Free and Public

Andrew Carnegie and the Libraries of Wales

Ralph A. Griffiths

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

A study of the thirty-five Carnegie libraries built in towns and industrial communities in Wales before the First World War. The library system is in a transformative phase that attracts much attention; these Carnegie buildings have never been fully recorded, and some are in critical condition. This book illustrates their social, cultural and architectural significance, and how they reflect Carnegie's extraordinary philanthropic vision. It reviews the free and public library system in Wales and Great Britain from the first Public Libraries Act of 1850, followed by an account of Carnegie's career as 'the richest man in the world' and the importance he attached to promoting libraries for all, regardless of age and gender. The haphazard development of public libraries in the nineteenth century is the context in which Carnegie's links with Wales are noted, along with the circles in which he moved in Britain. The largest section discusses the libraries' locations, sites and patrons, and the buildings themselves. It concludes with Carnegie's legacy in Wales, not least the role of his UK Trust in the county library movement after 1911.

ONE

THE PUBLIC
LIBRARY

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

John Ruskin, Of Kings’ Treasuries (1865)

And a century later,

What we must try to see is that those who want to learn to read fully can do so and that they be allowed the critical space and freedom from competing noise in which to practise their passion.

George Steiner, On Difficulty (1978)

FREE PUBLIC libraries are at the heart of civil society in the United Kingdom and stand as witness to its quality. During the twentieth century they strove to bring knowledge, learning and leisure to the entire population, men, women and children, if more easily in towns and cities than in country districts – and they continue to do so. At the beginning of the century the challenge was to establish free public libraries from coast to coast and to sustain them by engaging the public that they were intended to serve. At the century’s end, the challenge appears to have been to maintain the publicly funded countrywide library system which had emerged by mid-century to enrich ‘the cultural fabric of communities’, despite the consequences of two world wars.¹ This is as true of Wales as it is of the other countries of the United Kingdom.

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the Scots-American industrial entrepreneur and philanthropist, was a pivotal figure during early stages of this saga, in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and more broadly in the United States of America and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. His permanent legacy is represented by a considerable number of Carnegie Foundation Trusts, which continue to support cultural, educational and other causes, and, in Wales, by library buildings which remain part of the country’s social, cultural, educational and architectural heritage.

THE CARNEGIE LIBRARIES OF WALES

The following list is arranged and numbered alphabetically. It is displayed on the map opposite according to the pre-1974 counties of Wales. The Gazeteer of Carnegie libraries later in the book is arranged similarly.

