Family trees are baffling at the best of times; Allen Lane’s became more complicated than most when he learned that, as a condition of his joining The Bodley Head at the age of sixteen, he and his immediate family must exchange his father’s surname, Williams, for his mother’s maiden name of Lane. His parents and his three siblings dutifully traded names in order to advance the eldest son’s career in publishing; and with that the Williamses – and, indeed, Allen Lane’s Welsh connections – faded from the scene. Little enough was known about them in any event: it was said that undertaking ran in the family, and that Allen Lane’s lifelong interest in funerals represented some atavistic urge, and he once suggested, implausibly, that the unconventional spelling of his Christian name, which he shared with his father, had something to do with a missionary who was killed, but not eaten, by cannibals. His Williams grandfather was a sea captain from Neath, in South Wales, and was given to running a flag up the flagpole in the garden to announce the birth of a child.
These included Allen Lane’s father, Samuel Allen Gardiner Williams: according to family folklore, his two middle names were those of that same missionary, who had earlier been rescued in the Amazon by his nautical father. A round-headed, kindly-looking character with, in middle age, a balding pate, rimless specs and a walrus moustache, he was, according to his son’s friend and colleague William Emrys Williams, ‘a pleasant ruddy little man’. He was born in 1863; as a young man he prospected for gold in South Africa, without noticeable success, and when the Boer War broke out he joined a volunteer regiment attached to the Black Watch. Back from his African adventures, he settled in Bristol. In his eldest son’s birth certificate, he is listed as an ‘architect and surveyor’; elsewhere he is described, variously, as a clerk in the City Valuer’s Office, a corporation surveyor and (according to Allen Lane) the Deputy or Assistant City Valuer, working in the City Surveyor’s Department at Bristol Corporation. Either way, he never earned more than £400 a year, and evidently felt that he had not done his family proud on the monetary front. In a ‘goodbye letter’ written shortly before his death in 1950, he apologized for his ineptitude at making money; Allen Lane, by then a rich and successful publisher, was touched and worried by his father’s sense of inadequacy, assuring his mother that ‘of the making of money itself there is not much to be proud especially if, as is so often the case, it has been done at the cost of suffering and hardship to others…’ Out of office hours, the paterfamilias busied himself making vast quantities of homemade wines and cider, and when, in 1928, the Williams Lanes (as they had now become) moved to Falfield, in Gloucestershire, he maddened the cook by clogging up the kitchen with barrels and vats of fermenting parsnip and dandelion; unlike his three sons, all of whom were heavy and enthusiastic drinkers, he was abstemious by nature, but happily offered his potions to family and friends. He was also said to be a connoisseur of Cheddar cheese.
That the family should have switched surnames seems oddly apposite, since the Lane genes were gamier and more dominant than those of the Williamses, and Allen Lane was far more influenced by his mother than by his gentle and retiring father, and far keener on his Devonian ancestry than on anything originating from the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel. The Lanes – among them his remote relation John Lane, the founder of The Bodley Head – were farming folk; Allen Lane himself was to combine publishing with a passion for farming, and both his critics and his admirers – taking note of his stocky yeoman’s build, ruddy cheeks and sharp blue eyes as well as his shrewdness as a publisher – were to make much, over the years, of his peasant cunning and rustic guile. Lane told the writer Ved Mehta that one of his maternal ancestors had invented the first self-binder for tying up bundles of straw, and had to protect his machine from being sabotaged by indignant farm-workers worried that it would do them out of a job. But not all his ancestors worked on the land; towards the end of the 1930s, when he took up sailing, he kept his boat, the Penguin, at Fowey in Cornwall, and claimed to know the area well, ‘a number of my forebears having been pilots from the village of Polruan across the water’.
