Brenda Kekwick starts the Adelaide Junior Theatre in 1934; love of children extends to storytelling at library

The Brenda Kekwisk memorial bookcase in the South Australian Institute building on North Terrace, Adelaide. Inset: Kekwick at one of her storytelling session at the children's library.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia

Brenda Kekwick, actress, writer, producer, was best known in her short life for starting the Adelaide Junior Theatre in 1934 and for her storytelling at the Story Hour in the children's library, where her enthusiasm and spontaneity delighted young and old. 

Adelaide-born, Kekwick acted in theatre, including principal roles (notably in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion), with the Adelaide Repertory, the WEA (Workers Education Association) Little Theatre and Esmond George's Players.

Most at home with children, Kekwick found many outlets for her ability in Adelaide Junior Theatre she founded in 1934. She trained the children to act but also design and paint their own scenery, and generally to run the theatre themselves. Many of her pupils rose into the Adelaide adult amateur acting world. Kekwick also wrote many one-act plays for children: light, fantastic and whimsical adaptations of fairy tales.

Keen to promote reading as well as acting, she worked with the John Martin's department store in the year before she died, talking to individual children about their interests, before recommending the best types of books to their parents.

Kekwick died at the age of 28, in 1936.

The News Adelaide afternoon newspaper opened a Barbara Kekwick memorial fund and a hand carved bookcase filled with 80 books of children's plays and poetry was presented to the public library board, for the children's library, in 1937. The Manchurian oak bookcase was created by three members of the South Australian School of Arts: carving by George Mills, the panel designed by Margaret Bevan, and the words running from shelf to shelf chosen by Mary Harris. The words were from an essay on Shelley by Francis Thompson:

Know ye what it is to be a child?
It is to believe in love; to believe
in loveliness, to believe in belief.
It is to be so little that the elves
can reach to whisper in your ear.

It depicts a man and a woman offering their child as a gift to Father Time; the child is hiding his eyes to the wonder of things to come. The books were chosen by H.R. Purnell and E.A. Morley from the Public Library and included works on the opera, the circus, pantomime, the technique of pageantry and the use of paint, powder and patches, books on scenery, speech craft and for the producer, as well as plays.

The books included How to put on an amateur circus by F.A. Hacker and P.W. Eames, The Minstrel Easy by Walter Ben Hare, Pegasus perplexing by le Baron Russel, The Children's matinee by Noel Streatfield, Plays for marionettes by Maurice Sands, Little plays from Shakespeare, Johnny Crow's Garden by Leslie Brooke, Early one morning by Walter de la Mare.