The good life – drinking and gardening Hugh Johnson
Writing, drinking and gardening... That’s how Hugh Johnson has made a living for 60 years – and he’s had a ball
Much of the blame must go to P G Wodehouse, but perhaps the clincher was Oliver Edwards. On 17th April 1778, he told Samuel Johnson that he ‘too, had tried to be a philosopher, but I don’t know how, somehow, cheerfulness was always breaking in’.
It has always been so when I sit down to write, whatever the subject. I used to bone up on, say, the local undertakers for a searching piece in the local paper, and, by paragraph two, I was telling the one about the two Irishmen who… No, there I go again. That’s not what the editor ordered.
But it is how I got here. Why write, I asked myself, if readers are not going to read? And why should they read if it isn’t fun? Besides, I pictured them shuffling, looking at their watches, sneaking a look to see how long it was before the end. I was always nervous that they’d give up on me.
Suppose they weren’t interested in undertaking, or indeed clarets, which was what I proposed! Then hoodwink them. Start off by writing about something likelier to grab them, and then ease over to the matter in hand. Marriage prospects, I recall, handily introduced the subject of laying down First Growths (girls who do it have a string of suitors – or did in my day).
Wine, of course, has inherent cheerfulness. It’s what it’s for. By the time I’d developed a healthy thirst for it, at Cambridge and after (it didn’t take long), my curiosity was also hooked.
I found plenty of worthy, literate, enthusiastic books to read, but few I found absorbing, let alone amusing. I remembered that approved cliché: ‘If you want to learn a subject, write a book on it.’
But who would pay me? The editor and cartoonist Mark Boxer gave me a steer: ‘Try Jocelyn Baines at Nelson. They’re coining it in with Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World. Say you want to do the wine version.’
Which is why my first book, called by my favourite four-letter word, Wine, is a swanky number with full-colour plates (which I had to take), and why I pocketed the £1,000 advance which took me and Judy, newly wed, on a pan-european tour in the wettest and most miserable vintage ever, 1965.
Wine sold well. It sold in America (where I had the thrill of sharing a publisher with P G Wodehouse, Peter Schwed of Simon & Schuster). Then Harry Evans asked me to take over from the retiring Elizabeth Nicholas as Travel Editor of the Sunday Times.
Only months later, Jocelyn Stevens asked me to edit Queen – and Harry said, ‘Grab it – off you go.’ Celeste, our astrologer at Queen, summed up my career when she said, ‘You’re a lucky devil.’
Two years later, James Mitchell, leaving Nelson to start Mitchell Beazley, asked me to do a wine atlas. ‘If I can have serious maps, Ordnance Survey-style,’ I said. His backer agreed – what a splendid job they did. The sales of the atlas exceeded even my dreams. After 500,000, James presented me with a gold disc on the cover of a leather-bound copy.
When he asked what came next and I answered, ‘Trees,’ he thought (and perhaps hoped) I’d said, ‘Cheese.’
‘No – trees,’ I said.
‘Trees aren’t a consumer subject,’ he answered.
I have always loved trees, and still can’t understand how most people feel indifferent to the magnificent vegetables that give us shade, not to mention wood. It wasn’t going to happen without sponsorship from the International Paper Company.
James and I went to New York – and this mammoth producer of newsprint bought into the idea, bankrolled it, helped my research and I’m happy to say made a decent profit when we eventually sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Co-editions in translation were the secret of Mitchell Beazley’s groundbreaking success.
Trees, and a new house in north Essex, drew me into gardening. In 1974, war in the Middle East quadrupled the price of oil and everyone felt poor – including the Royal Horticultural Society. I was asked if I could help with its 100-year-old Journal and ended up, with James’s help, turning it into The Garden and starting Tradescant’s (or Trad’s) Diary as its editorial. I’m still writing it, 45 years later.
I’m surprised when people ask what wine and trees (and gardening) have in common. They are all intimate, personal, sensual pleasures that reward observation, study and patience.
They are all grist to the mill of a writer who tries to entertain by explaining quite complex themes.
The rest follows. Tony Laithwaite asked me to help with the Sunday Times Wine Club. I rashly undertook an ambitious book called The Principles of Gardening. I started my Pocket Wine Book and kept it up for 45 editions. I wrote The Story of Wine. Since then, enjoying both subjects has kept me happy and busy. There is no exhausting them – nor, so far, me.
Hugh Johnson’s Sitting in the Shade: A decade of my garden diary is published on 1st April (Mitchell Beazley)