History of the RSM
Feature of the month - July
Monica BaldwinMonica Baldwin (1896-1975) was the niece of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and in 1942 left the closed order of nuns which she had first entered in 1914.
Her autobiography, I Leap Over the Wall: a Return to the World after Twenty-Eight Years in a Convent, published in 1949, finds its way into the library collection because of the author’s description of her brief employment at the RSM as “a kind of assistant” in the Library.
Monica’s job consisted chiefly of “taking in, checking and giving out books and papers required by the Fellows. I also occasionally answered queries on the telephone.” She notes that “Librarians, as a class, tend to develop unusual personalities” and portrays George Francis Home, who served as the Society’s Librarian from 1935 until 1952, and as Honorary Consultant Librarian from 1952 until his death in 1958, as an “elderly semi-invalid, who liked Spain and played the cello in his leisure moments” and who “seemed curiously uninfluenced by the jagged rhythms of modern life.”
Other colleagues included Mr Kelson “who worked in a kind of eyrie at the top of a twisted iron staircase.” She writes: “I have marvelled at the agility with which his bony figure would dart up and down that iron stair in search of some query (we pronounced it to rhyme with ‘cherry’ at the R.S.M.)” Then there is a Miss Jones, a Girton M.A. who “presided over the large and luxurious Fellows’ Reading Room”, and “the two girls who ran the section in which I worked” from whom she learnt “quite a lot of which I had been unaware before” by “listening while they chattered to one another – and they were seldom silent…” She did, however, feel some affinity with John, a fellow library assistant who had recently graduated from Cambridge. “I felt at once that many of our values were the same. I liked him.”
The daily routine, however, was one which she freely admits she did not enjoy and for which the contemplative life had ill-prepared her. The telephone enquiries from Fellows were “nightmares. As often as not, I could make no sense of what the person at the other end was talking about…In the end, I avoided the telephone and applied myself to humbler jobs in which there were next to no ‘personal contacts.’ I thus earned for myself – in certain quarters – a reputation for shirking the more arduous part of the work.”
A chance meeting in the foyer of the Society’s building with Lord Dawson of Penn provided Monica with her escape route. Over dinner that evening at the Dorchester, Dawson, “friend and doctor of King George V”, invited her to take up a post at the Welfare Department of Industry.
Her final conclusions concerning the RSM are, however, positive. “During the months I spent there, a good deal was added to my Experience of Life.”
