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Rosemary Montgomery
'We Read What Was There': Secondary School Libraries and Adolescent Girl Readers in Second World War Australia
Reading is epistemological and political. In 1973 Andree Wright demonstrated its importance in the construction of Australian women through her ground-breaking analysis of The Australian Women's Weekly between 1935-1945.1
She opened up her research by looking at the 'authority' of this magazine in the eyes of its readers. In 1992 Lyons and Taksa subverted this approach, examining reading practices and perceptions in the light of influences on the reader of gender, religion, class, urban or country residence and educational history.2
In this paper I owe a debt to both these approaches. I examine some of the intersecting forces acting on adolescent girl readers between the ages of twelve and eighteen in the school libraries of second world war Australia; and the way in which these forces offered the readers diverse and complex ways of constituting a picture of themselves as Australian girls and women.
Lacunae in framing a reading situation by those responsible for it can result in a reading locus where the effect will not necessarily match the stated purpose.
In this paper I want to look at the difference between the intention of the secondary school library and the reality of school libraries in wartime Australia. I will then explore some effects of that difference on contemporary girl readers through the works of Sir Walter Scott and Georgette Heyer in those libraries.
Sources.
In carrying out the research for this project I was looking for a balance in primary sources. As Anne Clyde acknowledges in her brief history of Australian school libraries, listing the libraries, their aims and their resources is only part of understanding the place of libraries in society. There should also be some assessment of their effect on the population.3
The purpose in establishing the school library is illuminated through curricula, departmental directives, school accession registers, library notes and the contents of approved books. An image of the reality of these collections can also be gained from these sources.
In order to explore the effect of the library on schoolgirls I have had access to the recollections of one hundred and thirty seven women of varying class, religion and ethnicity from across Australia who were adolescent girls reading in both urban and country locations at that time. Their memories provide information about, and interpretations of, school library reading. It is frequently possible therefore, as the oral historian Trevor Lummis has pointed out4, to check for factual accuracy in these recollections and then use them to extend our understanding of the factual situation.
The interpretive element in the responses allows, as Lyons and Taksa suggest in their discussion of 'The Oral Archive'5, a qualified study of perceptions and attitudes through respondents' historical memory.
History of School Libraries
Whether the collections of reading material held by schools for readers' choice and the storage premises provided constitute a 'library' is contested ground, often depending on the researcher's interpretation of the term. Roy Lundin, accepting the definition of 'satisfactory' school library service to be found in the Munn Pitt report on the condition of Australian libraries in 1935, asserts that the history of school libraries in this country is 'relatively brief and recent'.6 He places their genesis as late as the nineteen fifties.
However, Anne Clyde recognises that, although small in size and unsophisticated in organisation, libraries were common across elementary, post-primary and independent schools in nineteenth century Australia. And the idea of the school library as a source of 'education' was recognised by departmental officers of the various levels of the hierarchy.
By the onset of the second world war, after the pressures of earlier wars, depressions and the increasing demand for publicly and privately funded secondary education in a sparsely populated country with a recently introduced dominant culture, school libraries were not constituted much differently from those in the late nineteenth century. What had changed, as far as this research is concerned, were the relative percentages of adolescent girl readers to whom the libraries of secondary schools were available, and the images library reading was now offering the readers of their roles as Australian girls and women.
By 1938 state education departments had specified that a school library should be a source of educational, cultural and spiritual development. At the same time, it should be a place for inculcating 'the reading habit' where ingestion of the appropriate values would come to be seen as both an agreeable and a dignified experience.7 With these aims in mind, lists of approved library texts were drawn up during these years and made available to schools in all the sectors.8
A study of School Demographics reveals that in 1939 Australian state education departments had already begun to inscribe the concept of secondary education as a 'stage' in the lives of many of the country's future citizens. Philosophically as well as financially, the newer developments favoured the employed middle-classes and the skilled working classes with their view of education as a passport to both security and upward mobility.9 The Catholic sector emphasised the value of state bursaries as a means of access to Catholic secondary education, thus ensuring a Catholic spirit at the guiding levels of this newer world.10 The common denominator across all education sectors was the emphasis on public examinations.
