House of Lords Library

Once the Library had opened, Leary made a list of the modest amount of stock, the vast majority of which consisted of law books, together with volumes of Hansard and various reference works.

Early in 1834, as space was once again becoming a serious problem, the French Chamber of Peers offered the Library around 1,800 books including parliamentary works, memoirs and histories, in exchange for publications of the British Parliament.

The Library survived the conflagration, but its threatened books were nevertheless evacuated, passed along a file of soldiers, and taken to the safety of nearby St Margaret's Church and the houses of clerks who lived close by.

Seemingly overwhelmed by the arrival of so many new books, Leary managed to get his brother James appointed as Assistant Librarian, in order to give him a helping hand.

The purchase of books declined, not helped by an 1842 resolution of the House that forbade the Librarian from buying any new material without the written order of three members of the Library Committee.

In 1851, it was decided that the original death warrant of King Charles I should be deposited in the Library, in order to give it greater protection; it would remain there until the late 1970s.

In 1897, the Library made its first major acquisition for many years with the purchase of about two thousand tracts on Irish affairs, that had once belonged to Sir Robert Peel.

These "Peel Tracts" remain in the Library to the present day, and are a valuable source for Irish history in the years leading up to the Union with Great Britain in 1801.

Strong's successor was Edmund Gosse, the well-known literary critic and bibliophile, and during his decade in charge the Library stock underwent something of a transformation.

He purchased books covering a much wider range of subject matter than any of his predecessors, acquiring many works of English and French literature and history.

Gosse retired in 1914, and it was his successor Arthur Butler who took the Library through the years of the First World War, when he had to manage without his Assistant Librarian Charles Travis Clay, who was away fighting on the Western Front.

Charles Travis Clay, Librarian from 1922, was a keen historian, well respected for his work in editing medieval charters, and he was eventually elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Once the War was over, Clay continued to innovate by helping to set up an internal bindery unit in the House of Lords, which led to a reduction in the amount of material that needed to be sent out to external binders.

In the years since, a sizeable number of historic and special items that used to be kept in the Library have been transferred to the Archives, where the storage conditions are more suitable for them; the death warrant of Charles I is the most notable example.

During that time, the main Library suite had its woodwork cleaned and restored, and the panels above the shelves, which featured the arms of the Lord Chief Justices of England, were repainted.

Christopher Dobson retired a few months after the report was published, and it therefore fell to his successor, Roger Morgan, to implement the Working Group's recommendations.

The Library now stretches well beyond the core riverside suite of rooms; its expansion was driven in no small part by the increase in the size of the collections, which by 1991 had grown to around 80,000 bound volumes, plus other documents like reports and pamphlets.

In 2001, a branch library was opened across the road in Millbank House, to serve the numerous members and their staff who now had offices over there due to overcrowding in the Palace.