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  Praise for Stuart Kells’ Penguin and the Lane Brothers

  ‘Penguin and the Lane Brothers … debunks many of the Lane myths and reveals a rather different and thoroughly fascinating story of the development of the company … Kells’ story is informative and entertaining and will appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in the world of books. In more than 30 years at Penguin Australia, I never got this close to the truth about Penguin.’

  Bob Sessions, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Kells persuasively corrects the imbalance in the extant biographies and histories, which focus on Allen, and presents the neglected but vital contribution of his younger siblings. [An] engaging, sharply written, and important revisionist history of a great literary institution.’

  James McNamara, Australian Book Review

  ‘Penguin and the Lane Brothers … is a fascinating account of how three, not one, Lane brothers launched Penguin Books, a company that changed the face of world publishing by shrewdly producing large quantities of quality low-cost books by literary giants such as George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and Agatha Christie.’

  Gillian Cumming, Courier Mail

  ‘Stuart Kells seeks to set history straight in this meticulously researched, unbiased biography of the publishing behemoth and its founders … This biography has conflict, intrigue, an insider’s view of the publishing industry, and cameos by celebrated literary figures of the era … It’s not a hyperbole to describe Stuart Kells’s dedication to providing a detailed historical report of Penguin Books and the Lane brothers as extraordinary. This task was a product of Herculean determination and stamina.’

  Ana Trask, BoldFace

  ‘Penguin and the Lane Brothers is written in a conversational style, wearing the enormous amount of Kells’ research lightly. It will be essential reading for all those fascinated by “books about books” and about the foundation stories of great businesses.’

  Tim Coronel, Books+Publishing Magazine

  ‘Dr Stuart Kells is a Melbourne author and bibliophile who has written a meticulously researched biography of the phenomenal 20th century publishing house Penguin Books and its three pioneering brothers, Allen, Richard and John … An excellent tale.’

  Clare Calvet, ABC

  ‘[An] extensively researched biography of the pioneering publishing house and the three brothers at its helm: Allen, Richard and John … If you like books about books, Kells offers a fascinating insight into literature and fraternal power plays. Among the many details included is the lengthy consideration of other potential mascots before settling on the famous Antarctic bird itself.’

  Thuy On, The Age

  PUBLISHED BY

  Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  The Lane Press Pty Ltd

  PO Box 6038

  South Yarra VIC 3141, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.thelanepress.com.au

  Text copyright © The estate of Richard Lane 2016

  Foreword © Geoffrey Blainey 2016

  Introduction and Epilogue © Elizabeth Lane 2016

  The estate of Richard Lane asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Lane, Richard, 1905–1982, author.

  Outback Penguin: Richard Lane’s Barwell diaries / editors: Elizabeth Lane, Fiona Kells, Louise Paton, Stuart Kells.

  9781863958172 (hardback)

  9781925203851 (ebook)

  Lane, Richard, 1905–1982—Diaries. Lane, Richard, 1905–1982—Childhood and youth. Child migrant agricultural laborers—Australia—Biography. Teenage immigrants—Australia—Biography. Publishers and publishing—Biography.

  070.5092

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

  Printed in China by 1010 Printing International.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Geoffrey Blainey

  Introduction by Elizabeth Lane

  LONDON TO ADELAIDE

  ADELAIDE AND MOOROOK

  RENMARK

  PICTURE SECTION 1

  RENMARK TO MANDURAMA

  MANDURAMA

  COONABARABRAN

  PICTURE SECTION 2

  SYDNEY TO LONDON

  Epilogue by Elizabeth Lane

  Acknowledgements

  About the editors

  Index

  To the memory of

  Richard Grenville Williams Lane

  1905–1982

  A man for whom family was all-important

  FOREWORD

  Richard Lane was one of many twentieth-century boys who sailed from England to become farm apprentices in Australia. Only seventeen, he left a big comfortable house and a tight-knit Bristol family to travel in a crowded passenger ship to Adelaide in 1922. Three and a half years later he returned, somewhat disillusioned but undefeated. Eventually he was a founder of a London firm that became one of the world’s famous publishers. He himself, however, was not a writer – except for an unusual story he wrote, day by day, about those frustrating but rewarding years he spent in Australia.

  It is a rare view of Australian rural life, as experienced from the lowest ranks. Scores of Australians have written memoirs about their late teenage years but nearly all have been written long after the time they describe. While the best are mature, like old cheese, Richard Lane’s book is fresh milk, unpasteurised, and therefore more valuable as a personal and historical record. Almost too young to write arresting prose, he was old enough to write honest, clear and observant prose. The only people looking over his shoulder were the father, mother and family members who received, every few months, another handwritten notebook diary from their son.

  Richard departed from Bristol Grammar School with the hope of adventure. For the parents his adventure was not expensive, because they paid only part of his steamship fare; the South Australian government presumably paid the remainder. He was part of a paternal scheme that supervised his life in the ship and his arrival at the final port, and his journey inland to his destination – close to Australia’s largest river – an employer who promised to welcome him and teach him farming.

