In Memoriam – Stephen Brough
Stephen Brough, Wynkyn de Worde Society Chairman in 2007, has recently died, aged 72. Patrick Brittain, a friend of Stephen’s, and a long term member of the Society, has written about him for us.
Stephen Brough was elected a member in 2003 and became our Chairman in 2007 – an auspicious year that marked the Society’s 50th anniversary. His programme that year culminated in a ceremony at St. Bride’s Church with the unveiling of a plaque, that some might say was long overdue, commemorating the man after whom we take our name . The Cardozo Kindersley workshop created the plaque, and Sir Simon Jenkins pulled the cord. There followed a dinner in Stationers’ Hall addressed by Sir Simon and the evening closed on a high note of conviviality.
Stephen was a distinguished Chairman who subsequently became a distinguished Treasurer to the Charitable Trust. To this role he brought energy and a fiscal rigour, much to the benefit of the Trust. He was an extremely good fund-raiser, exploiting his many contacts in the publishing world to acquire books suiting every taste for raffles. It was thanks to his efforts that the Trust was enabled to significantly increase its bursary endowment and, having been trained as a lawyer, he ensured that regulations governing trusteeship were scrupulously applied.
Although never a practitioner of typography, calligraphy or other crafts associated with the graphic arts, he always took a lively interest in such things.
After taking a degree in Law at Exeter, and finding preparation as a trainee barrister uncongenial, he took to the road, as it were, first working as a hospital porter before becoming a mini cab driver navigating the streets of London by reference to an A-Z on his knee. I have heard that in this role he raised his fares to the visibly affluent while bestowing free rides onto impoverished pensioners.
After that rather itinerant interlude, he settled for journalism, spending nine years on Holiday Which? before joining The Economist as editorial director of its book division. That division was later franchised to Hamish Hamilton, and it was there that Stephen met Andrew Franklin, then the publisher of their Penguin imprint. In 1995 Andrew asked Stephen to join him in a venture that saw the birth of Profile Books on April Fool’s Day 1996. In the first year they lost £36,000, but today Profile is a well-established book publisher turning over £18.5 million. Much of this success was down to Stephen’s pragmatism and sound business sense.
Stephen was a member of Surrey CCC, and to be seated beside him at The Oval, often as his guest, was to be seated beside a man wearing a most florid shirt of the tropical island sort who consumed a great deal of satsumas contained in a paper bag at his side.
The man himself: generous, kind, witty, irreverent, pragmatic and most dependable. Too good to lose, really.
Stephen Brough
28 June 1951 – 23 September 2023