EARLY DAYS IN THE TURNBULL LIBRARY

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 3, Issue 2, 1 August 1970, Page 112

EARLY DAYS IN THE TURNBULL LIBRARY

Alice Woodhouse

There must be few people who are fortunate enough to find themselves, especially when no longer young, in perhaps the one job in the whole country they would most like to have. That is what happened to me, and I still wonder sometimes how it all came about. Towards the end of 1925 I came up to Wellington from Dunedin to stay with some cousins, in order to recuperate after an illness. My plans were uncertain at the time, and one day my cousins said to me, 'Why don't you try for a position in the Turnbull Library?' And they explained what the Turnbull Library was, and where it was. I took their advice, and sent in an application, but there was no vacancy at the time, so I went off to Auckland to visit relations there. It was my father's home town - he was born there in quite early days - but I had never been there before. Naturally I found it an interesting place and was pleased to make the acquaintance of relatives I had not hitherto met, but this could not go on for ever, and I was wondering what my next move had better be when a message came from my Wellington cousins saying 'Turnbull Library enquiring for you'.

Back I came to Wellington by the next day s train and there were the inevitable interviews and two or three weeks of waiting while applications were being considered. I believe the only other applicant at that time was a well-educated Russian woman, a refugee, who spoke several languages, but of course knew nothing about New Zealand history and literature. At last my appointment was confirmed and I reported for duty at the Library on 13 December 1926. The number 13 has never had any terror for me and from this time on I regarded it as, if anything, a lucky number, especially when I found that this was the date on which Tasman had discovered New Zealand. For some obscure reason, this seemed to me a good omen. It was also just the day before my own birthday.

The Library was open to the public in the sense that people could come in and use it, but the front door was kept closed, and visitors had to ring to be admitted. At that stage it was a wise precaution, because the smallness of the staff made supervision difficult and also the greater part of the Library was still not catalogued. The large room on the ground floor was the Rare Book Room and it was also used by Mr Andersen as his office. He had a table for each of his different activities - the Library itself, the Polynesian Society, any book he was engaged on at the moment, etc. The small room adjoining also housed rare books and series like Book Auction Records. The portrait of Alexander Turnbull hung over the fireplace. The portrait of

his father was of course, set in the panelling over the fireplace in the large room. What had been Mr Turnbull's dining-room was the office, as it is today. Above the Rare Book Room was what was usually called the New Zealand Room though it really housed the main Pacific Collection. This is now the Reference Room and Reading Room. The companion smaller room also had some New Zealand books, as it had a cabinet which held the big illustrated books and such things as the portfolio of reproductions of Dr Wilson's Antarctic sketches. In the bay window of the New Zealand Room was the big table at which we did the cataloguing. The only accommodation for readers consisted of three small tables at the fireplace end of this room, though there was a large table in the next-door room which could be used if necessary.

Above the New Zealand Room was the English Literature Room, its shelves filled with the more modern writers, and with the theatrical collection, and other material. The small room next door was occupied by Mr Elsdon Best, ethnologist to the Dominion Museum, which at that time was in the old building at the top of Bowen Street. The four storeys of stack rooms at the back had fortunately quite a lot of empty space in some of them. The staff consisted of Mr J. C. Andersen, Miss Grace Davidson, Miss Marion Hardie and me, and then there were the two housekeepers - Miss Brouard and Miss Tweeddale. They had both been with Mr Turnbull for several years. Miss Brouard came from the Channel Islands and was short in stature, active and efficient, and with a lively disposition. Miss Tweeddale was tall, and of rather a melancholy cast of countenance. She became ill while I was there and had to go to hospital where she died, and I can't remember whether there was a successor to her or not. Probably there was one until Miss Brouard herself retired, and no more resident housekeepers were appointed. 1 Miss Davidson had been one of the original staff, the others being Miss Quinice Cowles and Miss Ursula Tewsley. Miss Cowles went over to the General Assembly Library, and I took her place. Miss Hardie's appointment was rather unusual, as she was over sixty, but Mr Andersen had been very pleased with some typing she had done for him on occasions, and had been anxious to have her at the Library. This was possible because of the peculiar arrangements about women in the Public Service at that time.

