Header overlay
Kate Berridge on The Saturday Books - Slightly Foxed Issue 29

An Editorial Peacock

At a country-house auction when he was outbid on the zoetrope that was his reason for attending, John Hadfield, The Saturday Book’s second editor, took some consolation from picking up an unexpected bargain – a pair of peafowl. They had caught his eye surveying the buyers quizzically from the gables. On being informed by the auctioneer that they were to be shot, Hadfield immediately made an offer. But Extra Lot 378 was much easier to buy than to catch.

One was cornered in a ruined belvedere after being stalked for only eight hours. It took us 15 days of coaxing, wheedling, casting down of bread, throwing of nets, setting of snares, crawling through nettle-beds and scrambling over coach-house roofs before the other bird yielded to our pleas and a handful of currants cooked in rum, and staggered, crestfallen, into our arms.

Thus was the accession of the ‘editorial peacock’ recorded in Volume 14, 1954. It is a revealing detail of The Saturday Book, an annual illustrated miscellany, that it had such an elegant mascot. Like the fan base enjoyed by a regimental goat, regular enquiries after the well-being of the birds came from all over the world. The following bulletin appeared in Volume 19, 1959:

His first wife was taken by a fox, [he] married again, has a chick in Worcestershire, and is still as ornamental, amiable and otherwise purposeless as The Saturday Book itself.

‘Minority interest’ is generally a suicidal category for a publishing venture. Not so with The Saturday Book. This scintillating all-sorts of new essays, stories, portraits, critical studies, country notes and photo-essays acquired a cult following during an impressively long run (1941–75). Where the Luftwaffe failed to interrupt production, a crisis in the British economy succeeded, so that 1974 was the only year when n

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

At a country-house auction when he was outbid on the zoetrope that was his reason for attending, John Hadfield, The Saturday Book’s second editor, took some consolation from picking up an unexpected bargain – a pair of peafowl. They had caught his eye surveying the buyers quizzically from the gables. On being informed by the auctioneer that they were to be shot, Hadfield immediately made an offer. But Extra Lot 378 was much easier to buy than to catch.

One was cornered in a ruined belvedere after being stalked for only eight hours. It took us 15 days of coaxing, wheedling, casting down of bread, throwing of nets, setting of snares, crawling through nettle-beds and scrambling over coach-house roofs before the other bird yielded to our pleas and a handful of currants cooked in rum, and staggered, crestfallen, into our arms.

Thus was the accession of the ‘editorial peacock’ recorded in Volume 14, 1954. It is a revealing detail of The Saturday Book, an annual illustrated miscellany, that it had such an elegant mascot. Like the fan base enjoyed by a regimental goat, regular enquiries after the well-being of the birds came from all over the world. The following bulletin appeared in Volume 19, 1959:

His first wife was taken by a fox, [he] married again, has a chick in Worcestershire, and is still as ornamental, amiable and otherwise purposeless as The Saturday Book itself.

