Allen Lane was digging an air-raid shelter at Harmondsworth when, at 11.15 on the morning of 3 September, Neville Chamberlain informed the nation over the wireless that Britain was now at war with Germany. By all accounts, Lane and his fellow-diggers downed tools and headed off for a ruminative drink: in Dick’s version of events, they made for the Peggy Bedford, a local road house in which a good deal of Penguin business and pleasure would be conducted over the years; another veteran of the event feels sure they retired to Silverbeck, where Lane briskly set about mixing cocktails of a suitably incendiary strength (‘They were like dynamite – they used to go off halfway down and nearly blow your head off,’ the veteran recalls). Little work was done for the rest of that day, but, like the phoney war that followed the announcement of hostilities, the lull was misleading: over the next six years, with all the pre-war staff except Stan Olney and Eunice Frost away in the Forces at various times, and a wartime staff that never exceeded forty people, Penguin would publish over 600 titles, almost half of which originated within the firm, start up nineteen new series, and, thanks in part to the popularity of Penguin Books among some (but by no means all) of the armed forces, see the firm established as a national institution. The titles published would range from archaeology to crossword puzzles, from green-covered detective stories to ‘Planning, Design and Art Books’ devoted to the reconstruction of post-war Britain, from the six volumes of Penguin Hansard to such invaluable aids to the war effort as G. H. Goodchild’s Keeping Poultry and
Rabbits on Scraps and R. A. Saville-Sneath’s Aircraft Recognition, the bestselling title on the Penguin list until the arrival of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the new series would include Puffin Books, Penguin Handbooks, Penguin Poets, John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing and Penguin Modern Painters, as well as more modest and shorter-lived enterprises like Editions Penguin, published initially for the Free French forces, the larger-format, buff-coloured Editions Pingouin, the single volume issued by Edizioni di Pinguino, and a set of four prints produced by Feliks Topolski. The Topolski prints included a drawing of Churchill in bulldog mood, and a less flattering one of Hitler – the accompanying verses to which, by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, alias Timothy Shy, strike a fine note of comic defiance:
Dolf Hitler gif a barty,
Der RAF komm by,
Day in der pants his troops gekick
Und sock dem in der eye.
Der Fuehrer cry: ‘So! Hermann!
Du winnst anodder maddle!
Wohl auf, my bully Kavaliers,
Boots offgepull und paddle!’
To begin with life went on much as before. Three weeks after the declaration of war, Lane bustled into Harold Nicolson’s chambers in the Temple, commissioned him to write a 50,000-word Penguin Special on Why Britain is at War, took delivery of the typescript a fortnight later, published on 5 November, and sold 100,000 copies, quite a few of them in the United States; he went skiing in Chamonix, calling en route at the Allied Headquarters in Arras and inspecting the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line; he and Dick went to a wine-tasting in the City, thought it a pity to waste so much good wine by spitting it out, swigged four or five bottles between them and somehow staggered back to Silverbeck, where Dick made incomprehensible phone calls while Lane slept in the car outside. With petrol rationing imminent, the brothers bought themselves bikes, and pedalled to work each day. ‘There is really an astonishing lack of interest in the whole affair, and except for the fact that there are more people about in uniform, and that there are occasional slight hitches in getting through supplies, there is very little to denote that there is really a war on,’ he told Elsa Lanchester, who was now living in the States.
Lane was in his late thirties when the war broke out, at the upper limit of those eligible for the Forces, and as the head of Penguin Books he belonged to a ‘reserved’ profession, more valuable for his non-military contribution to the war effort than for his martial prowess; and it was agreed that while his two younger brothers would do their bit in the Navy, he would be better employed in keeping the family firm afloat. According to Dick, he started the war as a captain in the Territorial Army, and remained as such for the duration, albeit in an honorific capacity. He also served as a corporal in the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard, doing guard duty in the Harmondsworth area and taking part in Sunday manoeuvres: he was soon bored by the proceedings, and happily allowed his platoon to be captured after learning that the ‘enemy’ was based in a nearby pub. His biographer, Jack Morpurgo, who was proud of his own war record, liked to think that Lane felt guilty and embarrassed at not having fought in the war, and relished his discomfiture. ‘Only much later,’ he wrote of Lane, ‘when the war was already won, did he so much as hint that he felt in any way deprived of being just too young for active service in the First War and too important to join in the more obviously military activities of the Second; and even then such unease as there was in his conscience he revealed only by sulky silences when in the company of old soldiers and forced to listen to their reminiscences.’ Morpurgo had his own agenda, but others have suggested that Lane’s refusal, in the early 1950s, to compete with publishers like Billy Collins for bestselling wartime memoirs like The Wooden Horse, The White Rabbit and The Colditz Story reflected a sense of inadequacy or guilt. None of this quite rings true. Good publishers, like Lane, know where their strengths and weaknesses lie: he had a very strong sense of what a Penguin book should be, and since he would rather step aside than publish books which might in any way dilute or corrupt the image of his firm, it seems far more likely that he felt, instinctively, that however well war books might do for Collins, Hodder or Pan, they were not right for the Penguin list. But he was also a sentimental man, and when the time came to choose the thousandth Penguin, in 1954, he bought the rights from Rupert Hart-Davis to one of the finest of all war memoirs, his former colleague Edward Young’s One of Our Submarines. (The first RNVR officer to command an operational submarine during the war, Young was awarded the DSO and the DSC, and was once described as ‘one of our greatest submarine captains’.) Nor was Lane averse to action at the time of Dunkirk. Bob Maynard, who had replaced Young as production manager without knowing the first thing about printing, paper or design, remembered how Lane stuck his head round his office door, told him that he had heard on the radio that boats were assembling on the South Coast to take part in the evacuation of British troops, and asked if he would be willing to help out: Maynard was happy to go along, but the Penguin, now tied up at Bucklers Hard on the Solent, was in no fit condition, and nothing ever came of the idea.
