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Playwright donates his life's work to Oxford's Bodleian
Danny Brierley24.10.08
THE author and playwright Alan Bennett has donated his life's work to one of Britain's leading libraries.
Staff at the Bodleian are celebrating the capture of the archive, which is being handed over free by Bennett out of fondness for Oxford University and in a passionate defence of free, state-funded education.
The treasure trove includes manuscripts, 30 years of diaries, letters, extracts from writings including the Oscar-winning Madness of King George and, on his death, all his remaining papers and working library.
The 74-year-old son of a Leeds butcher said: "I really feel Oxford is where I was educated and where I belong, and that if Bodley would like them, then they should have them. It sounds rather grand to say that I can afford to, but libraries in England are now well-endowed; they don't have much money. Me and my partner, we're relatively well off, and so I felt I didn't really want to make money from them."
The Bodleian is the main research library at Oxford and in England second in size only to the British Library. Staff there have already started cataloguing the donation, which also includes the script of the History Boys, which won awards as a film and West End play.
Bennett, who gained a first class degree in history at Oxford, is a friend of the chief librarian, David Vaizley, whom he first met as an undergraduate. He said he saw the donation as a debt repaid. "I was educated free in Leeds where I went to a state school, and then I got a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, and so at no point did my parents or me have to pay anything for my education."
