A. G. Bagnall, 1912-1986

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIX, Issue 2, 1 October 1986, Page 97

A. G. Bagnall, 1912-1986

Ormond Wilson

W. J. McEldowney

I I first knew Graham Bagnall in 1946 when I was a member of the first class of the New Zealand Library School and he was the newly appointed Librarian of the National Library Centre, occupying a room in the same building as the School. One day I bought an Early Printed Book, a rather shabby one, at auction, and bore it proudly back to Sydney Street. Graham asked incredulously what I wanted it for. First lesson: collecting books might be something of an indulgence, but it should have a purpose. Furthermore, it should not be based on ignorance.

Then, from the beginning of 1948 until the end of 1961, I worked for Graham, first as head of the reference section and then as head of the order section of the National Library Service, which had come into being when the Library School and the National Library Centre were added to the Country Library Service. During that period I came to know him very well, though my inclinations led me into different bibliographical paths, and the same sort of closeness, warm but from rather different viewpoints, continued until his death. I suppose, therefore, that I am qualified to write an appreciation of him, although there are whole areas of his amazingly busy life that I do not know much about - certainly not enough to pass the scrutiny of the standards that he would have applied to anyone who presumed to air his knowledge.

I have always thought that Graham's two great achievements were first (of course), the retrospective national bibliography, and second, the development of the National Library Centre as the core of what was to become the National Library. The Alexander Turnbull was of course his home, which he returned to in 1966. He would have been a distinguished long-term Turnbull Librarian, but I wonder whether his energy could have been contained there over a long period. Certainly, his creativeness would have found outlets, but in the National Library Service it was applied at precisely the right time to initiate and consolidate fundamentally important changes.

There was, first of all, the question of what the National Library Centre should be. The situation in New Zealand was unique in that what might be called extension services did not grow as appendages to a national or state library. The obvious library to branch out in

this way was the General Assembly Library, but it was not interested, despite a persuasive report written by young Alister Mcintosh during his last days as a librarian. Instead, the Country Library Service was set up separately, under G.T. Alley, whose imagination and appreciation of New Zealand's library needs led him over the next few years to accept other tasks which should have been undertaken by older and more established libraries. The National Union Catalogue found a home in the Country Library Service, and the central organisation of an inter-library lending system, and the Book Resources Committee of the New Zealand Library Association, which was assisted by the support that Alley, as Honorary Secretary to the Association and as leader of the Government's most lively library service, was able to give it.

The National Library Centre was created to take charge of all these things that had added themselves to the Country Library Service, but it was not at all clear, at first, where it fitted into the structure. This is not a matter for surprise: very often, it is only long after a development has occurred that one can understand what has happened. What is needed is someone to be in charge who instinctively makes the right decisions at the right times, and acts on them decisively. Alley was such a one, basing his actions on a very clear idea of what was needed to support New Zealand culture. Bagnall, with his bibliographical and historical inclinations, was another. They were not duplicates of each other; they did not always see eye to eye; but they appreciated each other's strengths and they worked well together.

During his time in the National Library Centre, Graham started, or took over and developed, a whole range of important bibliographical services. As Secretary of the Book Resources Committee, and as Librarian of the National Library Centre, he established, with the support of librarians from the major libraries, the solid bibliographical foundation on which the superstructure of national library co-operation was based. He was also responsible for a rationalisation of Government library procedures which irked some librarians later, but was needed at the time, and for the design and production of New Zealand printed catalogue cards. And he became increasingly involved in the administration of the National Library Service. More elusive was the influence that Graham had on the direction in which the National Library Service itself developed. I have referred to the fact that there was, at the beginning, the question of what the National Library Centre should be. Was it to be simply a bibliographical annex? Or was it (and this was a question that was not formed at that time) to become the core of a future National Library? Early in my time as head of the reference section, I found

that I had to settle the line of my responsibility. The point at issue was a minor one - whether the secretary of the National Library Service had the right to dress down a member of my staff who arrived late at work - but it seemed to me that there was an important point of principle. My contention was that, if I was to be responsible to the Librarian of the National Library Centre, such interference was not acceptable. This view prevailed, and was perhaps an essential, if not terribly important, step in the right direction.

As the functions of the Country Library Service were increasingly decentralised, the concept of a national centre, with a distinctive type of collection and distinctive aims of service, became gradually clearer. It was important, during this period, that the person in charge of the centre was one who by instinct was a denizen of a traditional national library, for that ensured that, when the National Library was established in 1966, there was a good general central organisation that could stand as high as the special collections, the Turnbull Library and the General Assembly Library. This was important, not only so that the general was not swamped by the particular, but also because there were those at the centre who understood and agreed with the values of the specialists. Towering above all of Graham's other achievements was the retrospective national bibliography. In his 'Reflections on Some Unfinished Business', 1 published in 1977, Graham wrote, after detailing all the other things he had had to do over the years,

You may well ask, if there were so many would it not have been better to have left the bibliography to someone else? I am not the one to answer this now but I will say only that the task throughout those 20 years was not merely a faithful interest to which I longed to return when elsewhere involved but also an anchor of absorbing preoccupation, even an assurance of sanity. When I first discussed the project with Geoff Alley his perceptive query was: 'Do you want to do this yourself, or do you merely want to see it done?' My debt is still to the bibliography which obligation has to be discharged in the time left as best I can.

