The Life and Times of Allen Lane

Large as the firm was, Lane and Dick were still the sole directors. Dick lived with his brother and Lettice at Silverbeck, where he busied himself as a handyman, made vats of tomato juice and jars of horseradish sauce, and helped with the running of Priory Farm. In the office, he saw himself as a steadying influence, a solid, dependable, commonsensical figure, full of sound advice; and, as such, he proved a major irritant to his more volatile and impetuous sabling. He worried about the seemingly insouciant way in which Lane, reliant on his publisher’s instincts, took on a book after meeting a man at dinner the night before, launched a new series after scribbling some sums on the back of an envelope, dictated letters in the back of a car, was invariably late for meetings, and every summer took a month or more on holiday with his family in the Scilly Isles, Cornwall or the South of France. Lane, who never enjoyed being told what to do, and was far more amenable to the circuitous than to the direct approach, came to see Dick as a bore and a drag on the proceedings. But he was happy to use him as a front man, sorting out (or seeming to sort out) awkward predicaments in which Lane, eager as ever to avoid a direct confrontation with the enemy, could pull the strings from a distance while benefiting from the general fondness felt for his brother. Interviewing Lane two years after the end of the war, a journalist who had known both brothers in their Bodley Head days claimed that Lane never worried over problems because Dick was on hand to do the worrying for him: he remembered Lane asking Dick whether he was worried about a particular problem, and when Dick admitted he was, Lane replied, ‘Then there’s no need for me to worry too.’

A kind and unalarming figure, ‘Mr Richard’ was popular with the staff, and even if his secretaries claimed that he dictated so slowly that they could take his letters down in longhand, and that most of them had to do with the cows at Priory Farm, his readiness to consider picture jackets, and his worries about poor standards of production and inadequate blurbs, suggest that he was far from being the fuddy-duddy of Penguin folklore; but his homilies, however sensible and well-meant, grated on his brother’s nerves. He told Lane he should try to get into the office earlier, for ‘although I dislike people who call themselves directors, as this is our job we should aim to carry it out’; he understood why Lane, after a busy day in the office, wandered off to weigh up parcels and fuss about the postage, but ‘this is not our main function in the firm’. Lane might not like it, but he should, from time to time, invite the heads of departments and their wives to dinner; he had to organize his time better, keep a diary, note ‘what he has discussed with whom’, and spend at least ten minutes a day dictating letters. The firm’s editorial policy, Dick declared, was far too slapdash. ‘You write a couple of letters, see a couple of interesting persons, and go off for six months,’ he complained. The firm was too much a ‘one-man concern’: problems were caused by Lane’s ‘having led people on’, since ‘possibly you don’t realize how infectious your enthusiasm can be, and people not knowing you are apt to consider that you mean everything you say’. He wasted too much time following up ‘unnecessary people and ideas’, and ‘it would do you more good wandering about the garden contemplating than burning up effort talking to tiresome nitwits’. It would be good to know which nitwits Dick had in mind: whoever they were, far too much of the firm’s money was tied up in advances for books that had yet to be written, and his brother seemed ‘rarely if ever worried by the amount of capital required for any particular venture’. Matters were very different when Dick was left in charge: on one occasion he refused to sign any cheques until Stan Olney reminded him that the staff might well leave if not paid. ‘Sometimes I am rather under the impression that you think nothing happens while you are away,’ Dick once told his absent brother. ‘Possibly we are not as efficient, but to balance this we are much more cheerful, and several types who had signs of gastric ulcers are now recovering slowly.’

Any ulcers in the making were more likely to occur among the upper echelons of Penguin. Although Frostie insisted that Lane knew everyone by name, and made a point of going from office to office when he arrived, junior staff found ‘AL’ benign but remote – among them a young woman called Margaret Clark, who started work as a secretary at Penguin in the year of the Festival of Britain. She began by typing letters for Mr Gale, the newly appointed office manager, who was ignored by everyone from Lane downwards; in cue course he departed, unremarked, and she was shunted down the corridor to work for Lane himself. The main offices, she noted, ran along the front of the building; a corridor linked them together, and since the partition walls were glass from above the dado line, the overall effect was of lightness and brightness. Lane’s office was in a corner of the building; his desk was twice as large as anyone else’s, and was covered with green leather embossed with golden scrolls. His last secretary had hated every minute – her father was said to have stormed into the office with a horsewhip, promising to exact revenge – but Margaret Clark was unalarmed. Her new boss ‘worked impulsively and restlessly, walking up and down, looking out of the window, biting his nails (the only outward sign that his volatile temperament, often so injurious to others, affected him equally), dictating in fits and starts, much of his negotiation done on the telephone’. She noted how he seemed to crave affection and attention, and how, when he began to dictate, his ‘magnetic’ blue eyes ‘dropped the twinkle and were cold as cold’. His dedication to his work was combined with an apparent levity and a refusal to seem too serious. He was prone to vanish suddenly and without explanation, was given to quick, darting movements, and used to run his stubby fingers along his beloved leather-bound stock books – which, according to office rumour, he took home to read in bed, poring over the details of that month’s sales.

