Norbury Library was due to re-open to the public
after major repairs, modernisation and re-modelling on 5 January 2021 with the
Mayor doing the official opening on 9 January. It was therefore a great
disappointment that the new lockdown rules to combat COVID prevented this from
happening.
In addition
the closed hall on the first floor has been modernised and named Maggie Mansell
Community Hall after the former Councillor.
The History of Norbury Library
The Library was set-up after campaigning by local
residents. It was
Croydon’s fifth library building in what was then the much smaller Borough area
before the merger with the Coulsdon and Purley Urban District in 1965.
The residents campaign across the Borough against the
early 2010s closure of libraries proposed by then the Conservative
administration was defeated, and Norbury Library saved.
The management of the Library service was tendered
out by the Conservatives and the management contract awarded to J Laing, which
had a joint development operation with the Council which included the building
of Bernard Weatherill House. Laing sold then sold the contract to Carillion,
which then ran down Norbury with decreasing book stock.
When Carillion collapsed the Council took the
management of the service back in house and the then Leader gave a promise that
not only would Norbury not be closed but it would also be modernised.
Opening
Anniversary
The 90th Anniversary of the Library’s official
opening in 1931 is 30 May, at which the Anglo-Pole Sidney Jast, Croydon’s former
Chief Librarian, and at the time President of the Library
Association, spoke outlining his
pioneering views about the importance of libraries.
“The
library was in some ways superior to life itself. We are limited by our three
score years and ten, but books extend our horizon to the furthest boundaries of
history, nay, and far beyond, for has not the speculative mind of man marched
with the stars and written of the growth and decay of universes?”
The
Campaign For a Library
The
Library’s opening was the culmination of years of campaigning by local
residents, especially the local London County Council Tenants
Association. The Croydon Advertiser’s editorial of 6 June 1931 commented:
“it required a battle to bring in the public library but nowadays there is no
institution, probably, of those which are charged on the public funds more generally
accepted as a boon and a blessing to men. As with other instruments of good,
much depends on its administration. In this particular Croydon shines and has
shone for a good while, so that we have ever with us an agency designed for
enlightenment being itself enlightened because informed by the enlightenment of
its administrators”.
As
with all capital projects it took time from the decision to build a new branch
library at Norbury taken by the Council on 14 January 1927, which included Government
permission to borrow the money to buy the land and build the library. The
following February it opened library facilities for all Norbury children at
Norbury Manor School. The number of books issued during the first month was
2,829.
A lot
of thought went into the design of the new library. The shelves were designed
to ensure that no one had to stretch up to the top or stoop to the bottom. ‘The
newsroom is unique in being the first to be opened with newspaper stands at
which readers may sit, the slope of which the newspaper rests being adjustable
to the sight and convenience of the reader’, said an observer of the time. As
well as the junior library area, there was also a story hour room which
children could use to do their homework.
Jast
praised the progressive nature in his time of the Libraries Committee, and the
‘remarkable staff’ he had had working for him.
Jast
proclaimed the importance of providing both first class and ‘rubbish’
literature, stating that: “the librarian who filled his library with only the best
in literature and declined the second and third rate would speedily find […]
his circulation going down by leaps and bounds, and it would be remarkable if
his committee and himself were not smothered under by complaints as to the
shocking supply of books. Most of us are second and third-rate people. We have
second and third-rate minds and even the few who flatter themselves that they
have first-rate minds have their second and third-rate moods. Our libraries
must function; the public must be reasonably catered for and the basic
proposition that it is better to read than not to read is a sound enough
generalisation even if one only reads rubbish”.
In
terms of the wider information role of libraries, Norbury had three shelves in
the reference section of holiday literature, including guides and maps.
Hundreds
of local people turned out for the opening despite the rain. On the first
Monday, 1,200 books were issued. Within less than three weeks 7,985
books had been issued and 3,000 tickets applied for. The junior branch had 319
ticket applications and 3,549 borrowings.
The
first floor has a lecture hall capable of holding 130 people. At the opening
Alderman Peter said that this was “something which had been badly needed in
their part of the borough and already there had been several bookings”. The
re-opening of the hall returns us to that vision.
The
Edwardian Library Legacy Of An Anglo-Pole
Jast “saw
libraries as a nerve centre for the development of communities. His ideas may
be a century old, but some things remain the same, even as we move ahead.”
