Libraries nurture the mind of man – let’s protect our heritage - Stanley Jast at Norbury Library opening 1931

 

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.