Partner Andrew McCall
Queer Places:
Eton College, Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead SL4 6DW
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
36 Chester Row, London SW1W 8JP, UK
Anthony Bernard Blond (20 March 1928 – 27 February 2008) was a British publisher and author, who was involved with several publishing companies over his career, including several he established himself, or in partnerships, from 1952.
Anthony Bernard Blond was born in Sale, Cheshire, the elder son of Major Neville Blond CMG, OBE, who had been a major in the Second World War and was later the founder of the Royal Court Theatre.[1] His mother, Reba Nahum, came of an established Jewish family in Manchester, and was the sister of Baron Nahum, the photographer. His parents divorced when Blond was a child and Blond was educated at Eton, where he was bullied.[1] He briefly served National Service in the Army, but growing pacifism soon led to him registering as a conscientious objector. Having gained a History exhibition (scholarship) to New College, Oxford,[2] he lost it by indulging too much in the distractions of an undergraduate life: "the joys of drink, people, parties, fancy waistcoats, foreign travel and falling in love – mostly with young men."[1] Academic study seeming to him so much less attractive than other pastimes. He started a magazine called Harlequin which enjoyed considerable success and frequently flirted with scandal. He did, however, reject a poem by Antony de Hoghton, one of the outsize personalities of the time, which began "God was in his garage, cranking up his Bentley". De Hoghton, piqued, took the poem to Cambridge, where Mark Boxer did publish it and was duly sent down for blasphemy.
After Oxford University, he briefly worked for a literary agent Raymond Savage,[3] and briefly joined Allan Wingate, but that publishing company folded in 1958, and with his own £5,000 set up a new firm, Anthony Blond (London) Ltd, in partnership with the future novelist Isabel Colegate[2] Reported to have given the first chance to some 70 writers, Blond was particularly close to the novelist Simon Raven.[1] Blond set up various publishing firms over the years, including Blond Educational in 1962, which he sold in 1969 to CBS, and he went into partnership with Desmond Briggs[5] as Blond & Briggs in 1960, an informal arrangement that lasted until 1979 when Briggs retired[4] and Harlech Television bought the company in 1979, retaining Blond as an advisor. In a management buyout Blond regained control after two years, and established his last partnership, Blond, Muller and White. Century Hutchinson absorbed this firm in 1987. Blond was an early director and publisher of satirical magazine Private Eye. His friendship with James Goldsmith (and other members of the Clermont Club circle) survived Goldsmith's numerous writs to the magazine in the mid-1970s.
In 1955 he had married Charlotte Strachey, daughter of John Strachey and the novelist Isobel Strachey. She had inherited her father's complexion (he had been known in Bloomsbury as "spotty John"). Anthony took her to the most expensive dermatologist in Harley Street and she became a beauty and a part-time model. They lived in a handsome house in Chester Row, with the publishing office in the back room, but the marriage was put under strain by a series of miscarriages and a tragic stillbirth. In 1960 Charlotte left quietly one day with the journalist Peter Jenkins, whom she subsequently married.
For 14 years Blond shared his life with Andrew McCall, author of The Au Pair Boy, with whom he created a beautiful house in Corfu, as well as continuing to live and entertain in Chester Row. I first met the Bentley-driving, boat-rocking Anthony Blond in the house of his sometime mother-in-law Isobel Strachey, writes Andrew Barrow. Almost every other night at the end of the Swinging Sixties, she gave a party in her L-shaped drawing room in Oakley Street, Chelsea. Accompanied by his glamorous young friend Andrew McCall, with whom he lived between his two marriages, Blond made a bouncy, punchy, almost showbiz entrance. I already knew about his fame as a publisher. I soon learnt that he was also part of a wild and witty circle of knockabout friends, who included the Joan-of-Arc-like Philippa Pullar, author of Consuming Passions, the American-born clergyman Charles Sinnickson, widely known as "the Vicar of Chelsea" and the future TV chef Jennifer Paterson.
After ending the relationship with Andrew McCall, who went to live for a time with Simon Raven, Blond married Laura Hesketh in 1981. Blond also had a son, Aaron, by the author Cressida Lindsay. Blond was a Labour Party candidate in Chester at the 1964 general election and was also on the executive of the National Council for Civil Liberties.[4] His autobiography, Jew Made in England, was published in 2004.[7]
In 1989, driving through a French village called Blond, and he decided to move there. In the event he bought a house in the nearby town of Bellac. He died in his 80th year, in hospital in Limoges, near the house in Bellac where he had lived with his wife Laura for the past 25 years. Blond was described in Michael Barber's Guardian obituary as "the last of the eponymous Jewish publishers whose chutzpah made publishing hum in the days before the conglomerates".[4]
My published books:
