‘London certainly seems to have caught a hell of a packet,’ John Lane wrote to his eldest brother in November 1940, at the height of the Blitz, ‘but I am hoping that there will be a silver lining to that cloud and that it will lead to a remodelled city – what a marvellous Pelican to publish on Armistice Day.’ He never lived to see VE Day, let alone the New Towns or the Green Belt or the Festival Hall, or any of those other innovations, all too often redolent of rusting concrete and windswept, litter-strewn public spaces, whereby the post-war Labour government sought to realize wartime dreams of a sunlit, brand-new, egalitarian England in which planners prevailed, poverty was abolished, and a happy, culture-loving citizenry marched confidently into the future: but he voiced sentiments which Penguin Books would both reflect and reinforce. Or, as Lane himself put it in his letter to Elsa Lanchester, written earlier that year, he would, where Penguin Specials were concerned, be switching the emphasis from international affairs to ‘discussing the possibility of a new world order when this mess is over’.
Although it would be absurd to claim that the entire nation, and not least its thinking classes, lurched to the left during the war – Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell were two obvious exceptions to the rule – people from very different political backgrounds were united in a belief that there should be a larger role for the state in the ordering of post-war Britain, and that society should be seen in ‘organic’ or ‘holistic’ terms; and such ideas, and their partial implementation once the war was over, would form the basis of the ‘consensus’ or ‘Butskellite’ politics that were shared by both the major political parties and prevail until their demolition at the hands of Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Thatcher. Those who subscribed to such collectivist notions came from across the political spectrum. Some, like T. S. Eliot, were Christians, placing their trust in an ordered, hierarchical society of duties and obligations; some, like R. A. Butler and Harold Macmillan, were what became known as ‘one-nation’ Tories, heirs to Disraeli, fiercely opposed to the harsh, uncaring views of Manchester Liberalism, eager to embrace those of Lords Keynes and Beveridge, and to distance the Conservative Party from images of the dole queue and the hunger march; some were statists, anxious for the state to intervene in every aspect of life, some libertarians, some Communists, some cranks, some – the great majority, perhaps – of no fixed views beyond a desire not to return to the ‘bad old days’, and a vague, benign belief that the war should be fought in a good cause on the home as well as the international front.
As always, war was a great leveller. German bombers made no distinction between rich and poor, and neither did conscription, evacuation or the ration book; servants vanished from the social scene; the air-raid and the air-raid shelter were, in A. J. P. Taylor’s words, ‘a powerful solvent of social antagonisms’. This was, it was said at the time, a ‘people’s war’, and although class distinctions remained firmly in place, there was a sense in which the country was united by sacrifice, and more open than ever before to egalitarian notions, irrespective of political party. As George Orwell declared in The Lion and the Unicorn, ‘Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with party labels. If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can say that the old distinction between Left and Right broke down when Picture Post was first published. What are the politics of Picture Post? Or of Cavalcade, or Priestley’s broadcasts, or the leading articles in the Evening Standard? None of the old classifications will fit them.’
Dunkirk, the fall of France, the replacing of the discredited Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill, and the participation of the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, in a Coalition government, all contributed to a new readiness among politicians to consider ideas that had hitherto been the preserve of radical journalists, idealistic writers and impractical academics. Conveniently forgetting their pre-war enthusiasm for pacifism and disarmament, left-wing politicians and theorists blamed military defeats on the ‘old gang’ associated with the ‘men of Munich’ and the Cliveden Set and, by implication, with all that was most benighted, selfish and socially undesirable in the old Conservative Party (and, indeed, the old social order). Harold Laski suggested that the price of Labour participation in a Coalition government should be a commitment to what came to be known as ‘reconstruction’, or the building of a ‘New Jerusalem’. In the days after Dunkirk, the Ministry of Information’s Home Morale Committee recommended a ‘statement on peace principles’, while the Ministry’s Director-General declared that ‘the opportunity should be taken of an all-party government to make some promises as to social reforms after the war’, and that ‘our aim should be to redress grievances and inequalities and create new opportunities’. Ever alert to the mood of the moment, Harold Nicolson, a National Labour MP, announced that ‘we should proclaim that we intend to make a better world at home in which the abuses of the past shall not be allowed to reappear. Unemployment, education, housing and the abolition of privilege should form the main planks of such a platform.’
