Like many undergraduates with publishing pretensions, I had very grand and romantic ideas of what the trade involved. When Leonard Cutts of Hodder & Stoughton, widely revered as the inventor of Teach Yourself Books, suggested that I might like to start work in the Hodder warehouse near Sevenoaks, I was duly outraged. My ardour was dashed by the prospect of trading in my new moss-coloured corduroy suit for a brown cotton overgarment, as worn by ironmongers and middle-aged grocers. I made no effort to conceal my disappointment, and another two years were to pass before I started at the foot of the publishing ladder.
Among the publishers whom I condescended to visit that summer was the old-fashioned firm of B.T. Batsford Ltd, best known for its distinctive and elegantly produced books on English churches, English counties, English inns and the like, and for steady-selling lines devoted to chess and handicrafts. It didn’t sound my cup of tea, but Terence had spoken with particular warmth of its managing director, Sam Carr, a fellow Irishman, so I dutifully arranged an appointment. I made my way to Fitzhardinge Street, off Manchester Square, where Batsford was housed in a black-bricked eighteenth-century house, with a royal coat of arms nailed above the fanlight. Quite why they were entitled to flaunt such a crest I never discovered, but the inside of the office was equally gracious and awe-inspiring. Wider than most, with elaborate plasterwork overhead and a black-and-white marble chessboard underfoot, the hall had been painted in the glowing terracotta fashionable at the time; apart from the familiar publisher’s litter of brown paper parcels, recently arrived from the printers, and battered-looking cardboard showcards, I was left with an impression of gilt and polished wood, with the firm’s recent publications suitably on display. A curving staircase with a gleaming wooden balustrade led to the first-floor landing, off which, I was told, Mr Carr had his lair.
I remember very little about Sam Carr, and nothing whatsoever about my interview. I like to think that he was a short, eager, friendly Ulsterman, akin to a bright-eyed wire-haired terrier in looks and demeanour. No doubt he recommended a spell in the warehouse, or in a bookshop, or in a printing works, and no doubt my crestfallen look and the lack of enthusiasm with which I greeted his kindly suggestions soon made it obvious that I was yet another undergraduate with ideas above his station. I heard no more from him; nor did I give Batsford another moment’s thought during the long years I spent in the book trade. Only once did their name crop up, and then for a lunchtime only.
In the early Seventies I found myself working as a literary agent with the venerable firm of A.P. Watt & Son. I spent much of my time working out how much we should charge textbook publishers to quote lines of Yeats or Kipling, and invoicing them accordingly, but one morning Hilary Rubinstein, a senior partner in the firm, bustled into my office and told me that we were to have lunch with the new and dynamic editorial director of Batsford. We had never done any business with the firm – hardly surprising, given the specialised nature of their list – and this was a chance to put things right and nip in ahead of rival agencies like A.D. Peters, David Higham and Curtis Brown. An hour or so later we set out for Soho, where our host had booked a table at Bianchi’s, an upstairs restaurant much patronised by trend-setting publishers and agents. He was already installed when we got there, and had made hefty inroads on a bottle of house red. He rose, unsteadily, from behind the table, shook us both warmly by the hand, and waved us to our seats. A shock-haired character in his late thirties, he was clad in jeans, corduroy jacket, open-necked shirt and slip-on shoes, a style of dress pioneered by whiz-kids like Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape which, though de rigueur nowadays, seemed bold and unconventional at the time, a deliberate gesture of defiance aimed at the tweeds and chalk stripes then favoured by the panjandrums of the trade – including, no doubt, Sir Brian Batsford MP and his fellow directors.