Dick and John had both been RNVR reserve officers before the war, and shortly after Dunkirk they received their call-up papers and joined the training ship King Alfred. In due course Bob Maynard also joined the Navy. Lane took him out for a farewell drink, plied him with a vast Tom Collins, followed by several more, and promised to keep his job open and his salary paid while he was away. Maynard was not the only old hand to benefit from Lane’s generosity. Members of staff away on active service received Christmas cards and ‘comfort parcels’ including the latest Penguins; one serving in North Africa was disappointed to receive Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps and Social Life in the Insect World, and a covering note in which Stan Olney apologized for problems with the printers.
Problems with printers became endemic during the war, not least because they lost many skilled men to the Forces, found it hard to replace machinery damaged or destroyed in air-raids, and could find their services being requisitioned by the Government at short notice; but paper shortages were the real nightmare, made worse when the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940 cut Britain off from Sweden and Finland, its traditional suppliers of newsprint, while the fall of France made it hard to acquire esparto grass. Paper rationing was introduced in March 1940, and the annual quota allowed each publisher was set as a percentage of the paper used by that firm between August 1938 and August 1939: it started at 60 per cent, was reduced to 37.5 per cent in 1942, went up to 42.5 per cent in 1944, and remained in force until 1951. Most publishers complained, bitterly, that 1938–9 had been an exceptionally lean year, and that 1937 should have been chosen instead; Lane, on the other hand, had enjoyed a phenomenal success with Penguin Specials during that time, selling 9 million books in 1939, and, much to the irritation of his rivals, he not only qualified for a far heftier paper ration than most, but by supplying special editions to the armed forces and prisoners of war he was able to corner additional supplies as well. But paper shortages were a problem for even the best endowed publishers. Publishers’ requirements were not regarded as a top priority: in 1944, a representative year, HMSO was allocated 100,000 tons, newspapers (many of them reduced to a mere four pages) 250,000 tons, magazines and periodicals 50,000 tons, and the entire publishing industry a miserly 22,000 tons. Despite some vigorous lobbying led by Stanley Unwin, the House of Lords, debating the matter in October 1941, was unmoved by revelations that, with the Allied fortunes at their lowest ebb, 30 per cent of publishers’ turnover still consisted of exports, 20 million volumes had been lost in air-raids and needed to be replaced, and demand for books, and not least for technical and scientific books, had never been greater. That same year, however, the Ministry of Supply released another 250 tons, to be shared out among members of the Publishers’ Association on the understanding that it should be used in a responsible manner. Despite initial opposition from Victor Gollancz and Douglas Jerrold from Eyre & Spottiswoode – both of whom, despite their very different political affiliations, resented being told how they should use any extra paper – the Moberley Pool, as this annual allocation came to be known, remained in being until 1949.
Quality as well as quantity was also under siege. From January 1942 book publishers were expected to comply with the Book Production War Economy Agreement: a committee consisting of Billy Collins, Stanley Morison and Wren Howard laid down rules about type size, width of margins and quality of paper to be used, and those who refused to cooperate were threatened with a reduced paper quota. Books became shorter and slimmer as a result; although the price of a Penguin went up from 6d. to 9d. in 1942, Bob Maynard did away with dust-jackets, dutifully trimmed the margins and type sizes and eventually replaced sewn binding with hideous metal staples which rusted in damp weather, turning the grey, straw-based paper orange in the afflicted areas. ‘Since my return from America I have been very much perturbed by the very shabby condition of our publications on a number of bookstalls,’ Lane had noted in 1941, even before the Agreement came into force; for a publisher who placed so much emphasis on the production and design of his books, it must have been a dismal state of affairs. Reprinting Sir Isumbras at the Ford was proving a tricky business, he informed its author, D. K. Broster: paper rationing made it impossible to publish books of more than 256 pages, and he was reluctant to reduce the type size below 10-point. Most writers were resigned to the worst, but G. H. Goodchild was anxious to be of help: ‘If the question of paper presents any difficulty, I might be able to get some concession, as the Government attach great importance to Rabbit Breeding,’ he informed his publisher. Books were pulped and re-pulped, and in 1943 the Ministry of Supply mounted a salvage drive to collect and pulp unwanted books. Black market paper merchants did brisk business; Lane was tempted to buy from a paper spiv, but when Stan Olney and Bob Maynard pointed out that to do so would make him liable to prosecution, he asked Maynard to disengage, and hurried off on holiday.
