Robert Woof; Wordsworth Trust director & expert on English Romantic poets and painters
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 10/11/2005) Telegraph
Robert Woof, who died on Tuesday aged 74, was the first
director of the Wordsworth Trust and a leading expert on
English Romantic poets and painters.
The Wordsworth Trust had been founded in 1891 to secure Dove
Cottage, Wordsworth's "little unsuspected paradise" at
Grasmere in the Lake District, "for the eternal possession
of those who love English poetry all over the world". Woof
became a trustee in 1970 and, with his wife Pamela, an
expert on Dorothy Wordsworth, was instrumental in turning
the Trust's holdings at Grasmere into one of the best
literary museums in the world and a centre of serious
research, scholarship and conservation.
With boundless reserves of infectious enthusiasm, Woof was
far more than a mere keeper of the flame. He oversaw the
restoration of Dove Cottage and was instrumental in
developing the Wordsworth Museum, opened in 1981, as a
national centre, adding to its collections and supporting a
wide range of educational activities, exhibitions and
cross-arts projects. These included residencies for
contemporary artists and poets and a popular season of
summer poetry readings.
He became something of a local hero, providing employment
for young people to preserve the legacy of the Lake Poets
and inspire new generations of artists and writers. Last
year the Wordsworth Trust collaborated with the Marie Curie
Cancer Care charity to arrange a mass reading by
schoolchildren of Wordsworth's Daffodils and sponsored walks
along the "trodden ways" used by the poet while composing
verse.
Perhaps Woof's greatest single achievement was the £3.15
million Jerwood Centre, a modern version of a Lakeland barn
built about 100 yards away from Dove Cottage to house the
Trust's collection of 30,000 manuscripts, 12,000 books and
8,000 prints, paintings and drawings, and designed to turn
the literary shrine into an international centre for English
Romanticism.
The scheme was initially opposed by the Lake District
National Park Authority, which not only threw out the
planning application but suggested, to Woof's dismay, that
the Trust's collections, built up since 1891, should be
dispersed. When the Trust appealed, the application became a
classic fight of "heritage" versus "progress". The
authority's decision was reversed on appeal and the centre,
opened this summer by the poet Seamus Heaney, was awarded a
commendation by the Civic Trust as "a breathtakingly
beautiful building of sheer simplicity".
Robert Samuel Woof was born into a farming family in
Lancaster on April 20 1931. From the Royal Lancaster Grammar
School, he won a scholarship to read English at Pembroke
College, Oxford. He went on to the Unversity of Toronto on a
travelling fellowship, studying under Kathleen Coburn and
James McGillivray and taking a doctorate on the literary
relations of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He remained in
Toronto as a lecturer before returning to Britain to take up
a fellowship at Newcastle University, where he became a
lecturer in English in 1962 and Reader in English Literature
in 1971.
After joining the Wordsworth Trust as a trustee in 1970,
Woof served as keeper of its collections and honorary
secretary and treasurer before becoming director in 1992.
Woof published extensively on Romantic writers and artists,
ranging from a critical edition of TW Thompson's
Wordsworth's Hawkshead (1970) to Wordsworth: The Critical
Heritage (2001), an analytical account of early critical
responses to Wordsworth by other poets and painters.
As well as his work for the Wordsworth Trust, Woof was
actively involved in the arts, serving as vice-chairman of
Northern Arts from 1974 to 1981 and later as a member of the
Arts Council of England, chairing its literature and drama
panels. In 1991 he became chairman of the Century Theatre,
Keswick, which he divided into two parts, the Theatre by the
Lake and the English Touring Theatre, which he chaired from
1993 to 2000. In 2003 he was appointed to the Cultural
Consortium England Northwest.
Woof, who was appointed CBE in 1998, married Pamela Moore, a
fellow scholar, in 1958. She survives him with their two
sons and two daughters, of whom one is the actress Emily
Woof.