Magic, Music, Mastering & Teeth: Meet Shrewsbury's Own Gareth Jenkins....

 ....aka God. ‘I’ve been plagued by that,’ Gareth says.  We’re in the Lion Hotel having a quiet drink, and Gareth is looking back upon his starring role in the recent production of Noye’s Fludde. ‘You go into a restaurant and ask if there's a table, and the answer comes back Yes, for God. All my priest and minister friends warned me about the danger of becoming God with a hat,' says Gareth, 'but I had to do it, didn’t I? I ignored all their warnings.  I thought I’d be behind a pillar booming forth, but oh no, Maggie Love had me up in the pulpit in a gold wallpaper frock for all the town to see. Now I’ll never live it down.’

I’m quite sure that Gareth will live it down. Shrewsbury expects nothing less from him.  Whether it’s dressed up as God intoning in his rolling Welsh accent or popping up on the telly in Come Dine With Me, Gareth Jenkins is a continual ‘watch this space’.  The one thing you don’t expect from him is a quiet life.

When the phone goes, Elizabeth hands it to Gareth.  ‘It’ll be for you,’ she says. Along with their four wonderful now fairly grown up children, she is high on Gareth’s list of things in life that define who he is [‘couldn’t have done anything without her toleration and support/everybody knows I married someone quite amazing/to be married to a chap like me, all these irons in the fire, is no easy task’].  But even higher on Gareth’s list is the word ‘Dentist’.

Gareth Jenkins is my dentist.  When we first met some thirty-three years ago, I’d no love of dentists and the newly qualified young Gareth wasn’t that impressed with me.  Or, at least, he wasn’t with my teeth. Things have improved since then. Thanks to him I never lost them, and I’m no longer terrified of dentists. Perhaps he hypnotized me - I can’t quite remember. Or perhaps he cast a spell on me.

Magic doesn’t feature on Gareth’s list, but it should. At five years old in his home town, Llanidloes, Gareth mastered his first trick. During his primary school years he worked at developing his skills. At the age of ten he put on an hour-long show at the church Christmas party.   ‘My parents were wholly supportive,’ Gareth says, sitting back in his chair, glasses stuck on top of his head, beaming at the memory. ‘I had two other brothers who were quiet, reasonable sort of children, then there was this middle brother, me, who liked nothing better than singing and performing.  I was a bit of a star turn over the next few years. In and around Llanidoes.  I’d do church events, and then the Liberal Party got hold of me, and to prove I had no political bias I performed for the Tories. Back and forth, that kept me busy.’

Gareth became a regular feature in the County Times. One day his Headmaster called him into his office to reprimand him. If he carried on this way, he said, Gareth would get nowhere in life. The Head didn’t want to see Gareth’s photo in the County Times again.

‘My next show was coming up at a Young Offenders’ institution.’ Gareth smiles at the memory. ‘But I had to insist on anonymity. I got my back on that Head, though. I won a significant essay competition and the prize was £100 of book tokens. That was a huge sum in those days. Seriously, a lot of money. I spent the whole lot on magic books, and because the competition had been entered via the school the Head had to sign for them. 

‘That was Llanidloes County School. I was Head Boy. The way they worked things there, if you were a girl you studied French and History and if you were a boy you were funneled into Physics and Maths.  I wanted to study Biology too, and then Music on top of that, and for some reason that really threw them. Finally I was allowed to take the subjects I wanted, but then when it came to the exams it turned out that the teacher had got confused and taught the wrong syllabus. We opened our exam paper and didn’t have a clue what it was about.  But the Headmaster swung it somehow. He was brilliant. He wrote an impressive letter to the exam board and that did the trick.’

When Gareth was at school, he was very keen on essay competitions. One was run by the joint Welsh Examination Board. Gareth won it twice. His prize was an all expenses paid trip to the Eisteddfod.  ‘That changed my life,’ Gareth says. ‘I discovered choral music. Primarily it’s been Bulgarian and Eastern European choirs that have interested me.’

I remember bumping into Gareth once at the Eisteddfod.  I was with my husband. He told us who to listen to and who would win. He was right. Over the year’s he’s visited Eastern Europe on a regular basis - Bulgaria, in particular, where he’s made many friends.  He likes the complex rhythms of their music and has risen to the challenge of transposing those rhythms onto English or Welsh words, Welsh preferably because, he says, the natural rhythm of Welsh is more musical.

Gareth has attended choir competitions all over Europe; France, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria.  He’s got to know the Bulgarian conductors and composers, whom he describes as interesting people. ‘Back in the old days of communism they were elevated by the state,’ he says. ‘They were very hospitable. I was invited to a lot of festivals representing Great Britain.  Flights, cars, dinners etc – it would all be paid for.  When communism went, so did all of this.’

