Helen Esmonde, the first Lady Master of the Stationers’ Company, bears the weight of history lightly. In more than 600 years of history, this venerable livery company has enjoyed a long succession of men whose names are destined to be painted in gold on the honours boards that adorn the main room of Stationers’ Hall.
And despite the experience of her predecessors, she is no different at the start of her year in office to anyone else. “You have no idea what you are letting yourself in for,” she says. She will have been well briefed by William Alden, Clerk to the Company and a Stationer himself for more than 30 years.
He has managed the operation for the last five years helping raise the profile of the Company within the industries it serves and among the City of London livery companies.
Stationers’ Hall itself, one of the oldest buildings in the City and third oldest of all the Livery Halls as all were destroyed in the Great Fire, is in great demand for meetings, conferences, weddings and so on. A team of architects has been engaged to look at ways to reshape the Hall to enable greater use.
But funds are limited. Both Master and Clerk had enjoyed a dinner at the Glaziers’ Hall the night before where air conditioning has recently been installed. They are one of the richer liveries, Alden says, pointing to the huge fan that serves as air conditioning for the Stationers.
The wealth that the Companies have accumulated over the centuries is distributed as charitable works. The Mercers Company donates around £6 million a year with schools and universities among the beneficiaries. Thanks to endowments in the past it is landlord to Covent Garden, so the source will not dry up soon.
In contrast the Stationers Company has £250,000 a year to provide, half from money raised from its 900 or so members. Perhaps uniquely for a livery of its antiquity, the vast majority of these members are active in the trades of the company: publishing, journalism, new media, packaging, paper and printing.
The focus of the works says Esmonde will be on education. There are three Saturday schools helping under privileged London children to read and write; there are 15 bursaries a year to help fund MA studies in lieu of grants; and there is the Crown Woods Academy. This is a school in the Royal Borough of Greenwich which is the first Media Academy under rules which allow outside involvement in secondary education.
The special curriculum bringing together an emphasis on English, design, IT and creative studies begins with the next academic year and the year after that Crown Woods will have a Digital Media Centre on one of the campus sites.
There are longer term hopes that once established schools outside London will take up the curriculum, but that will be after the first Lady Master has finished her term in office. She hopes also to digitise the Stationers’ archive which records copyright from its earliest days when the Company controlled which books could be copied and published. This would be of invaluable interest to historians of all types.
If education is the key priority, she also wants to reach out and pull in more applicants for membership. “It’s not just about correcting the gender balance,” she says. “We want to get a more balanced membership regardless of age, ethnicity or location.” The packaging sector will be a focus while there is also a relative shortage of working printers in membership.
“We are too old, too male and too white,” says Alden, pointing out that membership of the Stationers does not represent demographic patterns of employment in its industries.
It is about showing that the Stationers’ Company is as relevant in the 21st century as in the 16th and 17th centuries when non approved books would be burned in the yard. A huge London plane tree is said to mark the spot. Today the Company’s events allow people to debate the future, to understand where the media industries are headed, combining the great and the good with those forging new directions.
A marketing intern is joining the staff and will take the Stationers on to social media, keeping abreast with the latest means of distributing content. The Stationers’ Company has always been welcoming to new technology. In the days when its members were scribes and scriveners, England’s first print apprentice Wynkyn de Worde approached them about his plans to introduce the new technology of printing by the river Fleet.
Instead of nodding acceptance, the early Stationers said Why not join us? Six hundred years later, that attitude continues, even for Lady Masters.
Helen Esmonde will have been well briefed by William Alden, Clerk to the Company and a Stationer himself for more than 30 years.
