Branson

2 The beginning

The first ruse was simple and saved money. ‘Operator,’ berated the grating upper class voice, ‘I’ve put money into this pay phone and it hasn’t worked.’

‘Sorry, sir, I’ll connect you.’

The second ruse, spoken from the telephone box, was more sophisticated. ‘I’m Richard Branson. I’m eighteen and I run a magazine called Student that’s doing something really useful for young people.’ The caller was sixteen and Student was no more than an idea.

The third ruse was crude. The impatient bearer of six mediocre ‘O’ level passes, who had cheated in exams by secreting a crib sheet in the palm of his left hand, proposed that his father should write to Stowe’s headmaster explaining that his son wanted to prematurely leave the school to study law at university and enter politics. In fact, unwilling to study either for ‘A’ levels or a university degree, Richard Branson wanted to launch Student magazine. Ted Branson refused to lie but reluctantly agreed his son should leave the school. Thirty years later, journalists would, after interviewing the tycoon, mistakenly believe that the teenager had left Stowe because ‘Student magazine was successful’. The youth’s precocious confidence to make his fortune without an education owed much to an unusually dominant mother’s extraordinary gestures.

‘Find your own way home, Ricky,’ ordered Eve Branson as she pushed her four-year-old son from the car into the Surrey countryside. The mother’s lovingly reckless bravado was intended to ensure that her only son should not emulate her husband’s lacklustre career. Success as a barrister had eluded Ted Branson, despite his father’s bequest of Halsbury’s Laws of England. Eve willed her adored son to surpass Ted’s modest achievements. Maintaining the appearance of Establishment gentility was important. Dressing up and placing herself as the centre of attraction at endless social parties, Eve Branson distracted neighbours from the family’s dependence on second-hand clothes for her children and her sale of wooden tissue boxes to supplement the family’s limited finances. An extrovert and attention-seeker, she taught her son the power of presentation and self-publicity, and gave him the infallibility of fearless independence.

Eve Branson aspired to rekindle the fortunes of her family, the Flindts, one hundred and fifty years earlier. Gustavus Flindt had arrived in Britain from Hamburg to work as a broker on the Baltic Exchange. Julius Flindt, one of his ten children, in turn also became a broker, as did one of Julius’s sons and a grandson, until Eve’s father broke the tradition after fighting in the First World War against his forefather’s kinsmen. In Richard Branson’s parents’ marriage, the Flindts’ trading tradition was blended with the Establishment bias of the Bransons, educated at Bedford Grammar School and in medicine or law at Cambridge. Ted Branson’s father, the Right Honourable Sir George Branson, a High Court judge, had been appointed a Privy Councillor in 1940. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been a publisher and a lawyer in India. Eve had every hope that the combination would guarantee upper-middle class Establishment respectability. Her ambitions for her only son were loftier still.

‘Ricky’s going to be prime minister one day,’ she frequently glowed. ‘Nothing but the top,’ the aspiring parent would assert, ‘is good enough.’ Neighbours recall her position under a high tree in the centre of Shamley Green which had attracted stern warnings by all the other parents, forbidding their children to climb beyond a low height. ‘Right to the top,’ urged Eve Branson as her son perilously balanced on the highest branches. ‘Higher,’ shouted the woman famous for hyperactively urging, ‘Do something, Ricky.’ Eve Branson’s emotional exhortations created an obedient son convinced he could do no wrong and that self-doubt was a sin. ‘Shyness is very selfish,’ the mother regularly admonished. ‘It means you are only thinking of yourself.’ Her son, born on 18 July 1950, was not shy but he was awkward and inarticulate. Unable to express himself, he disguised his limitations with nervous gestures and stunts to attract attention, usefully camouflaging his lust for fame and fortune. Earning money, an unmentioned topic in the polite society of the early sixties, became his dominant preoccupation. He disdained authority and intellectuals. So long as his adoring mother approved of his behaviour, he was impervious to criticism.

