By the early Sixties it no longer made sense for Lane to stay on at Silverbeck. Lettice was living in London on the modest allowance he gave her; the two older girls, Clare and Christine, were grown up and making their own way in the world; Susanne Lepsius had been provided with a flat in Notting Hill Gate and was less in evidence than before; a new runway was being built at Heathrow, and all around the house trees were being felled and the ground razed in readiness. He moved instead to the Old Mill House in West Drayton, an elegant three-storeyed red-brick Georgian building perched over a stream; only a few minutes’ drive from Harmondsworth, it was converted into three self-contained flats, one of which was let to the Schmollers. Weekdays were spent in the Mill House or in Whitehall Court, weekends at Priory Farm, from where he would return to the office bearing eggs for sale to the staff.
His passion for farming was stronger than ever, and he spoke to his farm manager every morning from the office. ‘Don’t let’s exclude farming talk: it is all too long since we had a natter on such things,’ he wrote to Noël Carrington. He told Frostie that after consulting his ‘soothsayer’ he had come to realize that the only women he thought about were Lettice and Susanne – hardly cheering news for his most devoted colleague and correspondent – and that given his enjoyment of the farm, ‘I’ve often wondered if Susanne would really be at ease with me.’ He thought Lettice would like him back, but doubted if it would work. ‘We were both unhappy when we were together and are much better with each other when we have our separate lives,’ he went on, adding that ‘one thing I have learned about myself is that I am one who dislikes any form of ties, although I like affection and a feeling of warmth’.
Material ties were another matter, and in 1965 he bought another farm in Chapmansford in Hampshire, not far from where Carrington farmed. Larger than Priory Farm, it was, he told Carrington, ‘a gem’, even if the buildings were in a poor state: its 522 acres included a trout stream, a tributary of the Test, and water meadows, and he planned to concentrate on beef and barley. ‘The more I see of farming, the more I like it,’ he told his old colleague. The Old Mill House was owned by the firm, but the farm at Hurstbourne Priors was not the only new purchase to be funded from the sale of Penguin shares. He bought some woods near Iddesleigh in Devon, which he had come to regard as his ancestral county, and the architect Edward Samuel designed him a sunny, well-lit house on the beach at Rosscarbery, the village in County Cork where he and Susanne had spent so many summers with Bill Williams and Estrid Bannister. From there, in the summer of 1964, he wrote to Nora, who had just returned to Australia after spending three months in England. The time they had spent together had been ‘the most memorable and enjoyable moments’ of his life. ‘I can’t tell you what your coming over here has meant to me,’ he told her. ‘Before you arrived I was in rather a depressed state, and I don’t think that I could have realized at the time that it was possible for such a perfect relationship as ours to exist.’ Relations with Dick may have soured over the years, but his devotion to Nora was a reminder of how, in the old days, the intensity of feeling between Lane and his siblings had seemed like an impenetrable barrier, excluding all outsiders, Lettice included.
That same year, Lettice came back. Their lives were to remain, at best, semi-detached. They spent holidays together in Spain, taking Anna with them more often than not, and getting to know full-time ex-pats like Gerald Brenan and Bill and Annie Davies, the immensely rich American socialites and friends of Hemingway, Kenneth Tynan and Cyril Connolly; Robert Lusty went to stay at El Fénix after the death of his wife, and his gloom was alleviated by Lane’s ‘mercurial effervescence’ and regular samplings of ‘the tinto and the blanco’. Lettice steered clear of Whitehall Court and the Old Mill House and spent most of her time at Priory Farm, where she had her own self-contained quarters. Years later she told an interviewer that Lane had been ‘an impossible man to get away from, and an impossible man to live with’, and that she ‘wouldn’t have married any other man – never’: but although to outsiders – including Penguin employees – she seemed funny, clever, attractive and engaging, she was often short-tempered and sarcastic towards her errant spouse. ‘What do you mean by “one of my authors”?’ she snapped when Lane told her that he had invited the young historian Hugh Thomas to lunch: the implication being that, as a mere paperback publisher, he was not qualified to talk in such terms.
Lane’s relations with Clare and Christine were far more harmonious, though he was never a demonstrative father, shied away from displays of emotion, and was happy to leave their schooling to Lettice (much of which had been paid for by old Mrs Williams Lane, at least until Penguin went public). One or other of them often accompanied him on his journeys to the States or Australia, combining travel to exotic places with minimal office duties; racked with guilt about his treatment of Lettice and his affair with Susanne, he took Clare out to drunken dinners at the Savoy, during the course of which he told her that it was quite normal for middle-aged men to chase other women, and tried to gain her absolution; jealous of having his family broken into, he resented her falling in love with Morpurgo’s stepson, Michael, and was, for a time, tricky with his new son-in-law.
He remained, in his sixties, dapper and well-dressed enough to qualify as one of the nation’s Top Ten Best Dressed Men: ‘How shall I dazzle my audience today?’ he would ask before setting out for the office. He never wore a hat, and, when invited to John Curtis’s wedding in a synagogue, he borrowed one from his gardener and asked the lady in the Penguin canteen to steam it clean; he loved his collection of cars and was an enthusiastic motorist. He – combined, as ever, parsimony with sudden bouts of unexpected generosity. He retained his passion for cheap hotels and travelled economy class, and expected his employees to follow his example, but when the young John Rolfe, who joined the firm in 1960 in a junior capacity, screwed up the courage to ask whether Penguin could possibly lend him the money to put down the deposit on a house, Lane, who was just about to leave for Spain, told him he could let him have £3,000 interest-free, and that he should discuss the details with the chief accountant. The accountant knew nothing about it, and persuaded Lane to reduce the loan to £1,000: but he had the last word, and made amends by leaving Rolfe £1,000 in his will. Others in the firm benefited from Lane’s generosity in this way; and the staff at large benefited when, in 1964, he started the Penguin Pension Fund, putting in £100,000 of his own money to set the scheme in motion.
Giles Gordon remembered how Lane ‘was forever to be seen bustling about the fragilely partitioned eggbox compartments of the glasshouse at Harmondsworth’. His eye for detail and his perfectionist instincts were as evident as ever – he worried about the brickwork and the landscaping of the new warehouse, and instructed Malcolm Kelley, then working in the warehouse and run off his feet, to take time off to count some recently planted poplars and replace the dead ones – and in many ways he was as sharp and innovative as ever: he was one of the first publishers to introduce an automated warehouse, and for all his tirades about selling books in pubs and suchlike places, he seemed perfectly happy to see Penguins on sale in supermarkets. He still got up early every morning, and bustled off to work: he commissioned Ralph Tubbs, who had recently completed Baden-Powell House in the Cromwell Road, to design the new front offices at Harmondsworth, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of Penguin was celebrated with a long-remembered party in the aquarium at the Frankfurt Zoo – an appropriate setting, since Penguin had been one of the few British publishers to take a stand at the first Frankfurt Book Fair in 1947.
