Sandy 4 St Albans

They are not magic mushrooms of course but the very poisonous Fly Agaric – or “Amanite-tue-mouches” according to my French sister-in-law when she saw my photograph.  This morning they were adorning the lawns in front of Britain’s only prime ministerial library, Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden just outside Chester.

As well as being Liberal Prime Minister on four separate occasions and sitting in Parliament for over sixty years, William Ewart Gladstone was a prodigious reader.  He owned 33,000 volumes and from his diaries we know that he read at least 22,000 of them, with  many annotated in his own hand.

He formed the idea of turning this collection into a public resource – to “bring together books without readers and readers without books”.  Once he had determined that the collection should stay in rural Hawarden where he lived, the library needed residential accommodation for those coming from the cities to use it.  Initially he built a corrugated iron “tin tabernacle” for the books and converted a former grammar school into a dormitory.  At the age of 82 with only the help of his daughter and one servant, he wheel-barrowed his collection over from Hawarden Castle to the new library.

After he died, a new permanent structure with accommodation was built as a permanent memorial to the Grand Old Man.  The original 33,000 book collection has now increased to 250,000 volumes.  The galleried reading rooms, with alcoves created by intriguing three-sided bookcases of his own devising, are sublimely peaceful places to read and study.

(Gladstone also thought up the concept of rolling bookcases during a particularly boring debate in the House of Commons.  Now in common use worldwide, they were first used in the Bodleian at Oxford where he was MP for the university).

Students can still stay in the library for £30 per day covering dinner, bed and breakfast, but anyone else can come and stay too at remarkably modest prices.  Since 2000, 521 published books have seen the light of day from authors who sought peace and access to the magnificent reference collections.  You can find more details at http://www.st-deiniols.com/

Why was I there on this weekend?  It was for a study weekend on some of the writings of John Buchan, organised in conjunction with the John Buchan Society.  Buchan was a Conservative Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities.  But just before he died he wrote to a friend that he had concluded that he was really a Gladstonian Liberal, so the symposium was not wholly out of place.

And the symposium turned out to have a St Albans connection .  Laura Buchan, great grand-daughter of John Buchan, talked about his very early historical novel including A Lost Lady of Old Years.  This story is set at the time of the second Jacobite rebellion, and a key character in the story is Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the last person in Britain to be beheaded for treason.  As she noted in her talk, Fraser, on the last night of his journey as  prisoner from Scotland to London for trial and execution,  stayed in St Albans at the White Hart Hotel on Holywell Hill.  William Hogarth happened to be there at the same time and produced a remarkable likeness.

A copy of this extraordinary portrait used to hang in the bar at the White Hart.  It is no longer where it used to be.   I hope they have not got rid of it: it always seemed to me one of those little flashes of historical connection which make St Albans such a remarkable place.