‘Books, no way,’ Branson laughed, reflecting the family’s lack of interest in culture and education. ‘I don’t listen to music either.’ Ricky was a doer, not an observer excited by intellectual stimulation. Full of his mother’s forceful prediction of his destiny, he naturally dreamed of glory. ‘Bringing him up was rather like riding a thoroughbred horse,’ chuffed Eve Branson. ‘He needed guiding but you were afraid to pull the reins too hard in case you stamped out the adventure and wildness.’

Some of her son’s contemporaries at Stowe were intolerant of his exceptional qualities. The most critical lampooned ‘Greasy Branson’ as a self-centred big-head suffering oily, pimply skin with a smarmy manner towards teachers. But the majority accurately surmised that Branson’s diffident charm was exceptional. Since Stowe was a second-rate public school, it was not difficult to shine, especially after the sixteen-year-old boasted about his introduction to a prostitute by his father. Thirty years later, the former schoolboys could still recall Branson’s vivid account of a trip to Soho and the introduction to a woman paid by his father to remove the stigma of virginity. Sex, in every sense, was his obsession.

He suffered only two genuine handicaps: a knee injury which destroyed his enjoyment of sport, and slight dyslexia. Despite those impediments and his rejection of books, Branson surprisingly won the school’s Gavin Maxwell prize for writing the best English essay. Gavin Young, a well-known newspaper journalist, personally awarded the prize to Branson. Over lunch, Branson listened to Young’s description of a journalist’s glamorous lifestyle: a good income earned by interviewing celebrities in exotic locations. It was an attractive cocktail which matched his preoccupations: money, sex and fame. Branson was reminded of his discussions with a school friend about Student, their proposed magazine for sixth formers, similar to two new magazines, International Time and Oz. While others only talked about the idea, Branson’s energetic self-confidence could make Student a reality.

Daily, the schoolboy dispatched dozens of letters appealing for interviews to celebrities culled from Who’s Who. In the late 1960s, youth was tolerated and even lauded by the famous who were intrigued by the turbulence of their children’s generation. Unprotected by a screen of press officers, their replies were surprisingly positive.

To the bewildered admiration of his contemporaries, Branson regularly carried into the classroom stacks of correspondence. He regaled his audience with the words addressed to him by writers, musicians, actors and politicians including Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, and Ted Heath, the leader of the Conservatives. His success encouraged volunteers to write appeals for advertising and cajoling pleas to the famous for free articles. Richard Branson’s gift was his genial enthusiasm which disarmed those whom he approached for help. Even sceptics were seduced to espouse his ambition after listening to his bold account of a return to Soho to interview prostitutes for a sensational article in the new magazine. Soon, for the unusually worldly seventeen-year-old, Stowe had become insufferably parochial.

In 1967, Branson left the school and settled in the squalid basement of a friend’s house in Connaught Square, near Hyde Park, a desirable address in London, where, chanting the fashionable lure of ‘doing something really useful for young people’, he strove to complete the first edition of Student.

In an era when public schoolboys, even from Stowe, were still regarded as members of a rather staid Establishment, Branson was careful to present himself as a benign hybrid: part hippie and part charitable businessman. Controlling his awkward stutter when necessary, his telephone manner concealed his age to recruit a respected magazine designer for no fee; to secure paid advertising from major corporations; and to negotiate a printing contract for 50,000 copies of the magazine. In a testament to his style, during his sales patter, he would inaccurately boast of selling 100,000 copies but, if challenged, would switch from talking circulation to readership to conceal his exaggeration. Salesmanship relied upon a quality performance and Branson was a notable actor. The appearance of the slick first edition, a good imitation of many established glossy magazines, more than justified his confident sales pitch.

His unusual success in 1968 enticed other ex-public school teenagers seeking entertainment to join him. The attraction was his easy lifestyle inhabiting part of a four-storey house at 44 Albion Street in Bayswater which his parents had leased to share with their son. United by the safety net of parental wealth, Branson and his guests enjoyed the liberation of ‘Peace and Love’ in ‘Swinging London’. In a polite reciprocation for his hospitality, they agreed to sell their host’s magazine on the streets. The prospect of permanent parties in rent-free accommodation was fun.

