Steve Lewis did not have to spend long at Albion Street before he realized that the house was being used by Richard Branson as the centre not just for the mail-order record business and the magazine, but for two other activities as well. One was the Students’ Advisory Centre, a voluntary organization set up by Branson to help answer teenagers’ problems; the other was an employment agency which sought to match underemployed nurses with London families who wanted cleaners or babysitters. In his capacity as Angie, Lewis might therefore spend half his day chasing up obscure records to satisfy an order from a foreign collector. For the other half, he would be administering pregnancy tests to visiting teenage girls – reminding them to urinate in a bottle that was clean and had been rinsed very thoroughly to remove the last traces of soap – or referring worried young men with spots on their genitals to the relevant clinic at the nearby St Mary’s Hospital.
The employment agency for nurses was a short-lived venture. Branson saw a business opportunity to capitalize on the public sympathy for the low pay of nurses; he contacted the Daily Sketch, which had been running a campaign to raise nurses’ wages, and gave them an account of his plan with a philanthropic spin DICK STARTS BABY-SIT PLAN TO HELP NURSES, read the paper’s banner headline. The ‘strap-line’ above was more specific: ‘Now a barrister’s son joins battle for underpaid mercy girls’. In the article, Branson provided a plausible rebuttal to complaints by a nursing association that nurses who took in extra work would be too tired to do their normal hospital duties. ‘Most of the nurses sit in front of a television at nights, watching babies, and are paid five shillings to seven and sixpence an hour for four hours.’ The article described him helpfully as ‘founder-editor’ of Student magazine, and reported (without appearing to have taken any steps to verify the facts) his claim that Albion Street was getting calls ‘every thirty seconds’ for nurses to help out. In fact, the agency was far more casual and sporadic than the article suggested, especially since local families preferred to employ the same person to look after their children regularly than to invite into their houses an unknown member of an employment pool. But the coverage, which obviated the need to advertise for nurses, was an early example of Branson’s ability to use the press to get his message across.
It was personal experience that had prompted Branson to set up the Students’ Advisory Centre. According to the romantic account given to the Sun by the ‘brilliant young editor’, he had at the age of seventeen ‘met a girl, made her pregnant, then spent three months of hell not knowing what to do or where to go … Together, they set up an advice centre for young people.’
The Centre’s most controversial activity was probably its discreet system of referring pregnant women to sympathetic doctors for abortions. But it was to be something far more mundane that brought it notoriety. Among the ills which the Centre’s leaflets advertised help in curing was a reference to venereal disease’. In early 1970, the police told Branson that he was breaking the law by using the word venereal’, and ordered him to remove it from his leaflets. When the young entrepreneur refused, he was promptly arrested and charged with two offences, one under the Venereal Diseases Act (1917), and the other under the Indecent Advertisements Act (1889). John Mortimer, a rising barrister who was later to achieve fame as a writer and playwright, offered to defend Branson at no charge. Despite Mortimer’s eloquent denunciation of the archaic legislation that made it a crime to use a word that was in any case a euphemism, Branson was fined £7. But he won the wider argument; soon afterwards, the Venereal Diseases Act was repealed. The Students’ Advisory Centre continues, with Branson’s financial support, to give advice on venereal diseases to this day – though today they are known as ‘sexually transmitted diseases’, and the centre, based in Portobello Road, has changed its name to Help.
Lewis was happy with his work for the employment agency and the advisory service, but his work as Angie gave him cause for disquiet. The preprinted reply forms sent back to customers ended with the valediction ‘Love and peace, Angie’ – and some record buyers got the wrong end of the stick. It was not long before lovesick male students began writing to Lewis under his female pseudonym; when one said that he was coming to London and wanted to visit Angie in Albion Street, Lewis took fright. In future, his style of correspondence would be a little less friendly.
There was anyway little choice. While the other activities of the Albion Street gang withered, the record mail-order business, and hence Lewis’s workload, continued to expand. When Lewis went into hospital with suspected meningitis, Nik Powell brought round the sack of correspondence for him to deal with in his bed. Thereafter, he would do most of his work at home, picking up the letters once a week. Lewis also became the compiler of the Virgin Records sale list, and as such the company’s informal arbiter of musical taste.
Whatever arguments Richard Branson might offer, however, Steve Lewis had no intention of giving up the chance to go to university. The concession he was willing to make to Virgin was to apply to Brunel, in Uxbridge to the west of London, instead of to Manchester, so that he could be closer to Albion Street. Over the three years he spent at Brunel, Lewis was to combine his academic studies and his progression in the business with great success. By his last year, when Lewis was ready to think about working for Virgin full-time, he was the only student at the university who already had a company car. There was undoubtedly something reassuring about working at Virgin. All the senior staff drew the same £50 a week, and all of them drove Volvos. In those days, the Swedish marque had no connotation of suburban solidity; rather, its image was raffish and slightly exotic – just like the company itself. It was only later, however, that Lewis began to reflect on the fact that although he and the other senior Virgin staff had the right to drive the Volvos, it was Richard Branson and his partner Nik Powell who owned them.
But Branson had bigger things on his mind. If he could profit from selling records, why should he not also profit from making them? The idea of opening a recording studio was put in Branson’s mind by Newman, a guitarist and songwriter who had worked in Albion Street and had dabbled in amateur recording for a while. Once the record shops began to make money, it became a serious possibility. Newman was therefore duly sent off to buy some professional studio equipment. There was just one difficulty: the eight-track system he acquired was too large to fit in the crypt beneath the church across the road from the Albion Street house where the studio was to be installed. Another place would have to be found – and with London property prices what they were, it might as well be in the country.
Scouring the pages of Country Life, the glossy magazine of choice for those who wish to buy manor houses and estates, the two men made appointments to look at a number of possibilities between London and Wales, all of which proved disappointing on closer inspection. It was almost by chance that they dropped in at a seventeenth-century manor house at Shipton, a village on the Cherwell river twenty miles from Oxford. They arrived as the sun was setting, vaulted over the garden wall, and inspected the ruined mediaeval cloisters attached to the main Cotswold stone building.
On 11 January 1971, Steve Lewis discovered a kindred spirit. A fresh-faced young South African turned up at South Wharf Road, the new location of the Virgin offices, and announced himself as Richard Branson’s cousin. Simon Draper had finished studying literature at a South African university, and had nine months to kill. London, as the centre of the musical world that absorbed all his energy and money, was a magnet to which Draper had been attracted in his search for an interesting job. He had heard through his uncle, who was Ted Branson’s half-brother, that Richard was a fellow who couldn’t pass his exams. Then Draper saw a copy of Student,