Every now and then some luckless member of staff was sacked. A fellow publisher once remarked of Lane that ‘he was bad at hatchet work unless he could put the hatchet into someone else’s hands’, and he invariably deputed the wretched business to one of his lieutenants, who would be instructed to take the victim to lunch at the Berkeley Arms; at the critical moment Lane let himself out of a back door, and Margaret Clark would catch a glimpse of his stocky, grey-clad, neatly suited rear view bustling through a gap in the hedge en route for the car park. In his memoir, Bill Williams wrote that Lane was ‘gay, volatile, insecure, capricious and unreliable’, combining ruthlessness with a ‘lack of moral fibre’ and even ‘a decided streak of sadism’: ‘you could be top dog one day – and in the dog house the next’, and if Lane decided that a face no longer fitted, lunch at the Berkeley Arms would soon be on the agenda. Far and away the most painful sacking – or forcible retirement – was that of the loyal, clerk-like Stan Olney, who had devoted his life to Penguin but was increasingly out of his depth in a firm that, by the end of the decade, would have some 200 employees and a turnover far exceeding those of its rivals. Lane combined, as he had to, sentimentality about the past with the ruthlessness inherent in running a business, and old retainers like Olney were particularly prone to the delusion that long association would prevail over commercial imperatives. It was said that he never recovered from losing his job, and that the rep Bill Rapley, another veteran of the Crypt, was so shattered by Lane’s failure to attend his sixty-fifth birthday that he died shortly afterwards: tragic testimony to the folly of those who invest too much hope, faith and devotion in anything as fickle and heartless as a place of work. Others were more fortunate: Ashton Allen, who met Lane first in 1922 at The Bodley Head, and spent much of his life as Penguin’s North of England rep, lasted through until his retirement in 1968.

Williams never saw Lane lose his temper, but he tended to sulk if thwarted or displeased, with his lips clamped shut and his head sunk into his neck. He was never pompous or boring, loved gossip, preferably malicious, and ‘was good company at a party but never set a table at a roar nor broached a lively conversation. He was simply a cordial presence and a willing and contented participant.’ He used to stick his head round Williams’s office door in London like a jack-in-the-box, ‘eyebrows raised enquiringly and a smile at the ready in his bright blue eyes… He would come briskly in and start talking in his rapid staccato manner, jacket buttoned up, as always, and a quick pull at the knot of his tie.’ His moods were reflected, above all, in his eyes. ‘One might be gossiping with him of this and that, and he would be attentive and involved,’ Robert Lusty remembered. ‘Some word, some name, some project might strike a certain chord and on the instant Allen would be neither attentive nor involved. Cold little shutters would close upon the light in his eyes. Someone, something, somewhere had had it. The unpredictable was predictably about to happen: and nearly always rightly so.’

Although, in Bill Williams’s opinion, Lane had done ‘nothing to cultivate his mind or enlarge his knowledge’ since leaving school, he was ‘an inveterate and diligent quizzer’ who listened to other people with ‘modesty and eagerness’, and was adept at picking their brains. He had, Williams felt, ‘picked up a lot about books and their authors without actually reading them, and in this respect he was unique among all the publishers I have known’ – which suggests that, for all his important connections, Williams had little understanding of Lane’s fellow publishers, the best of whom worked in exactly the same way. According to Williams, Lane was never a nimble mathematician, and his letters, ‘whether dictated or written in his own hand, were devoid of any distinction: they were pedestrian, often awkward, and never felicitous’. Ruari McLean observed that Lane ‘did not appear ever to have read a whole book, but had a superb instinct for books’, and that his ‘façade was that of a clubman, most at home when telling stories in front of the smoking-room fire’: meetings with printers were constantly interrupted by phone calls to Lane’s farm manager, and were invariably brought to an end with a cry of ‘Now let’s all go across to the Peggy Bedford and have a drink!’ Lane’s eagerness to escape to the pub was never more apparent than at meetings: he would writhe in his seat, say little, and do his best to subvert the proceedings, playing ‘ducks and drakes’ with the agenda, as Bill Williams put it. Sometimes meetings were held in the Peggy Bedford, which made the proceedings more bearable: Bernhard Baer, the serious-minded German editor of Penguin Prints, was shocked to find an editorial meeting taking place in a rowing-boat at Silverbeck, lubricated with lashings of gin.

