Crispin Jewitt (1949-2025)

Crispin, author of Maps for Empire, the second edition of which the Society was proud to publish last year, passed away on 1st June after a short illness. 

Born Anselm Crispin Jewitt on 30th July 1949, Crispin was one of five siblings and attended Skinners’ School, Tunbridge Wells and later the School of Librarianship at North London Polytechnic.  In 1969 he joined the British National Bibliography, and here began a lifelong career of distinction in archiving and curatorship.  In 1973 he made his first foray into the world of maps with a placement in the British Museum Map Room.  He continued at the BM as a Legal Deposit cataloguer but by 1980, and clearly pining for the maps, returned as a curator to what was now the British Library Map Library. It was while here that he joined the Charles Close Society.

In 1988 Crispin’s career changed direction, joining the National Sound Archive, now also part of the BL.  In 1992 he was appointed as its Director, a post in which he remained for fifteen years. During this time, he oversaw the transfer of the Archive to its present site at St Pancras.  From 1999-2002 he was also President of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives.

Crispin was passionate about his work and the collections he managed.  Fascinated by bookbinding, he completed an evening course and continued it as a hobby.  In retirement he returned to the BL as a volunteer, and from 2011 to 2025 held the position of Specialist Advisor on British Military Cartography.  Here he curated the War Office Archive, a collection of mostly unique, unpublished manuscript maps produced in support of British overseas operations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  It was in this capacity that I first met him in 2017. He was wonderful to work with: kind, understanding, wise, and with a formidable knowledge that he was always willing to share.

Crispin was also a skilled and meticulous researcher as evidenced by his two books.  Maps for Empire (BL, 1992; 2nd Edn CCS, 2024) is a narrative history and detailed cartobibliography of the first two thousand sequentially numbered maps issued by the Intelligence Division, WO (and its successors).  Some of these maps were fiendishly elusive, and it was always a pleasure to pass on to him undiscovered ‘strays’ (his word, not mine!) that I occasionally chanced upon in the less frequented corners of the BL.  Intelligence Revealed (BL, 2011) is a companion volume covering the maps, plans and views published in the eighty years prior to the numerical sequence of Maps for Empire.  

Crispin married Mary Lee Lai-ling in 1970, and from here blossomed a deep interest of Hong Kong, Macau and China.  This included travel and the building of a personal collection of maps and histories. Mary Lee also taught Crispin Chinese, a skill he later applied to curating the WO Archive maps from that region.

Mary Lee pre-deceased Crispin by six years.  They lived in Edenbridge, Kent and had a daughter and two sons – Alexandra, Michael and Henry – and it is to them and the rest of the family that the Society passes on our sincerest condolences.