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Authority record
GB 1534 RM1 · Person · 9/12/1911-5/4/1988

Rosemary Joy Manning was born in Weymouth, Dorset, 9 December 1911. She attended boarding school in Devon and later studied at the Royal Holloway College from 1930 to 1933, graduating with a 2nd class honours degree in Classics.
Manning first worked in a department store on Oxford street and then as a secretary. Unhappy with her work she suffered a nervous breakdown and was treated at the Maudsley Hospital, following this Manning was offered a teaching job by her former headmistress where she stayed as a teacher for a further 35 years and in 1950 she moved to Hampstead, London to take over a long-established girls’ preparatory school as headmistress.
In 1957 Manning released Green Smoke, her first in the series of Dragon children’s books she would become well known for. In 1962 she released The Chinese Garden, following a failed suicide attempt. The book was later known as her greatest novel and an important piece of lesbian literature. After retiring, she publicly came out as a lesbian in a televised interview in 1980. She died on the 5th April 1988.

GB 1534 RM2 · Corporate body · 1975-

Marion Boyars Publishers is an independent publishing company located in London, England renowned for publishing adventurous and occasionally controversial fiction and nonfiction especially in translation within the humanities and social sciences.
Marion Boyars Publishers was formed in 1975, but had previously been formed in the sixties under the name Calder and Boyers being run jointly with John Calder. When Marion Boyars died in 1999, her daughter Catheryn Kilgarriff took over and currently is managing director of the company.

GB 1534 RM3 · Corporate body · 1978 - c.2013

The Women’s Press LTD is a publishing firm established in 1978 and dedicated to publishing books for women by women, feminist fiction and non-fiction by women writers from around the globe. Publishing included literary and crime fiction, biography and autobiography, health, race and disability, women’s studies and cultural, sexual and political history. The publishers appear to have dissolved c.2013.

GB 1534 RM4 · Corporate body · 1921 -

Jonathan Cape is a London publishing firm founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape and his business partner Wren Howard. The firm established a reputation for high quality design, production winning more Booker Prizes and short listings than any other publishers. After Cape’s death in 1960 the firm later merged with three other London publishing houses and in 1987 was taken over by Random House.

GB 1534 RM5 · Corporate body · 1899-

Curtis Brown LTD (Curtis Brown Literary and talent Agency) is a literary and talent agency based in London, United Kingdom. It was founded by Albert Curtis Brown in 1899 and has represented many famous figures in the literary and political world throughout the twentieth century. It is now led by Sarah Spear as CEO and has diversified with acting, television and theatre departments.

GB 1534 RM6 · Person · 10/05/1908- 27/06/1966

John Lancelot Agard Bramhall Davenport was born in London, England in 1908. He became known as a critic and book reviewer who wrote for The Observer and The Spectator.
Son of the writer Robert Davenport and the actress Muriel George, he was primarily raised by his grandmother and educated at ST Paul’s and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Following his studies Davenport worked for MGM as a screenwriter with F. Scott Fitzgerald. In 1934 Davenport married Clemency Hale, a painter and set designer and had one child. In the 1940s he taught at Stowe School and worked for the BBC at Bush House as head of the Belgian Section. Following his divorce to Hale, Davenport married Marjorie Morrison and had another child. In the 1960s, he retired to the country and died shortly afterwards.

GB1534 LP1 · Corporate body · 1984-1990

The Lesbians and Policing Project (Lespop) was a project developed from the Gay London Police Monitoring Group (GALOP) in 1985 in order to support lesbians in relation to the abuse faced from the police. Based in London they offered workshops and phone-line services often focusing on how race and disability intersected with sexuality to influence treatment of lesbians by the police. Their advice focussed on how to deal with police raids, tactics for demonstrations, legal advice, and information on Section 28. Lespop also sought to research treatment of Lesbians by the police by working with lesbians in London.

GB1534 GWY · Corporate body · c1984-1989

Gwynedd and Bangor Lesbian Line (also referred to as the Bangor Lesbian Line) is a telephone service that was started in 1984 by four lesbians living in Gwynedd. The line was set up to help increase awareness of lesbian issues, assist women coming to terms with their lesbianism and decrease isolation by improving lesbian social life in the Bangor and Gwynedd area. During the 1980s, Lesbian phone-line organisations were started in cities across the UK.

GB 1534 LAIC · Corporate body · 1984-1996

The Archive began in London in 1984, firstly under the name of London Lesbian Archive and later as the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre (LAIC). It was funded by the Greater London Council, supporting the wages of one full-time and two part-time workers to develop and sustain a collection of UK lesbian history and culture. LAIC operated out of the London Women's Centre at Wesley House, 4 Wild Court, London, along with many other feminist collectives and women's organisations. Like Glasgow Women’s Library’s own collection, materials in the archive were all donated.

In the early years the archive collection mainly comprised lesbian books including literature, pulp fiction and a significant amount of lesbian & gay as well as feminist non-fiction. It received donations of duplicates from other feminist libraries and archives in the UK, such as Bath Feminist Archive (which is now incorporated into the collection of Feminist Archives South). LAIC also took donations of journals and pamphlets, oral histories, foreign language materials, organisational records, press clippings and manuscripts from individual women, and by the late 1980s the LAIC had amassed an impressive and unique collection of lesbian women’s materials. The collection ranges from organisational records and personal archives to journals and ephemera.

Like many of its sister organisations, LAIC went through turbulent periods in its history. Shifting dynamics in feminist, lesbian and queer politics meant that the collection occasionally faced division, and even at times closure. The political landscape of the 1980s and early 1990s consistently put pressure on funding, and laws such as Section 28 caused precarity, uncertainty and turbulence for projects like LAIC. By 1995, funding the Archive became impossible and new premises were sought. Glasgow Women’s Library housed the collection as a donation; today, the Lesbian Archive comprises around one-third of GWL's entire archive, and LAIC's (uncatalogued) library collection is housed on the mezzanine level.

Southall Black Sisters
Corporate body · 1979-

Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a not-for-profit, secular and inclusive organisation, was established in 1979 to meet the needs of Black (Asian and African-Caribbean) women. Their aims are to highlight and challenge all forms gender-related violence against women, empower them to gain more control over their lives; live without fear of violence and assert their human rights to justice, equality and freedom.

For over three decades SBS have been at the forefront of challenging domestic and gender-related violence locally and nationally, and have campaigned for the provision of proper and accountable support services to enable women and their children to escape violent relationships and live in dignity. They run an advice, advocacy and resource centre in West London which provides a comprehensive service to women experiencing violence and abuse and other forms of inequality. SBS offers specialist advice, information, casework, advocacy, counselling and self-help support services in several community languages, especially South Asian languages.