For the last few years, Gareth and his wife have been looking after a Bulgarian boy, sponsoring him to study at Shrewsbury School, where he has a scholarship, and looking after him at weekends. He’s a remarkable pianist, Gareth says. One of the best the school has ever had.  Probably he’ll go on to the Royal College of Music. His name’s Galin Ganchev.

In addition, Gareth also composes.  These are works he describes as ‘done for my own interest, largely as an academic pursuit’. Generally his work is quirky, he says. Maybe that sort of thing will become fashionable one day, who knows?  ‘I’ll have a shot at anything,’ he says. 

That could well be the motto for Gareth’s life. Everywhere the conversation takes us, a new interest pops up.  Take Gareth’s fascination for garden architecture, which he designs and builds.  His garden, he says, is littered with structures. There is literally no room for any more pergolas, pagodas, potting sheds and other exotic structures, including the one he built for his children. With its pool table and computers this has now become a ‘community games room’, attracting gatherings of his children, their friends and random associates most nights of the week. 

‘Every year I build something,’ says Gareth. ‘I sometimes wonder how I have the energy.  My conservatory took me the whole year. I’m very proud of my conservatory.’

Gareth has a lot to be proud of, not least the dental practice that he’s built up from scratch. What led him into dentistry, I want to know. ‘I wanted a job that would use my hands,’ he says.  ‘I was good with my hands - all the practicing magic had probably done that - and everybody said that Llanidloes needed a good dentist, so my path seemed set.’

‘Except that you didn’t go back to Llanidloes,’ I point out.  ‘No, I came to Shrewsbury,’ Gareth says. ‘The plan after college was to do a couple of years here, then move back home. But I stayed.’

When Gareth first came to Shrewsbury he worked at Bellstone. Then he opened his own practice down by the railway station, then finally he took that practice to its current location, Bowdler’s House. My early memories of him are as a dentist who could fascinate children with coins appearing from behind ears as well as sorting out their teeth. One time I remember him hypnotizing a friend of mine who’d refused for years to let a dentist anywhere near her teeth.  

‘I used to lecture on medical and dental hypnosis,’ Gareth says.  ‘It’s effective at eliminating phobias, including fear of dentists.  And of spiders. It was less successful though with giving up smoking.  Hypnotism is all about talking to the subconscious, trying to influence or alter inner feelings. But the power of nicotine is very strong.’

Gareth is a NHS dentist.  ‘As long as I offer a good service, I’ll always be busy,’ he says.  He’s also a Draper.  In fact, he’s this year’s Master Draper, with the flashy-looking fur-edged cloak to prove it.

Gareth loves the Drapers, he says.  Based in the Drapers’ Hall, next to St Mary’s Church, he describes them as genuine, public spirited, three-dimensional people who want to carry on the Guild tradition that first brought Shrewsbury to eminence and made it what it is.  They were the ones who first provided housing for the poor in Shrewsbury. From the old almshouses at St Mary’s [now long since gone, along with the Victorian almshouses that used to be where Waitrose is today] to their current almshouse project out at Holy Cross, the Drapers have had a long-standing interest in providing housing in Shrewsbury for those with little means.

‘I’m loving my year as Master,’ says Gareth. ‘We have a carol service at Christmas to which we invite all our almshouse residents and treat them to lunch. Then we have guest nights when we invite friends and other Guild members from around the country. There are other church services too, like the choral evensong we have at St Chad’s. What we’re trying to do is maintain the traditions of the Drapers with authentic accuracy.' 

'This year the Drapers have the huge challenge of getting the Holy Cross Almshouses built. The existing Holy Cross almshouses next to the Abbey will remain [designed by Samuel Pountney Smith in 1853, regarded as classics of their architectural type and period], along with those managed by the Drapers at Fairford Place and the Hospital of St Giles. However up to twenty more units are planned at that site, providing accommodation  for a further thirty-two residents, bringing the total number up to just over fifty. 

This is a massive project. As well as housing, the development will also provide facilities designed for the benefit of the neighbouring community. ‘Eight of us Drapers are on the Holy Cross board,’ says Gareth. ‘We’ll have several meetings a week with planners and people from the Charity Commission, contractors and so on.  We also have a team of fund raisers who have brought in some incredible donations. This is a 2.7 million pound project. Juggling builders’ start dates and the getting in of grants is really complicated.  It’s on a knife’s edge at the moment.  Christmas. You know what it’s like. Just when you need to talk to people everything is closed for a month.’

There’s a lot more that could be said about Gareth. Governor of Priory School. Running the annual Gregynog Young Musician Competition with a £3,000 prize, for under eighteens. Member of the Shropshire Magic Circle, performing throughout the year in gigs as far-flung as Norway and the Patagonian Welsh. Organizer of extraordinary concerts.

If you haven’t attended Gareth’s annual November concert in aid of the Huntington’s Disease Association, you’ve missed a trick. One of Gareth’s many talents is that he’s good at persuading often really quite famous musicians to come to Shrewsbury and perform. ‘I get talking to them,’ Gareth says. ‘I bring out my magic and show them a few tricks. I lure people in – and once they’re in they want to come back, and to do it for free.’