And yet he seemed, at times, detached from and adrift in a rapidly changing world. By 1967 Penguin had 488 employees in toto, a far cry from the Crypt or even the post-war years. Tony Mott – whose first memory of Lane was of him bursting into Harry Paroissien’s office with a cry of ‘I’ve found a little man in Slough who can turn shirt cuffs for sixpence!’ – remembers bumping into him outside the newly installed computer-room, and Lane saying, ‘I have no idea what those sods are doing…’ At publishing parties in Vigo Street he often stood alone, with his back to the wall: Patrick Wright, who had recently joined Allen Lane The Penguin Press as its solitary rep, assumed that this neatly suited figure must be Mr Lane’s chauffeur, and hurried to offer him a drink. At another Vigo Street party for literary agents, Tony Mott found Lane in the lavatory, perched on a bale of lavatory paper. ‘Mott,’ he asked, ‘who are all those people out there?’ ‘But, Sir Allen, you invited them…’ ‘Why the hell did I do that? I don’t know any of the fuckers.’ He sent Mott out for a bottle of white wine which they drained together, Lane still perched on the lavatory paper; after which they returned to the party, where Lane dazzled the assembled agents with his urbanity and charm.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Siné’s cartoons and the sacking of Tony Godwin may have hit the headlines, but, according to Godwin, much of Lane’s time and energy during the 1960s was devoted to setting up an educational list, and trying to sort out the Australian end of the business. Penguin had always been an educational publisher in that Pelicans, Penguin Classics and Penguins themselves were read and studied by schoolchildren and students as well as by those in search of pleasure and information: but in the early Sixties it was decided to publish specifically for the educational market, and for schools in particular. It was, and still is, a highly competitive and specialized area of publishing, dominated by huge firms like Longmans and Oxford University Press, and employing sales techniques and methods very different from those of ‘trade’ publishers like Penguin: books were sold by specialist sales forces through educational suppliers rather than bookshops, and liberal use was made of inspection copies. Quite who first came up with the suggestion that Penguin should enter these dangerous waters is a matter of debate: Chris Dolley said that he put the idea in Lane’s head before leaving to run the Baltimore office; Morpurgo, a rival claimant, was sceptical at first on the grounds that educational publishing was outside Penguin’s area of expertise, but was seduced by dreams of becoming Lane’s deputy or even heir-apparent; some have suggested that Lane was so impressed by the vast profits being made by Longmans in particular that he was determined to tap this lucrative market for himself, making full use of the Penguin name in the process. His instinctive readiness to try something new, and a sense that educational publishing represented an extension of (rather than a distraction from) Penguin’s role as a public educator, coincided with changes in the world of education at all levels. Great hopes and high ideals were vested in comprehensive education, and the Penguin Education list was to exploit the new fashion for ‘child-centred’ textbooks; the Robbins Report of 1963 had paved the way for a huge expansion of higher education, the new ‘plate-glass’ universities were opening their doors, and – as an example of how a backlist title could benefit from a rapidly expanding market – the Penguin Classics edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists sold 10,000 copies a year after it had been adopted by Harold Wilson’s new Open University.
As early as 1961, Jack Morpurgo, then the Director General of the National Book League in Albemarle Street, had written to Lane to suggest, for no apparent reason, that he should be appointed ‘a sort of Minister plenipotentiary at Cabinet level’, representing Penguin’s interests overseas. After leaving Penguin, Morpurgo had worked for the Falcon Press, but bills were never paid and the company was wound up after its founder, Peter Baker, was arrested for forging Sir Bernard Docker’s signature. Wearing, for much of the time, ‘a smouldering expression, midway between a look of pleasure and a frown’, he had spent four years with the Nuffield Foundation before moving on to the NBL in 1955, where he busied himself promoting books in schools and factories and travelling overseas. Every now and then, he tells us, Lane would call in, sometimes with Susanne Lepsius, for a drink and a gossip: he told Morpurgo that he regarded him as his ‘human thermometer’, but vague promises – ‘Jack, you’ve been here long enough. You’re coming back to Penguins’ and ‘I must have a second-in-command I can trust, just in case’ – were never followed up. Morpurgo’s ministerial suggestion was similarly ignored, but a year later he returned to the attack. He was, he claimed, perfectly equipped to promote educational aspects of the Penguin list in the Commonwealth and what was becoming known as the Third World; and he could effect an introduction to the Nuffield Foundation, which was keen to be involved in scientific educational textbooks in the post-sputnik world, and would far prefer to deal with a firm like Penguin than with more conventional educational publishers. The notion of Morpurgo as a peripatetic ambassador was, once again, politely ignored, but the Nuffield Foundation was of interest. Meetings were held in Albemarle Street, and although he complained that he had ‘as yet nothing in writing to prove my position as the merest lackey in the courts of Harmondsworth’ and worried, pointedly, that Penguin might be sold to some predator like the property developer Charles Clore, ‘who would not give a twopenny damn for the security of one who was not a director’, Morpurgo was allowed to describe himself as ‘education adviser’ on the Penguin notepaper.
Although the Science Teaching Project, sponsored by the Nuffield Foundation, was launched in 1966, Morpurgo’s involvement with the Penguin Education list was mortifyingly brief. Chris Dolley attended a meeting at the NBL along with Lane, Paroissien and Bill Williams, and walked out on the grounds that Morpurgo talked ‘so much twaddle’ that he could bear it no longer. ‘With the best grace that I know I have removed myself from the scene,’ Morpurgo wrote to Lane. He had, he admitted, failed to come up with any figures to support his proposals, but had used instead ‘the knowledge that comes from experience… surely it is to use the instinctive shortcuts which come from experience that any organization takes on seniors instead of novices!’ ‘I would not wish it that bitterness should seem to be the sum of my reactions,’ he continued, rising to Pecksniffian heights of unctuous eloquence. ‘Disappointed and, I do not deny it, resentful of the circumstances of the conclusion I may be, but there are still those within the organization (and you first among them) whom I claim among my closest friends, and still I am devoted to the ethos of Penguin.’ Before long the friendship between the two men, such as it was, would be shattered for ever; and after Dolley’s departure for the States Penguin Education was run by a ‘novice’ in the form of Charles Clark, whose initial interview with Lane had been devoted, exclusively, to apples and apple-growing. The Penguin Education list went on to enjoy some phenomenal sales – the Success with English series, launched in 1968 as a venture into the highly competitive English as a Foreign Language or ‘ELT’ market, sold some 2 million copies overseas, much to the irritation of such long-established rivals as Longmans and Macmillan – but it was a mixed blessing: launching the series was hugely expensive, contributing to the cashflow crisis of the late Sixties; and, in the early years, the educational list was not sold in the UK by a specialist sales team but by the Penguin reps, who knew little about the educational market and were distracted from their main job of selling to the shops.
One advantage of Penguin Education was that Tony Godwin was neither interested nor involved: and the same applied to Puffin Books, which had the additional bonus of appealing more to Lane’s imagination, and being run by one of the people in Penguin of whom he was most fond. Eleanor Graham retired in 1961: Margaret Clark had been assured by Lane and Monty Woodhouse that she would assume the vacant seat, but Tony Godwin only recently arrived and flexing his muscles, told her, fairly brutally, that ‘You haven’t a hope in hell of getting the Puffin job.’ She left for The Bodley Head, but not before she had persuaded her colleagues to buy the rights in Tolkien’s The Hobbit – Eleanor Graham had long held out against it, greeting any mention with a ‘grimace of distaste’ – and the post she’d been promised was offered instead to a journalist and magazine editor, Kaye Webb. Buxom, ebullient and attractive, she had been married to Ronald Searle, who had recently left her to live in France, and had worked as assistant editor of Lilliput and edited the Young Elizabethan. Lane had met her first in El Vino or Champney’s, and they had taken to each other at once. ‘He was so beguiling – I longed to know more about him,’ she recalled, while Lane, for his part, took to ringing her with job offers and arranging lunch dates. Kaye Webb and Ronald Searle were old friends of the Godwins, and Godwin often claimed that he had suggested her for the job: devious as ever, Lane used Godwin to get rid of Margaret Clark, so clearing the way for his own favoured candidate. Kaye Webb had energy, enthusiasm and the obsessive single-mindedness of the true publisher, and she had timed her arrival to perfection: the Sixties saw a boom in children’s paperbacks as they gained acceptance in schools and libraries as well as in bookshops, and the Puffin backlist grew from 150 to around 800 titles. The number of titles published by Puffin doubled in her first year, and despite growing competition from rival paperback firms, Kaye Webb persuaded other publishers, including Billy Collins and the OUP, to license books to her. She published Mary Poppins, Dodie Smith’s A Hundred and One Dalmatians and the works of Roald Dahl and Philippa Pearce; she broke with Penguin tradition by publishing original fiction, including William Mayne’s A Parcel of Time and Clive King’s bestselling Stig of the Dump, which had been turned down by every other publisher in London. In 1967 she founded the Puffin Club, which organized competitions, outings and parties, published a quarterly Puffin Post, and boasted 44,000 members within two years. Lane thoroughly approved, and invited Puffin readers to barbecues on his farms; he had always liked to think of Penguin readers as members of a club, waiting for the monthly list of new publications and attending Penguin exhibitions, and Kaye Webb’s initiative appealed to this side of his character. She, for her part, reciprocated his affection, pointing out to his critics that he ‘was not devious or dishonest. He just avoided unpleasantness’, and loyally taking his side during the travails of the Godwin era.