But Lane’s bonhomie was matched by his reserve. ‘He had an easy, likeable way,’ Bernard Venables recalled, ‘but I always felt there was some guard behind that. That you’d be talking with apparent intimacy, but there was another Allen Lane standing by, making notes… But he had the ideal mix of mercenary and missionary for what he did.’ Lane’s reserve was sadly apparent in the long letters written him over the years by two of his closest associates, Bill Williams and Harry Paroissien. Paroissien had joined Penguin in 1947, the year of the famously frozen winter, when coal and fuel stocks ran critically low, the grimness of post-war austerity seemed set to last for ever, and many printers and binders had to close down (one ingenious binder defied the shortages by attaching bicycles to his machines). A mole-like character who smoked a pipe, Paroissien was dour, loyal, diligent and devoted to the interests of Lane and Penguin Books, a natural lieutenant who did what had to be done efficiently and well, resented change, and took pains to see off any threats to his own position in the firm. A cultivated character, if his handwriting is anything to go by – when young he had dealings with John Betjeman, who thanks him warmly in the foreword to A University Chest – he had worked for Simpkin Marshall, edited Books of the Month, and spent the war working for the British Council in North Africa and the Middle East; most recently he had been the managing director of the Book Export Scheme, designed to revive exports at a time when American publishers, bolstered by Marshall Aid, were making inroads into British markets while their London equivalents, still battered by paper quotas and currency restrictions, struggled to regain their old ascendancy. ‘I found that Harry and I had so much in common in our knowledge of this odd publishing business, and that our reactions were so similar, that I now have no doubts on at least one member of the team,’ Lane assured Paroissien’s wife Eileen; a year or two later, in case Paroissien had any doubts, he insisted that ‘I am slow to give my allegiance or friendship, and I am not more honest than the next man, but once given I am pretty constant.’

Paroissien was a good deal more reserved than the garrulous and bonhomous Williams, but they were as one in their eagerness to write Lane the office equivalents of love letters. Both are touchingly eager to prove their admiration and affection, and to break down his impenetrable reserve. They tell him, again and again, how highly they esteem him, and how working for Penguin has been the single most important ingredient in their lives: yet, like frustrated lovers, they get little in return, at least in letter form, and their outpourings of emotion elicit nothing more than conventional business letters, dictated on the hoof, in which the humdrum details of discounts and quantities ordered are interlaced with snippets of office gossip, welcome in themselves but hardly the response they craved. Reserved as he was, Lane’s failure to reciprocate may have been a deliberate technique: he relished power, and one of the means whereby the powerful keep their subordinates on their toes is by promising intimacy, and whipping it away when those to whom it is offered hurry forward to claim their reward; the half-open gate clangs to, and they are left to begin all over again. Because Lane seemed so amiable, it was easy to misread the signs; and, of course, he was far busier than most, and, as head of the company, needed to retain a degree of detachment and reserve.

He continued, as ever, to combine parsimony with sudden acts of hidden generosity. He insisted that pencil stubs should be handed in before new ones were issued, and when Bob Davies, the European rep, asked for a new briefcase when his eventually collapsed, he was handed an old one of Lane’s, in even worse condition; but when he learned that the daughter of Jimmy Holmes, the production manager, had leukaemia, he gave her a pony and invited her to ride it at Priory Farm. He made any excuse for a party, including the redecoration of the ladies’ lavatories; and the firm’s twenty-first birthday was celebrated with a party at Silverbeck – ‘nothing fancy, but rather jovial and alcoholic’ – and every member of staff was given a history of the firm with a freshly minted one pound note for every year of service tucked inside. Cricket matches were organized with neighbouring villages and firms, and the annual office outing was resumed. Before setting out for Le Touquet in 1950, Lane addressed the fifty-odd members of staff about the vexed matter of ‘lavatory accommodation’ in France, and warned them about the dangers of drinking too much Pernod, while Dick reminded them that ‘On the other side of the Channel you have to speak up.’ The outing had been a great success, he told Paroissien: ‘The plane trip, a new experience to the majority of the staff, caused some mild apprehension, but fears were soon allayed, and no paper bags were put into use.’ Several members of staff viewed French food with grave suspicion, but, with rationing still in force, happily returned home laden with bananas, brandy, nylons, chocolate and sugar.

