INTERVIEW


By the Dart INTERVIEW


RICHARD WEBB


RETIRING AFTER A LONG CAREER IN BOOK PUBLISHING


Interview by Phil Scoble R


ichard Webb sits in the top- floor study of his newly built


home overlooking Warfleet Creek – it’s the view he grew up with as it is on the site of his parents’ old house. It illustrates his continued emotional connection to Dartmouth despite a life in the highest levels of the publishing world. Richard was born on 26th


July


1943. The same day a certain Mick Jagger was born. He can claim a mixed bunch of ancestors including Edward Whymper, the first man to climb the Matterhorn, William Addis the inventor of the toothbrush and the famous Fiennes clan of actors, writers and explorers who are all third cousins. richard’s first glimpse of


Dartmouth must have been when he was taken as an infant to visit his grandparents in late 1943,


Richard in the sixties. “I had to check David


Bailey’s expenses and I even had to chaperone Twiggy!


in late 1954 richard’s father finally retired to his wife’s hometown of Dartmouth where Iris’s parents had lived since the end of the First World War. Richard was sent to Marlborough College to complete his secondary education where he discovered a passion for literature and won various literary prizes. He had taken a Royal Naval


Scholarship to BRNC, Dartmouth but Richard decided that he was better suited to a life working with the printed word so, after working briefly with christopher milne at the Harbour Bookshop, he left Dartmouth in September 1961, aged just 18, to begin his career in publishing. “My father said he would not


support me financially through University so I had to go and earn a living. I was plonked on the steam


shortly before the evacuation of the Slapton area, Exercise Tiger and the preparations for D-Day in 1944. Richard, with his father Lt Colonel


Richard Webb and his mother Iris, spent the years immediately following the war travelling around the world on military postings to Burma, Singapore and France.


train from Kingswear to Paddington with a week’s rent for a bedsit in Earls’ Court. It was a real step in the dark.” After a few roles in and around


Fleet Street, Richard secured an exciting job with the publishers of Vogue and House & Garden magazines in 1966. “I was rubbing shoulders with the top photographers and models,” he said. “I had to check David Bailey’s expenses and I even had to chaperone Twiggy! I was then put in charge of Condé Nast’s book division and did a lot of exciting projects – the famous Vogue posters and fashion books, House & Garden interior décor books and even one of mary berry’s first books: The Brides Cookbook.” We also published one of the


decade’s most iconic books: David Bailey’s Goodbye, Baby and Amen, a photographic essay on the decade, era, epoch and happenings of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Living in Chelsea and working at


Vogue - Dartmouth seemed a very long way away.” Then in 1970, aged only 27,


Richard became Publicity Director of the leading London book publishers Michael Joseph. He worked with many famous authors including James Baldwin, HE Bates, Dick Francis, James Herriot, John Masters, Spike Milligan, Derek Tangye, Leslie Thomas and the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson amongst many others. “It was an extraordinary time.


69


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