Shortages of paper, blockages at binderies and shortages of machinery and manpower in the printing industry coincided with an unprecedented demand for books. Publishers could sell whatever they had in stock: as Stanley Unwin pointed out, conditions were both ideal and deeply frustrating, in that editorial fallibility, ‘the most expensive item’ in any publisher’s business, was no longer a problem, yet shortages of materials and printing capacity often made it impossible to print as many copies as they could sell, or to reprint strong-selling titles and keep backlists in print. Like other publishers, Penguin had to ration their customers, providing them with only a proportion of their orders. There were two reasons for this seemingly insatiable demand for books: the destruction of existing stock, and the conditions endured by soldiers and civilians alike. On 29 December 1940, Paternoster Row, the heart of the book trade since the sixteenth century, was flattened in a German bombing raid: a clear night helped the Luftwaffe to pinpoint the City, and a low water level in the Thames made it harder for firemen to fight the blaze. Simpkin Marshall lost 6 million books; Longmans, resident in Paternoster Row since 1724, went up in flames; Blackwood’s, Hodder, Collins, Nelson, Eyre & Spottiswoode and Hutchinson suffered heavy losses. ‘I went to look at Paternoster Row and that area,’ Raymond Postgate told his American publisher, Alfred Knopf. ‘It was much as you suppose, but the ruins were all orange… There was a bright blue sky, and the whole effect was exotic, as if a view of Algiers had been concealed behind the brick of Ludgate Circus.’ ‘The Germans have done what Constable’s have never succeeded in doing,’ observed a sardonic Bernard Shaw. ‘They have disposed of 86,701 sheets of my work in less than twenty-four hours.’
Nor was this the only disastrous day for the trade: Allen & Unwin later lost 1.4 million books from a single bomb, and much of Secker’s stock was destroyed when their printers in Plymouth were bombed during the Blitz. Libraries, both public and private, were destroyed, and desperately needed to replace their stock. Publishers were compelled to pay war insurance premiums, so adding to their overheads; to pay the new Excess Profits Tax – designed to thwart shady operators, as well as raising money for the Treasury – publishers sold off their backlists, which they then found it impossible to replace. By 1942, 580 out of 970 titles in Everyman’s Library were out of print, at a time when demand for the classics, and the supposedly ‘escapist’ Trollope in particular, had never been higher.
Although Christina Foyle noted, in May 1940, ‘a general falling-off of sales of political books’, the war witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of reading. Civilians had to endure the blackout, or fill in the long hours of fire-watching; soldiers, sailors and airmen carried a book to while away the boredom of interminable journeys by train or in troopships, and reading made life in camp or in barracks more bearable. Some read to escape the tedium and unpleasantness of war, some to improve their minds, some to learn skills or obtain qualifications for when they eventually returned to civilian life. Although the great majority preferred comic books or the comic-strip adventures of the semi-naked Jane in the Daily Mirror to What Happened in History or the latest Evelyn Waugh, there was an extraordinary appetite for culture in general, and books in particular. ‘The average intellectual level of the books published has markedly risen,’ George Orwell noted early in 1942, and
the average book which the ordinary man reads is a better book than it would have been three years ago. One phenomenon of the war has been the enormous sale of Penguin books, Pelican books and other cheap titles, most of which would have been regarded as impossibly highbrow a few years back. And this in turn reacts on the newspapers, making them more serious and less sensational than they were before. It probably reacts also on the radio, and will react in time on the cinema.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, Stanley Unwin had bemoaned ‘the literary indifference and morbid tastes of our public’, which he saw as ‘of danger not merely to our intellectual but to our national life in general’, while Sir Geoffrey Faber claimed that all publishers had noted a ‘progressive decline in the quantity and quality of worthwhile manuscripts’ submitted to them; five years later, Unwin observed how
Young people were buying books, and not merely books but good books. They wanted the best. The war created a new reading public. Many acquired the reading habit who had never turned to books before, and there is much comfort in the realization that they did so for the acquisition of knowledge and the enjoyment of good literature, and not merely as an escape from the war.
Unlike Orwell, Unwin remained reluctant to give Lane or Penguin any credit. Towards the end of the war, his nephew Philip asked him whether he had changed his mind about Penguin. ‘No, not a bit of it,’ the sage replied. The phenomenal sale of Penguins was ‘entirely due to war conditions – you’ll see, as soon as the war is over, the demand for paperbacks will decline’.
Lane would have agreed with Unwin that ‘the chief feature of wartime publishing has been the prolonged struggle in defence of books with one government department after another’; where they differed was in their readiness to act on behalf of the trade as a whole. Unwin was the quintessential committee man, a passionate team player who busied himself in the Publishers’ Association and other trade bodies, campaigning against paper rationing and other iniquities; Lane was, and remained, a loner and a maverick, happy to enjoy the benefits accrued from the labours of others, but hating bureaucracy and bumph. Lane’s more public-spirited colleagues resented his disdain for bodies like the PA, and his refusal to lend his weight to their activities. When, in 1940, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, decided that publishers were liable for Purchase Tax, and a campaign was mounted by A. P. Herbert, J. B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole, A. D. Peters, R. H. Tawney and others to keep the tax at bay, it was left to such stalwarts of the trade as Geoffrey Faber, David Roy, Wren Howard and Harold Macmillan to lead a successful delegation to 11 Downing Street. Lane enjoyed good relations with Mr Reed, the all-important Paper Controller, but he made his own rules and went his own way, and his fellow publishers looked on with envy and indignation.