‘Why don’t you chuck up Middlesex and retire to Hobart or Perth, where life goes at the right speed?’ John Betjeman once asked him. Lane shared to the full Betjeman’s love of the country, but Penguin Australia was not immune to the editorial problems that had bedevilled relations with Penguin Inc.: though this time they were not of Lane’s making. On a visit to Australia in 1961, he decided that the Melbourne office should be encouraged to publish locally, and not be restricted simply to importing books from England. It was a fine idea in principle, but proved harder to put into practice. While in Sydney, he invited Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier to lunch at Nora’s house to discuss how best to set about it. Cultured and well-heeled, Dutton was an established writer and a senior lecturer in English at Adelaide University who knew everyone who needed to be known in the Australian literary world; Max Harris was a bonhomous bookseller who had earlier edited a literary magazine entitled, appropriately enough, Angry Penguins, wrote a regular column on bookish matters in the Australian, and anticipated its imminent popularity by commissioning an Australian Wine Guide; Stonier provided the practical publishing experience. All three were enthused by Lane’s vision, even if, as Dutton put it, ‘in the best Lane tradition, we were to do all the work ourselves and be paid very little’. ‘There was always some excitement about Lane,’ Dutton recalled, ‘some promise of impending action. With his neatness and trimness and precise movements, he reminded me of a tennis player, but the balls he hit were words, and although they came swiftly they came softly.’ An editorial meeting was held in the Melbourne offices, after which Lane returned to England and left them to get on with it. The first batch of Australian Penguins were published in March 1963. The penguin on the front cover was garlanded with boomerangs on either side, which infuriated those authors who prided themselves on being published by an international rather than a purely Australian firm: so much so that Patrick White rang Dutton and ordered him to Get rid of those fucking boomerangs!’
Despite the high hopes, the Australian publishing programme was blighted from the beginning by resentment and suspicion between Harmondsworth and Melbourne. Lane seemed happy to take a back seat, reminding Stonier that ‘I promised to send you duplicates of the signs we have on our toilets here. The one for the ladies’ department is obvious. The other pair, which represents variations on a Paris street urinal theme, are meant to be fixed to both sides of the door…’ Godwin, on the other hand, was determined not to ‘lose our controlling ability to direct and shape the Australian list’. He worried that Australian production and design would not come up to Hans Schmoller’s high standards, and insisted that major authors like Patrick White, already on the Penguin list, should continue to be published from Harmondsworth, with Penguin Australia indenting for as many copies as they thought they could sell; Melbourne were upset by Godwin’s apparent indifference to much-admired Australian authors like Randolph Stow, by his refusal to commit Harmondsworth to taking sizeable orders of Australian-originated books and by his insistence that they should cost such books on the basis of likely Australian sales, and regard any orders from England as so much jam on the bread, desirable in itself but not to be relied upon. Melbourne were so infuriated by Godwin’s lack of interest in Donald Home’s The Lucky Country that they decided to go it alone, and went on to sell 250,000 copies in Australia; when Lane came out to open Penguin Australia’s new Ringwood building, Dutton persuaded him to think again, and Godwin reluctantly agreed to take 15,000 for Britain, where it was published as Australia in the Sixties.
Worse was to follow when Godwin wrote to say that he was starting a new series of anthologies devoted to new writing in countries around the world – ‘Foreigners still begin at Calais’, ran the blurb to early numbers in the series, which included Raleigh Trevelyan’s excellent Italian Writing Today – and he asked Dutton if he would edit the Australian volume. Dutton duly sent off his selection, which included stories by Patrick White and Randolph Stow, and poems by Judith Wright, Les Murray and A. D. Hope: after an interminable delay the typescript was returned by sea mail along with a damning report by the critic Francis Hope, who pronounced the book unpublishable. ‘London Insults Our Best’ ran a headline in the Australian on learning that Godwin had rejected Dutton’s anthology as being of ‘far too low a standard for us to publish’ and had compared it with a school magazine: it was promptly sold to Billy Collins, who published it as a Fontana paperback original. In 1965 Tony Godwin, eager to make amends, paid a visit to Australia, where he was best remembered for taking a five-mile hike at midday in a heatwave, clad in heavy boots and knee-length shorts: but by then it was too late, and Dutton, Harris and Stonier handed in their notices and went off to found Sun books, a rival paperback concern. Lane wrote them a genial letter in which he said that, under the circumstances, he would have done exactly the same himself.
It was on his visit to Australia in 1961 that Lane came up with his most famous one-liner, indicative of both his ruthlessness and his awkward embarrassment when dealing face-to-face with disagreeable situations. The decision to publish for the Australian market coincided with Dick’s long-awaited departure from Penguin Australia and his resignation as a director of the parent company; Ralph Vernon-Hunt of Pan had told Lane that he expected to sell 3 million books a year in Australia, as opposed to a million Penguins, and Lane was determined to make major changes. On arrival at Sydney airport he was frisked by Customs officials looking for copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was still banned in Australia; writing from Melbourne, he told Harry Paroissien that he was having a ‘gruelling time’, that the existing management was in a ‘state of chaos’ and that sackings at all levels were imminent or in hand; it was rumoured that two senior executives were to lose their jobs, but no one knew who had drawn the short straws. Three of the top men from Penguin Australia saw him to the airport for his flight back to Britain, and still nothing had been said: but then, in the departure lounge – or, better still, at the foot of the steps leading up to the aeroplane itself – Lane turned to his escorts, said, ‘You’re out, you’re in, you’re out, and I’m off,’ and hurried away to take his seat. According to some reports, Ron Blass had accompanied Lane to Australia, and was ordered to stay behind and sort out the mess: whatever the truth of the matter, it was on a trip back from Australia with Ron Blass that Lane enjoyed or endured the one real adventure of his life.
Dark-haired, tough and genial, not unlike one of the Kray twins in appearance at least, Ron Blass had no literary or social pretensions, and had started his working life with Penguin before the war as a van-driver. Lane had been impressed by the orderly and logical way in which he packed and unpacked the bales of books, and after the war, which he spent in the Navy, he returned to Penguin to work in the warehouse. He rose from being warehouse manager to sales director: he may not have read any of the books he housed and despatched, but he knew every aspect of the business, was nimble at doctoring booksellers’ orders in an upward direction, was a brilliant negotiator with the firm’s biggest accounts, so much so that Penguin continued to dominate the trade throughout the Sixties, and seemed happy to be used as a hatchet-man, summoning those about to be sacked to lunch at the nearby Berkeley Arms. In his sombre dark suits and crisp white shirts, he was very much one of Lane’s cronies, sitting over long lunches in the directors’ dining-room at Harmondsworth, trading gossip and innuendo in the febrile world of office politics and, according to Richard Holme, indulging in long, maudlin conversations on death and suicide; but he was also, unlike Harry Paroissien, on good terms with the jeans-wearing, open-necked Godwinites in John Street and Vigo Street. An enthusiastic drinker, he liked nothing better than the occasional jaunt overseas; and, from Lane’s point of view, he made a perfect travelling companion.
