A recommendation from Colin Roderick was hardly a passport to Beatrice’s favour. Not having time to read the manuscript herself, she gave it to a reader, who thought that, though the author had a ‘marvellous’ knowledge of current Australian slang and could write convincing dialogue, the book lacked plot, and the incidents, though sometimes funny, were not sufficiently exciting to maintain interest. The reader added: ‘Perhaps as a series in some periodical … “Days in the life of a New Australian” or something of the kind, would have a success … It’s pleasant to read anything so competent but I doubt its success published in its present form as a book.’ A second reader complained that, although the manuscript had flashes of humour, there was far too much about damp courses, concrete foundations and other aspects of the building trade. (Given Weird Mob’s subsequent history, it was probably fortunate for the A&R readers that they were anonymous.)
Reports and manuscript went to Beatrice, who replied to John O’Grady on 30 January 1957. As she usually did when she had not read a manuscript herself, she paraphrased the readers’ comments: ‘In spite of some very amusing incidents and a fine command of Australian slang, Nino’s story would not, in our readers’ opinion, make a successful book. It is felt that the plot is not strong enough and that there is too much detail about various building operations.’ And she repeated the suggestion that They’re a Weird Mob could make a series of magazine articles.
The rest, as they say, is history. John O’Grady took his manuscript to Sam Ure Smith, who grabbed it with both hands and sold 300 000 copies in its first three years. It was made into a feature film starring the Italian actor Walter Chiari, and by 1981 it had been reprinted forty-seven times.
They’re a Weird Mob is close to the top of A&R’s list of ‘books that got away’ – although, because it was printed at Halstead and distributed by Angus and Robertson, the company did make money out of it.4 Turning it down did nothing for Beatrice’s reputation as a publisher, and people who thought she was too big for her high-heeled boots – and there were a number – were pleased that she had made such a spectacular error of judgement. However, her rejection of Weird Mob is not really surprising. She was not inclined to trust Colin Roderick’s opinion and she would have concluded that the manuscript was just another would-be-humorous novel, no different from a dozen others the editorial department rejected every year. Had she read the manuscript herself, she would probably have come to the same conclusion. When They’re a Weird Mob became so successful and Beatrice was reminded that she had turned it down, she was regretful but not devastated. For her, inadvertently rejecting Christina Stead was a much graver matter, though Stead sold less than one-tenth as well.
Nor is it entirely fair to stigmatise Beatrice for her lack of focus on profitability. The department she ran was surprisingly unfettered by commercial imperatives; indeed, the editorial section dwelt in splendid fiscal and intellectual isolation from the rest of Angus and Robertson. Beatrice and her staff were not responsible for preparing the budgets for books, for instance: that was the job of the finance or production department. Beatrice probably knew how well books had sold only if editorial corrections had to be made for a reprint. With its lack of deadlines and its staff occupied with the careful weighing and measuring of words, ‘poor bloody editorial’ resembled an old-fashioned university liberal arts department more than an arm of a modern publishing company.
Beatrice carried on a tradition that dates at least from the Middle Ages: as a guide, mentor and teacher to her staff, whom she trained on the job, she was in effect the leader of a craft guild. The team of editors Beatrice trained in the 1950s and 1960s – Nan McDonald, Alec Bolton, Elisabeth Hughes, Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, Janet Bennett, Anthony Barker, Eric Russell – became some of the best in Australia. Beatrice parcelled out the manuscripts from the editorial cupboard; she read the most promising ones herself, but all the editors were expected to read and report on some, and to write individual letters of rejection. The rule was to try to say something pleasant, or at least not too discouraging, about the manuscript, although Beatrice did not always follow this herself. Every manuscript received was reported on, and the reports were typed and filed by one of the typists downstairs in case the author submitted the same manuscript under a different title. Editors sometimes read manuscripts while they ate lunch at their desks; according to legend, someone’s ham sandwich once disappeared into a rejected manuscript.
