When in early 1951 Geoffrey Whatmore, the Manchester Guardian’s newly appointed chief librarian, turned up at the paper’s Cross Street offices, he found a reference service barely fit for purpose.
At the end of a dark corridor was a dusty room full of filing cabinets with warped, overstuffed drawers, coagulating paste pots, piles of newspapers (but seemingly no books), and a group of librarians who barely spoke to each other.
Fed up with his writers complaining about the haphazard state of the library, the Guardian’s then editor, AP Wadsworth, had felt compelled to employ a professional to establish some order. While there had been a library at the paper since the early 1900s, Whatmore’s task was to establish an active research centre, rather than just somewhere to file away material.
Seventy years later, I’m the current Guardian librarian. Of course my world is very different. I work in a large, light-filled, open-plan office surrounded by editorial colleagues. The 21st-century news library is essentially a host of databases, used to research information for – and by – Guardian journalists across the globe, working on a 24-hour news cycle.
By contrast, Whatmore’s day was focused on the publication of the first edition of the paper, usually around 10pm. Along with most of the other Manchester Guardian staff his shift started at 3pm, the first clatter of a typewriter key announcing that the working day had begun.
A core part of the news librarian’s job was updating the cuttings collection – news stories chopped from that day’s papers and organised into subject files for reference.
Whether it was to check a fact, see what had been written before on a subject or simply look for ideas, these scrappy manila folders were an essential research tool in the pre-search-engine era. In papers up and down the land, a journalist would wander along to the library – perhaps as an excuse to escape the mayhem of the newsroom, or for a smoke – and hope to walk away with a bulging file. This world was brilliantly captured in Alphabetical Order, Michael Frayn’s play about a news library. In one scene, John, a character based on a Guardian features writer, turns up looking for a quote “reported somewhere, in something, about halfway down a right-hand page” – a request that sounds all too familiar today.
The problem Whatmore faced was that Guardian files were rather threadbare, in part because the paper refused to take anything but its own cuttings and the Daily Telegraph’s. This was hardly a comprehensive résumé of events and so he increased the number of titles to be taken.
More daring – as he told me during an oral history interview in 2012, four years before his death – was the push for the collection to include personality files. At this time, the Guardian was more interested in weighty matters of state rather than the lives of individuals, so there was nothing on “Anthony Eden or Kathleen Ferrier, not an actor, not a sportsman”. This weakness was particularly exposed when an obituary had to be written close to deadline time.
Just as important was sorting out the library index, a venerable enterprise going back to Victorian times and originally handwritten in leather-bound volumes. This was key to locating the correct file, but over the decades indexers had created their own idiosyncratic systems – confusing for everyone, particularly reporters who stumbled upon it in the small hours. The problem was compounded by a lack of communication between members of staff. The new librarian standardised the index and in time recruited staff with a more collegiate approach.
The Guardian stopped taking cuttings more than two decades ago, with online text archives and digitised papers replacing the need for the old files. But retrospective reference – presenting current news in context – is as important today as it was then.
Editorial staff now have access to a range of newspaper archives and information sources from their desktops. But the library (also known as Research) carries out in-depth searching – verifying facts, compiling background reports and managing the information sources. As in Whatmore’s day, it hunts down biographical nuggets for obituaries, as well as maintaining the daily birthdays column. It also scours the paper’s archive for long-forgotten stories to reprint in the From the archive series.
The office my predecessor arrived at hadn’t changed much since CP Scott’s day, with life still revolving around the leader writers’ corridor, sometimes obstructed by an editor’s large and somnolent dog. But the paper was changing, and with it the library.
After winning a battle to have a telephone installed, memos from the Guardian archive reveal a “tart” exchange with management about purchasing a photocopier. Admittedly this was cutting-edge technology at the time, but Whatmore eventually got his way.
Much harder was wresting control of the book collection from an old man who also called himself the librarian. These were kept under lock and key in the corridor and were only to be read by the editor and a few privileged writers. Eventually a spare key was acquired and the collection was supplemented with books scavenged from the pile of review copies – something I still do.
By 1956, the library was making valuable contributions, coming into its own during major events such as the Suez crisis.
Chatting with my predecessor, it became clear that while technology gives me access to sources he could only dream about, the core role of the news librarian hadn’t changed. One of the things he enjoyed about the job was opening the next day’s paper on his way home late at night, and finding the paragraphs and chunks of information due entirely to the library’s efforts. This is something I still do – albeit flicking through the pages of theguardian.com.
