By Lizzie Shannon-Little and Martin Maw
The very settled life of Oxford University Press was turned upside down at the outbreak of the First World War; 356 of the approximately 700 men that worked for the Press were conscribed, the majority in the first few months. The reduction of half of the workforce and the ever-present uncertainty of the return of friends and colleagues must have made the Press a very difficult place to work.
At the time, the man in charge of the Press was the Secretary Charles Cannan, and the Printer, responsible for the printing house, was Horace Hart (best remembered for Hart’s Rules). The steady dissolution of Hart’s workforce, made up of generations of men he had known for years from the close-knit community of Jericho, was thought to be too much for the Printer. He retired and sadly took his own life in 1916. Hart was succeeded by Frederick Hall, who served as Printer from 1915 to 1925.
Women filled many of the gaps in the workforce, both on the print floor and in the offices. Previously, women could only be found in the bindery, and this change must have been revolutionary for all those who worked at the Press, men and women alike.
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The OUP Oxford War Memorial
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On Active Service, War Work At Home 1914-1919
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God Save the King sign erected at OUP Oxford
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Flower and Vegetable Show in the Oxford quad
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Printer Frederick Hall
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Printer Horace Hart
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Secretary Charles Cannan
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OUP Oxford quadrangle, early 20th century
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During the war, publishing continued at OUP, including Oxford Pamphlets, Shakespeare’s England (produced to mark 300 years since Shakespeare’s death in 1916), and also some secret document printing on the behalf of British Naval intelligence (much of which still remains a mystery). The Press also took on responsibility for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography during this time, which was bequeathed to it from another publishing house and proved to be a challenging task in bringing it up to the academic standards expected from OUP.
The remaining staff endeavoured to keep up a sense of community and morale; they started an annual Flower and Vegetable Show with produce they grew on the allotments allocated on the nearby Port Meadow. The growing of home produce was particularly essential to Britain after the German submarine blockades, which caused huge food shortages.
A number of the men from OUP were positioned on the front line during their service, and many others ended up in Greece, Egypt, and as far flung as Russia. For these men, the majority of whom had never been outside of Oxford, the experiences that awaited them abroad must have been overwhelming, and, for many, devastating. A total of 45 men were lost to the war; 44 on active service and one who died after his return from injuries sustained in battle. In 1920, the Press produced a book, On Active Service, War Work At Home 1914-1919 recording the events at the Press during the war and also giving the service record of all the men who were conscribed. A War Memorial to commemorate the soldiers who had died was also erected. The memorial still stands in the OUP Oxford quad today, and is still the centre for the Press’ own Remembrance Day each year.
Lizzie Shannon-Little is Community Manager at Oxford University Press. Martin Maw is an Archivist at Oxford University Press. The Archive Department also manages the Press Museum at OUP in Oxford. Watch the first in a series of videos with Martin, examining how life at the Press irrevocably changed between 1914-1919.
In the centenary of World War I, Oxford University Press has gathered together resources to offer depth, detail, perspective, and insight. There are specially commissioned contributions from historians and writers, free resources from OUP’s world-class research projects, and exclusive archival materials. Visit the First World War Centenary Hub each month for fresh updates.
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The post Oxford University Press during World War I appeared first on OUPblog.
This year marks the centenary of the start of the First World War. This cataclysmic event in world history has been examined by many scholars with different angles over the intervening years, but the academic community hopes to gain fresh insight into the struggles of war on this anniversary. From newly digitized diaries to never-before-seen artifacts, new stories of the war are taking shape.
Oxford University Press has its own war story. With publishing dating back to the fifteenth century, the Press also felt the effects of the war: the rupture of a strong community and culture in the Jericho neighborhood of Oxford, the broken lives of the men and women of the Press who enlisted, the shadow of the Press still operating on the homefront in Oxford, and the disastrous return home — for those who did. We present the first in a series of videos with Oxford University Press Archivist Martin Maw, examining how life at the Press irrevocably changed between 1914-1919. Here he sets the stage for life in Jericho before the outbreak of war.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Martin Maw is an Archivist at Oxford University Press. The Archive Department also manages the Press Museum at OUP in Oxford. Read his previous blog posts: “Jericho: The community at the heart of Oxford University Press” and “Sir Robert Dudley, midwife of Oxford University Press.”