As time went on, A&R’s editors developed areas of expertise. Poetry and fiction were usually edited by Nan McDonald or Rosemary Dobson, practical books such as gardening and cookery were given to Elisabeth Hughes, Eric Russell was generally allotted large, intricate books such as H.M. Green’s A History of Australian Literature. But whether the book was on sheep diseases or partial dentures, was a children’s story or a biography, most of A&R’s editors could handle anything.
Training was a part of her job that Beatrice took very seriously. ‘Darling,’ she would say to new editors in impressive tones, ‘if you make a mistake in print, it will haunt you for the rest of your life.’ Elizabeth Wood-Ellem remembers that when she joined the department in 1953 with a BA from the University of Melbourne, she spent her first year having everything she did scrutinised by Elisabeth Hughes, whom Beatrice had personally trained, while Beatrice – of whom Wood-Ellem was somewhat in awe – kept a strict eye on her progress.5 Wood-Ellem sometimes found this careful inspection painful, but by the end of her first year she knew the basics of her craft thoroughly.
Beatrice did not confine her training to hands-on editing. She asked Henry Mund – the head of A&R’s production department and a German immigrant of immense learning about books, as well as a gifted typographer – to give a series of talks to her staff about typefaces and book design. So, too, did Halstead’s head printer Leslie Apthorp, formerly employed by the great printers Jarrolds of Norwich.
Alec Bolton, who joined Beatrice’s editorial department shortly after the war, often said its fact-checking expertise was comparable with that of the NewYorker magazine.6 For general inquiries, editors used their own books, consulted those in the bookshop or went to the public library. Wood-Ellem once spent three weeks in the Mitchell Library checking Miles Franklin’s quotations in Laughter, Not for a Cage . An excellent memory was an indispensable asset; editors were expected to notice, for example, that the American general who fought in the Philippines during World War II might be Douglas Macarthur on page 47 and Doug McArthur on page 195. Authors who wilfully allowed inaccuracies in their manuscripts drove the editors mad. The worst offenders were Ion Idriess and, especially, Frank Clune. When an editor pointed out that Clune had given the same ship two different names, he solved the problem by tossing a coin.7
Copy editing or line editing was an orderly process, though sometimes messy. Manuscripts were supposed to be submitted on double-spaced foolscap or quarto, typed on one side of the paper, with wide margins to allow plenty of room for editing, which was always done in red. As well as a small bottle of red ink and a mapping or fountain pen, standard editorial equipment included a pair of scissors, Sellotape and a pot of glue. There were basically two ways to restructure a manuscript: retype the whole thing again or cut it up, rearrange it and type additional bits. Correction fluid did not exist: an editor who changed her mind about alterations in a manuscript retyped the passage and stuck it into the appropriate place.8 Everybody knew how to type. Mistakes were erased with a special hard tan-coloured eraser that smudged the carbon paper used for making copies.
Editors worked from nine to five-thirty Monday to Friday, and the staff – not Beatrice – took turns to come in on Saturdays in case an author turned up or telephoned. In 1954 the starting wage was £7 a week: low pay, especially for a university graduate, of whom there were several on the staff. Equal work for equal pay did not exist. Though the women editors were doing the same work as their male counterparts, their small brown pay packets never held as much cash. Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, with a medical student
husband to support, was paid less than Eric Russell, who had no dependants. Some were also irritated by the convention that the men on the staff, apart from their immediate colleagues, called the women by their first names, while they were obliged to address the men as ‘Mr’.
The editorial department conducted a love–hate relationship with production – the part of A&R responsible for metamorphosing a stack of edited manuscript into finished, bound books. Frank Thompson, who had been trained as an editor, was offered a job in the production department in 1958. George Ferguson assured him that Henry Mund would look after him, as would John Holland and Anne Davis, Beatrice’s niece, who had been working there.9 Before Thompson could take up the job, however, Henry Mund died of a heart attack, John Holland went to New York, and Anne Davis married and left A&R. Horrified and inexperienced, Thompson was the sole member of the department at a time when A&R were doing 150 new books and reprints a year. John Ferguson, George’s son, who had been learning the business at Halstead, soon joined and both young men had to learn their jobs very rapidly.
