Latest Posts

1. ‘The Peaceful, the Pure, the Victorious Pen!’: The Sun Inn Group

   11th July 2025 10:58 am Leave a Comment

   During the nineteenth century, Manchester was one of the most written-about cities globally; it was famously the subject of Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written following the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, and was later studied in Friedrich Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845) following weeks spent studying at Chetham’s Library with Karl Marx that summer. None of these writers were native to Manchester, however; although there were a few famed nineteenth-century Mancunian writers in the nineteenth century—chiefly Elizabeth Gaskell—many of them went overlooked or otherwise achieved little fame. Our current exhibition therefore shines a light on a collective of such overlooked writers, known as the Sun Inn Group. This group of largely working-class poets took their name from the Sun Inn, a timber-framed building that stood opposite the entrance to Chetham’s Library on Long Millgate where they met to recite poetry together in the 1840s. In turn, this public house earned the affectionate title of ‘Poet’s Corner’ from the literary gatherings that took place there.

   

   Figure 1: Joseph Adshead’s map of Manchester in 1851, showing the Sun Inn opposite the entrance to Chetham’s Library on Long Millgate (Chetham’s Library, Gal.M.2.1).

   Although the Sun Inn Group was relatively short-lived, it did manage to achieve relative local fame, with The Manchester Guardian occasionally reporting on their meetings. One meeting was reportedly attended by roughly thirty people, who gave a series of speeches, poetic recitals and songs, and was—according to the Guardian—‘conducted with much harmony and kind feeling’. Amongst the attendees was John Bolton Rogerson, who, in addition to being a poet, acted as the group’s most significant organisational figure, arranging many of their meetings, acting as the chairperson or vice-chairperson during them, and later ensuring that members of the group received paid poetry commissions during his time as an editor for the Oddfellows’ Magazine. Rogerson was also responsible for compiling and editing the group’s only published anthology, The Festive Wreath, which was comprised of poems read at a meeting held in March 1842. According to the Guardian, this meeting was attended by over forty individuals.

   

   Figure 2: John Bolton Rogerson (ed.), The Festive Wreath (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1842) (Chetham’s Library, 8.J.5.70).

   Our collections include a copy of The Festive Wreath, which is currently on display as part of our exhibition. Much of this anthology—including a preface written by Rogerson—appears keen to assure readers of the group’s poetic capabilities and legitimacy, often listing the poets’ other accomplishments after their names. The collection also stresses the importance of the Sun Inn Group’s gathering together to combine their abilities for a greater purpose. The collection’s first poem, ‘The Poet’s Welcome’, was penned by the group’s leading light John Critchley Prince. In the poem, he welcomed both the poets and spectators in attendance at the meeting, and emphasised the significance of the gathering, declaring:

   ‘The scattered sons of humanizing song,
   Like twilight starts ought not to reign apart
   As jealous of each other’s light, but come
   Clustering in one most glorious galaxy
   Of mental splendour – as I see you now.

   Although the poem feels overzealous in promoting the supposedly-divine nature of poetry, Prince’s love of poetry was lifelong. In the sixth edition of his own anthology, Hours with the Muses (1857)—a copy of which can also be found in our collections—he wrote that ‘poetry has been the star of my adoration, affording me a serene and steady light through the darkest portion of my existence.’ Prince’s journey towards becoming a poet was a difficult one; his father, a reed-maker, resented his son’s interest in literature, and the family’s financial struggles made accessing literature a difficult endeavour. Prince nevertheless stressed that ‘poverty, want, and punishment were unable to exterminate’ his passion for poetry. In a working men’s journal, Prince reminisced about how he had stolen away from his labour, into a ‘mental feast from the pages of a Pope, a Prior, a Gay, and more especially a Goldsmith’, a medley of older poets on whom Prince’s own poetry later drew. As his list indicates, Prince’s poetry is more evocative of older poets such as Milton, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom were more accessible to those with little money than the contemporary Romantics, whose works were more expensive and took some time to become available in the north.

   A similar sentiment is echoed later in The Festive Wreath, in Alexander Wilson’s self-referential poem ‘The Poet’s Corner’, an upbeat drinking song that implicitly attributes the success of the Sun Inn Group to ‘Tragedy, Comedy, Byron and Burns; / To Milton and Moore’. This poem is also the second of two within the anthology that explicitly names many of its members (the first being George Richardson’s poem ‘A Poetical Replication’). These poems are incredibly helpful when it comes to identifying the Sun Inn Group’s most prominent participants, and work to paint a colourful picture of the contemporary Mancunian literary landscape. Both poems are keen to portray their group as being comprised of a range of different members, each with their own poetic styles: Richardson turns from Samuel Bamford’s prosaic ‘graphical picture[s]’ to John Scholes’ medievalist ‘legend of Naworth’s old tower’.

   

   Figure 3: George Richardson’s ‘A Poetical Replication’, in John Bolton Rogerson (ed.), The Festive Wreath (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1842) (Chetham’s Library, 8.J.5.70, p. 13).

   Alongside their members’ various poetic inclinations, both Wilson and Richardson emphasised the group’s diversity of character and origin; Wilson playfully characterised the group as consisting of ‘publicans, sinners, Cork Cutters [a reference to James Boyle] and dinners’, and suggested a variety of political beliefs, writing of ‘whig agitators, and tory debaters’. Indeed, politics do not appear to have been a particularly taboo subject, although the group rarely used their poetry for the purpose of political activism. Richardson’s reference to Bamford eagerly underlines Bamford’s radical political beliefs and activism, and mentions the many times that he had had been arrested and imprisoned: a footnote jovially informed readers that ‘Mr. Bamford has suffered more imprisonment in the cause of Reform than perhaps any man of the present day’.

   Despite their range, however, these poems do not capture the full picture. The Sun Inn Group was home to a number of female poets, including Isabella Varley (née Banks), Eliza Craven Green and Eliza Battye, all of whom had poems featured within The Festive Wreath. None of these members were present at the festival: the Guardian noted that a number of the group’s female members did not attend, but did have some of their poems read during the event. Isabella Varley was an elusive member of the group who once hid behind a pair of curtains to hear her poem recited during a meeting. If one were to use ‘The Poets’ Corner’ and ‘A Poetical Replication’ as a basis for the group’s members, however, it would seem like there were no female members within the Sun Inn Group at all. Similarly, Richardson and Wilson’s poems seemingly refer to Robert Rose, ‘the bard of colour’, out of obligation alone; Richardson made no mention of Rose’s poetic capabilities, and merely requested that Rose attend the meeting ‘with his feelings more pure than his skin may be fair’, while Wilson wrote that Rose’s prose had poetry flow from it (as if to suggest that Rose was otherwise incapable of the delicate art of poetry).

   The rest of The Festive Wreath consists of less self-referential poetry, featuring lyric pieces, ballads, sonnets, and various other pieces of conventional poetry. Perhaps the most striking element of this collection is the continued thread of domesticity and the commonplace. Craven Green’s poem, ‘Children Sleeping’, devotes itself to the domestic sweetness of witnessing one’s kin asleep, while John Ball’s poem, ‘To My Daughter’ is ‘affectionately dedicated’ to his wife, and takes joy simply in the sound of his two year-old daughter’s attempts at lisping her parents’ names. As was previously mentioned, the group lacked a particularly political edge to their poetry, but there is nevertheless a sense of something radical in their emphasis on domestic matters, respite and personal relationships. Elijah Riding’s simply-named ‘Stanzas’ is a patriotic piece, which sees him celebrate love for one’s country through the mere act of spending time with one’s friends and families, the transformative capacity of which is capable of lifting oneself out of life’s difficulties. Rogerson’s own poem within the collection, ‘The Minstrel’s Lot’, laments that the poet often goes ‘unpitied and uncar’d for by the crowd’ while living a humble and often difficult life, but is posthumously granted ‘an age of fame’, with people undertaking pilgrimages to their grave while the rich man’s grave lies forgotten. With any luck, our latest exhibition will re-enact the same fate that Rogerson foresaw for himself and his companions.

