A Certain Style
Page 27
‘The situation will not be solved until after the annual general meeting,’ wrote Beatrice to Xavier Herbert in October 1960.13 ‘We have a reasonable chance of winning the cause of Publishing versus Finance, and it is of tremendous importance that we should win.’ It certainly was. Burns, who with his supporters just held the balance of power on the board, was now discussing with Sir Frank Packer the possibility of Packer’s Consolidated Press Holdings buying out Burns’s interest. For Beatrice and the other Ferguson supporters, the thought of A&R being merged with a newspaper empire was almost as bad as anything Burns alone could do.
At a board meeting on 18 October the situation seemed to improve. Anthony Hordern suddenly resigned as the chairman and in his place was elected Norman Cowper, who had strong links with Angus and Robertson. Just as importantly Arthur Swain, whose bookselling and stationery business Burns had bought and who owned a large parcel of A&R shares, declared himself in support of the Ferguson forces and deposed Burns as managing director. Though he remained on the board, Burns lost his dominant position.
So far so good. Like other members of the pro-Ferguson group, Beatrice believed that the annual general meeting in December – at which, ironically, almost the whole board except Walter Burns was up for re-election – would see Publishing defeat Finance. However, a week before the AGM it became clear that Arthur Swain, with his large block of shares, had switched sides. He and Burns had nominated a board that excluded George Ferguson and his supporters altogether.
There was very little time before the meeting and the situation was desperate. But a large number of shareholders were uncommitted to either side, and they could be reached. Beatrice swung into action, contacting every shareholder she knew, urging them to support the Ferguson forces. Hedley Jeffries spread the word down in the book-shop; Mary Gilmore and others did what they could. Colin Roderick collected evidence that state education departments all over Australia were alarmed at the non-appearance of textbooks for the 1961 school year and had little confidence in the way Burns was running A&R’s publishing. Simpson mobilised thirty-four prominent A&R authors, including Ruth Park, D’Arcy Niland, Kenneth Slessor and May Gibbs, to sign a statement to be presented at the AGM that they would never publish with A&R again if Burns and his nominees succeeded.
It all ended very quickly. At the AGM a majority of A&R’s shareholders supported the traditional, anti-Burns forces, and the Ferguson team was elected to the board. Burns remained but his supporters were in the minority. Sam Ure Smith, a rival publisher who had helped garner support for the Ferguson faction, had agreed to signal the result of the meeting from his city office window; a white handkerchief meant victory, a piece of paper with a red cross defeat. A jubilant Ure Smith hoisted the handkerchief and before long, with a bottle of champagne and a group of supporters, he rushed down the King Street hill to 221 George Street to join the A&R staff in a victory celebration.
The literary community was almost as relieved and delighted. ‘I feel sure George Robertson was sooling on the archangels,’ wrote Dame Mary Gilmore to George Ferguson on 26 December 1960. And a fortnight after the meeting a thankful Beatrice wrote to Xavier Herbert: ‘It was quite amazing how the old shareholders stood by – as well as our many friends in the book world. It has all been very exhausting and worrying, but now we can go ahead with a will. There is a tremendous amount of reconstruction to be done … I hope 1961 will be a very good year. At least it could not be worse than 1960.’14 Her exhilaration withstood even an Observer article in which Colin Simpson failed to deny credit for the entire triumph.15
This was not quite the end of the story. Almost a year later, in November 1961, A&R learned that Sir Frank Packer had bought Arthur Swain’s shares – Packer also held many of his own – and that Australian Consolidated Holdings now owned about 20 per cent of A&R. But Packer wasn’t about to come on board the good ship A&R – he wanted to ram it. He demanded two further seats on the board, and when that was rejected he went into full-scale takeover mode. Before the AGM on 15 December a tremendous proxy battle ensued. Colin Roderick, who had been nominated to the board, thought the day could be won if enough shares were mobilised. He organised a clever share-splitting arrangement that denied Packer control of the company.16