This was often made difficult by the editorial department and the printers at Halstead. Once a pictorial book about South-East Asia was ready to print, except that the editorial department had failed to supply a caption for one of the photographs. The printer, whose name was Thode, told the production department that they had to get the caption by noon. Editorial promised to supply it, which they did at two that afternoon, and Frank Thompson called Halstead with the caption. ‘Too late,’ said Thode. ‘We’ve printed.’ Thompson gulped and said, ‘Who wrote the caption?’ ‘I did,’ said Thode. ‘It was just an ordinary bloody street scene somewhere, so I called it “A sunny day in Bangkok.” ’
Like many other long-term A&R employees, Beatrice felt she was part of something great. Angus and Robertson wasn’t just a printing, book-selling and publishing company – it was part of the intellectual fabric of Australia, like the University of Sydney or the Australian Broadcasting Commission. George Ferguson believed, as his grandfather had done, that A&R’s publishing should express and reflect as far as possible the work of the community’s best minds. ‘We are dispensers, not prescribers,’ he once said.10 The first question must always be: is this book worth publishing? If so, it should be published, and the question of profit, though important, must be secondary.
It was this attitude, this sense of noblesse oblige inherited from George Robertson, that led the company to embark on publishing projects where profit came a long way behind commitment to Australian literary culture. The seven-volume Bibliography of Australia, a list of printed materials published between 1784 and 1900 and the life’s work of George Ferguson’s father Mr Justice J.A. Ferguson, appeared between 1941 and 1969. Angus and Robertson also published Percival Serle’s two-volume Dictionary of Australian Biography (1949), F.T. Macartney’s revision of Morris Miller’s Australian Literature (1956) and H.M. Green’s two-volume A History of Australian Literature (1961) – all indispensable reference books whose worth was far greater than their profitability.
But by far the biggest and most ambitious project Angus and Robertson undertook, and still one of the biggest and most complex enterprises in Australian publishing history, was the second version of the Australian Encyclopedia. This ran to ten volumes – nine plus an index – took ten years to complete, featured the work of more than 400 contributors, most of whom were authorities on their particular subjects, and dealt with almost every phase of Australian life. The list of subject headings alone consisted of 220 typed quarto pages, each with twenty-seven entries. The whole project was a problem for Beatrice, mainly because it gobbled up so much in the way of editorial resources. Some of her best and most experienced editors – Janet Bennett, Eric Russell, Alec Bolton – were seconded to the encyclopedia, which often over-stretched the production and printing departments as well.
Work on the encyclopedia had begun as early as 1949, when Walter Cousins engaged Alexander (Alec) Chisholm as chief editor. ‘Chis’ was a noted journalist and newspaper editor with a wide range of interests; as well as a great deal of journalism he wrote many books on natural history and several about Australian literary figures. A man with the air of a scruffy, snappy terrier, Chisholm was jealous of his knowledge and intolerant of any opposition. The rivalry between him and the historian Malcolm Ellis was a standing joke in A&R’s editorial department: their correspondence over the encyclopedia, which began ‘Dear Alec’ and ‘Dear Malcolm’ ground to a halt many years later under the permafrost of ‘Dear Chisholm’ and ‘Dear Ellis’. Chisholm had a literal sense of humour that depended heavily on puns, and he often regaled Walter Cousins and later George Ferguson with solemn and smutty schoolboy jokes. On an impressive range of letterheads – Royal Australian Ornithologists’ Union, Field Naturalists of Victoria and eventually Australian Encyclopedia Editor-in-Chief Alec H. Chisholm – Chis solicited contributions in courtly prose, complete with such phrases as ‘in a jamb’ and ‘fie upon you’ and signed ‘Ffy yours’, following the nineteenth-century tendency to delete unnecessary letters when the mning is clr. Chisholm oversaw about 6000 entries which were written, subbed, retyped, read (by himself or his deputy Bruce Pratt), set, proofed, read, corrected, sent to the author, corrected, pasted up, made up, proofed again, read and corrected before being printed and bound.11
His zeal for knowledge led him to some bizarre information. Having read somewhere that the Australian Aborigines were the hairiest race in the world, he thought an article on the physical characteristics of the white Australian should include some reference to hair. To Professor Abbie of the University of Adelaide he mused: ‘Hair seems to grow more quickly in this country than in Britain – the Duke of Gloucester told me in 1945 that he had to get his hair cut here almost twice as often as he did at Home!’12 Professor Abbie thought the Duke of Gloucester was talking through his hat.