During World War I many women were taken on the permanent staff of the Public Service, which they hadn't been before, but of course many of them didn't stay on - women had to resign on marriage, anyway - and the men complained that they were upsetting the super-

annuation fund and throwing things out of gear. So the edict went forth that no more women were to go on the permanent staff, and Miss Hardie was taken on as a 'temporary', and so was I, though as time went on I acquired, if I remember rightly, the rather curious designation of'permanent-temporary'. This was really to my advantage, as it meant that I was retained on the staff for two or three years longer than would have been the case if I had been strictly a 'permanent'. Miss Hardie's main job was typing, but she was supposed to help in a general way with the cataloguing and other duties, such as showing visitors round. But she found doing the catalogue cards in print script rather difficult, and any way her time was taken up more and more with the office work, and the cataloguing, reference work, and conducting visitors through the Library fell mostly to Miss Davidson and me.

For Grace Davidson I developed a great admiration, mingled with some slight irritation. She was so very conscientious! Anything she did was thoroughly done. If it was reference work, then anything remotely related to the subject would be looked out. If it was cataloguing, then you knew that every detail would be correct on the card she did in a neat and characteristic script, with rather square-shaped letters. But she got to the stage of thinking the place would collapse if she wasn't there to hold it together. She didn't always take her annual leave and she very seldom took the afternoons off that we were allowed to compensate for evening duty. And it was all so unnecessary. Everything went quite well on the rare occasion when she wasn't there.

The Librarian, Johannes Carl Andersen, was a remarkable man. He was remarkable in any company, with his height and his mane of hair and his craggy face. That is the only way I can describe it. Once at morning tea there was one biscuit left on the plate and I handed it to him and said, 'Here's .£IO,OOO a year for you, Mr Andersen.' And he said, 'Well, I can't be a handsome husband can I?' There was a stunned silence. Neither Miss Davidson nor I could think of anything to say. He was largely what one would call a self-educated man. Except for attending a few lectures at Canterbury College he had no university training. All his knowledge had been acquired by his own efforts. A glance at a list of his publications shows the wide range of his interests. He would come up and join us for morning tea and some chance remark might set him off on a dissertation on some subject or another which would go on for quite a long time. The cataloguing work suffered a little, but one learnt so much from him that it wasn't really a waste of time. Then he stopped coming up for tea - he said it didn't agree with him, and he certainly didn't look well. Sometimes he looked very ill indeed. I don't know what the trouble was, but in the end it was a chiropractor

who put it right and in time he was his old self again but he didn’t come up for morning tea any more and I for one missed those talks of his. Mr Andersen and I didn’t always see eye to eye. There was a small matter of my print script on the catalogue cards - or rather, of one letter in my print script. He said one day he didn’t like the way I made it, but I preferred my own way and, rather obstinately stuck to it. He didn’t refer to the matter again and I thought he had forgotten all about it and then a year or two later I found that this small thing had been stored up against me and that also, quite unconsciously, I had been getting his back up over other things which he had not mentioned. This I found when he sent in a report on me so unfavourable that I contemplated appealing against it, but I decided not to and nothing untoward happened. After that there was a certain coolness in our relations, which I was sorry about, but there it was. Faults on both sides as is usually the case in any trouble. % Except that he was tall like Mr Andersen, Elsdon Best was a different type of man. His neat grey beard gave him rather a distinguished look, and he usually wore an old-fashioned but comfortable type of‘Norfolk jacket’. He had been given a room at the Library because there was no suitable accommodation for him in the old Dominion Museum Building.

When I read the biography of him - Man of the Mist - by his nephew Elsdon Craig, I was surprised and somewhat annoyed to see it stated there that 'he had a dingy little room at the Turnbull Library'. It was nothing of the kind. It was what is now the Art Room and was quite a fair-sized room except that on two of the walls racks had been built to take bound volumes of Wellington newspapers, and that naturally encroached on the space. But he had a big working table in front of a sunny window, with a pleasant outlook over into the Parliamentary Grounds, and there were shelves for his books and papers, an armchair and a fireplace.