Unrecognised
here in Croydon, this is the assessment of its energetic innovator Chief
Librarian Stanley Jast (1898-1915), by Dan Cherubin, the Chief Librarian of
Hunter College in the United States (2014).
Born in
Halifax in 1868, Stanley was the son of the exiled Polish army officer Stefan
Louis de Jastrzebski. Stefan had joined the Polish Democratic Society in exile
and travelled on its behalf in England and France. He joined the Polish Legion
supporting the attempt led by Louis Kossuth to free Hungary from
the Austrian empire in 1848-9. After their defeat, many Legion members escaped
to Turkey.
Kossuth
toured Britain in 1850 and 1851, and visited again later in the late 1850s
including addressing a public meeting in Croydon.
Stefan
and his English wife had two sons as well as Stanley: Bodgan, who became a
doctor, and Thaddeus, a civil servant and chairman of the Croydon Liberal
Association.
Stanley
simplified his name to Jast in 1895. He started as a librarian in Halifax and
then moved to Peterborough. He became an advocate of the Dewey system of
classification – still used today to display books – and the open access
system.
He
became Croydon’s Chief Librarian in July 1898 and created a dynamic service
with the libraries becoming workshops for new ideas: the card catalogue, the
reference Library (in Braithwaite Hall) and information service,
publishing The Reader’s Index: The Bi-monthly Magazine of the Croydon
Public Libraries, lectures, reading circles, exhibitions of
books and pictures, and liaison with local schools. “While the revolution was
in progress, an orgy of experimentation raged”, recalled a former member of his
staff.
After
attending the American Library Association Annual Conference in 1904, he travelled
around US libraries. Inspired back in Croydon he implemented more changes:
recruiting a lady typist, holding weekly meetings of senior staff, and setting
up a staff guild.
He
became permanent Hon. Secretary of the British Library Association in 1905, and
helped to innovate national changes.
Jast
provided support and a base for the ‘Survey of Surrey’ photographic project. He
co-authored The Camera as Historian (1916) based on the
survey’s work.
He
moved to Manchester in 1915 and became Chief Librarian there in 1920. In 1931
he introduced the first mobile library in the country. His new central library
project opened in 1934.
Jast As Writer And Community
Activist
He was
a prolific writer, his pamphlets and books covering such subjects as: children
as readers, books for children in elementary schools, libraries and the
community (1939).
He was also what we would now describe as a
community activist, as a member of the
Croydon
Lodge of the Theosophical Society from October 1898 and was vice-president from
February 1900. He gave many talks to it and other lodges over the years, some
of which were published in 1941 (‘What it all Means’).
In
1910 he met Ethel Winifred Austin, the Librarian and Secretary of
the National Library for the Blind, whom he married. She died in 1918, and he
married again in 1925.
He was
a founder in 1916 of the Manchester experimental amateur dramatic society, the
Unnamed Society. He wrote many plays which it performed, such as The
Lover and the Dead Woman, and Shah Jahan (the builder of
the Taj Mahal).
“The perfect librarian does not
exist”
He
retired in 1932. He and Millicent settled in Twickenham in 1940 where he died
on 25 December 1944. Poems and Epigrams was privately
published after his death. Five days before his death he sent a subscription to
C. C. Fagg, the Croydon-based organiser of the newly forming Council for the
Promotion of Field Studies.
His
Speech At The Opening Of Norbury Library
As can
be seen from his speech at the opening of the Norbury branch Library in 1931, his
views were forthright.
“The
perfect librarian does not exist, never has existed and assuredly never will
exist. But good librarians do, and better librarians may.” (1915)
“Whence
my belief that a fairly normal boy or girl can read anything that is literature
without ill effects; at all events that to forbid books is likely to have
effects that are worse. There is a natural disinfecting quality in the unspoilt
imagination of youth.”(1928)
His
droll sense of humour is best shown by what he said at the 1904 American
meeting:
“The
best inventions of America are librarians on the one hand and a martini on the
other hand.”
As a result of Jast’s work,
Croydon libraries were the model to be followed across Britain
He was
an advocate of libraries, not only collecting photographs but also films about
their area, which should be shown to the public. Early acquisitions in Croydon
included Upper Norwood Academy of Music, the funeral of the late town clerk,
and the Croydon Horse Show.
As a result of his work, Croydon libraries were the model to be followed across Britain. His innovative, forward thinking approach was made possible because of a supportive Libraries Committee, even though it had budget restraints. There is lesson here for today’s Croydon Councillors.