As he poured us a drink, refilled his own and ordered a second bottle, our host explained that he had been working until recently at Penguin, initially under Tony Godwin, another legendary whiz-kid, keen on open-necked shirts and four-letter words, who had eventually been sacked by Allen Lane after publishing a book of cartoons by the French cartoonist Siné of which Lane deeply disapproved – so much so that, to Godwin’s extreme annoyance, he and some fellow conspirators stole into the Penguin warehouse in Harmondsworth in the middle of the night, removed the entire stock of Siné books, and burned them in Lane’s farmyard nearby. Batsford, our new friend disloyally explained, hastily draining his glass, was run by a load of old farts – kindred spirits to Sir Allen Lane, no doubt – not one of whom had even heard of modish American novelists like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon. His mission as he saw it – here he banged his glass on the table with such ferocity that the stem snapped in two, the contents sprayed across the table, and his diatribe was briefly interrupted while Elena, the maîtresse d’ of Bianchi’s, hurried forward with a cloth and a replacement glass – was to be shot of all those f****** awful books on chess and country churches and make a pre-emptive bid for Norman Mailer’s next! Batsford was awash with cash, he assured us – earned, no doubt, by Scottish Castles, The Cathedrals of England and Embroidery for Beginners – and was in a position to make giant offers such as Tony Godwin (now installed as George Weidenfeld’s right-hand man, and known for his extravagant advances) could only dream of. Yet the old farts were so half-asleep, so unaware of what was going on in the real world of publishing, that not one of them had ever met a literary agent or a paperback publisher, let alone had lunch at Bianchi’s! He was going to make Batsford the leading literary publisher in London, far outstripping Jonathan Cape …
As he raged on, his spaghetti congealing on his plate before him, a fresh glass of wine brimming by his right hand, Hilary and I raised eyebrows at one another and then, when the torrent began to ebb, tried to introduce a note of realism into the proceedings. Had it not occurred to him, we wondered, that although publishing books on bridge and English Alehouses was less newsworthy and less glamorous than publishing Eldridge Cleaver or Kurt Vonnegut, it was also, if well done, more dependable as far as the market was concerned, less expensive in terms of authorial advances, and almost certainly much more profitable? Nor was it possible to change a firm’s reputation overnight. The book trade functioned on the basis of a kind of shorthand: authors, booksellers, literary editors, literary agents, journalists and even a few members of the reading public associated particular publishers with particular types of book, and for Batsford suddenly to lash out and publish Portnoy’s Complaint or Brian Aldiss’s The Hand-Reared Boy would cause the system to short-circuit, as well as inducing apoplexies among senior members of staff, including Sir Brian Batsford. He looked thoughtful for a moment, ordered a third bottle, and resumed his diatribe. As we walked back in the direction of our offices in Bedford Row, Hilary and I shook our heads and predicted the worst. A few weeks later we learned that our excitable new friend had been sacked. I have never heard mention of him since, and Batsford continued to publish books on chess and country churches.
Some twenty years later my interest in Batsford was unexpectedly revived. I became gripped by a demonic character called Charles Fry, who popped up every now and then in James Lees-Milne’s diaries, emitting whiffs of sulphur, while in charge of editorial matters at Batsford in the Thirties and Forties. Described by John Betjeman as ‘a phallus with a business sense’ and by James Lees-Milne as a ‘terrible man, the worst and most depraved I know’, Fry was – if the great diarist is to be believed – a drunk and a lecher of satanic proportions. Like Betjeman, Sacheverell Sitwell, Peter Quennell, Cecil Beaton, Raymond Mortimer, Oliver Messell, Rex Whistler, Dick Wyndham and Christopher Hobhouse, Lees-Milne was one of the bright young artists and writers whom Fry persuaded onto the Batsford list. The two young men were united in their love of English country houses, and during the 1940s, when Lees-Milne was trundling round England in his baby Austin on behalf of the National Trust, his publisher sometimes joined him on his tours of inspection of run-down ancestral homes and their often demented proprietors. ‘I really think Charles is Satan,’ Lees-Milne noted after an uneasy encounter with the Duchess of Richmond. En route to their appointment, Fry insisted on ‘gin or whisky at every stop’, on top of which he