   Blog post by Anna Pirie

    

2. Poets’ Corner: Industry and Identity

   6th June 2025 9:40 am Leave a Comment

   ‘Near to the gates of Chetham College, in Long Millgate, stands one of those ancient and picturesque houses, which occasionally start to view like spectres of a bygone age, but are now fast disappearing before the levelling hand of improvement’. So begins the preface to an anthology of poems called The Festive Wreath (1842), written by a group of largely working-class poets who came to be known variously as the ‘Sun Inn Group’, the ‘Manchester Poets’ and the ‘Bards of Cottonopolis’. The group’s meeting place was this picturesque house, the Sun Inn, a timber-framed building on the corner of Long Millgate, which came to be known in the early 1840s as ‘Poets’ Corner’, from the literary gatherings that took place there. Notable members of the group included its leading light John Critchley Prince, the radical reformer Samuel Bamford, the ‘Bard of Colour’ Robert Rose, and Isabella Varley—who later wrote and published The Manchester Man under her married name, Mrs G. Linnæus Banks.

   Chetham’s Library’s latest exhibition focuses on this group and its poetry. The Sun Inn group was the one of the most prolific of the societies of working-class poets that emerged in Britain’s industrial cities around the middle of the nineteenth century. It played an important role in shaping Manchester’s literary and cultural identity at a key moment in the city’s history; while some of its members wrote about working-class conditions at a time when Manchester was rapidly expanding as an industrial powerhouse, others embraced a far broader range of themes, challenging contemporary views of the city as a literary wasteland. Some of the group wrote in their Lancashire dialect, a choice that went against the grain and contributed to a growing interest in regional dialect literature in subsequent decades. Although their poetry has been largely forgotten, and the Sun Inn no longer exists—its license was withdrawn and it became an antiques shop, its roof collapsed in a storm in July 1914, and it was demolished in the 1920s—the group staked out a claim to a literary identity for the city, foreshadowing its modern status as a UNESCO City of Literature. Over the coming months, we look forward to exploring this group’s membership and sharing some of its poetry with you.

   

   Figure 1: Print of the Sun Inn and Poet’s Corner, in John Bolton Rogerson (ed.), The Festive Wreath (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1842) (Chetham’s Library, 8.J.5.70).

3. Cataloguing the Cass Collection

   12th May 2025 10:12 am Leave a Comment

   Maisie, our placement student, recently completed a project to finish cataloguing of the Cass Collection, which originally arrived at the Library in 2016:

   Between January and April, I spent 20 days working on the Cass Collection at Chetham’s Library as part of my Master’s in Library and Archive Studies at the University of Manchester. In the nineteenth century, Chetham’s Library began to specialise in the history and topography of the north west of England, collecting material related to Manchester and surrounding regions. Donated to the library in 2016, the Cass Collection comprises works local to the north west, with an emphasis on dialect writing. The majority of the material dates to the nineteenth and twentieth century, and captures local and working-class voices of enduring appeal for readers in Manchester and beyond. Read the previous blog post about the Cass Collection here.

   Scholar and bibliophile Eddie Cass (1937-2014) pursued careers in banking and coal mining before turning to academia in later life to explore his penchant for folklore and Lancashire dialect writing. He amassed a considerable collection of works, over six hundred of which are held by Chetham’s Library. Contained within the collection are books, pamphlets, essays, dictionaries, poetry collections, dialect literature, songbooks, biographies, and more.

   

   Copies of Her Benny, Lancashire fiction within the Cass Collection (12.F.7.11-12).

   Cass was embedded in the cultural fabric of Manchester, and a prominent voice at many literary and heritage institutions. President of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, he was a trustee for the People’s History Museum, and Chairman of the Portico Library between 1988 and 1990, where he supported various exhibitions. The foremost expert on the Lancashire pace-egg plays, Cass was also President of the Folklore Society from 2008 to 2011, and donated a portion of his collection to the Society, currently housed at the University of Sheffield.

   Since its arrival in 2016, the Cass Collection has proved popular among readers, which was posing problems in the run-up to my placement. The library had made a start on cataloguing the collection, but the work was incomplete. Staff were finding it hard to locate material, and researchers were not privy to the full extent of the collection. Like most material at Chetham’s, the Cass Collection is closed access, meaning readers cannot browse the shelves. This means that any uncatalogued or unlisted titles are effectively invisible, making cataloguing a top priority.

   

   One of the Library’s copies of North and South by local author Elizabeth Gaskell (12.F.5.26).

   This is where my placement comes in. I was tasked with conducting a shelf check of the collection against the existing online catalogue, and creating records for uncatalogued items. I began by searching for the books by location on the online catalogue, to create a list to compare against the shelves. I worked my way through the collection, coming across missing, misplaced, partially catalogued and uncatalogued works. I used these findings to create a second ‘to-do’ list of material in need of cataloguing or updating. To avoid duplicating existing records, I cross-referenced my list with Chetham’s catalogue, to see if any of the books I’d identified were catalogued elsewhere in the library. I also made a note of any missing works, many of which I managed to find as the placement went on.

   

   An example of the spreadsheet created by Maisie to help with cataloguing.

    

   Once I finished taking stock of the shelves, I was ready to begin cataloguing. I was set up on
   Chetham’s test system to begin with. This allowed me to practice working with the software and prevented me from deleting existing records. I created my first records with the support of the Assistant Librarian, who took me through the main fields and the Resource Description and Access (RDA) cataloguing standard employed by the library. I also learned how to download and modify records from existing bibliographic databases.

   

   The V-Smart cataloguing test software used by the Library.

   After cataloguing a few test records, I was added to the live system. I taught myself how to create a template record, filling in pre-set fields specific to the Cass Collection, and added all the records I worked on to a designated save list for review. For each volume, I inputted information about the author, title, place of publication, publisher, date, physical extent, format, acquisition, subject, genre, and location. As I went along, I moved volumes around to save space and keep the collection together, and added shelfmarks on visible acid-free slips to facilitate future retrievals.

   

   The completed project: books on shelf fully catalogued with acid free slips.

   By the time I’d finished cataloguing, the ‘nearly three-hundred titles’ described in the first blog post about the collection had become 680 (including works split across multiple volumes). Accompanying the books is a small amount of archival material, containing some of Cass’ research photographs, some sheet music, and a letter from Edwin Waugh to a Mr Ireland.

   

   One of the archival items within the Cass Collection, a letter from Edwin Waugh to a Mr Ireland ((archival, location unavailable).

   I am so pleased I opted to do a placement as part of my degree, and couldn’t have asked for a better place to work than Chetham’s Library. I really enjoyed this project, and came away with first-hand experience of cataloguing and collection management, which I know will hold me in good stead as I progress into the wider world of libraries and archives. I now have a much deeper appreciation for the work that goes into making material accessible to readers, and I hope the work I have done will make it easier for readers to engage with this fantastic collection, which is now available to browse in its entirety on our online catalogue.

   I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to the entire team at Chetham’s Library for their support and encouragement throughout my placement. I will really miss working, and lunching, with you all.

    

   By Maisie Proctor

4. For the private amusement of Chetham’s Library

   16th April 2025 3:16 pm 2 Comments

   Early last year, we celebrated the appointment of Julianne Simpson, as Chetham’s new Librarian, with an exhibition entitled ‘Chetham’s Librarians: Lives and Legacies’.

   As part of the research for this exhibition, I had the wonderful opportunity to delve into some of the past librarians’ diaries that we have in our collections. Most of these are quite dry, and relate strictly to business: reader appointments, shelving numbers and committee meetings.  They were hard to extract any personality from the pages, to enlighten us as to the Librarian’s character. However, the diaries from the late 1940s are an entirely different matter.

   As the second world war was coming to an end, the decision was made to re-open Chetham’s and prepare to take in reader appointments again. After years of the Library being boarded up to protect the windows, and furniture and paintings being stored in safer locations, the position of Librarian was offered to Miss Hilda Lofthouse in 1944.

   

   Left: Hilda Lofthouse and cat. Right: Pauline Leech, photographed at Bletchley Park.

