I received an email from Mary Fawcett in summer 2017 informing me that her husband Trevor, one of ARLIS's founding members, had died. Until I became editor of this journal, Trevor Fawcett was just a name seen in the membership directory as an honorary member. I had read his contributions to the ALJ and News-sheet during my MA librarianship studies and knew vaguely that he was one of the great and the good. But it was his kind offer to donate his copies of the journal to fill gaps in the ARLIS archive collection at the V&A archive that made me realize that he was still an engaged member of the community in spite of retiring 30 years ago, and his importance to ARLIS heritage is tremendous.
There are two obituaries published already in the Bath Chronicle1 [LINK: https://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/news/bath-news/historian-trevor-fawcett-who-championed-329431] and the Guardian2 [LINK: www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/17/trevor-fawcett-obituary] They give all the essential dates and information about his life, as well as detail his scholarly work as an historian. So for this we have turned to fellow members of the ARLIS great and good – Sonia French, Beth Houghton, Phillip Pacey and Clive Phillpot – to elucidate Trevor's fundamental importance to the existence of ARLIS.
Sonia French spoke at Trevor's memorial service on the 15 September 2017 and below is her text, slightly modified.Footnote 1
When in 1985 Trevor retired from art librarianship he was made an Honorary Member of ARLIS, the Society he had inspired; the following are some of the words written then by Clive Phillpot and there can be no finer introduction on Trevor and ARLIS than these words from Clive's dedication.
Trevor Fawcett has retired from art librarianship. An era is thus delineated. While Trevor had published on art library issues before the birth of ARLIS/UK in 1969, none of these articles had the impact of a short letter which appeared in the Library Association Record in March 1968Footnote 2, asking if there was any interest in co-operation amongst art librarians.Footnote 3
The response to that letter in 1968 was immediate and far-reaching; within a year ARLIS, the Art Libraries Society was established through a remarkable meeting of minds and spirit. Many of the art librarians who responded in 1968 have remained colleagues and friends throughout their careers. To quote from Beth Houghton, former Head of the Tate Library and Archive, and someone who has also played a key role in ARLIS's life:
In 1968, from his outpost at UEA in Norwich, and feeling that perhaps art librarianship had not so far been recognised as a distinct specialization within the UK, Trevor perceptively sensed a change coming and seized the moment with his letter to the Library Association Record. It was a rallying call to the community to come together for mutual support and the benefits of co-operation.Footnote 4
Now ARLIS has, for nearly half a century, supported and sustained those working in the field of visual arts information. It has, quite simply been the defining force for generations of art librarians, not only in the UK, but internationally, as the UK Society was quickly copied in countries around the globe, from Europe to North America to Australia and New Zealand.
In 1979 one of early initiatives in international co-operation was a study tour to Germany, the first of many that took us far and wide across Europe and which became a very successful and enjoyable feature in the Society's programme. I have a photograph taken in a bar in Copenhagen in 1979 with Trevor and four other ARLIS colleagues including me gazing with mild disbelief at our table covered in glasses and bottles of Carlsberg. We were of course attending a conference.
Perhaps I can illustrate the extent to which ARLIS affected the careers of individual art librarians through my own working life. Initially librarians in academic, university, polytechnic and college libraries provided the core membership of the Society but gradually public reference libraries also swam into the ARLIS net. As someone working in a public reference library with a fine arts department, I was soon recruited into the Society's affairs. Over the years the range of the Society's work and activities increased, leading eventually to the employment of an Administrator, a post I was appointed to and was able to do from home. I'm not sure whether Trevor and the Society realized the extent to which this gradually became a French Family cottage industry with the children collating meeting papers across the kitchen table and floor and being dispatched to the local post office with bundles of ARLIS mailings and my husband rescuing me from the dire straits of address-label runs and the desk-top printing of the ARLIS Membership Directory. It was a privilege to work for the Society during a period of growth and optimism and was a highlight of my working life. Through ARLIS I have been able to keep in touch with colleagues from across the years; taking tea with the Fawcetts in Northampton St. during the Bath & Bristol conference is a pleasure I particularly recall.
As Beth Houghton has also said:
Later, although not quite so visibly involved, one felt that he was always there: a generous and gently guiding voice supporting those of us who have carried out the work of the Society over the years. His always thought-provoking writings and conference papers challenged us and reflected his questioning and scholarly approach to the subject area and the role of the visual arts in education and research along with the libraries that support it.Footnote 5
Today is an occasion to emphasize the powerful influence of Trevor's vision, how art librarians and their collections together can stimulate the widest range of creative and intellectual energies. The first fifty years of ARLIS's life has seen education, collection growth and co-operation between art libraries. The burst of momentum and achievement of the earlier decades has been replaced by the challenges of fiscal rigour today but a shared collegiate understanding flourishes of what can be done in a time of contraction rather than expansion.
To quote again from Clive Phillpot on the occasion of Trevor's ARLIS honorary membership:
One might say that Trevor Fawcett was fortunate to raise the question of co-operation at a time when the soil for an art library organization was exceptionally fertile. But one can also propose that the incipient sub-profession of art librarianship was extremely fortunate in having Trevor Fawcett in the right place at the right time.Footnote 6
Beth Houghton summarized her thoughts and I have amended them here where they are repeated in Sonia's recollections from the memorial service:
Although, in the last line of his Library Association Record letter, he recognized that ‘art’ should include ‘applied arts as well as the fine arts proper’, I suspect that Trevor, a true scholar-librarian in the Germanic tradition, found that he had created an organization of many and widely diverse parts, and that the dominant art library type (in the UK at least) was not the university art historical collection but the more professionally unorthodox art school sector with somewhat different concerns. Although most of them became universities themselves in time, of course!
In perhaps characteristic style he seems to have stood back a little to let the organization get going, not serving as Chair until some 5 years later. And, in the early years, getting involved in those activities in which he had a particular interest – theoretical aspects of our practice to do with cataloguing and classification systems, and the early development of our international relationships. He also, of course, co-curated the successful Art Press exhibition of arts magazines at the V&A in 1976.
He is, without doubt, the father of ARLIS, and (as he once wrote we should aim to be) the ‘compleat art librarian’.Footnote 7
Philip Pacey, a former editor of the ALJ, also referred to Trevor's article ‘The Compleat Art Librarian’, originally published in the ARLIS Newsletter no. 22 March 1975 and suggested it be reprinted here, which it is. He said of all Trevor's writings ‘…one stands out for me as being truly memorable and inspiring, a classic in its field, … I referred to it often, … It is truly worth more than all the stuff I wrote about art librarianship put together’,Footnote 8 The Newsletter was the forerunner to this journal and ceased its run exactly a year after Trevor contributed that piece.
On behalf of the ALJ editors and ARLIS/UK & Ireland itself, we would like to extend our condolences to Mary and to her and Trevor's children. And we thank Sonia, Beth, Philip and Clive for their recollections, which have given us a glimpse of Trevor's character as an art librarian, as well as reminding us of the Society's historiography. Trevor Fawcett identified a gap in support for art librarians and founded an organization that, almost 50 years later, is still working for people in art libraries at every stage of their careers, which is quite a legacy.