Churchill himself was indifferent to, and occasionally irritated by, such subversive notions, but his eagerness not to be distracted from saving the country from invasion by Hitler, and then winning the war, left ample opportunities for those more concerned with life on the domestic front. In July 1940, shortly before the Battle of Britain, the War Cabinet instructed Duff Cooper, the then Minister of Information, to set up the War Aims Committee to ‘consider means of perpetuating the national unity achieved during the war through a social and economic structure designed to secure equality of opportunity and service among all classes of the community’. Touring the country that same year, J. B. Priestley found that although the war itself was inevitably the prime topic of conversation, the second ‘was always the New World after the war. What could we do to bring our economic and social system nearer to justice and security and decency? That was the great question.’ Before long ‘reconstruction’ was itself a ‘war aim’. According to Laski, ‘the way to victory lies in producing the conviction now among the masses that there are to be no more distressed areas, no more vast armies of unemployed, no more slums, no vast denials of genuine equality of educational opportunity’. And whereas many of his fellow-writers from the Thirties had abandoned the political struggle – Auden and Isherwood had famously decamped to America shortly before the outbreak of war, while Cyril Connolly, never the most political of men, was urging his colleagues in the pages of Horizon to ignore the war as far as they could, to cultivate their art and not allow their talents to be wasted or diluted by propaganda work for the BBC or the Ministry of Information – John Lehmann reflected the mood of the moment in his editorial for the March 1941 issue of Penguin New Writing. ‘A new consciousness is stirring, both among those who have joined the armed forces and those who are still left in so-called civilian life,’ he declared: ‘a consciousness that, not merely as a matter of self-preservation for the moment, but in order to equip ourselves for a far more strenuous future when the results will be far worse if we do not avoid the dismal, sleepwalking mistakes of the past, the old ways of life and the old slogans will have to be scrapped’.
Poets and novelists may have retired from the fray, exalting the private and the pastoral at the expense of politics, but journalists, academics, politicians and well-intentioned middle-class reformers busied themselves envisioning the New Jerusalem. The Press was increasingly sympathetic to notions of reconstruction, and to the Left in particular: so much so that a Tory MP, writing in 1944, lamented that conservatism had ‘allowed itself to be deprived of the intellectual leadership of the nation’ and noted how ‘if you spend the weekend with an educated man, the odds are that you will find that the New Statesman is the only weekly taken. Your host may affect to laugh at its politics; he may say he only takes it for its literary articles or its film criticism; but the point remains that he does take it, and that he and his like have been reading it and its predecessor since the last war.’ Writing the ‘London Letter’ for the Partisan Review three years earlier, George Orwell remarked on how newspapers ‘print articles which would have been considered hopelessly above their readers’ heads a couple of years ago’, and how ‘to get any straightforward expression of reactionary opinion… you now have to go to obscure weekly and monthly papers, mostly Catholic papers’. As evidence of the pervasive swing to the left, David Astor followed J. L. Garvin at the Observer, employing Orwell and Arthur Koestler as columnists, and displaying an unmillionaire-like sympathy for left-wing views; Michael Foot took over as editor of the Evening Standard; Robert Barrington Ward replaced Geoffrey Dawson at The Times, where the influence of the left-wing Cambridge historian E. H. Carr and Stanley Morison led one Tory MP to describe the paper as ‘the threepenny edition of the Daily Worker; most influential of all was the Daily Mirror, which increased its circulation from 1,750,000 in 1939 to 3,000,000 in 1946, championed the Beveridge Report, and – like J. B. Priestley’s ‘Postscripts’, his hugely successful and influential series of BBC broadcasts – claimed to articulate a sense of community and to speak up for the hitherto neglected ‘little man’.