Branson’s unthreatening self-confidence attracted people older than himself seeking spiritual liberation in an uninhibited atmosphere. Attractive girls, eager to experiment, camped on his floors to escape their parents, and in turn welcomed a stream of ex-public school boys equally willing to produce and sell Student magazine. Without questioning their host’s authority, they enjoyed music, drugs and sex and ate food collected at the end of the day from the dustbin of a local delicatessen. Their presence reassured Branson of his popularity and guaranteed an escape from solitude. Paying his guests just £12 per week for selling the magazine on the streets, he none the less retained their loyalty by blurring the stigma of their status as employees. Money, he emphasised, was irrelevant; his fun party glued his new ‘family’ together. In the spirit of the era, they were all contributing towards the good of mankind although no one quite understood how.

‘He plucks,’ Eve Branson admitted innocently, ‘what he wants out of you.’ From his office on the top floor, Branson was part of the gang yet avoided immersion in his own party. While the guests played downstairs, he was focused on the fortunes of his magazine. ‘He was like a country squire,’ recalled Sue Steward, an early employee. ‘We were having a party and all living together but it was always on his estate. You always knew he owned it all. He wasn’t really a hippie, ever.’ Enjoying the sex, ignoring the music, occasionally living in a haze of marijuana, he acknowledged expressions of loyalty and developed the notion that his magazine should become the vehicle for his financial independence.

Profiting from the magazine could have presented a dilemma. After all, he touted Student to contributors and advertisers as a philanthropic venture to help poor youth. Among articulate students at the end of the 1960s, the public good rather than personal benefit was the only justification for business. Profits were incompatible with ideals. But Branson was not plagued by the self-doubts infecting so many students of the sixties revolution. He believed in profit and any contradictions were easily brushed aside by fluent self-invention. Sensitive to the mood of the time, Branson convinced himself and others that all his commercial ventures were for society’s ‘good’. The rebellious public school boy adhered to the credo that his ambitions were for his employees’ benefit. Earning money was not a sin, if conducted in the proper manner. But it was preferable to always pronounce, ‘I haven’t gone into business to make money. I like the challenge.’ Combined with his blokeish ordinariness, it was a disarming performance. Connaught Publications, his unregistered company, never published accounts. None of the blissed-out party-goers in Albion Street were sure whether their employer earned profits, let alone how much. Secrecy, Branson learned to appreciate, was preferable to public disclosure and even the existence of that secrecy required concealment. His guests witnessed a performance in which the magazine became the passport to his next incarnation.

Influenced by violent agitation across Europe and America, especially against the war in Vietnam, the baby boomers were trashing traditions in confrontations with university administrators, police and politicians. Students, congregating around the London School of Economics, were immersed in an extraordinary political revolution. Although younger than the undergraduates and not having enrolled as a student, Branson purposefully attached himself to the politicised and articulate agitators as an equal. Among the real activists, the serious-looking youth disguising his comfortable background as the grandson of a judge appeared no different from the thousands of other protestors. Understandably, Branson did not reveal that he was neither left-wing nor understood the political feuds raging among the multitude of student factions in the midst of the Cold War. Branson’s natural style implied that he sympathised with the spirit of the times and that he shared the common goal of an egalitarian, classless meritocracy. For Tariq Ali and the other leading Marxists who were preoccupied by endless political arguments and organising perpetual demonstrations, the credentials or motives of any young person hovering silently on the fringe of their turbulence passed unquestioned. But while Ali and others would remain permanently oblivious to Branson, the interloper himself, searching for a niche, exploited his presence at a decisive moment of history.