The concert, typically, will include pop, opera, all forms of music all with their own merits.  There will be young musicians and established ones too. The Maidment Building up at Shrewsbury School will be packed. The after show party usually ends up with the concert starting up again back at Gareth and Elizabeth's house.  ‘2.00am’s the limit,’ Gareth says. ‘Then everybody goes.’

I’ve one last story I want to tell you about Gareth.  This has been a long interview, I know, with lots to read, but this is a story that can’t possibly be left out.  Until recently, Gareth looked after an elderly relative who lived in Shrewsbury and was once a piano teacher at the High School. When she died, he found a bureau in her house with a locked compartment.  Eventually he found the key, and inside the bureau he found, amongst a pile of diaries and other papers, a hand-written letter [as distinct from a merely hand-signed letter] to Gareth’s relative from the king.

The king in question was George VI.  He had written to say thank-you for what this relative, named Doris, had done for her country.  As yet Gareth hasn’t been able to find out what exactly it was she did, but as the letter came at the end of the Second World War, it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what it might have been.

In addition, Gareth found Doris’s papers – the ones she never wanted anyone to see.  Whenever he’d asked why she’d never married, she’d always said she hadn’t been interested and that the right person hadn’t come along.  However, according to the papers locked in her bureau, there had, after all, been a great love in Doris’s life. He’d been an eminent author, and in the locked compartment of the bureau Gareth found his life’s work – manuscripts, lecture notes, books and private correspondence.  All on the subject of sex.

We haven’t had much sex yet in My Tonight From Shrewsbury, but it’s never too late. The love of Doris's life was an eminent sexologist who wrote learned books on sex and travelled the world lecturing on the subject. That's how Doris first met him. As an asthmatic, she was interested in the ways in which this condition might have held her back. She attended his clinic in a spirit of exploration. They fell in love. She was in her early twenties, he forty years older than her.  

These were the war years. Doris lived in Shropshire near to an air base.  To keep out of danger’s way, or so she said, she moved to the relative security of mid Wales. According to a Shrewsbury friend, ‘We don’t know what Doris did during those years’.  Maybe she’d simply moved closer to the new man in her life.  Or maybe she spent those years spying for king and country.  

Gareth doesn’t know.  Never in all the years he knew Doris did he pick up an inkling of any of this.  In her latter years he enjoyed keeping an eye on her, reading her letters when her eyes went, bringing in her shopping. She was very kind to his Bulgarian ward, Galin, whose musicianship she thought was superb.  Nobody had a clue about her secret life.

‘You know Doris was a direct descendant of William the Conqueror,’ says Gareth. ‘She'd worked it all out.  Her mother came from Yorkshire. She was a stunning artist. Her family name was Grosvenor, but she painted under the name 'Minnie Duck'.  When Doris died,  I found sixty water-colours in her house in tight roles. The colours were vivid and the technique beautiful. Doris was a first cousin to Henry Holt.  Her grandfather was the first man to produce crown plate glass.  Twenty thousand people went to his funeral. There were only fifteen for Doris.  Doris Grosvenor-Davies was her full name, but to us she was always the daughter of Mother Duck.’

A Bit Of A Shrewsbury Whistle-Stop Tour

What haven’t I written about this year that I intended to?  Hmmm Squad’s top of my list, hosted by the indefatigable Pip Bayley, providing Shrewsbury’s answer to the TED talks, tackling every subject from Death to Halloween and back again.  Next year’s talks include February’s on Love & Doing the Right Thing and March’s on Human Rights. Here’s what the group says about itself: 

‘Science, Philosophy and Discussion! Hopefully touching on a variety of subjects, topics and all aspects of 'the Sciences'. Meeting on or around the last Wednesday of every month at Shrewsbury Library. We have been meeting for over two years and have members of all ages and are incredibly welcoming. Possibility of biscuits.’

Network Rail is also up there on my list. Ever since they started wrapping Shrewsbury’s railway bridge  as if they were Christo and it a work of art, I’ve been meaning to get up there amongst those girders spanning the River Severn and see what’s going on. But it hasn’t happened. Work has been going on there for the last six months and still, at the end of the year, I haven’t managed to explore those girders which I populated with homeless children for my novel, Sabrina Fludde, or talk to the people who are restoring this wonderful, iconic old bridge about how work is progressing and when the wraps will be coming off. 

What else? Whilst on the subject of the railway bridge, how about mentioning Shrewsbury station?  I’m told it's one of only three in the world to have platforms built over a river. Don’t know if this is true, but I do know that it’s listed [Grade II], that it was built in 1848, and that its imitation Tudor style, complete with carvings of Tudor style heads around the window frames, came courtesy of architect Thomas Mainwaring Penson who was attempting to match the Tudor style of nearby Shrewsbury School, which is now the Castle Gates Library. 

