Five books every Salopian should read

By Mary Webb

As there's a Mary Webb Society, you should at least find out what the fuss is all about.

Webb, in case you don't know, was born Mary Gladys Meredith at Leighton in Shropshire, and drew on the landscape, people, and folklore of her native county for her novels, using disguised place names and so on.

Gone To Earth is probably her most familiar novel, if only because it was made into a Hollywood movie, partly shot on location in Shropshire and using local extras, in 1949.

Although her books were well regarded by contemporary critics, she only had modest success, and it was not until a posthumous tribute to her as a "neglected genius" by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, after her death at the age of just 46, that things really took off.

Her marriage had collapsed and her husband died in spectacular style, falling off Scafell in 1939.

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A SHROPSHIRE LAD

By A.E. Housman

He wasn't from Shropshire, he wasn't a lad any more, and he didn't write that famous poem that starts "Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun" which is often attributed to him.

Nor did Housman know what he was talking about. He hadn't even visited Shropshire at the time he started to write the collection of poems called A Shropshire Lad. Perhaps that's why in one poem he refers to the steeple of Hughley church. It doesn't have one - it has a timber-framed belfry.

Nevertheless Shropshire has taken Housman to its heart and his poems are seen as a romantic evocation of the county.

After his death his ashes were brought to Ludlow and buried against the north wall of St Laurence's Church.

And by the way, that Clunton poem was a traditional rhyme, and there is a theory that the title A Shropshire Lad should be pronounced with the emphasis on the word Shropshire, as if to distinguish it from lads from other places.

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THIS IS MY LIFE

By Dame Agnes Hunt

Agnes Hunt is a Shropshire nursing legend who shrugged off personal pain and hardship to found what is today the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital at Gobowen.

Its beginnings were as the world's first open air hospital for cripples, as they were then termed, which opened at Baschurch in 1900. Agnes was herself a "cripple" through the degeneration of a hip joint at the age of 10, and used crutches.

As a result she began to think she had been especially sent on earth to help other "cripples" and she was determined to become a hospital nurse.

Her autobiography tells of her battle in the face of polite official apathy and many practical problems to get things off the ground, along with co-founder and friend Emily Selina Goodford.

Agnes felt that nurses should always be happy and upbeat, as this would rub off on their patients, and her philosophy can be summed up as "patients come first."

It is an inspirational true story.

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THE WAITING ROOM TO HELL

By Keith Cubbin

There are books you will probably never see by authors you will never have heard of writing about aspects of Shropshire that, if they didn't write about them, nobody would.

These local books generally have small print runs and modest sales at best, but thank heavens people write them, as they are gems. This particular book is chosen as representative, if not quite at random, of this genre.

Keith Cubbin worked as a psychiatric nurse at Shelton Hospital in the 1950s and his book is fascinating in revealing the gulf between how things were supposed to be run, and how they actually were run by staff who found the well-meaning rules were impractical.

For instance, night duty ward reports were supposed to be written up in the morning, but with that period being so chaotic for staff with the psychiatric patients all getting up, the old hands would save time by writing harmlessly fictionalised reports in advance - Bloggs had slept well, Smith had been incontinent, Jones was a bit aggressive, and so on.

One problem with books like these is once they've gone, they've gone, and can be difficult to find - you're looking at shelling out at least £40 and even as much as £300-plus to get a rare copy of this through the internet.

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THE LONE PINE SERIES

By Malcolm Saville

We must have something for children to read too, and the choice is vast, but we shall cravenly play safe with this series by one of Britain's most popular children's writers of his day.

Saville was from Sussex and first visited Shropshire on holiday in 1936. His family were evacuated to Marshbrook, near Church Stretton, at the outbreak of war in 1939 and the Shropshire landscape was the backdrop for his first children’s book, Mystery at Witchend, which centred on the tale of a clutch of German spies living on a house on the Long Mynd.

Incidentally, the Malcolm Saville Society had also heard rumours to that effect and tried in 1999 to find out if there was any underlying element of truth to the fictional tale.

There followed nearly 90 titles between 1943 and 1982, including the Lone Pine adventure series. Seven books were serialised on Children’s Hour and two were made into films.

Saville kept close ties with the county, visiting for family holidays until the late 1970s.

By the time of his death in 1982 he had sold some three million books.