Lane’s mother, Camilla, was the driving force in the family. In later years he rang her almost every day from work, and when, after her husband’s death, she moved into a cottage a minute’s walk from Silverbeck, the William IV mansion he owned a mile or two down the road from the Penguin headquarters in Harmondsworth, he made a point of calling in to see her after work on his way home from the office; a tradition he broke only when restlessly travelling round the world or trying to relax on holiday in France or Ireland, and continued till her death in 1958. Born in 1873 – the date must have been engraved on Allen’s mind after he had, in a fit of absent-mindedness, set down her date of birth as 1893 when adding her name to the family plaque in Hartland church, an error that was remedied just in time by his brother Dick, who pointed out that, had that been the case, she would have been nine when her eldest son was born – she was a sturdy, large-featured woman: W. E. Williams, who thought her ‘ruthless’ on behalf of her family, remembered her as being ‘manifestly the head of the house: a genial farmer’s wife type of character, with a mop of curly hair twice as big as Jennie Lee’s’ – Jennie Lee being the fine-looking wife of Aneurin Bevan, a future Minister of the Arts and, at one stage, recommended to Lane by Williams as a possible heir-apparent at Penguin. Mrs Williams was also a good cook and an efficient and generous hostess – both qualities that Allen Lane came to expect of the women in his life, who would be called upon to entertain, often at short notice, printers, booksellers, authors and Penguin staff. Considered delicate as a child, she had been sent away from home to live with an uncle and aunt in Bristol; as a result, she was thought to be better educated than her Devonian sisters. For eight years she was engaged to be married to a Mr Harris, whose farm adjoined that of her parents, but, much to his indignation, her father’s territorial and dynastic ambitions were thwarted when she chose instead to marry the mild and inoffensive Samuel Williams. Both Camilla and her future husband were Chapel folk, and she accompanied the services on the harmonium; despite his low-church leanings, he also sang in the choir of St Mary Redcliffe, the magnificent Perpendicular masterpiece in the middle of Bristol, and it was there that they were married.
Christened Allen Lane Williams, their eldest son was born on Sunday 21 September 1902, between nine and eleven in the evening: we know this because, for some reason best known to himself, Lane invariably inscribed the details of his birth in the front of his new pocket diary at the beginning of each year, along with the dates of birth and death of his parents and his brother John. His brother Richard (known as Dick to his friends and to the readers of this book, as ‘Mr Richard’ to his subordinates at Penguin) followed in 1905, John in 1908, and Nora in 1911. Samuel was earning £250 a year when they set up house together in Cotham Vale, a pleasant, hilly suburb to the north of the city centre, and in due course Camilla had to cater and provide for a family of six on an allowance of thirty shillings a week. Years later, Allen Lane attributed his ‘awful compulsion to be doing something’ to his having been ‘brought up in the least affluent part of my father’s and mother’s families, and all my uncles and aunts were inclined to think that we were a curious brood and I wanted to show them’; but despite the shortage of funds, it was a happy household. ‘That our upbringing was a good one there is no denying,’ Lane told his mother in the letter he wrote her after his father’s death: all the letters he had received since then had commented on ‘the closeness of our family ties. Such solidarity could only spring from a happy and secure family life such as we enjoyed.’ His own daughters, he went on, had been brought up more leniently than he and his brothers, and got away with crimes which would have earned a ‘walloping’ forty years earlier – but ‘we none of us looked on Father as an avenging god, and what character-forming as he did was done more by example than precept’. Lane’s closeness to his parents and his siblings, and to his mother and Nora in particular, was to become one of his most noticeable characteristics, presenting a daunting and seemingly impenetrable barrier to the outside world, and his father helped to set the pattern: ‘During the whole of my life I don’t remember ever having heard Father criticize you or any action of yours. He supported you in every act with I am sure at the back of his mind a full realization of the importance of a solid front being shown to the outside world and in particular to the family, which is the first to perceive any rift, however slight.’
Not long after Dick was born, the family moved down Cotham Vale from No. 40 to Broomcroft, a much larger house. Now marked with a plaque to commemorate its most distinguished resident, it was a handsome Italianate pile on four floors, with rounded windows and stone balls along the parapet, built from a pinkish local stone, and stood at the end of a terrace. A dark and gloomy basement housed the kitchen, the coal cellar, a scullery with a stone sink, a cold water tap and a copper to heat the water, and so many larders and store cupboards that over one school holiday the Lane boys were deputed to paint all seventeen doors in the basement; the dustbins were put out in the area to await collection, and in his unpublished (and highly entertaining) ‘Reminiscences’ Dick remembered how vile they smelt in the hot summer months. There was no running hot water, and the top two floors had no water at all. Despite the modest salary on offer from the City Corporation, the Williamses, like the Pooters, could afford a maid; she worked from seven in the morning to eight at night, and was housed on the top floor. Of the five remaining bedrooms, one was used by Samuel as a photographic dark room; for some years Allen and Dick shared a bright and cheerful red-painted bedroom over the front door, and on winter evenings they were serenaded by a harpist who dragged her instrument behind her on a trolley, strummed in the street for twenty minutes or so, and was rewarded with a shower of pennies.