He had close ties, too, with the Ministry of Information, not least through Kenneth Clark, the Controller of Home Publicity. Based in Senate House, and employing what Clark described as ‘an uneasy mixture of so-called intellectuals, ex-journalists and advertising men, ex-politicians and éminences grises’ which included Graham Greene, Peter Quennell and the literary agent A. D. Peters with a leavening of civil servants, the Ministry was simultaneously concerned with propaganda, both at home and abroad, and censorship of the written word: according to Orwell, who later blamed his problems in finding a publisher for Animal Farm on the Ministry’s devious machinations, it was up to publishers to show the Ministry worrisome or problematic typescripts or proofs, and ‘the Ministry of Information “suggests” that this or that is undesirable, or premature, or “would serve no good purpose”. And though there is no definite prohibition, no clear statement that this or that must not be printed, official policy is never flouted.’ Given the informal nature of the Ministry’s interventions, it is hard to know to what extent Penguin was affected, but even contributions to Penguin New Writing were submitted to Senate House if they were thought to contain ‘sensitive’ material. And the Ministry, for its part, liked, if possible, to get its message across through conventional publishing channels – including Oxford University Press, Penguin, Foyles and Picture Post – and was in a position to make extra paper available if need be.
Although Lane too preferred to work behind the scenes, and loathed making speeches or performing on a podium – ‘I have a distinct phobia about speaking,’ he had earlier confessed – he had a brief incarnation as a public figure in the early years of the war. He turned up in canteens and dockyards and barracks, debating the issues of the day with other well-known names; with C. Day Lewis and Cyril Connolly, he took part in a broadcast debate about publishing and literary life, chaired by Alistair Cooke (he could not sell enough books, he declared, and his ‘superior publishing friends’ said the same); the Daily Mail organized a lunch at the Savoy, early in 1940, at which Lane, the film director Alexander Korda, William Crawford the advertising agent, Sidney Bernstein and the managing director of Harrods discussed wartime propaganda (Lane suggested that the work could be done by a ‘small nucleus’ of people, and should involve ‘taking the people more into our confidence, showing them what we are aiming at, and the steps we must take to reach our goal’). Such excitements soon palled – Morpurgo, typically, suggests that Lane was neither cultured nor quick-witted enough to hold his own – but Penguin’s propaganda value was recognized by both sides: at some stage in the war the Germans produced an imitation Penguin Special, and Paul Fussell has claimed that, in 1942, rumours were spread about paper being set aside for a million Penguin French-English phrase books in the hope that this would mislead the Germans into thinking that the Allies were planning to land in mainland France rather than francophone North Africa.
‘I can appreciate more than ever how our books must be needed by the services, and I think we ought to concentrate more than ever on them,’ Lane wrote to Eunice Frost on his way to Montreal in August 1941. In terms of size and weight – if not always of brow level or subject matter – Penguins were perfect for troops on the move or at rest. Richard Hoggart remembered how ‘only a mean-minded sergeant would spot them and demand that they be removed. They became a signal: if the back trouser pocket bulged in that way that usually indicated a reader, a rare spirit in Initial Training Camp.’ Paul Fussell, on the other hand, located the ‘Penguin pocket’ above the left knee of the battledress, and claimed that it was also used to carry copies of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon; according to Morpurgo, Penguins also fitted perfectly into the pocket of the haversack in which gas masks were carried. From very early on in the war, friends and relatives sent Penguins to soldiers, sailors and airmen drumming their heels in barracks or transit camps. ‘If you were to advertise or let it be known that you would send off direct parcels of, say, not less than six Penguins, it would be a good thing, and I think popular,’ G. B. Harrison advised Lane in October 1939. ‘If one does want to send books to people at the Front it is a bore to order them from Smith’s and then subsequently pack them oneself.’ Lane replied that he was working on a scheme whereby books could be sent to individuals in cartons of five or ten; individual benefactors could place orders directly with Penguin, and the books would be delivered via the Services Central Book Depot.
In the summer of 1940 Lane received a letter from Ifor Evans, whose recently published A Short History of English Literature was selling briskly on the Pelican list. Evans had shown a copy of his book to Lord Macmillan, the Chairman of the philanthropic and culture-loving Pilgrim Trust, who had written to say that he had had discussions with Tom Jones, Lloyd George’s former Cabinet Secretary, about the possibility of providing copies of the book to the Forces, since ‘the men in our Services nowadays are drawn from all classes and there must be many among them who would find in your history just the sort of reading they want in their scant leisure’. ‘Here surely is an idea bigger than anything that affects my book,’ Evans told Lane. ‘I think you should consult William Emrys Williams who knows Tom Jones…’ An inveterate fixer and puller of strings, Tom Jones was, with Kenneth Clark and Bill Williams, a founder-member of the Pilgrim Trust.