   At the time of her acceptance, Hilda was in her early 30s and working for the foreign office, and so her position was postponed until after the war had ended. Not long after that, it was decided that Hilda would require some much-needed help to get the Library back in working order, and the perfect candidate applied for Assistant Librarian…

   Miss Pauline Leech had been working as a code breaker at Bletchley Park throughout the war, and despite her father’s attempts to persuade her to stay on at Bletchley after the war, Pauline was determined to train as a Librarian.

   

   The first page of the 1947 diary

   Our first Librarian’s Log book by Hilda and Pauline (and intermittently Kathleen Monk) begins in 1947, and is continued in annual diaries right through to 1975. Despite the notice written on the first page, the diaries did indeed become part of the Library’s archives after Pauline’s death in 1994. I, for one, am very thankful they were!

   Each entry, whether short or long, gives us a wonderful snapshot into their everyday life in the Library. The arduous task they had, in cleaning and organising the Library after the hostilities, must have been exhausting. We know from Library Committee meeting notes from the time, that the windows of the medieval building had been boarded up to protect the building from broken glass, and the threat of gas to the staff during the war. However, this had meant that the building and its collection lacked sufficient ventilation during these years, and a great deal of care for the collection was needed after the Library was re-opened.

   However, it looks as though the women enjoyed the challenge, and they kept a tally of their achievements at the top of each page; rooms cleared, collections catalogued, shelves re-organised. There was only one real threat to their work… the Readers!

   

   ‘Fri 7 Feb [Heresy from a librarian-aspirant: That libraries are definitely better places without readers than with]’ – Diary entry from 1947.

   The irony of a Librarian not wishing to have readers is not lost on us, however the constant interruptions of visitors and scholars must have been more strenuous than usual, as a few of Pauline’s entries describe readers having to read by candlelight due to the gasworks being damaged, or the taps freezing over from the lack of heating available! Anyone who has worked at Chetham’s over winter, will be very familiar with the cold and drafty cloisters, and the idea of not having access to water for cups of tea and hot water bottles, makes one shudder at the thought!

   In addition to these disruptions, was the work taking place in the building, on clearing out the fire-damaged Governor’s rooms, and repairing the roof, which had been damaged during the blitz in December 1941. In many of Hilda and Pauline’s entries, they mention the noise of the workmen and of the dust they traipsed in around the building, however it was more often than not, the cleaner, Mary, who was doing the complaining.

   

   ‘Saying of the day Mary: (dropping teapot and milk-jug upon the step) “These men will have me MOTH-EATEN before they have finished!” In fact Mary was in an unbrookable mood altogether.’ – Diary entry from Tuesday 24th Feb 1948

   I have to say, the entries containing anecdotes about Mary, have become my favourite passages to read. One particular favourite of mine is from Saturday 26th April 1947, where Pauline writes about how ‘Mary was in a strongly reminiscent mood as she dusted us this morning. We heard 2 of the generations of rats that had lived and died in the Library and school – and since Mary saw their skeletons lying mouldering on the bookshelf tops, she has never been able to eat rabbits!’.

   Other entries mention regular visitors to the Library, Feoffees (trustees), long-term readers, and colleagues working at John Rylands or Central Library. Some of these names we recognise from meeting notes, or letters of business exchanged, but through these diaries, we hear a little bit more about their personalities.

   For instance, they hint at not getting along with the Feoffees all too well, except for Col. Riddick, who appears to be a favourite of theirs.

   ‘A handsome gift received today, by the Librarian and her assistant – viz. One large egg each from one of the Feoffee, Col. Riddick!’ and ‘ A day of ‘excitements’. Col. Riddick with a basket of daffodils discovered floating about the building – and generously handing out the daffodils.’

   I can’t speak for the rest of the Library staff, but I, for one, would love some someone to float about the Library handing out daffodils and freshly laid eggs! It would certainly make a change from the excitement of freshly laid mousetraps.

   One thing I can say about Hilda and Pauline’s diaries, is that no matter what is going on outside the medieval walls of Chetham’s Library, nothing really changes within.

   We still have problems with the heating, the electrics, the leaking roof, we’re very familiar with the spiders and mice that make this building their home, and we’re always dusting, dusting, dusting! There’s something quite warm and familiar about that fact, that in the 370 years Chetham’s Library has been open to the public, that the staff have been facing the same trials and tribulations all these years, and in order to work here, you must possess a good sense of humour!

   

   Caption on reverse: ‘HL + PL on Chetham’s Library roof. Victoria St. and Railway Offices in background. “Goldie” from Reading Room. 5.8.1969’

   By Siân-Louise Mason, Visitor Services Coordinator at Chetham’s Library

5. Contingency planning and The wartime library

   13th March 2025 12:11 pm Leave a Comment

   On Friday 4 November 1938, the Library Committee of Chetham’s Library assembled – perhaps in the Reading Room – as Chetham’s Librarian prepared to address them. The weather in Manchester that day was mild and slightly rainy, but across Europe, storm clouds were gathering. During the 1920s and 30s, a rising tide of fascism had engulfed Italy, Spain and Germany as three dictators – Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler – came to power in their respective countries. Allied appeasement of their regimes in the 1930s masked British re-armament, and by the end of the decade, there was a growing sense that matters were coming to a head. In October 1938, as another war seemed inevitable, the British Government sent out notices to the country’s major cultural institutions, instructing them to develop plans to be followed in the event of hostilities breaking out.

   

   The minute-book of the Library Committee, open on the entry for 4 November 1938 (Chetham’s Library, C/Lib/Min/3).

   Chetham’s Library was one such institution, and its librarian, Charles Phillips, had received this notice on 7 October 1938. Since his appointment in 1920, Phillips had spent almost twenty years immersed in the day-to-day work of the library, which consisted largely of cataloguing and indexing various collections of deeds and paintings. He had also taught classes in bibliography at the University of Manchester, delivered lectures on a wide range of themes to local societies, and contributed to radio broadcasts (the drafts of these lectures survive in the Phillips Collection in Chetham’s Library). The beginning of Phillips’ librarianship was therefore relatively peaceful, but it would be a mistake to assume that he was consequently ill-suited to running a wartime library; when the notice to prepare for hostilities arrived on Phillips’ desk, he immediately sprang into action, writing to other libraries to ask about their plans

   The first of his correspondents was Strickland Gibson, Sub-Librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, with whom Phillips perhaps had a prior acquaintance. Gibson had been a Library Assistant at the Bodleian between 1895 and 1912, and Phillips was appointed an Under-Assistant there in 1899, before joining the Extra Staff in 1903; it seems likely that the two men met around that time and continued their acquaintance, since the Phillips Collection contains, in addition to the drafts of Phillips’ lectures, an offprint of a lecture entitled ‘The Keepers of the Archives of the University of Oxford’, delivered by Gibson on 7 March 1928. The next two correspondents were far more local. One was Charles Nowell, who, after a career in various libraries, assumed the role of Chief Librarian at Manchester Central Library in 1932. The other was Dr Moses Tyson, who was Keeper of Western Manuscripts at the John Rylands Library from 1927 until his appointment as Librarian at the University of Manchester in 1935. Phillips was presumably well-acquainted with Tyson, given his lectures in bibliography at the university, and unlike the other librarians consulted, Tyson called on Phillips at Chetham’s Library in person. Phillips’ final correspondent was Frederick Wellstood, Librarian at Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the nature of the relationship between these two men – easily the most unexpected of the four – is not yet known.

   

   Typed extracts from a letter from Strictland Gibson, Bodleian sub-librarian (Chetham’s Library, C/Lib/Misc/28).

