Bill Williams was not the only key figure to join Penguin at this time, but whereas he remained deliberately detached, devoting less than half his time and energy to the firm, Eunice Frost could hardly have been more different. Like her slightly older contemporary, the even more formidable Norah Smallwood of Chatto & Windus, Eunice Frost was one of the first women to rise to the top (or near the top) of what had always been an exclusively male preserve: this in itself was enough to make her both pushy and prickly, and the fact that both women had started at the bottom of their respective firms, as secretaries, and neither had been to university or received that much in the way of ‘higher education’, made them still more sensitive to slights, and more aware than necessary of their own intellectual and literary shortcomings. Both were feared and sometimes detested by those who worked for them in junior capacities – one embattled secretary summed up Eunice as ‘plain horrible’ – and both were addicted to large and eye-catching hats; but whereas Mrs Smallwood managed, through force of personality, to cling on to power at Chatto until well into her seventies, Eunice Frost was only in her early forties when – neurotic, bronchitic and increasingly out of touch with changes in the publishing and literary worlds – she was edged out of Penguin to spend the rest of her life in exile in Lewes, grumbling about the sad falling-off of the firm, bombarding former colleagues with letters and interminable phone calls, and nursing that sense of grievance that is all too liable to afflict those who have entrusted their all to a firm or institution. Though she never lost her sense of humour or her contagious laughter, she was, by the end of her life, a melancholy and pathetic figure: but for twenty years she did more for Penguin, in terms of sheer effort and hard work, than anyone except its founder; and although, to her intense irritation, it was always assumed that she concerned herself exclusively with the fiction list – an honourable enough activity, but essentially second-hand in that it involved buying the rights in books already published by other firms – she busied herself, as a tireless editor, with every kind of book published by the firm, from Pelican philosophers and Penguin Modern Painters to King Penguins and John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing.
After her death in 1998, the papers of this very private woman – including tax returns for 1939, unopened copies of the Bookseller, still in their brown paper tubes, the proceedings of the Lewes Horticultural Society for 1961, and every letter and Christmas card she had received over forty years – were acquired by Bristol University Library; and from comments scribbled on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper it is possible to discover something of who she was and where she came from. She was born in the Midlands in 1915, ‘the fourth, last and unwanted child of parents who should never have had children at all’. She loathed her father, and longed to learn that he had been killed when he went away to fight in the First World War: he was, she wrote, ‘a proud, weak and intolerant man’, given to terrible rages, and ‘there was never anything but hate between us, and on my side a great fear and, later, a contempt’. She grew up in Burton-on-Trent, was educated at a convent school, and sent out to make her way in the world. ‘Never really had any self-confidence,’ she noted. ‘Have simply made my way. My pride has been a method of keeping going.’ As ‘a fighter, but not for myself’, she would always be worried about money: with reason, since her salary at Penguin would always be pitifully low. At the age of eighteen she went to work as a secretary-cum-receptionist in a ‘well-known country hotel’, and she came to London to work as a secretary at the Milk Marketing Board. From an early age she had literary and artistic ambitions: in later life she took up painting, storing her work in fridges dotted about the house, but in her twenties she wrote stories, articles (‘Nature Decorations for Your Home’) and poems. Several of her poems – ‘Song for Lost Love’, ‘The Toad’, ‘Some Have Yet Writ with Sorrow’ – were published in a literary magazine called The Decachord, other contributors to which included Ernest Raymond, T. Sturge Moore and Eden Phillpotts. ‘They strike me as being fresh and full of the spirit of the countryside,’ a publisher told her in a kindly rejection letter. ‘What a pity that poetry is not a commercial proposition.’
She was working as a secretary at the Chelsea Arts Club – helping, among other things, to organize the Coronation Costume Ball in 1937 – when she learned, through a small ad, that Allen Lane was looking for a new secretary. Always stylishly turned out despite the shortage of funds, and the owner of a vast collection of shoes, she turned up for her interview in Great Portland Street in an enormous black cartwheel hat. Lane was in his shirt-sleeves, half-hidden behind the publisher’s familiar detritus of typescripts, proofs, letters, estimates, review cuttings and seasonal catalogues. He had a soft spot for good-looking women: Eunice could hardly be described as a beauty – she had a long horse face framed by shoulder-length hair, and her expression was usually on the morose or lugubrious side – but he must have taken to her at once. ‘In my first week, instead of being told what to do, I was expected to do the extraordinary,’ she recalled in a brief memoir entitled ‘How I Became a Literary Midwife’. ‘Allen said, “How do you like reading?” and pushed a whole pile of books across his desk. And that’s how I learned that you had to take the baby home with you every night.’ Elsewhere she noted how ‘at the quixotic instigation of Allen Lane I was almost immediately catapulted from secretarial to editorial functions’, becoming as a result ‘the first in-house Penguin editor’. She found her new employer like ‘an extraordinary spinning-wheel, though even that may give too simple an idea of his complexities’. He was, as she soon discovered, ‘powerfully possessive, and found difficulty in sharing his kingdom. He lived his work, and you ignored this at your peril.’ She quickly became devoted to Lane and, offices being the way they are, it was assumed, probably incorrectly, that they must have had an affair. ‘Deep as her devotion to you is, she is inclined to get jumpy and hysterical when she is too close to you,’ Williams once told Lane, but whatever her feelings about Lane she seems to have been a neurotic and highly-strung woman who sought refuge in her work, was given to peals of nervous laughter and announced her presence with a warning cough. Although he exploited her ruthlessly in terms of both her workload and her pay, Lane valued her very highly; and whereas he was, to varying degrees, critical of all his colleagues, however close, he never ran her down behind her back but worried constantly about her neuroses and her poor health. ‘You don’t need me to have to tell you again that if one had to pick on the two people most responsible for the creation of the firm it would be us,’ he told her not long before she vanished into her forty-year exile in Lewes. Lane’s secretary, Jean Osborne, thought her ‘the ultimate in sophistication and savoir-faire’, but for most of the staff ‘Frostie’ was a daunting and alarming presence: according to the typographer and book designer Ruari McLean, who worked for the firm before and after the war, ‘while Allen was always charming and pliant, and did not always mean what he said, Eunice was the tough one you had to listen to’. (Tough or not, she took a shine to McLean, and even suggested that they should get married; but by then the war had broken out, he had enlisted as a submariner, and he held her at bay with a cry of ‘Not now – perhaps later!’)