Quite apart from his part-time work at Penguin, Williams was heavily involved in two other high-minded, acronymic projects, both of which reflected and helped to create a world in which Penguins and Pelicans could flourish: the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which became the Arts Council in 1945, under the Chairmanship of Lord Keynes; and the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), set up to teach members of the Forces why they were fighting the war, and what kind of Britain they were fighting for. Funded, in part, by the Pilgrim Trust, CEMA was set up in January 1940 to bring culture to the people. Many theatres and concert halls had closed at the outbreak of war, and the contents of the major art galleries had been taken to safe locations, far removed from the bombs; and yet, as publishers quickly realized, the demand for culture was greater than ever: ‘My feeling is that after the first shock of war there will be a great need for books along cultural lines,’ Lane told Ifor Evans. The best-remembered manifestation of this thirst for culture was Myra Hess’s piano recitals in the National Gallery, the Director of which, Kenneth Clark, had shipped all the Old Masters to safety caves in North Wales, and replaced them with contemporary works. ‘The public seemed to be quite suddenly transformed. The change was as pervasive as it was mysterious,’ John Rothenstein recalled, adding that ‘whatever the cause, the results were manifest everywhere, whether in an increased demand for the cheap editions of the classical authors, an increased desire to listen to the classical composers and to see fine painting’. ‘At no time in the pre-war years was there so large and varied a public for good literature, pictures, plays and music as there is at present. In fact the demand hugely exceeds the supply,’ the critic Eddie Sackville-West noted in 1943, while Mollie Panter-Downes, writing for the New Yorker, observed how ‘more and more Londoners have taken to reading poetry, listening to music, and going to art exhibitions, although there is less of all three in this shabby, weary capital’, and Philip Hope-Wallace noted the enthusiastic ‘Penguin-educated audience’ for such plays and concerts as were available: up to 8,000 people squeezed into the Albert Hall for the Proms after Malcolm Sargent took over in 1944. CEMA encouraged and catered to these needs, arranging concerts in factories and canteens, and encouraging amateur dramatics and local choral societies. Before long a split became apparent between the populists, including Bill Williams, who valued the efforts of amateurs as well as professionals, and those like Kenneth Clark and Maynard Keynes who had no time for Morris dancers or Northumbrian bagpipers, and insisted on the highest professional standards within conventional ‘artistic’ terms of reference. The perfectionists prevailed after Keynes replaced Lord Macmillan in 1942, and Williams nimbly changed sides; but in the meantime, as head of the Arts Panel, he was able to continue the good work he had begun in 1935 with his ‘Art for the People’ scheme, exhibiting the work of war artists in the depleted National Gallery and arranging for paintings by Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Barnett Freedman, Duncan Grant and others to be shown in workplaces and canteens.
Such activities bore fruit for Penguin, most obviously in Kenneth Clark’s editorship of the Penguin Modern Painters series, but Williams’s involvement with the Army Bureau of Current Affairs proved of equal value. No sooner had war broken out than various bodies were set up to deal with army education, which was thought to be good for morale, a useful antidote to boredom and inactivity, a safety valve, and a means of teaching skills that would be of use when the war was over. The Central Council for Army Education involved teachers and university lecturers in extra-mural classes administered by the Army Education Corps, and the Haining Report recommended that officers should give informal talks and lectures to the soldiers under their command. Gertrude Williams claimed to have had the idea for ABCA while she and her husband were on holiday in Wales; it came into being in 1941, with the full support of Sir Ronald Adam, the newly appointed and liberal-minded Adjutant-General, and Bill Williams as its Director. An unmartial figure, Williams refused to wear uniform or accept a rank – since his deputy was a brigadier, he should have been a major-general – and eschewed a staff car in favour of his battered old Hillman.
Within six months over half the units in the Army boasted ABCA discussion groups: compulsory sessions were held for one hour every week, with officers leading the discussions of prearranged topics. The ABCA handbook promoted the Cromwellian notion of the citizen-soldier who ‘must know what he fights for and love what he knows’; A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, suggested that ‘There had not been any army in England which discussed like this one since that famous Puritan army which produced the Putney Debates and laid the foundations of modern democracy.’ The Bureau published two regular bulletins, War and Current Affairs; exhibitions were mounted, plays put on, films shown, and a course in ‘citizenship’ provided. Although ABCA was viewed with grave suspicion by many Conservatives, who saw it as part of a left-wing conspiracy, even the diehard Tory Lord Croft acknowledged its Director to be ‘a very vital personality’, and ‘a man of ideas as well as of push and drive’.