‘Minority interest’ is generally a suicidal category for a publishing venture. Not so with The Saturday Book. This scintillating all-sorts of new essays, stories, portraits, critical studies, country notes and photo-essays acquired a cult following during an impressively long run (1941–75). Where the Luftwaffe failed to interrupt production, a crisis in the British economy succeeded, so that 1974 was the only year when no issue appeared. John Betjeman’s enthusiasm for what he termed ‘the best magazine in the world’ was reflected by a readership that extended beyond England, to places as far distant as New Zealand, South Africa and the United States. The Saturday Book was the brainchild of the distinguished literary critic Leonard Russell, who was also the husband of Dilys Powell (a distinction that I hesitate to list second). From the outset it was clear that Russell was not targeting the Man on the Clapham omnibus, though an élitist editorial stance was not informed by class prejudice but rather by cast of character. Russell’s original aim was to provide a literary shelter in a warring world, a place to which nostalgics might escape from the storm of the times. He wanted to reach those readers ‘who regularly cast their newspapers aside, hope for the best and retreat into a novel by Proust or their dream of having the outside of their house repainted’. Not everyone was impressed by this approach. To encourage nostalgia at such a time was seen as a ‘poor show’ and the first issue was criticized as unpatriotic and, even more damning, a waste of precious paper. Russell took this to heart, to stunning effect. From the second issue onwards actualities became part of the mix. The heavy bombing of London was vividly described in Alexander Werth’s Blitz diary, while the foreign correspondent Gregor Ziemer recorded a girls’ lesson in Hitler’s pre-war Germany: ‘Our Führer wants and needs soldiers to destroy his enemies. You all know soldier don’t just grow by themselves. They must be born. Don’t wait too long. You are now 15 – in a year or two you can have babies. Meanwhile become acquainted with some good Aryan soldier.’ The documentary content of these pieces alone makes The Saturday Books an invaluable source of social history. Illustration in these annuals was not subservient to the text but a marriage of equals. Bill Brandt captured the devastation of Bow Bells, and Cecil Beaton cast his eye over the rubble. The privations of war were reflected from an unusual perspective – young Margot Fonteyn sewing her own costume with the help of her mother, or a grocer’s Specials Today board announcing, ‘No sweets, no chocolate, no crisps – ditto chewing gum, matches, cigarettes, papers, snuff or ice cream’. The suffering in other parts of the world was documented with grainy images of arresting horror – ordinary streets in ordinary places strewn with corpses in everyday clothes in Greece, China, Russia, each a stark reminder of their greater exposure to the enemy at that stage of the war. Russell could have been left in no doubt that his original concept of ‘a tranquil book without a thunderclap of any kind’ was increasingly wishful thinking. In the fourth issue there appeared a photograph of the editorial office near Gloucester Road after a bomb brought the roof down while the editor was still at work, a powerful reminder of the challenging conditions in which the first Saturday Books were produced. In ways that would be inconceivable today Russell was given a free rein. He dealt directly with paper-makers and binders, printers and photo-engravers. There was no market research, no working parties or editorial board. Leonard Russell directed every detail of both form and content. His care and craftsmanship and the commercial faith placed in him by the publisher Hutchinson resulted in an association that has gone down in book-trade history as a golden reign. The Saturday Book showed what might be achieved when the love and vision of an editor were matched by the indulgence of his publisher regarding budgets for illustration. From Stanley Spencer in Volume 6, seven new drawings. From Agnes Miller Parker supremely beautiful wood-engravings commissioned for so many issues that she could be described as a collaborator not just a contributor. Likewise Olive Cook and Edwin Smith, whose combined talents were used to remarkable effect in a series of photo essays and pictorial features. In Volume 15, a characteristic treat from this couple is ‘The Art of Adornment’ – a pictorial history of chains, coronets, pendants, spangles, embroideries and rings. If you didn’t think you would be interested in shell ritual ornaments from the Belgian Congo, take my word, you will be surprised. And I defy the most serious-minded person not to have their curiosity piqued by the pearl-bedecked splendour of Maharajah Duleep Singh of Lahore and Elveden, Suffolk. According such respect to pictorial matter as well as to typography, borders and lettering, headpieces and endpapers paid off when on four occasions The Saturday Book won a national design award. Over the years, and from 1952 under the subsequent editorship of John Hadfield, a tranquil element did enter The Saturday Book, but tranquil was no euphemism for dull. The annuals achieved the remarkable feat of being light-hearted without being lightweight, of seasoning the scholarly with sophisticated wit, and of expanding the role of illustration so that many image-led features resembled an intelligent picture book. To pick up a Saturday Book is to get away without passport, suitcase or planning, to be spirited away to the cerebral equivalent of a luxury resort. The speed of departure from the everyday is sometimes almost instantaneous. You feel you’ve been beamed up on to another planet when the editor divulges that he is writing his introductory notes ‘lying naked in a calanque on the island of Porquerolles’ or, on another occasion, from ‘a gastronome’s paradise’ somewhere off the Côte des Maures. ‘Beside us – in addition to the hotelier’s pet pig, with a pink bow on its collar – a glass of Armagnac’, he tells us in Volume 20, 1960. The Elysian site of the porcine encounter was a private island belonging to a Frenchwoman of great distinction ‘who has permitted no tree to be felled for fifty years and has put a total embargo on motor cars, bicycles, mopeds and the juke box’. The escapism here described is emblematic of the getting-away-from-it-all quality that was the founding principle of The Saturday Book and which, apart from the war years, remained an intrinsic part of its charm. The Saturday Books are the literary equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities, but unlike their material counterpart, there is not a single dud specimen to be found. In every issue distinguished minds deliver consistently compelling writing on an eclectic range of subjects – the mythology of the salamander, a natural history of the unicorn, a social history of the chimney sweep, an essay on mechanical books including ‘mooing’ books, this last a gem by Iona and Peter Opie, nursery-rhyme scholars. And on top of all that, the list of contributors to The Saturday Books reads like a roll of honour of eminent littérateurs: Julian Symonds, Peter Quennell, P. G. Wodehouse, Graham Greene, H. E. Bates, Philip Larkin, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Nina Bawden, A. L. Rowse, A. A. Milne, Dilys Powell. Dilys Powell’s contributions to her husband’s venture are a delightful skein of gold running through many issues. I particularly rate her scholarly critique of three Disney characters, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy, in Volume 3, 1944. She praises the trio’s enthusiasm, contempt for the word ‘impossible’ and unfaltering pluck in the face of ridicule:

