Annette Stannett (1927–2016)

Annette Jacoby was born of Jewish parents in Lbeck, and spent her primary-school years in Stolp, Pomerania, North-East Germany (now Slupsk, Poland), in the 1930s. The family of three fled to Northern Rhodesia, settling in Livingstone. Having been designated Enemy Aliens on the outbreak of World War II, they were forbidden to cross any borders. Annette became the first refugee child from Livingstone to move on to a boarding school, in Southern Rhodesia, gaining special permission to travel there via a scholarship; and won her way to a university education, available only in South Africa, by winning a Beit Bursary, which brought permission to travel there. After three years at Cape Town University she enrolled for a fourth year as a student, picking Librarianship as her subject, as this was the only means to obtain a permit to remain in South Africa. At the end of that she was issued with a notice demanding her immediate departure from South Africa: nothing for it but to return to Livingstone, still stateless and confined to live and work in Northern Rhodesia, five years after the end of the war. But the Jacobys heard of the Nationality Act, passed in 1948, and Annette travelled 300 miles to Government House in Lusaka to find out more. She was told that the District Commissioner in Livingstone would be able to confer British Nationality on them, and returned with this knowledge. However, it transpired that he knew nothing of the Act, and asked Annette to come back two days later. By then he had found and read the relevant instructions, provided himself with a bible and a tie for the occasion, and in half an hour Annette took her oath of allegiance to King George VI and was declared a British subject. Annette came to London in 1950, working as a copy typist at a Trust Company in the City, then in Bush House, the foreign section of the BBC; then she was appointed Chief Librarian at the new ITV company, setting up its resource centre. Leaving London to work as information officer at Vickers Research, near Ascot, she met Bill Stannett, married him, and after seven happy years found him dead on the bathroom floor. In the following years, bringing up her two daughters alone, she earned money by teaching, translation, compiling bibliographies for the Ministry of Public Building and Works, establishing bookshops within schools (for Penguin Books) and acting as `library consultant' for Pergamon Press. Eventually she became library/research/resource officer in the Department of Educational Studies at Surrey University, then conducted her own research in this field, students' use of resources, and obtained a PhD.