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Otto
van der Sprenkel
Andrew Gosling reveals how Otto van der Sprenkel’s great love of Chinese civilisation lives on in the historian’s fine gifts to the National Library Otto van der Sprenkel (1906–1978) had a long and close relationship with the National Library of Australia. He had the distinction of holding reader’s ticket no. 2, just ahead of Manning Clark and A.D. Hope and advised on major Asian purchases, such as the London Missionary Society and the Walter Simon collections. For many years he worked in the Library on his bibliography of Western language publications about China. Otto donated rare European and Chinese books, including one of the oldest Asian printed items ever to enter the collection. A further 600 volumes in Chinese were acquired from his personal library. Former students still pride themselves on remembering his full name, Otto Pierre Nicholas Berkelbach van der Sprenkel. He might have been amused to know that a recent British university reading guide on the Internet listed his Chinese Civil Service (1957) as being by two authors, Otto van der Sprenkel and P.N. Berkelbach.
Otto was
born in the Netherlands, but raised in England, where he gained a First
Class Honours degree at the London School of Economics. He became an active
member of the left-wing intellectual Fabian Society as an undergraduate.
From 1931 to 1933 he was a lecturer in political science at the Late in 1947
he was appointed visiting professor at Nankai Back at the School of Oriental and African Studies during the early 1950s, he began to publish articles on the then largely neglected field of Ming Dynasty history (1368–1644), which he continued after moving to Canberra. The eminent scholar Wang Gungwu later described him as the pioneer of Ming studies in Australia. Otto accepted
the post of Senior Lecturer in Oriental Civilization at the Canberra Late in 1964 Otto suffered a heart-attack and spent a month in hospital. While recovering at home he kept a diary, which is now housed among his papers at the Library. Though they only cover the first few weeks of 1965, the entries reveal much about his life and interests. He and his wife Pamela had moved into their new house in the suburb of Turner near the university. ‘All is light and sunshine, and the colour of grass, trees and flowers is seen through every door and window’, he wrote on 1 January. Though far from well, he was reading voraciously. The diary is full of comments on books of all kinds. He took delight in the letters of Voltaire in the original French, but found Edna O’Brien’s latest novel ‘most depressing’. He was busy organizing his new study and library. On 28 January he wrote, ‘Later on Mr Blackstone arrived with the new bookcase he has made for the hallway, and installed it most efficiently. It looks very well, and I have now filled its ten narrow shelves with our disgracefully large collection of paperback thrillers, SF stories, etc.’. Friends and colleagues came to discuss academic work, to chat or play bridge. He was also enjoying his J.S. Bach records, and cricket on the television but not the new BBC serial Dr Who, in Otto’s words ‘an idiot who should never have been trusted with a time machine’.
As an undergraduate in Otto’s Modern Chinese History class in 1969, I recall his wit and love of words. He introduced us to ‘rebarbative’, meaning repellent, from the French for beard. This was no doubt aimed at those of us with the scruffy facial hair fashionable at the time. When our essays were long he quoted ‘better less but better’. We were invited to dinner at his house, where he held forth on the merits of the Belgian detective writer Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret, but we were then expected to listen in silence to his Bach records. Though he had not received a religious upbringing, Otto developed a strong interest in theology. He joined the Society of Friends, or Quakers, as an adult in England and remained an active member in Canberra. He gave the Society’s 1973 James Backhouse Lecture, published as Friends and Other Faiths. In it, he described the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light or ‘God’s in-dwelling in every member of the human race’ as ‘throwing out bridges’ to other beliefs and philosophies, such as Confucianism and Zen Buddhism. He saw similarities between the Quakers’ optimistic view of human nature and the Chinese Confucian philosopher Mencius, who taught that everyone is born with a potential for goodness. From 1964, and almost to the end of his life, Otto laboured on a major guide to publications about China. He called it ‘A Selective and Annotated Bibliography of Chinese History, Thought and Society to 1965 in Western Languages (Excluding Russian)’. It was a