‘write to Angie, and we’ll give you a price.’ The trouble was that Angie had left, yet the business was booming.
Branson had spotted a hole in the record market, and now it was all he could do to meet demand. Retail price maintenance – the system that allowed manufacturers of products to force shops to sell them at a minimum price – had been abolished by the government five years earlier, but neither record companies nor record shops had taken much notice. Rather than engage in a frenzy of discounting, the industry preferred to carry on much as it had done before, selling records at a standard price of thirty-nine shillings and elevenpence. Branson, therefore, had advertised his records at thirty-seven and six. A flood of customers had written in saying what they wanted, and enclosing postal orders and cheques. The records themselves had come in bulk from shops in Muswell Hill and the East End that were keen to unload excess stock. A group of girls had been recruited to type labels and to pack the records into envelopes. But without Angie, who could find the unusual titles that customers asked for? Who could distinguish the up-and-coming bands from the three-minute wonders?
Within half an hour, everything was agreed. Steve Lewis would become the new Angie. He would work for the business – Virgin Records, it was called – over the summer, at a wage of £10 a week. When the autumn came, he would go back to school to start his A-levels. But he would come down to Albion Street every day after school at 5 PM, and work four hours for £1, of which six shillings would have to be spent in tube fares. Once the arrangements had been made, however, Lewis saw little more of Richard Branson. It was Nik Powell – the scruffy character who had opened the door, the junior member of the partnership – to whom he would report from day to day. To his relief, Steve Lewis found Powell increasingly friendly, and came to appreciate his idealism, his warmth and his dry wit.
The mail-order record business that began in 1969 was Richard Branson’s first real commercial venture. But it was by no means the activity that he had intended to pursue. He had planned to start a national student magazine, and had first worked on it from the basement of a house belonging to the parents of a friend before moving his centre of operations to his parents’ pied-à-terre in Albion Street, near Paddington Station. The house had been taken by Branson’s parents on a short lease from the Church Commissioners for occasional nights in London, and he had been allowed to use part of it.
Student was an organizational, artistic and literary success. Its list of contributors and interview subjects read like a Who’s Who of the counter-culture 1960s. John Le Carré, the diplomat-turned-spy writer whose novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had established him a powerful reputation, had provided a short story. There were articles about Vanessa Redgrave, the revolutionary actress; David Hockney, the fashionable pop artist; and Henry Moore, the sculptor. James Baldwin, an American novelist who was exploring the uncomfortable themes of homosexuality and race, appeared in print next to an extract from a notorious speech by Enoch Powell, a coldly brilliant classical scholar who had predicted a year earlier in Parliament that racial tension caused by immigration would make Britain run with ‘rivers of blood’. Other names to be found in the magazine’s pages were Alice Walker, Jean-Paul Sartre and Stephen Spender. Letters of support had been solicited from everyone from Peter Sellers to Lyndon B. Johnson, the President of the United States.
Richard Branson was not only the magazine’s founder but also its editor-in-chief, interviewer-at-large, production manager and advertising director. With equal confidence, he telephoned famous people to ask for articles and businessmen to ask for advertisements. He boasted of the magazine’s success to visiting newspaper journalists, but pleaded failure when there were printers’ bills to pay. He had even once been promised a recording by John Lennon, to be distributed free as a plastic 45rpm single on the magazine’s front cover.
When the Beatles’ publicity man failed to honour his promise, the nineteen-year-old Branson had issued his very first writ – though Lennon had the last laugh by producing as his promised recording a tape-recording of the heartbeat of Yoko Ono’s dying baby.
Despite these achievements, Student never made money. Not even Richard Branson’s energy could produce new issues with the regularity that a proper magazine would have demanded. So the diversion of selling records by mail-order was something of a relief. What turned out to be the last edition of Student contained the first advertisement for Virgin Records – and by the time Steve Lewis appeared on the scene, there was little doubt about which venture would flourish and which would founder. The piles of undistributed magazines in the hall of 44 Albion Street, and the desperate attempts to find teenagers willing to break the by-laws by selling them in Hyde Park, were eloquent testimony to the greater commercial attraction of selling records.
It was no coincidence that Branson was the senior partner and Powell the junior. Richard Branson’s air of confident assurance made him a natural leader. Had he not suffered a torn ligament on the football field, he might have been the sort of schoolboy who was captain of every sports team. As it was, he seemed by the age of nineteen to be more mature than the other inhabitants of the Albion Street house, from some of whom he collected a weekly rent of up to £10. Anyone who wanted to could hear the story about how he had lost his virginity at the age of fourteen to the daughter of his cram-school headmaster – and how, when he had been caught clambering through a lavatory window, he had faked a suicide attempt in order to avoid being expelled by his paramour’s irate father.
The real story of Branson’s first experience of sex was told less often, but was perhaps more revealing. His father, a typical product of public school, the upper middle class and the British army, had taken Branson to Soho one evening and arranged a ten-minute assignation for his son with a backstreet prostitute, while he waited dutifully downstairs.
Richard Branson’s father Edward came from a distinguished county family. The family expectation had been that Edward Branson would follow his own father and grandfather before him into the law. But Edward had failed his Common Entrance exam, and instead of going to Eton had been sent to a very minor public school in Yorkshire. His stock had risen in value during the Second World War, when he served in the cavalry in Palestine, in tanks in the desert, and on the general staff in Germany. Once demobilized, however, the dashing Major Branson had been less fortunate when facing the cold realities of civilian life in late 1940s Britain. He studied to become a barrister, but failed to pass his exams.
Edward’s father, Sir George Branson, who had received his knighthood as the traditional reward given to a High Court judge, was not amused at his son’s apparent inability to measure up to the family’s intellectual standards. His irritation was compounded by Edward’s announcement that he had decided to marry a girl by the name of Evette Huntley-Flindt. Self-possessed, slim, beautiful and blue-eyed, Eve came from a respectable stockbroking background. But there were questions to be answered. Her father had retired to farm chickens in Devon; and Eve herself had worked as a dancer, an actress, and an air stewardess, serving drinks on the route between London and South America. Why, Sir George and his lady wanted to know, were Ted and Eve so keen to marry so quickly? After all, the two had only just met at a cocktail party; surely it would be prudent to wait a little.
The couple married on 14 October 1949. Eve gave birth to her first child, Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, on 18 July 1950 – precisely nine months and four days after the marriage. The child was born, according to his mother’s account, three weeks overdue. By the time Richard arrived, his father had qualified as a barrister; and he had settled with his wife in a picturesque village called Shamley Green, deep in the Surrey stockbroker belt in which people of their class and upbringing felt at home. But there was little money about – and the only home they could afford was Easteds, a condemned cottage which a ‘dear old lady’ was willing to let Eve Branson have for twelve shillings a week.
Richard inherited his easy charm, and his eye for a pretty woman, from his father. From his mother he inherited parsimony, enthusiasm, daring, an aptitude for sport, and a hyperactive tendency to pursue one madcap scheme after another until something succeeded. During