No sooner had Frostie installed herself in Great Portland Street than the firm was on the move. A council official inspected the crypt after the firm had applied for permission to install a lavatory, and was shocked by what he saw. ‘We were breaking every known by-law,’ Lane remembered, and ‘as he left he said, “If anyone says this place exists I will have to deny it. I just haven’t seen it. If anyone says I have, I will say they’re a liar.” That’s when we decided we’d better find real premises.’ Rather than remain in central London, the brothers decided to investigate the outer suburbs, where property and rates were cheaper; and since the Lanes still spent most weekends with their parents in Gloucestershire, it made sense to head in a westerly direction. Dick was deputed to visit estate agents and possible sites in his Morris Cowley, and eventually he plumped for a field of cabbages near the village of Harmondsworth in Middlesex, immediately opposite the future Heathrow airport. The Great West Road, famed for its roadhouses, ran past the cabbage field, epitomizing the new England of arterial roads and industrial estates celebrated by Priestley in his English Journey; Croydon airport had yet to be supplanted by Heathrow, and the surrounding countryside was flat, undistinguished and faintly scruffy, a not unpleasant world of pollarded willows, fields full of ponies, market gardens and red-brick walls. Morpurgo suggests that the decision to house Penguin in what was still – just – open country reflected Lane’s rural nostalgia, and that he had been influenced by visits to Port Sunlight, Bournville and the Reader’s Digest headquarters at Pleasantville in upstate New York; be that as it may he bought the three-and-a-half-acre site for £2,112, though negotiations nearly broke down when the farmer insisted on being paid an additional £200 for his crop of cabbages. Dick (or so it was said) was told to sell off the cabbages, or give them to members of staff; an architect was commissioned to design a building that would combine publishing offices and warehouse; old Mr Williams Lane laid the foundation stone in August 1937, and three months later Harmondsworth was in business. Some members of staff moved out from London and settled in Harmondsworth or West Drayton, and Lane helped them with a loan of £25 each to cover the move; others stayed put, and commuted against the flow. Edward Young, by now sharing a flat with Ruari McLean in Hammersmith, took the Greenline bus, and reported a ‘tremendous hoo-ha’ when he asked that his salary should be raised to £10 a week to cover the extra costs of travel.
Some years later, in one of the firm’s celebratory publications, a snug and anonymous Penguin – Bill Williams, no doubt – wrote of Harmondsworth that ‘plain men, in cars, passing it, say to each other, “That’s where the Penguin Books come from,” and know that they have thereby established their status in the cultural life of our time’. Although Lane sporadically opened London offices, in Portman Street and later in Holborn, he was proud to publish in a place far removed from Bloomsbury or Covent Garden, but editorial decisions were made, more often than not, in Bill Williams’s office in Tavistock Square or, more congenially, in the Barcelona, a Spanish restaurant in Beak Street in Soho. Run, according to Williams, by a ‘genial gastronome called Carbonnel’, it was well regarded by A. J. A. Symons in his capacity as restaurant critic of Night and Day, London’s short-lived equivalent of the New Yorker:* though a modest establishment – its other patrons included George Orwell and assorted refugees from the Spanish Civil War – it had an ‘excellent chef’, a monopoly on Alicante and Jijona turrones, laid in by Señor Carbonnel before the outbreak of the Civil War, and a good line in ‘inexpensive Habana panatellas’. Better still, for Williams and the Lanes at least, was a fathomless supply of wine from the owner’s family vineyards. Allen, Dick, Williams and Frostie formed the nucleus of the Barcelona lunchers, meeting there once a week to sift through and debate the books or proposals on offer to the firm; the typescripts were piled on the floor beside the table, and brought out one by one for dissection and discussion. Their deliberations were lubricated with innumerable glasses of wine, and favoured candidates were placed at the bottom of the pile on the understanding that the greater the number of bottles drunk, the better the chances of a positive decision. In later years, when Penguin had become larger, more institutionalized and part of the publishing establishment, Lane and Bill Williams and Frostie would look back at those happy days in the Barcelona with the fondness reserved for a paradise lost; nor was it simply a matter of their invariably drinking, as Lance Beales put it, ‘far more sherries than was good for us’. It was, Frostie recalled over fifty years later, ‘a time of very high idealism’, and together they seemed to ‘inhabit a time of innocent awareness, dedication towards ideals, and a constant determination in pursuit of the best that each could give or do’.
Their idealism was political as well as literary and educational. The Thirties was a period in which dictatorships and rival ideologies provoked a corresponding idealism, particularly on the Left, and the radicalization of a youthful middle class racked with guilt, and anxiety about unemployment, the rise of fascism and the persistent threat of war, were reflected in their reading habits. The Labour Party had teen divided and demoralized by Ramsay MacDonald’s decision to head the National government in 1931, with the result that many of its supporters defected to other left-wing parties, including the Communists, while the mass unemployment and the hunger marches of the early Thirties had moved Lane and others like him to declare themselves socialists. But as the economy began to recover, the fears and aspirations of the intelligentsia were increasingly focused on foreign affairs: the Nazis came to power in Germany, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, the Japanese annexed Manchuria and the Spanish Civil War broke out. Pacifism, disarmament, collective security and the League of Nations were proclaimed as universal panaceas by the idealistic Left; the USSR, with its five-year plans and beaming peasant girls gathering in the harvest, was hailed as a new civilization by Shaw and the Webbs despite the show trials and strong reservations on the part of Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell, who had witnessed first-hand the ruthlessness employed by the Communists against Trotskyites and Anarchists in Republican Spain. Memoirs of the First World War and the horrors of the trenches – Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Blunden’s Undertones of War – were read in their thousands, confirming a determination that such wars should never be fought again; there was much talk about the iniquities of armaments manufacturers and the devastation that could be unleashed on our cities from the air. Despite some dissenters, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and Roy Campbell among them, writers, academics and the intellectual classes, and not least the scientists, tended to be on the Left; some, like Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, were – briefly, and uncomfortably – members of the Communist Party. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War provided a unique opportunity to match idealism with activity: some, like Orwell and John Cornford, went to fight for the Republicans; some, like Koestler and Claud Cockburn, went out as war correspondents; some, like Auden and T. C. Worsley, served as ambulance men. In the early Thirties Hitler had benefited from the widespread notion, articulated above all in Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that Germany had been hard done by at the Treaty of Versailles, in terms of both territory lost and economic reparations, but once his territorial ambitions in Europe became more evident, along with his treatment of the Jews, the Left’s earlier devotion to pacifism and disarmament dropped away, and appeasers and the ‘men of Munich’ replaced cosmopolitan arms dealers as the villains of the hour.
