A book borrowed from a school library before the first world war has finally been returned – more than a century overdue.
A copy of Poetry of Byron was found by a man in Carmarthenshire, south Wales, who felt it should be returned to St Bees School, near Whitehaven, Cumbria, where it had been lent out to a schoolboy.
He noticed an inscription at the front of the book bearing the name Leonard Ewbank, along with the location ‘School House. St Bees’ and the date 25/9/11.
This simple inscription sparked a journey of discovery into the life of Leonard Ewbank, who was born on February 16, 1893 and attended St Bees School from 1902 to 1911 before continuing his education at Queen’s College, Oxford. The book was returned to the school in September and the headmaster of St Bees, Andrew Keep, said he was ‘honoured’ to have it back.
He said: “It’s incredible to think that a piece of St Bees’ history has found its way back to us after all these years. Records show that, despite his poor eyesight, he was recruited to the 15th Border Regiment in 1915 to fight in the first world war. He was killed in battle on 23 February 1916 by a bullet to the head and is buried at the Railway Dugouts burial ground in Ypres, Belgium, a cemetery that contains the graves of 2,463 troops.
Ewbank is commemorated on the school’s roll of honour as “an Englishman, brave, honest and loyal”. The book, featuring the work of Lord Byron, a Romantic poet famously described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, is not the first to be returned to a library after spending a lifetime elsewhere, but it could be one of the most overdue library books of all time.
In May, a book borrowed from a library in Helsinki was returned 84 years overdue. A Finnish translation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical novel The Refugees had been due on 26 December 1939, a month after the Soviet invasion of Finland, so it “might not have been the first thing on the borrower’s mind”, said Heini Strand, a librarian at Helsinki’s Oodi central library.
In July, Canoe Building in Glass-Reinforced Plastic by Alan Byde was returned to Orkney Library more than 47 years late, after being found during a house clearance. The library’s John Peterson said: “Fortunately we don’t charge overdue fines.”