Unmoved by politics or history, Branson none the less spotted a financial advantage which eluded those participants preoccupied with moral conflicts. Skilfully, by walking with the leaders of London’s huge demonstration against the Vietnam War, he positioned himself in 1968 as the editor and owner of Student magazine, and as a ‘Students’ Spokesman’. Newspaper photographs recorded Branson among the leaders of the march. While most demonstrators ended that day of protest bitter about police violence and frustrated by the state’s inhumanity, he had absorbed an invaluable insight into the new fickleness of the era.

Journalists dispatched by middle-aged Fleet Street editors to report and explain the student revolt, searched for a spokesman. Branson was discovered in Albion Street. Stepping over rubbish, unsold copies of Student magazine and couples sleeping on the floor, one grateful reporter bestowed credibility on his interviewee by lazily repeating Branson’s self-description as a ‘student leader’ and faithfully quoting his utterances in a London newspaper.

Mention as a ‘student leader’ in one newspaper brought invitations to appear on television and feature in Vogue magazine as a representative of Britain’s student rebellion. To enhance his apparent importance for visiting journalists, he arranged for friends to telephone the house from call boxes, creating an illusion of successful activity. Journalists, Branson realised, were unlikely to challenge his exaggerated claims for Student’s success or his personal importance. On the contrary, the more outrageous his assertions the better. A single pose alongside Tariq Ali during the demonstration had taught Branson the value of hype.

At eighteen Branson possessed star-quality. His jocular celebrity persuaded the unambitious living in his basement and seeking justification for their fun-seeking lifestyle to accept his argument for their common goals. Their dependence upon him was gratifying to Branson but also troubling. Student’s circulation remained low and static. It was his first taste of a recurring predicament throughout his life: a cash crisis. His solution was to borrow an idea.

To save Student he imitated Private Eye. Regularly, the satirical magazine promoted its Christmas edition by attaching a record on to its cover. Branson’s idea for his magazine’s issue in spring 1969 was inspired. In October 1968, he approached Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, requesting an interview and a special song recorded by John Lennon dedicated to Britain’s students. Ingratiating himself by focusing polite charm on his targets was Branson’s particular skill and Taylor agreed. But by early December, after commissioning an expensive cover design and placing a large printing order, the record had still not materialised. Sitting in Taylor’s office, helping him address Christmas cards, Branson pressed for delivery. Taylor, proud of fulfilling his pledges, had a problem. Lennon had been prosecuted for the possession of cannabis and Yoko Ono, his girlfriend, had just miscarried. Traumatised, the couple had isolated themselves in their house outside London. Impulsively, Taylor scribbled on a card, ‘Trust me, Derek.’ Carefully, Branson pocketed the card.

At the beginning of January 1969, the promised record had not been delivered. Branson’s own despair deprived him of any sympathy for Lennon. After consulting his father, he issued his first writ: Connaught Publications v. John and Yoko Lennon and Derek Taylor. The official document, alleging breach of contract, was served on Taylor in the street outside his office. Listed as proof of an agreement was Taylor’s scribble on the Christmas card. The writ established that sentiment would never interfere with Branson’s urge to earn money. His verbal awkwardness, his long hair and his broken glasses might have suggested a hapless, easy-going hippie but they were just the natural props in a well-marketed performance. At dinner that night John Varnom asked about the writ. ‘My father’s a judge,’ replied Branson inaccurately, suggesting that the mighty ranks of the British Establishment endorsed his behaviour. Varnom withheld any correction. Branson’s grandfather was a judge and, ever since an old gamekeeper on the family’s lost estate had tugged his forelock to the young boy, Branson had mirrored his mother’s determination to regain his family’s lost social status: for the next fifteen years he would not correct newspaper quotations that ‘My father is the sixth in line in a family of judges.’

In April 1969, Branson, Taylor and their lawyers met in Savile Row to finally take delivery of a tape provided by Lennon. It was the heartbeat of Yoko’s baby which ended in silence. ‘That’s when it died,’ announced Taylor. Branson never used the recording and abandoned his writ. By then, Student had flopped. Outsold by his more original competitors, Branson had exhausted his charitable sales patter to contributors and suppliers.