In the autumn of 1962 the two men went together on a business trip to Australia. Their business done in Melbourne, they spent a few days on the Great Barrier Reef before moving on to South Africa, via Mauritius; Lane, who had complained of boredom in Australia, suggested that they should break their journey home in Kenya, and spend a few days on safari. They hired a car in Nairobi, bought a cheap map of the country, and headed off to the Tsavo National Park, where other tourists were perched on Land Rovers, drinking gin and tonics and waiting for the animals to appear. This did little to alleviate Lane’s boredom, so they drove on, spotting two foxes and a rabbit as they went. ‘Well,’ Lane told his travelling companion, ‘I don’t go much on this safari lark.’ After passing a waterfall and two elephants, they came to a bridge bearing a notice which read ‘No Crossing’. Using their fingers to calculate distance on the sixpenny map, they worked out that if they ignored the notice and headed on for another seventy miles, they would reach Malindi, on the Indian Ocean. Lane took the wheel, picking his way past a rhino and a giraffe, and before long they had lost all sense of time or direction. They drove into a dried-up gulch, and were trying to reverse their way out when they were deluged by a torrential tropical storm, and the car was up to its axles in sticky black mud. They decided to walk to the nearest village: Lane took his diary and a pencil, and Blass a packet of cigars, but they left everything else in the car, including their coats and their money. ‘Don’t worry,’ Lane told his companion, ‘round the next corner there’ll be a melon stall,’ but his optimism was misplaced. Gazelles and giraffes were their only companions as they squelched through the mud, and a wild pig ran in circles round them for mile after mile. Parched with thirst, they smashed open some coconuts and drank the milk. Blass, who was leading the way, tried to distract Lane’s attention from some large Mine footprints, but there was ‘No need for you to do that, Ron – I saw them a long way back!’ By now it was getting dark: Blass lit a fire, Lane wrote his diary, and, in the distance, the drums began to beat. ‘I’m glad I’m here with you,’ Lane told Blass. ‘I’d rather be here with you than with anyone.’
They woke before dawn next day and resumed their walk. Their tongues had begun to swell from thirst, and they were beginning to lose heart when ‘out from the trees came three of the blackest-looking people you’ve ever seen, pushing bicycles’. Lane was mounted on one bike and Blass on another, and somehow they were separated: Blass, very much a man of his time, fully expected to be put in a pot and eaten, but much to his relief he caught up with Lane in a nearby village of straw huts, where he found his leader drinking Fanta with the local chieftain. They were given eggs to eat, their socks were washed, and they were told that at midday a lorry was due on its weekly trip to Malindi. The two publishers scrambled into the front with the driver, pots, chickens and locals were crammed in the back, and they made their way, very slowly, to Malindi, where they booked into a hotel on the beach, had a shave and a meal, cabled the office to report their whereabouts, and flew on to Mombasa the following day in an elderly Dakota. Back in Nairobi, Lane held a party to celebrate, with champagne for the hotel staff.
The two safari-lovers went their own ways at Rome airport: Lane claimed to be in need of a holiday and headed off to the villa in Spain, while Blass went back to the office. In due course a Mr Gosling of the East African Automobile Association wrote to say that the abandoned Peugeot had been discovered, and that all their possessions were on their way back to England, along with some samples of the black mud in which the car had bogged down; Lane sent Chief Ishmael Kenga of Malindi a parcel of books in return for his help and hospitality, and ordered a copy of J. H. Patterson’s classic The Man-Eaters of Tsavo for his travelling companion, ‘They tell me you have been doing your safari on the handles of a push-bike,’ Noël Carrington remarked. ‘I call that trying to keep up with Collins, who went to bed with Elsa the Lioness, presumably to give her better publicity.’ Billy Collins had indeed made a fortune from Born Free, and years later it was revealed that he had shared a bed with Joy Adamson, its formidable author.
Although he was never seen by Lane as an heir-apparent, their African adventures strengthened Blass’s position in the court of Harmondsworth: he became Lane’s closest confidant, a substitute son who drove him home after work and stopped off en route for a drink and a gossip as well as acting, when necessary, as both spy and hatchet-man. Lane continued to tantalize himself and others with talk of stepping down or taking a back seat, while his loyal retainers, never too sure where the future lay, jostled for position. Writing to congratulate Lord Beaverbrook on his eighty-fifth birthday, he recalled how, over dinner with Stanley Morison a year or two earlier, the press baron had told them how he kept out of the office as much as possible, but retained control through his senior executives. ‘I cannot pretend that I have taken things so far myself, but since I saw you I have kept away from the office as much as possible, and I have found that far from losing touch I have a greater sense of personal control,’ he told Beaverbrook (‘I am very flattered to think that advice of mine may have played a small part in building up that immense organization you have imprinted on London,’ the Beaver courteously replied). Bill Williams believed that after the battles with Godwin, ‘Allen’s buoyancy and resilience were not as effective and confident as they had once been, and for the first time in my long friendship with him I was becoming aware that he had had enough’: but although a large part of Lane quite genuinely believed that, as he endlessly assured friends and colleagues, he longed to ‘say goodbye to the rat race’, he had, in the last resort, no wish to give up. When Chris Dolley accused him of having no intention of retiring, or appointing an heir-apparent, Lane replied, ‘Why should I? Let them sort it out when I am dead,’ and he once told Charles Clark that ‘very few firms survive the death of their founder’: Morpurgo, anxious to present Lane in his last years as a lonely, embittered figure, suggested that ‘bitterness calcified his habitual indecisiveness, so that it was no longer a matter of his failing to make up his mind about what should happen to Penguin after his death. He just did not care.’
Despite the Woodhouse fiasco, he retained his fascination with Conservative politicians. ‘I wondered whether circumstances would ever permit you to think of joining us in the expansion of the educational side,’ he asked Edward Boyle, a portly, pink-faced and heavily chalk-striped former Minister of Education who combined patrician origins with liberal views and had stoutly defended the cause of comprehensive schools. In the spring of 1965 Boyle wrote, ‘with considerable diffidence’, to ask if he could possibly take up Lane’s offer, since life on the Opposition benches was not proving too onerous. ‘Do forgive me for writing, and if this letter finds its way into the w.p. basket, it will be only what I deserve,’ he wrote. Unable to resist such self-deprecation, Lane appointed Boyle a member of the Penguin Board, and made him a trustee of his charitable trust, the Allen Lane Charitable Foundation, set up in the 1960s to help the underprivileged, including the deaf and the mentally handicapped, and to fund archaeological expeditions and the publication of books by young writers. Although he only came in twice a week, Boyle was scrupulous about attending meetings, briefly held the fort at ALPP after Godwin’s departure, made his views known on editorial and publishing matters, and was popular and well-regarded by old guard and iconoclasts alike: even Harry Paroissien, never easily won round, found him ‘most impressive in a quiet way’.