most ambitious undertaking as he sought to cover all important books and journal articles on China in these languages. He based the bibliography on book reviews and library catalogues, searching thousands of serial volumes for suitable articles and reviews. While compiling the list he spent much time at the National Library, where he and his research assistants were allocated a special study room. When I began work at the Library in 1973 I recall Otto often joined the Orientalia staff for morning tea in the canteen, where he always seemed jovial and full of anecdotes. Unfortunately he did not live to complete his bibliography, but the typescript draft in 21 bound red volumes is housed in Manuscripts, where it is available for reference. A duplicate copy is at the Australian National University Library. The arrangement is by broad subject heading: History and Geography; Society; Thought; and Sinology. These categories are further subdivided. Otto’s annotations vary from two lines to abstracts a page long, often including quotations from reviews. Paul Rule
of La Trobe University, Melbourne and the Ricci Institute, In October
1968 the National Librarian, Sir Harold White, wrote to thank Otto for
a gift of rare books, which included what remains one of the oldest imprints
in the Library. Its preface is dated Igor de Rachewiltz
of the Australian National
In 1972 the Library acquired an important set of Chinese language works from Otto. Exactly 133 titles in 636 volumes were purchased. The Otto van der Sprenkel Collection is one of a number of private libraries on Asia acquired from scholars and book lovers between the 1950s and 1980s. They are the foundation on which the collection has been built. Around half of Otto’s books are on Chinese history, but there are also works on many other subjects, including literature, society, classics, philosophy and religion. Most titles date from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and neatly complement the Library’s own collecting of Chinese language publications which did not begin until the 1950s. There are also several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts on Chinese history and philosophy. The Otto van der Sprenkel Collection has been fully catalogued online as part of a major effort to improve access to retrospective Chinese holdings. Before this project, which began in 2000, many older Chinese books could only be found through brief title entries in the card catalogue. Collections such as Otto’s have been integrated into the main Chinese monograph run; a keyword search under ‘Sprenkel’ in the online catalogue brings together all its titles. In 1987, Otto’s widow Pamela donated a large oil painting of her husband and a set of off-prints he had collected on Chinese subjects, many signed by their authors, to the Library. The picture of Otto aged about 40 remains rather a puzzle. It has been suggested that it was executed in France by the British artist Barbara Robinson in about 1946. However, Sybille van der Sprenkel, who was married to Otto until 1962, corresponded with the Library in 1988 querying where, when and by whom it was painted. She remembered a 1948 study by a Chinese artist of Otto wearing a yellow open-necked shirt, but thought it was lost during the siege of Tianjin. At any rate the portrait of Otto in a blue shirt and tie looked down from the wall of my office into the Asian Collections Reading Room for many years.
Otto’s greatest
scholarly contribution was almost certainly as an exceptional teacher.
Though he only taught briefly in Toronto in the 1930s, he is acknowledged
as a major influence on the leading Canadian political scientist, C.B.
Macpherson (1911–1987). After Otto’s death, Macpherson wrote to Pamela,
‘whatever success I have as a political theorist owes its start to the
enthusiasm with which he then infected me … he made [political theory]
come alive with an intellectual acumen and an immediacy, to a degree unequalled
in all my subsequent experience’. Otto was remembered by his distinguished
former doctoral student in London during the 1950s, Jerome Chen, as ‘tall
and dark, slightly on the heavy side, extremely erudite and witty’. In
dedicating a book to his mentor, Chen wrote ‘From Otto I not only learnt
modern Chinese history but also cricket as we had spent many happy hours
of discussion on the state economic policies of the late Ch’ing while
watching James Laker and Denis Compton at the consecrated MCC headquarters
known to all as Lords’. During his later years at the Australian
National Another colleague
at the Australian National ANDREW GOSLING was Chief Librarian, Asian Collections from 1985 to 2003. He has written extensively on Asian collections and services in Australia. |
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