   Based on these librarians’ responses, Phillips formulated his recommendations for the library’s wartime precautions, noting that ‘damage by air raid would be occasioned in three ways’. The first threat was that posed by high-explosive bombs. Phillips expressed the hope that the thick walls of the medieval college buildings would be able to withstand the blast of nearby bombs, while sandbags might protect the fragile windows. He nevertheless noted that a direct hit would penetrate the building, echoing a general consensus summed up by Gibson’s sobering statement: ‘as regards high explosive bombs, nothing can help us’. The second danger was gas, which Phillips noted was more hazardous to the library’s staff than to the building or collections, since it was neither corrosive nor incendiary. He therefore suggested closing and sealing the library’s windows to prevent gas from entering the library; in the event, the library’s windows were boarded up, preventing their breaking and the entrance of gas at the same time. The final threat was that of fire spreading from incendiary bombs. Phillips noted that, while the force of an incendiary bomb was minimal, one might still penetrate the medieval slate tiles of the library’s roof. To reduce the damage that this would cause, he proposed the installation of a steel net above the library’s corridors to catch the bombs, an approach suggested by Wellstood. He also recommended the placement of buckets of sand in the library, in addition to the firefighting equipment usually kept there, since tightly-packed books do not burn quickly and the use of water on them was ‘in no way to be recommended’. At the same time, he noted the inevitable risk that fire posed to the wooden presses, floors and roof beams.

   

   Phillips’ suggestions to the Library Committee (Chetham’s Library, C/Lib/Misc/28).

   Finally, Phillips advanced some suggestions for the safeguarding of the collections. He proposed that the ‘more precious book rarities, both manuscript and printed’, together with the catalogues and records of the library essential to its daily running, could be moved to the Muniment Room. This was ‘the Bodley plan’ that Gibson had outlined in his letter (‘adequate protection of a very limited number of exceptionally precious books’ in the Underground Bookstore, now the Gladstone Link), while the use of the Muniment Room had been recommended Nowell during his visit: it was practically fireproof, had thick walls and a paved floor, and only a small window. Phillips suggested covering this window, and the floor above this room, with sandbags. There is no echo in Phillips’ proposals of the recommendations by Gibson and Nowell concerning the removal of the rest of the collection to other sites, but in the event, some of the library’s books were sent to the Central Library, some of its furniture to Tatton Park, and sixteen paintings (including that of Humphrey Chetham) to the basement of the Whitworth Art Gallery.

   On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. The following day, the library closed to visitors and readers, but re-opened to readers following a meeting of the Library Committee on 13 October. The library continued to operate in this limited capacity for most of the war, and its business largely carried on as usual: readers consulted the collections, new books were purchased, and discussions were held around the library’s acquisition of the Gorton Chest (a plan that would not be realised until the chest’s permanent loan to the library in 1984, and its eventual purchase in 2001). The spectre of war was ever-present, however, and the validity of Phillips’ concerns were proven by the devastating ‘Christmas Blitz’ of December 1940, in which Manchester Cathedral was badly damaged by a direct hit, and the library suffered some damage. It was reported on the radio and in the news that the library had been destroyed, and Luxmoore Newcombe, the Librarian at the National Central Library, wrote to Phillips to offer whatever assistance he could supply. A few days later, Phillips replied that the damage was ‘not nearly as bad as one would imagine’, and that ‘the House-Governor’s quarters are totally destroyed by fire; one dormitory is burnt out; but my Library is intact’. In another letter, he related that ‘all the windows were shattered, the panelling blown away from the walls, the roof broken in a number of places, books hurled from their shelves, a good deal of damage from water and dirt, [and] fifty volumes spoiled in their bindings’, but that no pages had been lost, and that none of the collections stored in the Muniment Room were damaged in any way. The good sense of Phillips’ precautions had been proven.

   

   Damage to the library’s roof as a result of bombing during the ‘Christmas Blitz’ (Chetham’s Library, no shelfmark).

   In July 1943, the library closed again, this time following Phillips’ death. The Library Committee decided that no action would be taken to appoint a new librarian until after the war, and in the meantime, they turned to Nowell for guidance. Following an inspection of the library, Nowell made several suggestions to the Library Committee on 30 September. One of these was the installation of a sign outside the library, advising that the library was now closed and directing would-be readers to apply to Nowell at the Central Library. Another was a thorough regime of book-cleaning, since the collections had gathered dust during the war, and Nowell loaned some of the staff from Central Library to assist with this. The task of cleaning continued well into the late 1940s, following the appointment of Hilda Lofthouse as Chetham’s Librarian. Hilda’s time as librarian was no less interesting than Phillips’, and the curious reader can discover more about her in an upcoming blog post; this post celebrates the librarian who took steps to protect our library during one of its greatest moments of crisis.

    

   By Emma Nelson

6. The Mysteries of the Manchester Alphabet

   12th December 2024 4:05 pm 3 Comments

   Browsing through some of the library’s blogs recently, I came across one from May 2016 which featured a new acquisition of an old book – Roger Oldham’s Manchester Alphabet, published in 1906. The blog described how the book had been bought to ‘fill a gap’ in the collection, which had been spotted by the librarian when, in 2015, the library acquired a copy of the New Manchester Alphabet. The New Alphabet was a collaboration between students on the creative writing and illustration courses at Manchester Metropolitan University, edited by poet Jean Sprackland, which had been inspired by a copy of Roger Oldham’s book in the university’s Special Collections library.

   I had first encountered images from the Alphabet a few years ago, on the Manchester Art Gallery website. I was researching representations of mill girls in the gallery’s collections and found an image which seemed to be an illustration from a children’s book. ‘A is for Ancoats’ features a little girl, draped in a red shawl and wearing clogs, standing with another small child in what is obviously a very rainy Victorian Manchester, complete with a background of red brick mills and chimneys.

   

   Image 2: A is for Ancoats, copyright Manchester Art Gallery.

   The image was from what is described on the website as ‘a complete set of hand-tinted printer’s proofs for the book [by Roger Oldham], coloured by the artist himself…’ I was enchanted by the witty verses and mischievous images featuring local landmarks. It seemed obvious that these were aimed at both children and their parents. Once I realised that Chetham’s had a copy of the original book, I went to the library stacks to retrieve it. However, I was surprised and rather disappointed to find that the illustrations, although delightful, were all black and white drawings, with no colour images at all. 

   

   Image 3: A is for Ancoats B&W Chetham’s Library copy.

   A little research revealed that Roger had been an architect and, from Manchester Victorian Society’s Biographical Dictionary of the Architects of Greater Manchester, I discovered that he had practised in Manchester and had lived in Sale. Sale Library is home to Trafford Local Studies and I found that they had a collection of material relating to Roger, including a significant number of hand coloured images for the Alphabet. The Oldham family had moved from Lincoln to Sale in 1874 when he was 3 years old. His father is described on the 1881 census as a ‘Manchester Goods merchant’ and at this time the household included his wife, six sons, one daughter and 3 servants. 

   Roger’s early school days were at Mr Lloyd’s school also known as the Manchester Grammar School Preparatory School on Poplar Grove in Sale; he then attended Manchester Grammar School. His friend I.H.Swallow later wrote that ‘the impression which Roger made on his schoolfellows was that of high spirits combined with cleverness.’ His memories of MGS were clearly happy – the October 1906 edition of ‘Ulula’, the magazine of MGS, informs its readers that: ‘The amusing “ Manchester A B C ,” which was published some weeks ago by the firm of John Heywood, is the work of an Old Mancunian, Mr. Roger Oldham, who has kindly consented to allow the picture accompanying the letter O to appear on a souvenir Postcard, which will be on sale at the Receiver’s office shortly. The Proceeds will be devoted to the Hugh Oldham Lads’ Club.’ Hugh Oldham had founded Manchester Grammar School in the sixteenth century, and Roger’s family believed that he was an ancestor.

   

   Image 4: O is for Owl from Ulula.

   In 1891 the Census records Roger as ‘Architects Articled Pupil.’ He had been articled to the Manchester architect Charles Henry Heathcote who also happened to live in Sale. From the age of sixteen and then, from January 1893 to February 1896, he studied architecture at the Royal Academy Schools in London. By 1901 the Census records him as an architect, 30 years old, with an office in Brazenose Street but still living in the family home at Washway Road in Sale. He formed a partnership with David Bird in 1910. It seems that much of his work was for smaller local projects and private homes as very few examples of his work are recorded. The partnership was responsible for the new bell tower for St Paul’s parish church in Sale and also a new physics room and toilet block for Roger’s old school on Poplar Grove.

