Branson. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