Although the Daily Mail and its readers – characterized by the literati as golf-loving, pipe-smoking suburbanites devoted to dogs, crossword puzzles, organized games and detective stories – remained impervious to the intellectual currents of the age, the media in general registered a perceptible shift to the Left that was to become still more explicit during the war, and make itself manifest in the election of a Labour government in 1945 and the establishment of the Welfare State. Nowhere was the swing to the Left more apparent than in the transformation of the Daily Mirror. Then as now, newspaper proprietors were regarded with deep suspicion, exerting undue power behind the scenes and dictating policy to their editors. Lord Rothermere, with his soft spot for Hitler, was a particular bogeyman, but in 1933 he made amends of a kind by selling the Daily Mirror. Under Cecil King, Hugh Cudlipp and its legendary editor Harry Guy Bartholomew, it was transmogrified into a campaigning paper of the Left, with its most famous columnist, Bill Connor, alias ‘Cassandra’, relishing his role as the scourge of the established order. Nor was the Mirror a solitary voice. Gerald Barry became editor of the liberal-minded News Chronicle in 1936; the Manchester Guardian already had impeccable liberal credentials; Geoffrey Dawson of The Times supported Chamberlain at Munich and was close to the Cliveden Set, but the appointment as a leader-writer of E. H. Carr, the left-wing Cambridge don and expert on Soviet Russia, and the presence behind the scenes of the Jesuitical, black-clad figure of Stanley Morison, who combined left-wing views with a devotion to the Catholic Church, suggested that changes were on the way. David Low, the scourge of Hitler and Colonel Blimp, had moved to the Evening Standard in 1934; Ritchie Calder was writing for the Daily Herald and Vernon Bartlett for the News Chronicle; Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman was more highly regarded and more influential than its right-wing rival, the Spectator, while The Week – edited by the mischievous Claud Cockburn, who also wrote for the Daily Worker under the pseudonym of Frank Pitcairn – could be relied on to expose skulduggery in high places.
In 1938 the Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant and Tom Hopkinson founded the legendary magazine Picture Post, a kindred spirit to Penguin Books until its demise in the early 1950s. Despite the huge success of Lorant’s pocket-sized Lilliput, launched the previous year and priced at sixpence, W. H. Smith, cautious as ever, placed an nitial order of only 70,000 copies of Picture Post: Lorant printed 750,000, and within four months the magazine was selling 1,350,000 a week. With its modern layout, bold use of photography and hardhitting approach to domestic and foreign politics, Picture Post not only reflected the influence of documentary film-makers like John Grierson, whose GPO Film Unit was set up in 1933, but literary fashion as well. Throughout the Thirties writers sought to record the lives of the hitherto inarticulate, both at home and abroad: though embarrassed by Orwell’s claim that the working classes smelt – so embarrassed that he insisted on writing a foreword in which he apologized for, and distanced himself from, his author’s tactless observations – Victor Gollancz published The Road to Wigan Pier, and working-class memoirs and exotic reportage were snapped up by publishers. Fact, a magazine devoted to documenting working-class life, included in its editorial team Storm Jameson, Stephen Spender and Arthur Calder-Marshall, providing prose equivalents of Humphrey Spender’s bleakly evocative photographs of slums in the North of England; and the anthropologist Tom Harrisson and the poet Charles Madge founded Mass Observation, a body devoted to interviewing, through teams of volunteers, the man and the woman in the street, collating their findings, and using the results to influence politicians and opinion-makers in a leftwards direction.
Nor were publishers immune to the prevailing political climate. Victor Gollancz was firmly established as the leading left-wing publisher. He had decided to set up a book club devoted to left-wing writing, both polemical and documentary, after a lunch with Stafford Cripps. The Left Book Club, he told the New Statesman, had been formed to ‘help in the terribly urgent struggle for world peace and against fascism, by giving all those who are willing to take part in that struggle such knowledge as will immensely increase their efficiency’, and he cited the ‘almost incredible circulation of books in the Soviet Union’ as a ‘glorious example’ to be followed. The books were chosen by Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski; club members were expected to buy the monthly choice for a minimum of six months, but whereas members of the public could buy the books from bookshops at 7s. 6d. or 5s., members paid a mere 2s. 6d. for their choices, each of which came in the celebrated orange limp binding. Advertisements for the Club made their first appearance in the spring of 1936; Gollancz had estimated that, for it to be commercially viable, he needed 2,500 members, but by May some 9,000 had enrolled, reaching 40,000 by the end of that year and 57,000 by 1939. Gollancz liked to boast that his chauffeur had been particularly effective as an enroller of new members, but elsewhere 5,000 or so volunteers helped to spread the word. Lectures, discussion groups and social evenings were held up and down the country, as were weekend and summer schools; trips to Russia were organized by the Club, along with Russian lessons; the first national rally of the LBC was held in the Albert Hall in February 1937, followed a year later by anti-appeasement rallies; working-class readers who found some of the choices fairly heavy going were offered ‘B’ membership, and were free to take alternative choices. Though never a Communist himself, unlike John Strachey, VG keenly supported their policy, dictated from Moscow, of a Popular Front in which all left-wing parties would be united against fascism; he fought hard not to alienate or offend the Party, and did battle with those, like Leonard Woolf in Barbarians at the Gates, who were critical of Stalin. ‘I should explain that I am a rather