Eileen Colwell, Times of London
Hyfler/Rosner
Telling tales, sharing stories, and making libraries dens of
magic for generations of children
SOME of the few residents of Hendon who did not know of Eileen
Colwell were said to have expressed doubts about her sanity. She was to be
seen walking the pavements of the borough or waiting at bus stops muttering
to herself interminably, with no regard for what was going on around her.
Rather than a sign of incipient madness, though, this was the
storyteller at work. From the time of her appointment as children's
librarian at Hendon in 1926 - one of the first in Britain - she set great
store by storytelling as a means to demonstrate to children the art and
power of narrative. Rehearsing stories on the way to work was an economical
use of time.
Colwell's arrival at Hendon came at the end of some zigzag
journeyings. She was born in Robin Hood's Bay in 1904 to the wife of a
Wesleyan minister, and her father's calling required that he spend only
three years in any one manse. So her itinerant childhood was spent variously
in Halifax, Bradford-upon-Avon, Chester-le-Street, Rawmarsh near Rotherham,
and Penistone. (Her recollections of these journeyings, and of the
privations of life in a minister's family in this period, were published in
2000 as Once upon a Time, and read like tales from another world.)
Although her education was necessarily haphazard, her zeal for
reading began early in her father's large and muchtravelled library, and
eventually governed her decision to become a librarian, and, if possible, a
librarian working with children.
She gained a place at University College London to take the
recently established course in librarianship and, once qualified, managed to
get a post as a senior assistant in Bolton Public Library at £80 a year. But
she was lonely there, and could not afford to entertain herself as the bulk
of her pay was sent home to her parents.
In the 1920s professional librarians had no great opinion of
children and little thought of providing services for them, so when Colwell
discovered that a library committee in Hendon was advertising for a
part-time temporary assistant to develop a revolutionary new children's
library, she applied and was an obvious choice. So began 40 years of
momentous, full-time work in the borough and, periodically, around the
world.
Hendon's experiment in developing its library system from child
readers upwards was an early sign of the emphasis on library services for
children that would reach a climax in the 1960s and 1970s. Colwell was near
the centre of this movement. She began in 1926 by identifying the seven most
conveniently placed schools, and ordered book cupboards for them before
ingeniously acquiring about 2,000 books from a variety of sources.
When Hendon Library opened in 1929, she was appointed its
permanent children's librarian. The west wing - the sunniest part of the
building - was transformed into a colourful environment with posters,
displays, special collections and weekly story hours, and she encouraged
children themselves to become involved in the running of the section,
recruiting "assistants" to help her to stamp books and to do other routine
jobs.
Through her patient networking among various dinosaurs in the
Library Association, she succeeded in establishing children's librarians as
a distinctive specialist group within the profession. By regular contact
with publishers and through the establishment of the association's Carnegie
and Kate Greenaway Medals, she saw the profession exerting an influence on
editorial standards and promotional activities. And through collaborative
endeavours she found herself involved in some tricky, and sometimes
near-farcical, postwar international ventures to promote children's
literature.
But the bedrock of her work lay in the service to the children
and the schools in Hendon, and especially in her enthusiasm for storytelling
and in encouraging others to tell stories. At first sight she seemed an
unlikely activist in such a campaign. Quietly spoken, petite (indeed,
smaller than many of those to whom she told stories), she looked almost
frail. But she had mastered voice-projection, and without any histrionics
she had the gift for holding an audience, first because they realised that
they were partners with her, sharing a story, and secondly because the
stories that she offered had become part of herself (the bus-stop mutterings
paid off).
Much of her repertoire, often with notes on the telling, has
been published in various anthologies, most notably A Storyteller's Choice
(1963). Her guide to the craft appeared as Storytelling in 1980.
On her retirement from Hendon in 1967, Colwell moved to
Loughborough, where she taught for a couple of years in the university's
school of librarianship. But she did not enjoy the constraints of such
formal work, so she retired a second time in 1970. In her last years she
became partially sighted - though she paid her paperboy to take them both
through the latest Harry Potter - but she enjoyed many years during which
she was vigorously able to maintain friendships long established at home and
abroad.
In 1965 she was appointed MBE, a thrilling moment for so ardent
a royalist, and in 1975 Loughborough made her an honorary Doctor of Letters.
At the age of 90 she was acclaimed by all her friends, colleagues and
admirers in the field of children's books with the presentation to her of
the Eleanor Farjeon Award.
She never married.
Eileen Colwell, MBE, librarian and storyteller, was born on June
16, 1904. She died on September 17, 2002, aged 98.
