These civil rights included various amendments that had been made to the US federal constitution following the American Civil War. These had ended slavery and given African-Americans citizenship and the vote (the last for males only, in line with the law for whites at the time).

However, these legal equalities between blacks and whites could only be effectively imposed in the South by the use of force by the federal government in the face of fierce resistance, and once troops were withdrawn in the late 1870s , black people were gradually intimidated out of political participation, leading to a simmering compromise whereby slavery had been ended but Southern states passed local laws denying equal civil rights and imposing segregation, which were not effectively opposed at federal level.

In the 1950s, this still unresolved conflict led to the civil rights movement. Segregation and systematic abuse continued to degrade and brutalise black people in the South; lynchings went uninvestigated, corrupt authorities advanced a racist agenda, and black people who had fought in the armed services during World War II against the most racist of fascist ideologies found on their return that they were treated as second class citizens in their own country. The civil rights movement achieved limited legalistic effects – limited, certainly with hindsight, because massive inequality in access to material resources partly along racial lines persists in the US as in all of human society at present.

Like all campaign movements, the civil rights movement encompassed various strands, organisations, and personalities: Martin Luther King, with his Christian and pacifist tinged political strategy; the more militant Malcolm X, joining King’s organisation from the Nation of Islam; bodies of the organised working class and university students (these two in particular encompassing many whites); and many more.

We have aimed in the books we have chosen to go beyond the better known figures, exploring the stories of many people associated with the civil rights movement in many ways.  So, as well as biographies of King, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, we have books on performers like Nina Simone and Paul Robeson,  whose commitment to the struggle was interwoven with their art, and sports stars like Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson, who refused to separate their identities as world famous sportsmen from the injustices inherent in their experiences as black citizens.

In the realm of very personal stories, we have James McBride telling the story of the marriage of his white mother to his black father against the backdrop of racial intolerance, Jan Carew recalls travelling with Malcolm X and their intimate discussions about his world view, and Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Journal gives a detailed and evocative picture of life in a Detroit car factory negotiating the assaults of race and class prejudice.  We hope this display will deepen and broaden our perspective on a movement which continues to reverberate.

The Biography Store Team, Kensington Central Library

Post-war British actors

This month the theme of our Biography Collection display at Kensington Central Library is ‘Post-War British Actors’.  From the iconic glamour of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to the compelling stories of more recent stars like Emma Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch, we have a range of fascinating biographies which give an insight into the worlds of film, theatre and TV as they have evolved over the last seven decades.

It’s a huge field, but we are putting particular emphasis on actors who have written their own memoirs – several, like Dirk Bogarde, were gifted writers whose reminiscences have become classics, and Rupert Everett’s beautifully written memoirs contain some of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read! As it is Oscar season, we’ll also be including as many UK actors as possible who have been honoured with one of the world’s most famous trophies.

If reminiscences of stage and screen interest you, you are sure to enjoy hearing actor Robert Gillespie read from his new memoir ‘Are You Going to Do That Little Jump?’ A hilarious, poignant, and at times provocative assessment of the profession that has been his life’s work. Join him on Tuesday 20 March 2018, 6.30 to 7.45pm at Kensington Central Library. Book your free place via Eventbrite

The Biography Store team at Kensington Central Library

Vote 100 2018

This month’s display of books at Kensington Central Library from our Biography Collection is to mark that 100 years ago today women got the vote for the first time.

 

On 6 February 1918, royal assent was given to the Representation of the People Act, and for the first time over 8 million British women were entitled to vote. The original legislation enfranchised only those women who were over 30 and owned property above a certain value, or who were university graduates still living in the constituency of their university. (It took another decade for women’s eligibility to vote to be based on the same terms as men’s.) It was widely considered to be a recognition of women’s role in the First World War (as almost thirty years later, their role in the Second led to women being given the vote in France), but the change in the law was also preceded by several years of increasingly militant protest and agitation by women determined to end their exclusion from the democratic process.

This month, we mark the centenary of this momentous legislation with a special display of suffragette and suffragist biographies from our special Biography Collection in Kensington Central Library. From the most famous names of the movement, like the Pankhursts, to working class women like Annie Barnes, campaigners for the female franchise left fascinating accounts of how they struggled and why. Picking up the resonance of the bitter conflicts of a century ago, we can also hear the voice of Mrs Humphry Ward, a passionate opponent of women’s suffrage.

