A Librarian’s Odyssey: Episodes of Autobiography

Citation

Day, A. (2001), "A Librarian’s Odyssey: Episodes of Autobiography", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 42-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.1.42.11

Born 85 years ago and, happily, still with us, not many librarians can look back on a career so rich, diverse, and full of achievement as K.C. Harrison. Successively, Borough Librarian of Hyde and Glossop, Hove, Eastbourne, Hendon and, finally, City Librarian of Westminster – a tough assignment if there were one, stepping into the shoes of Lionel McColvin – this career progression alone would have been more than enough to reflect on with enormous satisfaction. And if we add to this the years of professional activity culminating in a year as Library Association President, a three‐year stint as President of the Commonwealth Library Association, and publication list few can equal let alone surpass, and it can readily be acknowledged that he enjoyed a glittering and enviable career.

Obviously he is writing of a world that has passed, unrecognisable to the apparatchiks of today’s public libraries, but his contemporaries will recognise it well enough. In the days when the reviewer attended the Library Association conferences, and we were all well into our cups late into the night, the nostalgic reminiscing would inevitably begin and, sooner or later, some still bright old spark would remark that really somebody should write it all down before it was lost forever. Well, if Ken Harrison does not write everything down, he certainly covers most of it. Quite obviously the giants of the profession were not simply practical librarians efficiently doing a good job, but were individuals prepared to take the extra mile in their stride, and enthusiastic and energetic enough for their record to speak for itself. All librarians, at whatever level of experience, should be expected to undertake their basic duties effectively, but it is the extras that count when promotion is in sight. In the stiff competition for the top jobs Harrison could write his c.v. confident that it would stand scrutiny in comparison with those of his rivals.

Apart from progression to the peak of UK public libraries – City Librarian of Westminster along with similar posts at Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh must constitute the commanding heights – Harrison adds extra dimensions to his odyssey. To begin with, his wartime career as a soldier in which, from a standing start as a conscript squaddy, he attained the rank of Major, with a military MBE in his kit bag. His was no desk‐bound war, seeing action as an infantry officer in the Western Desert, the invasion of Sicily, and then the big one, landing on the Normandy beaches on D‐Day, where he was wounded, and a few months later in the race across France, and into Belgium with the Second Army. After the war he wondered at one point whether his MBE opened doors for him at interviews. Let’s just say that it could have done him no harm.

In another episode Harrison writes of his professional publishing, contributing articles to a wide selection of journals, and earning a steady income from two textbooks in particular – First Steps in Librarianship and Libraries in Scandinavia – which both went through a number of editions. As others have found, one step leads to another, and K.C. Harrison became known as Mr Scandinavia, leading library tours to all the Nordic countries. But, if we are to choose the episode which encapsulates KCH, it has to be Cricket, Lovely Cricket, in which he narrates his experiences playing in the Northern leagues, at his father’s knee support of Surrey County Cricket Club, as a committee member of Sussex CCC, his responsibility for its library committee, his membership of the MCC, and his work on its Arts and Library Sub‐Committee 1974‐1989. And where better to leave him, basking in the sunshine at Eastbourne, and at Lords? Perhaps he is there now, as I write this, during the tea interval on the third day of the second West Indies Test Match.