John Henry Pyle Pafford, D.Lit.

`Jack' Pafford was born on 6 March 1900 in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, and attended Trowbridge High School. He was commissioned into the Wiltshire Regiment in 1918 although, because of defective hearing, he was spared active service in the trenches. On demobilization Pafford entered University College London, to enjoy a fruitful period reading English under Professor W. P. Ker and his successor, Professor R. W. Chambers, the Shakespeare scholar, and was drawn towards a lecturing career. However, a temporary assistantship in the library of his old college converted him to librarianship and in 1925 he was appointed librarian and tutor at Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, where he remained for six years. In 1931 he returned to London as sub-librarian at the National Central Library and it was then that he began to familiarize himself with the Antiquaries' library, though he had not yet been elected a Fellow. A condition of its grant for the compilation of the subject index from the Carnegie Foundation in the 1920s was that the Society should participate in the inter-library loans scheme, and Pafford at the National Central Library actively promoted the rationalization of acquisitions and the exchange of books between specialist libraries. He frequently telephoned the then `library clerk', John Hopkins, F.S.A., to discuss items wanted by the Society, or available for loan from it, and the N.C.L.'s tricycle was a familiar sight in the Burlington House courtyard, collecting or delivering books. Pafford was as dedicated to adult education as he was to librarianship, the latter being a tool of the former, and his award of a travelling scholarship to study European libraries confirmed his commitment to inter-library cooperation and resulted in the publication of Library Cooperation in Europe in 1935. During the 1939-45 war Pafford played an important role in establishing army libraries and in the army education scheme. In 1945 he was appointed Goldsmiths' Librarian in the University of London, his first task being to supervise the re-housing of the collections in Senate House on their return from evacuation. He organized the publication of the great Catalogue of the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature and contributed the historical introduction to the first volume, while greatly increasing the number and quality of the library's holdings of rare books and manuscripts. Through Pafford's leadership and hard work the library's status was enhanced as an international research centre, particularly in the fields of music, maps and the history of London and the Americas. He was Library Adviser to the Inter University Council for Higher Education Overseas, a lecturer at the University of London School of Librarianship and Archives and, in the confines of Burlington House, an invaluable member of the Society's Library Committee from 1957-70, alongside other luminaries of the library world, Dr Nowell Myres and Sir Frank Francis. Pafford died in the west country on 11 March 1996.