The Sybil Campbell Collection
Goodenough College Library is the new home of the Sybil Campbell Collection – a notable collection of materials from the 18th to 20th century – following an agreement with the BFWG Sybil Campbell Collection Trust, an independent charity closely associated with the British Federation of Women Graduates.
Over 1,400 treasures from the Sybil Campbell Collection are now housed alongside Goodenough College’s own library collections.
To access the Collection, College Members and visiting researchers are able to locate titles using the new Sybil Campbell Collection online catalogue (developed by Jose Lopez Blanco, Academic Librarian at the University of South Wales), and then contact the College Librarian to arrange to view the materials.
The catalogue includes the whole Collection, and indicates which volumes are retained at Goodenough College for physical access.
Origins of the Collection
The Collection was established in 1928 as the Crosby Hall Library and became a charity in 1955. It was moved to a purpose built room in Crosby Hall in 1959 as the Sybil Campbell Library. From 1992 to 1995 it was in storage before being re-opened in 1998 at 28 Great James Street in Bloomsbury. In June 2006, after intensive work on cataloguing and conservation (aided by generous grants from the Pilgrim Trust and the Charitable Foundation), it was moved to the University of Winchester, where it remained until late 2023.
Sybil Campbell, a barrister, was the first woman to be appointed to full-time judicial office in Britain when she was appointed a stipendiary magistrate in 1945. The Collection is named after her in recognition of her work as an active member of the Federation and in campaigning to raise funds for a library at Crosby Hall, encouraging prominent figures such as the Woolfs, the Webbs and Lady Astor to donate items.
About the Collection
The Collection originally contained around 8,000 items, some of which reflect the entry of women into the professions in the first half of the 20th century and focusing on the educational aspirations of the period and the part graduate women played nationally and internationally. Some of the Collection was broken up and relocated elsewhere but over 1,400 items from the Collection are now housed in the College.
The materials include items of literature and history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – including women’s education, their personal libraries, biography, autobiography, women in wartime, the support the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) gave to refugees and so on. There are reports and publications of the BFUW (founded 1907) and the International Federation of University Women (founded 1920); some records of past BFWG Award Holders and BFWG Charitable Foundation Grant Holders; as well as records of the Women’s National Commission and interesting material on Crosby Hall and Chelsea.
The general material includes philosophy, history, literary criticism, biography, fiction, poetry, travel, art, crafts and much more, some of it bequeathed by members of the BFUW, members of Federations of University Women overseas, including India, the USA and Australia, and women who stayed at Crosby Hall. Some books are interesting for their provenance. Material was donated by significant figures of the 1920s and 1930s – Sybil Campbell, Ivy Davison, John Galsworthy, L P Hartley, Harold Laski, Eleanor Rathbone, Alys and Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Caroline Spurgeon, Lytton Strachey, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf to name just a few.
When the previous home of the Sybil Campbell Collection became unavailable, the trust which managed the small library, and the British Federation of Women Graduates, were extremely concerned that the entire contents would be scattered. That the cream of the Collection, along with a website covering the whole, has found a place at Goodenough College has been welcomed with, not just relief, but absolute delight.
BFWG members and others, wallow in the pleasure of knowing they can come to Mecklenburgh Square with the comfort that the books are there into the foreseeable future.
Professor Carrie de Silva, Chair of the Sybil Campbell Collection Trust
