Some Persephone readers will have seen this picture before but one can’t see it too often – the Foundling Hospital 1750 with the end of Lambs Conduit Street just out of the frame at the bottom.
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Theobalds (pronounced Tibaulds although none of us ever do) Road c. 1925. The library building, built in 1960, is now on the right, the garden on the left is Gray’s Inn. It’s chance that Camden Council have so far failed to close the library which sadly is not (yet) listed; but maybe the tide will turn soon in favour of libraries and the building will no longer be under threat.
Holborn Library is at the end of our road so it is two minutes to go upstairs to the Local Studies Centre. It is also extremely important at a time when politicians – shockingly – love to close libraries that we all support them as much as possible – the libraries not the politicians obviously. This week: images from the collection and first the 1839 drawing of Lamb’s Conduit Street by John Tallis. It shows our shop as number 52 instead of 59.
Betty Miller, our fourth writer with Irish connections, was born in Cork and lived there till she was 8. She wrote the extraordinary Farewell Leicester Square when she was 25. This painting by Bernard Meninsky hangs at the home of Betty Miller’s son Jonathan.
Here is a picture of Norah Hoult (1898-1984), the only other picture extant apart from the photograph on our website. And there are several germane photographs on the Forum.
This is a map of the Battle of Le Cateau 26 August 1914 at which Mollie Panter-Downes’s father Edward was killed. It was the day after her eighth birthday, but he had been away in Africa (as acting colonel to the Gold Coast regiment) for the previous three years so Mollie hardly knew him. Or her mother – she had accompanied her husband and Mollie had been left with friends in Sussex. Her mother Marie Kathleen Cowley was of Irish descent too, Does anyone know if there are any members of the Panter-Downes family in Ireland today? More on Edward here. And lots more research to be done by someone.
Mollie Panter-Downes was photographed by the great Lee Miller during the war years, the years when she was writing her Letters from London, later collected as London War Notes, soon to be Persephone Book No. 111. Both Mollie’s parents were Irish – more about her father tomorrow.
On Saturday RTÉ Radio 1’s Book Show broadcast an item about us. It was recorded in the shop and gives a rather nice verbal/aural portrait of life at Persephone Books, with the shop bell clanging away and the phone ringing – listen to the item here. So this week on the Post: Ireland. The only Irish writer who got a mention was Norah Hoult, author of There Were No Windows (the inspiration for last week’s posts curiously enough) but there are three others: Mollie Panter-Downes, Betty Miller and Christine Longford. Although the latter was not Irish (she married a Longford), Making Conversation is imbued with Irish wit and charm. Today: the library at Tullynally where she spent her life as an adult and where the Longfords still live. There are lots more wonderful photographs at The Irish Aesthete here.
And we cannot finish a week of windows without Matisse, whose windows on the sea in particular are so memorable. Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window 1922 is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The contrast with the lack of windows in There Were No Windows is heart-rending. But we so recommend you to read this incredible book: it is sad seeing the heroine decline into dementia and yet uplifting about the human spirit. Also the Forum about the book is wise and illuminating.
Through a Cottage Window Shipley, Sussex, 1930s by Charles Ginner Tullie House Museum. Significantly, the windows on the Post this week are not in fact blocked up but then the point of the Post is is not the blankness of a blocked window – but the joy of the view and the light, the striped curtain and the planting.