   In 1904 Roger married Dorothy Scorer in Lincoln. He was a committed Christian and was actively involved with his local church – first St Pauls in Sale and then at St Albans Church in Broadheath, where he and Dorothy seem to have settled after their marriage. They had no children but he helped with Sunday School and with young people’s activities at both churches. His ‘art stall’ was apparently a ‘well known‘ feature of many bazaars and ‘Sales of Work’ at St Pauls!

   The December 1972 edition of the ‘North Cheshire Family Historian’ includes an article written by Joan Bower called ‘Roger Oldham, Artist of Sale.’ Her neighbour, James Bramley Pye, had worked as a clerk in Roger’s Brasenose Street office and recalled that ‘One of his main interests was art and his office was also his studio where he turned out many drawings such as those that illustrated Picturesque Cheshire…’ Indeed Roger’s obituary records that in 1913 ‘he held an exhibition of ‘typical examples of his work’ at his studio in Temple Chambers, Brasenose Street.

   

   Image 5: Picturesque Cheshire.

   Mrs Bower had also made contact with Roger’s niece who told her that he and his brother Spencer, the young woman’s father, had loved to write and draw and had between them created two books of Rhymed Alphabets … Roger’s was a Manchester Alphabet and Spencer’s a Sale and Ashton-on-Mersey Alphabet. A copy of the Sale Alphabet is held in Trafford Archives; however, it isn’t illustrated.

   Roger was a passionate believer in the importance of art for all . After his death his wife, together with his close friend I.H. Swallow, published a collection of his writings called The Art of Englishmen. The title is taken from a lecture which Roger gave to the Manchester Society of Architects in November 1914. His wife records that he was an enthusiastic and popular public speaker to students, to the ‘Manchester Corporation’, to architectural and literary societies, and to working men’s associations. Most of his lectures consisted of a detailed account, illustrated by lantern slides and drawings on the blackboard of ‘the history and associations and meaning of some local building or the life and work of some local artist…. ‘

   Dorothy’s introduction tells us that ‘He held that Art is not a thing apart, a matter of schools and academies alone, but that it is, or should be, part of the real life of the people, and that for those who will only look there is often beauty in what seems to be commonplace and trivial’

   These beliefs clearly inform his delightful Alphabet book:

   M is for Manchester- the book

   Roger’s representations of wet, foggy Manchester and its landmarks, people and buildings are often humorous, but always affectionate. He shows us the dark sooty mill buildings in ‘A is for Ancoats’ and the murky river in ‘I is for Irwell’ but also the leafy suburbs of Heaton Park, Chorlton and Bowdon. The city’s architecture is, unsurprisingly, accurately observed – the towering Royal Exchange, the elegant interiors of the art gallery and the town hall. Roger also enjoys what we might describe today as ‘cartoon violence.’ In ‘M is for Motor Car’ horses buck and rear and people dangle from windows as a new fangled car billows smoke. In ‘T is for Tram’ bodies fly through the air due to overcrowded vehicles or are trampled underfoot in the rush hour in ‘X is for Exodus’.

   Although he suggests the reality of poverty, from the pawn shop in A is for Ancoats, to the shawl-wrapped women checking cabbages in the market at Shudehill, his images of Manchester people show warmth and humour. Children are always getting into mischief – climbing on the bridge over the Irwell, wandering across the path of the elephant in Belle Vue zoo. There are also a number of jokes based on his local knowledge. There had been ongoing problems with the commission for the Town Hall frescoes (started in 1879 but not finished until 1893). The top-hatted gents, clearly Manchester dignitaries, in deep conversation in F is for Fresco, take no notice of the artist or his work. The image is of Ford Madox Brown and is based on a very distinctive self portrait which Roger must have known. It was originally painted for Brown’s lawyer, Theodore Watts Dunton, and owned for many years by Dunton’s widow, although it is now in America.

   

   Image 6a: F is for Fresco.

    

   

   Image 6b: F is for Fresco.

   There is also a joke for the erudite adult reader in ‘Q for de Quincey’. The boy is engrossed in ‘Arabian Nights’ whilst a book by Mrs Barbauld lies discarded on the ground. Anna Laetitia Barbauld had been a ‘blue stocking’ poet, critic and author of children’s literature – a character in an early nineteenth-century novel by Sarah Burney actually remarks, ‘… you know fairy-tales are forbidden pleasures in all modern school-rooms. Mrs. Barbauld….and a hundred others, have written good books for children, which have thrown poor Mother Goose, and the Arabian Nights, quite out of favour, at least, with papas and mamas..’

   

   Image 7: Q is for De Quincey copyright Manchester Art Gallery.

   Penny plain or Twopence Coloured?

   In addition to the images owned by Manchester Art Gallery and described as ‘a complete set of hand-tinted printer’s proofs for the book by Roger Oldham, coloured by the artist himself’, Trafford Local Studies also have two boxes of miscellaneous material relating to Roger and his work, including two sets of coloured, card-framed images for the Alphabet. A number of the alphabet images are not in good condition, and some are missing so it is difficult to compare them with those on the gallery website which seem much lighter and brighter. Some of the Trafford images have received conservation treatment, but the cost is high. Manchester Art Gallery were fortunate in being able to fund extensive conservation on their set.

   

   Image 8: S for Shudehill, copyright Trafford Local Studies.

   However, the really curious aspect to this is that despite the website notes accompanying the Manchester Art Gallery images, I have found no evidence at all that a coloured version of the book was ever published. Chetham’s copy of the ‘Manchester Alphabet’ has black and white drawings. The catalogue entry for the John Rylands Library copy states that it was printed by George Falkner & Sons, London & Manchester and published by George Heywood Ltd in 1906. It is described as having 55 pages and ‘b&w ills.’ The British Library copy also has b&w illustrations.

   Hannah Williamson, Curator in Fine Art at Manchester Art Gallery, suggests that a coloured edition of this kind of small, locally themed book would have been a very expensive and unlikely publishing venture and speculates that perhaps Roger was simply provided with surplus paper copies of the unbound images. Perhaps the reason for the missing images from the Trafford sets is that Roger coloured them and gave them as gifts to friends (adults or children) or perhaps he sold them to raise money at his ‘church art stalls’. As mentioned earlier, we know that he had ‘O is for Owl’ postcards printed to sell for the MGS Hugh Oldham Charity. 

   My recent visit to Manchester Art Gallery revealed some intriguing additional information in a folder relating to the Alphabet. An enquiry had been received in 1982 from a gentleman whose mother, a resident of Sale, had left him three ‘pictures’ which she told him had been given to her by the artist. His descriptions indicate that they were X, M and G, although he doesn’t mention whether they were coloured. Sandra Martin, then Assistant Keeper of the Rutherston Collection, replied and mentioned that ‘several of Roger’s drawings both buildings and humorous were published as postcards….’

   Then in 2012, a letter was received by the gallery from someone who had bought at auction four hand-coloured Manchester Alphabet images on postcards. One of them, ‘I is for Irwell’, had the verse handwritten on the back and was signed ‘Roger Oldham’. Roger died in 1916 at the age of 45 – he had apparently been unwell for some time. He is buried in Brooklands cemetery and there is also a plaque to his memory on the wall of St Albans church, Broadheath which says ‘This tablet is given by his wife Dorothy and the congregation in gratitude for his useful and happy life.’ In 1917 Dorothy, assisted by some of Roger’s close friends, published a memoir celebrating his life called The Art of Englishmen which includes the text of several of his talks and lectures and an affectionate biographical note. His friend I.H. Swallow records that ‘His capacity for interesting others in the things in which he was himself interested was, in fact, very remarkable’ and that ‘in his company nothing seemed ordinary.’

   Copies of ‘A Manchester Alphabet’ are now rare and desirable, selling for several hundred pounds at auction. One imagines that Roger would be delighted but very amused.