Boyle was a valuable addition, but he was a part-time Penguin, and was neither an heir-apparent nor a managing director in the making. More often than not, Lane confided his worries to Frostie, who was no longer working for the firm and took a dim view of Godwin and his cohorts. Who, he wondered from Spain in December 1966, just as the Godwin crisis was coming to a head, should be the new managing director? Neither Godwin nor Hans Schmoller was keen; Paroissien ‘badly wants it, but is quite unfitted for it’; he had been talking to Arthur Crook, but ‘I wonder if the ability to control a staff of under a dozen can have fitted him to cope with our varied assortment of bods?’ Eight days later he was once again in touch: Arthur Crook would like to join ‘if he felt he would eventually step into my shoes – but could he?’ He couldn’t see Boyle as a ‘day-today boss’ – but what about Mike Randall of the Daily Mail? ‘What I find so difficult is having to explain how and why I am so redundant, and at pre-retirement age, too,’ the fifty-one-year-old Frostie replied, adding that she felt helpless as she watched ‘you spinning round from person to person’, and worried about ‘vulgarization’ and the ‘abdication of standards’ in the firm. In the meantime, a comic example of talking at cross-purposes was provided by the granitic figure of Lord Reith. Reith had been casting about for a role in life ever since leaving the BBC, and in 1963 Robert Lusty, then a Governor of the BBC, suggested to him that he should talk to Lane about the future of Penguin. It was agreed that Lusty should pick up Reith from his offices in the Great West Road – he was then the Chairman of British Oxygen – and that they should travel on together to Harmondsworth. Lusty was late, and Reith was in a foul mood as they made their way to Lane’s office. But any ill temper was soon blown away by Lane, who was at his most charming and gave the old curmudgeon a tour of the offices and the warehouse, followed by lunch in the directors’ dining-room. Reith was very taken with his host, but somewhat surprised not to hear from him again. ‘Having so much enjoyed my visit to you, I had hoped that I would have seen you before the long time that has passed,’ he eventually wrote to Lane; and to Lusty he memoed, ‘I have heard nothing from that fellow Lane. I thought he wanted me to take it over.’ But, according to Lusty, there was a further twist to this tale of mutual misunderstanding: assuming that Reith still exercised influence at the BBC, Lane thought he had called to offer him a governorship, and was puzzled to hear no more about it.
Not long before his downfall, Tony Godwin spent an evening with Lane at the Old Mill House. They downed glass after glass of white wine, and by half-past eleven Lane was well away. Godwin had matched him glass for glass, but managed to stay comparatively sober; and later he wrote a chilling account of how, as the evening progressed, Lane made no effort to disguise his ‘terrible contempt’ for his colleagues, and for his most loyal lieutenant in particular. Bill Williams had earlier referred to ‘poor miserable old Harry’ as being ‘spiritless, ineffective and supine’ and ‘overpaid and overindulged for years’: although Godwin himself thought Paroissien ‘totally subservient’, he was shocked by Lane’s ‘ruthless denigration of Harry on both personal and professional levels’ – and equally shocked to learn how pitifully little the most loyal retainer of all, Eunice Frost, had earned over the years. Godwin was ‘horrified’ by this unwelcome glimpse of a character once summarized by Morpurgo as ‘pathologically disloyal’: what, he wondered, ‘had given him this terrifying rancorous contempt for people’? Lane always retained a ‘tremendously disciplined public persona’ and he never let the mask slip again, at least in Godwin’s presence: but it had provided a foretaste of what lay ahead for Godwin himself.
Whatever Lane’s opinions in private, two of the old guard remained in harness: although he told Dick that Paroissien had been ‘a great disappointment to me, and quite incapable of making up his mind on important issues’, his long-serving lieutenant was made joint managing director with Chris Dolley after Godwin’s dismissal in 1967; and Schmoller would remain with the firm for the rest of his working life, grumbling about the covers while applying to the texts the same high standards as ever. Frostie was no more than a sympathetic ear, but Bill Williams lingered on in the wings, worrying about his health and his pension and what the future held when the time came for him to retire from the Arts Council. Though no longer actively involved in Penguin affairs, he was, he had told Lane in the spring of 1963, thrilled that his old friend still wanted him to ‘stick around’, still more so since his salary would drop by some £4,000 a year when he left the Arts Council at the end of the year. Two years later, after suffering a stroke and a mild heart attack, he wrote to Paroissien to say that he was ‘angry and appalled’ by rumours that he had had to retire due to ill health; eager to prove that he was still in the swim, he wrote from New York to say that he had lunched with Victor Weybright, who was ‘fatter than ever, and evidently propelled by some insatiable demon’, and when he learned that Lane and Lord Goodman were considering a bid for an ITV franchise, he begged to be put on the board, since ‘I know quite a lot about TV.’ Throat cancer struck next, and although he was to outlive Lane by seven years, his eloquent, well-written letters struck a nostalgic, valedictory note. ‘I accept the inevitable twilight, and feel nothing but thankfulness,’ he told Lane at the end of a long letter in which he looked back to ‘the enlightened boozing in the old Barcelona; the tantrums, the tears, the resignations’, and declared, once again, how the two of them had ‘a kinship together, almost (even) a twinship. We have separate identities, but we belong to the same totem, and I believe both of us have been conscious of that bond. I can only say that for you, as for no other man, I have always recognized and cherished a profound and abiding affection…’ Such effusions had been frequent enough in the past, but this particular letter had been written in response to one from Lane himself, in which he too had waxed lyrical about their long association. Writing from Spain, he told a gratified Williams that he had been thinking of the old days, and their lunches at the Barcelona:
You know and I know exactly how much you have influenced both the enterprise and me over this period. I don’t think either of us could have visualized what it was going to become, but both of us having a good streak of idealism and a certain toughness of purpose have made it very much in our own image. What happens after our time is beyond our control. As good gardeners or farmers we can only do our best to see that the soil is kept in good heart, free of weeds, and that the crops are not forced but allowed a natural growth in the knowledge that if these principles are followed our successors will continue to have the satisfaction from it that we have had ourselves.
No doubt he had particular individuals and types of book in mind when he referred to weeds and the forcing of crops, and these unwelcome developments had provoked an outburst of nostalgia: in the meantime, ‘what I have valued most has been the close friendship we have enjoyed over these many years, and I look forward to many more years of companionship when we can sit and drink and talk of life and love’.
For all the talk of totems and twinship, Williams still liked to think of Lane as a philistine businessman, ill-at-ease with things of the mind and the finer effusions of the human spirit. Anthony Blond remembers how Lane’s ‘eyes glazed’ when congratulated on a recent Pelican, and how Williams said, ‘Now you’ve upset him. Don’t you know he can’t read?’, which may have been meant as an affectionate joke but seems almost too insulting to be true; Richard Hoggart, a more reliable witness, described a meeting in Williams’s office in St James’s Square to discuss a donation from Lane to Hoggart’s Centre for Contemporary Studies at Birmingham University, and how, after producing a bottle of hock from ‘a well-stocked cupboard incorporated into his desk’, Williams turned to Lane and said, ‘Oh, give him what he wants, Allen. You’ve made a fortune by riding cultural change without understanding it.’ Whatever his understanding, Lane was shrewd enough to know a good thing when he saw it: after Tony Godwin suggested that a Lowry painting which hung in the directors’ dining-room might be presented to Bill Williams as a leaving present, since he was known to admire it, the picture suddenly vanished, reappearing soon after on the walls of the Old Mill House. Not unnaturally, Lane resented being patronized: Bruce Hepburn, a successful and popular sales manager, fell from grace when, during the course of an editorial meeting, he turned to Lane and said, apropos some literary matter, ‘You wouldn’t understand that, Sir Allen.’
