Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

At one point a few years ago, after re-watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I mentioned to Cassandra that Dad had live in England at that time and occasionally shared stories of his experiences.  This resulted in me e-mailing him to ask about the war-time bombing; his response follows.

Here are some comments on German bombing during World War II.

Where I lived in the north of England, we had no serious bombing. There were plenty of bigger targets, much closer to Germany or the French airports from which they sent their planes. One night a plane dropped a lot of fire bombs, but they all fell in the playing field of a girls’ high school about four blocks from our home. We suspect that a plane returning from a raid on Newcastle, a much bigger town to our north, wanted to get rid of its load.

London was the biggest target, and from the beginning of September 1940, an average of 200 planes a night bombed London every night for two months. Bombing continued after that but not so regularly and on a smaller scale.

Many children were evacuated to small towns and villages in the west of England, which were safe because there was no point in bombing them. A lot of these children did not see their parents for three or four years!

Since most of the bombing was at night, many people slept in bomb shelters, and also in the stations of the London Underground railway after it closed down for the night.

I moved to London five years after the war, and I lived and worked in the East End, which was the area most heavily damaged. I worked near the docks, which were an obvious target. In that area whole blocks of houses had been wiped off the map, and when they rebuilt after the war, they sometimes relocated the streets and gave them new names. Other streets of brick houses would have many gaps, with perhaps half the houses gone.

The German plan was simply to try to make London uninhabitable, but they did not succeed. It was a matter of luck what was hit and what wasn’t. The House of Commons was badly damaged, but Westminster Abbey, just across the street, was untouched. Fire bombs fell on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the firewatchers were able to put them out before they did much damage.

Air attacks on London declined when the Germans invaded Russia and were also heavily involved in fighting in North Africa. But in June, 1944, just after the allied invasion in the north of France, a new kind of attack came. The Germans launched flying bombs (the V1), which were pilotless and had jet engines set to fly just the distance to reach the london area and then turn off and fall to the ground. Over the next few months they sent several thousand of them, and there was no telling where they would land. My older brother was a member of an anti-aircraft battery stationed on the south-east coast, whose job was to try to shoot them down before they crossed the coast.

Three months later they began sending asupersonic rockets (the V2), which flew in a very high arch and arrived without warning. Again, since the aiming could only be approximate, the target was London. Their range was about 200 miles. They sent about 1,300 in the seven months from then until March 1945, when we were able to eliminate the last launching sites.

About a year before Dad’s retirement, I was working in the library computer lab, and my boss wanted as many staff members as possible to have web pages on the library’s website. The best way to encourage this was to start at the top, with the Director of Libraries. Of course, most of the staff weren’t familiar with HTML (this pre-dated CSS and WYSIWYG editors), so she tasked me with pestering Dad for content and creating his web page.

I probably have a copy of it on a floppy disk somewhere, accessible with a USB floppy drive, but it was easier to find using The Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web.

It’s very classically Dad… he mentions some hobbies, but not all (he played squash in Portland, and racquetball most of the time we lived in Miami), and neglects to mention that his sabbatical year included two small children, who were likely a bit disruptive to his research.  And it was written 20 years ago, before he retired to Guatemala and began taking cruises to various parts of the world, along with playing Scrabble and bridge regularly.

So here’s what Dad had to say about himself:

It’s a long way from London to Miami, especially if you go by way of Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Oregon, and take more than twenty years doing it.

I was born and grew up in Darlington, in the north of England, a town whose main claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of railroads. It lies on the the main line between London and Edinburgh, so collecting the names and numbers of the magnificent steam locomotives as they roared by was almost a required occupation for the youth of the town.

Some years later, armed with a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Durham, I enrolled in the School of Librarianship and Archives at the University of London. Because of its location, the School not only had on its faculty some of the finest teachers of library science, but it also enjoyed a constant stream of distinguished foreign visitors. One of these was the Dean of the School of Library Science at the University of Illinois. His glowing portrait of the state of librarianship in the United States clearly impressed me. After working in small college libraries in London for several years, I accepted an invitation to become a reference librarian at the Public Library of Akron, Ohio. Three years later I moved to the University of Illinois.

The University of Illinois Library was a wonderful place in which to expand one’s horizons. It was (and still is) the third largest academic library in the United States. Even in the early sixties, when I was there, it possessed more than four million volumes. Vast numbers of scholars with international reputations were to be found there, attracted by the quality of the University and of its Library. I worked closely with many of them, for it was my responsibility to try to obtain by interlibrary loan those works so esoteric as not to be held by that huge library.

During this period, the Dean of the Library School persuaded me to undertake a project left unfinished by one of his retiring faculty members, the preparation of a book surveying British government publications. It sounded like a straightforward proposition so, ignoring the danger signs (the work was far from complete, and the retiring faculty member had already spent fifteen years on it), I agreed. The problem with a project of this kind is that one tends to suffer from what I would call the “Babes in the Wood” syndrome – there are always more flowers to pick, so you keep going deeper and deeper into the forest. Before long, a bibliography originally conceived of as an appendix to the work blossomed into a separate book, that was ready for publication before its parent. It was to be fifteen years, including one year of sabbatical leave, before the H.W. Wilson Company was able to publish the Guide to British Government Publications.

Meanwhile, I spent five years at Penn State as the Library’s Assistant Director for Public Services. It was an exciting time of seemingly unlimited budgets and rapid expansion. Then, in 1969, I began a ten-year stay as Director of the Library at Portland State University in Oregon, a young urban institution. There, one learned lessons of a different kind: how to maintain the development of a library in an environment of frequent budget cuts and hiring freezes. And so, in 1979, to Miami, to a University about to embark on a dynamic thrust to higher quality, and to a library facing the need to cope with the age of computerized services. Both the University and the international community of Miami provide an invigorating environment.

Librarians, of course, don’t spend all of their time among their books. I like to spend much of my leisure time outdoors and in remote places. While in Illinois, I was advisor to a group of Explorer Scouts who – with improbable logic, considering their location among the corn fields – became interested in mountaineering. Thus, began a series of summer camping trips to the Rockies and beyond. The group’s first forays were mainly arduous hikes, but they gradually became more technical, planning climbs in the Tetons and, in the Cascades, assaults on Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shuksan.

My years at Penn State afforded proximity to rock climbing in the Shawangunks of New York State, while in Portland one was on the very doorstep of the Cascades. There, with Mt. Hood and other peaks on the skyline, one did not have to make long-range plans for climbing expeditions. A quick check on Friday’s weekend weather report was sufficient to make people reach for their ice axes and crampons. In addition to Mt. Hood, which was a mere ninety-minute drive, Mt. St. Helens was a perennial favorite until it suddenly became an active volcano in 1980.

More sedate hobbies include collecting books, especially the works of a group of minor turn of the century English authors. And I collect and study the postal history of mail carried across the Atlantic by 19th century steamships. With all of these activities, spare time is a commodity that I don’t have to worry about.