Nor were book publishers inactive on the Left. The Left Book Club had been given a knock by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and had some explaining to do, but Gollancz soon bounced back with his yellow-jacketed Victory Books, referred to by some as ‘Yellow Perils’, which called for a Labour victory once the wartime coalition had been dissolved. Far and away the most successful of these was Guilty Men by ‘Cato’, alias Michael Foot, which savaged the ‘men of Munich’ and, despite W. H. Smith’s refusal to handle it, went on to sell 220,000 copies. Not to be outdone by his more left-wing rival, Fred Warburg started a list of Searchlight Books, edited by Orwell and Tosco Fyvel, designed to ‘criticize and kill what is rotten in Western civilization’ and discuss the ways in which Britain could be transmogrified into ‘an up-to-date socialist community that could inspire the world’. Published in 1941 and 1942 at two shillings each, the list included Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn and Cassandra’s The English at War.
The promoters of the ‘New Jerusalem’ were, almost invariably, middle-class intellectuals who had little experience of business or industry, and were, irrespective of cost or the ability to pay, far more concerned with spending money on housing and social services than with industrial renewal, reviving exports and rebuilding the infrastructure once the fighting was over: the country was hopelessly in debt, deprived of currency reserves and dependent on American Lend-Lease, yet according to a 1944 Treasury report ‘the time and energy and thought which we are all giving to the Brave New World is wildly disproportionate to what is being given to the Cruel Real World’, and, Correlli Barnett sardonically suggests, the country’s most influential and articulate spokesmen were concerned only with ‘a vision of a garden-city society filled with happy, healthy children, smiling mothers, bustling workers, serene elderly souls in a golden twilight of state pensions; all living in houses furnished in Gordon Russell’s simple good taste; and, having been equally well educated in a reformed educational system, all busy in cultural pursuits other than dog-racing or going to the pictures’. What is certainly true is that the same names recur again and again. Members of the pressure group or think-tank known as Political and Economic Planning (PEP) included Julian Huxley, Maxwell Fry and Tom Harrisson, as well as Maynard Keynes, the great advocate of the managed economy and the notion that capitalism should be improved rather than abolished, and Lord Beveridge, ‘the people’s William’, whose celebrated report, unveiled in 1942, heralded the Welfare State, advocating the funding, through a national insurance scheme, of a national health service and protection for all against the ravages of illness, unemployment and old age. The report sold 645,000 copies, was accepted grudgingly by Churchill and with huge enthusiasm by the Labour Party and the Tory left wing, and – like Butler’s 1944 Education Act, the establishment of a Ministry of Town and Country Planning, and the 1944 White Papers on the National Health Service, employment policy and national insurance – set the scene for the reforms of the post-war Labour government.
Early on in the war, such ideas were being ventilated, by a similar cast of characters, through the pages of Picture Post and the deliberations of the 1941 Committee. Kenneth Clark at the Ministry of Information persuaded Edward Hulton, the immensely rich and temporarily left-wing owner of Picture Post, to devote a special issue of the magazine to the reconstruction of post-war Britain. Julian Huxley was co-opted as joint editor with Tom Hopkinson, and the forty-page special issue, entitled ‘A Plan for Britain’ and published on 4 January 1941, carried pieces by Maxwell Fry on planning, Thomas Balogh on the state management of the economy, A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, on education, J. B. Priestley on culture and recreation and Huxley himself on ‘Health for All’. In his editorial, Hopkinson argued for a minimum wage, a planned economy and full employment, and insisted that their plan was ‘not something outside the war, or something after the war. It is an essential part of our war aims. It is, indeed, our most positive war aim. The new Britain is the country we are fighting for.’