Early in 1962 Walter Burns resigned from the board, stipulating ill health. But Packer still had a seat on the board as well as his large shareholding. In May 1962 he cabled A&R from New York that he intended to sell his shares to an American company, but gave A&R the chance of acquiring them. George Ferguson immediately asked a number of British publishers for their help in getting rid of Packer. In his letter to Sir Stanley Unwin (of George Allen & Unwin), he added, ‘I certainly do not need to tell you the consequence that could flow in the Australian book trade from having A&R in American hands. I realise that if the Americans want to enter Australia we can’t stop them, but their road will be much harder if they don’t have the resources of A&R than if they do.’17 In order to keep the Americans from invading their patch, a group of British publishers led by William Collins – reluctantly, because Collins itself was just about to start publishing in Australia and was unwilling to tie up funds – agreed to buy Packer’s share of A&R. They paid well above market price for them, and Frank Packer sold out of Angus and Robertson at a tidy profit, as he had almost certainly intended.18 It was understood that, when A&R’s share price rose to the price Collins had paid, the British publisher would sell its shares to buyers friendly to the A&R board. In the meantime Collins would not interfere in A&R in any way, and hoped to be free of its investment within three years.19
So Angus and Robertson was safe again, free to pick up the pieces and carry on publishing as before. But despite George Ferguson’s repeated insistence that ‘all this is behind us’, the company had been shaken to its core. In only three years it had gone from an old-fashioned, paternalistic organisation, owned and managed by its employees, where, in the words of Colin Roderick, ‘the sun was as likely to fall out of the sky as something to go wrong’, to one that had come within a whisker of its staff losing control altogether.20
The person hardest hit by the events of 1960 was probably George Ferguson. Ever since joining the company as a young man in 1931 he had worked for the cause of Australian books, overseen the expansion in publishing of poetry, literary fiction, educational texts and writing for children, and forged important links between Australian and overseas publishers. He had served the interests of A&R’s shareholders and carried on the business honourably and with profit, in the tradition of his grandfather George Robertson. And now, because of his naivety, trusting benevolence and lack of business acumen, he had almost lost it all. Colin Roderick always believed that ‘the advent of Burns … totally undermined [Ferguson’s] moral universe’ and destroyed his faith in human beings.21
There was other fallout. P.R. Stephensen was left with a half-formed paperback publishing scheme and no home for it. At first he thought of selling his list to Consolidated Press but they were not interested, then he considered floating his own company, again unsuccessfully. He took legal steps to get his promised salary back; eventually some accommodation was reached but from then on he bitterly referred to the company as ‘Anguish and Robberson’.22
And what of Beatrice? With Angus and Robertson restored she was able to return to work, though perhaps in a less committed spirit than before. The events of 1960 had shaken her badly. For the first time she realised how vulnerable she was, how easily everything she had built up could be destroyed. Never again would her position be as secure.
PART 4
1960–1973
221 George Street
The Backroom Girl Moves up Front
The new offices at 221 George Street were in a part of Sydney that Beatrice had once known well, and in 1960 it was surprisingly unchanged. Still there, a few doors down from A&R, was the now dilapidated old building where she had rented a room, with divan bed and gas ring, twenty-five years before.1 The warehouses of
Circular Quay remained, as did the seagulls, the green-and-cream ferries held at anchor by creaking ropes, and the sharp smell of tar and salt.
A&R’s office was close to two well-known pubs, the Brooklyn and the Newcastle, and the latter, run by Jim Buckley, speedily became the A&R watering hole. Beatrice often dispatched members of her staff to the bottle department to replenish her supplies of red wine or Vat 69 whisky, as well as soda in metal-netted siphons. Though slightly more refined than the Brooklyn, the Newcastle nevertheless had a certain roughness. Frank Thompson, sent to buy a bottle of red wine for an office party and having already had a glass or two, once had difficulty with the word ‘Cawarra’ (a cheap local brand). The barmaid thought he meant Corio, a vile Australian whisky, but Thompson loudly insisted on red wine. The man next to him at the bar looked him up and down contemptuously. ‘’E wants a bottle a plonk, the bloody poofter!’ he announced to the dusty bar, and turned his back.2
The area was showing signs of gentrification. Near the Newcastle was the Andronicus coffee shop, where A&R staff on their way to the office from Wynyard station could enjoy a cup of real coffee, still a novelty in the Sydney of the early 1960s. And close to the office was John Huie’s, one of the first wine bars in town where, unlike the pubs, patrons could have a meal as well as drink their red wine or hock, lime and soda. Huie’s served French bread rolls with ham and salad and became a favoured place for A&R staff lunches – during the 1960s it was also one of Sydney’s best jazz venues.
