GIFT TO HIS SCHOOL

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 58, 10 March 1938, Page 11

GIFT TO HIS SCHOOL

3IR HUGH WALPOLE

LIBRARY TREASURES

(Prom "The Post's". Representativej "■;' , LONDON, February' 16.

Sir Hugh Walpole has presented his old school, King's School, Canterbury, with his collection of rare books and manuscripts.: He formally handed over the' collection to the Dean of Canterbury (Dr. Hewlett Johnson) this week, and declared open' the/school's new •library. : ..' ~

■-' Sir. Hugh recalled the time when 40 years ago a rather unattractive, dirty, and untidy infant aged 10. used to go into.a very dark and strangely uninviting room at the school and grub among the books to try to find one which would seem to him exciting. Nobody at that time in the school so far as he could remember, took the slightest care in helping any small boy to find anything in the library. Nobody i apparently thought it of any importance that .a boy should read, or that it mattered what he found to read. Contrasting those times-with the present day, he saidrthat it was not enough that there should be books on the shelves, and that the boys should be there. There must be a vital contact bringing the two together, '''~. In handing over the collection, Sir Hugh told the story of its origin as a warning to others. He was on leave from Russia in 1916, and went with Gerald du Maurier to a sale of manuscripts and books for the: Red Cross. Suddenly there was something he wanted to have, "The Romantic Tale of Monk Lewes," of' the early eighteenth' century', in' four little black vol-umes-He asked du Maurier how to bid, and was told to nod. He became madly recklesS, and eventually secured the books at a very large.price. "They're mine!" he cried to du Maurier, who replied, "Of course they are, you fool. I've been bidding for, them for you!" (Laughter.) : ■ ■■'■ In the 22 years from 1916 to 1938 he had been a regular magpie in collecting, behind which was, a lot of personal history and exciting adventure about which some day he hoped to write a book. He hoped sometimes to add to that collection. He wanted to secure a letter of Keats and a poem of Shelley's.. , . . .'..

The collection which Sir Hugh presented includes a Fourth Folio Shakespeare, a first edition of Bandello's Tales which belonged to Sir Philip Sidney when a boy at Shrewsbury and inscribed by him, Horace Walpole's copy, with his own marginal notes, of Sir Robert Walpole's "Life," and Charlotte Bronte's first novel and MSS. of Kipling, Meredith, Stevensbn, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, Bennett, and Henry James. It is being housed in a room furnished by Sir Hugh above the Prior Sellindge Gateway where the Prior, in the fifteenth' century kept, a wonderful collection of classical MSS. collected by him on his European •ravels. . ■ ..' ' ■ ..."..