Such views would have received a warm welcome at meetings of the 1941 Committee, held at Hulton’s house in Hill Street, off Berkeley Square. Chaired by Priestley, the Committee’s members included Victor Gollancz, David Astor, Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman, H. G. Wells, Gerald Barry of the News Chronicle, Ritchie Calder, A. D. Peters the literary agent, Tom Wintringham, Thomas Balogh, Douglas Jay, Tom Hopkinson, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, David Low the cartoonist, the left-wing MP Konni Zilliacus, Richard Titmuss and Sir Richard Acland. In May 1942 the Committee published a Nine-Point Declaration calling for free education for all, full employment and a degree of nationalization, after which it merged with Sir Richard Acland’s Forward March to form the Common Wealth Party. An earnest, bespectacled Devon landowner and former Liberal MP who believed in the common ownership of industry, urged the middle classes to abandon their privileges to create a classless society, and looked forward to the creation of a ‘new society’ and the ‘emergence of a new kind of man, with a new kind of mind, new values, a new outlook on life, and, perhaps most important of all, new motives’, Acland had founded Forward March in order to give the people what was good for them, on the understanding that it was ‘the right and duty of the progressive not merely to give people what they desire, but to teach them what they should desire’. Both Forward March and the Common Wealth Party were supported by teachers, solicitors, doctors and other members of the high-minded and well-meaning middle classes, Penguin-readers incarnate. Membership of the Common Wealth Party never exceeded 15,000, but for as long as the Labour Party was locked into the wartime coalition, it provided some kind of opposition, winning three by-elections in the process; it lost its raison d’être once the coalition was dissolved, and the Labour Party felt free to campaign on its own account, but in the meantime it helped to spread faith in the New Jerusalem among those whom Michael Frayn would later describe as life’s ‘herbivores’.
Allen Lane has, all this time, been notable for his absence, so much so that a reader might assume he had dropped out of the story, or that an inattentive typesetter had wandered into another book: yet Penguin Books and its creator were central to the development of the post-war consensus, not just through the books they published but because Penguin itself was coming to be seen as a benign monopoly in a country which had a more ‘concentrated’ or mixed economy than most by the end of the 1930s, with four railway companies replacing 130, and nationally owned corporations running the BBC and the airlines. Lane was never a political animal in the sense of belonging to a particular party, subscribing to an ideology or adhering to a consistent point of view, but he instinctively sided with the underdog and liked to annoy those in authority, and he was on good terms with people like Hulton, Kingsley Martin, Tom Hopkinson, Tom Wintringham, Gerald Barry and Tom Harrisson; as he told the historian Paul Addison, ‘We were anti-They We were against the privileged classes.’ His diary for 1942, for example, records attendance at several meetings of the Fabian Society, and one of the Socialist Propaganda Committee, but whereas radicals like Victor Gollancz were keen committee men, forever passing resolutions and writing letters and joining together to protest against this or that, Lane, with his hatred of committees and paperwork, left far fewer traces behind: in later life he was occasionally dragooned into signing a round robin – Gollancz persuaded him to lend his name to his campaign against capital punishment, and he signed a letter of support to The Times in support of George Weidenfeld’s decision to publish Nabokov’s Lolita – but this was not the kind of thing he relished. In public life as in publishing, he was a loner, and happy to keep it that way.