Fires were the only form of heating in the building, which meant that the housekeepers had to carry up scuttles of coal from the coalhouse at the back. In cold weather Mr Best's fire would be half-way up the chimney. In the New Zealand Room, with our table in the window and five double-banked rows of bookcases between us and the fireplace, it could be pretty cold and we would be glad of an excuse to go up to Mr Best's well-warmed room to consult him on some point of Maori history or the spelling of a name. He was always courtesy itself and took a great deal of trouble to find the right answer to any enquiries. It was sad to see his health failing in the last few months of his life. After all these years it isn't easy to remember more than a few of the people who came to the Library either as readers or visitors who wanted

to be shown round. There are two whom I do remember from my first year there. One was Sir Douglas Maclean, son of Sir Donald, and the other was Bishop Herbert Williams - the third of his family to be Bishop of Waiapu. In after years, when working with the historical collections in Napier, I liked to think that I had met, even briefly, two men whose families were so connected with Hawke's Bay. Sir Douglas liked to browse around but the Bishop usually wanted something specific or would like to look through the Maori collection. An interesting personality was H. E. Maude, Administrator of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. He sometimes came to New Zealand for his leave and on more than one occasion he spent considerable time in the Library, finding out all he could about the Islands of the Pacific. His own islands were getting overcrowded and he wanted to find an uninhabited group with similar conditions to which some of the people could be moved. With the information he got from the Library and also elsewhere he was able to find a suitable group, and some of the Gilbertese were transferred.

Then there was Harold Gatty the flyer, who was also very knowledgeable about the Pacific, and later, during the war, wrote little books about how to survive and find your way about if you had the misfortune to fall into it. He would drop in about tea-time and would talk away at a great rate about his flying and other experiences. A frequent visitor was T. L. Buick, author of The Treaty of Waitangi and other historical books. He was engaged on The French at Akaroa when I joined the Library. The material for this had been collected in Paris and elsewhere by Dr Robert McNab of Southland, but he died before he could get started on the book, so Mr Buick had been allowed the use of the papers. Most of the documents had been translated where necessary, but there were some still in French, and when he found that Miss Davidson and I were fairly good at French he asked us to translate them for him. This we were quite pleased to do and thought we had made a good job of it, but there were traps, like the phrase, a grande vitesse which we translated as 'full speed ahead', till Mr Buick pointed out that this is used only of steamers, and all the vessels concerned were sailing-ships. In spite of a few slips like this, he seemed to approve of our efforts, and when the book came out he presented each of us with an autographed copy.

Those who came just as sightseers, to be shown round the Library are still more difficult to recall, though I do remember two American ladies who wanted to see 'some da-a-h-cuments signed by Ca-aptain Co-o-ok' in an accent which I found so fascinating that I had to restrain an impulse to say, 'Oh, do say that again!' The procedure was for us to take the visitors through the Library, showing them anything that we thought would interest them, and then

they were supposed to sign the visitor's book which stood on a table in the passage-way, opposite the door into the office. Sometimes in the case of overseas visitors, once they had signed the book they seemed to be in some sort of trouble. A strained look would come over their faces and their hands would slide towards their pockets. 'To tip, or not to tip?' That was the question. I would leave them in their misery for a moment or two, and then say 'There's no charge', which seemed the best way of dealing with the matter and with a relieved look and polite thanks they would take their departure.

Once I had been showing a honeymoon couple round and the young husband insisted on leaving five shillings for the staff, in spite of my protests, so I accepted it and said I would put it in the tea-money. On another occasion, when I was showing an old gentleman out at the front door, he shook hands warmly and left something in my palm which at first glance looked like a penny and I thought perhaps he was a little eccentric and liked to go round distributing pennies to people he met. A closer look showed that it was a discoloured half-crown, but by that time the old gentleman was away down the street and I could do nothing about it, so that went in the tea-money too. This was, I think, the same old gentleman who took a particular interest in the Library because he had worked for the firm of W. and G. Turnbull for many years. He took a long look at Walter Turnbull's portrait, over the fireplace. 'Yes,' he said, 'it's very like him. He was a hard man, but he was a just man.'

