Not only was ‘that horror Charles Fry – it is the only word for him – drunken, dissolute and destructive’, but he was prone to sexual boasting as well. He informed the bookseller Heywood Hill’s wife Anne (unasked) that he had slept with three of her cousins, two male and one female; when Lees-Milne met him on his return from one of his frequent publishing trips to New York, he tossed back seven whisky-and-sodas before announcing that he had slept with forty people during his time away; towards the end of the war Lees-Milne remembered how
I had lunch with Charles Fry at the Park Lane Hotel. He was late, having just got up from some orgy à trois with whips, etc. He related every detail, not questioning whether I wanted to listen. In the middle of the narration I simply said ‘Stop! Stop!’ At the next table an officer was eating, and imbibing every word. I thought he gave me a very crooked look for having spoilt his fun.
I longed to learn more, but suspected that, like Derek Verschoyle, Fry survived only as a footnote in the memoirs of better-known friends and acquaintances. And then, poking about in a second-hand bookshop, I came across a handsomely produced book, edited by Hector Bolitho and published in 1943 to celebrate the centenary of B.T. Batsford Ltd. Not only did it contain a full-length photograph of the young Fry – a chinless, moon-faced character with thinning hair, leaning pensively against some bookshelves, an open book in one hand and a cigarette dangling from the other – but from it I learned that he was a member of the well-known Quaker family, and was a great-nephew of Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher of Jutland fame. He had himself started out in the Navy, but decided to try his hand at publishing instead, and joined the firm in 1924 as the assistant to its Chairman, Harry Batsford. Cecil Beaton met him at about this time, and thought him ‘frightfully nice-looking, all very fine and smooth and pale – a gorgeous complexion, and very pale yellow hair brushed right back’. On another occasion, Beaton joined Fry, Brian Howard, Raymond Mortimer and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy for dinner and noted how, after the meal was over, his companions suddenly whipped out powder-puffs and set out to ‘find a man’.
‘Pink and plump, hatless and without a waistcoat’ – or so his new employer described him – Fry presented himself for work at the Batsford offices in April 1924. He made his way to a large Georgian house, long since bombed or demolished, on the north side of Holborn, overlooking Red Lion Square. After he had rung the doorbell three times, a wicket door opened and ‘I was confronted by an elderly crone,’ Fry remembered, ‘whose sparse wisp of grey hair haloed a lined and battered face. A ruined mouth produced an unholy leer. “Come in, ducks,” said a cracked, hoarse voice, “Mr Arry’s not ere yet.”’ Such was his introduction to the firm: Mrs Murphy, the housekeeper, very occasionally ‘bestowed a whack with her duster on a book or a chair’, and liked to buy the staff their cigarettes. Every now and then the stubs from Fry’s ashtray were passed on to her ‘for the old man to fill his pipe with’.
Like other old-fashioned publishers, Batsford continued the eighteenth-century tradition whereby publishing and bookselling were combined under one roof. The firm specialised in producing hefty, ornate and handsomely illustrated volumes on architectural history and interior decoration. These were edited and designed from the first floor up, while the ground floor was occupied by a bookshop selling their own and other firms’ new publications as well as second-hand books. The directors’ office was on the first floor, a dark, dusty room crammed with yellowing first editions, the removal of any one of which left a patina of black dust on the fingers.
Mr Harry, Fry’s new boss, had succeeded a brace of uncles as the man in charge. A jovial, scholarly bachelor with a bald pate, he was, in Lees-Milne’s opinion, ‘the dirtiest, yet the sweetest old person I ever saw. He smokes, and coughs, and shakes incessantly, while the cigarette ash spills down his front, and not only ash. Saliva also. His eccentricities are Dickensian. He adores cats, and fills his coat pockets with the heads, tails and entrails of fish. As he stumbles down the pavement he distributes these remnants to the congregating cats. The smell of his clothes is overpowering. Charles is devoted to him.’
