FOLIOCollections • Research • Events at the National Library of Scotland ISSUE 11 WINTER 2005

Shopping in the 1930sKilling little hats and bands that play all day

‘From Baird to Worse’A televisual History

Literature in 1925Towards a Scottish Literary Renaissance

‘The Lamp of its Own Citadel’The National Library of Scotland 1925 to 2005

Shopping in the 1930sKilling little hats and bands that play all day

‘From Baird to Worse’A televisual History

Literature in 1925Towards a Scottish Literary Renaissance

‘The Lamp of its Own Citadel’The National Library of Scotland 1925 to 2005

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IN THE YEARS before the Second WorldWar, going to the shops was wellestablished in Scotland as a pleasurableactivity, especially for those who lived in

towns. Times were difficult for shops sellingluxury goods, but there were many places togo shopping. In the cities and larger towns,department stores were enjoying theirheyday, and there were numerous multiplestores with branches nationwide such asBoots and Woolworths. For those whopreferred more traditional shops there was awide range of small specialist and generaloutlets to be enjoyed. Shopping was a safe,sociable pastime, and one that could beenjoyed all year round. For many, visiting theshops had become a way of life, whether ornot they had any specific purchases to make.Although shopping particularly appealed towomen, as the editor of the Lady’s Pictorial

Shopping in the 1930s

In 1912, the Lady’s Pictorialdescribed shopping as ‘almost’ a

national pastime. The ‘almost’ looksquaint nowadays, with shoppingestablished as a major activity ineveryone’s life. To celebrate this

fascinating slice of social history, theLibrary’s winter exhibition traces

changes in shopping habits over thecourse of a century. In this article,Olive Geddes dips into a 1930sjournal and finds out about the

Edinburgh shopping experience ofthat era.

observed, it was also attractive to men suchas Arthur Birnie, a lecturer in EconomicHistory at Edinburgh University.

Edinburgh was Arthur’s world. His diariesdetail the daily activities of a comfortable,middle-class family, living an unexceptionallife in Craigmillar Park in the 1930s. Arthurwrites, ‘I love Edinburgh, and would notchoose to be anywhere else, though [I]could always do with a little more salary.’There is much talk in his diaries of family lifewith his French wife, Yvonne, and theirdaughters, Monica and Yvonne (referred toas Yvonne II to differentiate her from hermother), and of Mrs Birnie’s tempestuousrelationship with their live-in maid, Chrissie.The family’s recreations and social activities,from bridge and badminton evenings to visitsto the cinema and St George’s West church,all feature. There are also numerousaccounts of regular expeditions to the shops.Arthur and Yvonne Birnie often wentshopping together. Joint shoppingexpeditions by men and women were not

Olive M. Geddes

Killing little hats and bands that play all day

Shopping in George Street, a 1926promotional booklet enticing shoppers toEdinburgh’s George Street.

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new. The Lady’s Pictorial commented thatmen ‘even do much of their shoppingnowadays beneath the same roofs as theirwives and sisters’. Male interest in shoppingwas due at least in part ‘to the fact that somuch attention is paid to men’s wearingapparel and that it is so very much moreattractive in this country than in France, sodainty, in fact, that even women stop beforehosiers’ windows to admire shirts, ties, socksand so on, all ensuite in the daintiest ofcolours’.

Being appropriately dressed wasimportant then as now. Yvonne wasparticularly concerned that her husband be‘well-turned out’. He needed to ‘look thepart’ in his professional life, at the kirk, andsocially. The Birnies patronised a range ofshops. Arthur bought ‘an expensive pair ofwhite trousers, a white pullover … and apair of grey gloves’ at Stark’s on SouthBridge, and went to ‘King’s on North Bridgefor a hat and tie’, but their first resort wasusually one of Edinburgh’s departmentstores.

In Edinburgh, Jenners was the place togo. It was established on Princes Street in1838, selling ‘every prevailing British andParisian fashion, in silks, shawls, fancy dresses,ribbons, lace, hosiery and every descriptionof linen drapery and haberdashery.’ Thestore prospered in spite of a disastrous firein 1892. Patrick Thomson’s on the Bridgeswas another favourite haunt and it was tothese two stores that the Birnies turned firstto augment their wardrobes. On 24February 1936 Arthur records, ‘Yvonne hasdecided I shall wear black coat and stripedtrousers on Sundays, so went to PatrickThomson’s and ordered 2 coats andwaistcoats on approbation.’

Yvonne, too, was anxious to be suitablyattired. When George IV died later that year,she ‘went out to buy mourning clothes.Eventually appeared in black velvet skirt andblack jumper’. Although husband and wifewent shopping together, there were timeswhen decisions as to purchases had to bemade alone. ‘Went shopping with her[Yvonne] to Princes Street, she trying on adress. As gentlemen are not permitted to bepresent when ladies are trying on dresses Isat in the car.’

The clothing industry had beenrevolutionised during the nineteenth century,in no small part by the introduction of thesewing machine. Singer’s factory opened inGlasgow in 1856 and sewing machines soonbecame readily available. By the 1900s, both

Advert for Greensmith Downes’ 1926Christmas offers from Shopping in GeorgeStreet.

Advert from Shopping in George Street forbutcher William Orr’s ‘Pick of theMarket’.

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ready-made and home-made clothesbecame easier to make and cheaper. Men’soutdoor clothes were among the first mass-produced garments available over thecounter. The range gradually increased, andsoon even garments traditionally made athome, such as underwear, were beingmachine produced. By the 1920s, the rangeof women’s clothing in the shops was wideenough for fashion to be considered as wellas style and price. However, buying clothesfor those going out to work was a priorityand the thrifty housewife made much of herown clothing.

Yvonne Birnie made garments both forherself and the girls, going to the shops tobuy the materials. On 5 November 1935,Arthur wrote, ‘Gave Yvonne £3 to buymaterial for a new dress.’ As a housewife,she was also expected to knit for the family.Yvonne’s knitting needles and wool camefrom specialist wool shops. Arthur writes ofa tram ride ‘down town to Smith’s, the woolshop in Frederick St., one of the busiestshops in town. Always full of women.Swarms of assistants. Yvonne chose somewool for a jumper taking something like 20minutes to select the colour, a kind of coral.’In the1930s, small shops still predominated,but the emergence during the mid-nineteenth century of department storesselling a wide range of goods hadtransformed the shopping experience.Shopkeepers now realised that their functionwas not only to supply goods, and that theycould also influence what their customersbought. People could be persuaded howthey spent their money.

From the eighteenth century, high-classretailers in particular had become skilled atenticing customers into their shops. In retailthen as today, footfall was crucial to thesuccess or failure of any shop. The first fixedshops tended to be open-fronted boothssuch as the Luckenbooths erected in the lateMiddle Ages in Edinburgh’s High Street.Those selling goods would simply lean outand ‘cry their wares’ to passers-by, in muchthe same manner as stallholders in thetraditional marketplace. With theintroduction of plate glass windows this wasno longer an option, and shopkeepers hadto find other means of persuading potentialcustomers to enter their premises.

The solution lay as much in the shopsthemselves and their staff as in the goodsfor sale. Tempting selections of sale goods,special lines and new stock were presentedin eye-catching window displays. Inside wasthe promise of more delights to come.Shops such as Jenners were elegantly laidout often with grand staircases and plushviewing galleries. Staff were polite andsmartly dressed in their uniforms. Toventure inside these shops was to enter adifferent world.

Department stores evolved from generaldraper’s stores such as Duncan McLaren’s inEdinburgh. With their large-scale operations,these shops increasingly stocked a widerange of materials and accessories for homedressmaking and other items for women’soutfits, from hats and gloves to hosiery andlace. Many also sold household goods,furniture and carpets, all at fixed prices.Department stores were usually first tointroduce new technology: cash registers,pneumatic tubes to dispatch orders andpayments, and escalators to transportcustomers were all features. Like the generaldraper’s store, their market was the cost-conscious middle-class customer anxious toconfirm her (and it usually was her) gentility. The style of retailing of the new larger storeswas also different from that of the smallhigh-class shop. Customer service was still ofgreat importance but it was less personal.Unlike more traditional stores where goodswere kept out of reach in closed drawersand boxes, everything was attractively laidout on open display with clearly markedprices. Browsing was actively encouragedand shoppers could handle goods withoutbeing challenged by overbearing staff.

