Tom Roper's Weblog

So farewell then....

...Mick Farren, 1943-2013. I still have two of his vinyl albums, Mona, which he made after the Deviants split up, and Ptoof! the first, under the original name of the Social Deviants. They're shelved in an alcove and the cats love to sit on them. At Kent University, we once persuaded the university radio station to play one of the tracks from Mona, an incoherent monologue by a hapless young man in prison whose punch line, 'all they give you to eat, man, is potatoes,' became something of a catch phrase among our set.

His musical-cum-political journalism was the point; I tried, under the tutelage of Big Mick Carver, to like his fiction, mostly sub-Moorcockian fantasy, but found it hard going. His writing for the NME, though, was the reason we would forgo food, drink and even drugs to find the money for a weekly copy. 

Edward Dudley and subversion

Like so many in the profession, I was saddened to hear that Edward Dudley had died. We will be poorer without his intellect and wit.

Edward influenced me long before I met him. I went to what was then the Polytechnic of North London's School of Librarianship and Information Studies for the postgraduate course in 1983, at the Essex Road site. a curious place with its own culture. When we moved over the summer of that year, the postgraduate course following the calendar rather than the academic year, to Ladbroke Grove, we lost something.

Edward had left the Polytechnic, succeeded by Kevin McGarry as Head of School, but the course I followed showed the work Edward had put in to make PNL, as it was then, one of the best library schools in the country. I believe he followed the management principle, too often ignored, of appointing good people, giving them what they needed, and letting them get on with it. The result was eclectic and stimulating, and only Edward could have created a department that contained, in relative harmony, people such as, on the one hand,  Derek Langridge of the Cataloguing Research Group, evangelist for  Ranganathan and all thing faceted and, on the other, radical believers in the progressive role of the public library such as Jim Hennessy and Bob Barker. I held the position of student representative on the Academic board, and  had the privilege of seeing this disparate group debate the future direction of library education. No blows were exchanged. I was also grateful to Edward for his 1953 FLA thesis, which CILIP tell me is still available, and which I must re-read in his honour. Entitled Libraries in the USSR: some post-war developments it was a key resource for my dissertation on Krupskaya, libraries and literacy.

I also became aware of his journalism. At that time New Library World, whose editorship he took on  in the year I was at PNL, was a much more interesting read than the Library Association Record. His editorials, in particular, became required reading and when having finished library school, I found myself working in Hendon Reference Library, I would often be distracted from my task of checking in journals onto cards held in metal trays by the latest NLW. These were sent over to headquarters for the Borough Librarian, the Deputy Borough Librarian and the Principal Assistant Borough Librarian to read, but I took some satisfaction in knowing that I had read them first.

Yet at this time I had not met the man. I think we first met at a LIbrary Association AGM. Guy Daines and I, both then active in the infant Library Campaign, proposed a motion at the AGM (in itself unusual in those pre-democratic days) asking the LA to work with the Campaign and the trade union movement to oppose cuts and closures in library services. I am sure we owed a debt to Edward. In the run up to the AGM, the LA leadership, led at that time by George Cunningham, a former MP who had joined the SDP renegades from the Labour Party, lost his seat and so found himself a refuge as our Chief Executive , made fierce oppositional noises to the motion, claiming it would put us in breach of the Royal Charter. We expected a fierce debate at the meeting, and were not sure it was one we could win. When we turned up at the meeting, held I think at Glaziers' Hall, we found that the leadership, I'm sure as a result of Edward's expert string-pulling, had had a complete volte-face and were no longer going to oppose our motion.

After an AGM, Edward approached me. I don't recall the conversation exactly, but I told him of my historical interests, particularly  in the scientists who in the 1920s, 30s and 40s joined or were close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, people like J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, whose post-war work on the information needs of scientific researchers bears re-reading sixty-five years later, Lancelot Hogden and Hyman Levy. Not only did Edward know these eminent figures, he had served many of them in the branch library he worked in, Belsize Park in what was then the borough of Hampstead and, I hope I recall correctly, was a member of the same Communist Party branch. Edward discovered my interest in the literature of that period and would often suggest books to me, generously asking if I had a copy of a particular Left Book Club edition of which he had a spare.