The large investment of resources meant that schools offering complete secondary courses could only be located in the bigger population centres. Secondary library reading, with the exception of country boarding schools, was largely urban.11
Condition of Secondary School Libraries 1936 -1945
The damning comments of the Munn Pitt report had created the beginnings of library consciousness. However, library funding was extremely limited, and spending on education had dropped notably between 1939 and 1942.12 Many library initiatives for plant and resources dwindled across the war years. In New South Wales, one of the most active states in terms of school library development, 1943 saw an official silence on the subject.13 This was unbroken until, with an eye to post-war education, attempts at calculation of existing school libraries began in the latter months of 1944.
In addition, there were specific problems for the libraries which grew from the exigencies of war. Trade agreements meant that the books in Australian school libraries were predominantly those from English publishing houses. As a result, British paper shortages after the fall of Norway, enemy sea action and the destruction of many of the East End printing and publishing companies in the first blitz meant new books became increasingly rare. Moreover, Australian paper shortages and poor paper quality, as well as the state of the national publishing industry, reinforced the problem of obtaining new books.
The privations of war affected all the sectors' libraries. Both Mac Robertson Girls' High School in the public sector and Abbotsleigh in the private sector faltered notably in building and maintaining their collections during the middle and later years of the war. Abbotsleigh lost its foundation librarian when she joined up in 1942, while Mac Robertson's fine premises were expropriated for military use. References to book and paper shortages increase in all schools' library reports examined for this research. So do references to the libraries' inability to collect only ideal titles. Despite the existence of approved collection lists, libraries clearly depended on available donations in addition to purchasing stock from a range of titles limited by the pressures of war.
Both contemporary school sources and the memories of my respondents indicate that throughout the war years there were broadly three kinds of school library in Australia.
Firstly, there was the relatively well-stocked and well-cared for library such as that which existed at Abbotsleigh. This school, despite changes in library premises, not only had a comparatively large collection, but also maintained reading and study areas.14 State-funded Mac Robertson Girls' High School had two substantial libraries, the '3rd and 4th Form Library' and the 'Reference Library'.15
There was also the library which had been synthesised within a particular school and was functioning as a central library despite lack of funding and real hierarchical support. The library at Wollongong High School, subject to waning Education Department interest, is an example of such, and of its role in the war years. Its collection was skimpy. My respondent Marsali recalled its premises as ' a small dark room at the foot of the girls' stair'. These were so limited that the 1943 'Library Notes' for the school included an apologetic acknowledgment that there was room for book changing only, and then for only one educational level of borrowers at a time.16
Finally, there was the non-library library, fragmented, sparsely and often idiosyncratically stocked and physically relatively inaccessible to readers. Frequently this last was constituted as a shelf in a cupboard in individual classrooms, available on rainy days or to those who finished set work early.
The Purpose of the Library:
Secondary school library collections were adjuncts to presenting the philosophies informing the various education sectors. Yet while they were about the acquisition and purposes of knowledge, and the meaning of success as the various codes applied to the reader's gender, cultural background and class, they were predominantly about passing public examinations.
State high school libraries were mainly expected to be housed and developed from the scarce resources of the schools. As a result the emphasis was on relatively inexpensive book collections rather than the more expensive capital resources associated with research and study.17 Nevertheless, state school librarians did make an attempt to cull unsuitable donations and specify additions to their collections. Preferred material, both fiction and non-fiction, was secular, conservative and, even when popular or ephemeral, 'serious'.
These readers were offered information about the traditional cultural, political and social roles of ruling-class women and girls belonging to the metropolitan race of a powerful, commercially-based, Protestant empire. At the same time, they were shown the masculinist traditions and structure of that empire.
By the beginning of the war, private establishment schools such as Abbotsleigh, were recalled as in the throes of philosophical change. Jill Ker Conway's memories reflect the continuation of a dichotomy which had begun in the previous century. She saw the population of Abbotsleigh as 'an elite. Ergo, we were born to be leaders. However, the precise nature of our leadership was by no means clear. For some of our mentors excelling meant a fashionable marriage and leadership in philanthropy. For others it meant intellectual achievement and a university education'. The libraries in schools such as Abbotsleigh and its counterpart, Walford, in South Australia, were ideally 'space for uninterrupted reading, studying and research tasks', as well as repositories of information which extended candidates' understanding of syllabus subjects.18
In the Catholic system secondary books on all subjects were expected to be 'A Witness to the Church'. Several papers read at the 1936 Catholic Education Congress19 had offered instruction on the implementation of the 'witness' concept.
