Anthony Sheil
Literary agent who ran a betting book while at Ampleforth
ANTHONY SHEIL, who has died aged 84, was the founder of Anthony Sheil Associates, an agency that represented an array of distinguished authors, including John Fowles, John Keegan and Paddy Leigh Fermor.
One of three children, Anthony Leonard Sheil was born in London on May 18 1932. His mother was a Canadian heiress. His father, Jerry, had served in the Royal Artillery in the First World War.
In 1935 the family moved to Ireland, where Jerry Sheil’s uncle owned and ran the Confey stud. Jerry Sheil became a successful trainer and was set to take over Confey. He was called back into the Army in 1939, however, and Anthony’s mother took her children to Canada for the duration of the war.
Six days before the end of the war in Germany, Anthony’s father, now a brigadier, drove over a mine and was killed. Anthony was sent back from Canada alone in 1946, to go to Ampleforth.
On his father’s death, Anthony, aged 13, inherited the stud, but his mother insisted he sell it and at 15 he returned to Ireland to do so. Yet a passion for riding and racing never left him. At Ampleforth, he ran a betting book. By his late twenties, however, he had run through most of his inheritance.
Ampleforth was followed by National Service, then Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Greats as a scholar, rode in point-topoints and generally had a good time. After Oxford, he started studying for the Bar and, with a fellow student, James Kinross, began reading manuscripts for pin money.
It occurred to them that starting a business for reading and placing manuscripts would be more fun and profitable than piece work, so in 1962 they set up Anthony Sheil Associates, an agency in Grafton Street.
Their first authors were mainly military historians, with a few sportsmen, and some novelists, of whom John Fowles was the best known. The agency’s first secretary, a respectable middle-aged lady, had a lucrative sideline in the forging of cheques, a fact that went undetected for more than a year.
Purnell’s History of the Second World War, a weekly anthology published in 1966, was one of their early successes. Another series of which Sheil was proud was Sources of History edited by Sir Geoffrey Elton.
Kinross died in 1966, and in 1967 Gillon Aitken joined the agency, which then moved to Dean Street above a strip club, and eventually to Doughty Street. Along the way, the agency had taken over Richard Scott Simon and Christy & Moore, the latter representing Catherine Cookson, among others.
In 1974 Sheil set up a New York agency – Wallace, Aitken and Sheil – and a London-based foreign rights company Marsh and Sheil, with Paul Marsh, in 1986. He sold the agency to Sonia Land and formed a joint outfit with her, Sheil Land Associates in 1991. In 1998, he left to work as an independent agent with Aitken, Alexander Associates.
He had stopped gambling in his late twenties, becoming instead a passionate Arsenal fan. Yet his eye for form continued to serve him well as an agent.
He was loyal to his writers: one alcoholic author would ring from a telephone box asking for his advance before it was due. Sheil would send a cheque from his personal account, though he realised the book would never be finished.
Tall and wiry, Sheil affected an air of unhurried nonchalance and was a gifted raconteur. A keen birdwatcher, he loved cross-country rambles; the first holiday he took from his agency was a four-week walking tour in Greece, sleeping out in fields.
His first marriage, to Coline Covington, was dissolved, and in 1997 he married Annette WorsleyTaylor, the driving force for many years behind London Fashion Week. She died in 2015. There were no children of either marriage.
Anthony Sheil, born May 18 1932, died January 10 2017