Lend an ear to closing chapter

Library users are staging “read-ins” to show their support and Bentham library is expected to be packed this morning, when 20 of the 6,000 registered users take it in turns to read from a chosen book.

They are being supported by our most celebrated writer, Alan Bennett, who spends much of his time when in the area at Clapham.

“Closing libraries is child abuse,” he said in a message – though another engagement keeps him from adding his famous Leeds cadences to today’s protest.

Bentham – split into High and Low Bentham – is a self-sufficient community on Yorkshire’s western fringe. A major employer makes fire protection equipment and its livestock market is one of the busiest in the country.

Its library is open four days a week. Irena Pritchard, an émigré from Communist Czechoslovakia 30 years ago, is an avid reader.

She lists fiction, gardening, cookery, travel and history titles – and is currently enjoying Joyce Tyldesley’s Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt. There is a monthly book group. The library is adjacent to the primary school and hosts under-fives story times. The nearest library to it in the county, at Ingleton, is also at risk of closure.

Bentham library is popular with children as a place to do their schoolwork, and with their elders for leisure reading. It’s a theme which is repeated elsewhere at libraries in places such as Embsay, near Skipton which is also facing the chop. Suggestions that local volunteers might be able to take on the running of Bentham library are dismissed by Irena Pritchard, one of the organisers of today’s read-in protest. She says the town already has a number of self-run schemes and there are insuffient people available to add an extra one.

However, this arrangement has seemed to work in Grassington, where the library has been run by the people since last autumn. Apart from its reading and audio resources, Bentham library is also home to the only public internet site in the village. If Bentham and Ingleton libraries close, the nearest public internet in Yorkshire would be 11 miles away in Settle.

The love of libraries touches all of us. The broadcaster and poet Ian McMillan speaks passionately of “weeping with anger” at the threat of losing his library in Darfield, near Barnsley. He describes the closure of public libraries as “a stunning act of cultural vandalism” and recounts his boyhood visits to the library, jumping into “pools of knowledge” that would take him from Darfield “to the very end of the world”.

Gargrave is not as gritty as Barnsley. It is set in marvellous hunting country on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park and is lively with small businesses, a multinational surgical company, tourists and their traffic. It is, then, an okay place so far as residents are concerned and losing its library is not in the village plan. Alan Simpson, a retired city policeman, is chairman of a readers’ rescue campaign.

He retains the warm Cumbrian accent from his childhood in Penrith, where in the 1940s he picked up the reading habit at the library.

“As a young boy, if you wanted to go to the library you got a form from the librarian, signed by your teacher and parents,” he says.

“They would examine your hands to see if they were clean, before we could get a book. I wanted a book and always made sure mine were clean. I liked looking at the National Geographic magazines. They were in the adult section and I had to sneak in there to look at them.” He’s been a library user all his life, likes travel and history and has just finished The Generals, Simon Scarrow’s trilogy of Napoleon and Wellington.

Alan Simpson is one of the 683 registered users at Gargrave library which moved into the village hall in 1999 – funded by £32,000 raised by the village, and administered by North Yorkshire County Council.

The library also serves Malhamdale and a population of some 3,000. Figures from the NYCC show that the library computer is a popular adjunct to book loan and audio visual hire.

A third of the library users are under 16. An equal number are over 55 and a quarter are 24 to 54. The remaining five per cent are 15 to 24. Alan Simpson and the library supporters suggest various options for the future.

One is no change, retaining the two professional librarians, whom he describes as “brilliant”. Alan thinks this is unlikely.

Or there could be volunteer support plus one professional librarian. Or the village could take over the library, an arrangement where the fabric was left in place and the stock rotated as normal by NYCC.

Finally there’s the option of closure. The nearest library would then be in Skipton, some four miles away and reached by bus, rail or a breezy walk along the bank of the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

In the end it will come down to money. Alan Simpson doesn’t expect to hear the full financial facts from NYCC before the end of February.

He does know that in the event of a local takeoever the villagers would not be allowed to charge for book loans.

“We wait to see what we will be required to do to keep the library going,” he says.

A rumour a year ago that the Labour government planned to scrap the statutory requirement on local authorities to provide a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ library service earned this response from a Tory politician. “I think this is outrageous and offensive to everyone who ever cared about books and reading.”

His name is Ed Vaizey and he is now the libraries Minister.

Today’s day of resistance in Bentham is expected to be repeated elsewhere with more than 40 read-ins planned around the country.