  There was another event – not mentioned in the diary – driving Richard and his eighty travel companions from England. In the seven decades leading up to the Great Depression, unemployment in England was at its worst in 1921 and 1922, the year of his departure.

  Boarding the passenger steamship Bendigo at Tilbury on a September afternoon, he was taken aback by the crowded decks. More than 1200 passengers and crew filled a ship of a mere 13,000 tons, and at least eight boys were jammed into a typical inside cabin.

  As the ship steamed slowly down the Thames estuary and passed the last lighthouses, Richard Lane must have turned to the first page of his diary and wondered what sights and feelings he should record. ‘I had rather a bad fit of the blues in the evening,’ he wrote; similar fits of the blues would hit him on some, but not all, of his more frustrating days in Australia. And yet, on the whole, he coped well with the loneliness, extreme heat and physical exhaustion, the scores of unfamiliar farming tasks, and the variety of farming families, with their whims as well as their kindnesses.

  His first family lived in the Riverland re
gion of South Australia, in one of those farms set aside for soldiers returning from the First World War. Owning twenty-two acres of grapevines and mixed fruit trees, the Kings inhabited a small, dirty, iron-roofed house, which, in the words of one official, was ‘not fit for people with the ordinary amount of respect for cleanliness’. On some of the farms mateship was not as widespread as we might like to believe. The wife especially was rude and aggressive towards a boy who had been assured, before leaving Bristol, that he would be a guest of the family. The diary also makes clear that, nearly half a century after the eight-hour day was common in a variety of city occupations, it had not reached many farms. Richard was often milking the cows soon after 6am, and except for time spent at breakfast and dinner (then the common word for lunch), he worked all the daylight hours, often with a hoe in hand. The long summer evenings were almost dark, with the frogs in the irrigation channels making their din, when Richard found a free fifteen minutes in which to write down the happenings of his day.

  On pages that might have been loaded with grievances, he wrote lightly of his sunburn and tiredness: ‘although I am aching all over I am really as fit as a fiddle.’ The sky and sunsets, so unlike England’s, delighted him. He marvelled how, in the hot, dusty climate, the evening sky was first streaked with red and pink. A little later, ‘yellow and orange is predominant’, before it makes way for a lemon colour, and then ‘the stars begin to peep’.

  Words attracted him, and he noticed that the Australians called Britain ‘the Old Country’ or ‘Blighty’. Of course he was called a ‘Pommy’, though later the term ‘Barwell Boy’ was used to describe his kind of farm apprentice. Henry Barwell was the premier of South Australia who launched the scheme, in which close to 1700 English lads arrived during the 1920s.

  Moving on to the farms of kinder employers, Richard wrote down again and again the generous acts. He matured quickly, for at the age of eighteen he had enough business confidence to run a regular car service between Renmark and Adelaide, a journey of about 250 kilometres. On busier days the passengers crammed into the front and back seats of the handsome second-hand Moon car, originally imported from the big factory in St Louis, and Richard drove them and tried to collect the fares. Soon in debt, he gave up the business and farm work; travelling on the coastal ship to Sydney, he became a jackaroo, ploughman, fire-fighter and jack of all trades in the interior of New South Wales. Almost everywhere he worked – and he worked with a will – his new friends concluded that he was more a man of words than of the soil. That he needed quiet every evening while he wrote up his diary, and that he rejoiced when the mailman brought him the latest copies of the British literary magazine John O’London’s Weekly, were puzzling to people who had no time for books – except perhaps the useful Farmer’s Handbook.

  They were not surprised when Richard, upon receiving £20 from his brother Allen in London, promptly bought a ticket on a French ship soon to steam from Sydney to Marseilles. On the final day of his round-the-world journey, sitting in the fast train taking him from Dover to London, he marvelled at the green scenery and the primroses colouring the railway cuttings, and decided it was worth being abroad for three years and facing all his setbacks ‘if it was only for the joy of returning’.

  It is unusual for a lad so young to keep a readable diary for so long. In its quiet, reflective way, it is one of the most revealing stories yet written about rural life in Australia. Here it is, published for the first time, almost a century after he took up his pen.

  Geoffrey Blainey

  November 2015

  INTRODUCTION

  My father, Richard Grenville Williams Lane, kept a diary that now serves as a priceless bridge between two very different histories: the history of Australian immigration, and the global history of publishing.

  Richard Lane’s diary is one of the best records of the ‘Barwell Boys’ child migrant scheme, which, in the 1910s and 1920s, saw thousands of boys travel from England to South Australia to work the land as farm apprentices. The diary describes in fascinating richness what life was like for a boy migrant at that time. The story of the scheme is told not from the perspective of politicians or bureaucratic officialdom, but from the viewpoint of the boys themselves. We hear their voices when they are served unwholesome food on the voyage out, when they fight and barter and swear, when they are dispersed to their placements, and when they try to make the best of what was often a very hard and bleak existence on the land.