Such a philosophy meant that the emphasis on library reading was not as definite in the Catholic sector as in other systems. However, libraries were also part of the Catholic secondary education process, for both religious and secular reasons. Congress papers demonstrated the policy of Catholic school library collection. It lent itself to the private exploration of secular books and authors which had already been the subject of structured analysis in the classroom by a teacher who was also a religious. Images of success here were created around the nucleus of a Catholic spiritual life which would inform all aspects of the temporal roles of the female Catholic in a powerful spiritual empire. Equally, the majority of the books were necessarily those set for public examinations.
Despite some differences in reading collections and opportunities for research, girl readers' presence in the all these libraries meant that these readers would be candidates competing in public assessments founded on masculinist socio-economic expectations.
The Aura of School Libraries:
School libraries were often recalled specifically by respondents, especially those who left at the level of the junior examination, as being for 'an elite'. Marsali wrote of the library at Wollongong in these terms, referring to it as a place for those who subscribed to the school's concepts of success in terms of gender, culture and class. Her view is reinforced by the nomenclature of some wartime school libraries. Mac Robertson had its previously mentioned Third and Fourth Form Library and its separate Reference Library, available to final year girls. St Mary's College, established in Wollongong by the Good Samaritan Sisters, has kept in its archives books designated for its Senior Library. Kit, at a Catholic boarding school, recollects 'the senior library, a small library of classics' was made available to those who became candidates for the senior English literature paper. Secondary school libraries were seen as a 'place' for those who clearly committed themselves to supporting the values of their respective systems.
Correspondences in Collections.
The majority of school library collections consisted mainly of fiction holdings. These were approved popular modern fiction, or 'classics', which W J Scott, in his contemporary survey of adolescent reading, defined as 'those novels which would be considered worthy of mention in any comprehensive survey of the English, American, and European fiction written before the end of the nineteenth century'.20
The greatest correspondence in secondary collections across all sectors and across the nation lay in their commitment to 'the classics'. In all secondary libraries, and in both junior and senior collections, the influence and uniformity of past English syllabuses at school level, and those authors favoured by past university syllabuses, is notable. Copies of virtually all the literature books listed for the Sydney University Modern Literature course in New South Wales in 1926 could be found in the Mac Robertson Girls' High School libraries in Victoria at the end of the war. So could the books listed in South Australia's Department of Education Course of Study from two decades earlier. Their publishing dates and accession numbers place these books across the spectrum of years.
Dickens and Scott feature significantly. Scott, in particular, was seen as valuable across all three sectors. His work was associated with the roots of British history by an Australian education hegemony with strong ties to the metropolitan country. It had an added advantage in the eyes of those constructing libraries in Catholic secondary schools. It brought to life the lost Catholic world of England. Both these authors are remembered by many respondents in terms similar to those used by Enid, at a South Australian girls' high school, who referred to them as 'unreal' and 'fusty'.
I would like to look briefly at what Sir Walter Scott and Georgette Heyer show us about school library reading and the wartime girl in Australia.
The historical novel is designed to show us in some part who we are and how we got to be as we are. Its reading must be underpinned by a sense of sympathy and connection on the part of the reader. The reaction to Walter Scott's novels is remarkable for the level of spontaneous dislike secondary-educated respondents expressed.
He still looms large as an 'important' writer of 'heavy classics' and an author who was very difficult to read. Diana, who left her South Australian state school as a senior, recalled Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy with pleasure, but she wrote of Scott's 'turgid, quasi-historical detail'. Irene, a junior in Victoria, noted that she found 'heavy classics, like Scott, hard going'. Marsali, leaving her selective school after the Intermediate Certificate in New South Wales, had already tried, and failed, to read Waverley and Rob Roy through the school library, as did Win in Victoria, with Kenilworth. Kath listed Scott at the head of her most disliked reading while at an elite girls' private school. And Ann, at a convent in New South Wales, recalled the dislike of Scott among herself and her friends at the same time as she recollected being encouraged to read him.
W J Scott, in his wartime survey of the reading habits of juniors and seniors in New Zealand's post-primary schools, noted that this author's name was pre-eminent among those books readers failed to finish.21 Sir Walter's position as a writer would appear to have been paradoxical; he was at once sought out for reading and rejected by readers.
