Till recently publishing was often a family business, but most of the famous
names have now been swallowed up by conglomerates. The most recent to go was
John Murray, sold to Hodder Headline, itself a subsidiary of the French firm
Hachette.
John Murray, often described as “the last of the gentleman publishers”, had
survived almost two and a half centuries, run by seven generations of John
Murrays, though Jock (John Murray VI) was the son of a Murray daughter and
exchanged his father's name of Grey when he entered the family firm.
He wasn’t actually the first to change his name. The firm’s founder was John
McMurray, who became a bookseller and publisher after serving in the Royal
Marines and engaging in other business ventures. He did so because he
observed that “many blockheads in the trade are making fortunes.”
This was in the 1760s and he soon dropped what a friend called “the wild
Highland Mac”. Anti-Scots feeling was running high in London, stirred up by
the radical politician John Wilkes in his newspaper the North Briton. The
Scots were also thought to be clannish, one reason why Dr Johnson disliked
them.
John Murray II was the one who really established the firm. He was a friend of
Sir Walter Scott, who was associated with him in publishing a Tory magazine,
the Quarterly Review. (Scott’s son-in-law and biographer John Gibson
Lockhart became its editor.) But John Murray’s real lion was Lord Byron, and
the firm was to be more closely associated with Byron than with any other of
its authors.
Byron and Murray weren’t always on easy terms. Murray was nervous about
publishing Byron’s masterpiece, Don Juan, being alarmed by its improprieties
and by the personal attacks on royalty, politicians and established authors
such as Wordsworth. He was, however, enough of a businessman to set his
scruples aside.
Byron died in Greece, where he had gone to fight for Greek independence from
the Ottoman empire and left unpublished memoirs. What followed was quite
extraordinary. Murray and a close friend of Byron, John Cam Hobhouse,
decided the memoirs must be destroyed. Better not to revive memories of the
scandalous episodes in Byron’s life that had driven the poet into exile.
The memoirs would damage the poet’s reputation of which both men were jealous
guardians, and would distress his estranged wife, Annabella, and his
half-sister Augusta, who had also been his lover. So the manuscript was
burnt in the drawing-room of the Murray house, 50 Albemarle Street, Mayfair.
This was all the more bizarre because neither Murray nor Hobhouse had actually
read the memoirs. Hobhouse feared they would reveal Byron’s bisexuality. He
knew about this because he had been Byron’s companion on his first visit to
Greece, and had later had letters from him recounting his conquests.
Murray knew nothing of this side of the poet’s life. Even 100 years later it
came as a surprise to John Murray IV when Harold Nicolson pointed out in
1923 that Byron’s last love poem had been addressed to a Greek boy called
Loukas.
Even so, the decision to burn the memoirs remains as strange as it was
reprehensible. It would surely have been possible to publish an expurgated
version, or to set the manuscript aside for publication at a later date when
all immediately concerned were dead.
Indeed later generations of Murrays hoped that this had been done. John Murray
VII remembered that his father, Jock Murray, was sure the manuscript was
somewhere in the Albemarle Street building.
“Every time we had workmen in doing alterations he would be peering behind
panels and under floorboards, still hoping it would turn up,” he recalled.
Murray succeeded Murray and the firm flourished. They published Malthus’s
Essay on Population forecasting famine, and, astutely, a rebuttal of his
theory. They published Charles Darwin’s controversial Origin of Species and,
very profitably, a series of travel guides for the continental holidays the
railways made possible. They found a bestseller in the Letters of Queen
Victoria.
Jock Murray was for his authors an ideal publisher. After the second world
war, he made 50 Albemarle Street an unofficial club for them. The likes of
Osbert Lancaster, John Betjeman, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Harold Nicolson
would drop in for sherry at six in the evening.
Invariably bow-tied and affable, Jock Murray regarded his authors as an
extended family. Some needed urgent “injections of cash” at odd moments.
“Have made Bank Manager happy,” Jock telegraphed to Paddy Leigh Fermor on
one such occasion. He had his eccentricities, once claiming to have been the
only London publisher to have read proofs in the nude.
For the Irish writer Dervla Murphy, the reward of being a Murray author was
“the sheer friendliness, the lack of any friction, and one feels honoured to
be published by Murray’s”. Many agreed, even if other publishers could offer
bigger advances. Some didn’t realise that Jock was often in the grip of a
profound depression as he was so amusing.
When Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation became a bestseller in 1969, Jock arranged
for a royalty cheque for several thousand pounds to be tucked into the toe
of the author’s Christmas stocking; not a gesture any author is likely to
receive from one of the conglomerates.
Always there was Byron. Murray was, uniquely, identified with the firm’s most
famous author. Almost every good book on Byron, from the first Life written
by Byron’s friend the Irish poet Thomas Moore, came out of 50 Albemarle
Street, most notably the American scholar Leslie Marchand’s 12-volume
edition of his Letters and Journals, the publication of which all but made
up for the act of cultural vandalism committed by John Murray II and
Hobhouse.
Jock Murray was obsessed with Byron. His wife, Diana, allowed him to talk
about Byron at either lunch or dinner, but not both. There were three in
their marriage, she said.
My own association with John Murray was less than I had once hoped for. In a
rare failure on his part, my agent Giles Gordon didn’t manage to interest
the firm in a book on Byron’s travels to be published in his bicentenary
year; they had already, I think, commissioned one from Michael Foot.
But 10 or so years later, I did turn off Piccadilly into Albemarle Street to
stand where Byron and Walter Scott had first met (and found they liked each
other). I had been invited there to discuss an idea for a book on
Anglo-Scottish relations over the years.
It was a joy to have the idea approved, the contract signed, to be at last a
Murray author. It was as if one was being invited into a select brotherhood.
But the book — The Thistle and the Rose — as books will, was longer in the
writ-ing than I had anticipated, and when at last I delivered copy it was to
the Hodder Headline building in the Euston Road, not to the time-honoured
offices in Albemarle Street.
It was a sad day — and not only for Murray authors — when this grandest of
publishing firms was sold. It was the end of an era, the end of a particular
style of publishing, the end of a literary world.
But for Scotland, there was compensation when the wonderfully rich John Murray
archive was sold to the National Library of Scotland (for much less than its
market value, and with the purchase price assigned to a trust to be used for
the care of the archive). It was an appropriate destination. It was two and
a half centuries since the first Murray, John McMurray, had set off from
Edinburgh to establish himself in London, and, as for Byron himself, he had
written that he was “born half a Scot and bred a whole one”. So in a
sense the archive had come home.Publish and be praised,
The Seven Lives of John Murray: the Story of a Publishing Dynasty,
1768-2002, by Humphrey Carpenter, John Murray, £25