This passage says a lot about Graham. His bibliographical and historical expertise reached the pitch where it was a source of pleasure to himself in the way that a top athlete is elated by a first-class performance. I remember once referring a manuscript to him for comment and marvelling at the skill and speed with which he hit on weak points and checked them against an astonishingly varied range of publications, all in his own collection. This was his life, as they say. The same passage also says a lot about Geoff Alley. Each of these men, so different in many ways, was the best kind of guide for a young librarian in the difficult art of administration. Each was able

to make clear what he wanted, but each was equally able to leave important decisions to a subordinate whom he trusted. Graham always said that he appeared to be good at delegating only because he was not interested in what his heads of sections were involved with, but that is not my impression of him. He certainly showed what could only be described as vehement interest whenever anything seemed to him to have gone seriously wrong. But he left plenty of room for individuality, as Geoff Alley did, too. This was a side of them that was probably most apparent to those few who benefited from it, but it was extremely valuable and, I hope, has been passed on down the line.

Graham was a very clearly defined individual, impossible to describe properly in a short note. He had an aversion to universities which was rather endearing and nineteen-thirtyish in its own way, and which was based on a very salutary contempt for what he saw as sloppy research. He was a master of the blunt statement: my predecessor at Otago had adopted the style and title of Librarian and Keeper of the Hocken Collection, and when I was going to take his place Graham said, 'lf you are going to call yourself Keeper of the Hocken Collection you had better learn something about New Zealand books' (I dropped the title, but this is quite a different story). He was also a master of the statement that reveals an ankle but conceals the rest of the leg (a specifically Public Service accomplishment, I think); and many of these were delivered in buses and in other places where you couldn't hear them properly anyway. He was a most considerate friend. And he was a person who had no pretence whatsoever. I see him clearly in a passage from his Presidential Address to the New Zealand Library Association, 2 in which he talked about the empty argument about whether librarianship was a science or an art:

Upon the essential core of general and special education must be superimposed some professional training which draws constantly upon a wide and developing range of technical skills. What gives success which can be instantly recognized when seen is an individual amalgam of personality, training and judgement which in its highest application is essentially an art. He would not have been consciously describing himself, but we can recognise him as a great artist.

II

Old men forget, and I am forced to check documents and records in order to revive uncertain memories of the past. But Graham Bagnall, only five years younger, seemed never to forget. The last time I saw him, a month or two before the end, that encyclopaedic mind was as vigorous as ever, and as always mine was left floundering behind as he spoke of persons, places and events, both recent and historical, linking past and present. Inevitably, he was not one to suffer fools gladly, and it was with trepidation that when I was asked, in 1959, to take over the chairmanship of the Historic Places Trust, I sought his advice and John Beaglehole's. Subsequently I came to depend on those two for guidance. In personality they could hardly have been more different: Graham, always so quick—even impatient —in pouncing on errors and misjudgements;J.C.B., so reflective. All the wise decisions of the Trust stemmed from one or both of them, and between them they forestalled the Trust's endorsement of inappropriate or uncertain projects. More to the point, they guided it in the search for authenticity. When in 1969 Graham invited me to accept appointment to the Special Committee for the Alexander Turnbull Library, of which Alister Mcintosh was shortly afterwards to become chairman, and until Graham's retirement in 1973, I saw him at work in a different but related field and once again there was the contrast between his quick and incisive judgements and Alister's reflective thinking aloud. As in the counselling of the Historic Places Trust, their minds and styles were exactly and most usefully complementary.

In the Turnbull Library Record of October 1972 there is an essay headed 'Part of an Address . . . given by Graham to a summer school on local history. No one tackling such a project should fail to read it, but mutatis mutandis it is both a guide and a warning to those embarking on any historical study: a warning as to the diversity of sources which any history, small or large, must take into account, and the disappointments as well as the excitements that lie ahead when seeking to track them down. And if, in such efforts, the disappointments often seem more frequent than the illuminating discoveries, fickle chance occasionally bestows her blessings. In this essay Graham records how after long searching and delays he finally acquired from Sweden the diary of a visit to New Zealand by a botanist, Sven Berggren. Thanks to this, and Graham's memory that Berggren had made reference to the Maori prophet Papahurihia, I was led to surprising information about this obscure figure. Collecting information is only the groundwork for historical writing. The skill which Graham displayed so abundantly lies in

presenting the facts and bringing the past not merely alive but into perspective. This is what he invariably achieved, and this was also relevant to our projects in the Historic Places Trust. And not only did he study the documents on which his local histories were based, but he himself knew the places as they are today. Indeed, his interest in their past developed out of awareness of the present. Apart from a common interest in New Zealand history, he and I shared the pleasure of creating gardens. But while mine grew, so to speak, out of its own impetus and environment, Graham's, on a steep hillside at Mahina Bay, has become something of a miniature of another territory that fascinated him: the North Island central plateau. With its rock terraces and podocarps grown from seed, the garden at Mahina Bay is a miniature of the Ruapehu scene.

Once again, while we both delighted in those volcanic mountains, and while I was satisfied to explore their diversity, Graham had to delve into the human history associated with them. As always, that skill in research and that knowledge of documented sources, gave rise to a work which, if finished, would have stood beside the New Zealand National Bibliography as his memorial. The first part at least, recording the early climbs, is I believe ready to be published. Now it must be.

An extended tribute by Nigel Williams was published in the Record at the time of Graham Bagnall’s retirement from the Turnbull (v. 6 no. 2, October 1973, p. 36-40), and valedictories will appear in New Zealand Libraries and the New Zealand Journal of History.

REFERENCES 1 A. G. Bagnall, 'Reflections on Some Unfinished Business; the Retrospective National Bibliography, 1946-1976', New Zealand Libraries, 40 (1977), 40-46. 2 A. G. Bagnall, 'Presidential Address; the State of the Library Art', New Zealand Libraries, 28 (1965), 21-31.