L'Heure Joyeuse: educational and social reform in post-World War I Brussels.

ABSTRACT

The day after the Armistice of 1918 was signed ending World War I, the Book Committee on Children's Libraries was established by a group of American women. The committee's relief efforts focused on the establishment of children's libraries in order to help with the "educational reconstruction" of Belgium and France. This article focuses on the first of these children's libraries, L'Heure Joyeuse Brand Whitlock, and the ways in which it became a site of educational and social reform.

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On the day after the Armistice of 1918 was signed, the American Art War Relief Committee, headed by Mrs. Caroline Griffiths, established a new foundation, the American Book Committee on Children's Libraries. Its aim was to help the children in the areas of Belgium and France devastated by the war. For Belgium the close of the Great War brought to an end four years of German occupation marked by famine; deportation; destruction of housing, land, and industries; unemployment; and civilian, political, and military casualties. One of the worst battles of the war, Ypres in Flanders, had been fought on Belgium territory. As a newspaper article suggested, the postwar rebuilding presented Brussels with the opportunity "to inaugurate a new era of efforts aimed at school age children; encouraging the development of a literary culture which they so deeply lacked" (Mixame, 1920, p. 7). On September 24, 1920, the first children's library, known as L'Heure Joyeuse Brand Whitlock, opened in Brussels. This article focuses on its founding and the ways in which it became a site of educational and social reform.

In the spring of 1919 Lilly-Elizabeth Carter, the director of Ecole Moyenne, and Dr. Rene Sands, secretary of the Fondation Universitaire, attended the Child Welfare Conference in Washington, D.C. Before returning to Belgium, Carter and Sands visited New York. There they toured the New York Public Library and met with Miss Annie Carroll Moore, the supervisor of the Children's Room. As described in a report by Agnes Cowing, a librarian and member of the American Book Committee on Children's Libraries, Carter and Sands "caught a glimpse of what children's libraries had meant to the children of America, and were filled with the desire for similar libraries for the children of Belgium." Moore put Carter and Sands in contact with Griffiths and the American Book Committee on Children's Libraries, "which was then considering the idea of offering to equip a children's room as part of the contemplated restoration of the Library of Louvain." According to Cowing, Carter convinced Mrs. Griffith and the committee that if the children's library were to be established in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, and not in Louvain, the library and reading room would be more visible and "much more quickly known to those interested in the education and social welfare of Belgium." (1)

Public libraries, and specifically library service to children, were not, however, entirely new to Belgium. Prior to World War I there had been several attempts to establish public libraries with reading rooms for children in Ghent, Mont-Saint Arnaud, Herstal, Forest, and Brussels (Mixame, 1920, p. 7). In Brussels a reading room open only to schoolchildren had been established in one of the schools. Here teacher-librarians guided students in their reading by introducing them to the works of the "best" writers (Mixame, 1920, p. 7). The outbreak of war in 1914 forced an end to these libraries and reading rooms, and while there had been some attempts to revive them after the war had ended, there was "no attempt to conduct a reading room or to create the so-called 'library atmosphere.'" (2)

The offer made by Mrs. Griffiths and her committee to the city of Brussels included furniture, an initial collection of books, and the training of the librarians according to the American model of public librarianship. In exchange for this gift, the city of Brussels agreed to provide a location for the library, to appoint a committee to oversee the running of the library, to hire and pay a trained librarian, and to fund and maintain the library. (3) The city of Brussels designated three rooms on the ground floor of a building located at 16 rue de la Paille near the Grand Place as the site for the first children's library and reading room and paid to have the rooms painted and updated with electricity and heating. (4) In order to re-create the "library atmosphere" of American libraries

 
   the Book Committee…