Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

by Richard Branson

‘I just wanted to ask you –’

  The telephone rang again.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ Tony would apologise, ‘but it’s Mick Jagger for you and he says it’s urgent.’

  ‘Please excuse me for a minute,’ I’d say, reluctantly picking up the phone. ‘Mick, hello. Fine thanks, and you? Really? An exclusive? Yes, that sounds great …’

  And on I went until Jonny couldn’t stop laughing in the call box opposite or the pips went.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I’d say to the journalist. ‘Something’s cropped up and we’ve got to dash. Are we finished?’

  The journalist would be ushered out in a daze, passing Jonny on the way, and the telephone would stop ringing.

  Journalists swallowed our scam hook, line and sinker: ‘Photographers, journalists, writers from papers throughout the world seem to have fallen over themselves in assisting Student,’ wrote the Sunday Telegraph, ‘and a massive voluntary distribution organisation has grown throughout schools and universities, allowing, perhaps, over half a million students to read the magazine.’

  ‘An amazing number of top-class contributors. Its scope is limitless,’ said the Observer. While the Daily Telegraph said, ‘It seems probable that Student, the glossy publication that has attracted a lot of well-known writers, will become one of the largest circulated magazines in the country.’

  By autumn 1968 Jonny’s parents had understandably had enough of having almost twenty teenagers squatting in their basement and asked us to find somewhere else to live. We moved to 44 Albion Street, just round the corner from Connaught Square. Jonny left to go back to school and take his A levels. He felt guilty about abandoning me, but he was under pressure to continue his education, and his parents sensibly worried that working on a small magazine from their basement was hardly the perfect foundation on which to earn much of a living.

  Without Jonny, Student almost fell to pieces. There was too much for me to do, and nobody else whom I could really trust to help me out. After a few weeks, I asked Nik to come and help. Nik had finished at Ampleforth, but was due to go to Sussex University at Brighton. He agreed to delay going to university and come to Student’s aid.

  With Nik’s arrival, Student was put back on the rails. He started controlling the cash, and, rather than having a large biscuit tin full of money which anyone could dip into to buy food or drink or dope, Nik used our Coutts account properly. He started writing cheques and then checking the stubs off against the bank statements. Nik had lost a front tooth, and with his long black hair he looked rather terrifying. I think he kept away a lot of debt collectors.

  The commune, which had been very cramped in Jonny’s basement, now spread up and down the new house. People made dens and there were mattresses and joss sticks everywhere. By now most of the people working with Student were nineteen or twenty, and there was lots of talk about free love, and lots of practice of it. I installed a large brass bed on the top floor, with a telephone running off a long extension lead which looped down through the banisters. Some days I did all my business from bed.

  I’d put the house in my parents’ name so that the owners – the Church Commissioners – would not think we were running a business from it. My parents loved the excitement of journalism and, although Dad was a barrister with short hair who wore a blazer and tie to church on Sundays, he and Mum never had any problem talking to people who had hair halfway down their backs and hadn’t shaved or washed for a month. Lindi came to stay in Albion Street every half term and during some of her holidays. She helped distribute Student and fell in love with a series of men working on the magazine.

  I had a short relationship with Debbie, one of the girls living at Albion Street and working on the magazine. One day she told me she was pregnant. We were both very shocked and realised that a baby was the last thing we could cope with. Debbie decided that she wanted to have an abortion. After a few telephone calls it became clear that this would be very difficult to arrange. Debbie could not have an abortion on the National Health Service unless she had proven psychiatric or medical problems. We grew frantic phoning around all the National Health hospitals trying to see if there was any way this could be overcome. When we tried to find a private doctor to help, we found it would cost over £400 – money we didn’t have. I was at my wits’ end when I finally tracked down a kind doctor in Birmingham who told me that she would arrange the operation for £50.

  After the operation, Debbie and I realised that there must be a host of young people who had faced the same problem and had nowhere to turn for help. It would surely be much better if there were one telephone number you could ring to be referred to the right doctor. It wasn’t just unwanted pregnancies that were the problem: what if you needed psychological help, or had a venereal disease but were scared of admitting it to your nice family doctor, or had run away from home and had nowhere to live? We drew up a long list of the sorts of problems that students faced, and decided to do something about it. We would give out our telephone number, work out a list of all the best and most helpful doctors, and see who called.

  GIVE US YOUR HEADACHES was the slogan for the Student Advisory Centre. We handed out leaflets along Oxford Street and advertised in Student. Soon the calls started coming in. A number of doctors, both in the National Health Service and the private sector, agreed to give their services for free or a minimal charge, so we built up a network of professionals to whom we could refer people. Worries about pregnancy and contraception formed many of the calls, but we also became quite a centre for gay men and lesbians to hang around. It soon became clear that they were not as interested in asking our advice as in finding ways of meeting each other, revealing how difficult it was for gay people to lead a normal social life.