Both ABCA and CEMA encouraged a receptive readership for Penguin Books; and Lane made use of Williams’s innumerable connections and intuitive understanding of the bureaucratic mind when following up Ifor Evans’s suggestion. He was already on good terms with Lt-Col. Jackson of the Services Central Book Depot, which had shipped 200,000 selected Penguins to the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force in February 1940; three months later the Postmaster-General authorized the free transmission of books and periodicals to the Forces, and – on the assumption that a Penguin reader might, in due course, become a Penguin buyer as well – many new Penguins carried a message urging its purchaser to drop the book off, once it had been read, at the local Post Office for posting on to the troops. In the first year of the war, half a million second-hand books, many of them Penguins, were donated to the Forces by the public through voluntary organizations like the Red Cross, but before long the Blitz and paper rationing had taken their toll: on the home front, and among the Forces, demand was far exceeding supply. Late in 1941, just before the paper ration was reduced yet again, Lane had a bright idea which, he hoped, would increase his paper ration. Penguin, and Penguin alone, would supply titles for what would be known, misleadingly, as the Forces Book Club, which would in turn supply units rather than individual servicemen. With Williams playing a key role in the negotiations between Penguin and the War Office, of which ABCA formed a part, Lane suggested to Colonel Jackson that he should produce ten titles a month for the Services Central Book Depot, supplying 75,000 copies of each title at 5d. each. The Paper Controller, Jackson reported, would be happy to cooperate provided all the extra paper provided was used solely for books for the Forces, and the scheme did not include any reprints.
News of the scheme soon leaked out, and was greeted with cries of outrage from Lane’s rival publishers, who felt that his already bloated paper allowance was being unfairly augmented, and that he had been given a monopoly in this particular market. Cape, Cassell, Chatto, Dent, Murray, Faber, Heinemann and Harrap set out to beat Lane at his own game by publishing Guild Books, a jointly owned paperback imprint publishing reprints from their backlists at 6d., 9d. or IS. Walter Harrap was its driving force, but although a trade paper reported that he ‘paces his office throwing off witty cracks like an electric train spitting sparks’, his dealings with the Army authorities were lethargic and condescending. ‘Sooner or later the Services will have to do something to make the publication of such books possible if they really feel the troops must have light reading,’ he told the Services Committee for the Welfare of the Forces in April 1942, three months before Colonel Jackson gave the go-ahead for the Forces Book Club. What Harrap failed to realize was that Bill Williams, wearing his Penguin trilby and his ABCA peaked cap, was reading all his correspondence and passing copies on, duly and derisorily annotated, to Allen Lane. ‘If I know anything of the PA [the Publishers’ Association], I think we may well be in for a protracted correspondence and at the end of it get nowhere,’ Lane noted, displaying his habitual contempt for trade bodies and the spirit of cooperation. He was right to ignore the competition: although Guild Books limped on into the post-war years, it was fatally weakened by having no paper quota, its members drawing on their own reserves for those titles they decided to reprint themselves in paperback rather than sub-leasing to Penguin.
Bill Williams, in the meantime, assured his military masters that ‘Allen Lane in this matter is mainly a philanthropist, he wants to give the Services priority in book supplies and he wants to mitigate for them the consequences of the impending book famine’; and although Lane initially wanted to keep Penguin’s name off books supplied to the Club for fear of annoying other publishers, it was thought best to come clean and print in the prelims ‘Published for HM Forces by Penguin Books Ltd’. The first batch of ten titles was published in October 1942. Although Lane took advantage of the Club edition to run-on copies for the trade, so reducing the overall unit cost, the scheme was a failure, with print-runs nearer to 10,000 a title than the anticipated 75,000. It proved popular with the chosen authors, who made a windfall of £75 each in what seemed a good cause, but its readers were less happy. Few soldiers, it seemed, were that keen to read Howards End or Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea. ‘Could you please arrange to increase a more liberal supply of fiction and adventure books, as we find that the majority of the books are of a heavy type, and seldom find any demand by the men of this unit,’ a unit commander informed the Central Book Depot. Lane was frustrated by the failure of his scheme, which was discontinued in September 1943, after 120 titles had been published in their own distinctive bindings. ‘It seemed to me to be obvious that we are not supplying the types of book which you feel are best suited for the Services,’ he told the Depot. ‘You mentioned three categories stressed by you – “warm” fiction, Westerns and crime – and as we have never published any books in the first two categories and not more than two titles a month out of a total of ten for the last category, I can readily understand how unsuitable as a whole our list must be.’
Lane’s other efforts to publish special editions for the Forces were more modest and, probably, more successful: an Egyptian printer was licensed to produce editions for troops serving in the Middle East, and the Prisoner of War Book Service capitalized on the ‘permit’ scheme whereby publishers were allowed to ‘export’ books to prisoners of war via the Red Cross. The contents of such books were vetted by the authorities to make sure that no references were made to such sensitive subjects as docks, airfields, navigation tables or tidal charts. In March 1943, The Prisoner of War, a magazine for the relatives of the incarcerated, announced a scheme whereby they could place orders with booksellers for Penguins to be despatched to individual prisoners. The books were specially produced and included works by Margery Allingham, L. A. G. Strong, Ngaio Marsh, Stella Gibbons and T. H. White, as well as The German Lebensraum and two books about escape attempts by the British in the First World War. According to the printer Elliott Viney, who served as the librarian in a German camp, all went well until that ‘fatal day in 1942’ when the German censor spotted an advertisement, drawn by Bob Maynard, for a short-lived Penguin Pen, in which a British Tommy, wielding an outsize fountain pen, was shown hoisting a runtish and terrified Hitler aloft by his trousers on the point of the nib. After that (or so it was said), all Penguins coming into the camp were confiscated. The ban was lifted shortly after the Normandy invasions, and some 25,000 pent-up Penguins flooded into the camp; a few were read, but the great majority were put to good use as fuel or lavatory paper.
