A library .... lots of books .... and Mr. Carnegies’ donation ………. Eccles Library in 1907

Now Andy Robertson collects pubs and police stations and more recently he has branched out into Carnegie Libraries, which were the libraries paid for by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For those of us in south Manchester, we have the one in Chorlton, opened in 1914, Didsbury in 1915, and Withington in 1927.

They were three of the 660 he funded in Britain, 1,689 in the United States, 125 in Canada and more elsewhere between 1883 and 1929.

From humble beginnings he had built up a huge steel business before selling out for an estimated $500 million in 1901 and devoting himself to philanthropist projects. Even before he retired, he had been spending money on all sorts of projects of which the establishment of public libraries was just one.

But there are those who would argue the money was not his to give away, having been made by the men who toiled in the steel plants and who were denied the right to organize collectively in his workplaces. But that is another story.

The Eccles Library cost £7,500 and was opened in October 1907 with a gold key by Edward Potts who was the chair of the Library Committee.  So committed was Mr. Potts to the building of the Library that in his opening speech he asserted that "had Mr. Carnegie declined to help them he would still have advocated the erection of that building  even if they had to economise in other directions.  

Indeed, had he been committed to alternatives, he would rather have submitted to badly lit streets than allowing the minds of their people to grope in darkness.  

The library, he held, would tend to  economy.  Ignorance bred vice, and vice was costly in all communities”.*

It was a sentiment which was met with applause and I rather think is still a ringing endorsement of the importance of a library service.

That said, just seven years later,  the Libraries Committee, regretted that "they were unable to purchase many new books again this year”, because of its limited revenue, but argued that it was perhaps time to ask Parliament for powers to raise the library rate beyond penny limit”.**

After which the Library settled to the business of providing books, but the odd bit of controversy did rear its head. In 1938, after objections from the public, the Town Council banned the Library’s copy of Mein Kampf.

Less controversial was the third annual open air art exhibition staged in the gardens of the library in 1950 which the Manchester Gaudian judged a success.

Location; Eccles

Picture; Eccles Public Library, 2020, from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Eccles Library, A Fine Carnegie Institution, Manchester Guardian, October 21st, 1907

**Few New Books for Eccles Library, Manchester Guardian, June 9, 1914