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Sunday 12 April 2020

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Eileen Colwell

Eileen Colwell, who died yesterday aged 98, was an author and librarian and one of the founders of the children's library movement; her knowledge of children's literature was unrivalled and she was much consulted by book publishers, translators and library administrators who came from all over the world to study her methods.

In the 1920s, when Eileen Colwell first became a librarian, there were no children's sections in libraries, and the presence of children, especially young children, was discouraged. She considered it of vital importance that children should have access to books from an early age, and that their first introduction to literature should be a pleasant one.

In 1937 she set up the Association of Children's Librarians (which became the Youth Library Section of the Library Association), and was its first secretary and later its chairman. Her aim was to create attractive and welcoming children's sections in public libraries with a selection of colourful, appropriate and interesting books for children of all ages.

Eileen Colwell's forthrightly expressed views were not always wholly in line with received opinion; she considered Little Black Sambo an ideal book for the very young, but did not hesitate to characterise the Orlando books as too sophisticated, and Awdry's Little Engine books as tedious and stereotyped. She believed children were never too young to be introduced to the Bible, preferably in the Authorised Version, as she herself had been at an early age.

Eileen Hilda Colwell was born on June 16 1904 at Robin Hood's Bay, Yorkshire, where her father was serving as a Methodist minister. She and her three siblings were brought up to believe that "a home without books is like a house without windows". From the age of seven she was taken by her father every week to buy a volume of Nelson's Sixpenny Classics, which she read herself. By the time she had reached her early teens she was familiar with most of the great works of English fiction. Her mother was a gifted storyteller, and the family made their own entertainment by putting on plays at home.

Public libraries were then very limited in scope, normally not allowing access to the shelves and forcing borrowers to choose titles from the catalogue; children's sections were virtually non-existent. Eileen Colwell decided to make her life's work in this field. At 17 she won the first scholarship awarded in the West Riding of Yorkshire to read Librarianship, and went to University College, London.

In her spare time she did voluntary work, reading Bible stories to children in hospitals and children's homes. Slight of build, she always looked younger than her years, and developed an innate sympathy with her young listeners, many of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and had little knowledge of literature.

After a short and frustrating spell in a Lancashire public library, she was appointed, at the age of 22, to a part-time and temporary post at Hendon, where there was no public library, but where she set up a service for children using local schools as centres in the evenings. A gift of several hundred books from Foyle's helped her to get started and, by the end of the first year, more than 25,000 books had been issued; this was more than doubled in the second year. Eventually 14 schools were being used as evening centres, prior to the building of the main library (now the Central Library of the London Borough of Barnet). She was soon working there permanently.

Among Eileen Colwell's many ideas, remarkable at the time, was to enlist the children themselves to help with issuing books. She also trained them in the use of the catalogue, and encouraged them to write simple book reviews.

Local schools were invited to bring parties to introduce them to the library. After one such visit, a six-year-old wrote: "We all love Miss Colwell. God bless her in her work." She produced special booklists and a newsletter, "The Magic Casement", which continued until the outbreak of war in 1939 brought paper rationing.

Eileen Colwell built up a large illustrations collection which was used for serious reference, not only by children and teachers but by film-makers, designers and many others. She organised play readings and book weeks as early as 1928 (an idea which later spread widely) and encouraged well-known writers and poets to give talks to the children.

From her early days teaching Sunday school she had been interested in storytelling to groups, and in the 1920s she studied with the actor Sterling Mackinley to improve her diction and technique. She began storytelling sessions at Hendon Library and arranged story festivals in local schools. In these activities she was much encouraged by John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, with whom she formed a firm friendship. She also set up oral story sessions for the many German refugees flooding into north-west London in the late 1930s, generating an unexpected degree of enthusiasm in her audiences. The story sessions continued unbroken throughout the war years, except when the risk of bombing made them too dangerous.

Having initiated a campaign to introduce parents and teachers to the best in children's books, Eileen Colwell lectured to student groups, to the staff of homes such as Barnardo's, and publishers and authors.

She was also the first children's librarian to be a member of the Carnegie Medal judging panel. The course she set up at University College, London, in library work with children, was for years the only theoretical training available in the subject.

Eileen Colwell published a number of books of stories for telling or reading aloud, with hints on how to deliver them. These included Princess Splendour and Other Stories (1969) and The Magic Umbrella, and Other Stories for Telling (1977). She also edited numerous collections, and conducted storytelling demonstrations as far afield as Canada and Japan. In 1956 she published a short book, How I Became a Librarian, and her autobiography, Once Upon A Time, was published in 2000.

She was appointed MBE in 1965.

Eileen Colwell never married, but she was close to her brother and sisters and their families, and found ample fulfilment in her work for children, often remarking that, if she were to live her life again, she would choose to have it exactly the same.

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