Hilda van Stockum: Hilda van Stockum, internationally noted author and illustrator of such children's classics as the The Mitchells, The Winged Watchman and A Day on Skates, for which she took Newbery honours, died at 98 on November 1st in Berkhamsted, England, after a stroke.
She was for many years a resident of Washington, DC. She won the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Van Stockum was known for her warm and vivid but realistic depictions of family life, often in the face of difficulty or danger. Her most famous book, The Winged Watchman (1962), tells the story of two young boys living in a windmill who help the Dutch resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the second World War.
Her books were originally published primarily by Viking under the editorship of May Massee. They were widely and favourably reviewed, and were a favourite among librarians because they celebrated family life and dealt with issues of good and evil.
The Mitchells (1945) was a semi- autobiographical account of how van Stockum's family coped in Washington, DC during the second World War. Someone asked van Stockum who the protagonist of the book was, and she immediately answered: "The family is the protagonist. The family weathers the storms."
The Mitchells includes a description of her brother, Willem Jacob van Stockum, who was killed in 1944 on an RAF bombing mission. She often used her family as models for the written and illustrated characters in her books.
In addition to writing and illustrating her own books, van Stockum translated and illustrated editions of many other authors, including editions of Afke's Ten, Hans Brinker, Little Women and Little Men, and Willow Brook Farm. She was a charter member of the Children's Book Guild and was the only person to have served as its president for two consecutive terms.
While van Stockum was best known internationally as a writer, she was better known in Ireland as a painter of some note, showing frequently in galleries in Dublin, Geneva, Ottawa, and Washington DC.
She was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Hibernian Academy and her work appears in major collections of 20th- century Irish artists. In 1993 her still life, Pears in a Copper Pot, was chosen to appear on an Irish postage stamp as part of Ireland's Europa series honouring contemporary art.
Hilda Gerarda van Stockum was born in Rotterdam in 1908. Her father, Abraham Jan van Stockum, was a naval officer and her mother, Olga Emily Boissevain, was the granddaughter of Charles Boissevain, a prominent Dutch newspaper editor.
As a child, van Stockum grew up in Ireland and the Netherlands and travelled with her family to France, Switzerland and the East Indies. Constantly filling notebooks with stories and pictures, she wrote and illustrated a book for her younger brother Willem when she was five.
In 1932 in Dublin, van Stockum married Willem's roommate at Trinity College, a medal-winning mathematician, Ervin Ross Marlin. Two years later, the Marlins moved to New York. Van Stockum taught at a Montessori school and published her first children's book, A Day on Skates (1934). The book, which includes a preface by her aunt, Edna St Vincent Millay, took Newbery honours in 1935.
The family moved to Washington in 1935 when Marlin won by exam a US civil service position in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was posted to several agencies, including the Social Security Administration and the Federal Security Agency (later renamed the Secret Service).
Van Stockum continued to teach, study art, and write children's books in Washington during the war, while her husband was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services in Dublin and London.
After the war, her husband was with the US delegation at the founding of the United Nations in 1945, and then served as director of technical assistance for the International Civil Aviation Organisation in Montreal and as senior director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. The Marlin family followed him to these posts. He retired in 1973 and died in 1994.
Van Stockum's books, which are set in the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, Kenya and the United States, were published by Harper & Brothers, Viking and Farrar Straus. The Cottage at Bantry Bay (1938) was the first of three books about the O'Sullivan family in Ireland. Many of van Stockum's works remain in print by Bethlehem Books.
She converted to Catholicism in 1939. During the years before her death she wrote several chapters of her autobiography. Van Stockum is survived by her six children, 18 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Hilda van Stockum: born February 9th, 1908; died November 1st, 2006