There were several reasons for Scott's initial popularity. His poems were printed frequently in prescribed primary school reading, such as school magazines and readers, across the states.
This introduction was then followed up in the junior secondary schools through continuing association with his poetry.22 In the junior anthologies lines from his shorter poems such as these taken from 'Jock o' Hazeldean':
The kirk was deck'd at morning-tide,
The tapers glimmer'd fair;
The priest and bridegroom wait the bride,
And dame and knight are there:
They hath sought her baith by bower and ha';
The ladie was not seen!
She's o'er the Border and awa'
Wi' Jock o' Hazeldean.
are easily read to conjure up possibilities of sexuality and romantic love, fulfilment and freedom for the wartime adolescent girl reader.
The girls' own response is best summed up by survey respondent Nancy, a Queenslander who attended a private school. She wrote, "I loved Walter Scott's poetry, but his novels were too 'heavy'."
Girls approached Scott's fiction with anticipation. However, wartime readers were used to the two hundred and fifty page novel, and the action and visual clarity of the historical movie.23 The opacity of a style where it takes one hundred and forty six pages to cover the hero's first day of travel (I am using Quentin Durward as an example here, but Scott's slow, discursive beginnings are easily demonstrable through many of his novels), meant that in this locus, despite some official encouragement, Scott's direct influence was minimal.
There was a further difference between the world girl readers had been presented with through the shorter poems and the world of the novels. Scott's fiction shows certain aspects of 'historical' society in much greater detail, so the wartime reader was able to recognise its rigidly hierarchical nature, the power of patriarchal force in its structure and the resulting circumscription of female lives.
Female characters who strive towards, and achieve, some personal agency in Scott's novels are doomed to romantic unfulfilment, like Jewish Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Her competence, as well as her race, seals her fate as one of those women 'who have devoted their thoughts to heaven and their actions to works of kindness to men, tending the sick, feeding the hungry and relieving the distressed.' Although through her the time-honoured tasks of the 'good woman' are given public value, she does not have the author's unqualified approval. She is the woman of rationality rather than 'sensibility'. Rowena, noble by birth and the incarnation of 'gentleness and goodness', and patience, is awarded Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the English knight in whom the Saxon sense of honour and the Norman love of personal adventure come to be joined. It is this young woman who is the means to his line (his family). In a novel Scott intended to show the historicity of the spirit of 'England',24 she is the embodiment of what he considers to be the pinnacle of Anglo-saxon femininity.
One result of these complexities is that Scott's writing appears to have possibly introduced for some, and clearly reinforced for more of these Australian wartime girl readers, two concepts. Sir Walter's work offered the idea of the historical, European-based novel demonstrating personal codes and the possibility of romantic and sexual fulfilment. In addition, it explored in social and personal detail events which could be read as both culturally meaningful and exciting. Even though the way in which his stories were framed made them uninteresting to these readers, he revealed that historical Europe was, in the words of my respondent Richmal, 'the place for the interesting stories'.
Thus, in the secondary school library, Scott's works can be seen as one of the centres of the recognition by wartime adolescent girl readers that European romances, set in historical times, had possibilities of satisfaction. Respondents often recalled that throughout these years they approached his work voluntarily. At the same time, such readers also record how, after beginning to read, they rejected his longer writings.
Many of the same respondents made clear their preference was for 'historical' fiction written in a style commensurate with most of their novel reading, and representing some of their own contemporary perceptions of the social roles of girls and young women. Barbara, whose education had already exposed her to Scott, began reading as an 'Anglophile' (her term) the stories of Georgette Heyer. Such examples are numerous among the recollections of state and private school library readers. Heyer's most frequently mentioned novel, both among my respondents and the respondents to WJ Scott's survey, These Old Shades (published 1926), has a heroine who moves confidently about the urban, public world in masculine guise before marrying the English Duke of Avon in the closure. She is presented as the ideal wife for Avon in this novel and in Devil's Cub (1934) is used as an image of an approved mother while still occupying a place in the public world. The Masqueraders (published in 1929) is even more explicit in making traditionally masculinist autonomy and public position available to a young woman. Furthermore, the athletic 'Prue's' courage and individualism in a public world suggest to the British nobleman, Sir Anthony Fanshawe, that she would be a loved and ideal wife for him.
