Ernest Hecht
Unorthodox Czech-born publisher who revelled in mess but maintained his independence
ERNEST HECHT, who has died aged 88, was one of a colourful band of European émigrés – among them George Weidenfeld, André Deutsch, Paul Hamlyn and Paul Elek – who started their own publishing houses in London after the war, bringing a theatrical flair to the British book trade.
Unlike many of his rivals, his imprint, Souvenir, somehow managed to avoid being swallowed up into one of the larger media empires and by the time of his death it was the sole remaining independently owned major publishing house in the country.
A short, jovial, scruffy looking man, Hecht, who came to Britain as a nine-yearold refugee in the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia, ran his company from ramshackle premises opposite the British Museum.
Visitors would find him in the front room peering out from between piles of books, notes, old gramophone records, Arsenal T-shirts, wine bottles, theatre programmes, plastic bags and, possibly, unsolicited manuscripts, which swamped his desk and spilt on to the floor. “I find things by the dust, like arboreal dating,” Hecht claimed.
Hecht was fast-talking, impish and with a shrewd eye for an unlikely bestseller, and his catalogue, immodestly captioned “The Independent Publisher of Books that Sell Well”, was as unorthodox as the man, ranging from jazz to euthanasia.
There were numerous titles on cats and dogs (“We’re probably the most successful cat book publishers in Europe”), on living with disabilities (“We have the largest list of books on disabilities in Europe”) and raunchier fare by such writers as the romantic novelist Madeleine Brent (real name Peter O’donnell) and Rosemary Hawthorne, the wife of a vicar and author of the popular Knickers: A Popular Appraisal and Bras: A Private View. “The only thing I won’t publish,” Hecht told an interviewer, “is German generals.”
His more literary productions included works by Latin American authors such as Borges, Neruda, Cortazar and Amado, and for 40 years Hecht published books by Ronald Searle, including his illustrated memoir of life as a POW of the Japanese, To the Kwai – and Back. But as he once remarked: “Anyone can create a high-class literary list of prestige titles. It’s better to have a balanced list, comprising books that make money and those perhaps more worthy titles that don’t.”
Notable among the former were Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods and books by the “airport” writer Arthur Hailey, whom Hecht first commissioned in the mid-1950s to co-author a “novelisation” of the television film Flight Into Danger. When this appeared in 1958 (and as Runway Zero-eight in America in 1959), it was an immediate success. Hailey would go on to produce such blockbusters as In High Places (1962), Hotel (1965) and Airport (1968).
Hecht had a small staff with only one editor and no marketing department at all. Though he spent a lot of time abroad, his trips were more likely to coincide with big football fixtures than book fairs. He missed the Frankfurt fair in 1966 because he wanted to attend a match and, noticing it made no difference to his business, decided never to go again.
His motto was that a publisher’s first duty is to remain solvent, and he saw himself as a representative of a roguish Central European tradition – good at cutting deals and winning publicity, quick to recognise what would sell. He admitted to a few failures, however, and was once reported to be battling with Camden Council over the right to fly his company flag at half-mast whenever a title was remaindered.
An only child, Ernest Hecht was born on September 21 1929 in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, to assimilated Jewish parents who ran a clothes manufacturing business.
In 1938 his father Richard, seeing the way the political wind was blowing, visited England, ostensibly on a business trip but really to find out more about the possibilities of getting his family out of danger. Ernest himself did not leave Moravia until April 1939, after German troops had marched into Czechoslovakia, when he travelled alone on one of the Kindertransport trains carrying Jewish children to safety. As he travelled by train with his mother to Prague, he threw up over the only other passenger in the carriage – a Gestapo officer: “He was actually all right about it. He wiped himself down, telling my mother not to worry because he had young children, too.”
Hecht had to leave his mother in Prague. She eventually escaped from Czechoslovakia three weeks before Germany invaded Poland, in September 1939. The family reunited in a small flat on Tottenham Court Road, from which Ernest was soon dispatched as an evacuee to the village of Great Somerford in Wiltshire, where he played cricket and began adapting to his new life.
He went on to take degrees in Economics and Commerce at Hull University, where he managed the football team.
After graduation, in 1951 he set up Souvenir Press (the name taken from the souvenir theatre programmes he sold in his university vacations) in the bedroom of his parents’ flat. His first book was a biography of the cricketer Len Hutton, his second the autobiography of Ron Burgess, the former Spurs and Wales captain, which he sold direct to the Spurs’ supporters club. His first bestseller was The Password Is Courage, the story of Charlie Coward, a British soldier who got into (not out of) Auschwitz, and was subsequently a witness against IG Farben in the war crimes trials.
Almost fanatical in his love of the “beautiful game”, Hecht, a long-standing Arsenal supporter, worked from time to time as a freelance sports journalist in order to get official accreditation for the World Cups, and as the British literary agent of Pele. He later became the official publisher of the great Brazilian football team, and of Matt Busby and Bobby Charlton.
Another interest was music and theatre and he also produced plays and concerts. In 2011 Souvenir Press celebrated its 60th birthday at a concert given by Willard White performing the songs of Paul Robeson at the Royal College of Music.
In 2003 he set up the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation, which supports a wide variety of good causes including Singing for the Brain (for Alzheimer’s sufferers), the Tricycle Theatre and the Chickenshed theatre company. For several years, every autumn he sponsored Myra Hess Day at the National Gallery, with concerts in the domed gallery where Dame Myra played to thousands of Londoners during the war.
Hecht was unmarried and lived alone in Notting Hill. He was indifferent to what would happen to his business after his death, “for the simple reason that I won’t be here”.
Hecht received the British Book Awards Lifetime Achievement award in 2001 and was appointed OBE in 2015.
Ernest Hecht, born September 21 1929, died February 13 2018