Marooned in Albion Street, Richard Branson was a trader in search of a commodity. Downstairs were the friends and tenants who enjoyed the loose lifestyle and, while talented, shared none of his material ambition. Which was precisely why they were partying untroubled by their low wages. But they had provided ideas and thanks to John Varnom and Tony Mellor, Branson switched his full attention to the newly created Virgin Records.

‘We’re not selling Andy Williams,’ suggested Al Clark, a contemplative journalist and Virgin’s director of publicity, recruited to Virgin Records after the launch. ‘We need an underground feel,’ suggested the enthusiast who was more perceptive than most in the company. The records offered by Virgin, Branson meekly agreed, would reflect the lifestyle lexicon of the sixties. Like a sponge, he willingly learned from others, hiring people to perform tasks he could not have undertaken. Those arriving at Albion Street in 1969 included Steve Lewis, a North London schoolboy on the eve of going to university. Lewis enjoyed finding more obscure records, buying them at discounts from record shops and dispatching the packages. Lewis and the other employees never recognised Branson as an aspiring tycoon. Even when he moved the business in 1970 to a warehouse in South Wharf Road in Paddington after the Church Commissioners, the landlords of Albion Street, had exposed his repeated deception that the premises classified for domestic occupation were being used contrary to the lease for business, Lewis and the others never thought of themselves as the underpaid employees of a fame-seeking buccaneer.

The alchemy of his personal relationships had been learned in Surrey and at Stowe. Charm and respectfulness covered an elusive character whose ambitions and class were well disguised. Unlike the majority of entrepreneurs, Branson enjoyed deep roots in English society – he had not had to scramble out of the gutter – but he saw commercial value in shedding that pedigree and veering in the opposite direction. Commercial success was connected, he considered, to classlessness. The informality generated loyalty but his agenda, shrouded behind contrived ambiguity, was quite specific. ‘People thought,’ he explained, ‘that because we were twenty-one or twenty-two and had long hair we were part of some grander ideal. But it was always 99.5 per cent business.’ Uncluttered by Sartre or Marx, he could motivate his public school cabal and the working class aspirants by infectious enthusiasm. His dominance was asserted imperceptibly; his genial decisiveness arrived without shouts or threats. Only the astute perceived his insensitivity to the disillusionment bedevilling the sixties generation. While the Class of 1968 unsuccessfully struggled in the early 1970s to disengage from their youthful preoccupations of socialist revolution and free love, Branson suffered none of their emotional turmoil. He had always stood apart from the soul-searching idealists. Free of their self-destructive agonising which eventually constrained the revolutionaries’ professional ambitions, Branson breached the moral code of that era and pursued wealth.

The compartmentalisation began early. One Branson sat behind a desk in the warehouse playing hardball on the telephones as a tycoon; while another Branson, doing ‘good for society’, established the Student Advisory Centre to help young people solve their problems. The unemployed, the suicidal and pregnant girls were invited to telephone for assistance. Although Branson would some years later say that ‘The Advisory Centre was dealing with 3–4,000 people a week at the time’, Jenny Bier, whom he recruited to answer the single telephone, recalls between ‘ten and twenty-five people calling every week’. Of those, about four sought help for abortions. Among the callers in spring 1970 was Jennifer Oliver*, a twenty-year-old undergraduate desperate to terminate a pregnancy. ‘Come and see me,’ offered Branson.

The following day, Jennifer Oliver sat on the other side of the desk in South Wharf Road explaining her predicament, dismayed by the frequent interruption of telephone calls including one from Ted Branson speaking from a golfing holiday in the Algarve. Turning to Oliver, Branson was reassuring. ‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort it out for you. I’ll ring you within a week.’ Two weeks later, Oliver was in despair. Branson had not called and her pregnancy was approaching the ten-week deadline allowed under the new Abortion Act. Oliver’s call to Paddington was again answered by Branson. ‘Oh gosh, I forgot. Did I say that? Come and see me immediately.’