Alan Gibbons’ Blog

It is easy to see what drew library campaigner Tim Coates to the subject of his latest book, the 19th-­century Times editor John Delane and the Crimean War (Delane’s War, to be published in October by Iain Dale’s new venture, Biteback).

Coates features frequently in the pages of The Bookseller as an out­spoken champion of the absolutely central place of books in libraries. It’s a self-appointed role, fuelled by conviction, which over the last 10 years has brought Coates into regular conflict with those in the public library service who, as he sees it, are falling far short of the public duty they are paid to take on.

Passionate in his beliefs about what good libraries are, and about the potential for modern local authorities to deliver them—as evidenced by his own revamp of the libraries in the London borough of Hillingdon—Coates has raised his head above the parapet time and again. Most recently, that took the form of a formal complaint against the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council over its activities in relation to the troubled­ Swindon library service, a complaint which was upheld in July.
John Delane’s story is also one of a man who took a brave—and unpopular—stand against the bureaucrats and politicians of his day, in his case over the conduct of the Crimean War. And it is a stand that Coates believes has led Delane to be largely left out of the history books because it simply embarrassed the establishment so much.

Neglected stories
Delane’s War relays that neglected story. As editor of the Times in the 1850s, Delane was horrified to dis­cover from the uncensored reports of his correspondent in the field that while the British had gone to war to a gung-ho public mood, the soldiers were actually hopelessly underequipped and undermanned. Military incompetence was leading to desperate casualties and great suffering.
Delane repeatedly exposed the situation in the Times, instigating the first newspaper appeal to raise money for the troops and reflecting the real popular opinion in the country rather than that of the ruling élite. The Times’ coverage inspired Florence Nightingale to open her field hospitals in the Crimea. Eventually Delaney’s influential journalism brought so much pressure to bear on government that, dramatically, the entire cabinet was forced to resign.

Exposing untruths
“Massive incompetence, arrogance and lying,” is how Coates describes the situation Delane faced as the Crimean War got underway. “The commissariat, which supplied things [to the troops], had been taught for 40 years not to spend money on anything because that’s what the Duke of Wellington had told them to do in the Peninsular war. The blokes running it were all in their 70s and all working on the principle that you don’t give anyone anything until they’ve got a form in triplicate. You weren’t allowed a greatcoat unless you’d been in the service for three years, so there were greatcoats ­sitting there and men with no greatcoats because they’d all been in the army two months, so they died of cold.”

Meanwhile, in government, the ministers were misreporting the numbers of casualties by a massive margin. “If you look at the history books, this is the time of empire, the time when we were supposed to have been at our best,” says Coates. “What people think was wrong with that time was that we were overdominant across the world, but what emerges here is that we were incompetent, and Disraeli, Gladstone and Palmerstone were just a shambling bunch of self-interested politicians. Even Gladstone, who we all think was one of the famous Victorians, was fiddling the figures and lying in parliament. An awful, awful moment for him.”

What it took to change the situation and hold the government to account was someone with integrity, determination and “absolutely straight-forward values, the kind you would expect any nine-year-old child to have—‘I must be honest.’” And someone who was not afraid to speak out, despite being widely attacked for doing so: “Delane wasn’t frightened to say, ‘Where’s the Queen in all this? She’s up in Scotland, hunting, shooting and fishing when our boys are dying. It’s not right.’” Delane is a neglected but true hero of the Victorian age, Coates believes.

But when Coates refers, as he does, to a “lack of leadership” as being the key cause behind the Crimean War army debacle, the phrase brings with it a frisson of recognition. For it is the same phrase often to be heard on the campaigner’s lips as he lambasts the contemporary situation within the public library service. Coates, it is clear, sees parallels between Delane’s situation and his own.
Though superficially quiet and unassuming in manner, Coates is something of a firebrand. He believes all those professionally involved in the library service—the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council; the Society of Chief Librarians and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals all in­cluded—are currently failing the service, acting to support their own interests rather than meeting the real needs of the public whom they are there to serve. His outspoken criticisms to that effect have been condemned by those in the firing line as, at best, well-intentioned but wrongheaded, or else as out-on-a-limb and divisive.

England’s best
Even those in sympathy with Coates will sometimes say he goes too far. But it would be hard to dismiss him, as many would like to do, as an eccentric or an outsider in the world of books. Coates has 35 years in the book trade behind him, including years at W H Smith in the 1970s and ’80s when he reorganised and re­designed shops and was, as he puts it “the little bookseller at Smith’s who could double the book sales by allocating space in shops correctly”. From publisher Paul Hamlyn he won the accolade, which he still cites with pride, “the best bookseller in England”, and Coates went on to be m.d. of Waterstone’s in its heyday in the late 80s and early 1990s. In libraries, his record in Hillingdon, where he revamped the library service and actually achieved cost savings at the same time, is an enviable one. 

This is how Coates himself puts his case. “They [the library professionals] believe that their role is to attract public funding. When you say to them: ‘But what did you do with the last lot they gave you?’, well, that’s not the point. Their prestige comes from their ability to get more public money, the people who succeed in that are the ones who get to the top of the tree. You say: ‘But every single year the book lending figures go down. Where is the government policy that says book lending isn’t what libraries do any more?’ They reply: ‘Well, that’s the consequence of getting money from a certain place, which means we had to be paid more and employ more staff, which meant there wasn’t enough money for books.’

“But who’s actually looking at the whole pot and saying: ‘Books are not an important part of it’? Nobody. Absolutely nobody, nowhere. And of course, you say that and you become the outsider who is asking impossible questions.”

The criticism he attracts does affect him, he says. “All that stuff in Swindon was horrible, absolutely horrible. But you’re doing what needs to be done. It’s the public who matter, not the sensitivities of these people who are all being paid £100,000 a year. When 98% of the budget is taken up by staff costs and 2% by buying books, I’m saying that’s a problem. They’re saying: ‘That’s conflict’!”
He is gloomy about the potential for either the investigation into the Wirral library closures or the Library Service Modernisation Review, both due very soon, to deliver the change that is needed in the service. Again, it is about failures of leadership, he believes. “We’ve had, what, eight ministers in the last 10 years? We need a minister who says: ‘Libraries are about books,’ a tough person, a Florence Nightingale for the library service who says, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but don’t give me this tosh, we have a job to do. Let’s do it and stop making excuses.’

Shoulder to shoulder
“I believe deeply that those people who think the role of libraries has changed are fundamentally wrong. But I also believe that’s what both the ministry of culture and the library profession should have been saying too. ‘Yes, we can find all these other uses for libraries, but . . . our cultural heritage is at the essence of what we do here’—and they should be protecting it, not destroying it. Why the hell are we having to fight alone? They should be on our side.”