All year I’ve wanted to get behind those windows and find out more about the building and the life of the station which it houses. However, emailing, phoning, even turning up in person and being passed around from pillar to post has got me nowhere.

Another Grade II Listed building that’s been high on my list all year is the old Granada Cinema, currently housing Gala Bingo. Built for Granada in 1934, its lavish and still largely intact interiors were designed by Russian émigré, Theodore Komisarjevsky. In its day, the stage of the Granada saw many live shows, amongst them a series of pantomimes whose stars included Eddie Calvert, Rosemary Squires, Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Dick Emery and Sid James.  Some of these pantomimes were presented on ice.  Not on ice, and most definitely not in pantomime, were the Beatles in February 1963 and,  in January 1964, the Rolling Stones.

What are the chances of getting them back for a Golden Jubilee year show? Only joking, of course.

At the end of this post is a recent photograph of the River Severn in flood.  I haven’t written as much about the river as I would have liked, given that it’s an ever present part of town life.  

Here's another picture of the river, this time featuring The Stew [behind trow, on right of picture], whose plight I have written about - but it hasn’t been saved yet. An argument of sorts has been put forward that it played no part in Shrewsbury’s river trade, so it doesn’t matter if it’s knocked down to put up a boutique hotel instead. Outrageous. Un-be-liev-able. The battle to save this fine old building, the last reminder of a history going back to the Wars of the Roses, carries on into the New Year.   

Shrewsbury is almost as rich in charities as it is in old buildings.  One I’ve been intending to feature for months now, based in College Hill, is Village Water, whom I first came across at the Shrewsbury Marathon.  ‘Changing Lives in Africa through safe water and sanitation’ is their byline.  From 2003, when they first set up in rural Zambia, they’ve supported activities in more than 540 villages and twenty schools, reaching approximately 150,000 people. This year has been their tenth anniversary. I’d hate to let it slip by without recognizing their hard work.  

This litany of people, places and activities could go on and on.  Some time over the year I would have written about Hall’s Auction House by the Welsh Bridge if it hadn’t moved out of town, meaning that my days of mooching round its general sales looking for the occasional piano accordion or Polish icon are over for good.

The Wakeman School has gone too – the last state secondary school in Shrewsbury town centre, now replaced by the Art & English departments of Shrewsbury Sixth Form College.  And Jane Dyas has gone. As I write, her shop stands empty in the Square, having graced it for over a hundred years, supplying generations of Shrewsbury ladies with clothes, shoes and underwear [or lingerie, as Jane Dyas would call it].

There are regattas that My Tonight From Shrewsbury hasn’t written about, coracle and dragon boat races, theatre events, concerts, festivals and fairs. There are churches it hasn’t been into, including arguably the most beautiful church in Shrewsbury, the decommissioned St Mary’s, its windows full of jewel-like stained glass.  There's a Museum and Art Gallery that hasn't opened yet, but when it does it'll be another year's good news.  

There are pubs that haven’t been written about, and restaurants like the Drapers Hall and The Golden Cross.  Shrewsbury is full of wine merchants, publicans, market stallholders, shop owners, business people and residents who all have fascinating stories to tell. But the year isn’t over yet.  Some of those stories I still intend to tell.  So stay tuned and see what comes up next.

The Castle Gates Library

A while back I wrote a post on Shrewsbury School’s Ancient Library, now here I am writing about the Castle Gates Library which is housed in what used to be the old Shrewsbury School.  It’s a drop-dead beautiful library, housed in one of the finest buildings associated with public lending libraries right across the country.  It’s one of the finest buildings in our town as well. We Shrewsbury folk are lucky to have such a fine library - and the extraordinary thing is that all are welcome, seven days a week, and it can be used for free.

I first joined a library back in the dawn of time when I was nine years old, queuing on my little scooter outside the newly-built library in my home town, waiting for its doors to open for the first time.  I loved the smell of books when I got inside, and I still find myself savouring that smell when I go through the doors at the Castle Gates Library. It makes me feel at home.

But then so it should. I’ve been a member of Castle Gates Library since moving to Shropshire back in 1974. I was a newcomer to the county then, wintering amongst the library’s shelves while my house sale went through.  In more recent years I was to find my own books on those shelves, but back then it was Shropshire Folk-Lore that I stumbled upon, collected by Charlotte Burne, Georgina Jackson’s Shropshire Word-Book and A.G. Bradley’s Book of the Severn, all of which have been invaluable in my writing life, as has that other treasure from amongst those shelves, Brian Waters’ Severn Stream.

As an author, I have much to be grateful for in the Castle Gates Library. But the other day it was as a reader that I met Caroline Buckley, Castle Gates’ Branch Manager, full of questions about the day-to-day mystery of how the library works. 