    

   By Patti Collins

   With thanks to the team at Trafford Local Studies, to Peter Johnson of St Albans Church and to Hannah Williamson at Manchester Art Gallery

    

    

    

    

    

7. No Cure for Love: Two Early Modern Apothecaries and Their Books

   26th November 2024 11:54 am Leave a Comment

   Chetham’s Library has no lack of books with famous former owners: there is a copy of Plato’s works owned by the early modern playwright Ben Jonson (see our post on this subject as part of our ‘101 Treasure’s of Chetham’s’ series), a book owned by Elizabeth Gaskell and, of course, the five books annotated by Dr John Dee, scholar and alchemist and warden of Manchester college from 1595 to 1605. The collection even includes books owned by royalty: Matthias Corvinus King of Hungary, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I all owned books that are now in Chetham’s Library. However, less illustrious readers also left their traces, and many of the volumes in the library tell stories of the lives of readers from past centuries. One such example are the books owned by Robert Syddall and John Hartley, two apothecaries living in Manchester in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

   Not much is known about Syddall and Hartley beyond the evidence they left in their books. The parish registers of Manchester Cathedral show that Syddall was born in the 1570s, married in the early years of the seventeenth century, had a son (also named Robert) and died in 1645, survived by his widow Ellen. An inventory of Robert Syddall’s possessions compiled after his death reveals that he kept equipment necessary for the making of remedies, such as stills and an alembic, in his house, suggesting that he pursued his profession from home rather than from a shop. John Hartley is even more elusive: the parish registers only show that he had three daughters, one of whom survived to adulthood, and that he died in 1667. It is not clear whether Syddall and Hartley knew each other, but it seems likely, given that they were active in the same profession at the same time in what was a relatively small town in the seventeenth century. Thirty books owned by these two apothecaries are now in the collection in Chetham’s Library. Of these, thirteen have ownership inscriptions by both Syddall and Hartley, suggesting that they perhaps came into Hartley’s possession after Syddall’s death.

   

   Image 1: Signatures of Robert Syddall and John Hartley in Champier’s Speculum Galeni (BYROM 2.I.3.69)

    Ten have inscriptions by Syddall but not Hartley and seven by Hartley but not Syddall. One further volume that belonged to Syddall is now in the British Library (BL Add MS 62127). The books came to Chetham’s Library as part of the Byrom Collection, donated in 1870 by a descendant of the Manchester poet and scholar John Byrom (1692-1763). It is not entirely clear how Byrom acquired the books or who owned them between Hartley’s death and Byrom’s acquisition, but it is probable that they stayed together as a collection from the seventeenth century onwards.

   With few exceptions, they are works relating to medicine and adjacent subjects like botany, and they show both a keen interest in the literature of their profession on the part of Syddall and Hartley and their links with a wider network of readers, including other medical professionals like Thomas Cogan, an Oxford-educated physician who was the master of Manchester grammar school between 1583 and 1597. The large majority of the books, most in Latin, were printed in Europe. Since books were often initially sold unbound, their bindings also reveal something of their story: they range from high-quality decorated calf bindings to cheaper limp vellum bindings and originate from different countries on the Continent as well as England, demonstrating that even in the seventeenth century, readers in Manchester had access to scholarship and scientific literature from continental Europe.

   

   Image 2: Blind-stamped sixteenth-century full calf binding on Champier’s Speculum Galeni (Byrom 2.I.3.69).

   

   Image 3: Limp binding on Actuarius’ De urinis libri septem (Byrom 3.E.6.69).

   

   Image 4: Pressed poppy in Ambroise Paré’s Opera chirurgica (Byrom 2.I.6.13).

   The traces Syddall and Hartley left in their books give us tantalising glimpses of their (reading) lives. Some of the books include pressed plants, possibly used in the making of remedies. One of the books has a hole burned through a page: it is easy to imagine it getting damaged in an apothecary’s workshop. Most interesting, however, are Syddall’s and Hartley’s annotations. They reveal two medical professionals at work, testing and amending medicinal recipes and occasionally creating new remedies of their own. We see Syddall, for instance, adding the words ‘ut probavi’ (‘as I have tried out’) on one occasion, and making comments like the suggestion that a remedy needs more honey to sweeten it. Syddall also added, on a blank page in one of his books, a remedy against an illness he calls ‘pestis’. This could be a general term for any kind of illness, but it could also more specifically mean the plague, of which Manchester experienced a devastating outbreak in 1605, while Syddall was active as an apothecary.

   

   Image 5: Syddall’s annotation ‘ut probavi’ (‘as I have tried out’) in Wecker’s Antidotarium (Byrom 2.K.4.39).

   

   Image 6: Syddall’s remedy against ‘pestis’ in Wecker’s Antidotarium (Byrom 2.K.4.39).

   Some of the books also reveal the apothecaries’ interests beyond medicine: Syddall’s books include, for instance, an Italian grammar. Some annotations, too, are unrelated to professional matters: on an image of Aristotle on the title page of his Logic, a reader, possibly Hartley, has written the words ‘long beard’. The books also include a laundry list, in addition to quotations from poetry, ingredient lists and many other kinds of annotations: they are a fascinating look into the working and reading habits of two apothecaries who lived four centuries ago. Finally, they also reveal what Syddall saw as the limits of his art: to one of his medical works, Syddall has added a quotation from the Roman poet Ovid, which translates to ‘love can be cured by no herbs’ – even industrious readers like Syddall and Hartley, it seems, did not find cures for every ill.

   

   Image 7: The words ‘long beard’ added by a reader to a woodcut of Aristotle in his Logic (Byrom 2.K.4.17).

   

   Image 8: Quotations from Mantuanus and Ovid in Fuchs’ Methodus seu ratio compendiaria (Byrom 2.K.2.31).

   By: Ellen Werner

8. A total gamechanger – looking back 30 years

   18th November 2024 4:00 pm Leave a Comment

    

   On 19 November 1994 seven jackpot winners received around £800,000 each in the first National Lottery draw. In its first year £267m of lottery money went to “good causes” – arts, heritage, millennium and sport, and £154m went to charity. Since then around £49 billion has been given away to over 690,000 projects. As part of the 30th anniversary celebrations we are looking back to a project that was an absolute gamechanger for Chetham’s Library.

   In June 1995 an appeal was announced with the intention of raising more than a million pounds to ensure the survival of the Library.  In a short time over £200,000 was received towards the target and there was lots of interest in the media on the Library’s problems and plans for the future. These funds were especially valuable in demonstrating the widespread support for the Library to the Heritage Lottery Fund and providing the partnership funds which are essential to a successful lottery bid.

   

   A photograph of Librarian Michael Powell, taken in 1995 during the fundraising appeal

   The Heritage Lottery Fund awarded a grant of £1.8 million to the Library in January 1996.  The majority of the grant, £1.4 million, was added to our endowment fund in order to ensure the Library’s financial sustainability for future generations. The remainder, together with funds from the appeal, went towards a series of capital projects – essential restoration of the historic book presses, a new reading room and collection storage rooms on the ground floor, cataloguing and conservation of the collections.

   The most significant part of the project was work on the historic first floor of the Library. In particular the condition of the presses (book cases) was of most concern with several starting to lean alarmingly. These oak presses were designed specifically for the Library in the 1650s and constructed by a team of joiners headed by Richard Martinscroft. We still hold the original accounts for the work in our archive. In the 1740s the height of the presses was increased and new shelves added at lower level.  Later in the century the height was increased again by the addition of three new shelves to the present height of 10ft.  The additional weight of several shelves of books created a problem that only became critical after two hundred years.

   Most of the work was carried out by just two joiners, Steve Slater and Dave Evans of Fourways Joinery of Preston. Each press was dismantled piece by piece and the shelves taken away to a workshop on site where they were repaired and the joints strengthened. In the Priests Wing the floor was also reinforced with specially cut stainless-steel plates inserted into the supporting beams. Wherever possible, the original wood was retained and all new strengthening pieces are hidden from view.  For visitors now the first floor appears to be completely unaltered for the last two hundred years ever since the additional shelves were added and the gates between the presses installed. A true testament to the skill and craftmanship of the work.