Goofy’s daring has induced in him a disregard of physical law whose logical consequence in a logical world could only be a broken neck. A man without the debonair and jovial confidence of Mickey Mouse might have lapsed into misanthropy. Less strongly armed with consciousness of moral rectitude, Donald Duck would long since have fled from the humiliations of public life.

The calibre of the contributors is everywhere apparent – as early as Volume 2 we read ‘John Steinbeck is welcomed to these pages.’ He tells a good story of how a young girl ‘in a dirty little Californian cow town in 1879’ is persuaded to board a funeral train to gate-crash a grand funeral in Monterey. This adventure leads to an encounter with Robert Louis Stevenson. Elsewhere, from Cyril Ray comes a portrait of Matthew Gregory ‘Monk’ Lewis, author of the best-selling habit-ripper in which monks and nuns undo and are undone by one another’s debauchery. Lewis, one discovers, was also a friend of Wilberforce and the owner of a vast slave plantation in Jamaica, and it is to Lewis as a plantation proprietor that Byron alludes when he laments the death of his friend:

I would give many a sugar cane Matt Lewis were alive again.

I own to a penchant for biographical portraits, and The Saturday Books are full of them, proof that a good writer can distil the essence of a personality in a paragraph or two, where a lesser writer might take 500 pages and still fail. Peter Quennell’s essay on Henry Fox, the last Lord Holland, in Volume 2 is typical:

He liked women but had mistrust of love affairs. As soon as the footlights had begun to go up he was already foreseeing the gloom and oblivion of the theatre when the stage had been deserted.

The Saturday Books are the best thing I know for silencing the tinnitus of present worries, and they do so without lapsing into the trivial or pining for some Paradise Lost. What better tonic in our own troubled times?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Kate Berridge 2011


About the contributor

At a country-house auction when he was outbid on the zoetrope that was his reason for attending, John Hadfield, The Saturday Book’s second editor, took some consolation from picking up an unexpected bargain – a pair of peafowl. They had caught his eye surveying the buyers quizzically from the gables. On being informed by the auctioneer that they were to be shot, Hadfield immediately made an offer. But Extra Lot 378 was much easier to buy than to catch.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.