Caroline said that it depended for its smooth running upon a mass of tiny things. Even before opening to the public there were date-stamps to be updated, newspapers to put out, daily deliveries of requested books and returns to receive and record.  The hour before the library opened was always a busy one. Shelves would be tidied on a rolling rota system, which allowed for every section to be put in order before moving onto the next. 

Then, once the doors were opened, the day would be spent helping people find the books they wanted and use the computers.  For the weekly Story Times, they’d have up to thirty toddlers and accompanying parents, and on the monthly babies’ Rhyme Time the children’s library could become a bit of a buggy park. 

In addition, staff from Castle Gates Library would go out to the smaller libraries around town, like Bayston Hill’s library and the Lantern on Sundorne, and they’d help with activities in these. They were always responding to the time of the year, and to general interests that the public might have – books on sport activities around the time of the Olympics, for examples, or Booker short list displays.  There would be spooky stories on offer on Halloween week, and during the summer holidays there would be reading challenges.

Amid all this activity, one thing’s for sure – the Castle Gates Library might exude peacefulness and relaxation, but behind the scenes librarians are very busy people. In addition to their work in the library, they’re also organizing author events, school visits, book quests, poetry reading and composing competitions – you name it; if it’s to do with books and writing, they’ll be there. In addition, the library provides a quiet place for children to do homework.  It becomes packed during the exam season, Caroline said.  You never know who is going to turn up asking for what obscure piece of information, and it’s your job to help track it down.

Caroline has been at Castle Gates Library for fifteen years and seen many changes over those years.  Nowadays, she says, members of staff come in at a younger age than in her day.  The arrival of the internet, too, has brought about changes in the library.  Fifteen years ago there was no online referencing.  No emailing. No computers.  

Caroline can remember the library back to when she was a child. In those days, when the library included museum artifacts, it had stuffed birds in cases, children’s books in the Hobbes Room and an art gallery upstairs.  Then, in the 1980s a massive revamp took place. Then, in more recent years, the decision was made to open the library seven days a week. However, the biggest change of recent years, Caroline said, was the absorbing back into the Castle Gates building of the Reference Library, because of local government cutbacks.  

‘Some library services have faced far bigger cut-backs than that.  It was a shame to lose the reference library building, but in general terms  we’ve been lucky so far,’ said Caroline.   

It’s the books that count most, of course, buying new ones, repairing old ones – how does that all work? Caroline said that suppliers would put together book lists according to a library’s specific criteria.  Then librarians would go through the lists, which largely happened online nowadays [‘You mean there’s no actually physically handling of books any more?’ I naively asked] and decide whether to knock books off the list or arrange for their delivery. ‘Most days we have new books coming in,’ Caroline said.  ‘You hear in the papers about book funds being cut, but we still have some money left for buying books.’ 

Looking after stock is of vital importance.  When books become too tatty to keep on the shelves they’ll go into book sales.  Some books disappear altogether from the shelves, others - including the classics - will be ordered anew. ‘A considerable amount of time is spend repairing,’ Caroline said.  ‘The binding of a book will often be the first thing to go. A careful repair, or a simple re-jacketing, can give a book months more life.’

According to Caroline, Shrewsbury’s Castle Gates Library has a bit of every sort of book. Crime novels are massively popular, as are thrillers, Booker Prize winners and books that have been made into films. You got to know the regulars, Caroline said, and what they liked. And you followed the reviews and picked up trends. What was the best thing about her job, I wanted to know.  ‘The variety,’ Caroline replied.  ‘Two days in the library are never the same - and you’re never short of a good book to read!’

Friday the 13th: One Of Those Days

Today has been One of Those Days.  Mostly I’ve written about Shrewsbury in a positive light, not because I’m trying to paint a false picture, but because it really is a lovely town and living in it is a privilege.  

Today, however, everything has been different.  Turned upside down somehow.  It rained.  So what, I hear you say. But the rain came every time I stepped out of my car, and stopped every time I got into it.  I felt targeted.  It was heavy rain.  Shrewsbury didn’t look so pretty in the heavy rain.  I took no photographs, so you’ll have to trust me on that.

Today was a day of car trips. There were items of furniture that needed moving and cleaning jobs that wouldn’t wait, involving the transporting of vacuum cleaner, mop, bucket, cleaning products and all the rest by car. Behind all this activity was a property to empty out before new tenants moved in. Decorating equipment had to be removed, and all other personal items. Then, when that was finished, Christmas pre-shopping in Morrisons needed to be done, and then a heaving car load of items needed unloading at my house, which involved parking in town and hoping the traffic wardens would recognize [which they don’t always, I’m sorry to say] the difference between a recklessly parked car and one that was part of a loading/unloading process. 

In addition, back and forth a general braving of traffic needed to be done.  Every entrance to the town [and in my travels today I tried them all] was clogged with traffic.  It was One Of Those Days. 