peculiar kind of publisher in that, on topics which I believe to be of vital importance, I am anxious to publish nothing with which I am myself not in agreement,’ he once declared. He declined to publish Homage to Catalonia, with its bitter denunciations of Communist practices in Spain, but although Orwell soon placed his book with Fredric Warburg, then making his name as the publisher of non-Communist left-wing writers, he sold a mere 1,500 copies through Secker & Warburg, whereas the LBC edition alone of The Road to Wigan Pier had chalked up sales of 42,000. Orwell went on to dismiss most of the Club’s output as ‘slick books of reportage, dishonest pamphlets in which propaganda is swallowed whole and then spewed up again, half-digested’, and in this he was not alone: the Labour Party, according to A. J. P. Taylor, disliked the LBC on the grounds that it ‘was diverting high-minded schoolteachers into reading Communist tracts when they ought to have been joining the Labour Party or working for it’, and stalwarts like Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton denounced it as a Communist front, a ‘dangerous type of vermin’ and an apologist for the Soviet Union. An attempt to set up a rival Social Democratic book club, with titles chosen by Tawney, Dalton and G. D. H. Cole, collapsed: a Low cartoon devoted to the Battle of the Book Clubs – Douglas Jerrold’s Right Book Club had now joined the fray – carried the caption ‘A fierce battle is now taking place on the reading front, the Blimp Book Club advancing strongly against the Left. Heavy casualties are reported including twenty-nine unconscious and General Gollancz’s spectacles blown off
Taylor may have dismissed the LBC as a harmless safety valve whereby members ‘worked off their rebelliousness by plodding through yet another orange-coloured volume’, but although Lane shared none of Gollancz’s fervid political convictions or aspirations, or his yearning to make his mark as a public figure, he must, however grudgingly, have been impressed by the LBC as a display of stylish and opportunistic publishing which made a good deal of money as well; and he, too, was eager to alert the public to what was going on in the world about them, while at the same time profiting from the chance to do so. But whereas Gollancz wanted the Left Book Club to ‘provide the indispensable basis of knowledge without which a really effective United Front of all men and women of good faith cannot be built’, Lane was less dogmatic about the uses to which that knowledge might be put. ‘People want a solid background to give some coherence to the newspapers’ scintillating confusion of day-to-day events,’ he told the Penrose Annual; later he recalled how ‘It was pretty obvious to many of us that we were drifting rapidly into a dangerous situation internationally, and some of us felt that the general public was perhaps not as well informed as to the shape of things to come as they might be.’
Inherent in the philosophy of Penguin Specials was the notion, spelled out in Wickham Steed’s Special on The Press, that the news as presented in newspapers was shaped and coloured by the interests of proprietors, advertisers and big business: the Specials could not only go into far greater detail and background, but – as G. T. Garratt, author of Mussolini’s Roman Empire, told the Bookseller – could reveal the ‘news behind the news’. The Penguin Specials were, on the whole, shorter and more accessible than the LBC choices, and whereas Gollancz’s books were sold in large numbers to the converted, Lane’s reached a far wider and less ideologically committed market. Both series were aimed, above all, at the young, radicalized middle classes, and Specials were often on sale at Book Club meetings. Edward Young, responsible for designing the red and black typographical jackets of the Specials, each different from the other, not only found the job a pleasant change from the standard Penguin and Pelican jackets, but happily admitted his debt to Stanley Morison’s forceful lettering on Gollancz’s titles.
The first Penguin Special, published in November 1937, was an expanded reissue of Germany Puts the Clock Back by the American journalist Edgar Mowrer, first published by Ronald Boswell at The Bodley Head in 1932; over-optimistically, Mowrer dedicated Lane’s signed copy ‘To Allen Lane, who helped to prevent what should have been prevented’. Shortly after it was published, Lane had lunch with Gerald Barry of the News Chronicle, who urged him to get in touch with the French journalist Geneviève Tabouis about her book Blackmail or War, in which she warned of the drift to war and berated the British and the French for their failure to stand up to Hitler. Although, to Dick’s distress, Madame Tabouis turned out to be a teetotal vegetarian, Lane flew to Paris for lunch with his new author; her book was translated and published within two weeks of its delivery to Penguin, and over 200,000 copies were sold, so setting a pattern whereby Specials were printed and published at speed, and often went on to sell a quarter of a million copies or more. Cassandra’ wrote about her at length in the Mirror; other reviewers included ‘Frank Pitcairn’ in the Daily Worker, and a curious character called A. S. B. Glover, later to loom large in the Penguin story.
Later that year, at the time of the Munich crisis, Shiela Grant Duff’s Europe and the Czechs was published at still greater speed, appearing in the shops within a week of the typescript being delivered by the author. Edward Young worked on the typescript with her in trains, buses, and a dentist’s waiting-room, and remembered her as ‘a tremendous fire-eater’; she told him he ought to be doing his bit in Czechoslovakia, and he ‘felt awfully wet just being here publishing books’. As publication neared, the residents of Harmondsworth saw lights in the Penguin warehouse on a Sunday evening: suspecting burglars, they summoned the police, who rushed to the scene of the crime, only to find staff packing 50,000 copies for delivery first thing on Monday morning. Its author returned from Prague to be greeted with posters in Victoria Station announcing the Munich Agreement: her book had been overtaken by events, but ‘with bitter irony it became a bestseller now that the cause it championed was lost’.