Most members of staff admired Lane for what he had achieved, and their idealism about Penguin and pride in their work made up for modest pay packets and austere working conditions. According to Isabel Quigly, who joined as an editorial assistant in 1948, fresh from Cambridge, the offices were sometimes so cold that she and her colleagues worked in their overcoats. She was particularly taken by Lane’s unpretentiousness and lack of pomp: towards the end of his life, years after she had left the firm, he spotted her in the Tube – in itself a commendation – and he let out a cry of ‘Quigles!’ and bounded across the compartment to greet her. Employees were expected to turn their hands to anything, irrespective of qualifications or expertise. David Herbert wangled a job by writing in with such persistence that Lane felt obliged to employ him. He knew nothing about selling books, but one day Lane told him, ‘I want you to go on the road tomorrow. Borrow my wife’s car – she won’t like it – and go to the mining valleys’: but despite reversing Lettice lane’s Morris Minor up vertiginous Welsh slopes, Herbert failed to sell a single copy. As Nikolaus Pevsner soon discovered, cars – or the shortage of cars – loomed large in Penguin deliberations. David Hedges, the London rep, was given the use of Dick’s Rover, the proprietorial owner of which regularly inspected it for telltale scratches and abrasions; and when Dick was sent out to Melbourne to run the Australian office, and Harry Paroissien was posted to Baltimore, much time and correspondence was given to shunting second-hand cars around the world.

With a few honourable exceptions – Trollope, Sinclair Lewis, Dickens, Roy Fuller and P. G. Wodehouse among them – writers have tended to neglect office life, but in 1947 an insight into Harmondsworth life was provided by Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation: eight years earlier, the organization had been responsible for the Penguin Special Britain by Mass Observation, but this report was for internal consumption only. The report began, soberly enough, by trying to define the average Penguin reader. Basing their findings on questionnaires fielded in Hammersmith, Bethnal Green, Middlesbrough and Worcester, the MO teams discovered that 41 per cent of middle-class respondents were Penguin readers, as opposed to 17 per cent of the artisan class and a mere 8 per cent of the working classes, and that 44 per cent of Penguin readers had benefited from some form of secondary education whereas 8 per cent had never got beyond the primary stage; and that although those who never read books at all tended to be working-class women over forty, more women than men read Pelicans. After quoting Tribune to the effect that ‘Penguin Specials broke into a new book-reading market. Millions of people who had never before been touched by socialist propaganda or by the Labour Party found themselves guided daily to the left by their reading,’ MO revealed that – according to their polls – Penguin readers were five times more likely to vote Labour than non-Penguin readers. ‘There is no doubt,’ it declared, ‘that Penguin’s public is pre-eminently a “Keep Left” public.’

With the statistics behind them, the observers moved into Harmondsworth itself. Although some Penguin employees, and in particular those editorial types who insisted on living in central London, faced long bus or train journeys to work, others bicycled or walked across the fields. The hours were eight to five or nine to six, with half an hour off for lunch in a ‘drab and cheerless canteen’, inherited from the Air Ministry along with a Nissen hut which housed accounts, and an aircraft hangar which served as a bulk store. The directors and senior staff ate in the canteen along with everyone else, and fetched their own meals, but tended to stick together; the door invariably jammed open, causing icy blasts to rush through and exciting loud cries of ‘Shut that door’, and the leftovers were fed to the pigs on Priory Farm. The buildings were unheated; the ladies’ lavatory was arctic, and staff were expected to bring their own soap and towels. Those with time to spare after lunch could entertain themselves with a game of table-tennis, and all members of staff benefited from a free medical once a month. There was a strong sense of camaraderie among survivors from the Crypt – Dick remembered how the rustling of mice sometimes gave them a fright when writing invoices in the middle of the night – and a good many references, emanating usually from Lane and Bill Williams, to the need for a ‘snifter’, particularly after a meeting. The meetings themselves were genial, informal affairs: Frostie kept her colleagues informed about ‘the younger contemporary intellectual circles’, and contemporary writing usually aroused stronger feelings than academic works. At the annual Christmas party, the canteen was decorated with satirical drawings, dinner was served on long trestle tables and paper hats were worn; directors and senior staff donned white waiters’ jackets and served at table, and Lane mixed cocktails in a silver shaker shaped like a penguin.

Despite the visiting doctor and the celebratory snifters, those interviewed were not entirely complimentary about their presiding genius. ‘He’s got no sympathy with people he thinks are no good,’ said one. ‘You can never get hold of him, and when you do get him, the phone rings, people keep coming in, and this that and the other, and you never really get through,’ complained another, seemingly unaware of a trait shared with many other monomaniacal publishers, and tycoonery at large. Lane’s wealth excited a degree of resentment. ‘He’ll be buying himself his own aeroplane before long,’ suggested one respondent, while another, who had damaged an office door by using it to prise the crown top off a beer bottle, was duly unapologetic: ‘Oh, Mr Lane’s door. Good job he’s got a lot of money…’ A satirical drawing pinned up in the canteen over Christmas showed Lane at his desk with a memo pad which read:

12. Scenes from Office Life