Finally all the contents of my car were stacked up in my hall and kitchen, making it hard to get from one to the other.  I drove my car to its parking place ten minutes’ walk from my house. [You’ll know, if you live in a town centre yourselves, that you rarely can park outside your house.]  I walked home, yes, in the rain.  Shrewsbury did not look beautiful.  I unlocked my front door. My hall did not look beautiful, neither did my kitchen when I staggered through into it. I’ve always thought I live in a rather elegant house, not only a house with a history, but one that’s a delight to live on a daily basis.  But not on this day. 

What would you have done next?  I had two choices, it seemed to me.  Either start unpacking and finding homes for everything – or go to the cinema. And that’s exactly what I did.  It was a f***k it sort of day. Besides, ever since I started writing My Tonight From Shrewsbury I’ve been meaning to write about the town’s third ‘secret’ market hall - and the cinema is it. 

Who’d think that a beautiful old market hall standing in the middle of a medieval square would house a cinema?  It certainly doesn’t look like a cinema until you get close up and see the posters behind the glass. Shrewsbury’s Old Market Hall cinema surely has to be the oldest cinema in the country.  I once visited a cinema in a tithe barn down in Dartington, Devon.  But the Old Market Hall goes back earlier than that.

Enough of history, however.  Today was enough for me – or at least switching off from it.  I stomped down Pride Hill [in the rain], passing the Big Issue girl and the various buskers without a hint of a smile.  The film was going to be half over, but I didn’t care. I didn’t know what film it was, but I didn’t care about that either.  I would care, though, if it was sold out and I had to stomp back up the hill. 

When I arrived, however, to my astonishment, given how late in the afternoon it was, the film was due to start in just five minutes. Not only that, but it was ‘Saving Mr Banks’ with Tom Hanks [never much cared for him] and Emma Thompson – a film I’d already told myself I wanted to see over the Christmas holidays because it was about the children’s writer, P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins.

Was the day turning? And my luck too [not that I've any time for luck]. I thought it just about might be until I sank into my seat and the film began and, just when I should have been relaxing and enjoying myself, the awful thought came to me that I had forgotten something in my diary, which I’d left at home.  A date with somebody.  An interview for My Tonight From Shrewsbury.  Somebody was going to be knocking on my door, or sitting in a pub somewhere, and I had forgotten them.  Not only that, but I’d left blackcurrant sorbet in one of my shopping bags when it should have gone straight into the freezer. When I got home it was going to have melted. How would I explain myself if anybody knew what I'd been up to?  My behaviour today had been nothing short of eccentric. People were going to think [I was thinking] that I must be heading for dementia.

Weirdly, the sorbet worried my every bit as much as the forgotten interviewee.  I hardly took in the film, except to notice that Tom Hanks gave a surprisingly good performance, and to wish I had it in me to be as ascerbic on occasions as Emma Thompson’s P.L. Travers.  It certainly got things done.

After the film, dragging my heels through the Old Market Hall’s lovely bar and coffee shop, then back up Pride Hill in yet another shower of rain, I fretted about arriving home, opening my diary, finding out, shock, horror, what I’d missed. When I did get home, the sorbet, astonishingly, had held its shape.  And the diary was empty - as empty as it had been that morning when I’d checked to see what needed to be done.

I had ruined my cinema trip for nothing.  It was around that time I discovered that this was Friday the 13^th.  I’m not normally a superstitious but I thought of course. Certainly it raised the second smile of the day.

The first smile, however - and the bigger one, came when I hit Castle Street and found that a new Shrewsbury Ark charity shop would soon be opening in one of the empty units just past H & M.  I went into the Ark earlier this year and interviewed its manager, Tim Compton, for My Tonight From Shrewsbury.  The work they’re doing there amongst the homeless and more vulnerable people in our town is second to none.  I was thrilled to see the big empty shop with a Shrewsbury Ark sign up, and a Christmas tree in the window and a board telling me to watch this space.  I would, I thought. Not only that, but I had a few spare belongings that I just might pass their way.

Shrewsbury School's Ancient Library

I’m beginning to think this blog should be called ‘My Yesterday Morning From Shrewsbury’, or even ‘My Last Week’.  In my mad panic to fit everything into the one year I’m beginning to develop a backlog of posts. Foremost in my mind, however, isn’t the film club I went to on Friday night, or the film makers I met a few days before that, but last Sunday morning’s visit to the library at Shrewsbury School.

Shrewsbury School is [geographically in particular] part of the backdrop against which the town is set. ‘The town is of great importance to the school,’ somebody told me on my Sunday visit to its library.  But the school – one of England’s seven great public schools, alongside Eton and Rugby – is important to the town too. Set up initially as a Grammar School by Edward VI, to educate the sons of the town, today it still has significance in shaping Shrewsbury’s life and character.

You can’t miss the schoolboys wandering about town. Even out of uniform you can pick them out. Many a boy comes to Shrewsbury for school and, barring university, never quite leaves. Take a walk along the river, and you’ll pass Shrewsbury schoolboys rowing on the Severn – and Shrewsbury schoolgirls, too, these days. Walk through the Quarry and look up Beck’s Field and you can’t miss Shrewsbury School standing high above the river, or fail to hear its bell ringing out the hours.

