Sir John Brown

Publisher of the Oxford University Press

John Gilbert Newton Brown, publisher: born Chilham, Kent 7 July 1916; sales manager, Oxford University Press 1949-56, Publisher 1956-80; President, Publishers' Association 1963-65; CBE 1966; Kt 1974; Professorial Fellow, Hertford College, Oxford 1974-80; chairman, B.H. Blackwell Ltd 1980-83; chairman, Basil Blackwell Ltd 1983-87; vice-president, Blackwell Group Ltd 1987-2003; married 1946 Virginia Braddell (one son, two daughters); died Oxford 3 March 2003

As publisher of the Oxford University Press, John Brown was one of the great leaders of British book publishing throughout the years of its recovery after the Second World War until his retirement in 1980.

He then added bookselling to his repertoire as non-executive chairman of B.H. Blackwell and a director of several Blackwell subsidiary companies. He was also for many years a director of Book Tokens and on the boards of both the British Council and the British Library. To a generation of publishers behind his own he was a constant and cheerful encourager, ever patient and wise in his advice. By any definition, he was the most attractive of men.

John Brown – or Bruno, as he was known to his many friends and fellow publishers – was born in 1916 and educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Zoology. He first joined the Oxford University Press at its Bombay branch in 1937. Thus began a life-long love affair with India and a realisation of the importance of, and opportunities in, overseas markets for British book publishers.

Soon, however, the clouds of war intervened and he found himself commissioned in the Royal Artillery, serving with the 5th Field Regiment. This led to his capture by the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942 and to four dark years as a prisoner of war. He never talked about those years. But, later, there was great admiration among his peers when he agreed to lead a high-level British publishers' trade delegation to Japan. Whatever his personal misgivings about returning to the land of his captors, he was determined that it should be a success. And it was.

Rejoining the Oxford University Press after the war in London – at that time OUP publishing was headquartered in London and not (as now) in Oxford – he was appointed Sales Manager in 1949 and Publisher (i.e. chief executive) in 1956.

During those 30 years he built a team of extremely able and loyal colleagues. He also won enormous respect from fellow publishers for bringing the OUP into the mainstream of the British book trade, recognising that neither national lobbying nor international marketing benefited from the UK's two great university presses being isolated from the rest of British publishing. (Happily the Cambridge University Press took the same view). This was a time when there were many more individual publishing houses, most of them independent, which despite their differing sizes treated each other as equals. Today's corporate agglomeration was still well out of sight.

Thus it was a source of widely felt delight, and no surprise, when Bruno Brown was elected President of the Publishers' Association in 1963. Over the next two years he and his successor as President (my father, John Attenborough) were the principal architects of the still-flourishing Book Development Council, established with government encouragement and substantial publishers' investment to strengthen the position of British publishers in overseas markets. Marketing books overseas was then, as now, a challenging business. I recall Bruno once confessing that the OUP felt itself fortunate if in any one year none of its export markets collapsed because of local revolution or national insolvency.

It is too late to ask him which books he was most proud to have seen published by the OUP during his years at the helm. One for which he will be long remembered is the stupendously successful Advanced Learners' Dictionary of which many millions of copies have been sold to overseas students of English. Without belittling the dictionary's merits, it is widely deemed to have been given one of the most commercially astute titles of all time. It has certainly been a wonderful spearhead for OUP's big list of books for people wanting to learn English.

Brown's name will also be linked with the publication (jointly with the Cambridge University Press) of the New English Bible, the New Testament of which was published in 1961 followed by the Old Testament in 1970. All his skills as a marketeer were brilliantly applied and its launch was a stunning commercial success. Indeed 1961 is well remembered not just for claret but as the year when every bookseller in Britain achieved record sales. And all thanks to one book and the skills of its publisher. Brown's honour of a knighthood in 1974 seemed marvellously well won and brought joy to his friends and admirers.

Outside the humdrum of everyday publishing Bruno Brown was both the warmest and most loyal companion. As to loyalties, he and I shared three which inspired me to give him some new ties to celebrate his retirement: the first for the Band of Brothers cricket club (he was a good cricketer, ever loyal to Kent); the second being the Royal Artillery (in which I was a mere National Serviceman); and lastly the Garrick (a club whose congeniality he greatly enjoyed).

The greatest of his loyalties were, however, to his family. In Virginia he was blessed with a wife who gave him love and support for 56 years and who greatly enlivened many a book-trade occasion. He was immensely proud of their son, John, also a publisher (albeit of a very different discipline), and he much enjoyed being a director of the latter's John Brown Publishing. Bruno was pleased, too, that there was publishing in their two daughters' blood: Julia is a freelance picture researcher, and Olivia once worked for a children's book publisher (and is now a speech therapist).

Although physical limitations were a great frustration towards the end of Bruno's life, his and Virginia's retirement years at Great Milton in Oxfordshire will be remembered as a happy time and place both for them, for their family and for their visitors.

Philip Attenborough

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