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Wendy Cooling obituary

Wendy Cooling, who has died aged 78, transformed many lives as a teacher, author, anthologist and, especially, as the founder of Bookstart, the flagship national programme of the charity BookTrust, which puts books into the hands of babies and toddlers, to encourage a lifelong love of reading.

Cooling had learned early in her teaching career that book poverty touched all levels of society: the comfortably-off, whose busy lives led them to outsource such time-consuming activities as bedtime stories, and cash-strapped families for whom book buying was an unimaginable luxury. Her work, like that of the educationist Margaret Meek Spencer, bridged children’s literature and literacy. She was driven by her core belief: “If you can read, you can do anything.”

Bookstart began in 1992, as a pilot study in conjunction with Birmingham University. Cooling had joined BookTrust two years earlier as head of the Children’s Book Foundation (later incorporated into the main organisation), with a brief to “promote reading for children”. She enlisted the academics Maggie Moore and Barrie Wade to run the project alongside local library and health services, giving books to 300 families in inner-city Birmingham. The research demonstrated that babies brought up with books and family reading scored higher in pre-school assessments.

Over the next few years, funding from Europe enabled 60 further pilots. Then, in 1999, Sainsbury’s chose Bookstart as its millennium legacy project, committing £3m a year for three years, with BookTrust working with publishers to produce the Bookstart packs. The climate was propitious: Britain had just embraced World Book Day and the new Labour government was emphasising children’s education. By March 2000, 92% of local authorities had signed up. The world’s first nationwide book gifting programme was under way.

Over the next few years, the departments of education, and culture, media and sport got involved and in 2004, the chancellor, Gordon Brown, who in 1999 had described child poverty as “a scar on the nation’s soul”, announced in his budget £27m of funding to enable universal provision in England and Wales of free books at three key stages – Bookstart Baby for 0-12 months, Bookstart Plus for two-year-olds (this was later discontinued) and Bookstart Treasure for three- to four-year-olds.

Alexandra Strick, a friend and colleague of Cooling’s for 25 years, joined BookTrust to manage the children’s literature department when Bookstart was “just a word on the job description. Wendy came up with the idea and she kept on with it – it could have slipped away. She was instrumental in getting people aboard. She was convincing and articulate, so persuasive, a storyteller at heart. She was bewitching.”

Wendy, the middle of three sisters, was born in Wroxham, Norfolk, to Wilfred Cooling, a baker, and Ena (nee Watson). She learned to read perched on her father’s knee as he perused the local evening paper. The mobile library visited only monthly but at Blyth grammar school, Norwich, Wendy was often banished to the library as punishment for her chattiness.

A “brilliant librarian” directed her reading. She left after O-levels, moved to London and joined the civil service, living in a hostel near Hyde Park Gate, and taking A-levels in English, history and maths at night school. A trip to New Zealand inaugurated a lifetime of travel, Cooling staying a few years and supporting herself with casual jobs.

Back in the UK, she trained as a teacher in Colchester, Essex, and began 20 years teaching English in inner-London secondary schools where reading aloud to children, however old, was her priority. She moved to the Inner London Education Authority as a resource officer, advising on libraries and the development of resource-based learning, simultaneously taking an MA in the subject at the Institute of Education.

She joined BookTrust in 1990 and began visiting schools. On one such visit, she watched a little boy on his first day “who obviously had never held a book in his life”. The seed that would become Bookstart was planted and from the outset she was determined it would not be simply for “needy” children. The children’s bookseller and writer Kate Agnew sat on a Bookstart committee and remembers Cooling’s “breadth and depth of knowledge, her foresight, her desire to get to the whole community … the universality is crucial.”

A free spirit, Cooling left BookTrust in 1993 to become a self-described “book dabbler” – she disliked the term consultant, though that’s what she remained to Bookstart until 2017, a one-woman resource with a wealth of experience available to all.

She edited numerous anthologies: themed and age-ranged short stories and inventive poetry collections, such as Me: Poems About Being Born and Growing Older (2000) and All the Colours of the Earth: A Multicultural Treasury (2004).

In 2006, she won the Eleanor Farjeon award for her outstanding contribution to children’s literature, and was appointed MBE in 2009.

No children’s book event was complete without Cooling’s magnetic presence. She was “a friend to everybody”, not just in Britain but in Colombia, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan and the Emirates, where she inspired similar schemes. For 10 years, she attended the Bookaroo children’s festival in India at her own expense, a distinctive figure in panama hat and exotic clothes, mobbed by children, revelling in her official title of “stationery monitor”, and supervising activities such as the poem-athon.

Such trips combined Cooling’s twin passions, and her travels in turn provided inspiration for books (The Camel Fair reading book was a photographic account of travels in India) or simply a good anecdote, such as her arrival in Peru when she was forced to dodge bullets during a little local difficulty. Steven Butler was a fledgling author when they first met: “She told me she’d walked the entire Silk Road from Europe to Asia. I thought she was Indiana Jones.”

She is survived by her sisters, Ann and Sue, and her nieces and nephews.

• Wendy Ena Cooling, teacher, author and anthologist, born 3 October 1941; died 21 June 2020