Lane’s time was not solely given over to publishing. He had decided to become a farmer as well as a publisher, and after lunch one day at the Hind’s Head in Bray, he and John, then home on leave, went along to an auction in Reading. He liked to make out that he acquired Priory Farm after the auctioneer had mistaken John’s picking his nose for a bid; either way, the farm was acquired by the three brothers, on the understanding that, until the war was over, Allen would be responsible for its running. It was less than an hour’s drive from Silverbeck, and Lane set out to learn about farming with the same thoroughness and professionalism he had brought to his life as a publisher.
Farming was to become a source of great pleasure, but acquiring Priory Farm was not the only change to his domestic circumstances. One evening in the spring of 1941, Lane went to a party in Cambridge, given by Lance Beales. The LSE had moved to Cambridge for the duration, and every now and then a Pelican editorial meeting was held in the town; hence Lane’s presence at the party. Among the guests was a short, pretty, strong-featured girl named Lettice Orr. Clever, quick-witted and possessed of a caustic tongue, she was the eldest daughter of Sir Charles Orr, a Woolwich-trained soldier who, after serving in India, had entered the colonial service, working under Lugard in Nigeria and in Cyprus and Gibraltar before ending his career as Governor of the Bahamas. Lettice’s mother was a good deal younger than her husband, and when he was sent to the Bahamas she refused to go with him, partly because she disapproved of her children consorting with black people, and partly because she was having an affair with his aide-de-camp, so she stayed behind in England and taught her children at home. Lettice took a diploma in the social sciences at Bedford College, where she was taught by Gertrude Williams; she had trained as a psychiatric social worker, and was now working at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. She went to the party in the hope of meeting her old tutor’s husband, Bill Williams, but noticed instead a ‘short, powerful-looking man in country gentleman’s tweeds’, standing by himself and talking to no one. She went up to him and said, ‘You’re looking sad’; he told her that both his brothers were in the Navy, she persuaded him on to the dance floor, and, a week later, he invited her to stay at Silverbeck. After her return to Cambridge, Jean Osborne and Joan Collihole used to stand at the top of the stairs at Silverbeck, just outside Lane’s ‘huge bedroom’, and listen in to his two-hour telephone marathons with his new girlfriend. The net result was that Lettice and Lane got engaged, and were photographed for Tatler and the Sketch, a terrier posing at their feet. They were married on 28 June 1941, a contingent of cardboard Penguins forming a guard of honour outside the church; Joan Collihole returned to Devon, and Jean Osborne was ‘unceremoniously’ told to leave Silverbeck once Lettice was installed.
Their marriage was to prove an embattled affair, and although they were still together, just, when Lane died, they had spent much of the intervening time apart. Writing to Eunice Frost four years before his death, Lane admitted that his brothers’ joining the Navy, leaving him alone for the first time, ‘was the reason for my getting married. If the three of us had stayed together I very much doubt if I would ever have married.’ His sense of isolation was heightened when Nora got married and went to live in Newcastle. Her fiancé, Frank Bird, had been put out when Lane whisked his wife-to-be off to India for three months, and then insisted on sending her to America with John just as war broke out, checking up on the newly opened New York office; and as soon as they returned he made her Mrs Bird and carried her off to Northumberland, far removed from the clannish, possessive and overpowering Lanes. All three brothers were bachelors by nature, hating change, stuck in their ways and wanting things done their own way. Dick and John resented their elder brother getting married, and John in particular: he regarded Lettice as an interloper, and would burst into the newly-weds’ bedroom, talking Penguin business non-stop and paying her no attention whatsoever, and she disliked him heartily in return.
For all his good looks and urbane demeanour, Lane’s reputation as a ladies’ man was misleading, and the sexual side of their marriage may well have been blighted by an imbalance between the demands and expectations of the two partners. As a young man, Lane once confessed to Frostie, ‘somehow I got the idea that sex was wrong’. He had indulged in odd affairs before meeting Lettice, but ‘I remained a rather self-contained and aloof being, and although at the beginning Lettice and I had relations of a sort, they were never of the intensity which I now know they should be in a happy union.’ She was still involved with a Cambridge don when they met, and the affair continued even after her marriage; it had made Lane very unhappy, and he had thought of postponing the wedding for six months. Sad and familiar as their predicament was, it made for an inauspicious start.