Apart from a large map printed on English paper, the encyclopedia was a proudly Australian enterprise. The paper stock – 100 tonnes of it – was specially made at Burnie, Tasmania, and the stock for the black and white photographs came from Ballarat. Most of the printing blocks were made in Halstead’s engraving department, all the printing was done at Halstead and only Australian materials were used in the binding.
The Australian Encyclopedia, launched at the Australian Book Fair in Melbourne in March 1958 and published early in June, was universally hailed as a major event in the history of Australian publishing. ‘Our greatest work of reference by several million words,’ enthused the Age, which devoted almost a page to it. In recognition of his role, Alec Chisholm was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours that year.
Angus and Robertson’s high-minded sense of duty also extended to its employees, though it did not go as far as paying them high salaries. The house magazine Fragment, named for A&R’s cable address, was a lavish publication that appeared intermittently between 1954 and 1959, and was more than a transmitter of social news. In the words of A.A. Ritchie, the chairman of directors, its aim was nothing less than ‘to give members of the firm a better knowledge of books, of the men and women who write them, and of our fellow members who edit, produce and sell them [and] to preserve the personal atmosphere of the firm … ’13 Before Halstead Press moved from Surry Hills in 1957, the home addresses of all Halstead employees were checked and a map prepared. A site south-west of the city near a railway station was convenient for the greatest number of people, and so Halstead moved to such an area, at Kingsgrove.
Those who worked for Angus and Robertson were expected to follow high standards of dress and behaviour, especially when dealing with the public. It was an age when people smoked in the office and drank alcohol during the day; the men frequently went down to the pub at lunchtime. The management of the bookshop warned employees against drinking on the job. An undated memo ran:
Members of the Board, their friends and relations and customers have lodged complaints about the smell of liquor on assistants’ breath during wor
king hours. Actual names have been submitted but will not be mentioned unless there is a repetition. Should this occur the offender’s name will be posted on the Notice Boards. Two offences will result in dismissal. With Christmas almost with us and acquaintances extending invitations to “have one” it will be difficult to avoid … but YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
This kind of headmaster-ticking-off-the-school-assembly prose was not unusual in A&R memos.
In the 1950s Angus and Robertson was doing well. They could afford to pour vast resources into a huge project for ten years without getting a penny back. Halstead Press, which printed books for most of Australia’s publishers, expanded and moved to a modern, bigger plant. The bookshop remained one of the best in the country, employing about 300 in selling and allied service departments (general office, advertising, purchasing, mail orders) in Sydney and Melbourne. The retail operation in Australia and in the UK was going strong. Even publishing, the least profitable part of the company, was booming.
Like other employees, Beatrice assumed she had a job for life. And why not? Anyone looking at the company’s history over the last forty years – and that included George Ferguson and the board of directors – had good grounds for concluding that Angus and Robertson, the colossus of Australian publishing, was set for further growth and continued prosperity. Which just shows what an unreliable guide history can be.
Bringing the Pirates on Board: The Battles for Angus and Robertson
To many people inside and outside Angus and Robertson, it seemed extraordinary that Beatrice had so little authority except within her own department. She was obviously one of the most intelligent and experienced people in the company and yet men with less knowledge, talent and force of personality had greater status. While she had a more responsible job than any other woman in the company and had been at A&R for over twenty years, she had never been invited onto the board of directors. George Ferguson adopted his grandfather’s practice of recruiting long-serving employees to the board, but this did not apply to women.
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