Walking with the Ancestors - Hesba Stretton

Community Spirit

Philip Larkin left Wellington in September 1946, to become Assistant Librarian at University College Leicester. While he was glad to escape the increasing workload and 'hopelessness' of his post, Larkin confessed to his friend Jim Sutton some regret at leaving and, in later years, clearly retained affection for the Shropshire market town where his professional and literary career began. In 1962, he returned to open an extension to the remodelled library building and appeared pleased to find many of the archaic traces of the building he remembered wiped away. Although Larkin seemed unwilling to take any credit, it was arguably he who had initiated the process of dragging the library into the Twentieth Century in the first place, having orchestrated many improvements to the lending library during his time in charge, when he doubled the establishment's readership and book issues. In later years, Larkin remained scathing of latter day developments such as the area's administrative subordination to Telford, which he imagined to be 'a rather horrific place' and 'very unlike the Wellington I knew'. However, he still warmly recalled the town's 'treasured community spirit' and individual readers he had helped, such as a boy he had introduced to the Sherlock Holmes stories, all of which seems far removed from the image of serving 'tripey novels to morons' more commonly associated with his time in east Shropshire.