The Fourth Estate

It had taken Armstrong ten days to find suitable accommodation, and he only signed the short lease on a flat in Stanhope Gardens when the agent mentioned that a retired brigadier was living on the floor above.

The search for an appropriate office took even longer, because it needed to have an address that would convince Julius Hahn that Armstrong had been in publishing all his life.

When John D. Wood asked what price range he had in mind, a very junior agent was handed the assignment.

Two weeks later, Armstrong settled on an office that was even smaller than his flat in Stanhope Gardens. Although he couldn’t altogether accept the agent’s description of the 308-square-foot room with a lavatory on the floor above as ideal, perfect and unique, it did have two advantages. The Fleet Street address, and a rent he could afford to pay—for the first three months.

“If you’ll be kind enough to sign on the bottom line, Captain Armstrong.”

Armstrong unscrewed the top of his new Parker pen and signed the contract.

“Good. Then that’s settled,” said the young agent as he waited for the ink to dry. “The rent for this property is, as you know, Captain Armstrong, £10 a week, payable quarterly in advance. Perhaps you would be kind enough to let me have a check for £130.”

“I’ll send one of my staff round with a check later this afternoon,” said Armstrong, straightening his bow tie.

The agent hesitated for a moment, and then placed the contract in his briefcase. “I’m sure that will be all right, Captain Armstrong,” he said, handing over the keys to the smallest property on their books.

Armstrong felt confident that Hahn would have no way of knowing, when he rang FLE 6093 and heard the words “Armstrong Communications,” that his publishing house consisted of one room, two desks, a filing cabinet and a recently installed telephone. And as for “one of my staff,” one was correct. Sally Carr had returned to London the week before, and had joined him as his personal assistant earlier that morning.

Armstrong had been unable to give the estate agent a check immediately because he had only recently opened an account with Barclays, and the bank was unwilling to issue a checkbook until it received the promised transfer of funds from Holt & Co in Berlin. The fact that he was Captain Armstrong MC, as he kept reminding them, didn’t seem to impress the manager.

When the money did eventually come through, the manager confessed to his accounts clerk that after their meeting he had expected a little more than £217 9s. 6d. to be deposited in Captain Armstrong’s account.

While he was waiting for the money to be transferred, Armstrong contacted Stephen Hallet at his offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and asked him to register Armstrong Communications as a private company. That cost him another £10.

No sooner had the company been formed than another unpayable bill landed on Sally’s desk. This time Armstrong didn’t have a dozen bottles of claret to settle the account, so he invited Hallet to become company secretary.

Once his funds had been deposited, Armstrong cleared all his debts, which left him with less than £40 in the account. He told Sally that in future she should not pay any bills over £10 until they had received at least three demands for payment.

Charlotte, already six months pregnant with their second child, joined Dick in London a few days after he had signed the lease on the Knightsbridge flat. When she was first shown round the four rooms, she didn’t comment on how small they were compared with their spacious apartment in Berlin. She was only too happy to have escaped from Germany.

As Armstrong traveled to and from the office by bus each day, he wondered how long it would be before he had a car and a driver. Once the company had been registered, he flew to Berlin and talked a reluctant Hahn into a loan of £1,000. He returned to London with a check and a dozen manuscripts, having promised that they would be translated within days, and that the money would be repaid as soon as he signed the first foreign distribution deal. But he was facing a problem that he couldn’t admit to Hahn. Although Sally spent hours on the phone trying to arrange appointments with the chairmen of all the leading scientific publishing houses in London, she quickly discovered that their doors didn’t open for Captain Armstrong MC in the way they had done in Berlin.

On those evenings when he got home before midnight, Charlotte would ask him how the business was doing. “Never better” took the place of “top secret.” But she couldn’t help noticing that thin brown envelopes were regularly dropping through their letterbox, and seemed to get stuffed into the nearest drawer, unopened. When she flew out to Lyon for the birth of their second child, Dick assured her that by the time she returned he would have signed his first big contract.

Ten days later, while Armstrong was dictating an answer to the one letter he’d received that morning, there was a knock on the door. Sally bustled across the room to open it, and came face to face with their first customer. Geoffrey Bailey, a Canadian who represented a small publisher in Montreal, had actually got out of the lift on the wrong floor. But an hour later he left clutching three German scientific manuscripts. Once he had had them translated, and had realized their commercial potential, he returned with a check, and signed a contract for the Canadian and French rights on all three books. Armstrong banked the check, but didn’t bother to inform Julius Hahn of the transaction.

Thanks to Mr. Bailey, by the time Charlotte arrived back at Heathrow six weeks later, carrying Nicole in her arms, Dick had signed two more contracts, with publishers from Spain and Belgium. She was surprised to find that he had acquired a large Dodge automobile, and that Private Benson was behind the wheel. What he didn’t tell her was that the Dodge was on the “never never,” and that he couldn’t always afford to pay Benson at the end of the week.

“It impresses the customers,” he said, and assured her that business was looking better and better. She tried to ignore the fact that some of his stories had changed since she’d been away, and that the unopened brown envelopes remained in the drawer. But even she was impressed when he told her that Colonel Oakshott was back in London, and had visited Dick and asked him if he knew of anyone who might employ an old soldier.

Armstrong had been the fifth person he had approached, and none of the others had anything to offer someone of his age or seniority. The following day Oakshott had been appointed to the board of Armstrong Communications at a salary of £1,000 a year, although his monthly check wasn’t always honored on the first presentation.

Once the first three manuscripts had been published in Canada, France, Belgium and Spain, more and more foreign publishers began to get out of the lift on the right floor, later leaving Armstrong’s office carrying long typewritten lists of all the books whose rights were available.

As Armstrong began to close an increasing number of deals, he cut down on his trips to Berlin, sending Colonel Oakshott in his place, and giving him the unenviable task of explaining to Julius Hahn why the cash flow was so slow. Oakshott continued to believe everything Armstrong told him—after all, hadn’t they served as officers in the same regiment?—and so, for some time, did Hahn.

But despite the occasional coup with foreign houses, Armstrong was still having no luck in convincing a leading British publisher to take on the rights to his books. After months of being told, “I’ll get back to you, Captain Armstrong,” he began to wonder just how long it was going to take him to push open the door that would allow him to become part of the British publishing establishment.

It was on an October morning when Armstrong was staring across at the massive edifices of the Globe and the Citizen—the nation’s two most popular dailies—that Sally told him a journalist from The Times was on the line. Armstrong nodded.

“I’ll put you through to Captain Armstrong,” she said.

Armstrong crossed the room and took the receiver from her hand. “It’s Dick Armstrong, chairman of Armstrong Communications. How can I help you?”

“My name is Neville Andrade. I’m the science correspondent of The Times. I recently picked up the French edition of one of Julius Hahn’s publications, The Germans and the Atom Bomb, and was curious to know how many other titles you have in translation.” Armstrong put the phone down an hour later, having told Andrade his life story and promised that his driver would have the complete list of titles on his desk by midday.

When he arrived at the office late the following morning, because of what Londoners described as a pea-souper, Sally told him she had taken seven calls in twenty minutes. As the phone rang again, she pointed to his desk. A copy of The Times lay open at the science page. Armstrong sat down and began to read Andrade’s long piece about the atom bomb and how, despite losing the war, German scientists still remained far ahead of the rest of the world in many fields.