At number 221 the educational and technical publishing division shared the ground floor with Robinson’s Maps – once it became known that A&R had moved, staff in the map shop as well as the education department had to cope with would-be authors – while the production department was on the third floor and editorial on the fourth. It was ironic that the publishing staff of A&R had Walter Burns to thank for new offices that, for comfort and safety, far surpassed those at 89 Castlereagh Street. Not that they were particularly lavish – one newspaper article described them as being ‘austerely finished old Edwardian chambers perfumed with that delightful ink and paper smell given off by the books stacked on tables, desks, chairs and portions of the floor’, and noted that Beatrice’s room had no pictures on the wall and a view of a brick wall and a square of corrugated-iron roof, painted red.3
The fourth floor, with the editors at one end and Georgie and her proofreaders at the other, was bisected by a lift-well housing an ancient birdcage lift with doors on two sides protected by a metal concertina arrangement that pinched the fingers of the unwary. Hal Porter, who once described Beatrice as ‘a celestial friend and a comforting goddess’, said it was ‘proper to ascend’ to visit her, but a lurch upwards in a clanging, grating lift had very little in common with a glide to the summit of Mount Olympus. Most people found it faster and more comfortable to take the stairs that circled the lift-well. It was an office joke that if the two elderly cleaners happened to be mopping the stairs, whoever used the lift knew all about their family and medical problems by the fourth floor. Once when Beatrice was holding a celebration to launch a new travel book by Colin Simpson, the party was well under way when the author arrived. The lift became stuck between the third and fourth floors and, as getting him out was impossible, guests passed him food and drink for a couple of hours until help came. (It would be nice to say that the book being launched was The Country Upstairs, Simpson’s book about Japan, but it wasn’t.)
Beatrice had not been at 221 George Street very long before she decided that her office wasn’t really suitable for entertaining. Though she continued to invite people to lunch at the Queen’s Club, she really wanted a place in the city where she could host large parties. She found it in the building next door, which was almost identical to 221 except that it was a honeycomb of little rooms, some the offices of small businesses, others rented out as studios. Such places were disappearing fast as city rents increased. On the first floor of 219 George Street was a large room that, years before, had been a studio for Thea Proctor and Roland Wakelin. Beatrice arranged to rent it from its current tenant, the artist and children’s writer Elisabeth MacIntyre. ‘Beatrice’s studio’, as this was immediately called, was an austere place, with board floors and an open balcony facing the street, furnished with a chaise longue, a rickety table, and butter boxes painted in different colours, originally seats for models and students. The most startling item was an old pale grey dentist’s cabinet with narrow pull-out trays for instruments. Its reason for being there was a mystery, but the shelves made excellent glass holders during parties. Off the studio was a tiny kitchen with a sink, a draining board and a brass tap, and Beatrice added a refrigerator to provide ice for drinks.
The studio was used a great deal, usually for drinks parties after work and occasionally for larger functions, such as book launches. Beatrice also allowed the PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) club and the Australian Society of Authors, founded in 1961, to use it for their evening meetings. She paid for the drink and food herself – George Ferguson was never very keen on entertaining – and her staff would go to David Jones further up George Street to buy bread, cheese and pâté. Almost anyone in Sydney who was a writer of any kind came to Beatrice’s studio; the parties tended to be large and raucous, with some guests (notably Colin Simpson and Hal Porter) having to be poured into taxis afterwards.
