there the ‘three-guinea briefs’, often paid six months after the conclusion of the case, that were the sole means of support of a young and financially straitened criminal barrister. Meanwhile, Eve had gone into business at home with a helper in a little hut in the back garden, making and spray-painting objets d’art and ‘fancy goods’ – table mats, trays, tissue-box covers, decorative waste-paper baskets. At first her products were sold to local shops and taken up to Harrods in London. As the business grew larger, however, Eve would travel to fancy goods fairs in Blackpool or Bournemouth – on one occasion slipping three discs in her back when she picked up a heavy box and sneezed at the same time. Although he was willing to allow his wife to help support the family, Ted was in other respects an old-fashioned father. Only once did Eve venture to leave him with the baby; when she returned, Ted was at the window with the squalling Richard under one arm, and helplessly waving a nappy with his other hand. It was financial necessity that first prompted the couple to think of sending the young Richard to board at Scaitcliffe Preparatory School on the borders of Windsor Great Park; the school was run by a cousin of Ted’s, who might have looked upon an occasional delay in paying the fees with more sympathy than a stranger.
As Richard grew up, his parents’ finances became more comfortable. The owner of the cottage died, and generously stipulated in her will that the cottage should be offered to the Branson family for sale. ‘As the people came from Somerset,’ recalled Eve bluntly, ‘the solicitors didn’t know the value. We got that quite cheaply.’ The family was later able to sell Easteds at a substantial profit, and to invest the proceeds in Tanyard Farm, a sixteenth-century farmhouse with its own orchard, dovecote and swimming-pool, on the other side of Shamley Green. But Richard had already learned from his mother. As a child, he pursued a number of unsuccessful moneymaking schemes, from growing Christmas trees to breeding budgerigars.
Eve had few expectations of Lindi and Vanessa, Richard’s two younger sisters, other than that they should grow up healthy, happy and charming. But she had grand ideas for Richard, taking it almost for granted that he would some day become prime minister. ‘I always aimed terribly high,’ she remembered. ‘You’ve got to get to the top. Nothing but the top was good enough.’ There was only one difficulty. Richard showed little more aptitude for scholarship than his father had. He had scraped into Stowe only after his worried parents sent him to a crammer; once at public school, he had shown more interest in cricket than in Latin. He passed O-levels in scripture, English language, English literature, French, history and ancient history; but he failed elementary mathematics three times. By the age of seventeen, he was pressing his parents to move him from Stowe to a more ‘useful’ technical college. It soon became clear from the draft letters that he sent his father, urging him to copy them out in his own hand and send them back to the school, that Richard Branson had had enough of education. He saw no reason to take the regulation three A levels. He did not want to go to university. What he wanted to do was to work.
Steve Lewis did not have to spend long at Albion Street before he realized that the house was being used by Richard Branson as the centre not just for the mail-order record business and the magazine, but for two other activities as well. One was the Students’ Advisory Centre, a voluntary organization set up by Branson to help answer teenagers’ problems; the other was an employment agency which sought to match underemployed nurses with London families who wanted cleaners or babysitters. In his capacity as Angie, Lewis might therefore spend half his day chasing up obscure records to satisfy an order from a foreign collector. For the other half, he would be administering pregnancy tests to visiting teenage girls – reminding them to urinate in a bottle that was clean and had been rinsed very thoroughly to remove the last traces of soap – or referring worried young men with spots on their genitals to the relevant clinic at the nearby St Mary’s Hospital.
The employment agency for nurses was a short-lived venture. Branson saw a business opportunity to capitalize on the public sympathy for the low pay of nurses; he contacted the Daily Sketch, which had been running a campaign to raise nurses’ wages, and gave them an account of his plan with a philanthropic spin DICK STARTS BABY-SIT PLAN TO HELP NURSES, read the paper’s banner headline. The ‘strap-line’ above was more specific: ‘Now a barrister’s son joins battle for underpaid mercy girls’. In the article, Branson provided a plausible rebuttal to complaints by a nursing association that nurses who took in extra work would be too tired to do their normal hospital duties. ‘Most of the nurses sit in front of a television at nights, watching babies, and are paid five shillings to seven and sixpence an hour for four hours.’ The article described him helpfully as ‘founder-editor’ of Student magazine, and reported (without appearing to have taken any steps to verify the facts) his claim that Albion Street was getting calls ‘every thirty seconds’ for nurses to help out. In fact, the agency was far more casual and sporadic than the article suggested, especially since local families preferred to employ the same person to look after their children regularly than to invite into their houses an unknown member of an employment pool. But the coverage, which obviated the need to advertise for nurses, was an early example of Branson’s ability to use the press to get his message across.
It was personal experience that had prompted Branson to set up the Students’ Advisory Centre. According to the romantic account given to the Sun by the ‘brilliant young editor’, he had at the age of seventeen ‘met a girl, made her pregnant, then spent three months of hell not knowing what to do or where to go … Together, they set up an advice centre for young people.’
The Centre’s most controversial activity was probably its discreet system of referring pregnant women to sympathetic doctors for abortions. But it was to be something far more mundane that brought it notoriety. Among the ills which the Centre’s leaflets advertised help in curing was a reference to venereal disease’. In early 1970, the police told Branson that he was breaking the law by using the word venereal’, and ordered him to remove it from his leaflets. When the young entrepreneur refused, he was promptly arrested and charged with two offences, one under the Venereal Diseases Act (1917), and the other under the Indecent Advertisements Act (1889). John Mortimer, a rising barrister who was later to achieve fame as a writer and playwright, offered to defend Branson at no charge. Despite Mortimer’s eloquent denunciation of the archaic legislation that made it a crime to use a word that was in any case a euphemism, Branson was fined £7. But he won the wider argument; soon afterwards, the Venereal Diseases Act was repealed. The Students’ Advisory Centre continues, with Branson’s financial support, to give advice on venereal diseases to this day – though today they are known as ‘sexually transmitted diseases’, and the centre, based in Portobello Road, has changed its name to Help.
Lewis was happy with his work for the employment agency and the advisory service, but his work as Angie gave him cause for disquiet. The preprinted reply forms sent back to customers ended with the valediction ‘Love and peace, Angie’ – and some record buyers got the wrong end of the stick. It was not long before lovesick male students began writing to Lewis under his female pseudonym; when one said that he was coming to London and wanted to visit Angie in Albion Street, Lewis took fright. In future, his style of correspondence would be a little less friendly.
There was anyway little choice. While the other activities of the Albion Street gang withered, the record mail-order business, and hence Lewis’s workload, continued to expand. When Lewis went into hospital with suspected meningitis, Nik Powell brought round the sack of correspondence for him to deal with in his bed. Thereafter, he would do most of his work at home, picking up the letters once a week. Lewis also became the compiler of the Virgin Records sale list, and as such the company’s informal arbiter of musical taste.
Whatever arguments Richard Branson might offer, however, Steve Lewis had no intention of giving up the chance to go to university. The concession he was willing to make to Virgin was to apply to Brunel, in Uxbridge to the west of London, instead of to Manchester, so that he could be closer to Albion Street. Over the three years he spent at Brunel, Lewis was to combine his academic studies and his progression in the business with great success. By his last year, when Lewis was ready to think about working for Virgin full-time, he was the only student at the university who
