Charles Frank Albert Marmoy 1909–2005

Abstract

Charles Marmoy, who died on 28 February 2005, was a distinguished librarian and historian. Like Leslie Morton, who died a year before him, he was a survivor of the group who established a professional identity for medical librarianship in Britain after the Second World War. Most of his working life was spent in the Thane Medical Sciences Library at University College London, but he also served as Honorary Librarian to the Huguenot Society, and was a link with the early days of the Wellcome Library. Charles's father died when he was six years old, and he had to join his mother as family breadwinner at an early age. He started as a junior in the Thane Library in 1925. In 1930, with no immediate prospect of promotion, he moved to a slightly better-paid assistantship in the Wellcome Library, which was then taking shape in the former Burndept wireless factory, near Willesden Junction. Noel Poynter joined the staff a month later. Their work was mostly sorting and cataloguing, but also included bidding at auctions. Charles was now sure that he wanted to make medical librarianship his career. In 1933 he was invited back to UCL, to succeed Leslie Morton in charge of the Thane Library, and apart from the war years he did not move again. He attended the UCL School of Librarianship and obtained his Fellowship of the Library Association in 1935. When UCL Library was dispersed during the war, he worked for a time at the BMA, and then joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, serving in Belgium and Germany. He left the Army in 1946, a convinced pacifist, and returned to the Thane, which he ran with quiet efficiency until his retirement in 1974. Until it moved to the DMS Watson Building in 1968 it was a self-contained fiefdom in the Anatomy Building. He was a founder-member of the Library Association Medical Section in 1947 and was on the organizing committee of the first International Congress of Medical Librarianship in 1953. His Huguenot ancestry provided another strand to his career: he became Honorary Librarian of the Huguenot Library, when it was deposited at UCL in 1957. Retirement from UCL gave him more time for Huguenot activities; he continued as Honorary Librarian until 1986, and was much involved in the 1985 centenary celebrations. He published regularly on professional topics. As an historian, he contributed a definitive account of Jeremy Bentham's “auto-icon” to this journal in 1958, but most of his research was on Huguenot history, particularly charitable institutions. Major achievements were two volumes of extracts from the archives of the French Protestant Hospital, published in 1977, and a general index to the Huguenot Society's Proceedings, published in 1986. In 1948 he married Primrose Newport, also a librarian, and they enjoyed a happy family life in Muswell Hill and Harpenden, although failing health eventually forced them into sheltered accommodation. Primrose died in 2003 and they are survived by four children and seven grandchildren.