‘The Most Unforgettable Character I ever met’....Cap'n Bob

Do you remember the old series in Readers Digest called ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I ever met’?

I was mulling over this and thought about the many great personages I have met during my long and totally misspent career.

I came up with three names; Robert Maxwell, Desmond Plunkett, and Hastings Banda.

Cap’n Bob first.

When I came out of the army, I decided that a career in publishing sounded free of any  form of physical effort, so I joined the Pergamon Press, prop. Captain I.R. Maxwell MC.

He was a person of extraordinary ability, and, from my brief acquaintance, considerable charm.

He was born Jan Ludvik Hoch in Czechoslovakia into a Yiddish-speaking family, but he scarpered to the UK in 1940 at the age of 16 when the Nazis arrived. The remainder of the family was not so lucky; they all went to the gas chamber in Auschwitz.

He joined the army, fought through France to Germany as an infantry officer and was awarded the MC by Monty.

His business career really started in Hamburg after the surrender. He was guarding barges in which the Nazis hoped to spirit away some of their treasures before the beastly British arrived. Amongst them was the entire stock of Axel Springer, one of the world’s most important scientific publishers. Legend has it that Bob ‘liberated’ the lot, which I can well believe, as the Pergamon Press was healthily stocked with Springer books.

His next move was r to acquire a zombie firm of printers called Simpkin Marshall, which although nominally bankrupt was asset-rich because of its prime-site location. Bob thus became one of the first asset-strippers.

His next big break-through was when he acquired the rights to the proceedings of the International Geophysical Year around 1956. This meant that he had a captive monopoly as every university and scientific body in the world would have to buy the various publications. The scuttlebutt was that he got the Russian rights by going to see Khrushchev personally (amongst his many talents was fluency in 7 languages, including Russian. It was also rumoured that he was a KGB agent, like a number of prominent members of the Labour Party at that time). Each small paperback cost about £7, a large amount for a small book nearly 50 years ago.

All were printed in Poland at low cost and avoiding the militant printing unions of the time.

I was assigned to the rare book department, and one morning as I was salivating over a complete and original set of the Proceedings of the Royal Society back to Volume 1, Cap’n Bob, tall, very handsome with wavy dark hair wearing a double breasted blue pin-stripe of Saville Row’s finest, appeared in my room and said that he wished to speak to me.

Now it so happens that 1958 was election year. My old man, who was a life-time member of the Labour Party and Chairman of the Buckingham Constituency Party, confidently expected to be the next candidate for what was then a relatively safe Labour seat.

To the anger and consternation of the local party, Bob Maxwell was parachuted in by Transport House. He was not even qualified because he had not been a member of the party for the necessary minimum period.

The merde really hit the fan when the nomination papers were published. The old man had seconded the nomination paper of the Tory Candidate!

Of course he was booted out of the party forthwith. But he also had his 15 minutes of fame when he was splashed all over the front pages of the red-tops. It was a major kick in the slats for Bob, although he did win the seat.

So Bob said to me that the differences between him and my father were nothing for me to worry about and that my career was assured. I knew then that it was time to seek fame and fortune elsewhere.

As we know, it all ended badly when he disappeared off his yacht.

Did he jump? Highly unlikely; people with an ego that big don’t top themselves.

Did he have a heart attack and fall over the side? Possibly; by this time the handsome young man of my acquaintance had turned into a gross monster.

Was he bumped-off?

Possibly; it is now pretty certain that he was a Mossad agent (which is where the lion’s share of the MGN pension fund ended-up – allegedly) and he may have outlived his usefulness.

We shall probably never know for sure.