  The diary is also important because of a remarkable fact: a Barwell Boy subsequently co-founded Penguin Books, the most successful publishing house of the twentieth century, and now a global icon and media powerhouse. As Stuart Kells has shown in Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution, Richard’s experiences in Australia were the crucible in which Penguin’s cheerful philosophy of low-cost, high-quality books was forged. The diary is therefore of worldwide interest.

  My father was a careful and candid observer of everyday life in rural South Australia and, later, New South Wales. During his coming of age in Australia, he worked as an apprentice fruitgrower, a track-car driver, a jackaroo and, briefly, a drover. He displayed levels of entrepreneurship and resilience that became a characteristic of all three Lane brothers, Allen, Richard and John. His diary captures the development of his literary taste, his approach to business, his role models and his aspirations in life and in love.

  As Kells wrote, Richard Lane became in Australia:

  a student of character and a connoisseur of human types. In his migration diary, he created a lively, vivid, observant chronicle of daily life, and an important document of antipodean social history. If Australia was Richard’s coming of age, then his diary was his bildungsroman.

  The diary was created as a series of notebooks, which my father filled sequentially and then posted to his family in Bristol. It is a moving experience to handle those notebooks today: a pile of black student exercise books, which an antiquarian bookseller might describe as well used, somewhat battered around the edges, lightly foxed, covers worn and chipped, and with evidence of periodic invasions by silverfish.

  When my father’s parents and siblings first received the notebooks in the post, they were equally fascinated and dismayed by their contents. They shared extracts with a journalist at Bristol’s Western Daily Press, who remarked on the novelty of a Bristol boy’s adventures alone in the New World.

  A few biographical facts may help the reader as they navigate Richard’s diary and adventures. Samuel and Camilla Williams had four children, Allen, Richard, John and Nora, who were born at tidy three-year intervals. My father was born on 5 July 1905 in Bristol. The family’s cousins were Lanes, Colliholes, Puxleys, Smiths and, in California, Priddys. Richard’s closest boyhood friends were Doug Gael and Doug McMinn. The Williams family home in Cotham Vale Bristol, was called ‘Broomcroft’. Allen and Richard shared the ‘red room’, decorated with red wallpaper.

  In 1918 the family experienced a profound piece of serendipity. A distant relative, also called John Lane, called on them and put forward a proposal: if Camilla and Samuel would agree to change Allen’s surname to Lane, then Uncle John Lane would take Allen on as an apprentice at the august publishing house The Bodley Head, which he owned and ran. Obligingly, all the Williamses adopted the Lane surname, and Allen started work in London alongside another young man, Ben Travers, who became a close friend as well as a successful author and farceur. From this unexpected connection to the publishing world, the three Lane brothers would found Penguin Books.

  In the meantime, Richard travelled to Australia at the age of seventeen. The origins of the trip were simple. My father yearned for the sort of adventure that his father had experienced in South Africa at the time of the Boer War, and that his grandfather, also named Samuel Williams, had encountered as a Master Mariner, sailing ships such as the Speedwell to exotic ports in India, Siam and Patagonia.

  With his friend Doug ‘Mac’ McMinn, my father thought of travelling
to the Priddys in California but failed to satisfy the US Immigration Authorities. South Africa and Australia were the next choices. The boys read of the Barwell Scheme in South Australia. For the sum of £10 they could travel to Australia and find work as agricultural apprentices. Over the next few years, Richard got the adventure he was seeking. In spades.

  He made the first entry in his diary on 6 September 1922, when he was leaving England on the TSS Bendigo. Over the following four years he filled eight notebooks. When each one was finished he sent it home to Bristol, Samuel, Camilla, Allen, John and Nora read of Richard’s adventures and his observations of rural life in Australia, and looked at the pasted down photographs of their son and brother.

  Richard returned to London in 1926, having realised during his stay that he could not envision a life without books. In February 1926 Richard surmised: ‘To be absolutely candid, I am far more interested in books than in rams.’ After a brief stint as a Shakespearean actor in Egypt, he took a position as secretary to A.J.A. Symons at the First Edition Club. He then joined his brothers at The Bodley Head. Recognising the need for books that were accessible to everyone, in 1935 the brothers co-founded Penguin Books, a company and a brand that became one of the most successful in the history of publishing.

  Somehow these old diaries have survived countless moves, between houses and between countries. (They even survived a near-fatal encounter with a Red Cross jumble sale.) In the mid-1950s the books returned to Australia – to Templestowe, in Melbourne, where we lived while my father ran Penguin Books Australia. Initially this was to be for a few months only, but as Kells documented in Penguin and the Lane Brothers, that was not the case. Richard’s older brother, Allen, had planned a somewhat different future for him.

  My father was an intelligent, well-read, witty and delightfully reserved Englishman. He adored my mother, Betty, who matched him in intelligence and humour. Our house was filled with books. As a child, I loved going into his office and looking at all the treasures in the cupboards: his old naval uniform; a leather bag filled with ancient coins; boxes of letters and diaries from John Lane and his wife, Annie Eichberg; and of course the Barwell diaries. I delved into the notebooks to read of his time in Australia, and looked at the photos of my young and very handsome father.