Nor was life that easy on the domestic front. Though neurotically neat and tidy in his appearance, and a devil for detail in the office, Lane was disorderly and impulsive in his manner of living: he would roll up late (or not at all) for meetings, change his mind on a whim, fill Silverbeck with an ever-changing cast of people, and liked nothing better than to throw an impromptu party in the grounds. Throughout the war staff continued to work and even live at Silverbeck, particularly after Harmondsworth had been requisitioned by Lord Beaverbrook’s Ministry of Aircraft Production for the repair of fighter aircraft in 1941. ‘Every time a stack of books was moved you’d find the fuselage of a Hurricane or a Spitfire, all bullet holes,’ a veteran recalled: the warehouse and staff were moved to a building in West Drayton formerly occupied by the Rotary Photographic Company, a firm specializing in postcards of royalty, actresses and seaside resorts, but although editorial and production stayed put for a time, the noise was so unbearable that Bob Maynard, Frostie and Jean Osborne decamped to Silverbeck. June Pipe, who joined the firm in 1944 at the age of seventeen, used old Mrs Lane’s dressing-table as a desk, arranged for her employer’s shirts to be recollared and recuffed when required, and soon learnt to gauge his mood from the look in his eyes; Elizabeth Creak, another teenager who joined that year, remembered paying six shillings a week for communal lunches cooked by Lettice, who had never boiled an egg until she got married. Lane expected her to run his household efficiently and well, provide meals on time for as many people as might be around, bring up their children – Clare was born in April 1942, to be followed by Christine in 1944 and Anna in 1947 – and entertain the guests at their parties: but, clever and well-read as she was, he never asked her opinion on books, and she never attended meetings held at Silverbeck or set foot in Harmondsworth. Nor were his attempts at jocularity always benign. ‘I want you to meet Lettice Orr,’ he told Bob Maynard, when the two men were on fire-watching duty together. ‘The “W” is silent.’
Despite being called up, Dick and John kept in touch with Penguin affairs: Dick was given leave by the RNVR, who had no immediate call on his services, to visit Penguin’s New York office in May 1940, while John, writing from HMS Mollusc later that year, worried about the American office and suggested giving W. H. Smith a ‘solus’ discount. But the Navy brought the two brothers together in a world from which Allen himself was, for once, entirely excluded. On their last voyage together, their ship was torpedoed, and after the order to abandon ship had been given John, immaculate as ever, insisted on returning to their cabin and changing into his best suit. Back on dry land, they went down to visit their parents, where, after lunch washed down with ‘quite a few glasses of home-made wine’, they got out the deckchairs and sat under a chestnut tree. ‘After gazing idly at some magazines we both decided that a little shut-eye would be a very good thing,’ Dick remembered.
I woke first and looked at John, who was still peacefully sleeping. And I thought of all that we had just been through together. Then I remembered early childhood days, happy times at Coombe Dingle, his world tour when he wrote us such amusing letters, the day when he and I moved from Talbot Square to Silverbeck, the occasion when we were at King Alfred and father came to dinner with us and John took him off on a tour of nightclubs, the day we joined the ship together, ‘Lane Bros reporting for duty, Sir,’ the monumental week in Ireland when Nora joined us, and then back to our last voyage…
Later that year, in November 1942, Dick was on leave at Silverbeck when a telegram arrived to say that John was missing, and presumed dead: his ship, the Avenger, had been sunk off the coast of North Africa while taking part in the landing of Allied troops; only four out of some 800 men had survived. Quite how Lane received the news remains uncertain. According to one version of events, Lane’s father was the first to hear the news and rang Lettice, who then passed it on to her husband; according to another, Lane received the telegram, read it, folded it up, put it in his jacket pocket and then, without saying a word, went on talking to Bill Rapley, the London rep, about an order from Bumpus. John’s death had a devastating effect on his eldest brother. Agatha Christie thought Lane ‘loved John better than anyone in the world and when John was killed in the war Allen was inconsolable. For a time it seemed to change his character completely. He became in many ways unapproachable.’ According to Morpurgo, Lane forgot his recent animosity towards his youngest brother, and thereafter ‘encased himself in a spiritual armour which he hoped would keep him free from similarly generous relationships and from the consequent danger of suffering hurt’; for a time he took to ‘solitary drinking’, ate very little, and avoided looking at the baby Clare because she reminded him of John.
Lane’s reserve, his combination of affability with unapproachability, a sense that even those he loved most could get so close but no closer, was remarked upon by all who knew him – including, much as they loved him, his daughters – and John’s death accentuated this aspect of his character: as Lane himself once put it, ‘I have got a little barrier around myself that I find very difficult to let anybody inside. People confide in me and I enjoy it and try to help them if I can, but I find it very hard to discuss anything which brings people into a very close relationship with me.’ But he was not the only one to suffer from John’s death. Dick, dependable as ever, was granted a temporary shore posting to enable him to sort out his dead brother’s affairs, but his own survival was a permanent reminder of what had been lost. It was said that, in an unguarded moment, Lane blurted out that the wrong brother had been killed; and, however close they may have been in the past, he became increasingly irritated by Dick’s torpid and cautious approach to life. Eager as ever to keep things in the family, Lane made Nora a ‘temporary director’ of Penguin while on his way to the States in 1944: but John’s death marked the transition from youth to maturity, from the carefree, optimistic, uninhibited life of the pre-war years to the wary, more calculating wastes of early middle age. Nothing would ever be quite the same again.