Then he went on to tell me that one of his first jobs was to go up with the first load of newsprint for the Blundells when they were starting the Evening Post. He helped with the loading of the dray and then Mr Turnbull drew him aside and said, 'Now, boy, you're to go along with the driver and see that these rolls of paper are delivered properly. And boy, mind you come back with the cash!' The portrait of Walter Turnbull had a special interest for me after I learnt from an uncle of mine that there was a curious sort of link between the Turnbulls and my mother's family. Both families came from the small town of Peebles in Scotland. Walter Turnbull had a drapery shop in the town and my grandfather, John Bathgate, was agent for the Union Bank of Scotland, and with his family lived in the Bank House which had a frontage on the main street and a fairly large garden at the back. The house was later on occupied by John Buchan, afterwards Lord Tweedsmuir, author of his own particular brand of 'thrillers', and many other publications. His mother and his sister, who wrote as 'O. Douglas', lived on there for several years.

The Turnbull house was somewhere further back and my grandfather gave Mr Turnbull permission to take a short cut through the bank garden, so that he could get home more quickly.

My uncle said that when he was a small boy playing by the stream that ran at the bottom of the garden, he would often see 'Wattie Turnbull' making his way home for his mid-day meal. Nobody could possibly have thought that many years later, on the other side of the world, the niece of that small boy would be caring for the treasures collected by the son of the older man. Some years after I had retired from the Library, and while I was living in Napier, I went on a trip overseas and was able to walk down the main street of Peebles looking for the Bank House, which was quite easy to find because on the wall beside the outer door there was still a brass plate saying, 'John Buchan, Writer'. (This did not refer to Lord Tweedsmuir's literary work. In Scotland a 'writer' means a lawyer.)

I went inside and explained that my grandfather had once occupied the house - now turned into offices - and I asked if I could look out over the garden at the back. I was shown into a room with a wide modern window and there was the garden, mostly grass and shrubs, sloping down to the little stream, just as my uncle had described it. But I couldn't see any sign of another house further back. It may have been hidden by trees or it may have been pulled down and so disappeared altogether.

There were other visitors - Important People who came to see Mr Andersen or to be shown some of the treasures in the Library - and these we did not come in contact with as a rule, though sometimes we would have liked to. One we were determined to get a glimpse of was George Bernard Shaw. It had been arranged that he and Mrs Shaw would spend about an hour with Mr Andersen looking at the Rare Book collection, and we thought the best way to see him would be to watch for them coming out again into the hall. Neglecting our work we listened for the sound of opening doors and when we heard this, we slipped down on to the half-landing so that we could look down into the hall. As they came out of the small room G.B.S. caught sight of the figures on the stairs and looked up right at us, so we had a splendid view of him and I can at least say that I once saw George Bernard Shaw. In 1933 C. R. H. Taylor was appointed Deputy-Librarian and after his study trip to the United States and elsewhere, on a Carnegie Grant, some changes were made in the Library arrangements. The door was left open so that people could come in freely, the staff was enlarged and became much younger, and cataloguing methods were brought up-to-date especially with the introduction of the multigraph for reproducing the cards. I learnt how to cope with the thing, more or less, but never really got the hang of it, as I have no mechanical aptitude whatever. Naturally World War II brought changes to the Library and the

staff especially. When the war moved into the Pacific to safeguard the Library's treasures, Mr Taylor, by this time Librarian, arranged for a great many of the books to be housed in a room on the top floor of the Public Trust Office in Masterton, a work that was spread over several months and which meant occasional trips to Masterton for two or three of the staff at a time. This made a pleasant break in the usual routine.

While Mr Taylor was with the Army Education and Welfare Service in the Pacific in the last year or two of the war, I became Acting Librarian, which I enjoyed very much - largely I am sure because of the loyal co-operation I had from the staff. That makes a lot of difference.

Once, while the books were in the process of being moved to Masterton, it was found necessary to have some new shelves built and I was sent up on my own to keep an eye on the work, and do some unpacking and arranging of the books. I was having a wonderful time - getting books into their classes, matching up volumes that had got separated from their sets and dipping into books that perhaps I hadn't looked at for years. I cast a glance round at the workmen, busy on their job, and thought: 'Poor things - what a life! Nothing to do but saw wood and hammer in nails all day!' Towards the end of the afternoon one of the carpenters, sitting astride the top of a book-case and hammering in some final nails, looked down on me, pityingly. 'I wouldn't have your job for anything,' he said, 'nothing to do but look at books all day.'

1 Miss Tweeddale was followed by Miss O'Donnell. On Miss Brouard's retirement a married couple, Mr and Mrs Brown, were resident custodians until the evacuation of the building in 1953. (Editor)