I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by AHTV and the Arts and Humanities Research Council this week. It took place at the Barbican Centre on Wednesday 5th February, so I travelled down the previous evening, and back to Glasgow on Thursday. The whole purpose of the event was to provide academic researchers with an opportunity to meet with TV professionals, and to learn more about getting one’s research discovered and disseminated through the medium of television.
It was a most informative day. I must confess to feeling a little star-struck when I realised that the keynote address was by Bettany Hughes, whom I’ve seen and admired on television history programmes. Similarly, hearing about the making of ‘Suffragettes’ with Lucy Worsley was fascinating – even if Lucy herself wasn’t actually there! I also availed myself of the opportunity to have a speed meeting with a TV professional.
I’d genuinely love to have the opportunity to get the Claimed From Stationers’ Hall network research out to a wider audience, but my first problem is the fact that we need big names or significant events to hang our story on. However, our primary heroine – Elizabeth Williams, nee Lambert – was, on the face of it a complete nonentity in terms of big names or big achievements. It goes without saying that she wasn’t a nobody in my opinion! (See A Labour of Love for Miss Lambert, also on this blog.) Of course, we know that her music catalogue was significant and highly useful to the music lovers of St Andrews in the late Georgian era. It made the collection much more easily navigable, and hence more useable.
In the wider scheme of things, it demonstrates the importance of work that goes on behind the scenes in libraries to this day. Very few professional cataloguers have a prominent public profile, and Miss Lambert certainly wasn’t a professional of any kind – she was paid a tiny amount for producing a catalogue, and that appears to be the sum total of her ‘official’ involvement. She married at a fairly late age and went off to join her husband, his mother and brothers, in Islington – and there’s not a lot more known about her life apart from her gift of her shell collection to the Natural History Society of Northumbria not long before her death. You could say that her life went as unnoticed as the vast majority of women of her era (and indeed subsequent eras), and yet those two handwritten music catalogue volumes do have significance in their own way.
We have to bear in mind that this veritable mountain of legal deposit music wasn’t exactly what most Georgian university officials wanted in their libraries – it was the books on law, theology, medicine and science that they had their eyes on. The St Andrews professors maybe took a different attitude to most, in allowing non-university music lovers to borrow music through the good offices of their professorial friends. The collection that was clearly important to Miss Lambert was heavily used by both men and women – I interrogated the music in terms of what was most borrowed by various categories of readers. Considering that there were parallel collections in several other legal deposit libraries, we were keen to compare what survived elsewhere, but nowhere else are there borrowing records or evidence of such intensive use. So many stories – but can I argue the case for a television documentary? Well, let’s see!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 