To further encourage customers, prices,especially of new ranges or discounted items,were advertised in the local press, and mailorder catalogues were introduced. Just aboutanything could be obtained for the customerwith funds. Although some small shops sawdepartment stores and multiples as rivals andcomplained of unfair competition, otherswelcomed them as they brought customersinto the High Street.

Then as now, where people did theirshopping and what they bought reflectedtheir position in society. There were shopsfor rich and poor. Advertisements were a

good indicator of the target clientele. CountryLife magazine for January 1922 includes anadvert for the drapers McEwan and Co ofPerth, promoting ‘Gowns for the South andthe Riviera’ – with the implication being thattheir customers holidayed on the Riviera.This was aspirational shopping for theupwardly mobile middle classes.

Other shops aimed to sell to the lesswell to do. These shops, such as Lipton’sgrocery stores, tended to sell food andessential household goods rather thanluxuries. Their advertisements stressed thecheapness of their wares and the length oftheir opening hours rather than the qualityof the goods stocked.

How people paid for goods was also anindicator of social status. The middle classesgenerally paid in cash and the wealthyexpected credit, while the poor had littlemoney and needed credit to eke out whatthey had. ‘Cash drapery stores’ such asPatrick Thomson’s, which advertised goodsfor cash at fixed prices, were firmly aimed atthe middle classes. Co-operative stores werefor the working class. Their goods wereusually not the cheapest, but the share ofthe Society’s profits or ‘dividend’ paid to allmembers made them popular.

Arthur and Yvonne clearly enjoyed theirvisits to department stores in the 1930s.These were attractive, safe environmentswhere even a lone female shopper mightfeel comfortable. In this, department storesin Edinburgh, as elsewhere in Britain, hadfollowed the lead of Selfridges, which wasopened in London in 1909 by the Americanretailer, Harry Selfridge. His store boasted arooftop tea garden, luncheon halls and asmokers’ lounge, together with a picturegallery, hairdressing salon, library, and even apost office.

Shops were no longer places to gosimply to make purchases, but also popularmeeting places, with restaurants whereshoppers might eat, drink and relax. ArthurBirnie writes that at Patrick Thomson’s,where a small orchestra played diners’requests in the Palm Court Restaurant, he‘met Mrs Kay and her daughters at the door.Great palaver. Went and had tea.’ Thosemoving in the same social circles patronisedthe same shops and so often met friendsand acquaintances while out shopping,whether intentionally or not. This wasparticularly important for women. Just asmen had their clubs where they might go torelax, meet friends and be pampered, sowomen went to the shops. Shops hadbecome places to go, to see and be seen.

As shopping came to be seen as aleisure activity, so increasingly there was adistinction between buying everydaynecessities and consumer goods. Someconsidered shopping for fashionable itemsfor personal use indulgent, a charge often

Pattern book for Weldon’s Fair Isle Jumpers

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Note on sources

Arthur Birnie’s diaries for the years 1906–09and 1934–36 were presented to theNational Library of Scotland by his family in1994 as Acc.11018. The Library’s ManuscriptCollections include numerous diaries andjournals of men and women from theeighteenth century to the present day.Arthur Birnie’s diaries form part of theNational Library of Scotland’s winter2005–06 exhibition Sale of the Centuries: ACelebration of Shopping in Scotland. MalcolmCant’s Edinburgh Shops Past and Present(2005), an anecdotal social history illustratedwith over 200 pictures, is on sale in theNational Library shop.

levied at women. Arthur Birnie, however,appreciated his wife’s attempts to be stylish.In 1935, he wrote ‘Yvonne has bought akilling little summer hat. Only cost her 12sh6d but she has fitted a flower to it and itlooks exquisite.’ Both had an eye for abargain.

Buying presents for others was a meansof countering the charge of over-indulging inshopping. Arthur and Yvonne went toJenners together to buy a ‘wristlet watch’ forMonica on her birthday. On the same tripthey bought a box of chocolates for Chrissie,the maid. Arthur ventured into Jenners alonein early December to look at a pearlnecklace for Yvonne and order otherpresents.

While shopping for clothes and presentswas a shared pleasure, for Arthur Birnie, theacquisition of books was usually savouredalone. Books featured large in Arthur’sprofessional and personal life. His diariesrecord his various literary activities, fromtextbooks on economic history, to hisattempts at writing a novel, and reading forpleasure. The new National Library was asource of reading matter, as were Boots onPrinces Street, and an array of Edinburghbooksellers from Thin’s to the shops andstalls in Haddington Place and on George IVBridge.

Thin’s was a favourite haunt. James Thinopened his bookshop on Infirmary Street in1848, and soon became an Edinburghinstitution. Arthur Birnie spent many apleasant hour browsing among thebookshelves and was delighted by thepersonal attention given to regularcustomers.

24 August 1935. On [my] way home [I] waslooking at the books in Thin’s window, when amember of the family who is always to be seenin the front shop came out and told me my

book was selling very well. They had ordered afurther supply, had sold at least 50 copies …Was very glad to hear the news and grateful toMr Thin for his kindness in telling me.

When he wanted to borrow books, itwas to Boots on Princes Street that Arthurturned. Boots, the Chemists, began inNottingham in 1849 selling herbal remediesand expanded rapidly in the late-nineteenthcentury. Their shops were initially aimed atworking-class customers but in the mid1890s they began to target the middle classwith new stores and an extended selectionof products ranging from stationery andtoiletries to fancy goods and books. BootsBooklover’s Library was established as asubscription library in over a hundredbranches in the early 1900s. In March 1935Arthur wrote, ‘always enjoy spending anafternoon in Boots. Nothing I like betterthan rummaging the shelves of books, andthen the people who come in are alwaysinteresting.’ The Boots libraries closed in themid 1960s.

Shopping for Arthur Birnie meant buyingclothes, presents and books. There are onlyoccasional references in his diary topurchases of foodstuffs. In the days beforethe supermarket and shopping mall andrefrigeration and the domestic freezer,ushered in different ways to buy groceries,this was a daily task. ‘Going for the messages’does not seem to have been part of Arthur’sroutine. When he does mention buyinggroceries, Chrissie the maid is unwell and hiswife is away for the day. Arthur writes,‘Yvonne out. I was left in charge of thehouse. The day passed quietly. Didhousework and went out for tomatoes.’Grocery shopping was a chore, and oneArthur was happy to leave to the women ofthe house.

For the Birnies, expeditions to the larger

stores to buy clothes and presents werepleasurable shared social experiences.Middle-class women in particular knew thatwhen shopping they were likely to meetwith friends and neighbours on the sameerrand. Conversations with fellow shoppersadded to the attraction. Shopping oftenmeant very different things to men andwomen. For many women, it offered afreedom they might not otherwise be ableto enjoy. There was also a cleardifferentiation between shopping fornecessities and shopping for consumergoods. While men might participate fully incertain shopping expeditions, when andwhere they went was on their terms. As theLady’s Pictorial commented in 1912, menwere ‘very much keener on shopping thanthey allow, or, perhaps even realise’, but itwas their womenfolk who took the realresponsibility for shopping, in ensuring thehousehold was provided with everydaynecessities as well as participating in themore pleasurable experience of buyingconsumer goods.

Postcard advertising Patrick Thompson’sdepartment store on Edinburgh’s NorthBridge. The sender has written: ‘Isn’t this alovely shop – a band plays all day.’Reproduced with the kind permission ofMalcolm Cant.

electrical knowledge he had gained as astudent at Glasgow’s Royal TechnicalCollege, he found that the system respondedbetter to the rate of change of the currentfrom the photocell, than to the current itself.Baird worked on in his cramped atticlaboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho, usingthe head of a ventriloquist’s dummy as hissubject. His own memoirs, published in 2004

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‘From Baird to Worse’

ACENTURY AGO, television was nomore than a fantastic idea,foreseen by H.G. Wells in hisnovel The Sleeper Wakes. In 1908

the Scottish physicist A. Campbell Swintonsuggested that ‘distant electric vision’ couldbe achieved using cathode ray tubes, but hedid not attempt to develop his ideapractically and in 1924 he declared that itwould be so much trouble to do so that itwould hardly be worthwhile. In that sameyear, small news items began to appear inthe popular press concerning televisionexperiments, first in Hastings and then inLondon, by a young electrical engineer calledJohn Logie Baird.