I was unable to put down, amongst others, the memoir of Lady Constance Lytton, who created an alter ego, complete with physical disguise, so as to serve her sentence in Holloway Prison without deriving any benefit from her aristocratic status. Her intimate, immediate account of the conditions of the suffragette prisoners as they were force fed, tortured by being hosed with water, and degraded with filthy clothes and bedding, is a deeply shocking reminder of how much was endured for the cause.

To tie in with this display, we are delighted to be marking the service to that cause of a local woman, Kate Parry Frye, with a talk by her biographer Elizabeth Crawford . Elizabeth Crawford will be focusing on the biographies of this Kensington activist and of some of her fellow suffragists, and author Sonia Lambert will be reading excerpts from fictionalised accounts of women’s experiences that she has created based on extensive reading of the testament of suffragettes. The event will take place at  Kensington Central Library on Monday 26 February, 6pm – 7.45 pm. Book your free place via Eventbrite

One of the challenges we face with our Biography Collection displays is that some of our most fascinating books are hiding behind some of our least alluring bindings! Although we’re all familiar with the adage “never judge a book by its cover”, we are always looking for ways to entice potential readers to overcome their resistance to borrowing these less than beautiful-looking volumes. This has proved particularly true this month, with some of our truly compulsive suffragette memoirs looking, frankly, a little unglamorous. Our solution is to enhance these with a wrapper showing a picture of the author, and a quote from the text which will hopefully whet your appetites.

The Biography Store Team at Kensington Central Library

Musical anniversaries 2018

This month’s display of books from the Biography Collection at Kensington Central Library showcases musicians with significant anniversaries in 2018. Those we have most books on in the collection are Leonard Bernstein (born 1918), Claude Debussy (died 1918), and Gioachino Rossini (died 1868), but we include many others.

Gioachino Rossini

Other hard copy resources for music in our libraries are:

• Scores in at Kensington Central Library’s store

• CDs at Kensington Central Library

• DVDs of operas, shows etc and books on music, across all all our libraries

• A special collection of music reference books at Kensington Central Library

All these can be looked for on our library catalogue

We also have resources online:

• Naxos Music Library – we have a workshop about using this music streaming service, more details below

• Biographical and newspaper online resources useful for musician biographies and performance and recording reviews

Naxos Music Library workshop

Naxos Music Library workshop
Friday 26 January
2 to 3pm
Kensington Central Library

Come along to our workshop to find out more about the Naxos Music Library, the music streaming service which is free for library members. You will be shown how to:

• Access the service
• Find the sort of music you are interested in
• Find multiple recordings of a work, or all the recordings available on the site by one recording artist or composer
• Put together a playlist of your favourite music
• Share your favourite tracks or albums

This event is free, no need to book – just turn up.

The Biography Store Team at Kensington Central Library

The Reformation

In the run-up to the major Christian festival of Christmas, the display of books from the Biography Collection at Kensington Central Library is focusing on the period of rapid change in Western European Christianity known as the Reformation, in the year that marks 500 years since the events traditionally taken as being the starting point for the process.

Martin Luther

The main emphasis, inevitably, has to be on Martin Luther and other dissident thinkers in the German-speaking world, the traditional starting point for the Reformation being the nailing by Luther, to the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, of his Ninety-Five Theses. This notwithstanding, it does appear that, although nailing notices to church doors was a regular practice at the time, there is no direct evidence that Luther actually did do this in this particular case. What is certain is that the theses were circulated in the context of debate at a private university (i.e. not a church institution) which was supported by Luther’s local secular lord, and that Luther’s personal arc and the Reformation more widely were partly given impetus by local and wider conflicts between church and secular state.

Catherine of Aragon

Anne Boleyn

This factor is arguably even more straightforwardly to the fore in events in England: the conflict between state and church authority over the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon; the dissolution of the monasteries; the establishment of what amounts to a national catholic church in England, i.e. one which on the one hand does not acknowledge the international authority of the Pope, but on the other maintains the episcopal system and stops short of the much wider structural and theological changes that characterise Lutheranism, Calvinism, and other nonconformist denominations.

Whatever your belief system, the Biography Collection team wish you celebration and recuperation over the period of holidays following the northern-hemisphere winter solstice.