Although, in later years, Allen became increasingly impatient with Dick, they were, as children, extremely close. Both were exceptionally good-looking little boys. Allen was smaller, darker and sharper-featured, though never as lean and foxy-faced as brother John; Dick was large, blond, moon-faced, ruddy-featured and benign; both appeared in St Mary Redcliffe on Sundays in the guise of choirboys, clad in ruffs and white cassocks. The Williamses were, according to Dick, a ‘fairly religious family’, and on Sunday evenings the head of the family sang hymns in the drawing-room in a deep bass voice: Allen – who never showed much interest in music in later life – sang in a madrigal society, attended a concert at the Colston Hall given by Clara Butt, and, when the First World War broke out, sang to the troops while his cousin Ducka Puxley collected the money. As an adult, Lane was a famously natty dresser, never appearing in public without a tie and a hip-hugging double-breasted suit, and bearing at times a curious resemblance to another dapper Bristolian, the actor Cary Grant; and in his childhood opportunities for dressing up were provided by membership of the Boy Scouts. A tinted photograph shows him in full regalia, peering anxiously out from under a gigantic tent-shaped fawn felt hat. Both boys were Scouts when war broke out, ready to shin up lampposts and turn off the gas in the event of an air-raid, spending odd nights on duty in a signal station somewhere beyond Clevedon, and – or so they told their friends – spotting a German submarine as it made its way up the Bristol Channel and arranging for its immediate arrest.
Mrs Williams liked to claim that her eldest son learned to read by studying estate agents’ notices and advertisements when taken for walks by a governess, Mrs Hastings, who lived in the house next door. Printed matter of a more literary kind was in ample supply in the Williams household – their father kept old copies of the Strand magazine, exciting in his eldest a particular liking for the work of Conan Doyle, and Allen Lane once suggested that a regular diet of W. T. Stead’s penny paperbacks, including Books for the Bairns, the Penny Poets and the Penny Shakespeare series, may have planted a Penguin seed – but neither boy was particularly bright or keen on learning. Dick was, according to the Puxleys, ‘as dense as could be’; Allen, who thought he must have been ‘probably rather dull’ as a child, wanted, like any self-respecting Edwardian boy, to become an engine-driver, and six months before he died he referred, appreciatively, to the proximity of the main London to Exeter line to his farm at Chapmansford in Hampshire, ‘which allows me to pander to my love of trains’.
The two older boys went to kindergarten together, and then on to a dubious establishment called Tellisford House, which they both loathed. The headmaster, Mr Crawford, was an old-fashioned sadist who revelled in beatings and patrolled the corridors with his cane at the ready; every now and then he would rap on the door of a classroom with the handle of his cane, ask the master in charge which boy was paying least attention, and administer a thwacking. Despite his reign of terror – Dick claimed that they were beaten several times a day – the Lane brothers were, more often than not, on mischief bent: ‘Allen and I were likened to the two facets of a Seidlitz powder, harmless when separated but explosive when mixed.’
Over forty years later, after he had settled in Australia, Dick – who, by then, felt bruised and aggrieved by the treatment he had received at the hands of his older brother – wrote a long, nostalgic letter to Allen describing, in almost Arcadian terms, their happy childhood in Bristol, and wondering whether he too looked back on those days with a comparable fondness. No doubt he received back an awkward, businesslike letter, far more concerned with staff problems or annual profits than with the tenderly remembered minutiae of a distant past, but if Dick was wounded (though unsurprised) by the inadequacy of his brother’s reaction, his own letter provides some glimpses of their boyhood together. He recalled summer holidays spent rowing on the river, clambering round Clifton Gorge, fishing for sticklebacks at Coombe Dingle, and bringing them home in jam-jars; and how they caught butterflies, raided birds’ nests, fished for eels in a claypit, took a sea journey in a tug and made a trip by paddle-steamer from Hotwells to Clovelly. More than once, they bicycled down to Devon to visit Lane relations: an uncle owned a shop in Winkleigh, drew ice-cold water from a pump in the garden, and allowed them to peer through a telescope mounted in his sitting-room. They were there when an uncle got married; the old father disgraced himself by taking the bell-ringers to the pub before the service and filling them so full of beer that the celebratory peal of bells was discordant and out of tune. Did Allen remember, Dick wondered, his friend Gale, who made gunpowder and tested it on the tramlines in Whiteladies Road, so effectively that the explosion could be heard for miles around? Or wandering round Bristol docks, clambering over the boats and visiting ‘old Martin who had that delightful but rather dark old ships’ repair store-room down by the river, not far from Bristol Bridge’, and how, one summer holiday, Allen supplemented his twopence a day pocket money by being apprenticed to a shipwright who worked on tugs and barges in the docks?