‘Are these Penguin Specials any good?’ Bernard Shaw asked Lane: he had written ‘a lot of stuff knocking adult suffrage into a cocked hat’, and was torn between publishing ‘a Constable book which no one will buy at Constable prices, and a Penguin book’. His book never materialized, though Dick was soon involved in a long and whimsical correspondence about the apparent impossibility of keeping both volumes of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide in print at once, given the maddening tendency of Volume I to sell more briskly than Volume II. Shaw or no Shaw, the list of Specials steadily expanded. Norman Angell advocated an armed League of Nations in The Great Illusion; Stefan Lorant drew on his own experiences of Nazi Germany in I Was Hitler’s Prisoner, and published an extract in Picture Post; Louis Golding discussed The Jewish Problem; Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge reported on Britain by Mass Observation; Edgar Mowrer moved on to Mowrer in China; Shiela Grant Duff resurfaced as a contributor to E. O. Lorimer’s What Hitler Wants, G. T. George reinforced her original warnings in They Betrayed Czechoslovakia, and The Air Defence of Britain provoked a flurry of leading articles and a thunderous denunciation of governmental apathy by ‘Cassandra’, who insisted that ‘Someone Has Got To Clean Up The Mess We Are In… Or Fifty Million People Will Want To Know The Reason Why’. But whereas Left Book Club contributors were expected to toe the line, Penguin Special authors were free to express divergent and even heretical views. C. E. M. Joad, the popular philosopher whose career came to ruin after he had been discovered travelling on the Oxford to London train minus a ticket, promoted the pacifist cause in Why War? The Marquess of Londonderry, a former Air Minister who thought Hitler a ‘kindly man with a receding chin and an impressive face’ and a peace-loving character who ‘dreads war’, set out his views in Ourselves and Germany, the cover copy of which announced that his book ‘represents a point of view which is in many respects opposed to that expressed in most of the previous Specials… We publish it because it is the clearest exposition so far of the policy of rapprochement with Nazi Germany and a plea for a more sympathetic understanding of Herr Hitler’s point of view.’ It was serialized in the Evening Standard, and the author made sure that complimentary copies were sent to Hitler, Goering, Ribbentrop, von Papen, and his cousin Winston Churchill, who thoroughly disapproved of his views.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, D. N. Pritt, a genial Pickwickian barrister, unrepentant fellow-traveller and far-Left Labour MP who later became a neighbour of Lane’s in the Berkshire countryside, got in touch after dictating 3,000 words on what he regarded as the unfair anti-Soviet hysteria prompted by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939. Lane suggested he should convert his essay into something more substantial. Pritt (or so he later claimed) produced the extra words within a day: anticipating large sales of Light on Moscow, Lane urged him to alter the proofs in response to the changing political situation, telling him not to worry about the costs and to ‘tear it up if you like!’ Lane, Pritt recalled, ‘always seemed to be bubbling when I saw him’: understandably, perhaps, since Light on Moscow sold 12,000 a week after its appearance in November 1939, and with its successor achieved sales of over 250,000. Published during the Russo-Finnish War, Must the War Spread? exposed an alleged conspiracy on the part of the capitalist West to make common front with the Nazis against the Soviet Union; it gave the Labour Party a longed-for opportunity to expel the pestilential Pritt, though he clung on as the MP for Hammersmith North. After being told that it was ‘seditious’, Lane reneged on the contract to publish Pritt’s Choose Your Future, which vent on to sell 15,000 for Lawrence & Wishart, the Communist publishers: but although Pritt referred the matter to arbitration (and von), he still referred to Lane as a ‘superb publisher’. Lane was, he recalled in later years, ‘an old-fashioned liberal’ at heart: ‘I never thought of him as a socialist: I just thought he had the generous mind which would lead a man halfway to socialism. If you are a Welshman, you are either a fool or in favour of the underdog…’
Thirty-five Specials were published between November 1937 and the outbreak of war, including two ‘topical’ novels, Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm. Lane actively commissioned titles, and suggested to Basil Liddell Hart, without success, that he should write a book on Blitzkrieg. Chalmers-Mitchell, abandoning his scientific brief, put him in touch with the ‘Red’ Duchess of Atholl for a book on the Spanish Civil War. A passionate partisan of the Republican cause, the Duchess aroused the wrath of the Catholic Press. ‘Have you noticed the titles of the first three Penguin Specials?’ asked the Catholic Herald’s reviewer of Mussolini’s Roman Empire. ‘I don’t say the Penguin owners are responsible but someone must have been pushing hard to achieve this propagandist coup. I am told that the real reason why these books are left is that the publishers consider only leftish books can sell in sufficient quantity to justify the venture.’ The Tablet thought little of the Duchess’s book – ‘To believe all evil of the Nationalists and to make every excuse for the Republicans may be forgivable in an ardent partisan, especially in times of war, but persons who write and feel like that should not degrade the high name of historian’ – and George Orwell, drawing on his own experiences of Communist methods in Republican Spain, was equally unimpressed. The Duchess’s book, he declared, was a straightforward apologia for the Communists, and had nothing new to say, but was an interesting phenomenon in itself. ‘Anti-fascists in high life’ – people like the Duchess, in other words – were ‘simply part of the national war preparation’:
The people who read the New Statesman dream of war with Germany, but they also think it necessary to, laugh at Colonel Blimp. However, when the war begins they will be forming fours on the barrack square under Colonel Blimp’s boiled blue eye. That, I think, is the real function of books like this of the Duchess of Atholl’s and Mr G. T. Garratt’s Mussolini’s Roman Empire, and the prophetic utterances of Madame Tabouis and various others of the same kind. These people are forming – not consciously, of course – the link between Left and Right which is absolutely necessary for the purpose of war.
Towards the end of his life, Lane looked back on the Specials as ‘perhaps the most interesting things we did’, but not all his friends shared his enthusiasm. Referring to rumours that Lane was thinking of starting a journal devoted to current affairs, Ethel Mannin told him that ‘there is some feeling current about the fact that your proposed magazine is going to be edited by a Communist, John Lehmann, and be generally in the hands of Communists. If this is indeed a fact, I do think it is a pity.’ Lehmann was indeed sympathetic to the Left, but Mannin and her informants seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Undaunted, she resumed the attack a few days later. ‘Your name is associated with the Communist Party for very obvious reasons,’ she wrote in August 1938. ‘It was John Lehmann who edited New Writing, and Krishna Menon who edited (or was anyhow associated with) the series of non-fiction books done by The Bodley Head – the Twentieth Century Library. Both are Communists.’ To make matters worse, Penguin had published Ralph Bates’s book about the Spanish Civil War, Lean Men, as well as polemics by the notorious Professor Laski. ‘If a Communist edits your proposed paper, whether you like it or not you’ll be lined up with Gollancz as far as publishing is concerned,’ she warned her old friend. ‘If you did something by George Orwell it would balance the Communist stuff. I wish you could do his Homage to Catalonia, but I fear it’s too newly out; but there are his novels, only I don’t suppose Gollancz would release them.’ In due course Penguin would publish all Orwell’s major works, but in the meantime Lane was irritated by Ethel Mannin’s charges. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll supply any evidence except the Penguin list against such fool accusations,’ he told her, in a rare display of temper. She promptly climbed down – ‘I shall firmly contradict any party labels attaching to Penguin, and intend to track down this particular one to its source’ – but the damage had been done: Lane had published three of her novels in Penguin, but only one more was to follow, and they were never as close thereafter.