Heyer's images of the lives of girls in 'historical' times were satisfying to readers like Janet who wrote that after reading Heyer's Powder and Patch (first published in 1923) at fourteen she 'was hooked. Every available minute and money was spent in reading through every available romance book [Heyer] had.'
While she was by no means as heavily represented as Scott and Dickens, those few historical novels of Heyer's which were seen by the departments of education to accord with the traditions of the genre were on lists approved for secondary school libraries (The Conqueror and Royal Escape for example). Thus Heyer had an approved 'name' on the library lists. In addition, the relative autonomy of school librarians, the dependence on donations and the increasing struggle to find 'suitable' books for school library collections, meant that not only had her some of her romances been placed on the school library shelves before the war, they continued there, and often their numbers were increased throughout the war.25
In conclusion, despite its apparent place in educational philosophy, the concept of the school library did not have a secure foundation in Australian educational practice at this time. As a result, libraries were peripheral adjuncts to much of both elementary and secondary school life.
Libraries could be seen as places for girls who wanted to achieve as members of the middle classes - and sought to do it through the system the school represented.
A conservative spirit informed the collections. Cultural meanings generated through stories about the British metropolitan society were dominant. Traditional roles and the concepts of duty and service to a powerful polity, religious or secular, which had its epicentre on the other side of the world for these readers were emphasised. Yet forces acting on the formation of the wartime library collections and on the presence of the readers themselves had made some of the messages shifting and ambiguous. Girl readers in the secondary libraries of this time were offered a variety of pictures of the roles of women and girls. In parallel with images of submission, passivity and confinement as characteristics of femininity, the libraries also reinforced the concept of public value attaching to traditionally feminine tasks, and developed the ideas of personal pleasure and fulfilment for every individual. At the same time they allowed readers to explore a vision of the competitive, public, modern world that was not wholly masculine.
'There was very little to choose from', recalled Joan, who finished school as a senior at the end of the war. She goes on to complete her point, 'we read what was there.' However, personal experience and preference mediated strongly on the readers' satisfaction with material from the libraries. These forces expanded the possibilities of interaction and fluidity in the perceptions the girls drew from their reading.
Endnotes
(1) Andree Wright, 'The Australian Women's Weekly: Depression and the War Years, Romance and Reality' in Refractory Girl, no. 3, Winter, 1973.
(2) Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890-1930. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992.
(3) Anne Clyde (Head of Department of Library Studies at Western Australia CAE) , 'School Library History', Forum on Australian Library History, Canberra: Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1985. p 18.
(4) Trevor Lummis, 'Structure and Validity in Oral Evidence', The Oral History Reader. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (ed), London: Routledge, 1998. pp 274 -277.
(5) Lyons and Taksa,, p 15.
(6) Roy Lundin, 'School Library Development' in School Librarianship (ed) John Cook, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1981. p 1. Roy Lundin is Head of Department of School Librarianship at Kelvingrove CAE, Brisbane.
(7) 'School Libraries Report' New South Wales Education Gazette, 1 July 1935, p 180.
(8) In 1938 teachers in New South Wales were 'strongly urged' through the pages of the Education Gazette to purchase a copy of the authoritative catalogue prepared in conjunction with the Model School Library. In 1944 the Victorian Standing Committee on Libraries offered a list of approved school library inclusions, Supplement to Vic EG&TA, October, 1944.
(9) Craig Campbell, 'Secondary schooling, modern adolescence and the reconstitution of the middle class', History of Education Review, Vol 24, No 1, 1995 pp 53-73.
(10) Brother Urban Corrigan's report to the Australian Catholic Education Congress, 'The Achievements of the Catholic People of Australia in the Field of Education', p 290.
(11) The 1938 Review of Education demonstrates that this process was already clearly established by the beginning of the war.
(12) D M Waddington, W C Radford, J A Keats. Review of Education in Australia, 1940 - 1948. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research: Melbourne University Press, 1950, p 255.
(13) The NSW Minister of Education finally acknowledged the virtual impossibility of obtaining any new books and requested that schools' take extra care in maintaining their libraries (NSW Gazette 1.6.1944) after which there were no more real library initiatives until late in the war.