Shrewsbury School has stood on that prime site in Kingsland since the demise of the Old Shrewsbury Show, which I wrote about earlier this year.  Before that it was housed in what’s now the Castle Gates Library. Its old boys include the founders of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Brooker and Paul Foot, not to say anything of traveler and ex-Python, Michael Palin, and Radio One’s John Peel.

The view of Shrewsbury from the school’s current site is one of my favourites. I climbed up Beck’s Field and sat at the top in front of the main school building a number of years ago now, to witness the town’s last total solar eclipse. I couldn’t have chosen a finer place to do it. The wind dropped, the sky began to darken and the birds fell silent. In the unnatural twilight the rooftops, spires and towers of the town fell into shadow. I sat until the light returned and won’t ever forget the experience, including the wonderful stillness that fell across the town. No finer place in Shrewsbury, I reckon, could have been chosen to witness what My Tonight From Shrewsbury’s forebear would have called a ‘freak of nature’. 

The forebear in question is anonymous, but the manuscript in which he wrote about freaks of nature, amongst other things, is not.  In Shrewsbury School’s Ancient Library it’s known as ‘Dr Taylor’s MS’.  It’s an Elizabethan town chronicle, dated from the late 1570s,  penned by an anonymous Salopian using existing local annals, printed broadsheets and pamphlets, and drawing more widely for a fuller, more national – and indeed international – appeal. Apparently it was full of murders, suicides, executions, prognostications, freaks of nature, fires, floods, earthquakes etc.  Has the world changed? I don’t think so.

Certainly there are no executions or freaks of nature so far in My Tonight From Shrewsbury, but we’ve had floods this year, sadly we’ve had a murder and an unexpected death. And as for prognostications - well, who am I to say?

Until last Sunday I didn’t know about my Elizabethan counterpart, but now I can’t stop thinking about him – and I want to read more. You’ll know, if you’ve read many of My Tonight From Shrewsbury’s post, that I love old books.  Well, on Sunday I was in book heaven – and I want to tell you all about it.

My visit began on the stroke of eleven o’clock, when I arrived at Shrewsbury School in time for its act of remembrance. Sad to think, looking at a photo later of a group of boys, that within a couple of years of it being taken exactly half those boys would be dead, killed in battle.  Young lads, scarcely out of their childhood we might now say. And masters died as well. Their names are all read out. Every year the same, followed by the school crowding round the Philip Sidney oak to leave their poppies with the dropped leaves on the ground.

Afterwards in the library, Michael Morrogh, the school’s Ancient Librarian [I’m not being rude here; this is Michael’s official – if slightly Gormenghastly – title] showed visitors round a collection of memorabilia from the first and second world wars. Browsing amongst the tables I found a pamphlet on the Re-conquest of America [‘the Most Astounding Document Ever Discovered in The History of International Intrigue’] with fascinating sections on such matters as ‘Hostile Native Tendencies’. Then I picked up the Ruhleben Prisoner of War Camp Magazine, with some extraordinary drawings in it, and several German propaganda booklets putting forward a very different view of their Allied enemies and the war.

The Shrewsbury School library is a treasure house of books, not just old ones either, but modern books too.  On display I found everything from the latest Booker prize-winner to a collection of graphic novels.  There were easily a dozen books I could have stopped to thumb through, but I had a date with something older than them. These were not the books I’d come to see. 

I’d come to see the old guys. The really old ones. The ones that made my own person 19^th century acquisitions from Candle Lane Books seem like Johnny-come-latelies. Some of these books were chained. Others were kept in a strong-room so strong that it felt like walking into an air-conditioned safe [but then I was walking into an air-conditoned safe].

In that library’s inner sanctum - a small room packed floor to ceiling with what I heard described as ‘the crown jewels’ - I saw an illustrated Bible from the 13^th century, Charles Darwin’s personal atlas, with his name – and other comments – written inside it, and a Tyndale Bible.

This is a big deal. It’s the book, above all others, that I’d come to see. In its day, the Tyndale Bible [or, more accurately, New Testament] was dynamite.  Because of it, William Tyndale ended up being executed in horrendous fashion.  His crime? Translating the Bible into everyday English so that every man [who could read] could read it, and not just the privileged few. Also - equally heretical in the eyes of the church – he dared to translate not from the standard Latin ‘received’ text, but directly from the Hebrew and Greek.

Tyndale Bible

In 1522, William Tyndale acquired a copy of Martin Luther’s German translation of the New Testament, and began a translation into English using a Greek text compiled by Erasmus, which was older and reckoned to be more accurate than the Latin Vulgate, which was the only text authorized by the Roman Catholic church.  He was refused permission to continue with his work, which was seen as heretical, but moved abroad and carried on anyway, a fugitive from justice, on everybody’s Most Wanted list.