Whereas Bill Williams combined condescension with clear-headedness, in that he never wanted or expected to be more than a right-hand man, Morpurgo patronized Lane while cherishing delusions of grandeur that combined self-importance and pathos in equal measure. Several times, in the years after Lane’s death, he claimed to have been the heir-apparent – or, as he put it, ‘the Prince of Wales’. ‘I believe that I was the only person who was brought to the walls of Caernarvon Castle twice, the second time in the Sixties when, in the role of potential successor, I attended several sales and editorial meetings, at least once as Chairman,’ he told Steve Hare, striking an appropriate note of bathos as he did so. In his perceptive but self-serving biography of Lane he claims the ‘dubious distinction of being the only man who twice mounted the steps and twice was tripped before he reached the throne’. ‘On the first occasion,’ he informed New Statesman readers, ‘I was pulled back before I was proclaimed; on the second I was presented to the populace – then pushed into the moat. Allen Lane never forgave me for knowing how to swim – which seems to confirm Williams’s opinion that he was a sadist.’ No member of the ‘populace’ can recall Morpurgo being presented to them from the walls of Caernarvon Castle, or anywhere else for that matter: no doubt it was as spurious as Morpurgo’s repeated claim to have been ‘one of Allen Lane’s very few confidants’.
Morpurgo’s expectations, unrealistic as they always were, may have become inflamed when Clare Lane fell in love with his stepson Michael, then at Sandhurst and later to achieve fame as a writer of children’s books. As it turned out, the young couple’s decision to get married had quite the opposite effect. Far from cementing Morpurgo’s tenuous foothold in the firm, it drove the two men irrevocably apart, so much so that, according to Morpurgo, they never spoke again: much to Lane’s relief, no doubt, since he had come to loathe Morpurgo, and was glad to see the back of him at last. In Morpurgo’s version of events, set down in his biography and elaborated in his memoirs, Harry Paroissien took him out to lunch, at Lane’s request, and during the meal Morpurgo was informed that, on the basis of his salary at the National Book League, he could afford to give the newly-weds an annual allowance of £2,000 a year, which Lane would then match. Morpurgo was so infuriated by the suggestion that he, ‘a salaried book-trade administrator and modestly successful author’, should be expected to stump up the same amount as a publishing millionaire that he let out a cry of, ‘To hell with you both, and to the lowest circles of Hell with Allen Lane!’, stormed out of the restaurant and, on the grounds that he had sullied their friendship, never spoke to Lane again. The whole episode, he declared, was typical of Lane’s ‘zest for labyrinthine machination and the cowardice which made him prefer the use of hired assassins to face-to-face confrontation’. And with that Morpurgo disappeared from the Penguin story, resurfacing only when he wrote Lane’s life some years after his subject’s death. He left the National Book League in 1969 to become the Professor of American History at Leeds University: Robert Lusty, who commissioned the biography at Hutchinson, was considered by Lane to be ‘about my oldest friend on this side of the Atlantic, apart from Bill’, but it may be that he had no idea of Lane’s real opinion of his former colleague.
Towards the end of Godwin’s time, Lane had, in a deliberate attempt to reassert his control over editorial matters, paid Robert Lusty at Hutchinson £25,000 for the paperback rights in Svetlana Stalin’s Twenty Letters to a Friend, buying the book over the phone without consulting anybody else; and after Godwin’s departure, he infuriated his young left-wing editors by agreeing with Charles Pick of Heinemann that Penguin would publish the simultaneous paperback edition of Randolph and Winston Churchill’s account of the Six Day War. For a time there was a stalemate, with the editors refusing to work on the book, but in the end Lane got his way: like a prewar Penguin Special, the book was co-published within ten days of delivery of the typescript, and the first printing of the paperback amounted to 100,000 copies. Godwin’s inheritance was, in part, being dismantled. David Pelham from Harper’s Bazaar was appointed to look after fiction jackets (‘If you’re going to make changes, change ‘em now. Chop!’ Lane told him). Lane and Harry Paroissien had wanted to close down Allen Lane The Penguin Press, but Charles Clark persuaded them to think again, and he was deputed to run both ALPP and Penguin Education; and although Lane worried that Harry Paroissien was showing his age and seemed unable to deal with the younger generation, life seemed to have recovered much of its old flavour. To the historian Paul Addison, who met him at this time, he seemed to exude a sense of power, not unlike Sir Magnus Donners in Anthony Powell’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, but he was never a pompous tycoon: he went on holiday to Morocco with Nora and his cousin Joan Collihole, smoked some hash, and was too dazed the following day to read a page of his book; meeting the recently knighted Rupert Hart-Davis for the first time since the death of Sir Rupert’s third wife, the former Ruth Simon, ‘he flung his arms round me and kissed me – in the Garrick Club, much to the amazement of the other members’. When visiting Joan Collihole and her sister Evelyn in Devon he seemed happy to hang about the kitchen or go shopping, lugging the groceries back by hand; Dixon of Dock Green was his favourite television programme, perhaps because its hero, played by Jack Warner, looked rather like him; he had a fish-tank in his office, and when his daughter Christine asked him what he did all day, he told her that he’d sit there ‘with my feet on the desk and watch the fish’.
But no sooner had Penguin life improved than his health let him down. ‘Why are you so scared by death and dissolution?’ Frostie asked him after he had been laid low by an attack of jaundice in the early Sixties. ‘I suppose because you are coming to it all rather late in life, and as one who has hardly known what it is to be ill.’ In due course he had more reason to be scared. In July 1968 he wrote to Frostie to say that, far from being in Spain as expected, he was incarcerated in the Middlesex Hospital. ‘In general terms,’ he told her, ‘it’s innards towards the bottom end.’ The diagnosis of bowel cancer seemed horribly appropriate: it was always said in the office that Lane’s favourite book was F. A. Hornibrook’s The Culture of the Abdomen: The Cure of Obesity and Constipation etc., published by Heinemann in 1924, and when the poet and translator James Michie, then the editorial director of Heinemann, was taken to lunch at the Zoo to discuss the possibility of a job at Penguin, they talked about the weather for most of the meal until, at the coffee stage, Lane leaned forward and urged upon him the importance of regular bowel movements and the passing of a daily ‘stool’. Kaye Webb wrote to say that she felt sick when Edward Boyle broke the news at an editorial meeting: she admired Lane for being so ‘reticent and unfussy’, but reminded him that ‘people who love you will want to be fussing’. ‘You must try to be the best, fastest-healing, miracle patient they’ve ever had,’ she told him; nor need he worry about the office, ‘because we’ll work even harder…’
Lane’s courage in dealing with what proved to be a fatal illness, and his reluctance to have attention drawn to his plight, provoked widespread admiration. ‘Your stamina and your resolution will soon restore you to your usual volcanic form,’ wrote Bill Williams: a month later, on his way to Lake Como, he wished that Lane could come with him ‘so that we two wise old soldiers could sit in the san and ruminate upon our campaigns and adventures’; Lane, for his part, told his old friend how much he had ‘appreciated your visits to this rather dismal cell. Having enjoyed rude health up to the present time, it comes a bit hard to face some of the problems of mortality.’ Lettice rang the hospital, and was surprised to learn that he was sitting up in bed and asking for newspapers: he was, she told Frostie, doing well but he had become very thin and ‘looks about half of himself. ‘I sometimes think you must think I am very callous about Allen,’ she went on, suspecting perhaps that her tone might seem insufficiently sympathetic, ‘but he is so much part of me that the cruel part of me exactly fits him – I can exorcize myself through him.’
