I knew little about steel magnate and latterly philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, when I was looking for an office for a business I was setting up in 1998, after Belfast’s Good Friday Agreement and the new Assembly created an opportunity for a political lobbying consultancy.
A friend alerted me and my partner Fiona to an old Carnegie Library, recently restored privately by an architect, not far from where we lived in South Belfast; it was spectacular – beautiful brick and sandstone, fine metalwork, leaded windows, elegant wood and stunning vitreous mosaic tiles in the entrance hall. We rented it immediately and ran our company Stratagem from it for the next two decades; each visitor and new staffer wowed and exclaimed as they entered for the first time, emphasising what a fine workplace location could do to inspire workers, clients and guests alike.
Over the years we learned that Belfast had two other Carnegie libraries – one on the Falls Road, still a flourishing library under motivational leadership and the third in lower Oldpark, declining through neglect and abandonment; I had been in it a few times, with the local community group as they endeavoured to wrest it from the state via community asset transfer; not to be.
When the community worker phoned to report that it was now up for auction, and would I hold her hand in the audience at the Europa Hotel, as it was gobbled up by some rapacious private developer, I agreed. The reserve price was £90,000. No-one bid for it. No interest whatsoever. ‘Going, going…’ Suddenly my hand went up. ‘Sold’, the auctioneer bellowed, as I was hustled into a side room to lodge a 10% deposit, before I might welch on my naïve enthusiasm. The community worker took me across the road to the Crown Bar, lest I fainted, she reported later, as I explained to Fiona at home that we now owned a tumbledown library, as well as a house, a car and a bicycle.
That was when I had a rather consuming full-time public-facing job in another part of town, it was before Covid was heard of, and before I had read of Andrew Carnegie’s remarkable life story, and his far-sighted ‘Gospel of Wealth’ in which he explains: ‘He who dies rich, dies thus disgraced’, the first espousal of the modern ‘Giving while Living’.
I now know that Carnegie was himself a ‘Bobbin Boy’ in his family’s weaving cottage in poverty-stricken Dunfermline, Fife in Scotland, before he left for Pittsburgh in the 1840s as an economic migrant, where he used a generous citizen’s private 400-volume library to improve himself; he climbed the career ladder swiftly in railroads, steel and finance, through acquisitions and vertical integration (‘Why am I buying steel – let’s buy the steel mills to control the industry! Why am I borrowing money – let’s create some financial instruments!’ he argued), becoming the richest man in the world – many times wealthier than the modern titans Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (some say 60 times!).
Remembering his perilous climb up the greasy pole of US corporate life, he decided to give away his fortune, endowing 2,500 libraries across the English-speaking world, including 66 on the island of Ireland, describing them as ‘cradles for democracy’, ‘temples of knowledge’, ‘palaces of learning’ and ‘the best gift that can be given to a community’. Recalling dull and tedious Church of Scotland services, he also mischievously donated cash for church organs ‘to lessen the pain of the sermons…’
Whilst his business methods have met with widespread criticism – he was ruthless, brutal and one-dimensional in many respects – his philanthropy has become emblematic of a bygone era of noblesse oblige; although he had also argued in The Gospel for 100% inheritance tax – that would certainly take him way out of favour in the current UK debates on that subject.
Now, nearly a decade on, I have left my full-time job, prioritised the Carnegie #BackToLife project amongst my various activities, established a charitable trust for the library’s governance, undertaken emergency repair works to sort out the roof, dry rot and ‘water ingress’ (one of the many technical terms I have had to learn) and developed early plans for ‘The Carnegie Centre for Weaving’, combining Carnegie’s own background with the industrial heritage of North Belfast where the great mills and factories hummed, clattered and clanked in the late 1800s as Belfast became the great city, Linenopolis.
Join us in this #BackToLife effort!
– Quintin Oliver