   

   During the building work, a makeshift bridge for staff to get to their office!

   

   Everything back in its rightful place

   One mysterious legacy from the project was the discovery of a stone head. We assume that he was part of the medieval building, saved by earlier workmen and hidden away.

   

   Our mysterious stone head, now on display in the Library

   We remain deeply grateful to the Heritage Lottery Trustees for their magnificent support and all those lottery players over the last thirty years who have helped to ensure that Chetham’s Library can survive and thrive for many more centuries.

9. Of Eggs, Shee-Spies and Aphra Behn

   12th November 2024 3:53 pm Leave a Comment

   Following on from our last blog, here is an example of spycraft from the 17th century.

   To put a Schedule, or lytle wryting into an Egge, lay an Egge certaine days in strong vinegar, until it be soft, and wryteyour name or what you lyst in a lytle peece of paper, and folde the paper as harde together as you can: then with a Raser, cut the sayd Egge in the toppe finely, and advisedly; through the which, putt the lytle paper into the Egge cyrcumspectedly, and then put the Egge into cold water, and immediately the shell wyle be harde as it was before. A proper secrete.

   Hiding messages in eggs, creating invisible ink from artichoke juice, smuggling notes in their skirts, cracking codes; these were all in a day’s work for more than sixty female spies in overlapping networks in 17th-century England. Monarchs and governments employing spies to safeguard their regimes saw that women had certain advantages in the game. They were generally excluded from politics and considered at the time to be too irrational and undependable to be agents, which is exactly why they were perfect for the job. They did not arouse suspicion, were not searched when travelling and, presumably, were patient enough to hide little notes in eggs and ingenious enough to make use of such arcane subterfuge.

   So why was the ancient art or science of spying so crucial in the mid to late 17th century? The restoration of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660 did not mean stability was magically restored after twenty years of political turbulence. Rumours of republican conspiracies were rife, there were problems with the community of parliamentarian exiles in the Netherlands, and commercial and naval rivalry had already resulted in war with the Dutch. To survive and prosper, the new regime found it necessary to deploy spies and informers to penetrate and betray any potential plots and gain secret knowledge of foreign affairs. Despite his cheerful deportment, Charles II, the Merry Monarch, was a worried man.

   

   Charles II dancing at a Ball at Court, c 1660. Hieronymus Janssens (Flemish, 1624-93).   Berkshire: Windsor Castle, RCIN 400525. Source: Royal Collection Trust

   This particular espionage tale starts in Surinam, an English plantation colony utilizing slavery for sugar cultivation, much coveted by the Dutch. Even in such distant colonies, people of suspicion were under surveillance. One of these was Robert Scott, son of a regicide, who played a double game in an uprising before the Restoration and had known ties to England’s number one enemy. Also there, according to her (not altogether reliable) memoirs, was Aphra, a young woman going under the name of Astrea, who was eventually expelled by the Deputy Governor, possibly because she was suspected of being a royalist spy. Somewhere between this expulsion and 1665, Aphra married a shadowy, probably German, figure by the name of Behn, who promptly disappeared from the records.

   In 1666, the first record of Mrs Aphra Behn appears, she was to become a celebrated playwright, poet, translator, and one of the first English women to earn a living by writing and became a literary role model for later generations of female authors. Virginia Wolf famously wrote of her: ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon (her) tomb…for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ Much of Behn’s work is easily available today in modern editions, but Chethams Library holds some rare first edition fragments – two translations, a prologue to a play by John Fletcher, and her own prologue to her late, probably unpublished, play ‘Like Father Like Son or The Mistaken Brothers.’

   

   Aphra Behn’s Prologue to her play ‘Like Father Like Son,’1682, in Chetham’s Library.

   But to get back to the spy story, Aphra records in her memoirs that she had an audience with Charles II after her return to England. Such a meeting seems unlikely for the daughter of (allegedly) a barber and a wet nurse, unless either she had taken his fancy, or, more probably, unless she was an agent with news to report. It may be that by this time she had already made inroads in the world of theatre and politics and that her services were recruited by Thomas Killigrew, the dramatist heading up the King’s Company and secretly working in intelligence for the King. However she was recruited, by July 1666, during the darkest point of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, she finally enters recorded history as the subject of a document issued by the office of the Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, entitled ‘Memorials for Mrs Affora’ and giving her a 14-point list of instructions. And so she embarked on a short, frustrating, dangerous and ultimately unprofitable career as a spy: Agent 160, Code Name Astrea.

   By this time Robert Scott had left Surinam, was lying low in Holland and was suspected of working for the Dutch. Aphra was charged with finding him and then ‘to know whether Mr Scott has any resolution to become a convert and to serve his KING and COUNTRY. To use all secrecy imaginable.’ She was to extract information on how many ships the Dutch had, how many had been lost in a recent skirmish, whether and when they would ally with the French, what the private Dutch East India Company fleet was doing and the whereabouts of other merchant ships. Additionally, she was to discover anything at all about Dutch spies operating in England, whether the English exiles in Holland would invade and if so where they would land. Any information was to be relayed in code to Arlington. The code was not complex: 160 for herself with the cover name Astrea, 159 for Scott, whose cover name was Celladon, 26 for Amsterdam and so on. We can assume that Aphra had some kind of cover story and there is evidence that she was accompanied by a MrPiers, a merchant sailor.

   

   Distant View of Antwerp,17th century, Hans Bol. WA1863.149 © Ashmolean Museum.

   In return for such intelligence, acting as a double agent, Scott was to be offered both money and a pardon for his earlier misdemeanours against the new regime. Arriving in Antwerp in Flanders, rather than hostile Holland, Aphra wrote to Scott asking for a meeting. Surprisingly, he agreed immediately, perhaps because he already knew her from their days in Surinam or perhaps because he was tempted by the offer of money. She does not seem to have been pleased to see him. ‘I was forced to get a coach and go a day’s journey with him to have an opportunity to speak with him, …’ but she felt she had been successful: ‘After I had used all arguments to him that were fit for me, he became so extremely willing to undertake your service.’ She, naively as it turned out, felt she had gained his trust: ‘I really believe [his] intent is very real and will be very diligent in the way of doing you all the service in the world for the future.’

   The National Archives holds 19 of Aphra’s spying letters sent to London from Antwerp. We learn that Scott did write several letters with snippets of information but it seems Aphra copied out the first few to send to Arlington’s office, and kept the originals, claiming that Scott was afraid to have his own handwriting recognised if the letters were intercepted. Some scholars believe she rewrote the letters to make the intelligence sound more important than it really was, with the occasional comment on what English policy should be. Others have suggested that the letters were the early attempts of a budding fiction writer and they contained half-truths based on her own eavesdropping, reading of newspapers and imagination. In any case, Scott refused to divulge more unless he was paid and his pardon assured, and unless she came to Amsterdam, which was safer for him, but highly dangerous for Aphra – she ‘dare as well be hanged as to go’, particularly as the English had just burnt some of the Dutch fleet in its own harbour and anti-English feeling was raging.

   

   The Four Days’ Battle, 1-4 June 1666. Abraham Stock. Wikipedia.

   In the next few months, this spying life became increasingly uncomfortable and dangerous for Aphra. She had unwisely shared her credentials with a failed English spy, Thomas Corney, who had earlier been betrayed by Scott to the Dutch government, imprisoned and tortured, dropped from Arlington’s payroll, and was seeking his revenge by undermining the ‘shee spy’, as he called Aphra. Both he and she were somehow able to access each other’s correspondence and he insulted her to everyone he knew. He suggested Scott and Aphra were lovers conspiring to swindle Arlington and that the whole mission was hopeless. Back in London letters were arriving from both Corney and Aphra, each claiming that the other was indiscreet, and both begging for money.