Among the members of staff who appeared at the Middlesex bearing flowers and chocolates was a new fiction editor named Judith Burnley. She had met Lane in Spain, when she was working on a woman’s magazine: she had told him of her interest in short stories, and after her arrival at Penguin he had encouraged her to start a new series, Penguin Short Stories, which appeared four times a year over the next three years, and included work by established authors and novices, Shiva Naipaul among them: Tom Maschler had published new plays in the New English Dramatists, and Tony Godwin had planned to publish a hardback fiction list, but this constituted Penguin’s first foray into original adult fiction since Penguin New Writing. Another, much older beneficiary of Lane’s editorial hunches was also in touch: writing from Majorca, Robert Graves told Lane that he had ‘always been deep in debt to Penguins, and to you personally: especially for commissioning The Greek Myths’. Figures from his past were always welcome, but Lane retained his interest in the present: Robert Hutchison, one of Godwin’s young editors in John Street – Godwin had appointed him religious books editor after Hutchison told him he was prepared to give God ‘the benefit of the doubt’ – visited him in the Middlesex shortly after Mick Jagger had performed in an open-air concert in Hyde Park, and Lane was keen to hear all about it.
Lettice Lane once said of her husband’s last three years that ‘he had his hell here and now – it was horrible’, and although he put on a brave face and still talked about the future, his involvement with the day-to-day running of Penguin could not continue as before. Reporting to Frostie from the Middlesex on an outbreak of civil war between old guard and Young Turks, he said that ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’ve had enough, and have no intention of going back to the office. One could go on battling, but to what purpose? It’s been a great adventure, best at the start when it was all a bit of a lark, but good too as the pattern began to form and we blossomed out in so many directions.’ Of course he went back once he’d been let out, but not with the same energy or enthusiasm; and although Paroissien had proved a broken reed, he seemed happy enough to leave matters in the ambitious hands of Chris Dolley. A bouncing, ebullient figure with a permanent tan and a melon-shaped grin on his face, Dolley was keen on modern management techniques, knew about cashflow and budgets, and despised Penguin non-fiction editors in particular as unworldly, donnish ‘red moles’, middle-class sympathizers with the 1968 student revolts who had no understanding of business and no sense of financial responsibility, and wasted valuable resources publishing Maoist tracts and revolutionary handbooks, of which Carlos Marighela’s For the Liberation of Brazil, with its bomb-making tips, was the most cited example; he believed that Penguin was being ‘used as a soap-box’, and nowhere more so than in the Latin American Library, edited by Richard Gott, with its books about South American radical priests and the followers of Che Guevara. Most of the Penguin editors returned his disdain in full, regarding him as a wide boy and a philistine, only interested in profit-and-loss accounts and moved by the dispiriting disciplines of the publishing accountant. They would have liked him even less had they known that while still in Baltimore he had urged an increasingly desperate Lane to sack the ‘Gang of Three’, and that Lane had begged him to come back and run Penguin.
Dolley’s detractors, of whom there were many, were convinced that only death prevented Lane from becoming disillusioned with his new protégé; but for the time being he was happy to allow him his head. Dolley’s subsequent claims that Penguin was in dire financial straits when he took command in the autumn of 1968 were certainly exaggerated – the firm remained in the black throughout the late 1960s, and the number of copies sold rose by 1.5 million a year between 1964 and 1970, with the biggest increase shown in 1969 – but he was right in his belief that the systems used were no longer adequate for running a firm of its size and complexity. According to Bill Williams, Lane ‘never quite grasped the niceties of budgeting or the tidal mysteries of cashflow’, but he was not unique in this respect among publishers of his generation, most of whom placed more faith in shrewdness and native wit than in the abstractions of accountants and management consultants. According to Dolley, there were no financial controls or management accounts; there was a negative cashflow, the warehouse was clogged with unsaleable books, suppliers could not be paid, and there was an overdraft of £600,000 at the bank (which was hardly unusual or surprising, since publishers inevitably have money paid out in the form of advances and production bills, and it takes time for the tide to flow back from booksellers and wholesalers). Margins had been steadily eroded since Godwin’s arrival: books were under-priced and over-printed, with unbusinesslike editors committing the cardinal publishing sin of printing too many copies in order to get the low prices they were after. The huge investment involved in setting up Penguin Education had been a steady drain on funds, and – in Dolley’s opinion – ALPP had been an expensive failure, producing books that sold modestly in hardback and had, for the most part, little paperback potential. After comparing costs with Ralph Vernon-Hunt, he realized that Penguin was paying more than its competitors for paper, typesetting, printing and binding, so reducing the margins still further; large advances had made matters even worse. He negotiated an immediate loan of a million pounds from the bank; margins on new books were increased and print-runs reduced, and Hans Schmoller was asked to renegotiate terms with the firm’s suppliers.
Lane agreed that there had been far too much over-printing, but was too ill to be fully involved. He had always been keen to keep Penguin prices as low as possible, and his old-fashioned idealism had manifested itself in 1964 when Jim Callaghan, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, appealed to industry to exercise price restraint. ‘You’ve heard what the Chancellor has said,’ Lane told a pricing meeting. ‘We’re going to exercise price restraint. It’s in the country’s interest, and I think we should do it.’ Lane’s public-spiritedness may have cost Penguin dearly, since price increases were, for some years, pegged to 1964 levels. His words are touchingly evocative of a vanished world, ignorant of cashflow, management accounts and the stock control systems now being imposed by Dolley, Ray Maskery, the chief accountant, and John Rolfe: one has the sense of two different perceptions of life, one representing the past and the other the future, passing in a haze of mutual incomprehension.
Frostie, of course, was unimpressed by all she had heard of Dolley. ‘I feel a deep sense of exhaustion at the thought of yet another palace upset in the cause of this succession fever,’ she wrote. ‘On what grounds is he likely to be the answer?’ she wanted to know. ‘What about Harry’s expectations and situation? What qualities has CD got that are a real improvement on the two Tonys [Godwin and Walker]?’ Lane was, she suggested, merely pretending to ‘face a situation you don’t want to face at all. You insisted on having your way in picking the Tonys even though all they stood for was so plainly wrong, and tagging after them was difficult enough for almost all their colleagues.’
Whatever Frostie’s reservations, Dolley was in charge, and still more so when Harry Paroissien finally bowed out: but Lane’s ‘succession fever’ was far from over, and became all the more heated when Robert Maxwell told his fellow MP Edward Boyle that he ‘was only biding his time before having a go’. Richard Hoggart came up with a scheme whereby a consortium of universities would buy the shares in Penguin for two-thirds of their market value to ensure ‘continuity of control and a guarantee that no quick profit would be made by anyone’; Lord Goodman bustled to and fro, and a meeting was held with Hoggart, Alan Bullock, Isaiah Berlin, Asa Briggs and other eminent academics, but although such a plan tickled Lane’s vanity and his sense that Penguin was not a publishing firm like any other, it ground to a halt when it became apparent that individual universities could not guarantee to stay in the scheme. There was a suggestion that OUP and CUP should jointly acquire Penguin: more seriously, there were renewed discussions with Heinemann and the Thomas Tilling group, and – or so it was claimed after Lane’s death – with Mark Longman, whose family firm had merged in 1968 with Pearson’s, the owners of the Financial Times, to form Pearson Longman Ltd; Paul Hamlyn’s pink Rolls-Royce was seen parked outside the Old Mill House, but he came to discuss a possible role in the firm rather than a takeover. Despite Lane’s unhappy dealings with American publishers and his worries about British publishers being bought up by their American rivals, he seemed unconcerned when McGraw-Hill bought shares in the firm. ‘You’re welcome! Most welcome!’ he told its President, Shelton Fisher, and before long McGraw-Hill had increased its holding in Penguin from 10 to 17 per cent. But even as the corporate publishers hovered in the wings, part of him wished that some way could be found for Christine and David Teale to be involved in the future running of the firm, young as they both were.