The public became fully aware oftelevision in 1925. In March, Baird set updemonstrations in Selfridges departmentstore, where shoppers queued up to seemoving images traced out by a flickeringneon lamp, viewed through a large rotatingperforated disc known as the Nipkow disc.Simple shapes cut out of cardboard wereplaced in intense light in front of anotherrotating-disc apparatus with a photoelectriccell which acted as the camera. The weakelectrical signals from the photocell wereelectronically amplified and sent to the neonlamp at the receiver disc.

In May 1925 Jack Buchanan, a risingtheatrical star and an old friend of Baird fromtheir schooldays in Helensburgh, sponsoreda press luncheon at the fashionableRomano’s restaurant in the Strand, topublicise Baird’s experiments. Once again theNipkow discs were put to work and thebemused pressmen tried to write up theshow as best they could. Most of the reportswere enthusiastic, but the Daily Graphic tooka mocking tone: ‘After lunch we were shownlots of pulleys and wheels and bits ofcardboard, and told exactly how we weregoing to be able to see everything in futureby wireless.’

The images were only the size of abusiness card and they contained just 30lines of definition. Baird’s biggest problemwas the lack of any shades of grey (halftones), so that the human face appearedsimply as an oval blob of light with blackholes for the eyes and mouth. It waspossible to see when the subject wasopening and closing his mouth, but facialfeatures could not be recognised. More lightwas needed. Baird also looked for ways toincrease the amplification of the weak signalfrom the photocell. Making use of the

The first television image wasachieved by the visionary scientist

John Logie Baird in 1925, thesame year the National Library of

Scotland was founded. Eightyyears on, the Library itself has avision for increasing accessibilityto its collections using the latesttechnology. With the dividing

lines between internet, televisionand telephone disappearing,

Malcolm Baird, the greatinventor’s son, looks back at the

early days of television.

Malcolm Bairdunder the title Television and Me, capture theexcitement of the first breakthrough:

Funds were going down, the situation wasbecoming desperate and we were down toour last £30 when at last, one Friday in the firstweek of October 1925, everything functionedproperly. The image of the dummy’s headformed itself on the screen with whatappeared to me almost unbelievable clarity. Ihad got it! I could scarcely believe my eyes, andfelt myself shaking with excitement. I ran downthe little flight of stairs to Mr. Cross’s office andseized by the arm his office boy WilliamTaynton, hauled him upstairs and put him infront of the transmitter. I then went to thereceiver only to find the screen a blank.William did not like the lights and the whirringdiscs and had withdrawn out of range. I gavehim 2/6 [12.5p] and pushed his head intoposition. This time he came through and onthe screen I saw the flickering, but clearlyrecognisable, image of William’s face – the firstface seen by television – and he had to bebribed with 2/6 for the privilege of achievingthis distinction.

Until this time, news about Baird’sresearch had mainly taken the form of littlepieces in the popular press through which hehoped to attract investors to his company,Television Limited. Few technical details hadbeen given and the scientific establishmentremained dubious, as Baird had no academicor corporate connections and his degreefrom the Royal Technical College lacked thecachet of Oxbridge or the London colleges.Baird and his associate Oliver Hutchinson,realising the need for respectability andcredibility, decided that the first publicdemonstration of television should be givento invited members of the Royal Institutionand reported only in The Times. On theevening of 26 January 1926, a gathering ofdistinguished scientists, some in eveningattire, waited on the narrow staircase in FrithStreet for their turn to be ushered intoBaird’s laboratory. The visitors were admitted a few at a time. They first saw theimage of the ventriloquist’s dummy (namedby Baird as Stooky Bill) and then took turnsto be ‘televised’ in the intense floodlighting.Baird takes up the story with a typical touchof humour:

In one room was a large whirling disc, a mostdangerous device, had they known it, liable toburst at any minute with showers of brokenglass … One of the visitors who was being

A Televisual History

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Contemporary leafletexplaining how theBaird ‘Televisor’works.

John Logie Baird with hisapparatus at 21 LintonCrescent, Hastings, January1924 (photo courtesy of theRoyal Television Society).

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transmitted had a long white beard, part ofwhich blew into the wheel. Fortunately heescaped with the loss of a certain amount ofhair. He was a thorough sportsman and tookthe accident in good part, and insisted oncontinuing the experiment and having his facetransmitted.

The scientific visitors were favourablyimpressed and a report of the demonstrat-ion appeared in The Times of 28 January.Baird’s achievement acted as a spur totelevision research by others, in particular inAmerica. In April 1927, the AmericanTelephone and Telegraph Company senttelevision over the telephone lines betweenWashington and New York, with HerbertHoover (soon to be president) appearingbefore the camera. AT&T used a version ofBaird’s system in which the images werescanned mechanically by a rotatingperforated disc. Baird was shaken by the lossof his monopoly of television, but he pressedon with public demonstrations; he senttelevision by phone line from London toGlasgow in May 1927, and then in February1928 he sent television by short wave radiofrom London to New York. The New YorkTimes compared this achievement to that ofMarconi in sending the Morse code letter ‘S’across the Atlantic by radio, twenty-six yearsearlier.

In 1930 a new company called BairdTelevision Ltd. was formed from earlier Bairdcompanies. Although it had fewer than fortystaff, it moved ahead in many directionsincluding the showing of large-screen

iconoscope or the image dissector was ableto produce recognisable pictures. Progress inthe USA was slowed by a bitter patentdispute between Farnsworth and RCA whichwas not fully resolved until 1939.

In Britain, the leading record companyElectrical and Musical Industries (EMI)decided to become involved in television.They soon combined with the MarconiWireless Telegraph Company to form a jointsubsidiary Marconi-EMI Television Ltd. withthe sole objective of developing electronictelevision. The new company had access toRCA’s television patents, and it emerged as amajor competitor with Baird Television.

In 1932 the control of Baird Televisionpassed to the Gaumont British PictureCorporation. A year later, Baird waspersonally deprived of executive power,although he retained the title of ManagingDirector for publicity purposes. On thepositive side, Gaumont British had greatfinancial resources, enabling the company toincrease its research effort and extend itsscope from mechanical television to othermethods, in particular the use of cathode raytubes. Baird Television Ltd. was part ownerof a German company, Fernseh AG, whichhad developed the so-called ‘intermediatefilm’ technique, whereby a scene was filmedand then the film was developed within aminute or so and scanned to provide atelevision signal. The Baird company alsoentered into an arrangement with PhiloFarnsworth, but his image dissector cameraproved to be rather insensitive.

Much has been written about the

television to capacity audiences at theLondon Palladium (1930) and the televisingof the finish of the Derby (1931 and 1932).In 1929 the BBC had been persuaded, withconsiderable reluctance, to startexperimental television broadcasting. Thisenabled Baird Television to market theTelevisor, the world’s first mass-producedtelevision set. The scheduled televisionprogrammes were broadcast over regularBBC medium wavelengths late at night, afterradio had closed down. Because of thelimitations of the permitted bandwidth onthe medium wave, pictures could only besent on the original 30-line standard, evenafter the Baird company had developedhigher definition pictures of 120 lines. Thismeant that the broadcast programmes wereusually restricted to one person at a timebefore the camera, for example in talks,recitations or solo musical performances.

By the early 1930s electronic televisiontechniques, as first envisaged by CampbellSwinton, were moving towards practicality. In1923, Vladimir Zworykin in the United Stateshad patented an electronic camera whichbecame known as the iconoscope. Althoughthe early iconoscopes did not produceanything resembling a picture, the RadioCorporation of America (RCA) threw itsimmense resources behind Zworykin.Another American, Philo Farnsworth,developed a type of electronic cameraknown as the image dissector. The first testof this device, in September 1927, simplyshowed a moving blob of light. It tookseveral more years before either the

John Logie Baird with hisapparatus at the ScienceMuseum (photo courtesy ofthe Royal Televison Society).

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Note on sourcesJohn Logie Baird’s ‘presence’ at the Libraryis mainly in the shapes of books, magazines,year books and technical material, somecontemporary, some retrospective. Two ofthe most recent publications relating toBaird are John Logie Baird: A Life byAnthony Kamm and Malcolm Baird, NMSPublishing, 2002 (GEB-1.2003.4.2), andTelevision and Me: The Memoirs of JohnLogie Baird edited by Malcolm Baird,Mercat Publishing, 2004 (HP2.204.2706)Journals such as Television (Y.116) give asense of the excitement generated by thenew technology.

technical competition in 1936between Baird Television andMarconi-EMI, with the twocompanies transmitting ‘highdefinition’ television to BBC viewerson alternate evenings. The Marconi-EMI electronic technology, based onthe RCA system and providing a405-line picture, had the edge overBaird’s 240-line pictures. Baird usedthree different systems all of whichwere on somewhat of a trial basis.These were mechanical scanning,the intermediate film system, andthe Farnsworth electronic camera.In early 1937 the decision wasmade that the BBC would adoptthe Marconi-EMI technology.Nevertheless, Baird Television Ltd.stayed in business as a manufacturerof receivers and, through GaumontBritish, started to provide large-screen television in cinemas,including an experimental show incolour.

