Shane Jarman was up a ladder decorating a Christmas tree at the school where he was deputy headteacher when he got a call asking him to come to Rotherham hospital ASAP. It was December 2007 and Jarman’s wife, Claire, had given birth the previous day to their first child, a girl called Emma, so of course he rushed to the phone. All was well, he was told, but that “everything would become clear” when he got to the hospital.
Once there, his wife told him – somewhat unexpectedly – that they were going to meet Dolly Parton. “And literally within what felt like five minutes,” he recalled, “there were great camera flashes, lots of noise, lots of clicking and in walked this real big bundle of energy.”
Jarman said that as his wife handed over their tiny 4lb 6oz baby to the country star, “all I remember is seeing Dolly Parton with my little girl’s head in her hand and these great big red nails”.
Was he a little nervous about the nails? “I was very nervous about the nails to be quite honest.”
Parton was in the South Yorkshire former mining and steelworking town – not principally known for its razzle-dazzle – for the British launch of the Imagination Library, the book donation programme the musician had started in her Tennessee home of Sevier County a little over a decade earlier, and which she had been invited to extend to children in Yorkshire.
If Rotherham – or at least a gathering of local dignitaries that assembled later in a disused steelworks – was a little bemused by the singer, Parton knew places like this, and of course knew how to charm.
“I gotta make sure I say your town name right – it’s Rother’m?” she said, flattening the famous southern twang to something approximating flat Yorkshire vowels. “Did I get it right? I’ve been practising because it don’t look like that on paper. In the States, anything that’s h-a-m we have to say Rother-ham.”
Among the torrent of tributes to the entertainer, businesswoman and philanthropist since her death on Monday, Rotherham too has been remembering the impact of a woman who, for all her own glamour, cared deeply about places that had a little less of it.
Parton may have jested when she said she had considered buying a South Yorkshire pied-à-terre (“so you may be walking down the streets of Rotherham and see me coming out of a little cubbyhole somewhere”), but her description of the post-industrialist town as “a heart spot for me” was sincere, thanks to the similarities she saw to her own outsider upbringing.
“I totally related to Rotherham,” she said some years later. “I know that it’s out in an industrial area … When they were making fun of me for going out there, I thought, you know what? Don’t make fun of me.”
The scheme ensured that every child in Rotherham was posted a free book, in their own name, for each month of their life until they were five, funded partly by Parton’s foundation and partly by the local authority and other local funders. Deborah Bullivant, who took over leading the Rotherham Imagination Library shortly after Parton’s visit as part of a wider literacy drive, said that despite some initial scepticism from locals, it “changed the culture” for many.
“Some people were very suspicious: Why Dolly Parton? What is this thing?” she said. “[But] can you imagine receiving a book, from registering your child’s birth, your baby in their own name receives the book every month through the letterbox? For many families who didn’t really have a background in reading, it changed the culture within their homes to being more of a reading culture and embracing books and using books and sharing books.”
The fact that the literacy drive was so personal to the singer was “the best way to counter any of the suspicion or worries that people had about it”, Bullivant said. “Why is Dolly Parton doing this? Who is she? She doesn’t know about this? Well, she does. She understood she needed to drive her own work herself from scratch. She got the importance of the imagination, of reading, of telling stories.”
Though the Rotherham scheme was wound up in 2015 after the council withdrew support, it would be rolled out to other places in Britain, including Doncaster, North Lincolnshire, the London borough of Southwork (“Hello Suth’rk! This is Dolly!”) and Nottingham (which even coaxed an “Ay up me duck!” from the singer).
In total, 6.3m books have been given to children across the four UK nations since one-day-old Emma Jarman received the first one in 2007, a copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which Parton autographed for her. (Globally, the figure is 300m).
Emma, now 18, will shortly be going to university to study biomedical science, “and, if I know Emma, [the book] will go to university with her so that she can show her friends there,” said her father.