Lane’s fiftieth anniversary as a publisher was marked with a flurry of dinners, speeches and presentations. Old Penguin, embodied in Noël Carrington, Bill Williams, Frostie, Eleanor Graham, Nikolaus Pevsner, Max Mallowan and E. V. Rieu, presented him with a painting of Priory Farm by S. R. Badmin, one of the artists featured in the post-war Puffin Picture Books (it was agreed that a John Piper would be too expensive); a publishers’ dinner was held at the Garrick, graced by Robert Lusty, Bill Williams, Harold Raymond, Ian Parsons of Chatto, Hamish Hamilton, Arthur Crook, Billy Collins, Edmund Segrave, Desmond Flower, Jock Murray, Fred Warburg and Edward Young. Despite a recent admission that ‘I’m not a very intelligent man, and I’ve really got away with murder’, he was made a Companion of Honour: he was too ill to receive it in person, but congratulations flowed in from Lord Thomson of Fleet, Harold Raymond, Agatha Christie and Baroness Budberg, who assured ‘darling Allen’ that ‘H. G. [Wells] always said it was the best one’. Edward Boyle arranged a vast and formal dinner in the House of Commons, attended by, among others, Harold Evans, Lord Goodman, Kenneth Clark, Max Reinhardt, Norah Smallwood, Noël Carrington, Elliott Viney, Edward Young, John Lehmann and J. H. Plumb, who had been appointed Penguin’s history advisory editor in 1961: the assembled throng was treated to a speech of mind-boggling pomposity by the don and civil servant Lord Redcliffe-Maude, a fellow-Bristolian, who spoke at length about his time at Eton and his experiences as the High Commissioner in Basutoland before admitting that he loathed paperbacks and only read them as a last resort.
Rather more to Lane’s taste was a party at Vigo Street, suggested by Ethel Mannin and restricted to such old friends as Joan Coles (she who had first suggested the name Penguin), Ben Travers, Norman Clackson of sailing fame, Bill Williams, Frostie, Edmund Segrave, Bob Lusty, Christina Foyle and Peggy Rafferty, the proprietor of the Duke of York in Iddesleigh, where Lane was the patron and founder of the darts league. Having suggested the idea, Ethel Mannin was unable to attend. Writing to apologize, she revealed how far she had travelled from the advanced ideas of her youth. ‘That’s an incredibly dirty book The Bodley Head published, My Father and Myself,’ she remarked of J. R. Ackerley’s classic memoir. ‘I wondered if you’d read it? I know anything goes nowadays, but the physical details are the very, very end, even in this post-Lady Chatterley era of depravity…’
Among other absentees were Kingsley Martin, who had just died, and J. B. Priestley, who a year or two earlier had expressed his regret that his relations with Penguin had not been as happy as they might have been. ‘I always had the feeling that somebody there – certainly not you, and not Billy Williams, who is a friend of mine – was against me and my work: perhaps one of Dr Leavis’s pupils,’ he had written, bearing in mind, perhaps, the large number of Leavisites who had contributed to Boris Ford’s multi-volume Pelican Guide to English Literature: back in the Fifties, both Lane and Williams had been keen to publish a Priestley Companion – ‘Allen Lane is as ardent as I am about the pro-Priestley campaign,’ Williams had told him – but matters had ground to a halt when Priestley’s agent A. D. Peters (‘a pretty tough nut’, in Lane’s opinion) insisted on an advance of £1,000 rather than the £500 offered to other authors in the series. Peters would certainly have been among the guests at a huge party held at Stationers’ Hall. ‘I’m all for lumping the lot, publishers, booksellers, critics, literary agents, printers and authors into one gigantic binge with lashings of good grub and booze and calling it a day,’ Lane told Bill Williams, adding that what he dreaded above all else were ‘pompous speeches’; and, ill and frail as he was, he stood by the door of the Stationers’ Hall, shaking hands with an interminable stream of well-wishers. Lane’s sentimentality, and his sense of the symbolic occasion, seldom let him down, and on 23 April 1969, exactly fifty years after he had joined The Bodley Head, Penguin finally published Ulysses in paperback. The advance – £75,000 – was the highest yet paid by a paperback publisher in this country: but the book had sold 420,000 copies by the end of the following year, and the wheel had come full circle.
Gratifying as it might be to meet John Gross and Stephen Spender to discuss the possibility of his backing a successor to Encounter, lunch with fellow-tycoons like Israel Sieff and Max Rayne, and put up the money needed to endow the Morison Room in the Cambridge University Library, given over to Stanley Morison’s papers and work-in-progress, Lane was well aware that, though still only in his sixties, time was running out. His time in hospital had made him realize that his ‘hold on life is on a leasehold basis and not a freehold, and that the tenancy is due to run out in the foreseeable future’; after one of his monthly lunches with Bill Williams, then recovering from his throat cancer, he told Dick that ‘Our old pals are popping off like flies, and I realize that I now know more people on the other side than I do here.’ He looked back with nostalgia to the old days and colleagues who no longer worked for the firm. He asked Bill Williams to write a history of Penguin, urging him, three weeks before his death, to make it a top priority; he had lunch with Edward Young to discuss a collection of reminiscences, and asked Dick if he would make a contribution; although Kaye Webb was not keen to reprint Eleanor Graham’s slow-selling Story of Jesus, he asked her to slip it through. ‘I often think that our old and well-weathered friendship deserves a bit of life together: talking, talking, talking about what we have learned from so much living,’ Bill Williams told him; and they would sit for long hours together in the garden at Priory Farm, drinking white wine and poring over the past. He had had enough of city life, he told Williams, and was happy to spend his days at Priory Farm: but he was constantly in and out of hospital, and for the last year of his life a nurse lived in at the farm, while Ron Blass bought him a second-hand Rolls-Royce, large enough for him to lie down in the back. After a visit to the Middlesex, Lettice told Frostie that he wouldn’t allow her to change his dressings: ‘I really can’t be of any use, except as a snappy companion – and, after all, he has got Nora…’ Frostie, devoted as ever, sent him postcard views of Edwardian Bristol during his last illness, as if she was steering him home.
‘I am still making progress, but it will be some months before I am completely mobile,’ Lane wrote to Dick in February 1970, adding that he had been thinking of taking a set of rooms in Albany, where the three brothers had lived all those years before; a few days later he wrote again to say that he would arrange for Cliff Bosley, his chauffeur, to meet Dick when he arrived at Southampton on the Canberra in May, and that although he was back in bed he was planning a trip to Spain. Such hopes were never realized: he died, quite suddenly, on 7 July, and his ashes were taken to St Nectan’s church at Hartland to be buried alongside those of his parents and Uncle John. Letters of condolence flooded in, the obituaries were long and laudatory, and Richard Hoggart, Harry Paroissien and Robert Lusty addressed a mighty throng at a memorial service in St Martin’s in the Fields. He left £1,216,474 in his will, the greater part of which was left to the Allen Lane Foundation: Lettice was left nothing, Lane fearing that she could all too easily fritter away a fortune, and neither were his three daughters, all of whom, he felt, had been adequately catered for by the trusts he had set up for them in the 1950s; £10,000 was left to the Society of Authors, the Royal Literary Fund, that lifeline for indigent authors, and the Book Trade Benevolent Fund, whose bungalows in Hertfordshire provided retirement homes for booksellers, most of whom had been wretchedly paid during their working lives, and £500 to the staff of the Garrick Club, where, before he was eventually made a member, the blackballs against his name had been unkindly compared with caviare in a teaspoon; there were some thirty bequests to friends and colleagues, gifts of books and paintings, and £10,000 to Bob Maynard’s blind daughter in Australia. It had been a brief but busy life, and one that had brought pleasure and improvement to millions around the world.