   Indeed, whatever Aphra’s shortcomings as a spy, she needed money to live, and instruction to continue to ensure Scott’s trust. ‘I have sent several times to Mr Hallsall,’ she wrote, ‘but I can get no word of answer…I have by this post sent him things from Celladon who is the readiest man alive to serve his majesty… without any encouragement than barely my word.’ Her frustration is palpable. ‘I confess I carried no more … but 50 pounds and I have not only spent all that upon mere eating and drinking but in borrowing of money to accomplish my desires of seeing and speaking with the man. I am as much more in debt having pawned my very rings.’

   As the months passed she feared she had lost the trust of Scott due to Corney’s intervention, and she needed money to pay her debts and return to England. She wrote to Arlington himself: ‘Therefore my humble petition to your lordship is that I may have a final answer of what I am to do, and not let me be disgraced and ruined in a strange place where I have none to pity or help me.’ There was no immediate answer. Eventually Scott, always under surveillance by both sides, was arrested by the Dutch (after which he disappears from the record), and the mission was clearly at an end. At last, Aphra received enough money to pay her immediate debts and return to London in May 1667.

   Even after she returned, she had debts to pay, a warrant was issued for her arrest, and she was forced to ask her former employers for help. No amount of pleading could induce the English government, now on the verge of bankruptcy, to give her more. Hearing nothing, she petitioned the King. Thereafter her name as an agent disappears from the records, either because the petition worked or because she served her time in a debtors’ prison, but within a few years she had built a reputation as a writer, still using her pastoral pseudonym of Astrea, and her plays were wildly popular on the stages of Restoration London.

   Aphra was just one of many women who, for reasons of pride, financial gain, ambition, love or adventure, undertook roles as secret agents for their King and country, at great risk and cost to themselves. In her case, at least part of the motivation appears to have been a genuine devotion to the Stuart cause. Despite her shoddy treatment in the King’s service, she revered Charles II, and subsequently supported his brother James II, dedicating a play to him even after he had been exiled. Just before she died, she declined an invitation to write a welcoming poem for the new monarchs, William and Mary. Had she lived she would have been an enthusiastic advocate of the Jacobite cause and would no doubt have deployed her now powerful pen in its service. 

   Aphra Behn’s talent had not been dampened by her dispiriting experience as a secret agent; her exuberant works in poetry and prose, sometimes serious and lyrical, sometimes bawdy and erotic, speak of power, politics and religion, women’s rights, colonial oppression and slavery. Some of her plays were so popular that they were on stage in London every season for decades after her death. Although she had not been clever enough to survive in a wartime spy network, she later personified that highly valued 17th attribute – ‘Wit.’ Her memorial in Westminster Abbey regrets: ‘Here lies a proof that Wit can never be/Defence enough against Mortality.’

    

   

   Gravestone of Aphra Behn (east cloister)© Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

   Sources

   Nadine Akkerman, ‘Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in 17th Century Britain’

   Janet Todd, ‘Aphra Behn: a Secret Life’

   National Archives project, ‘Aphra Behn: Memoirs of a Shee Spy. Katy Mair, Elaine Hobby

    

   By: Kath Rigby.

    

   NB In July 2024 the Guardian promised ‘joy at the celebratons of Aphra Behn: a Netflix film, statue and a newly discovered first edition. These have yet to materialise.

10. KEEP IT SECRET, KEEP IT SAFE: WAX SEALS AND LETTER-LOCKING

    17th October 2024 4:26 pm 1 Comment

    As anyone who has visited recently will know, Chetham’s Library played host this summer to a remarkable assembly of furniture: the original marriage bed of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, a copy of it produced by the prolific Victorian forger George Shaw, and several other pieces of furniture produced by him and passed off as original Tudor pieces. The story of the marriage bed’s rediscovery and its connection to Chetham’s Library is a thrilling one, and it has been a pleasure sharing it with so many of you through tours and evening lectures during its time here. Now that the furniture has been safely packed away, however, our thoughts have turned to the new exhibition that has taken its place in the library, which focuses on the fascinating hidden history of ciphers and codebreaking.

    For as long as written communication has existed, people have had to contend with the fact that others might try to intercept and read their missives, and have consequently gone to great lengths to prevent this. Codes and ciphers have long been employed to encrypt the contents of letters, preventing anyone who did not have the key from reading them. Several books in our collections deal with precisely this topic, providing instruction on how to create substitution ciphers that replaced the letters of the alphabet with other letters or symbols. Such ciphers eventually developed into modern cryptography, including the Enigma Code that was employed by Germany during the Second World War. In fact, one of our past Assistant Librarians, Pauline Leech, worked as a codebreaker in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, where Enigma was cracked, before she came to the library!

    

    Wax seals on letters in our collections (Chetham’s Library, E.1.4/5, A8, 14, 21 and C13).

    Another way of keeping the contents of a letter safe was to ensure that nobody could open it without it being obvious that they had done so. Since ancient times, wax seals were used to close letters; each seal was unique to its owner, so an intact seal signified both that the letter was genuine, and that the letter’s contents had remained private. The Romans used rings engraved with images, sometimes carved into gemstones called ‘intaglios’, to make their impressions in the wax. During the medieval period, these intaglios were sometimes reused and set into rings that bore legends attesting to the secrecy of their messages: examples include ‘clausa secreta tego’ (‘I cover closed secrets’), ‘frange, lege, lecta tege’ (‘break, read, cover what is read’) and ‘tecta lege, lecta tege’ (‘read what is covered, cover what is read’). The use of seals persisted well into the early modern and modern periods, and several letters in our collections still bear the traces of the seals that once kept them secure.

    

    The Chetham seal matrix (Chetham’s Library, no shelfmark).

    A particularly exciting item in our collections, and one that was only acquired recently (through the generous assistance of the Friends of the Nation’s Libraries), is a seal matrix with three faces. The matrix was therefore capable of making three different impressions in the wax, depending on which face was used. At the moment, we don’t know much about who originally owned this matrix, but it clearly has a connection with either Humphrey Chetham or the library that he founded, since the Chetham achievement of arms is found on one of its three faces: the crest (a demi-griffin gules charged with a cross double-crossed, or) above the eschuton (quarterly, 1^st & 4^th, argent, a griffin segreant gules, within a bordure, sable, bezantée; 2^nd, argent, a chevron between three crampons, gules; 3^rd, gules, a cross double-crossed, or; over all charged with a crescent for difference). On the second face, the Chetham griffin crest – the symbol still used by the library to this day – is displayed on its own. On the third face, an as-yet-unidentified classical head appears in profile.

    Nevertheless, letters closed by wax seals weren’t as secure as might be imagined. Using a heated knife, someone determined to read a letter’s contents could have lifted its seal intact before reapplying it with an extra dab of wax, leaving next to no trace that it had ever been opened. As a result, during the early modern period – when easily-foldable paper replaced stiff parchment as the most commonly-used writing support – people started to come up with more and more inventive folding techniques that added yet another layer of security to letters. Some, such as the ‘tuck and seal’, were relatively simple, while others, such as the ‘spiral lock’, were incredibly complicated and, as a result, incredibly secure. The former is known to have been used by Elizabeth I’s chief adviser William Cecil, and the latter by Elizabeth herself, so it is entirely possible that John Dee received letters locked in this way while he was the warden of Manchester’s collegiate church between 1595 and 1608/9. In fact, all letters sent before the invention of the envelope in 1840 were closed by folding them in some way, since the early postal service charged by weight rather than size; folding letters enabled senders to avoid using a second sheet of paper as an envelope, which would have doubled the price!

    

    Modern reproductions of locked letters.

    Common to both wax seals and letter-locking is the fact these were highly personal ways of securing correspondence. The poet John Donne, whose literary works we have in our collections, even developed his own unique letter-lock, which perhaps provided an extra layer of security! Other encryption techniques were less personal, however, and we’ll be taking a look at those in future blog posts relating to our new exhibition. We’ll also be exploring Pauline Leech’s experiences of Bletchley Park and the library through her diaries, also in our collections. We hope you’ll enjoy coming with us on this journey into the hidden history of correspondence! To find out more about the fascinating practice of letter-locking, you can visit the Letterlocking project page here.

    By Emma Nelson