Although only a few thousandhouseholds could afford the setsand the reception was limited to a 50-mileradius of London, the future for televisionlooked good. But in September 1939 theBBC abruptly closed down its televisionservice in the interests of national security,the market for sets vanished and BairdTelevision went into receivership soonafterwards. Baird decided to continue hisresearch using his own savings. Betweenthen and 1944 he produced results which,but for the war, would have had animmediate effect on the industry. Theseincluded high definition colour television withan all-electronic receiving tube known as theTelechrome, the first of its kind in the world.He also developed high definitionstereoscopic television. Baird had neverenjoyed good health and in early 1946 hebecame seriously ill. He died in June of thatyear at the age of fifty-seven. His memorylives on and there have been five majorbiographies, including most recently JohnLogie Baird: A Life by Antony Kamm andmyself. We are grateful to the NationalLibrary of Scotland for their help in theresearch for this book.

Much has changed since the time of JohnLogie Baird. Picture definition was increasedfrom 405 to 625 lines in 1964 and colourwas introduced in Britain in 1967, severalyears after its appearance in the USA. Othertechnical advances have included thereplacement of valves by solid state devices,the introduction of satellite and cable, andthe proliferation of available channels. Today,television is in 99 per cent of householdsand the real cost of a set is a few days’average earnings as opposed to severalmonths’ earnings in the 1930s.

As recently as the 1960s, thousands ofBritish workers were employed in the designand mass production of television sets. Atthe professional level, the Television Society,formed in 1928 with Baird as its firsthonorary fellow, consisted of scientists andengineers with a smattering of journalists.This all changed when television setproduction ceased in the westernhemisphere. The last major British factory toclose (1978) was the Baird cathode ray tubeplant in Bradford, operated by Radio RentalsLtd. which used the Baird name for its brandof television sets. In the past thirty years, theterm ‘television industry’ has come to referto programming and distribution rather thanthe manufacture of equipment. The changehas been faithfully reflected by the RoyalTelevision Society (it gained royal status in1966) which now caters for televisionmanagers and executives who are concernedwith ratings, regulatory politics and finance.

Although science and engineering havemoved away from centre stage in televisionpublicity, the technology continues itsinexorable advance. The small 30-linemonochrome picture of 1925 is nowreplaced by a 1,000-line colour picture on a1.07m (42-inch) screen that can be hung ona wall, taking up far less space than acathode ray tube set. Stereophonic sound isavailable. Stereoscopic television has yet toreach the consumer, although it is beingused in industrial and medical applications.

Programme quality has not improved to thesame extent as technology. The averageprogramme is seen once by a large butuncritical audience, just as a tabloidnewspaper is glanced through once before itis discarded. Although there are a fewnuggets among the dross, there is a longhistory of dissatisfaction with the content oftelevision. In a historic interview in 1967,Malcolm Muggeridge asked the BBC’s firstDirector General, Lord Reith, what hethought of the medium; he replied that itwas ‘potential social menace of the firstmagnitude’. In the United States at about thistime, the television pioneer Philo Farnsworthangrily refused to have a set in his house.The humourist Frank Muir, in a letter to TheTimes in January 1976, asked slyly whethertelevision had gone from Baird to worse. Mymother, shortly before her death in 1996,was asked by a journalist for her opinion ofmodern television programmes. She wasusually plain-spoken, but on this occasion shedamned with faint praise: ‘Well, I supposetelevision must be a good thing as itprovides employment for so many people.’The pace of change has accelerated inrecent years because of channel proliferationand audience fragmentation; even the BBC,formerly a rather complacent organisation,has been affected by the general mood ofuncertainty. The growth of the internet hasreduced the average weekly viewing hoursper person and this is particularly true forthe more educated and affluent sectors ofthe population. Video piracy is becoming aserious issue. The Royal Television Society’sbrochure for its convention at Cambridge inSeptember 2005 describes television as agroup of ‘burning platforms’, which is thenew management jargon for problemsrequiring urgent action. As the industrystruggles to adapt to change, the technicalpeople in the background continue to comeup with new devices which are keeping theadministrators off balance. The next eightyyears of television promise to be as eventfulas the first eighty.

Seeing by Wireless: The Story of Baird TelevIsion byRay Herbert. The images to the bottom right werephotographed from the screen of a Televisor in1928.

The Scottish Literary Renaissancewas initially inspired and led byHugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve).He had returned from war service

in Macedonia ambitious to become a poetof significance; and ambitious also to instigatea revival in Scottish writing which wouldthrow off North British associations andrecover a distinctive literary identity drawingon revitalised traditions and European andother contemporary influences. His firstventure consisted of the three NorthernNumbers anthologies published between1920 and 1922: collections of contemporaryScottish poetry modelled on the successfulEnglish Georgian poetry anthologies editedby Edward Marsh. These were followed inAugust 1922 by The Scottish Chapbook, thefirst of several magazines to be edited byMacDiarmid. It was in a series of editorials or‘Causeries’ in the Chapbook betweenFebruary and April 1923 that he debated thefeasibility of Scots as a modern literarylanguage (having earlier appeared in theOctober 1922 issue as the new poet ‘HughM’Diarmid’ with the Scots-language ‘TheWatergaw’). His avant-garde conclusion in his editorials was that ‘the ScotsVernacular is a vast storehouse of just thevery peculiar and subtle effects whichmodern European literature in general isassiduously seeking… It is an inchoateMarcel Proust – a Dostoevskian debris ofideas – an inexhaustible quarry of subtle andsignificant sound.’ Sangschaw (1925), acollection of modernist lyrics in literary Scots,was the first significant outcome of thisdebate and experimentation, to be followedin 1926 by Penny Wheep and the longmodernist dramatic monologue A Drunk ManLooks at the Thistle.

Of course, not everyone agreed withMacDiarmid’s emphasis on Scots as thelanguage of a literary revival; nor with hisdistinctive, modernistic literary re-creation ofthe language. What is important, however –apart from the achievement of MacDiarmid’sown poetry – is the new interest the debate aroused in historical tradition andcontemporary possibilities. John Buchan’shistorical collection The Northern Muse isrepresentative of this. Unlike MacDiarmid,Buchan seemed uncertain of the continuingliterary potential of Scots, but he wasanxious that contemporary readers shouldremain aware of the old tongue and be ableto read the poetry and other literature it hadinspired. A review of Buchan’s anthology in

F O L I O10

Literature in 1925

Margery Palmer McCulloch

1925 was a significant year forliterature in Scotland. It saw the

publication of HughMacDiarmid’s first collection ofScots-language lyrics, Sangschaw,

John Buchan’s historicalanthology of Scottish poetry,

The Northern Muse, Edwin Muir’sFirst Poems and Willa Muir’sextended essay Women: An

Inquiry. In their different ways, allwere representative of the

revival in Scottish writing whichbegan principally in the yearsafter the end of World War Iand continued throughout the

interwar period.

Towards a Scottish Literary Renaissance

the Burns Chronicle of 1925 suggests not onlythat his concerns had struck a popular notebut also that the ambitious contemporaryrevival inspired by MacDiarmid was winningsupporters in the wider community. For theBurns Chronicle reviewer:

This book comes opportunely on the eve ofthe promised Scottish Renaissance, for theproper understanding of which it will be a greathelp to the general reader who has not made aspecial study of Scottish literature, and whoselibrary of Scottish vernacular poetry isconsequently limited… Hence, in the 533pages of the book more than a superficialacquaintance is made with the works ofDunbar, Montgomerie, James I, Henryson, SirDavid Lyndsay, Barbour, Blind Harry, Sempill ofBeltrees, Gavin Douglas, and some of theanonymous Makars who have done so muchfor the Scottish lyric.

Other happenings in 1925 suggest howquickly this idea of a literary renaissance tookhold among those interested in education

C.M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) pictured on hisseventieth birthday. Photograph: Gordon Wright.