Invisibility and influence are perfectly compatible: Lane exercised influence through the books he published, so much so that the Daily Herald once suggested that he had done more than Shaw, Wells or Beveridge to ‘influence the tastes, the thoughts, the knowledge and perhaps even the character of the English’. The outbreak of war was followed by a flurry of Penguin Specials explaining why Britain was at war, but although foreign affairs occasionally intruded – K. S. Shelvankar’s The Problem of India, published in 1940, was described as a subversive work in the House of Commons by Duff Cooper, then the Minister of Information – most of those published thereafter dealt with life on the home front; and the kind of society they hoped to see in post-war Britain Sir Richard Acland’s Forward March appealed to Lane’s liking for outsiders and eccentrics, and his manifesto, Unser Kampf was published as a Penguin Special in 1940; it sold 150,000 copies, and gave Penguin as well as the House of Commons as a forwarding address for those eager to ventilate their views or learn more about the party. Another Special, People’s War, provided an additional pulpit for Forward March and its belief that the war should be fought for ‘fair play and food, freedom and homes’: its author, Tom Wintringham, was a Communist Party member who had commanded the British battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, and was now in charge of training the Home Guard in guerrilla warfare at Osterley Park, a project partly funded by Picture Post. In Where Do We Go from Here? a more conventional left-winger, Harold Laski, called for a ‘revolution in the spirit of man if we are to enter the Kingdom of Peace as our rightful inheritance’. Though not a religious man, Lane was happy to publish books by churchmen which invoked the New Jerusalem, and nine Penguin Specials of a religious nature were published between 1940 and 1944, all of them calling for the creation of a better society. Archbishop Temple’s Penguin Special on Christianity and the Social Order sold 140,000 copies, while James Parkes, the author of God in a World at War and God and Human Progress, argued that God was ‘a thoroughly intelligent and capable personality’, a supreme planner who bustled about ‘in his shirt sleeves’ and believed in ‘getting on with his job’; ‘For the first time in the progress of the human race, religious, scientific and creative artists are united in aim and moving forward co-operatively and simultaneously in the same direction,’ Phyllis Bottome declared in Our New Order or Hitler’s, published in 1944, before invoking a new order ‘founded and built upon a state educated to Courage, Truth, Freedom and Love’.
Nor were the practicalities of the New Jerusalem ignored. C. H. Waddington’s The Scientific Attitude, another by-product of the Tots and Quots, argued for the importance of the scientific mind in developing a new culture, and its relevance to modern architecture in particular. Published in 1942 in a landscape format, Ralph Tubbs’s Living in Cities looked eagerly forward to the glass and concrete Le Corbusier-inspired cities that (or so it was fondly believed) would rise on the ruins of those destroyed in the Blitz and later by doodlebugs, the tower blocks punctuated with un-English piazzas populated with brightly clad citizens teetering about on pointed triangular legs. Invoking the spirit of ‘swings and roundabouts’, Lane was happy to publish, initially, at a loss. ‘Our cost of production will amount to exactly twice the amount we will receive from the trade,’ he told Tubbs, ‘but so convinced am I of the “worthwhileness” of the venture, that this causes me no qualms.’ He was as good as his word: in due course Tubbs’s book spawned the ‘Planning, Design and Art’ series which included The County of London Plan, edited by Ernö Goldfinger and E. J. Carter, and Hugh Casson’s Homes by the Million. Lionel Brett’s Houses, Gordon Fraser’s Furniture and books on gardens, public transport, ships and pottery formed part of another new series, ‘The Things We Can See’, inspired by an exhibition boldly entitled ‘Britain Can Make It’.
Bill Williams, in the meantime, was propagating similar attitudes through ABCA, and making himself unpopular with right-wing Tories in the process. ‘I am more and more suspicious of the way this lecturing to and education of the Forces racket is run,’ the Conservative MP Maurice Petherick memoed Churchill’s PPS. ‘I maintain most strongly that any of these subjects which tend towards politics, even if the lecturers are Tories, are wrong… for the love of Mike do something about it, unless you want the creatures coming back all pansy-pink.’ Churchill himself regarded the whole business with grave suspicion. ‘Will not such discussions only provide opportunities for the professional grouser and the agitator with the glib tongue?’ he asked the Conservative Chief Whip, David Margesson, in 1941; and a year later he returned to the attack, hoping that ‘you will wind up this business as quickly and decently as possible, and set the persons concerned to useful work’. ‘We are fighting not only for the Britain we know, but for the better Britain it could become,’ Williams informed readers of his Current Affairs in October 1942; his wife, Gertrude, explained Keynesian demand management in a piece entitled ‘Work for All’, and an article on ‘Building the Post-war Home’ discussed the need to build between 3 and 4 million new homes in the ten years that followed the end of the war. As early as 1942 The Times conceded that ‘the ABCA habit may develop in the demobilized soldiers such a social consciousness as may make them a shrewder electorate than their fathers were’; Richard Hoggart recalled how ABCA pamphlets ‘did not talk down, and underestimated neither the subject nor the capacity of the readers – getting across without selling out… They were rare English examples of that haute vulgarisation which the French respect and the English fear’ – he could well have been describing what Williams and Lane were striving to achieve with the Pelican list – and how they ‘did a great deal to make many soldiers vote for Attlee – not because ABCA’s activities were barely disguised socialist propaganda (they were not), but because they helped reduce the power of the mandarin voices, accelerated the decline in deference, made soldiers realize that they did have the right to think for themselves’.
