Virgin King (Text Only)

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 Richard’s childhood, Ted Branson would go dutifully to his London chambers by motorcycle every morning, picking up here and 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 already had a company car. There was undoubtedly something reassuring about working at Virgin. All the senior staff drew the same £50 a week, and all of them drove Volvos. In those days, the Swedish marque had no connotation of suburban solidity; rather, its image was raffish and slightly exotic – just like the company itself. It was only later, however, that Lewis began to reflect on the fact that although he and the other senior Virgin staff had the right to drive the Volvos, it was Richard Branson and his partner Nik Powell who owned them.

But Branson had bigger things on his mind. If he could profit from selling records, why should he not also profit from making them? The idea of opening a recording studio was put in Branson’s mind by Newman, a guitarist and songwriter who had worked in Albion Street and had dabbled in amateur recording for a while. Once the record shops began to make money, it became a serious possibility. Newman was therefore duly sent off to buy some professional studio equipment. There was just one difficulty: the eight-track system he acquired was too large to fit in the crypt beneath the church across the road from the Albion Street house where the studio was to be installed. Another place would have to be found – and with London property prices what they were, it might as well be in the country.

Scouring the pages of Country Life, the glossy magazine of choice for those who wish to buy manor houses and estates, the two men made appointments to look at a number of possibilities between London and Wales, all of which proved disappointing on closer inspection. It was almost by chance that they dropped in at a seventeenth-century manor house at Shipton, a village on the Cherwell river twenty miles from Oxford. They arrived as the sun was setting, vaulted over the garden wall, and inspected the ruined mediaeval cloisters attached to the main Cotswold stone building.

On 11 January 1971, Steve Lewis discovered a kindred spirit. A fresh-faced young South African turned up at South Wharf Road, the new location of the Virgin offices, and announced himself as Richard Branson’s cousin. Simon Draper had finished studying literature at a South African university, and had nine months to kill. London, as the centre of the musical world that absorbed all his energy and money, was a magnet to which Draper had been attracted in his search for an interesting job. He had heard through his uncle, who was Ted Branson’s half-brother, that Richard was a fellow who couldn’t pass his exams. Then Draper saw a copy of Student, and was impressed; and saw a Virgin mail-order advertisement in Melody Maker, and was enthused. He knew nothing whatever about business, but Simon Draper had pronounced tastes in music. Working with his young English cousin, he decided, might not be so bad after all.

Encouraged to confide in Draper by the family connection, Branson revealed to him over lunch that the Virgin empire was soon to become a great deal larger. A postal strike was threatened, which would if it took place immediately starve Branson of his mail-order financial lifeline. So Virgin would open a record shop as a substitute. But that was by no means the only plan up Branson’s sleeve. He had already planned a fully fledged music empire, encompassing not only retailing but also an artistic agency, a chain of recording studios, a management company, a music publishing business – and a record label, for which a logo had already been designed. ‘You can start my label,’ said Branson.

Draper was at first tempted to be dismissive. The empire by the end of January 1971 would consist of a small and rather shabby shop in an upstairs room in Oxford Street, and a mail-order firm that was doing no business. His cousin’s ambitions seemed a little fanciful, to say the least. But Draper’s interest was tickled; he liked the look of the group of new friends whom he would meet if he came to South Wharf Road; and he loved the idea of turning the music that was his life’s great enthusiasm into a way of making a living. He agreed to start the following day, but refused to commit himself on how long he would stay. It would never have crossed Simon Draper’s mind that he would work for Richard Branson for more than twenty years.

Caroline Gold had required some persuading to work as Richard Branson’s secretary. At twenty-one, she was a year older than him when she answered the ad in the Evening Standard. She had been to art school, and was married; and she had not been at all sure after her interview with this ‘gauche, studenty type’ that this was the right job. The crypt in which Branson had his desk was dark and damp; and the salary, at £12 a week, was significantly less than the £20 that her talents might have commanded elsewhere. But she had accepted the offer – intending, with the blithe confidence of someone brought up in an era free of mass unemployment, to find something else if this job did not work out. But Branson’s mixture of simplicity and guile had charmed her, and the typing he had asked her to do on her first day at work was more interesting than she had expected. Instead of a stack of commercial correspondence about widgets and settlement dates, he dictated to her a string of letters to famous contributors to Student, thanking them for the articles they had sent in and apologizing for having been unable to use them. To her relief, she discovered that his dictation was so hesitant that she had no difficulty keeping up with shorthand. Then he took her across to the Albion Street house to meet the others. It was only when she knew and liked Richard Branson better, that Caroline Gold got around to wondering whether he had saved up some exciting letters just to impress her.

Branson surprised her with his ability to get things done. One example was the installation of new telephone lines when they were needed. In those days, ordering a new telephone was a major project that required correspondence with the General Post Office, and usually a delay of several months. But Richard Branson had found a shortcut. He had befriended a local telephone engineer, who made himself available around the clock to serve the needs of the growing business. Whether Branson paid anything for this service or not, Caroline Gold never discovered; but the middle-aged engineer once boasted to her that he was allowed to use Branson’s houseboat on the canal at Little Venice for secret assignations with the women with whom he had affairs. He once approached her with the news that Branson had been forced to turn him down because of a prior engagement, and asked whether he might borrow the next-door boat where Caroline lived with her husband Rob. The answer was a polite no.

Branson had an uncanny knack for negotiation. On one occasion, a man telephoned to offer the nascent mail-order firm a load of bootlegged, or illegally copied, Jimi Hendrix records. The caller was told to come around to the Virgin offices in South Wharf Road, where Mr Zimmerman would discuss the transaction with him. At ten o’clock the following morning a shifty-looking character appeared, and duly asked for Mr Zimmerman. Branson explained that Mr Zimmerman was just around the corner, and would arrive in a minute. An hour later, Branson explained to the waiting caller that Mr Zimmerman was around the corner at the Riviera Café, and suggested that he should go and meet him there. When the angry bootlegger returned at twelve, complaining that there had been no Mr Zimmerman at the Riviera even though he had waited at least half an hour, Branson looked at him innocently.

‘What did you want to see Mr Zimmerman about?’

The man opened the boot of his car, and replied that he was going to sell him some records.