Hector Bolitho was equally fond of Mr Harry, but ‘the chaos of his office quickens my blood into real temper, for I cannot abide the idea of my manuscripts joining such a muddle’. Apart from the mounds of paper on his desk, the clutter in his office included a family of stuffed hedgehogs in a case, a cat basket for the use of passing strays, a huge West Indian knobkerry, referred to as the Authors’ Welcome, a thick coating of dust, and a broken thermos flask brimming over with cigarette ends. ‘And here sits my friend Harry Batsford,’ Bolitho recorded, ‘drinking tea, shouting Hell! Damn and Blast! – yet slowly forming with his authors such friendships that calling upon him becomes a delight. He never ceases to be surprising. The last time I called on him he lifted a copy of “Way Down in Old Kentucky” from the table and asked me to sing. I obliged, in a bronchial voice, and he listened with polite delight.’
‘Once one realised the “point” of what one was doing, one’s working hours were gay, unconventional and wildly interesting,’ Fry later wrote, adding that ‘we all let ourselves go and, when working under high pressure, we have had some tremendous tiffs, with explosions of highly coloured language all round.’ Fry’s desk became, in due course, as chaotic and heavily piled as Mr Harry’s, with two telephones into which he shouted rather than spoke, and a brimming-over ashtray. According to Bolitho, ‘Charles’s praise for an author is guarded, so that the slightest compliment from him is to be treasured. His scorn is like a hive of bees let loose.’
In the late Twenties the firm moved from Holborn to a late-eighteenth-century house in North Audley Street. Sir Albert Richardson, an architect and historian of eighteenth-century England, and the man responsible for the post-war efflorescence of ‘Post Office Georgian’ buildings, designed an elegant shopfront, the coat of arms was nailed up over the door, and – on the surface at least – life went on as before. But the Depression of the early Thirties took its toll on a firm rooted in the Edwardian era, so to save money Mr Harry decided that they should dispense with the services of writers and illustrators, and do the work themselves: he and Charles Fry would write and edit the books they needed, while his nephew Brian Cook would provide line-drawing illustrations and the jacket artwork. The three men took to touring the British Isles in Mr Harry’s cube-shaped Morris. In the evenings, their researches done, Fry and Cook would search out a suitable pub and install themselves in the bar, while Mr Harry, suitably clad in trilby, plus-fours and rustic tweeds, went on making notes and inspecting buildings until nightfall drove him indoors.
Of the three, Brian Cook was the quietest and, in terms of what he achieved, the most interesting. A slim young man with a domed forehead and a widow’s peak, he had enjoyed the benefits, while at Repton, of a remarkable art teacher named Arthur Norris, whose other Reptonian protégés included Anthony Gross and Anthony Devas. After school, Cook joined the family firm, simultaneously studying at the Central School of Art. The line drawings he provided for the insides of the firm’s books were pleasantly old-fashioned, very much in keeping with its dusty image, but the jackets he produced in the thirties were very different – dazzling and audacious works of art, as redolent of the period as the Chrysler Building or a Bugatti, Peter Jones or a silver cocktail-shaker.
As the Depression lifted, and with it the need for the editorial staff to write as well as publish their books, Fry persuaded Mr Harry that Batsford should extend their architectural and topographical interests to embrace a less specialised and scholarly kind of reader; the books should be shorter, less freighted with academic paraphernalia, and more dashingly presented. By taking a gamble and printing 8,500 or even 10,000 copies of new titles, they could afford full-colour jackets; by having one artist responsible for all the books in a series, it should be possible to create a distinctive ‘Batsford’ look, of a kind that appealed to collectors, in much the same way as Allen Lane and Victor Gollancz were creating distinctive ‘looks’ for their firms. (Although we tend to think of ‘branding’ as a modern phenomenon, it found nimble practitioners in the Thirties, from huge corporations like Guinness and Shell to publishers like Lane and Gollancz, who sold