Where there's a will there's a blazing row

Portadown could have done with some good news. Then word got out that the town had refused the dying wishes of a famous son, reports Rosita Boland

When Alexander Walker died in July last year, at the age of 73, and details of his will were published, jaws dropped across London. The Irish-born film critic, who worked for London's influential Evening Standard for more than 40 years, may have numbered Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor among his friends, but he was also steadfastly old-fashioned. He chose never to learn to drive nor use a computer, and he was always impeccably turned out. When he returned to his native Portadown for holidays he cycled round the Co Armagh town on the old Raleigh that he stored in a bike shop on Bridge Street.

Yet he was a man both of means and of shrewd taste. Throughout his life he was as knowledgable about modern art as he was about film, and he had accumulated a large collection of 20th-century art. By the time of his death it was immensely valuable. Walker chose carefully: his collection included significant work by a litany of now-famous names, such as Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Rachel Whiteread, Jasper Johns and Lucian Freud. He also had pieces by Picasso, Matisse and Miró.

In his will Walker left his collection of more than 200 works to the British Museum, which calls it "the largest and most significant bequest of modern works" that its department of prints and drawings has received in the past 50 years. Until January the collection is on view in its entirety as an exhibition called Matisse To Freud: A Critic's Choice, The Alexander Walker Bequest.

Walker also remembered his home town in his will: he left 1,000 books to Portadown Library. But now jaws have been dropping in Co Armagh, too. The area's chief librarian, Kathleen Ryan, refused the collection without consulting her colleagues.

In fact, she seems to have turned it down without knowing precisely what it contained: Walker's executor, Thomas Gibson Fine Art of Bond Street, had described the collection only as "leisure reading". Although it invited Ryan or a colleague to examine the books in London, nobody came. The collection has now been sold, with the money going back into Walker's estate.

It would be fair to say that Portadown has had its share of negative publicity in the past decade. Locals are dismayed by the loss of both the bequest and the opportunity for some good publicity for their town.

So why was the collection refused? One employee of Portadown Library, who refuses to be named for fear of disciplinary action, says there is anger and astonishment within the library service at the refusal of Walker's bequest.

"He specifically wanted Portadown to be remembered in his will. He was proud of where he came from, and he returned here on holidays. It is true the books we were bequeathed were not his research library, but his personal collection surely would have been of interest to people here.

"To even see the kinds of books he liked reading for leisure would have been an insight into his personality. And some of those books could well have been first editions, books signed by friends, books given to him as gifts from people in the film world - but we'll never know, since we never got to look at the collection, and it is now sold and dispersed.

"There is a lot of despondency and very bad feeling about the whole thing within the library service and among the townspeople. We didn't know about it until it was too late to do anything about it. It was not right or proper that one person made such an important decision on behalf of us all."

Kathleen Ryan, the chief librarian, says: "We would have accepted the material, but we could not guarantee that we could keep all the books together for all time in Portadown Library [as Walker had stipulated\].

"The executors would not agree to this, so we refused the collection. I applied the normal library-service policy in terms of donations."

Did she see a list of the contents of the collection "No. But we knew the collection did not contain the books he used for his research; those went somewhere else. We were told what we were being offered contained everything from Shakespeare to Harry Potter."

Given that there were more than 1,000 books in the collection, did she not think it worthwhile to send a representative to London to examine the contents before taking her decision?

"We're talking about a collection we were given to understand was not particularly special or valuable. It wasn't his specialist collection. And 1,000 books isn't a lot of books: I probably have 1,000 books at home myself. I did not send someone because there wasn't time to do so. The executors wanted it dealt with in a few weeks. It wasn't possible in that time to send someone."

Is a few weeks not a reasonable amount of time to organise a short visit to London? "It was not possible," says Ryan, who also defends her decision to refuse the collection without consulting her colleagues, even though Walker was a famous local and had specifically bequeathed the books to Portadown.

"It's true I didn't discuss it with individuals in Portadown Library. I would expect my colleagues to understand why it was turned down: we could not guarantee that the collection would be permanently held in Portadown Library."

Is she taken aback by the unpopularity of her decision? "I'm not surprised," she says. "I think it's hard for people to see the wider perspective of my decision." Which indeed seems to be the case.