Remembering wonders of Offord & Meynell shop
If you entered Offord & Meynell Booksellers, the secondhand bookshop at 50 East Street, Chichester, in the 1960s, chances were you might find yourself rubbing shoulders with Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, or Bishop Bell.
Charles Offord and Vivian Meynell had been colleagues in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war. On demobilisation, they decided to pool their resources and set up in business, and after searching from Canterbury to Torquay for suitable premises, they settled for Chichester.
The shop they found belonged to the Dean and Chapter and had served as a wartime forces canteen. Their bookshop opened in 1946.
Meynell came from a literary family. His grandparents were Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, both poets; his uncle was Sir Francis Meynell, founder of the Nonesuch Press; the biographer Viola Meynell was a cousin.
Although Offord soon dropped out to become a farmer and beekeeper, the name above the shop remained unchanged.
In addition to books, Meynell sold china and prints and in 1954 his became the first bookshop to install a coffee bar. It was the Italian coffee and Patsy Meynell’s sandwiches that attracted a whole new clientele.
When the Festival Theatre opened, the Minerva Studios in nearby Eastgate Square were used for rehearsals and eminent thespians – Michael Redgrave, Fenella Fielding and the like – would drop in for coffee and gossip.
As a schoolboy in the early 1960s, I would scan the outside shelves for something I could afford, then venture in to pay, having to reach past the celebrities perched on the barstools in a fug of Craven A and espresso fumes in order to do so. I can still hear their high-cultural voices, the joshing and merriment.
Literati such as Christopher Fry, John Betjeman, Bertrand Russell and A.E. Coppard were among other visitors.
Graham Greene, on one of his tours of provincial bookshops, walked in one day and noticed a copy of one of his early novels, probably The Name of Action or Rumour at Nightfall, priced at £10.
"If I could afford it, I would have it from you and burn it,” he told Meynell. He later returned, only to learn it had been sold.
I still possess some of my own purchases from this shop. My copy of A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1905) bears the bookplate of Lord and Lady Gorell, and a little research reveals that Lord Gorell died at Arundel in 1963, so I guess Meynell had acquired his library.
Meynell complimented me when I splashed out 12 shillings and sixpence (his pencil price is still present) on an 1853 four-volume set of Alexander Pope.
With three children to support, Viv Meynell wore other hats. In 1956, he became the Chichester correspondent for the West Sussex Gazette, and later superintendent registrar of births, deaths and marriages.
It was a sad day when increased overheads forced Meynell to close the shop in 1976 but he moved to smaller firstfloor premises at 11 The Hornet and continued trading until 1985, when, at 69, he retired to his home at Birdham.