  The Student Advisory Centre began to take up more time than Student magazine. I would be talking to possible suicides for an hour at three in the morning, advising pregnant girls as to who was the nicest doctor they could go and see, writing to someone who was terrified that he had caught venereal disease but didn’t dare tell his parents or go and see a doctor – and in what little time was left, trying to run the magazine. One of the biggest problems we found ourselves dealing with was that teenagers were unable to confide in their parents. Hearing others’ stories made me realise how lucky I was in my relationship with my own parents. They had never judged me, and always supported me, always praised the good things rather than criticised the bad things: I had no qualms about admitting my problems, worries and failures. Our work was to try to help out those who were in trouble but with nowhere to turn.

  With both the Student Advisory Centre and Student magazine, life at Albion Street remained frantic and the numbers of people coming in and out of the house at all times of day and night continued to drive our neighbours to distraction. Due to complaints from the neighbours, we were visited on a regular basis by the Church Commissioner inspectors to check that we were not carrying out any kind of business. These visits had all the clockwork tension of a West End farce. The Commissioners had to give us 24 hours’ notice before an inspection, and as soon as we received it the whole Student staff and my mum immediately wheeled into action.

  All the telephones were piled into a cupboard, and the desks and chairs and mattresses were covered by dust sheets. The Student staff would pull out paint pots and paintbrushes, put on overalls and start painting the walls of the house. Mum would arrive from the country with Lindi, eight-year-old Vanessa and an armful of toys. By the time the Church Commissioners arrived they would find a friendly crew of painters cheerfully decorating the house, the furniture all swathed in dust sheets, while a mother and her family huddled upstairs. The little girl would be playing with some toys in a rather bemused way, while Lindi and I were engrossed in Monopoly. If Vanessa ever looked as if she might ask us what was going on, Mum would rapidly shoo everyone out of the room, saying it was time for Vanessa’s bed.

  The Church inspectors would look at this happy domestic scene and wonder what all the fuss was abou
t. They would scratch their heads and say what a lovely girl little Vanessa was, drink their tea and have a nice chat with my mum. As soon as they had disappeared down the street, Mum went back home; we put away the Monopoly, yanked off the dust sheets, plugged in the telephones and got back to work.

  The end came on one fatal visit when we forgot to unplug the telephones. By then it was their fifth visit and the inspectors must have suspected something. They stayed for their ritual cup of tea and were just about to leave when two of the telephones started ringing inside the cupboard. A shocked silence fell.

  ‘And just listen to that,’ I improvised quickly. ‘Can you hear that telephone? The walls are so thin in these houses we can hear everything that goes on next door!’

  The inspector strode forward and pulled open the cupboard door. Five telephones, a switchboard and a tangle of wires all tumbled out on top of him. Not even a big family needed a switchboard. That was the end of 44 Albion Street. Vanessa and her collection of dolls and toys were taken down to Shamley Green for the last time, and Lindi and I packed up the Monopoly set. Student magazine had to find somewhere else to use as an office.

  We scoured the neighbourhood looking for somewhere to rent. The best deal was offered by the Reverend Cuthbert Scott. He liked the work of the Advisory Centre and offered us the use of the crypt at St John’s Church, just off the Bayswater Road, for no rent at all. I put an old slab of marble across two tombs to make my desk, and everyone found themselves somewhere to sit. We even charmed the local Post Office engineer into connecting the telephone without our having to wait the normal three months. After a while none of us noticed that we were working in the dim light of the crypt surrounded by marble effigies and tombs.

  In November 1969 I received a visit from two plain-clothes policemen from Marylebone Police Station. They had come to draw my attention to the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act and the 1917 Venereal Disease Act, in case I was unaware of them, which, not surprisingly, I was. They told me that it was illegal to advertise any help or remedy for venereal disease. These Acts had originally been introduced to stop quack doctors from exploiting the large numbers of people who came to them for expensive and ineffective cures for venereal disease. I argued that I was only offering a counselling service and that I passed on anyone who had VD to qualified doctors at St Mary’s Hospital. But the policemen were adamant: if the Student Advisory Centre continued to mention the words ‘venereal disease’ in public, I would be arrested with the prospect of two years’ imprisonment.

  The week before, we had successfully prosecuted a policeman from Marylebone Police Station for planting drugs on one of the Student Advisory Centre’s clients. The policeman had been sent down, and so I suspected that this visit was connected. I was amazed that the police had trawled through this old legislation to find some obscure law that we were breaking.

  We duly changed the mention of venereal disease in the leaflets we distributed around London and started describing it as ‘social disease’. Then we got a huge number of inquiries from people who were suffering from acne, and the number of people calling us for help over VD dropped from sixty a week to ten. We decided that the police were bluffing and that helping the remaining fifty people a week was worth risking the Metropolitan Police’s threats: we reinserted the mention of VD. We were wrong. The police came back to the crypt again, in December 1969, and arrested me.

  John Mortimer, a barrister who had established a reputation for his support of libertarian causes after his defence of Oz magazine and his role in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, offered to defend me. He agreed that the law was ridiculous and that the police were merely being vindictive. John reminded us that every public lavatory carried a government notice on the inside of the door offering advice to those suffering from venereal disease. If I was guilty then so was the government. I was duly prosecuted on two counts: under the Indecent Advertisements Act 1889, which prohibited advertisements of an ‘indecent or obscene nature’ and deemed references to syphilis and gonorrhoea to be indecent, and the Venereal Disease Act 1917, which banned advertisements offering treatment or advice or mentioning the words ‘venereal disease’.

