I worked in the School Library from 1981 to 1987, first as a junior assistant on Monday lunchtimes, later helping to supervise the library on Friday evenings, and giving what extra time I could spare. During those six years the library (then in its old premises adjoining the house block) changed hardly at all, and my memories of it are almost photographically precise. At the centre of the library was the issue desk, where Keith stood to survey the scene like a captain on the bridge of his ship. On entering the small office behind the library, you were confronted by a small placard with the words:

GREAT IS HIS FAITHFULNESS:
THE LOVING KINDNESS OF THE LORD
BEGINS AFRESH EACH DAY

Rows of periodicals ran along one wall, double banked and stacked up to the ceiling. The remaining shelves carried a few essential reference books, like British Books in Print, and a small cache of books that were considered too valuable or too suggestive to be put on the open shelves. The office was austerely furnished, with a filing cabinet, a pot plant, and a desk, where Keith could be found waging lengthy telephone battles to convince publishers that their books were in print, or where his wife Mary sat filing catalogue cards, or typing the names of borrowers with overdue books onto small cardboard strips. Somewhere a kettle would be boiling.

Despite its superficial ordinariness, the whole scene bore the strong stamp of Keith's personality. It was somehow characteristic that the library should have adopted the Bliss classification system, with its idiosyncratic and sometimes playful logic (B for Biology, C for Chemistry, CB for Organic Chemistry) rather than the more impersonal Dewey. It was equally characteristic that the periodicals were filed away for twenty years before being discarded. The Library had its own way of doing things, and its own way of measuring time, which did not always synchronize with the rest of the school.

Keith was one of the first professional librarians to be appointed to a school library, and he ran the place accordingly, up to the standards of the large public libraries where he had previously worked. He also kept in touch with new developments in the profession. When I went up to Cambridge in 1987 the college libraries were only just beginning to install security systems to protect the stock, but at Haberdashers' a security system had already been in operation for two or three years. This put an end to the problem of theft (a real problem; we had been losing scores of books every year), though Keith continued to make occasional dawn swoops on the History Department, where a few missing books would always mysteriously be lurking. Similarly, CD-ROMs were in use in the library at Haberdashers' several years before they became widely available in academic libraries.

Keith was not averse to new technology, although he had served his apprenticeship in the days before automation, and his organisation of the library remained highly labour-intensive. When the library was redecorated in the mid-1980s we carried the books upstairs by the armload, and spread them out in long rows on the tables. Then we manoeuvred the empty bookcases, inch by inch, to their new positions, and carried the books downstairs again. Though immensely time-consuming, the job could hardly have been done more efficiently; what was remarkable was Keith's readiness to take it on at all. He was mildly disappointed, I think, that we called in workmen to repaint the walls, instead of doing the work ourselves.

Keith's professional training was also evident in his commitment to the traditional values of the public library system. He was determined to preserve the independence of the library, as a place reserved for private study rather than appropriated for teaching. A school library was not a classroom with books in it, still less a school common-room: hence his exasperation, celebrated in school legend, when a teacher unloaded a class on the library without warning, or when a couple of sixth-formers chose to hold a conversation in a secluded corner.

The utility of the library was taken for granted, and as a result the library did not advertise itself: it was simply available for everyone who wished to use it. It is an ideal that owes more to Richard Hoggart than to Margaret Thatcher (not surprisingly, Keith's politics were moderately left-wing), and one that has passed rapidly out of fashion in the modern public library system. But it was perfectly suited to a school that expected its pupils to devote much of their time outside the classroom to private study. For every person who chafed under the Librarian’s strict discipline, there were others who worked in the library constantly and were grateful for the space and privacy it provided.

To those who showed an interest in using the library's resources, Keith could be immensely generous with his time and practical help. He encouraged me to look at the school archives, gave me free access to the library storeroom where they were kept, and spent several days one summer helping me to sort them out; after I completed a catalogue of them, he would introduce me to visitors as the school's honorary archivist, to my embarrassment and secret pride.

Keith's independence from the school's teaching departments had its disadvantages: he did not always liaise with other members of staff about the purchase of new books, so that the library's stock of A-level set texts and related books was strong in some subject areas, very weak in others. But he also had a breadth of vision which was denied to some of his colleagues whose notion of education was narrowly focused on the demands of the examination boards. He was, for example, one of the few teachers who encouraged me to extend my academic interests beyond the confines of the A-level syllabus. By teaching me the rudiments of bibliography, and the importance of checking facts for myself instead of relying on secondhand information, he also set me in the direction of postgraduate research, for which I am profoundly grateful.

Above all, he provided a refuge from the intense pressure which the school placed on its pupils, particularly during their exams. Late one summer, after we had finished the drastic reorganisation of the library described above, Keith took the library staff on a day trip (or, as he insisted on calling it, a "works outing") to two gardens owned by the National Trust, and to a country pub for lunch. It is a memory which I treasure, and which aptly combines Keith's wide interests, and love of the English countryside, with his gift for friendship and generosity of spirit.

Arnold Hunt (Haberdashers' 1976-87)