Rather less contentious was a short-lived series of Pelican Specials, launched in June 1938 to ‘deal with matters of non-political significance, particularly the arts and sciences’; as Lane himself put it in an article entitled ‘Books for the Million’ in the Left Review, ‘In the books on Science and Art you will find no abstruse technical treatises or highbrow art criticism. We believe in treating art as a human activity, in historical and social perspective.’ Lane took Arnold Haskell, formerly of Heinemann, out to dinner, and suggested he should write Ballet for the series: ‘I never discovered if Allen read the many books he sponsored or whether his success came from an immense flair and an idealistic outlook, which he certainly possessed,’ Haskell wrote in his memoirs. Modern German Art, written by the German art critic O. Bihalji-Merin under the pseudonym of Peter Thoene, was published to coincide with an exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, organized by Herbert Read in response to the Nazis’ exhibition of ‘degenerate’ art in Munich. Lane asked John Betjeman to write a book on English churches: it was never delivered, but may well have resurfaced some years later in the two-volume Collins Pocket Guide to English Churches. J. G. Crowther, the scientific correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, was asked to advise on scientific books; adept as ever at knowing whom to approach for expert advice, Lane consulted James Fisher, author of the Pelican on Watching Birds, about the possibility of his advising on natural history books, and J. M. Richards, who had succeeded John Betjeman as assistant editor of the Architectural Review, for suggestions about architecture. Fisher went on to edit Collins’s famous New Naturalist series with Julian Huxley, but although Richards’s part-time career as an editorial adviser was cut short by the war, he wrote, at Lane’s suggestion, The Modern Movement in Architecture for Pelican. When Lane asked him who would be the best person to write a history of European architecture, he promptly suggested a colleague on the ‘Archie Rev’, so effecting an introduction to Nikolaus Pevsner, later to become the best-known of all Lane’s ‘outside’ or advisory editors. Richards later recalled that Lane’s ‘flair and judgement were remarkable considering that when one met him his conversation did not even seem to be intelligent. His manner was detached and brisk. He listened more than he talked and seemed to arrive at decisions by a process different from other people’s.’
Until he left Penguin to join Alan Bott’s Reprint Society, Edward Young combined editorial labours with designing jackets and press advertisements: he enjoyed a jocular relationship with Anthony Bertram, the author of a Pelican Special on Design, reporting that his secretary was ‘violently hiccupping after the most fearful binge last night’ before adding that ‘It’s a good thing the bosses manage to keep sober these days.’ Both young men had their serious sides: Bertram confessed, apropos his book, that ‘behind all this business of taps and teapots and where to put the electric light there lies a very big idea – the idea of civilized man planning and making a civilized life’, an attitude which reflected the ethos of Penguin Books and of contemporary designers and architects like Maxwell Fry, Ralph Tubbs and Ernö Goldfinger, all of whom shared a belief that good design enhanced spiritual as well as material life; Ruari McLean was well aware that, charming as both Young and Lane invariably were, ‘iron determination was hidden under a thick layer of velvet’.
One side effect of the Penguin Specials was to bring Lane into contact with the austere figure of Kurt Enoch, the co-founder of Albatross Books. Now based in Paris, Enoch oversaw the distribution of Albatross Books throughout Europe outside Germany, as well as distributing works published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press – the precursor of the post-war Olympia Press, run by Kahane’s son Maurice Girodias, which was effectively put out of business in the 1960s after Penguin’s publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover led to a falling off of prosecutions under the Obscene Publications Act. Enoch and John Holroyd-Reece had gone their separate ways in 1938; Holroyd-Reece, who took a tearful farewell of his old partner, had been dividing his time between his house in Lincoln’s Inn and 1 luxurious flat-cum-office on the Île de la Cité, and the punctilious Enoch had found his approach to publishing finances lax and wildly optimistic. Early that year, Holroyd-Reece and Lane defended paperbacks at a dinner held by the Double Crown Club, the members of which were publishers, printers, typographers and artists. Ian Parsons of Chatto and the bibliophile John Carter read papers on Cheap Reprints’ to a gathering that included Geoffrey Keynes, Noel Carrington, Bill Williams, Jock Murray, Reynolds Stone and Barnett Freedman. Most of the diners were too busy inspecting the samples that were passed round the tables to pay much attention to the proceedings, but after the main speeches Harold Raymond ventilated his familiar views on the matter: according to the minutes of Holbrook Jackson, an authority on printing, typography and the fin de siècle, Lane made a ‘spirited rejoinder’ – ‘Cocky little sparrow, that chap,’ Noël Carrington’s neighbour commented afterwards – while Holroyd-Reece’s ‘acute sense of values contributed a note to the discussion which was cynically overwhelming’. ‘With the greatest skill and charm you blunted the attack against yourself by claiming that it was all my fault since your brilliantly successful efforts were derived from the instigation and impetus of the Albatross,’ Holroyd-Reece told Lane many years later; in the meantime he faded from the scene, briefly resurfacing shortly after the war, when he was rumoured to have landed in Kent in a light aircraft without the requisite authorization.
Enoch replaced Holroyd-Reece as his London representative with the young Charles Pick, who had started out as Gollancz’s London rep, was now working for the fledgling firm of Michael Joseph, and – with Joseph’s permission – was happy to boost his earnings by acting for Continenta, Enoch’s distribution firm. Pick had come to Lane’s attention after he had imported a line of French paperback classics, selling them on at 6d. each, and together they made several trips to Paris to see Kurt Enoch in his offices in the Place Vendôme and discuss the possibility of reissuing French and even German translations of Penguin Specials under the imprint of Penguin Paris: Lane agreed to put up £5,000, and André Maurois was prepared to lend his name to the enterprise. The outbreak of war prevented such schemes from coming to fruition, but Pick was impressed by Lane’s insistence on staying in cheap, bug-ridden fleapits in Paris – on one occasion he was so badly bitten that he finally agreed to move into Pick’s more salubrious quarters – and the way in which, when the train from Dieppe to Paris broke down, Lane wandered off into the surrounding fields while Pick and John Lane stayed dutifully on board, worrying that the train would drive off without him: it was, Pick concluded, ‘exactly the sort of mild Russian roulette that Allen played’. Enoch, for his part, paid a couple of visits to Harmondsworth, greatly relishing the huge English breakfasts served aboard the Hercules biplanes on the Paris to London morning flight.