All this bore fruit in the election of 1945. All parties, including the Conservatives, gave greater priority in their manifestos to full employment, housing and social security than to industrial reconstruction or reviving exports. A total of 1.7 million servicemen voted, returning 393 Labour MPs and 213 Tories; and there were many among the liberal-minded middle classes who, like the filmmaker Michael Balcon, ‘voted Labour for the first time after the war: this was our mild revolution’. ‘Your bloody Picture Post is responsible for this,’ Tom Hopkinson was told at an election party (or wake), and Penguin too came in for blame or credit. ‘After the WEA, it was Lane and his Penguins which did most to get us into office at the end of the war,’ Attlee was reported as saying, albeit in old age and to a Penguin editor at the end of a party; and when, in 1947, the Conservative Party mounted an exhibition entitled ‘Trust the People’, devoted to showing ‘how the people were told a story’ and the ways in which ‘Socialist propaganda was “put across” in spite of the Party Truce’, the rogues’ gallery of those responsible included Allen Lane, along with Michael Foot and Hannen Swaffer of the Daily Herald.
Victor Gollancz may well have wondered at his exclusion, since his own firm had made its own flamboyant contribution to a Labour victory; and despite his earlier hostility, he was happy to cooperate with Penguin over a book on which he had an option. John Hersey’s Hiroshima had been published, in toto, in the New Yorker in the autumn of 1946. Victor Weybright, then in charge of editorial matters at Penguin’s New York office, tipped off his colleagues in Harmondsworth, should they want to nip in ahead of Gollancz; the book would come at a price, since Knopf, the American publishers, were looking for an advance of $2,000 and a guaranteed first printing of 250,000 copies. Lane was in Switzerland at the time, and neither Dick nor Frostie was enthusiastic. It was, Dick told Weybright, an ‘able piece of work’, but there was a bottleneck in production, and to have to print so many copies would only make matters worse. Back from holiday, Lane was appalled to discover what had been going on in his absence. ‘INTENSELY ANXIOUS TO SECURE NEW YORKER HIROSHIMA ARTICLE,’ he cabled Weybright, adding, in a letter, ‘I am frantically excited about the Hiroshima book… What thrills me even more is this instance of cooperation from your side. It will I hope prove to be the forerunner of many such plans, and it demonstrates how usefully we can run in double harness.’ Lane acquired the paperback rights – Gollancz seemed happy to follow on with a hardback edition for the libraries – and Dick was left to make amends. ‘I can quite see Allen’s point of view,’ he told Weybright. ‘It is something new and exciting; it involved cables and transatlantic phone calls, which he loves; and also there is the question that if we got the book, a certain other publisher would not…’
VG and Lane may have come to an accommodation over Hiroshima, but they were still rivals when it came to publishing left-wing politicians. ‘Now that Gollancz’s Left Book Club is out of action for all practical purposes, the Penguins are far and away the most effective means of diffusion left,’ wrote the maverick Labour MP Konni Zilliacus in 1948, and Lane seemed happy to publish William Gallagher’s The Case for Communism. The only Communist MP, Gallagher had noted Penguin’s publication of Quintin Hogg’s The Case for Conservatism and John Parker’s Labour Marches On, and approached Lane with his proposal on the grounds that ‘you say in your Publisher’s Note that “As Publishers we have no Polities’”. Lane told Gallagher that he planned to publish his book at the same time as two new books on Roman Catholicism, by Douglas Woodruff and Barbara Ward, and ‘they will undoubtedly be read in conjunction with your book as expositions of the two great rival philosophies with which the world is now confronted’. But before long his nerve began to