The death of William Mayne

The Darlington and Stockton Times reports:

An award-winning children’s writer whose career was ruined when he was jailed for sex attacks on children has been found dead at his home in the Yorkshire Dales. 

William Mayne, who was 82, was the author of more than 100 books and was regarded as one of the leading children's authors of the 20th-century. 

But his career crashed to a halt in 2004 when he was jailed for two-and-a-half years by a judge at Teesside Crown Court. 

He was also placed on the sex offenders’ register and banned from working with children for life after admitting to 11 charges of indecent assault between 1960 and 1975.

The paper goes on to quote the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as calling Mayne "one of the most outstanding children’s authors of the last century".

And the book is right. At his best he was almost miraculously good - as in A Grass Rope, which won the Carnegie Medal for the outstanding children's book of 1957. In it a hunt for a unicorn is completed in a manner that satisfies both a romantic little girl and a scientifically minded teenager.

I started collecting Mayne when Malcolm Saville books became to rare and expensive 10 or more years ago. Having another writer to look for made it less likely that I would return from a trip to a secondhand bookshop empty-handed.

While my collecting of Saville had a lot to do with nostalgia, I found that I could read Mayne book, even those written for younger children, with unaffected pleasure. He always was argued by some to be a children's writer whom children did not read but adults loved.

His disgrace late in life was sickening, but then the annals of children's literature contain their share of distinguished figures whom you would hesitate to employ as babysitters.

That fact that Mayne used his fame as a writer to entice children might be used by some as an argument in favour of requiring authors who visit schools to have clearance from the Criminal Records Bureau or Independent Safeguarding Authority - the proposal Philip Pullman objected to so vehemently.

But at the time Mayne was committing his offences he had no criminal record - no one has a criminal record until he is caught. So it is hard to see how a CRB check would have made any child safer.

If anything, the feeling that someone "must be alright" if he has the relevant piece of paper puts children at risk because it makes other adults less likely to voice their conerns. We cannot contract out our responsibilities as adults to an agency of the state.

Later. An obituary of William Mayne has now appeared in the Guardian.