Penguin Specials were not the only innovation of those frantic pre-war years. Penguin Parade, an occasional magazine carrying original stories, poems and essays, made its appearance in December 1937 under the editorship of Denys Kilham Roberts; although fourteen numbers were published between then and 1948, it never acquired either personality or purpose, and would soon be eclipsed by John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing. (A convivial barrister who divided his time between the office and the racecourse, Kilham Roberts was a hard taskmaster, according to Julian Maclaren-Ross, the great chronicler of Soho literary life. Penniless as ever, and working at the time as an ineffectual vacuum-cleaner salesman, Maclaren-Ross submitted a story to Penguin Parade not long before the outbreak of war. It was accepted, and he was offered a fee of £4. When he asked when he could expect to be paid, he was told that nothing would be paid on acceptance, nor was it clear when exactly the money would be forthcoming. Maclaren-Ross then tried to discover when the story would be published, in the hope that this might clarify matters, as a result of which his story was returned with a note regretting that he was not prepared to abide by the magazine’s rules of payment. Ruefully wondering how Kilham Roberts reconciled his behaviour with his other role as Secretary of the Society of Authors, Maclaren-Ross wrote that ‘I was back where I started with no story published, and Denys Kilham Roberts has since been awarded the OBE.’ Maclaren-Ross is not the most reliable of witnesses, but, as ever, his story provides a colourful insight into the travails of the literary life, the bedrock on which all publishing ultimately rests.) Still more unsuccessful was a short-lived list of paperback Illustrated Classics, designed to undercut such long-established lists as Everyman’s and the World’s Classics. Its editor, Robert Gibbings, was a jovial, red-bearded, Chestertonian Irishman of prodigious size and girth who like to set type in the nude; a celebrated wood-engraver, he had run the Golden Cockerel Press from 1924 to 1934, publishing exquisite limited editions illustrated by Eric Gill, David Jones and Paul Nash. The Penguin series was launched with a party in Talbot Square in May 1938; Gwen Raverat had provided the woodcuts for an edition of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, while Gibbings himself had provided those for Melville’s Typee. ‘I must say, though I says it myself, these first ten volumes seem to me ruddy fine, and I hope they create a revolution. Young’s arrangement of the covers is masterly,’ Gibbings told his publisher; but the war put paid to the series, which never got beyond the initial ten.
The Illustrated Classics may have been a doomed venture, but lane’s last pre-war innovation, King Penguins, are remembered with huge affection, and hoarded by those lucky enough to own them; yet they were entirely different from anything that had hitherto appeared in Penguin in that they were mostly hardback originals, aimed at the collector or the casual buyer in search of an elegant and entertaining gift, and devoid of any educational pretence. They were modelled, unashamedly, on the work of German publishers. In 1912 the firm of Insel Verlag had started a line of small-format hardbacks, and in due course the list ran to nearly 1,200 titles. Full colour illustrations were introduced in 1933; the books were published at the equivalent of 9d. each, in print-runs of between 50,000 and 100,000, and were given over to a wide variety of subjects, from birds and wild flowers to minerals and folklore. The series soon found admirers and potential imitators on this side of the English Channel. In 1935 Ian Parsons approached Lane about the possibility of his collaborating with Chatto on an English equivalent, but although Edward Bawden produced some sample illustrations, nothing came of it; two years later Chatto started the small-format Zodiac Books, but without the illustrations or colour work that distinguished the Insel Verlag exemplars.
That year two German refugees, Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath, founded Adprint, a prototype ‘book packager’ designing, editing and producing illustrated books for publishers who lacked the time or the expertise to undertake the work themselves. Adprint is best remembered for producing the wartime ‘Britain in Pictures’ series for Collins, and Neurath would, in due course, found Thames & Hudson with his wife Eva. In the meantime Foges suggested to Lane that Penguin might be interested in an Insel-style edition of Redouté’s famous roses. Lane was taken with the idea of a series; his ideal price would be a shilling, necessitating a print-run of 25,000 copies. Elizabeth Senior, from the staff of the British Museum, was appointed series editor, and there was keen debate about where the proposed series should be printed. Adprint favoured a firm in the Sudetenland, hardly the most suitable venue in 1938; Edward Young and Lane arranged to take the boat train to Holland to visit ‘old man van Leer’ from a firm of Dutch printers, but ‘we went to some party and got rather tight and missed the train’, so they had to take the plane instead, and the hungover Young was impressed by the efficient way in which Lane, equally reduced, got on to Croydon airport and rearranged their trip. With war imminent, British printers were finally given the work, and the first two King Penguins, A Book of Roses and British Birds on Lake, River and Stream, were published in November 1939. After producing four titles in the series, Adprint were given their marching orders; their standards of production were not thought high enough, and Nikolaus Pevsner, who had been contracted to produce a book on illuminated manuscripts, told Elizabeth Senior that, given the poor quality of the colour work, he wanted to pull out. After Elizabeth Senior’s death in an air-raid, Lane asked Pevsner if he would edit the series: Pevsner told him he would only do so on the condition that he had a printer as co-editor, so R. B. Fishenden, the editor of the Penrose Annual and an authority on colour printing, was put in charge of their production; and the art historian E. H. Gombrich wrote Caricature, the first ‘in-house’ King Penguin. Seventy-six King Penguins were published between 1939 and 1959, when the series was discontinued; print-runs hovered around the 20,000 mark, though Gwen White’s Book of Toys eventually sold 55,000 copies. Including reprints like Ackermann’s views of Oxford and Cambridge and cartoons by Max Beerbohm as well as original work by modern artists like Ronald Searle, Edward Bawden and Lynton Lamb, the King Penguins are, perhaps, the most loved of all the birds in Lane’s aviary; and, like the Christmas books which he occasionally produced for his friends, they enabled him to indulge his passion for the finely printed hardback.