F O L I O 11

and the arts. MacDiarmid himself had brieflyused the phrase ‘a Scottish Renascence’ inthe first Scottish Chapbook of August 1922when writing of the earlier Belgian literaryrevival and its magazine, Jeune Belgique: ‘thenext decade or two will see a ScottishRenascence as swift and irresistible as wasthe Belgian Revival between 1880 and 1910.’The phrase was taken up more prominentlythe next year by the French writer and criticDenis Saurat who contributed an article on‘Le Groupe de “la Renaissance Écossais”’ tothe Revue Anglo-Americaine in April 1924. In1925, both Thomas Henderson, editor ofthe Scottish Educational Journal, and EdwinMuir, writing in the Saturday Review ofLiterature, used the phrase in the title of theirarticles on the new Scottish literature, andthis terminology continued to be usedthroughout the interwar period innewspaper articles and literary and culturaljournals both within and without Scotland asinterest in the new movement spread. Thisinterest was probably helped by the ScottishEducational Journal’s commissioning ofMacDiarmid in 1925 to write a series ofarticles on Scottish literary and other artisticfigures – a series which caused greatcontroversy in the Journal’s pages and whichwas published as Contemporary ScottishStudies in 1926.

There was interaction also with other artforms. In his 1925 article in the SaturdayReview of Literature, Edwin Muir drewattention to the work of composer F.G.Scott and his modernist settings ofMacDiarmid’s lyrics. MacDiarmid himselfwrote in the Scottish Educational Journal inNovember 1925 about the Scottish visualartists William McCance and his wife AgnesMiller Parker who were supporters of thenew movement but had been forced tomove south to England for work because ofthe absence of opportunities in the visualarts in Scotland. When looking for an imagefor the cover of my recent book of primarysource documents for the ScottishRenaissance, I was excited to come uponWilliam McCance’s linocut ‘The Engineer, hisWife and their Family’, held by the HunterianGallery in Glasgow University. Its modernistEuropean influences and the resonances ofGlasgow’s engineering past in its machine-likeforms and title, parallel the interaction ofnew influences and past traditions Irecognised in the literary movement also.Interestingly, this image too belongs to 1925,although I did not realise when I chose itthat it would have a future significance in thisarticle!

Another major poet of the revival periodwas Edwin Muir, whose First Poems waspublished in 1925 by Virginia and LeonardWoolf at the Hogarth Press. In the early1920s, Muir was celebrated as a critic ratherthan poet, with MacDiarmid describing him

in the Scottish Educational Journal ofSeptember 1925 as ‘incontestably in the firstflight of contemporary critics of welt-literatur’. Muir had come to prominence as awriter with the London New Age periodicalunder the editorship of A.R. Orage. Thesuccess of his first book We Moderns (1918),written under the pseudonym of ‘EdwardMoore’, and developed from a previousseries of articles in the New Age, resulted ina contract with the American Freemanmagazine which allowed him and his wifeWilla to travel in Europe. There theyachieved the competence in German whichenabled them to earn their living until thelate 1930s as translators of Germanliterature, including the fiction of Franz Kafkaand Herman Broch.

Muir was always ambivalent about Scotsas a revived language for poetry, although hewrote perceptively not only about earlyScots poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, but also about the modernistMacDiarmid. As a result of recent criticalemphasis on Muir’s Scott and Scotland quarrelwith MacDiarmid over the use of English asthe future language of ambitious Scottishpoetry, it is often forgotten that in the 1920sand early 1930s Muir was probably the mostsignificant published interpreter ofMacDiarmid’s new poetry. He wrote in his‘Scottish Renaissance’ article of 1925, forexample, that in the poem ‘Country Life’there is

an almost fantastic economy, a crazy economywhich has the effect of humor [sic], and yetconveys a kind of horror, which makes thispoem so original and so truly Scottish… This

vision is profoundly alien to the spirit of Englishpoetry; the thing which resembles it most,outside other Scottish poetry, is perhaps thepoetry of Villon. It is the product of a realistic,or more exactly a materialistic, imagination,which seizing upon everyday reality shows notthe strange beauty which that sometimes takeson, but rather the beauty which it possessesnormally and in use.

In a later article, ‘Literature in Scotland’, inthe Spectator of May 1934, Muir commented:

The real originality of ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ isthat he employs Scots as any other poet mightemploy English or French: that is, to expressanything which a modern writer may have tosay. This has not been done in Scotland sinceshe ceased to be a nation, since about twocenturies, that is to say, before Burns.

Although the use of Scots as thelanguage of poetry was not for Muir himselfthe way forward (as an Orkneyman hedescribed Scotland as his ‘second country’ ina Listener article in 1958), the abovequotations show that he understood boththe formal and cultural aims and achieve-ment of MacDiarmid’s early poetry. In 1925,his own poems were more tentative andeclectic, searching for ways to overcome thesense of discontinuity he felt with his Orkneychildhood and recover a more stable senseof self. Muir’s best poetry came in the 1940sand 1950s, after many years ofapprenticeship and achievement as critic,novelist and autobiographer as well as poet.

Willa Muir’s Women: An Inquiry wasanother significant publication of the year1925. The Scottish Renaissance movementhas been criticised as a male-dominatedmovement which – like the modernistperiod in art and culture generally –marginalised the achievements of women. Itis certainly true that the dominant publicfigures in Scottish as in European modernismwere male, with women often operating onthe periphery as writers, or being involvedmore as supporters and enablers. Willa Muirherself suffered from being consideredmainly as the wife of Edwin, as opposed tothe highly educated writer and translator sheknew herself to be. She wrote in her journalat a particularly low time in her life in 1953:

I am a better translator than he is. The wholecurrent of patriarchal society is set against thisfact, however and sweeps it into oblivion,simply because I did not insist on shoutingaloud: ‘Most of this translation, especially Kafka,has been done by ME. Edwin only helped.’ Andevery time Edwin was referred to as THEtranslator, I was too proud to say anything; andEdwin himself felt it would be undignified tospeak up, I suppose… And I am ashamed ofthe fact that I feel it as a grievance. It shouldn’tbother me. Reputation is a passing value, after

Lines Review No. 4, January 1954, contains part 1 ofan article by Hugh MacDiarmid on the ScottishRenaissance. The Library has a complete run ofLines Review 1952–99.

particular. The same is true of anumber of women writers of the1920s and 1930s who, withhindsight, are now seen as havingcontributed important femaleperspectives to the literature andsociety of that time. Although inmost cases I have not been able tonominate publications specificallyrelated to the year 1925, thesewriters include Catherine Carswell,whose two novels Open the Door!(1920) and The Camomile (1922)began a female ‘renaissance’ beforethe literary revival of MacDiarmidand his associates was securelylaunched. Nan Shepherd’s TheQuarry Wood of 1928 anticipatedLewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Songof 1932 in its rich north-eastScottish register and story of acountry girl torn between her loveof learning and her love of the land.Nancy Brysson Morrison’s The GowkStorm (1930) tells the story ofunfulfilled female lives in a remoterural manse on the edge of theHighlands, but it also, implicitly, involves itselfin the contemporary debates about religionand Scots language and the need for renewalin insular country communities. Dot Allanbrings a woman’s perspective to urbansettings and topics in novels such as HungerMarch (1934) and Makeshift (1928). As inAllan’s Makeshift and Carswell’s TheCamomile, fictional scenarios by women inthis period often involved the ambition to bea writer, which returns us to the question offemale creativity and how this should/couldbe manifested, which Willa Muir explored inher 1925 essay.

In the 1920s, the focus of the nationalrevival debate in Scotland was predominantlyliterary. In the 1930s, on the other hand, aseconomic conditions in Scotland worsenedand the political climate in Europe darkened,‘the condition of Scotland’ and politicaldebate of various kinds – national andinternational – increasingly moved to centrestage. What makes the interwar Renaissancemovement so distinctive as a culturalmovement is that its writers were equallyinvolved in the debates about social,economic and political conditions in Scotlandand Europe as they were in the debatesabout Scotland’s literary culture. For thesewriters, cultural renewal had to proceedhand in hand with a wider national renewal;and nationalism (in its varying degrees) andinternationalism were two sides of the onecoin, not opposing positions. Although theoutbreak of World War II brought an abruptend to the interwar phase of this renewalmovement, and although the changedpolitical and social climate of the immediatepost-war years could not accommodate a

all. […] And yet, and yet, I want to beacknowledged.

