musings from 50 albemarle street
organised for David Livingstone’s daughter to receive music lessons in Paris and provided her with pocket money. Freya Stark asked my father to send her a hip bath to the Hadhramaut by diplomatic bag, and Noni Jabavu, the first Bantu author to be published in English, asked me to send her a pot of Plush Prune nail varnish urgently. I had no idea how to procure this so I had to ask the advice of a young secretary. From 1812 the drawing room at 50 Albemarle Street became the great meeting place of authors, politicians, explorers, scientists and archaeologists. Walter Scott described these gatherings as ‘Murray’s Four o’clock Friends’. Its historic rooms are still lined with portraits of generations of authors including Byron, Walter Scott, Coleridge, Darwin, David Livingstone and those who came later. Up to 1928, when the publishing o Y ces took over, No. 50 was the home of the Murrays and in many ways my father continued to treat it as home. Indeed, it still has the feeling of a family house. After the Second World War he re-established the tradition of commissioning por- traits of his 20th-century authors and these now adorn the beautiful 18th-century staircase up to the first floor. When I’m in the main rooms alone in the evening as it gets dark, I can imagine the authors coming out of their frames like the scene in the haunted gallery in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore and picking up their conversations from where they’d left o V . In my father’s time, Osbert Lancaster always popped in for a gossip after doing his pocket cartoon for the Daily Express . John Betjeman was another regular visitor and a great friend. They had met at Oxford, and my father had taken an interest in his early poet- ry. Betjeman’s first collection, Mount Zion , was published privately in 1931 in a small hand-printed edition. My father took a copy to show his uncle old Sir John Murray, then head of the firm, saying ‘You won’t have heard of Betjeman, but I’m anxious to publish his verse.’ Sir John replied, ‘Poetry doesn’t pay. Betjeman? Probably a German. No, no, no.’ My father didn’t give up and sold his few shares in Bovril to finance the publication of Continual Dew in 1937 . It was Betjeman’s second book of poetry and included one of his most famous lines, ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!’ My father would often take Betjeman to Murray’s warehouse where
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