In the centenary of World War I, Oxford University Press has gathered together resources to offer depth, detail, perspective, and insight. There are specially commissioned contributions from historians and writers, free resources from OUP’s world-class research projects, and exclusive archival materials. Visit the First World War Centenary Hub each month for fresh updates.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post A publisher before wartime appeared first on OUPblog.
Justyna Zajac, Publicity
In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.
Martin Maw is an Archivist at Oxford University Press, UK. Keep reading to learn about how he was charmed by libraries at an early age.
Though I never analysed it at the time, the power and charm of libraries took me over at a young age. I grew up in a fairly isolated town, long before anyone had even dreamt of the Internet, and the local library was the only way I had to explore my culture. Consequently, teenage Saturday mornings were often spent ferreting round that glass and concrete cube near the town hall, trying to find an alternative to school texts or to the unfathomably dull novels I knew at home.
It didn’t take long. Like many adolescents, I immersed myself in science fiction – though I read probably more of Ray Bradbury than any other writer. These days, I find Bradbury far too overblown and theatrical, but those are exactly the qualities that appeal to an impressionable 13 year-old: he seemed to be writing in wild colour when everything else I read was a tentative black and white. Bradbury was also the first writer I found who expressed the mystery of libraries themselves. His novel Something Wicked This Way Comes hinges on a small-town library and its caretaker, and exactly evokes suspended, after-hours atmosphere of deserted book stacks – places where anything may be revealed at the flick of a page. Equally, in writing Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury showed that books and stories can be dangerous things in themselves – you might have to memorise a text that was too risky to physically possess, and in some sense be taken over by that book. It wasn’t until much later I understood that Bradbury might be saying something else: that some people can get possessed by texts, that they can become walking repositories of other people’s words and thoughts, and that this can be a deprivation, even a threat to their very sense of self. It’s a theme handled with much greater subtlety – and menace – by Shirley Jackson in her story “The Tooth,” and in M. John Harrison’s work, especially The Course of the Heart: a mournful, visionary fantasy about the futility of fantasy itself, and (for my money) one of the best novels published in the past thirty ears. Needless to say, Bradbury’s implied caution is one you need to observe every day when working as a publisher – or as their archivist.
The enchantment of libraries persisted. I went to university in the Midlands, and discovered an open-shelf treasure house that offered everything from V.S. Pritchett’s short stories to obscure works by the Beats, Lorca, and Burton’s rare translation of the Arabian Nights. None of this was on my syllabus – I endured two months of pointless misery, trying to read law, before switching to a history degree – but that didn’t matter. I was after an education; I got one. Or rather, I started on one. The more you read, the more you realise how little you’ve read.
That came home to me when I started working at the Bodleian Library. Not to experience its spell is, I think, impossible: you seem to inhabit a vast, hushed pavilion of ivory stone, which floats at one remove from the crowded lanes around it in Oxford city centre. But for a reader, its stacks are mania made visible. The gorgeous architecture is just a penthouse. Under it lie five floors of subterranean shelves, some 90 miles in total, holding not only every book you’ve ever read, but also all the ones you’ve never read and never will. You see where Jorge Luis Borges, a librarian himself, got his inspiration. Standing in the midst of the Bodleian’s shelving, it’s easy to imagine that the stacks stretch to infinity, as in Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” and that their volumes capture every conceivable combination of letters – including this article. It’s said that the ancient library at Alexandria had a motto carved on its wall: “The Place of the Cure of the Soul.” Underground in Bodley, you might well think the opposite. This would be an easy place to go mad.
All of which helps to explain the lasting mystery of libraries, even with the “gimmethat” reach of the Internet. Good libraries are zones outside the mundane. They show you what you never imagined. They can put you in touch with the dead voices, take you to imaginary or vanished places: as in séance, you’re suddenly on those extraordinary blue lawns Fitzgerald glimpsed after dark at ‘20s society parties, or at Einstein’s elbow as he writes, very carefully, for the first time, “E=mc²”. Libraries are time travel on the cheap. But more than that, those ordered books on quiet shelves order ourselves in their turn, and help us keep our small intelligence in perspective: for, as an 18th century rabbi once noted, no matter how many books we absorb in our life, we have not yet truly read the first page.
