musings from 50 albemarle street
attracted to a magnet. After my time at Eton I went up to Magdalen College Oxford and not being academic I graduated with an excel- lent third-class honours degree in Modern History (this only went up to the end of the 19th century beyond that was ‘current a V airs’!). Speaking of Magdalen (and as a diversion), I was sitting there with a friend one evening reading an account by John Buchan of a walk he took from London to Oxford on a Sunday. In a fit of undergraduate enthusiasm we decided to follow his example and borrowing a friend’s car, drove to London and set o V on foot at 6 am from Hanger Lane. We followed the old A40 all the way to Oxford and walked exhausted twelve hours later into Hall at Magdalen for dinner. Just the kind of mad thing an undergraduate would do. On another occasion I swam the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia before wandering across Turkey to the Syrian border. I claimed to have followed in Byron’s footsteps (breaststrokes!) until someone reminded me that Byron swam the Hellespont not the Bosphorus (needing much greater stamina). On the way back to England I climbed Mount Parnassus by moonlight up a stream bed and was nearly eaten alive by one of the fierce mountain hounds trained to defend sheep from the rustlers. I luckily survived and managed to watch from the summit the sunrise over the Peloponnese. Three months later a backpacker was found dead in the mountain as a result of an unfortunate meeting with one of these bloodthirsty hounds. Before joining Murray’s in 1964, I decided I should learn some- thing about business and signed on to Ashridge Business School. There, far from learning how to cope with a small family publishing firm, I was trained to run businesses such as steel mills. I was almost the only person on the course coming from a company of under 500 employees. Murray’s had thirty-seven and unlike the others was more like a large family. When, on joining Murray’s I tried to im- plement critical path analysis to streamline the systems, I was firmly told by one of the packers in our warehouse, ‘Young John, you can’t possibly use that here’. There was an uproar and rightly so; the firm was too small for this to work and was also too steeped in tradition. I then spent some time in Frome at the printers, Butler & Tanner, where I decided for my apprenticeship to produce a little book of my own to demonstrate the skills I was learning. It was made up of a
655
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter