Edward Young

Designer of Penguin books' first symbol and author of a best-selling account of wartime life in submarines

Edward Preston Young, writer and book designer: born San Fernando, Trinidad 17 November 1913; DSC 1943; DSO 1944; managing director, George Rainbird Publishing Group 1970-73; married 1945 Diana Graves (two daughters; marriage dissolved), 1956 Mary Cressall (died 2001); died Littlehampton, West Sussex 28 January 2003.

Edward Young had some remarkable "firsts" in his life. In 1935, aged 21 and virtually untrained in typography, he designed the first sixpenny Penguin books in the famous red-white-red covers; and in 1940 he was the first Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officer to be admitted to the submarine service of the Royal Navy. In another three years he not only became the first RNVR officer to command an operational submarine, but proceeded to have a distinguished career in command.

He was born in Trinidad in 1913. After leaving Highgate School he joined the publishing house John Lane the Bodley Head as office boy. The way he kept the book of office cuttings caught the eye of the managing director, Allen Lane, and, when Lane broke away from the Bodley Head to set up Penguin Books, he took Young with him as his production manager. When after long debate the name "Penguin" was decided on, Young was sent to London Zoo to draw a penguin for the new firm's symbol; it remained in use until Jan Tschichold tidied it up after the Second World War.

Young's contribution to the new firm in its earliest days was more than the Penguin and Pelican symbols and the eye-catching covers; he wrote most of the publicity, in a friendly, unpretentious style that was exactly right for the new young public (and their elders) who could now afford to buy good books for sixpence.

The newly formed Reprint Society took him from Penguins in 1939. In early 1940 he joined the Navy; some holiday sailing and evening swotting got him direct entry as a sub-lieutenant, RNVR. The Admiralty now decided to take the unheard-of risk of inviting an RNVR officer to be trained in submarines. They found that one man currently on the officers' training course at HMS King Alfred had been a diver (actually quite irrelevant), so they asked him, and he asked two of his friends, one of whom happened to be Edward Young. When Young learned that this was a quick way to get on to the advanced navigation course in which he was interested, he accepted.

After the obligatory three months' experience in surface ships, he was the only one of the three to turn up at Fort Blockhouse for the submarine course. He passed out top of his class, over the heads of the RN professionals, and never looked back. After sea experience in older boats (submarines are always "boats" not "ships") he was posted as Third Hand in a brand new submarine, HMS Umpire. On her first voyage after acceptance she was accidentally sunk in a collision in the Channel at night. Young was one of four men who escaped from the conning-tower without any escape equipment: of those four, only Young and one other were picked up alive.

He had three years of war patrols off Norway and Russia, in the Bay of Biscay and the Med, and then became (the Navy having admitted the necessity of RNVR officers) the first RNVR officer to command an operational submarine. In HMS Storm he proved himself an exceptional commander – for some time wearing two wavy stripes while his first lieutenant had two straight ones. This embarrassment was rectified when Young was promoted Lieutenant-Commander.

In 1945 he brought Storm home after 18 months in the Far East, having taken her, since her launching, 71,000 miles and spent over 1,400 hours submerged – figures which may mean little to modern nuclear submariners, but meant a lot then. Young was promoted to Commander and given a staff appointment in a submarine depot ship stationed off Rothesay on the island of Arran.

After the war, with a DSO and two DSCs, he returned to publishing. He had a spell with the Reprint Society and Pan Books and then joined the new firm of Rupert Hart-Davis as director in charge of production. He had been asked by the C-in-C, Home Fleet, to set down in book form his wartime experiences. In due course he completed One of Our Submarines, which Hart-Davis published in 1952. The sales manager predicted a best-seller. Young said that, if it was, he'd take the sales manager out for the "most expensive lunch in London". When sales passed 50,000, the lunch took place at Simpson's in the Strand: the most they found they could spend at that time (barring absurdly expensive vintage wines) was not more than £10 a head.

In 1954 Penguin Books honoured their original production manager by reprinting his book as the thousandth Penguin, with green laurel wreaths round both the number and the penguin on the red-white-red cover. More than 40 years later the book is still in print. It is a modest and gently humorous account, with none of the over-dramatic writing in T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars (which Young had much admired before the war) but owing something to David Garnett, then his co-director at Hart-Davis.

Young later became managing director of the Rainbird Publishing Group (from 1970 to 1973) and wrote several other books, but no more best-sellers.

Ruari McLean