Willa’s ‘grievance’ and the problem offemale public invisibility generally at that timehad probably more to do with social moresin relation to gender roles than with anydeliberate attempt to marginalise women by their male counterparts. Willa’s con-temporary Catherine Carswell, whose publicprofile in the 1930s was strengthened as aresult of her Life of Robert Burns, wrote inher unfinished autobiography about ‘theirritability of diffidence’ – something whichsuggests an inner insecurity with regard toher public role despite her confidentexterior. On the other hand, the interwarperiod was a time of expansion for women,and for women writers in particular, andWilla Muir’s 1925 enquiry into the creativityand role of women in society was symbolicof the new thinking and changing oppor-tunities of the time. However, while heressay focused on the importance ofregarding female and male roles as equal andcomplementary, although different in nature,this was not her experience in her everydaylife. She began her first novel ImaginedCorners in 1926 while in St Tropez andMenton with a translation commission. As aresult of pregnancy, a difficult childbirth andits aftermath, new mothering responsibilitiesand the pressures of translation deadlines, itwas not until 1931 that the book wascompleted and published. Edwin, meanwhile,published six books in addition to their jointtranslations in the same period.

Despite her difficulties, Willa Muir in theend made an important contribution totwentieth-century Scottish writing and to ourunderstanding of the interwar period in

F O L I O12

Note on sources

Margery Palmer McCulloch’s Modernism andNationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland1919–1939 (Q3.205.0015) provides anexcellent selection of primary sources,illuminating the Scottish Literary Renaissancethrough the voices of those who generatedit. As well as the printed publications – manyrare and ephemeral – of Hugh MacDiarmid,Neil Gunn, Edwin and Willa Muir etc., theLibrary’s Manuscripts Division has extensivecollections of relevant correspondence andpapers. Full details are easily found on theLibrary’s website www.nls.uk.

return to the cultural debates of the interwarperiod, this ambitious attempt to create anindigenous, distinctive modern Scottishliterature had laid the foundations for theconfident literary culture we have today.Constituted in 1925, the National Library ofScotland, with its rich resources of Scottishbooks, periodicals and manuscript material,enables contemporary readers to understandthis story – and other stories – of Scotland’spast and so participate in the continuingdevelopment of a distinctive, modern futureout of an awareness of the past. Suchunderstanding and participation is what theScottish Renaissance novelist Neil M. Gunndescribed in the essay ‘Highland Games’ as‘growing and blossoming from our ownroots’.

Edwin Muir by P.H. Butter was published in Oliverand Boyd’s ‘Writers and Critics’ series, 1962.

Margery Palmer McCulloch’s Modernism andNationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland1919–1939. the cover illustration is ‘The Engineer,His Wife and His Family’ by William McCance.

F O L I O 1413

by specific events, but deeper examinationreveals that progress comes only after mucheffort. So it was with the founding of theNational Library of Scotland. The notion ofthe Advocates’ Library as a national libraryde facto was in circulation for almost acentury before 1925. In 1842, the Facultyitself declared that the Library ‘from itsimportant contents – and liberalcommunication to others – may justly bedeemed a National Library’. In 1863, thepublisher, William Chambers, later LordProvost, presented a paper at the SocialScience Congress in Edinburgh, in which hecandidly expressed his aim as ‘thetransforming of the Library of the Faculty ofAdvocates into a national institution’. Thearguments about how this was to be realizedrumbled on for the next half century. TheFaculty wished to uphold its legitimate pridein its Library and its ‘reputation throughoutEurope as a learned society’, but it also hadto face the realities of running an institutionof such national importance on a virtualshoestring.

A proposal by Gladstone, Chancellor ofthe Exchequer, in 1854 to take over ‘thewhole of the Library for public use’ was notpursued. By 1922, this idea had again gainedgeneral, if not universal, acceptance in the

Faculty. It was taken up on the eve of theFirst World War through the FacultyCommittee, under the active Convenershipof Hugh P. Macmillan. With war intervening,it was not until 1918 that the Faculty by a

DRIVEN BY THE VISION of Sir GeorgeMackenzie, King’s Advocate, theLibrary first appears in theAdvocates’ Minute Book of 28

July 1680 in a reference to a ‘Fonde for aneBibliothecq’. By the time of its officialinauguration in 1689, the scope of theoriginal library had already begun to broadenfrom a source for law books to a ‘generallibrary for gentlemen’. Mackenzie hadstressed that its content should consist onlyof books closely allied to jurisprudence, butby 1695 the Minute Book records that ‘theprofession of the Laws carys necessarly withit all the Belles Letres and the knowledge ofancient and modern History’. Thefoundations of the Advocates’ Library as abroad scholarly library were set.

In the early years the Faculty made themost of its limited purchasing funds butrelied heavily on gifts from Faculty members.In 1710 legal deposit, which permitted claimof every book registered at Stationers’ Hall,was granted to the Library, along with eightothers including the Ancient Universities ofSt Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh andAberdeen. From the beginning theAdvocates’ Library claimed extensively,thereby setting the foundations of thecollecting policies followed by its successor.Foreign books were also acquired, but it wasduring David Hume’s Keepership that asystematic policy of purchasing works ofWest European scholarship, particularlythose of France, was established. Theeighteenth century was the Library’s ‘goldenage’ as one of the great intellectual centresof Scotland, but the nineteenth centurybrought a new range of pressures.

The insatiable demand for print led to anenormous expansion in the numbers ofbooks published, and legal deposit became a‘burdensome blessing’ as accommodationbecame vexatious. Running the Libraryconsumed an increasing proportion ofFaculty funds; and the generous public accessintended for serious scholars began to raiseconcern as the Library turned into a generalmeeting place for Faculty business andtourists dropped in to see round. In 1859the Library Keeper, Samuel Halkett, reportedexasperatedly that ‘the Library premises areso laid out that strangers, when onceadmitted, can hardly be prevented by ourweak staff of attendants from roaming at willover the building’. As the century wore on, itbecame apparent that this situation couldnot continue indefinitely.

In retrospect, history seems dominated

‘The Lamp of its Own Citadel’The National Library of Scotland 1925 to 2005

Ann Matheson

To mark the eightiethanniversary of the foundation ofthe National Library of Scotland,Ann Matheson traces its genesisthrough the centuries. Scotlandhas good reason to be gratefulto the Faculty of Advocates forthe custodianship of its private

library over more than twocenturies until by agreement, in

1925, the non-legal collections ofthe Advocates’ Library were

transferred to create theNational Library of Scotland. To

appreciate the latter, it isnecessary to understand these

deep-rooted origins.

1925 newspaper article from the Edinburgh EveningNews, in which William Graham MP discusses‘What the Future Holds’ for the newly constitutedScotttish National Library.

F O L I O14

majority accepted a proposal for a revivedLibrary Committee with a remit to conferwith Government about the institution of aNational Library of Scotland. The MacmillanCommittee then set about pressinggovernment for funding, backed up byappeals to private benefactors. It would havebeen easy for the Faculty to buy its way outof trouble by selling Library treasures, acourse of action that had supporters, but it isto its credit that this solution was irrevocablyset aside in favour of a wider view of thenational interest.

After protracted government negotia-tions, the path to Scotland’s National Librarywas eventually smoothed by the quietintervention of Mr Alexander Grant, anenterprising businessman from Forres, whosemunificence in contributing £100,000 as apermanent endowment nobly con-cludedthe matter. At their first meeting in 1923,Grant confided to Macmillan that he ‘hadalways … had a great admiration forlearning, but in his own life he had littleopportunity or leisure for the enjoyment ofbooks. Here … was the chance to dosomething practical to help others to enjoythe advantages which he himself had missed’.When his banker arrived with the cheque,the amount had been left blank forMacmillan to complete. He wrote £100,000,the sum that Grant had casually mentionedin conversation, and was informed that MrGrant required no receipt. These two menimplicitly trusted each another in theircommon cause. National achievements ofteninvolve many hands: but in the founding ofthe National Library of Scotland thetriumvirate of Sir Alexander Grant, LordMacmillan and Sir John Lamb of the ScottishOffice stands supreme. With the lastimpediment removed, the National Libraryof Scotland Act 1925 received Royal Assenton 7 August 1925, and its new Board ofTrustees, chaired by Sir Herbert Maxwell,met in Parliament House for the first timeon 26 October 1925.