I also became a willing recruit to his campaign to bring a little democracy to the LA, and then CILIP.  Of an evening the telephone would ring. It would be Edward. Would I consider seconding a motion at the next AGM, proposing the dangerously radical notion that Presidents should be elected by the whole membership, not just council? Of course I would. And I was invited to attend, in what capacity I was never quite sure, meetings in his and Kate's Barbican flat to prepare the CILIP in London regional branch as the new organisation came into being. He remained a moving force in London affairs right up to his death.

I have further cause to be grateful to him. When I left health libraries for a time in 2006, I also stood down from the Editorial Board of Health Information and Libraries Journal. I missed it, because there is nothing like involvement in a journal to teach library and information people about how the material we organise and make available comes into being. Quite out of the blue, in 2008, I was invited to joint the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, JOLIS, which Edward had been instrumental in founding, persuading the LA of the need for a theoretical journal,. Once more, I could enjoy his contributions to a debate, always fresh, never clichéd or formulaic.

He was always keen to understand new technologies. He read my blog, I know, and would sometimes refer to it in his column in Update. At the famous CILIP 2 open meeting of Council in 2009, addressed by Phil Bradley, who I heard yesterday won the election for Vice-President, he approached me afterwards. What was my assessment of this Web 2.0 carry-on? I wrote at the time that I made some vague and semi-coherent noises about how I was interested in the aspects of Web 2.0 which seem to offer greater opportunity for democracy. He thought briefly. 'Yes,' he replied, 'and subversion'. I trust we will all be as subversive as we possibly can, in his memory.

On haggis

I never cease to sing the praises of the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required, but most public libraries have one...in fact now anyone can join any public library anywhere, if a local authority is too mean to subscribe, all one need do is join another that is less short-sighted).

The new lives for January are an interesting batch. Among better known entries such as that for Muriel Spark, or Roger Keith Barrett, or Syd as he was better known, one can find Macsween, John Angus (1939–2006), haggis manufacturer. I shall be eating one of his haggises on Burns night.

Austin Gresham, 1925-2009

The time delays in obituaries are odd. Austin Gresham, the histopathologist, died in July, but has so far only had an obituary in the Telegraph and the Times. I hope Guardian and Independent ones will come soon. I knew of him, and was surprised to find that he was younger than my father, by 13 years. With my childish sense of time, I thought the whole medical establishment of Cambridge were exactly the same age, born just before the first war. His name, and that of his wife, Gweneth Leigh, who was in charge of child health in Cambridge, would often crop up at meal times. My father, a GP, was never one to leave work behind when at the dinner table. As well as kittens, a regular table decoration in our house, he took some pleasure in reading medical journals and textbooks at table. I recall in particular a lavishly illustrated dermatology text, showing syphilitic lesions, which he pored over as we tucked into the help's steak and kidney pie Professor Gresham and my father both moved in that curious Cambridge medical no-man's land, not quite fully part of the university, nor fully within the NHS. I remember lying in bed hearing parties downstairs: the smells of gin and sherry, tobacco smoke (in those days doctors smoked like anything, whatever advice they might give their patients), women's scent, when she came to kiss me goodnight, my mother would be wearing lipstick, which she only ever put on for parties and parent's evenings at school.Later, when I worked in what would now be called a gap year as a hospital porter at Addenbrooke's, one of Professor Gresham's sons was also a porter.Both obituaries mention something he deplored, that his Colour Atlas of Forensic Pathology had been an inspiration for Damien Hirst.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

I was puzzled to read the Llanberis mountain rescue team quoted in the Times as saying that, when they found the body of the late chief constable of Greater Manchester in Snowdonia, 'there were no obvious signs of death'.

Patience Gray 1917-2005

I'm very sad to see that Patience Gray has died. I rank Plats du Jour and Honey from a Weed with the works of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson.
PS here's the Guardian one with a good photograph

Leslie Durbin

Leslie Durbin, the silversmith who made the sword of honour given by Britain to the people of Stalingrad, has died.

New Leslie Morton obituary

As we prepare for Thursday and Friday's events to commemorate the life of Leslie Morton, the BMJ publishes an obituary to add to those already listed here.

David Bain obituary

Times obituary of David Bain. I'm off to read Apotropaic Farting and Six Greek Verbs of Sexual Congress.
Lest anyone think I'm mocking, I assure you I'm not. This sort of scholarship is more useful and interesting than anything else I can think of and I think we're much worse off without David Bain

Dick Heckstall-Smith in the Guardian

Guardian on Dick Heckstall-Smith.