(14) Abbotsleigh, with its five hundred girls, recorded additions of two hundred and forty one books and magazines in 1941 alone, and an acerbic note from the librarian that 'the library is a long way from being equipped for a school of this size' ('Library Notes', The Weaver. Abbotsleigh, 1941. p 37). Despite 'transplants' to larger premises as it developed, suitable reading and study areas, as well as areas for collection storage, appear always to have been considered (Denys Burrows, History of Abbotsleigh, Sydney: The Council of Abbotsleigh, 1968).
(15) Mac Robertson Girls' High School in Victoria was a well-established school; a selective which had grown from the nucleus of co-educational Melbourne High School and settled under its new name and in new premises in 1935. While it suffered all the wartime trials and upheavals known to Australian schools, including a short evacuation in 1942, its libraries were relatively extensive. The '3rd and 4th Form Library', by 1949 held approximately fifteen hundred books, mainly novels. The 'Reference Library' had well over six thousand volumes by 1950.
(16) Wollongong High School, with approximately five hundred students (R W Gray and G L Urwin, Wollongong High School 1916 - 1966. Wollongong: Wollongong High School, 1966. p 30), was a selective school in a relatively large provincial city in New South Wales. It had a small but independent central library. By the beginning of 1948 its accession register had listed four hundred and twenty three books; wartime library notes, detailing its additions, both accord with this level of collection and reveal the struggle behind the achievement.
(17) There were of course the book subsidies. Some states, South Australia is a case in point, provided 'essential furniture' (Australian Education Review, 1940-1948, p 101) and maintenance (Queensland), but other furnishings were purchased through local interest. In 1943 the library at Wollongong High School was only able to offer one day a week 'in a small dark room at the foot of the girls' stair' to each of the years to change books.
(18) Jill Ker Conway, The Road From Coorain, Minerva Press, 1992. p 102. Walford, A History of the School, Helen Jones and Nina Morrison, Adelaide: Hyde Park Press, 1968, p 33.
19) 'English Literature: A Witness to the Church' was presented at this Congress for 'A Religious of the Sacred Heart Order'. Another paper, entitled 'The Use of Secular Subjects as a Medium of Religious Formation', was presented for M M Evangelist, a religious of the Ursuline Order. Australian Catholic Education Congress, Adelaide, Australia, November 8th-15th, 1936. Melbourne: The Advocate Press.
(20) W J Scott, Reading, Film and Radio Tastes of High School Boys and Girls, Christchurch: New Zealand Council for Educational Research - Whitcombe and Tombs, 1947. p 10.
(21) W J Scott, p11.
(22) The Poets' Commonwealth, a junior poetry book with four Scott poems was listed in NSW in 1939, 1940, 1942; in Queensland in 1943, 1944, 1945, in South Australia in 1942, 1943,1944 and in Western Australia in 1939, 1944 and 1945. The Bond of Poetry, with two Scott inclusions appeared in NSW in 1941 and 1944 lists, in Queensland in 1939, 1943,1944 and 1945. The Treasury of Verse Part III with three inclusions in 1945 in NSW and 1939 in Western Australia.
(23) Despite the fact that my survey asked respondents to consider what they had read during the war years, it is impossible to overlook the number of spontaneous references to film, either general or specific. The Adventures of Robin Hood was released in Australia in September, 1938, and was showing in Sydney in October of that year.(SMH 6 Oct 1938). Even small provincial towns like Camden had energetic cinema programmes throughout the war. Camden girls would have been able to see the following 'historical' movies in the first half of 1939: Marie Antoinette, The Story of Louis Pasteur, Suez (a movie biography of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the engineer responsible for the Suez Canal) and The Three Musketeers.(Ian Willis provided the database from which this information came.)
(24) Sir Walter Scott's 1830 'Introduction' to this novel which was first published in 1820. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott, Bart, London: Daily Express Publications, 1933.p 13.
(25) Abbotsleigh included her more straightforward historical novel, Royal Escape, in its collection in 1940. Mac Robertson had four of Heyer's romances, of varying accession numbers, scattered throughout its Third and Fourth Form Library accession list just after the war: These Old Shades, Beauvallet, Devil's Cub, These Old Shades (second copy). By this stage it was also in the process of adding more. The Foundling was included in 1949, the year after its publication. Mac Robertson's Reference Library also included a 1930 edition of These Old Shades!
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