By the 1925 Act, the non-legalcollections (c.750,000 books, and a collectionof manuscripts) passed to the nation, whilethe Faculty retained the law books,manuscripts, Faculty Records, and legaldeposit for law books. Borrowing rights forAdvocates exercised the minds of theFaculty and the Scottish Office; and acompromise that bestowed lifetimeborrowing rights on Advocates in Faculty in1925 was eventually agreed upon. Facultymembers continued actively to use theborrowing privilege. The last member toexercise this right was the late LordCameron for whom ‘M’ books, the ‘pick’ ofnewly received legal deposit books, wereregularly set aside and sent through to theAdvocates’ Library, until shortly before hisdeath. His son, Lord Cameron of

Lochbroom, has told me of his childhoodmemories of his father bringing books homeand how useful they were to him as a youngboy at his studies.

Over the eighty years from 1925 theNational Library has presided over a majorexpansion of its collections and publicservices. With numerous successes andsome shortcomings, it has gradually taken itsplace as one of the national libraries of thesmaller northern European countries,developing strong national, UK, Europeanand international links. In the post-1925period, the Library’s buildings – the 1956building on George IV Bridge and theCausewayside building, completed in two

phases in 1989 and 1995 – provided pivotalpoints for expansion. The responsibilities ofnational libraries began to be defined inprofessional library writing from the 1960s,and the Library was quick to adhere tonational and international guidelines.Improved funding encouraged new collectingpolicies, for example, the manuscripts ofmodern Scottish writers from the late 1960s.Where there were gaps in collections, stepswere taken to fill them. The Advocates’Library had failed to claim Scotland’s localnewspapers in the nineteenth century, thusdepriving the country of an invaluableresearch source. By the 1950scomprehensive claiming of the country’scurrent local newspapers had been achieved,and a systematic policy of filling gaps in thenineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryholdings by acquiring microfilm copies wasestablished in the 1970s, and has beencontinued by the work of the recentNewsplan 2000 Project, which was fundedby the Heritage Lottery Fund and the UKregional newspaper industry. Collectingpolicies began to be formalised, althoughretaining an essential touch of serendipity.

The landmark British Library Act of 1972reshaped national library services in the UK,but retained the distinctive traditions ofScotland and Wales in their separatenational libraries. Curatorial expertise forspecial collections (e.g. maps, music,manuscripts and rare books) was expandedin the 1970s, and a more structuredapproach to collection management andpreservation was introduced in the 1980s.Surveys to identify the needs of the Library’sreaders were introduced, and the resultshelped to guide future policies. In 1986, forexample, a survey to establish where thecollections were failing readers showed adissatisfaction rate of less than one per centover thirty-six weeks, but notably most ofthese items were nineteenth-century Britishlocal publications which, although of littleinterest at the time, were actively sought acentury later. Above all, the advent ofcomputers introduced unparalleledopportunities to make the Library’scollections available remotely, initiallythrough online catalogues and more recentlythrough digital texts.

The collecting policies of the NationalLibrary largely followed those established byits predecessor. The difference was in scopeand scale. The Library continued to drawgenerously on legal deposit to secureScottish publications and those of the rest ofthe United Kingdom in supporting researchin its widest definition. By the end of thecentury over 250,000 books and journalswere received annually. A voluntary schemeset up in the 1990s between the legaldeposit libraries and publishers for thedeposit of some electronic publications

The Gutenberg Bible is one of the Library’sgreatest treasures. This illustration shows the firstpage of volume two. The illuminations were doneby hand, probably in Erfurt (Germany).

F O L I O 15

Note on sources

The most detailed account of the historyof the Advocates’ Library and the NationalLibrary of Scotland up to 1989 can befound in the series of essays published tomark the 300th anniversary: For theEncouragement of Learning: Scotland’sNational Library 1689–1989, Patrick Cadelland Ann Matheson (eds). Edinburgh:HMSO, 1989. In the same year RogerCraik and John St Clair published TheAdvocates’ Library: 300 years of a NationalInstitution, 1689–1989, Edinburgh, HMSO,1989. A detailed study of the Library’searly buildings can be found in Iain GordonBrown’s Building for Books: The ArchitecturalEvolution of the Advocates’ Library,1689–1925, Aberdeen, AberdeenUniversity Press, 1989. The Records of theFaculty of Advocates (Faculty Records)provide very detailed information for theearly period. Lord Macmillan deals with theevents surrounding the 1925 transfer in hismemoirs: A Man of Law’s Tale: TheReminiscences of the Rt Hon. LordMacmillan, London, 1952. For the post-1925 period, the National Library’s AnnualReports are a useful source: up to the mid-1990s the Reports contain detailedstatistical information about the Library’scollections.

The title of this article, ‘A Lamp of itsOwn Citadel’, is from W.K. Dickson andHugh P. MacMillan A National Library forScotland: Proposal to Establish a ScottishNational Library on the basis of theAdvocates’ Library, Edinburgh, 1922.

culminated successfully in the Legal DepositLibraries Act 2003. The scale of purchasingfrom overseas also increased dramatically inthe second half of the twentieth century.Even in the 1950s, the Library’s purchasegrant from government was a mere £1,000:by the early 1980s it had risen to £750,000.This welcome increase enabled gaps in thecollections to be filled, and allowed greaterscope for buying manuscripts and overseasmaterials. It was short-lived, however, sincefrom the late 1980s government consistentlypegged purchase grants to inflation levelsthat bore no resemblance to market prices.An additional factor was the need to buyscience publications for the new ScottishScience Library, with little extra provision infunding. Supported by its Trustees, theLibrary resolutely maintained its purchasegrant as a separate figure in its grant-in-aidto protect the collections through thesedifficult years, despite the temptations of asingle line budget. Nevertheless, in the mid-1990s, in spite of the Library’s bestendeavours, it was necessary to divert somefunds to cover essential running costs.

Throughout the century the Librarybenefited greatly from special collections thatwere gifted, deposited, or, in certaininstances, purchased to add to existingstrengths in particular fields. The 1925foundation brought immediate donations –Lauriston Castle in 1926 and Rosebery in1927 – and over the next eighty years a vastarray of collections on diverse subjects,including literary first editions (Hugh Sharp),mountaineering (Graham Brown), Scottishmusic (Glen), baking and confectionery(Macadam) and manuscripts (Blackwood andHaig among many others) have been added.Prominent among deposited collections arethe Crawford (Bibliotheca Lindesiana)Collections (1988) and the Collections ofBlairs College Library (1974). The full list (to1999) can be found in the published Specialand Named Collections in the NationalLibrary of Scotland, and an updated list ismaintained on the website at www.nls.uk.The Library has always been deeply indebtedto the generosity of private donors, andsome of its most splendid books andmanuscripts are owed to private gifts.Despite the greater financial pressures ofmodern times, it is notable that so manyindividuals still choose to present collectionsor individual books to the nation.

A major development in the 1970s wasthe Library’s turning to the outside world or,in Sir George MacKenzie’s words, ‘a mutualco-operating for the good of the whole’.With more publications to acquire and lessfunding available, it was clear that if librarieswished to satisfy the needs of their readers,they must work together more. TheNational Library was a British pioneer in thisfield, setting up a confederation with other

research libraries in Scotland in the early1970s. Co-operation was originally based onlibraries’ physical collections but subsequentlythe benefits of online technology were alsoexploited collectively for the national good.Co-operation on Scottish collections beganwith Scotland’s public libraries in the late1990s. The ‘national collection’ would thusbe the sum of all its parts, and the nationallibrary would be one among other libraries.

The well-known genealogist, DonaldWhyte, who came to the Library as a youngploughman with a keen eye for research, andwas taken under the wing of the Librarian,Maryatt Ross Dobie, comments in hismemoir ‘Fifty Years a Reader: Memories ofthe National Library, 1950–2000’ that duringthis period ‘NLS was marked by change anddevelopment in almost every aspect’. Newinitiatives were introduced to make theLibrary’s collections better known: travellingexhibitions (from 1977); an expandedpublishing programme (from the late 1970s);and involvement in international scholarlyprogrammes (from the 1970s). Later, whenonline catalogues were introduced, theLibrary in the 1990s gave the highest priorityto securing funding for the retrospectiveconversion of its printed catalogues in orderto make the national collections accessibleremotely. It is to the credit of government,and to the enlightened Scottish Office civilservants at the time, that the importance ofthis step was readily appreciated, and fundswere found to support it.