The family was on holiday in Highbridge when war broke out in August 1914: Dick remembered watching a train pass by full of Scottish soldiers, with flat freight trucks laden with field guns bringing up the rear. With the outbreak of war, Mr Williams, too old for the regular army, joined the Special Constabulary and the local Volunteers. Every now and then he did guard duty at the Filton Aircraft works, returning home at six in the morning for a wash before setting out for the office; as a sergeant in the Special Constabulary, he kept a record of ships’ crews visiting Bristol, and augmented the family rations with tins of ships’ biscuits, which he soaked in warm water before serving them up with sugar and hot milk. A concert party was given to raise money for the Blue Cross and the horses on the Western Front, and ‘Father appeared dressed as the Kaiser, complete with German helmet and sword.’ The Cotham Road tennis courts were converted to allotments: Allen and Dick applied for one, successfully, and set about the hard work of digging up their patch. At choir practice in St Mary Redcliffe, Allen offered his fellow choristers free sweets, cakes and lemonade in exchange for their manual labour; in his brief memoir of his old friend, W. E. Williams sees this as an early indication of Lane’s entrepreneurial spirit, as well as his liking for Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
War brought changes, too, to John Lane at The Bodley Head: his large house in Lancaster Gate Terrace was hit by a bomb, and although the damage was fairly modest, some of his staff proved reluctant to return. Lane and his American wife, Annie Eichberg, decided to decamp for the duration to Bath; and, once installed, they got in touch with their relations in Bristol. Quite how Camilla Williams and London’s most eminent publisher were related remains obscure: second cousins once removed might not be too far from the mark. Whatever the connection, the Williamses visited the Lanes in Bath, and were visited in turn in Cotham Vale, where the best china was brought out, Mrs Williams served up roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and the boys were on their best behaviour. During the course of one of these uneasy gatherings, ‘Uncle’ John Lane – who had no children of his own, or any immediate family – first raised the possibility of Allen’s joining The Bodley Head after he left school. Allen’s initial reactions were understandably lukewarm: Dick’s friend Gale had a cage full of rabbits, and when Uncle John raised the subject of a career in publishing. Allen muttered something about having to see to the rabbits, made his excuses and left. Sensing his kinsman’s yeoman blood, perhaps, old Lane grumbled, prophetically, that if Allen was more interested in rabbits than books, he should probably become a farmer rather than a publisher; and his nephew would, in due course, combine a passion for farming with a single-minded devotion to the business of publishing.
Allen Lane once claimed that he left school and went to work in the rates office of Bristol Corporation, only to be ‘yanked back to the Grammar School in Bristol’ at the insistence of John Lane, who wanted him to transfer to the classical side of the school as a precondition of his being offered a job at The Bodley Head: but according to his woefully undistinguished school record, Lane clocked into Bristol Grammar School on 18 January 1916, when he was fourteen and a bit, and spent seven terms at the school before leaving on 11 April 1919 at the age of sixteen-and-a-half. It may be that he could take no more caning at Tellisford House, left as soon as he could, and put in a short stint at the rates office before enrolling at the Grammar School; or, more probably, that he took a holiday job in the rates office during his first summer at his new school with the vague idea that, since the school leaving age was then set at fourteen, he might abandon academic life if things worked out, but was persuaded to return to his studies.