Beatrice had Sir Frank Packer to thank for another development in her working life. In 1960 Packer had bought the Bulletin and merged it with the Observer, planning to turn the result into a news magazine. Douglas Stewart recognised that this spelled doom for the Bulletin’s literary section, including the Red Page. ‘On the day we were taken over by Packer,’ he said later, ‘we were all assembled in the Bulletin corridors and old Sir Frank got up on the landing there and made a genial speech saying we were not to worry: “There may be a few staff changes I suppose, but don’t worry about your jobs.” … I applied that very afternoon to Angus and Robertson.’4 He was not the only one. The Bulletin’s literary editor Ronald McCuaig also approached A&R, as did Douglas Stewart’s assistant John Abernethy. McCuaig went to Canberra, but Stewart and Abernethy both joined Angus and Robertson.
Stewart came in three days a week to oversee and give some direction to A&R’s poetry list. His brief was also to develop Sirius Books, a paperback series of Australian classics heavily dependent on A&R’s backlist. (At last George Ferguson had got the message about paperbacks.) Stewart was a quick and efficient worker who came in at about ten, worked for two or three hours before lunch, came back to the office afterwards and went home at about four-thirty. Beatrice was delighted to have her old friend and colleague in the office, readily available for consultation.
She was less pleased to see John Abernethy. Then in his early thirties, Abernethy had been a proofreader for the Sydney Morning Herald before moving to the reading room of the Bulletin. A man of wide-ranging intelligence and literary knowledge, as Douglas Stewart quickly recognised, Abernethy was tall and broad, with dark hair and eyes, large features and a hearty voice. Though Beatrice recognised that he was highly intelligent and well informed, she found him a little too insistent for her taste.
Before long Abernethy was in charge of Angus and Robertson’s local publishing. Beatrice must have had a weary sense of déjà vu – this was the second time in two years that a man almost young enough to be her son had been promoted over her. But George Ferguson had learned from the Burns and Packer episodes: if A&R were to continue to be competitive, especially with new publishers in the field, they had to get out and find and promote new authors. Abernethy never shared Beatrice’s view that if people did not choose to be published by Angus and Robertson it was undignified to try to persuade them. In 1966 one of his friends, a young writer named Thomas Keneally, was about to have his second novel published by Cassell. Abernethy, who very much wanted him for A&R, brought the new manuscript into the office for everyone to read and make editorial suggestions. Keneally’s novel was called Larks and Heroes;
Anthony Barker, a relatively new member of the editorial staff, suggested the addition of ‘Bring’.5 Bring Larks and Heroes won the 1967 Miles Franklin Award and Keneally published several novels with Angus and Robertson thereafter, edited by John Abernethy. Abernethy was also keen to persuade Patrick White to publish with A&R in Australia, and White toyed with the idea but his London agent advised him against it. A significant writer who appeared at this time was David Ireland, whom Douglas Stewart found and supported.
Beatrice’s job had not dwindled in importance: she was still in charge of the editorial department and she and her editors continued to work as they had always done. She was also getting some publicity: a 1964 article in the Sydney Sun described her as one of Australia’s few women in a top-rank executive job.6 (Less flatteringly, journalist John Yeomans called her ‘a handsome, middle-aged veteran of the struggle to establish a viable book-publishing industry in this country’ as well as ‘intensely shy’.) But it was true that Beatrice had less influence on publishing decisions than before, as Abernethy was taking over her territory of local fiction, and it was from about this point that Beatrice quietly began to turn away from the new order and concentrate on the authors with whom she felt most comfortable.
Foremost among these was Hal Porter. In June 1960 he began to drop coy, leaden hints that he was becoming friendly with ‘a Mr Eliot (Thomas Stearns) and Mr Osborne (Charles)’, two of the movers and shakers at Faber and Faber. He had already assured Beatrice that he was busily at work on his new novel The Tilted Cross. Porter always worked fast and in concentrated bursts, and he said he was writing about 4000 words a day – especially impressive because he wrote every word in his elaborate longhand. ‘I’d love to be one of those clever people who take a year or more to write a novel,’ he wrote to Beatrice. ‘Much more gracious I feel than an immoderate few months’ stint which leaves one with pinpoint ruby eyes and looking generally as though one has been slept in.’7