The last two decades of the twentiethcentury brought major change. From the late1980s building up physical collections was nolonger considered an unchallenged good.Government pressed the legal depositlibraries to reduce their collecting policies,and review after review was initiated. Whilenot resisting, the Scottish Office gave theLibrary considerable support. The PolicyReview by the Scottish EducationDepartment in 1987 reported that theLibrary’s legal deposit policies were ‘well

articulated, consistent with each other, andsoundly documented in the Library’s ownpolicy documents’. The term ‘heritage’entered the lexicon in the 1980s, andpromotion of heritage led to lengthy debateson how libraries could offer greateraccessibility to collections without patronisingover-simplification. Less government fundingfor new initiatives led to the need to seekfunding for collections from alternativesources such as the Heritage Lottery Fund.Most significant of all was the arrival of theWeb, and the opportunity to add ‘virtual’collections to the physical collections built upover three hundred years. At the end of thecentury there came constitutional changeand in 1997 Scotland’s Parliament.

In serving twenty-first-century Scotland,and in directing its own future course, theLibrary has the profound strengths of itsinheritance, and a strong collective memorythat is an eloquent expression of more thanthree centuries of Scottish life. From the1680s there have been many difficult timesbut, like Pitt, the Library has always ‘walkedupon impossibilities’.

A detail from the Auchinleck manuscript, 1330,which is displayed in full at www.nls.uk/auchinleck

F O L I O16

MALCOLM BAIRD was born in 1935 atSydenham, not far from the Crystal Palace,where his father had an experimentaltelevision transmitter. After his father’s deathin 1946 he went to school and university inScotland. For several years he worked in theChemical Engineering Department atEdinburgh University and since 1967 he hasbeen with McMaster University in Hamilton,Ontario, where he is now professoremeritus. He is co-author (with AntonyKamm) of John Logie Baird: A Life (2002) andhas edited his father’s memoirs entitledTelevision and Me (2004).

OLIVE GEDDES is a Senior Curator in theManuscript Collections Division of theNational Library of Scotland. She has a wide-ranging interest in Scottish social history,particularly travel, women, leisure activitiesand sport. Olive Geddes is the author of ASwing Through Time: Golf in Scotland,1457–1743 and The Laird’s Kitchen: ThreeHundred Years of Food in Scotland. She iscurator of the Library’s winter 2005–06exhibition Sale of the Centuries: A celebrationof shopping in Scotland.

MARGERY PALMER McCULLOCH isResearch Fellow in Scottish Literature at theUniversity of Glasgow and co-editor of thescholarly journal Scottish Studies Review. Herprincipal research interests are in twentieth-century Scottish writing and her booksinclude critical studies of Edwin Muir, Neil M.Gunn and (as co-editor) Lewis GrassicGibbon, in addition to many chapters andarticles on women writers. Her most recentbook, published in 2004, is Modernism andNationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland1918–1939, a collection of primary sourcedocuments for the interwar ScottishRenaissance.

ANN MATHESON was Keeper of PrintedBooks in the National Library of Scotlandfrom 1983 to 2000. She was SecretaryGeneral of the Ligue des BibliothèquesEuropéennes de Recherche (1994 to 2000),and Chairman of the Literature Committee,Scottish Arts Council (1997 to 2003). She isChairman of the Consortium of EuropeanResearch Libraries, which provides integratedtools and services for European printing ofthe hand press period. Her researchinterests are in the 18th century, and she hascontributed articles to a wide range ofscholarly and professional journals.

National Library of ScotlandGeorge IV Bridge • Edinburgh • EH1 1EWTel 0131-623 2700 • Fax 0131-623 3701

www.nls.ukFolio is edited by Jennie Renton

ISSN 1475-1151

Cover image: From a 1920s Bird’s Custard advertfrom Weldon’s Fair Isle Jumpers pattern book.

Notes on contributors NLS TodayMoray LaunchAs our final article recounts, many of the tenetson which the Library was founded continue toflourish and evolve in the twenty-first century.The National Library has a healthy history ofcollaboration with other libraries. This traditionhas recently been extended to public libraries,with the recent launch of a partnership withMoray Libraries in October. The partnershipwill see the active promotion of nationalresources to the people of Moray, primarilythrough raising awareness in schools andlibrary-learning centres throughout the region.This renewed relationship with the area has ahistorical resonance, as it was a Moray man, SirAlexander Grant of Logie, who helped to maketoday’s National Library of Scotland possiblethrough his donation of £200,000 in the 1920sand 30s, the equivalent of £12m today. TheMoray partnership is part of a wider programmeof working with local libraries, with authoritiesin Glasgow and Aberdeen engaging in similarinitiatives in the near future.

Newsplan ScotlandSimilarly, the Library’s vision to capture andpreserve Scottish daily life has recently reacheda new level, with the completion of theNewsplan Scotland project in August this year.This ambitious project began in 2000. Its aimwas to work collaboratively with local librariesacross Scotland, to preserve nearly 4 millionpages of newsprint, from the period 1700-1950, which pre-dates the Library’s ownrigorous policy of collecting Scottishnewspapers and periodicals.

Thanks to the effort of all involved in theproject, researchers and local historians cannow retrieve early editions of currentnewspapers or historic titles which are nolonger in circulation, such as the AberdeenShaver, Cambuslang Pilot, Piper O' Dundee,Edinburgh Star, Glasgow Clincher, GreenockElection Squib, Highland Echo, ScottishProhibitionist and Saturday Smile.

Isabella BirdPerhaps the most significant shift in Librarypolicy of recent years has been to widen accessand broaden engagement with a more diverserange of individuals and communities than everbefore. This can be seen in the foreigncollection policies (from South Asian toAustralasia and Eastern Europe), thedevelopment of the digital library, and in theLibrary’s outreach, events and exhibitionprogramme.

The Library’s recent exhibition, In the Footstepsof Isabella Bird: adventures in twin time travel,advances this trend with the first UK showingof photographic work by Professor KiyonoriKanasaka of Kyoto University. The exhibition,which is part of the EU-Japan Year of Peopleto People Exchanges, marries eastern andwestern cultures and offers contrasts between19th century exploration and modern daytravel. Professor Kanasaka retraces the intrepidjourneys made across remote reaches by 19thcentury explorer and writer Isabella Bird. Thisexhibition not only promotes a valuable cross-cultural exchange, but also reflects on historicalchange. To cement this link between past and

present, it should be noted that much ofIsabella Bird’s work, original photos and letterscan be found in the John Murray Archive,which the Library hopes to acquire in 2006.

Our current exhibition, Sale of the Centuries,provides a glimpse of our changing relationshipwith shops and shopping, over more than threecenturies, from the early markets and fairs,through the growth of the corner shop and theHigh Street, to the age of the grand depart-ment store and beyond.

Sale of the Centuries runs from 8 December to 12February

Scottish Science Hall of Famewww.nls.uk now offers an interactiveopportunity for web users to select historicscientists for celebration. The latest addition tothe website’s Digital Library, the ScottishScience Hall of Fame, has just been launched.The site is a two-part project, whichencourages users to vote for their favouriteScottish scientist. Users can choose from aselection of twenty four scientists, spanningseveral centuries and most disciplines. Thevoting site – a ‘first’ on the NLS website – is aninteractive resource for anyone interested inscience and could be of particular use toschools. The top ten will then be featured in amore detailed site, which will further outlinetheir contributions to science and everyday life.John Logie Baird – whose endeavours arerecalled by Malcolm Baird’s article within – isamong the candidates. Why not log on andcast your vote? www.nls.uk/scientists

Future PublicationsThis is the final issue of Folio. The Library willlaunch a new publication, replacing both Folioand Quarto, in the New Year, with a revisedformat and design, while retaining the highquality, in-depth articles that reflect on theLibrary’s collections, research, outreach andother activities.

We would like to take this opportunity toextend our gratitude to all who havecontributed to Folio over the years, and inparticular to the Editor, Jennie Renton.

We welcome comments on how we mightbest develop our newsletter, as well ascontributions for publication. Please address allcorrespondence to the in-house Editor, JulianStone, Marketing Communications Officer atj.stone@nls.uk or 0131 623 3764.

Our newsletter will continue to be availableonline. For enquiries concerning web featuresand content, please contact Alison Buckley,Web Editor on a.buckley@nls.uk or 0131 6233775.

If you are reading someone else’s copy andwould like to be added to our mailing list,please contact Bruce Blacklaw,Communications Assistant onb.blacklaw@nls.uk or 0131 623 3762.