A partial translation of the New Testament was printed in Cologne, after which Tyndale was betrayed to the authorities. Doggedly, however, he carried on with the work, escaping to Worms where a full translation of the New Testament came out in1526.

It’s hard now to understand what all the fuss was about. Bibles are two a penny and, arguably, make very little difference to modern life. But Tyndale saw the Bible differently. Buried deep in his translation were direct challenges to the Catholic church, which was the major authority of the day.  The word ‘priest’ in the Latin Vulgate, for example, when  translated directly from the Greek came out as ‘elder’ - an elder being not a member of a separate caste but one of the people.  And the Vulgate phrase, ‘doing penance’ [something from which the Catholic Church accrued revenue], in Tyndale’s translation from the Greek came out as ‘repentence [something to be achieved for free]. 

Tyndale’s Bible was a bombshell.  Its legacy continues to this day. Some say that English as we now know it was formed out of Tyndale’s taking of the unpopular Middle-English ‘vulgar’ tongue, improving it with the help of Greek and Hebrew syntaxes and idioms and forming out of it all an early modern English that Shakespeare and others would draw upon.  I’m not a historian, or a linguist, so I wouldn’t know about that, but I do know that Tyndale was a reformer and a man of principle and faith, and that when he died [in 1536, by strangulation, followed by burning at the stake] he prayed that the King of England’s eyes would be opened.

Tyndale Bible in box

And indeed it turned out that they were. The Tyndale Bible played a massive part in the Reformation generally and - in England in particular - as much as Ann Boleyn, the Tyndale Bible played its part.  It changed society by bringing with it a new freedom from authority. It featured prominently in the Geneva Bible that was taken out with the Mayflower by America’s founding fathers. It found its way into the King James Bible, which is still being read. 

Nowadays I have the King James version of the Bible on my Kindle. I can carry it around. And Bible readers in Tyndale’s day could do the same. The Tyndale Bible that I saw in Shrewsbury School’s strong room was surprisingly small.  Given its status in history, I expected some massive tome, but out of a small box came something small enough to pocket and walk out with.

Not that anybody would be pocketing that particular copy, or even borrowing it on their school library card!  But there were other books in that Ancient Library that could be handled, and there were others on display that I want to share with you too.

Included amongst these are John Donne’s poems in first edition.  Then also a first edition of Ben Johnson’s plays, followed by an early Caxton dating from 1483.  None of these were in the strong-room, but on show in the main body of the Ancient Library, alongside Oliver Cromwell’s original death-mask, a whole host of Darwin artifacts, letters and the like, and a tiny but beautiful metrical psalm book bound in an immaculately stitched needlework cover [see below].

The Shrewsbury Fragment

For somebody who loves books, Sunday morning I was as near to Paradise as life on earth can get. Behind glass I saw a whole collection of tiny psalters, including a tortoiseshell one, which is a Huguenot psalm book dated 1660. I also saw the last book to be printed by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press; the Gwassanaeth Meir – a devotional work, and rare text, written in the South Wales dialect of around 1350-80; and, oh my God – the Shrewsbury Fragment. The actual, real Shrewsbury Fragment in the flesh.

For one whole year, ever since I began My Tonight From Shrewsbury, I’ve been saving up writing about the Shrewsbury Fragment because I wanted to hang onto a few really special posts for the end of the year.  The Shrewsbury Fragment is intended as one of those posts, so forgive me if I don’t write more now.  All I’ll say for now is that the Shrewsbury Fragment is one of our town’s treasures, it has a remarkable story, which almost nobody seems to know about [in fact most people I’ve talked to have never heard of it] and one day before the end of the year I’ll tell it to you. 

Many thanks to Shrewsbury School, and Ancient Librarian Michael Morrogh, for allowing me to browse so freely amongst so many lovely treasures.  Thanks, too, to Head of Philosophy and Theology, Andrew Dalton, for being my fixer behind the scenes. Much of what I saw is there to be viewed most Sunday mornings after chapel, from 11 o’clock onwards. A warm welcome was extended to me and to other visitors, and I’m sure it would be to you too, if you wanted to arrange a visit.

I left the library with my head in a spin, and walked towards the school gate, heading down Central - an avenue of trees flaming in the autumn sunlight. Darwin’s statue stood tall at one end [representing the sciences] and Sir Philip Sidney’s at the other, profiled against an unsettled sky [representing the arts]. It had been quite a visit. I’d seen more than I have time to tell you now. Not just the Shrewsbury Fragment, but other things too.

Another day, maybe.

Sir Philip Sidney

Darwin's Atlas

A drawing from the Ruhleben Camp Magazine

Darwin with foot on [I think] an iguana 

A bit of a PS here.  On the subject of book heaven, I've just been sent this photograph of Cincinnati & Hamilton County Library in Ohio. Looks fairly heavenly too, so I thought I'd share it: