Philobiblon

p. 74 Thursday 9 August, 1945, Edie Rutherford, (43 at the end of the war, a proud and sometimes sanctimonious housewife in Sheffield, married to a timber merchant and football fanatic, eager for news from her native South Africa,… delighted with the Labour government despite everything).
“Japan gets her second atomic bomb. How many more before she wakens? I brought up the subject of the new bomb at work yesterday. Horror of its power if definitely the chief reaction …All at work commented on the cost of this atomic bomb research and remembered the howl that always goes up if 2/6d weekly is suggested for adding to old-age pensions. We live in a mad world.”

p. 375 Wednesday 2 April , Maggie Joy Blunt, 1947 (a lyrical and talented writer in her mid-30s living in a cottage by Burnham Beeches, near Slough, eager to leave her job as a publicity assistant in a metals company, frustrated that she can’t put her public school and university training to better use) – she’ through the diaries trying to write an 18th-century biography, she eventually died as a retired bookseller, no book recorded).
“Sarah, of tolerant, liberal outlook, living in a very conservative, well-to do-country district where everyone grumbles as they do here, obtained via her MP a ticket for the House one evening and sat in the Members’ Gallery. Heard Eden and Shinwell and said it was very interesting, but thought they wasted too much time talking for the sake of it and on schoolboy backchat.”

p. 443 Tuesday, 2 September 1947 Maggie Joy Blunt
“We none of use really understand what it’s all about, what the Government is doing for the future. They are criticised for being in too much of a hurry, trying to impose their ideals too rapidly, yet future generations may bless their little hour of power.
Smallness of plaice. Fishmonger explained that young shoals were being netted instead of thrown back. “Soon the North Sea will be dry of fish – that’s what will happen.”

p. 455 Monday 6 October Maggie Joy Blunt
Last week, an article by Easterbrook in the Northern Chronicle on ‘Britain is Being Poisoned’ – our rivers polluted and creatures in it killed off by man’s carelessness. Now an RU book on man-eating tigers (by Jim Corbett) in which the author says that this magnificent beast is being threatened by extermination.; Man is a slovenly, careless, greedy creature allowed to live in a miraculously wonderful world, which he won’t appreciate.”