The George Padmore Institute is deeply saddened to hear of the death of our dear friend, the publisher, editor, critic and author Anne Walmsley, whose decades of work on Caribbean artists and writers brought their work to global audiences. After Anne wrote her pioneering book The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History, published by New Beacon in 1992, she gifted her research papers to the George Padmore Institute, and these became one of our earliest and most popular archive collections. But more than this, Anne has been a long-standing friend of and advocate for the Institute and many of our founders, including the late Sarah White and John La Rose.
Anne Walmsley was born in 1931 and earned a BA in English from Durham University. In the late 1950s Anne was a secretary at Faber & Faber publishers for four years, working for T. S. Eliot amongst others and becoming life-long friends with Rosemary Goad and Jan Cousins. She moved to Jamaica to teach at Westwood High School from 1959 to 1963, where she met and became friends with people including Joyce Trotman.
On her return to the UK, Anne worked for BBC Schools television service, then joined Longman publishers in 1968 as their first editor for the Caribbean. She focused on providing local educational material, travelling through the region for nine years. Her 1968 anthology of Caribbean literary material, The Sun’s Eye, regularly updated and republished, became embedded on school syllabuses, and she also published a number of notable Caribbean authors, including Roy Heath, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Ismith Khan. During this time, Anne was a participant in the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), which had been co-founded by our late chairman John La Rose, the poet Kamau Brathwaite and the author Andrew Salkey in 1966. Anne and Kamau became close friends and they maintained a lifelong correspondence until his death in 2020.
Anne spent two years in Nairobi as Publishing Manager of Longman Kenya. She came back to the UK and obtained an MA in African Studies from the University of Sussex, then worked as a freelance editor and consultant. At this time, Anne was also an active member of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean and African Literature (ATCAL), which had been founded in the late 1970s.
In 1985 Anne was funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship to start research into CAM. After being inspired by the regional span of the writing in CAM, she co-edited, with Nick Caistor, another landmark anthology, Facing the Sea (1986). This collection introduced writing from the Dutch, French and Spanish Caribbean to secondary school students of the anglophone Caribbean. In 1992 she was awarded a PhD from the University of Kent for her thesis on CAM, whilst New Beacon Books published it as The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History, widely seen as a ‘groundbreaking study’ (as noted by academic Gail Low). At the same time, she donated these research materials to the GPI.
Anne taught ‘Aspects of Caribbean Art’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her articles appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines over the years, including BIM, South and ArtsEtc. She also contributed essays to exhibition catalogues and produced critical writings on Caribbean visual artists, particularly the Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams, whose work she profiled in her 1990 book Guyana Dreaming. Williams saw the manuscript of this first significant publication on his work ten days before his death. She co-edited Art in the Caribbean: An Introduction with Stanley Greaves, in collaboration with Christopher Cozier, launching the volume at the October Gallery in October 2010. Like her other work, the book was again intended to be a teaching text of Caribbean art, laced with history and research from across the whole Caribbean.
In 2016-17, Anne donated her collection of documents on Caribbean art – including exhibition catalogues, photographs, interviews and correspondence with artists – to the Alma Jordan Library at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She donated her correspondence with Caribbean writers over many years to the University of Sussex, and her library of Caribbean literature to the University of Newcastle. In 2018, Anne Walmsley donated material to Newcastle University Robinson Library Special Collections and Archives, as part of the Walmsley (Anne) Archive.
Anne received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, Jamaica, in 2009. The citation stated:
Dr Anne Walmsley has long crossed over from being a distant enthusiast or detached observer of the still flowering Caribbean literary and artistic tradition: rather we can comfortably recognize her as an integral and active component of the Caribbean Artists Movement.
At the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in 2018, Anne was the recipient of the Henry Swanzy Award in recognition of her distinguished service to Caribbean letters. The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian wrote:
One of the most avid supporters and facilitators of Caribbean literature for many decades, Anne Walmsley shepherded key writers into print during her time at Longman, and her school anthologies exposed generations of Caribbean children to the literature of their home region.
Anne lived in Wimbledon for many years with her husband, Ron Farquhar, who died in 2021. We all remember her as a dedicated advocate for Caribbean artists and writers, as an enthusiastic and generous supporter of the Institute and, most importantly, as a dear friend to so many of us who are part of the GPI. She will be much missed, but we are heartened that her legacy lives on through her work and the groundbreaking books on the Caribbean.
Selected bibliography
Ed. The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers. (Longman, 1968; new edition Hachette, 2021).
Ed., with Nick Caistor, Facing the Sea: a new anthology from the Caribbean region for secondary schools. Illustrated by Errol Lloyd; preface by Edward Kamau Brathwaite. (Heinemann, 1986).
Guyana Dreaming: The Art of Aubrey Williams. (Dangaroo Press, 1990).
The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History. (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1992; now published by GPI).
Art of the Caribbean: A Postcard Pack for Schools. (Upton, Oxfordshire: Goodwill Art Service, 2003).
With Stanley Greaves, Art in the Caribbean: an Introduction. (London: New Beacon Books, 2010; now published by the GPI).
Please note that The Caribbean Artists Movement and Art in the Caribbean: An Introduction are available here: https://www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/shop
Links to Related Material
Film about the Caribbean Artists Movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dsppkUrSmk&t=92s
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