Bristol Grammar School is a sixteenth-century foundation, duly equipped with an impressive and elegant set of Victorian Gothic buildings, including a dining-hall with a hammer-beam roof and portraits of heavily gowned and mortar-boarded headmasters glowering down from the walls. Despite a long and distinguished history, it had gone steadily downhill in late-Victorian times, but matters began to improve when Cyril Norwood, a former civil servant, was appointed Headmaster in 1906. The number of pupils shot up from 185 to 528, and new laboratories and sports facilities were laid on, as well as a gym and a library. ‘We have a library of several hundred volumes and the school covered in pictures where there was not a book or a picture in 1906,’ an exultant Head told the assembled parents and governors in his farewell peroration in 1916, when he left to become, successively, Headmaster of Marlborough, Headmaster of Harrow, and President of St John’s College, Oxford; in 1944 he produced the hugely influential Norwood Report on the future of education, in which the teaching of science and technology was relegated to a paragraph, the classics were exalted above all else, and future Ministers of Education were urged to retain the existing divisions between grammar and secondary schools. Norwood was succeeded by J. E. Barton, in the same term in which Allen Lane joined the school. With a first in Greats and the Newdigate Prize already under his belt, Barton was said to have written the only book about Thomas Hardy which its subject could read with any pleasure; within the school, his great achievement was to enthuse his pupils about the pleasures of art and architecture. Although, in strictly academic terms, Lane seems to have learned almost nothing during his time at the school, it may well be that his visual taste and sense of style, which he put to such good effect as a publisher, were encouraged by a headmaster who ‘opened [his] eyes to the significance of design and form’. Certainly Barton would have proved a more congenial figure than the austere Cyril Norwood: he was, according to a contemporary, ‘a shorter, more substantial person, with ruddier cheeks and more than a suspicion of a nautical roll’ and ‘a robust sense of humour’. Revisiting his old school in 1952 to open a new building, Lane spoke of his ‘real affection’ for the school, and recalled how his ‘education was taken in hand by Mr Barton, who commenced by introducing me to Palgrave and finished – I hasten to add that this was after I had left here – by introducing me to a very potent mixture of Russian stout and draught Bass in pint tankards’. Barton himself had nothing to say on the matter, but he did remember how ‘the street lighting was dimmed by war regulations, and the school clock forbidden to strike, lest it might excite the interest of hovering zeppelins’, and how, with most of the school lit by gas, the gas mantles in the classrooms below the Great Hall were damaged by ‘the stamping exuberance of our Armistice Day assembly’.
Dick and John followed their brother to the Grammar School in due course, their father shelling out £5 per head per term for the privilege. Between them the three brothers appear not to have notched up a single public exam, nor made any impression whatsoever on the games field. All three records are a blank, revealing nothing beyond routine details of dates of entry and departure and father’s occupation; none of them appears to have passed a single School Certificate, let alone the Higher School Certificate needed to go on to university. ‘I wasn’t very bright at school,’ Lane once confessed; and although he occasionally turned out, reluctantly, for the Penguin cricket team when it took on neighbouring villages, he showed no interest whatsoever in games of any kind.
Early in 1961, Ernest Wilmott, a fellow-pupil who later became a builder in Bristol, heard Sir Allen Lane the publisher on the radio programme Frankly Speaking, and – discounting the change of name and the clipped, precise voice, oddly reminiscent of Noël Coward’s in accent and intonation and lacking all traces of a Bristol burr – suddenly realized that the speaker had once been Allen Williams of Form IVA. In a letter sent only days before Lane’s death, he recalled their feasting together on the gym roof and, wondering why his friend seemed to irritate the masters, attributed it to ‘an incipient smile which was always on your face’ – still present, he noted, in photographs of Lane in later life. Lane’s humour, and his sense of mischief, would be evident in his career as a publisher, always more happy to tease and deride those who seemed to embody the established order; and so too was a loyalty to old friends that sometimes sat uneasily with volatility, fickleness and an alarming tendency to suddenly turn cold on those who had seemed, until recently, to be the favourites of the moment. His life would be threaded with characters who went back a long way, and among his more distinguished and diligent contemporaries at the Grammar School were Ivor Jennings, later the Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Oliver Franks, who went on to become an eminent civil servant, British Ambassador in Washington, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, and (by now a peer) the author of the Franks Report into higher education. As a schoolboy, Franks was Lane’s antithesis, serving as a school prefect, playing for the cricket and hockey elevens and the rugger fifteen, and winning a scholarship to the Queens College, Oxford; and whereas Lane provides invaluable ammunition to those of us who long to be told that there is no correlation between success at school and success in life thereafter, Franks’s school record, in the words of his biographer, ‘offers no crumb of comfort to those who like their great men to be school dunces’. Unconcerned by his own failure to go on to university, and unabashed by the great gulfs of learning that lay between them, Lane would, in due course, publish Ivor Jennings’s The British Constitution as a successful and long-lasting Pelican; he kept in touch with Franks via Old Bristolian dinners, and although nothing ever came of his approaches, he liked to touch him for advice and ponder his suitability as a possible Penguin director.
In the meantime, he accepted his Uncle John’s offer of a place at The Bodley Head and, with his immediate family duly renamed, Allen Lane Williams Lane set off to London to seek his fortune.