Heating in the Old Classics Library
Readers of the Faculty alumni e-newsletter will know that we are employing the contents of the old Mill Lane Library filing cabinet to travel in time. Our destination? The former Classics Library, which from 1933 to 1982 was located on the top floor of the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms.
The Mill Lane Lecture Rooms
From: Library Annual Report 1952-53:
During the Lent Term, an electrical heater was installed in the Palaeographic Room. Recently the boilers heating the Lecture Rooms and the Main Library have been renewed. It is hoped that the inadequate heating of the Library during recent years will have been remedied.
Alas, the hope proved to be misplaced! Read on…
Carbon-copy of a letter from M.I. Finley (Faculty Chairman) to the Secretary-General of the Faculties, The Old Schools, dated 7 November 1968.
Dear Sartain
For more than two years we have been trying to get something done about the very inadequate heating in the Faculty Library. Although there has been some patching up, the situation remains intolerable. The other day the thermometer read 52, and staff and students have been complaining bitterly. I am told that Mrs. Easterling was compelled to conduct her palaeography classes in her coat.
I appreciate that this problem does not fall directly within the province of the General Board. But I am hopeful that the Board may take cognizance of it and direct that a solution be found as quickly as possible,
Yours sincerely,
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… there were bitter complaints from Faculty members after the University switched off the heating on 31st March 2023. And more bitter complaints when the University declined to switch on the heating in October 2023…
‘52’ is 11 degrees centigrade. Mrs. Easterling is now Professor Emerita Pat Easterling. Professor Moses Finley (1912-1986) was perhaps the most celebrated ancient historian of his day, and his books still appear on undergraduate reading lists. Note that although this letter dates from that year of world-wide social upheaval 1968, senior members of the University continued to address each other by surname! The letter was probably dictated to the Faculty Secretary (Mrs Kemp) in the Chairman’s office on the ground floor at 20 Silver Street (amid clouds of cigarette smoke).
Note also the concise, emphatic, telegraphic style of English, with its precise vocabulary: very inadequate, remains intolerable, complaining bitterly, compelled to conduct, fall directly, take cognizance of it and direct. Is the high style a side-effect of dictation to a secretary, rather than our present-day mode of direct typing?
The sequel: Library Report for 1968-69:
Improved heating in Mill Lane has made the Library a much more tolerable place in which to work.
Evidentally, Professor Finley’s eloquent appeal to those in high places did not fall on deaf ears!
But if heating is a perennial library issue, the ‘lending’ of rooms can involve occasional contretemps also:
Letter from E.J. Kenney (Faculty Chairman) to Mr Donald Smith (Financial Board) dated 12 August 1971.
After our telephone conversation yesterday about the alleged misuse of the Faculty Common Room and Palaeography Room in the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms by employees of the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board, I have been to view the scene myself. I find that the actual signs of physical damage are very small indeed. The most vexatious one is literally a matter of pin-pricks: to make goals for some kind of table football it appears that paper cups were fastened with drawing pins to the ends of some of the Palaeography Room tables. It is clear that these people made a tremendous mess but Mr Curran [the Mill Lane custodian]thought that it was no more than what was to be expected at the end of a three weeks occupation.
It is clear that there was misuse of the rooms, and supervision of those working in them cannot have been adequate…For instance, when a generous provision of ashtrays is made they ought to be used not tables and window-sills. I ought perhaps to remark that the decoration of the Common Room was completely the work of volunteers both senior and junior, from the Faculty of Classics. Naturally there is a tendency to identify with these facilities, which seems to me quite on the whole an admirable thing: this sort of pride is not all that common nowadays.
Professor E.J. Kenney (1924-2019), usually known as ‘Ted’, was Kennedy Professor of Latin from 1974 to 1982. He co-founded with Professor Pat Easterling the famous commentary series known officially as the ‘Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics’, but near-universally as the ‘Green and Yellows’. Their distinctively-coloured spines fill nine shelves in the present-day Classics Library. We may safely assume that there are many more volumes to come!
The Green and Yellows