‘It remains one of the more surprising facts of life that the intrepid traveller Eric Newby, who by the time I knew him had the weatherbeaten cragginess of a man only happy when halfway up the Hindu Kush, should have carved out an earlier career astride the lower slopes of haute couture. Everyone has to start somewhere, however . . . ’ – Ariane Bankes in the preface to Something Wholesale by Eric Newby
Newby was in his late twenties when he returned home in 1945 after an adventurous war. He had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy and had fallen in love with his future wife Wanda, who had saved his life when he was hiding out in the mountains. Back in London, however, demobbed and demoralized, he bowed to pressure and joined the family firm.
Lane & Newby, ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’, occupied a warren of offices in Great Marlborough Street and here young Eric was put to work in the Mantle Department, cutting off lengths of fabric to supply orders for customers.
As Eric blundered his hapless way through the various departments, doing his best to repel the advances of Lola, the in-house model – ‘a girl so silly her silliness had a sexual quality’ – things were beginning to go wrong at Great Marlborough Street. Eric’s father, an Edwardian patriarch with a light-hearted attitude to accounting, had somehow managed to keep the firm going while sidestepping the more extreme changes in fashion. But he had been running up debts, and during the Fifties Lane & Newby finally collapsed under the weight of a massive tax demand. By this time, however, Eric was laying plans for an excursion to the Hindu Kush which would form the basis for an equally exuberant and entertaining book – and the rest is travel history.
Please scroll on to read Ariane Bankes’s preface to Something Wholesale and discover a selection of our favourite Slightly Foxed titles, each capturing an author’s early steps into the working world. From hapless apprentices at literary institutions to behind-the-scenes adventures on film sets, each of these memoirs lights up the page with wit, sharp observation and humour.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF staff
Isabel, Rebecca, Edie, Ruth & Jennie
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