crack. Bill Williams had initially supported publication on the grounds that ‘much as some of us may dislike the policy advocated, I don’t feel we as publishers can afford to ignore it’, but now reported a ‘lingering sense of unease’ about the effect publishing such a book might have on Penguin’s reputation; and the book’s prospective editor was already spending long hours at the Communist Party’s headquarters in King Street. Lane tried to wriggle out on the grounds that the typescript was shorter than agreed – Hogg’s, on the other hand, had come in at twice the contracted length, and had to be published as a Penguin Double – but by now it was too late. The book went on to sell over 100,000 copies, but it marked the end of a line. Although they were revived towards the end of the 1950s, Penguin Specials came to a halt in 1945; Gollancz had printed a mere 6,250 copies of the last Left Book Club title, G. D. H. Cole’s The Meaning of Marxism, in 1948, and when, three years later, Lane turned down another proposal from Zilliacus, he blamed continuing paper shortages, the rising cost of living, a tendency among book-buyers to go for ‘permanent’ rather than ‘topical’ titles, and the fact that it now took at least eighteen months to get a book published: for all of which reasons ‘I am fighting shy at present of all books on Current Affairs’. And he told the Daily Telegraph that ‘the demand is now for cultural books’, and not for more overtly political works.
Bernard Shaw would have regretted Lane’s decision – he thought ‘Zilly’ should be the Foreign Secretary rather than Ernest Bevin, and deplored the Government’s assumption that Stalin was ‘a twentieth-century Attila instead of the mainstay of peace in Europe’ – but the old Fabian retained his admiration for Penguin, and remained as anxious as ever to have his work made available in paperback. Dick took pains to remind Lane that the ‘old boy’ was extremely fond of him, and that he should pay him the occasional visit; and Lane dutifully obliged, calling on Shaw at Ayot St Lawrence or in Whitehall Court, the pinnacled, lavatory-tiled pile on the Embankment where, before long, he took a flat himself. From time to time Shaw disagreed with what Penguin had in mind, and a jocular correspondence ensued: he strongly objected when Lane insisted on retaining the word ‘unpleasant’ in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, warning him that he would ‘lose sales on any book you label Unpleasant’, but caved in when Lane refused to budge (‘Well, have it your own way…’).
Equally contentious was the vexed issue of Topolski’s illustrations. One of the most fashionable artists of the day, Feliks Topolski had been published by Lane at The Bodley Head. Shaw had been happy enough with his pre-war illustrations for the Penguin Pygmalion, seeing them as a ‘genuine independent attraction’ and far preferable to photographs, but his proposed cover illustration was going too far. ‘Topolski’s cover for Pygmalion is a ghastly mistake,’ he told Lane, ready for once to abandon his objections to illustrated covers. ‘Ask yourself whether the pictures of a repulsive old man and an unpleasant middle-aged one, both of them badly dressed and unwashed, would induce you to buy… Tell Topolski his business is to design an attractive cover and not cry stinking fish.’ Penguin’s New York office were keen to have Topolski illustrate St Joan and Major Barbara, but Shaw would have none of it. Topolski’s style was ‘so individual and masterly that he can illustrate nobody but himself. His St Joan is not my St Joan, nor anybody’s but his own,’ he told Lane; and Lane, for his part, saw the need to tread warily. ‘The pleasant relations which have existed between Shaw and myself have been a little disrupted of late by the appearance of others on the scene at Ayot St Lawrence, and I don’t want to make a false step, particularly as the old man has always been so frightfully generous in all the transactions I have had with him,’ he told the rejected artist.