1. Abercanaid (Glamorgan)

2. Aberfan (Glamorgan)

3. Abergavenny (Monmouthshire)

4. Aberystwyth (Cardiganshire)

5. Bangor (Caernarfonshire)

6. Barry (Glamorgan)

7. Bridgend (Glamorgan)

8. Brynmawr (Breconshire)

9. Buckley (Flintshire)

10. Canton (Glamorgan)

11. Cathays (Glamorgan)

12. Church Village (Glamorgan)

13. Coedpoeth (Denbighshire)

14. Colwyn Bay (Denbighshire)

15. Cricieth (Caernarfonshire)

16. Deiniolen (Caernarfonshire)

17. Dolgellau (Merioneth)

18. Dowlais (Glamorgan)

19. Flint (Flintshire)

20. Llandrindod Wells (Radnorshire)

21. Llandudno (Caernarfonshire)

22. Merthyr Tydfil (Glamorgan)

23. Newport (Monmouthshire)

24. Penarth (Glamorgan)

25. Penydarren (Glamorgan)

26. Pontypool (Monmouthshire)

27. Rhyl (Flintshire)

28. Rogerstone (Monmouthshire)

29. Skewen (Glamorgan)

30. Tai-bach (Glamorgan)

31. Trecynon (Glamorgan)

32. Treharris (Glamorgan)

33. Troedyrhiw (Glamorgan)

34. Whitchurch (Glamorgan)

35. Wrexham (Denbighshire)

The Carnegie Libraries of Wales

Carnegie was a remarkably successful industrialist and steel-maker who became one of the world’s most notable entrepreneurs and philanthropists. He is judged to be ‘the world’s first modern philanthropist’ and, according to his fellow billionaire J. P. Morgan, during his lifetime the world’s richest man. In the winter of 2013–14 an exhibition held at the Scottish Parliament by the Carnegie Trust UK (in association with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) celebrated his international educational and cultural legacy. His native Scotland has been a handsome beneficiary of this legacy, but Carnegie did not neglect Wales, especially in the way he helped to create public libraries in communities where few or none had existed before. Yet his Welsh legacy has been neglected, not least because the extent of his personal support for library provision in Wales has not been fully identified and recorded. A proposal in December 2013 that his and the Trust’s philanthropy in Wales should be celebrated with an exhibition at the National Assembly for Wales was not pursued.²

However, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales’s website, www.coflein.org.uk, has begun to record some of the thirty or so libraries which were created as a result of generous gifts by Carnegie himself, totalling thousands of pounds, in the decade before the First World War – and that is aside from the grants he offered and which, for a variety of reasons, were not taken up. The Carnegie libraries of Wales helped to boost the public library movement in Wales and were instrumental in transforming the lives of the communities they served, in all parts of Wales from Dolgellau to Barry, from Tai-bach to Wrexham. Now that public libraries are facing financial difficulties and, in some cases, a less certain future, Carnegie’s support for towns and parishes which were keen to sponsor free libraries for the general public is an inspiring example of how private wealth can be set to the public good.

Some Carnegie libraries – such as the buildings at Abergavenny (opened in 1906), Bangor (1907) and Treharris (1909) – continue to function as libraries, engaging the public and inspiring pride in those who work in them. A few are neglected (including Aberystwyth’s library, opened in 1906), and yet others have been strikingly refurbished by their local authorities (as at Colwyn Bay (1905) and Cathays, Cardiff (1907)), or are now given over to other public community purposes (as in Brynmawr (1905) and Bridgend (1907)). Only a very small number have been either disposed of (such as the small library at Troedyrhiw) or demolished (as in Abercanaid (1903)).

Like church and chapel buildings in Wales, the Carnegie libraries were built close to the heart of their communities, acting as community centres and meeting places or else, more fundamentally, as freely available havens for quiet contemplation and self-improvement. Today, when the professional public librarian seems to be about to join the ranks of endangered species, the local librarian and their (usually volunteer) assistants who staff these libraries are the successors of those librarians who have been able over the past century and more to place their specialist knowledge at the disposal of young readers as well as adult men and women, the poor and the better-off – in short, ‘the public’ − and whose skills and experience introduced others to reading for the first time and thereby changed lives, deploying what has been identified as their ‘capacity for empathy’. Simon Jenkins, writer, architectural historian and chronicler of our own times, has described the potential role of the library well:

Libraries and churches have a shared metaphysic. [Libraries] embody the cultural identity of a place as its archive, museum and collective memory … The Victorian tycoon Andrew Carnegie, first great patron of public libraries in Britain and America, dreamed of one in every town and village. His vision awaits renaissance.³

With an even broader social and cultural agendum in mind, the novelist and playwright Irvine Welsh, like Carnegie a patriotic Scot who relocated to America, recently wrote in the free weekly magazine the Big Issue about libraries, alongside independent bookstores, as ‘these little boot-camps of interaction where people can go’.⁴

TWO

ANDREW CARNEGIE, 1835–1919

ANDREW CARNEGIE was born into a poor household in the town of Dunfermline in Fife. His father was a humble handloom linen weaver by trade and a nonconformist in religion, with Chartist sympathies. Depression in the domestic linen industry caused the family to leave for America in 1848, moving to the Pittsburgh area where relatives had already settled some years before. As the elder of two sons, at the age of thirteen Andy (as he was known) took a job as a bobbin-boy in a local cotton factory. The sheer energy and thi...