In June 2020 the Archives and Special Collections team created a quiz to test your knowledge with questions inspired by the collections in the University Archives. Over the last month we've seen a huge surge (almost 1000 new responses) of people completing it and we'd love to know who we can thank for promoting our quiz! Have you shared the link with a class? Or posted on social media? Drop us an email archives@strath.ac.uk.

If you have yet to undertake the challenge, have a go at our virtual quiz (click on the image on the left) and learn a little about the history of the University of Strathclyde.

Roses are red, violets are blue; want a wittier way to say, ‘I love you’? To celebrate Valentine’s Day, this post presents some wryly humorous, love-themed contributions to a student autograph book of 1916, some of which might well grace a modern-day Valentine’s card.

The owner of the autograph book, Louisa Jessie Fletcher (1893-1972), trained as a primary school teacher at the Glasgow Provincial Training College (later known as Jordanhill College) from 1914-1916. On receiving the book as a gift in May 1916, she invited her fellow students to fill its blank pages with their signatures, verses and drawings. This was a common practice of the day, and an excellent way to compile a keepsake for the future, as explained in our related post on student autograph albums. However, after Louisa gained her teaching qualification and left the College in the summer of 1916, her autograph book apparently passed into the hands of James Maxwell Dewar Teape, a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

The connection between Louisa and James is unclear. James did not study at the Glasgow Provincial Training College, nor did he become Louisa’s husband. When the First World War ended, James married another Glasgow schoolteacher, Isabella Falconer, who had trained at the College from 1913-1915. As a second-year student, Isabella may have encountered first-year Louisa in the refectory, at the College dances, or at one of its club and society meetings, but they did not live in the same district of the city and Isabella is not among the many ‘College Friends’ who signed the autograph book, suggesting that the two women had not known each other well. Could James have been Louisa’s erstwhile sweetheart, a family member, or perhaps a childhood friend? Was the book Louisa’s parting gift to James when he was called up for war service? We may never find the answers to these questions, but the book’s dual ownership has produced an intriguing variety of content. While some pages are covered in the teaching-themed doodles, poems and signatures of Louisa’s classmates, others bear the signatures of James’s fellow servicemen. This page of tongue-in-cheek quips about love was contributed by Catherine Makin, who trained alongside Louisa:

‘Cupid anticipated Marconi’; ‘To think more of someone else than yourself – that is love’, and ‘A kiss is love in tabloid form’: senders of Valentine’s cards may find plenty of inspiration here, so long as the object of their affection possesses a certain sense of humour! Should Catherine Makin’s witticisms fail to impress, the book also offers solace for the lovelorn in this charming, if of it's time, cartoon drawn by Louisa’s College friend, Helen Greenshields. A little boy has plucked up courage to steal a kiss from his beloved, receiving a bruised and bandaged eye for his trouble. Yet he remains triumphant: ‘I don’t care; I kissed her!’ As the image suggests, the pursuit of true love may be a painful business but is worthwhile in the end! 

Based on an article originally published in February 2013 in our Item of the Month feature.

Further information:

Autograph book of Louisa Jessie Fletcher and James Maxwell Dewar Teape (ref: JCE/22/2/13)

Glasgow Provincial Training College: General register of students admitted to training, 1905-1915 (ref: JCE/10/1/1)

Glasgow Provincial Training College: Schedule showing results of students who completed training (form 17T) (ref: JCE/10/2/5)

In this blog post we are delighted to hear from our colleague Andy from the cataloguing department of the Library. He was recently working on ‘A Humument: a treated Victorian novel’. What’s a ‘humument’? read on to find out!

The artist Tom Phillips sadly died in November at the age of 85. He had a long and varied career, encompassing work as a painter, printmaker, collagist, composer and librettist. Perhaps surprisingly, his most enduring achievement is a book: A Humument was a fifty-year project which involved almost completely remaking a Victorian novel, namely A Human Document by William Hurrell Mallock. Inspired in part by the cut-up poems of William Burroughs, Phillips took Mallock’s book (which he had purchased at random for threepence in an antiques shop in 1966) and began scoring passages out in pen and ink, with the aim of creating a new narrative from the portions of unredacted text. This simple method was later surpassed as Phillips began employing more visual techniques, such as drawing, painting and collaging over the pages. Gradually, portions of text on each page of the book were creatively defaced, with the remaining unaltered text forming a new ‘found’ story, accompanied throughout by hundreds of unique and colourful artworks.

Phillips repeated the process several times throughout his career. Six trade editions of A Humument were published (plus various other limited editions) between 1970 and 2016, each giving a completely new reading experience centred around Phillip’s invented protaganist, Toge (whose name can only appear on pages that originally contained the words ‘together’ or ‘altogether’).

The Library holds two copies of the second revised edition, published by Thames and Hudson in 1997. One copy is available to borrow from the main library (available at D 700.924 PHI). The other is held in Archives & Special Collections, and is part of a limited edition of 150 copies, which includes an original artist’s plate hand coloured and signed by Phillips. Please contact us if you’d like to view this copy in the Reading Room.

Further reading:

Mallock, W. H., A human document. New ed. New York: Cassell publishing company, 1892. Available from HathiTrust.

Tom Phillips : Works and texts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Available in the main library D 759.2 PHI/T

‘Doctoring Victorian Literature – A Humument: An Interview With Tom Phillips’ in Partington, G., & Smyth, A., Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (New Directions in Book History). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. eBook available via SUPrimo