Writing to Shaw in November 1945, Lane revealed that he planned to celebrate the old boy’s ninetieth birthday the following July by reissuing ten of his works in print-runs of 100,000 each. Inspired by gratitude and commercial acumen, the ‘Shaw Million’ was the first of several ‘Millions’, or ‘Tens’ as they were also known, awarded to bestselling authors on the Penguin list: later recipients included Evelyn Waugh, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Georges Simenon and Agatha Christie. GBS was understandably chuffed, and said he would happily agree ‘provided Willie can do it’ – ‘Willie’ being William Maxwell of R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh, the firm responsible for printing all Shaw’s works on an exclusive basis. In fact Clark’s could undertake only a proportion of the work; the rest, unknown to Shaw, was farmed out to other printers but carried R. & R. Clark’s imprint on the copyright page. ‘No venture which I have undertaken in thirty years of publishing has given me so much pleasure,’ Lane told Shaw. His pleasure was still greater when, on the day of publication, the manager of W. H. Smith in Baker Street tube station rang to say that a seemingly interminable queue building up outside his shop did not consist of stranded commuters but eager buyers of Bernard Shaw. The Million sold out in six weeks, and the birthday itself was celebrated with a party at Silverbeck. Shaw was unable to attend, but the guests included Sybil Thorndike, Wendy Hiller, Topolski, William Maxwell, Stanley Morison and his close friend Beatrice Warde, the historian of printing and typography. ‘We had sherry on a smooth lawn that sloped down to a little weir, and a Siamese cat came and conversed with us,’ Beatrice Warde remembered. ‘The dinner was superb – Scotch salmon and chicken and a compote of raspberries which Richard Lane had canned himself, and home-grown peaches: iced hock and no end of champagne.’ The guests were presented with a cased set of the Million, and Morison toasted ‘the most significant event in publishing in our time’. The austere old typographer may have been carried away by the excitement of the moment and a surfeit of champagne, but the Shaw Million, and those that followed after, reflected Lane’s combination of generosity and shrewdness, and his belief that a publisher should concentrate on an author’s work in toto, on the backlist as well as the book of the moment.
Shaw’s Fabian beliefs had been a huge influence on Pelicans and Penguin Specials, and on most of those who had set out to create the New Jerusalem in post-war Britain, and his death in 1950 marked the end of an era. The following year saw both the end of a Labour government which had introduced the Welfare State and nationalized large swathes of the economy, and the public celebration of that high-minded, idealistic, leftwards-leaning spirit which had brought it into being. The Festival of Britain originated with Lane’s old acquaintance Gerald Barry. ‘A glamorous figure in the worlds of journalism, the arts and left-to-middle-of-the-road politics’, according to George Weidenfeld, Barry had suggested the idea to Sir Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, in 1945, and three years later he was made its Director-General. ‘The tone of the Festival’, according to Michael Frayn, ‘was not unlike the tone of the News Chronicle, which he had edited for eleven years-philanthropic, kindly, whimsical, cosy, optimistic, middlebrow, deeply instinct with the herbivorous philosophy so shortly doomed to eclipse.’
If the cartoonist Roland Emmett, with his model railway trundling round Battersea Park, epitomized the whimsicality of the Festival, Ralph Tubbs was its idealistic manifestation. Tall, rosy-cheeked and elegantly suited, convinced that architecture ‘lives by the very passion to stir the human heart’, Tubbs was, with Mischa Black and Hugh Casson, in charge of the Festival’s overall design; he also designed its famous Dome of Discovery, then the largest dome in the world. Back in the Thirties, when Lane got to know him, he had worked with Gropius, Maxwell Fry and Ernö Goldfinger; a passionate, idealistic believer in planned cities and the public ownership of land, thereby cutting out property speculators, he had most recently spelt out his ideas in The Englishman Builds, published by Penguin in 1945. The new architecture, he declared – the uncluttered tower blocks, the pedestrianized shopping malls, the swathes of gleaming white concrete-would ‘achieve a place among the great: architectures only if we have a set of values which are not entirely materialistic, if we have faith in the Spirit of Mankind’. It was a fine and noble sentiment – and one which Lane, hard-headed as he was, both valued and sought to realize.