They were a luxury the firm could well afford: Penguin was becoming a national institution, so much so that Merle Oberon appeared in Alexander Korda’s The Divorce of Lady X reading a Penguin. Jonathan Cape may have complained about the non-payment of royalties, while Lane was alerted to the ‘complete disintegration of the old Bedford van’ used to ferry books around London, but in the autumn of 1938 he told the Evening Standard that he had sold over 17 million books in the previous three years, was shifting six tons of books a day, and never printed fewer than 50,000 copies of any new title. Penguin’s press advertising had always been livelier than most, and the firm’s high profile was reinforced by a front cover advertisement in the Bookseller featuring penguins gambolling at the Zoo: the photograph was taken by Howard Coster, commissioned by Lane to take the authors’ back cover portraits, and one of the most sought-after photographers of the day.
A celebratory dinner of ‘Penguin Elders’ was held at the Hind’s Head in Bray, conveniently coinciding with ‘Father Beales’s’ departure to the States ‘to preach the Gospel of the True Penguin Faith to the eternal confusion of Adolf Hitler, Benito Beelzebub, Krishna Moloch and other servants of the Devil’. Lane, Dick, Bill Williams, Frostie and Edward Young were served Krug 1928 and oysters on arrival; the giblet soup was washed down with sherry, and the lobster soufflé with Bâtard Montrachet; Château Lafite, Haut Brion and two other wines accompanied the subsequent courses. Such self-indulgence was well deserved. Lane’s conviviality was accompanied by an engaging lack of pomposity, made pleasingly apparent when a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Kenneth A. Mason, submitted An Anthology of Animal Poetry. ‘Let’s see the boy. This is a fine selection,’ Bill Williams reported. ‘I note that you are at school,’ Lane wrote to his newest and youngest author, ‘but I assume that you will have at least one free afternoon during the week, and if you could arrange to come down here to see me I would much appreciate it.’ An author of an older generation reported on the popularity of Penguins in the Baltic states. ‘It is obvious that the greatest difference in the knowledge of English during the last few years has been made by your sixpennies,’ Lane was informed by Holbrook Jackson, whose The Eighteen Nineties would shortly be reissued as a Pelican, and the students in Latvia and Estonia ‘carry a Penguin in their pockets as Americans used to carry a flask’.
‘I guarantee you twelve months from today we shall be at war with Germany,’ Lane warned Dick after Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich waving his scrap of paper and promising ‘peace in our time’, and despite the apparent inevitability of war, and the fact that his empire was expanding in so many different directions, Lane decided to take six months off, leaving the firm in the hands of Dick and John. The Governor of Aden had invited him to stay, and, never happy if alone for too long, Lane asked if he could bring his sister Nora with him; she had done some repping in the West Country and manned the Penguin stand at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Earl’s Court, and, quite apart from the pleasure of her company, she too deserved a break. They left in December 1938, after giving sixty friends a premature Christmas party which involved a showing of Night Mail at the GPO theatre in Soho Square, a tour of the Oxford Street lights and dinner in Talbot Square. From Aden he decided to travel on by P&O liner to Bombay; he cabled home for a further £500, and for the next three months he and Nora travelled all over India by train, visiting rajahs and politicians, enjoying a long talk with Nehru, and professing themselves shocked by the ‘pitiful conditions’ endured by the great mass of Indians. He had noticed that Pelicans sold far better than Penguins in India, and ‘the reason was not far to see’: the Indian student had to scrimp and save to secure an education, and ‘he was not inclined to waste his time on poor escapist literature, but wished to use his new knowledge to the full by reading such books as might make him fitted for a better job, a higher rank in the Civil Service’.
According to Morpurgo, Lane wrote long and eloquent letters home about what they had seen, and, for the only time in his life, contemplated writing a book of his own based on their travels; but the letters were lost, and, once back in England, the pressures of publishing life carried all before them. He had told Bernard Shaw that he was making the trip ‘in connection with a proposal that we should publish a number of titles in basic English for native populations’, but although nothing more was heard of this, he told A. C. Bouquet that his travels in India had made him realize that ‘one of the greatest needs was for a book on Comparative Religion’, and promptly commissioned him to write a Pelican on the subject. In Ceylon he contracted dengue fever; the Times of Ceylon devoted a full page to the distinguished visitor, noting how ‘this rather serious young man takes everything else but himself seriously’, how he was ‘about medium height, well built, with a slight suspicion of a stoop’, and how ‘his face might well have made him a fortune on the screen. It is finely chiselled, with a broad forehead, straight nose, firm mouth and very resolute chin. His eyes look at you directly all the time he is talking.’
Back in London, the lease on Talbot Square was about to expire, so Dick and John scoured the property pages for a house they could all share, ideally not too far from Harmondsworth. Eventually they decided on Silverbeck, a handsome William IV mansion, a couple of miles from the office and now at the end of one of the main runways at Heathrow airport. For £2,250 they acquired seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, a dining-room, a library-cum-billiards room, a cellar, a large greenhouse, a potting-shed, a garage, a mushroom house, nine acres of surrounding field, a half-mile frontage on the River Colne, and a large garden complete with walnut trees; in later years Lane added a rose garden with an ornamental pond complete with fountain and goldfish, hemmed in with a yew hedge interspersed with alcoves and seats: the perfect place to give a party. The river was deep enough to swim in, but before long a swimming-pool was installed, and an aviary replete with budgerigars. Desperate to get the place ready before the master returned, Dick and John supervised decorations and alterations, scraped and polished the floors, installed an Aga, fitted kitchen cupboards, hung the curtains, trimmed the hedges, dug the garden and mowed the lawn. Mr Knight, the butler from Talbot Square, found country life too quiet and quickly returned to London, but two maids, a gardener and an all-purpose boy were enlisted. All was finally in order when Lane and Nora returned from their travels with forty pieces of luggage, including rugs, ebony elephants and tea-chests crammed with tea. No sooner had they unpacked than the parties began. Since none of the brothers was married, their cousin Joan Collihole was summoned from Devon and, to her initial alarm, told to act as hostess to a stream of authors, printers, journalists and publishers; she was also put in charge of the chickens, preserving their eggs in isinglass, while her sister Evelyn, a more sporadic visitor, cleaned the Aga, already in a ‘shocking state’. The brothers, in the meantime, were photographed prancing about the grounds in their tight-hipped double-breasted suits, like Cary Grant in triplicate. All in all, it seemed a good place in which to await the outbreak of war.