  At the first hearing on 8 May 1970 at the Marylebone Magistrates Court, Tom Driberg, the flamboyant Labour MP until 1974, gave a dramatic plea on my behalf. Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans, also gave evidence pointing out how many people the Student Advisory Centre had referred to his charity. John Mortimer made his argument that, if I was found guilty, I would have no option but to prosecute the government and all the local authorities, since they had also put up notices in public lavatories. The magistrate dismissed the charge under the Venereal Disease Act on the grounds that the Student Advisory Centre did not offer to cure people but referred them to qualified doctors. He adjourned the other charge until 22 May.

  As the court case was proceeding, statistics were released revealing that the number of people with venereal disease had risen dramatically in the previous year to a post-war peak. Lady Birk, the chairman of the Health Education Council, used the statistics together with the example of my prosecution to try to amend the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act in the House of Lords.

  ‘It’s ludicrous that outmoded laws should restrict responsible efforts to stop the spread of these serious diseases,’ she said.

  By the time of the second court case a number of newspapers had declared how idiotic it was that I was being prosecuted. There was a strong movement to change the law. The magistrate reluctantly found me guilty under the strict letter of the law, but he made it clear that he considered the law was absurd by fining me just £7, some way short of the two years’ imprisonment with which the police had been threatening me. John Mortimer made a statement to the press outside the court in which he called for the law to be changed or we would have no alternative but to prosecute the government for mentioning VD on the doors of public lavatories. The newspapers all joined forces behind us, and Lady Birk’s amendment to the law was incorporated into government legislation at the next sitting of parliament. Reginald Maudling, the home secretary, sent me a personal letter apologising for the Crown Prosecution.

  That court case taught me that, although I was young, wore jeans and had very little money behind me, I need not be afraid of being bullied by the police or the Establishment. Particularly if I had a good barrister.

  One day in 1970 I came back to my desk and found that Nik had been sitting at it. By mistake he had left a draft of a memo which he was writing to the staff. It was a plan to get rid of me as publisher and editor, take editorial and financial control of Student and turn it into a cooperative. I would become just part of the team, and everyone would share equally in the editorial direction of the magazine. I was shocked. I felt that Nik – my closest friend – was betraying me. After all, Student had been my and Jonny’s idea. We had started it at Stowe and against all odds we had managed to publish it. I knew what I wanted to do with Student, and it seemed to me that everyone was happy working there. We all drew equal salaries, but ultimately I was the editor and publisher and it was up to me to make the decisions.

  I looked around at everyone working. They all had their heads bent down studiously over their desks. I wondered how many were part of this. I put the memo in my pocket. When Nik came back I stood up.

  ‘Nik,’ I said. ‘Will you come outside for a quick chat?’

  I decided to bluff my way through the crisis. If Nik had already whipped up support from the ten other people it would be difficult for me to stop them. But, if they were undecided, I could drive a wedge between Nik and the rest of them and cut Nik out. I had to put our friendship to one side, and get rid of this challenge.

  ‘Nik,’ I said, as we walked down the street, ‘a number of people have come up to me and said that they’re unhappy with what you’re planning. They don’t like the idea, but they’re too scared to tell you to your face.’

  Nik looked horrified.

  ‘I don’t think that it’s
a good idea for you to stay here,’ I went on. ‘You’re trying to undermine me and the whole of Student. I think that we should remain friends, but I don’t think you should stay here any more.’

  I still don’t know how I managed to say those words without blushing or my voice cracking. Nik looked down at his feet.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ricky,’ he said. ‘It just seemed a better way to organise ourselves …’ he trailed off.

  ‘I’m sorry too, Nik.’ I folded my arms and looked straight at him. ‘Let’s see each other down in Shamley Green, but Student is my life.’

  Nik left that day. I told everyone that Nik and I had disagreed over how to run Student, and they were free to leave, or to carry on, whatever they wished. They all decided to stay with me, and life at the crypt went on without Nik.

  This was the first real disagreement I ever had. Although I felt anguished, I knew I had to confront it. I hate criticising people who work with me, and I try to avoid doing so. Ever since then I have always tried to avoid the issue by asking someone else to wield the axe. I admit that this is a weakness, but I am simply unable to cope with it.

  Nik was my best friend and I deeply hoped that he would remain so. When I was next down in Shamley Green I went round to see Nik and found him eating one of his mum’s puddings. We sat down together and polished it off.

  Apart from the fact that he was my oldest friend, Nik had taken charge of the distribution of the magazine and made sense of it. I missed him terribly. Until Nik had arrived, the distribution had only ever been casually handled, with bundles being sent out to volunteers in schools and universities. For over a year Student carried on without Nik and we put out four more editions. When Nik told me that he was standing for a student election at Sussex University, I used Student’s purchasing power with the printers to run off some cheap campaign posters. Nik won the election but was later disqualified because he had got outside support for his campaign.