Well, I can wait to hear myself speak, because I know exactly what I am going to say. Muggeridge probably didn’t, and would ad lib to fit the occasion. I want to say exactly what I want to say, and so I apologize for having to read this speech.

I started in the university library on Monday 2 February 1970, so today I have completed exactly 39 years of work. Now during this time there must have been people who at times infuriated me, and things happened that made me just as furious. Well, don’t worry, because I am not going to talk about those people or those events!
If I did, I might not be given my present, which would be a great shame, as I have given, over 39 years, a small fortune- but happily, willingly- for others departing the workplace. (Maybe enough to pay for my daughter’s wedding!).

Also, I am not going to talk about the past, about my personal work history. I don’t want my farewell to sound like “this is your life”.(There are three words I must stop myself from using, and those words are “I remember when”). Instead, I am going to talk briefly about the future, which is you, and about the job we do. I don’t believe we stop to think about the importance of our work enough. The university and research libraries of the world have the enormous responsibility of carrying on the knowledge of the past and adding to it the knowledge of the present generation. Is there a more important job than that? Can there be a more important job than that? I don’t think so. I know there appears to be other “players”( for want of a better word) in the information industry, and ones we collaborate with successfully, but ultimately they have to answer to their shareholders, not stakeholders, as we do, and our stakeholders include future generations. So we are the guardians of the Word. Remember that.- the guardians of the word. But to understand how this happened, I have to take you back, only briefly, I promise, a long way into the past, to the Carolingian renaissance of the Franks, to the time of Charlemagne, the 8th and 9th centuries. Our roots are not in the libraries of antiquity but in the monasteries of the Benedictines, whose monks faithfully copied not only the scriptures and the commentaries on the scriptures, but also the Latin classics of Rome, and rather later that of Greece. In the Eastern Empire, Byzantium, something similar was happening. And who was it who was responsible for, who decided, what texts should be copied next, and how many copies made? Not the Abbott, or the Prior, but the Librarian! Yes, the Librarian was collector and publisher! The Librarian was the boss of the scriptorium, or copying room, as well as the collection of books. But by the time of the 12th Century Renaissance throughout Europe, the great universities had been established, and the monastery collections eventually, by gift, bequest, purchase (or dare I say it, theft!) over the next few hundred years, found their way to the new centres of learning, often spending time in the private hands of scholars or wealthy families, before finding a permanent homes. The secularization of recorded knowledge flowered in the great Paris workshops and elsewhere in Europe throughout the late middle ages.
So this is our heritage, our line of descent. Thousands of unknown copyists painfully and slowly building collections, and the Librarians directing activities for much of this time.

So, to anyone hesitating about making librarianship their career, hesitate no longer! You will be on the side of the angels. I believe there is no occupation that can provide so many genuine and permanent benefits to so many people. And of course, digitisation (yes, I know it’s not perfect yet!) opens up such enormous possibilities of access to unpublished prime source material that even a stalwart of the age of print culture like myself can’t fail to be excited!

Librarianship has changed enormously in my time, when I started her there was no automation other than a computerised list of serials in the Physical Sciences Library. Things soon changed.

I have particularly enjoyed the last eleven years of my working life as Special Collections Librarian after spending so long as head of the old Acquisitions Department – no staff to worry about, no money to worry about, and actually getting paid to handle and show people 15th century books and manuscripts!

Also, there was my work with the police over three years, which while distressing in that we lost so many books, was exciting in the sense that few if any librarians have organised clandestine camera installations in their libraries after closing time, or accompanied large numbers of plain clothes and uniform police in early morning raids executing search warrants on the properties of book thieves (with immediate results, I can say).

Over the years at Canterbury I have worked with many wonderful people, and some of them are here today. I won’t name them because being wonderful people, they are also modest people. There were some interesting and unusual people too. I particularly remember the female member of the Lending staff who smoked a pipe at morning tea, and the Kardex assistant who corresponded with the poet and novelist Robert Graves. (She wouldn’t give up his letters to the library.)
But I would like to thank particularly Library IT for their help over the years, and Sharon and Carole for all the detailed, time consuming work, those little touches which would certainly be missed if they hadn’t attended to them.
I would also like to thank Cynthia, my boss, and whose boss I was many years ago, for her thoughtfulness and helpfullness in all things.

Regrets? Only two: the first is that I am not able to cash in on my days of sick leave credits, which total 334. I used to have 335, but I had to take one last year, so now I have only 334. I have worked out that I could have bought a secondhand Aston Martin with the money, rather than the Toyota I did buy.
The second regret is that I was not present on that day, or rather evening, in November 1975 when the Vice-Chancellor was ordered out of the library by a student assistant.