Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Gail Rebuck
Oration given on 13 July 2001
Vice Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved
that the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Gail
Rebuck.
It used to be thought that the new means of communication would lead to a
‘paperless society’. Not only has that proved not to be true in terms of
the more mundane activities of record keeping, messaging, information gathering
and correspondence, but happily it has not happened either in the realm of
books. Books have not been supplanted by ubiquitous television; indeed, in
many ways television has stimulated readership. A surprising number of
people appear to agree with Groucho Marx, who once said, “ I find television
very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room
and read a good book”.
We are so far away in historical time from the advent of books and, later, of
the invention of printing, that it is easy to forget what revolutionary
implications these had for the destiny of human kind. Books educate,
entertain, they instruct, titillate, provoke, sometimes anger or mislead but
always it is to books that we turn: as objects that are real, we can hold them
in our hands, our eyes can scan them and our brain and emotions are stimulated
by them; they are active, rather than passive: in short, to paraphrase Thomas
Carlyle, books are friends that never fail us.
Gail Rebuck would doubtless agree with these sentiments, just as she would no
doubt endorse John Ruskin’s dictum, “If a book is worth reading, it is worth
buying”, for, as Chief Executive of the Random House Group, the United Kingdom’s
largest publishing company, her lifelong pleasure has been to read and her trade
and profession are to sell books.
It all began after graduation from Sussex University in the mid-1970s with a
degree in French and Intellectual History. Like so many new Arts
graduates, she had no specific career plans, so she took a summer vacation job
as a tour guide. Then she worked as a driver, ferrying her brother’s
antiques-dealer girlfriend around auctions and fairs in the Midlands. She
was, she told one interviewer, “perfectly happy until I sat on a stall one day
and realised that I had to do something about earning a living. “I had
always loved books” she said, “so it had to be publishing”.
After that, it was a bit like launching a rocket: to begin with movement is
slow, but then the rocket starts to accelerate, until, finally, it blasts away
into the stratosphere. Gail Rebuck’s ‘launching pad’ was as a production
assistant with Grisewood & Dempsey. One of her first jobs was to
revitalise a flagging series of London guides, which she did by enlisting the
‘knowledge’ of London taxi drivers, whereupon the series took off. Soon
she moved on to become Editor of Robert Nicholson Publications and by 1979 she
had joined the Hamlyn Group, with the task of launching a new mass-market
paperback list.
It was in 1982 that the metaphorical space-craft separated from the booster
rocket when Gail Rebuck, with four colleagues, founded a new publishing house,
Century, where she was Director with responsibility for the non-fiction list.
She, and the company, flourished. In 1985, Century merged with Hutchinson
and four years later was acquired by Random House Incorporated.
If this oration is beginning to sound rather like a potted history of the
publishing industry, that is because, in many ways, it is precisely that.
Names that evoke comfortable images of oak-panelled offices, avuncular editors
and bibulous lunches, for good or ill, have almost disappeared. The names
may survive, Random House, for example, incorporates Jonathan Cape, Chatto &
Windus, Heinemann, Hutchinson, Doubleday, Arrow, Vintage and Corgi but ownership
and overall control are exercised by big corporations although it is a feature
of Gail Rebuck’s management style that in Random House’s towering, Thames-side
headquarters, she has allocated separate floors for each individual imprint and
encouraged them to maintain their own special identities and this suits the many
authors published by the Random House Group very well. And what a list it
is, including as it does Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Robert
Harris, Sebastian Faulks, John Grisham and Ruth Rendell. There are also
John Keegan and Michael Ignatieff, Roald Dahl and Catherine Cookson, Bill Bryson
and Germaine Greer, and many, many more (not to mention the classic backlist
that includes Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf and Sigmund
Freud).
This scant, selective characterisation of the company of which Gail Rebuck is
Chairman and Chief Executive should be enough to show what a crucially important
job hers is. It is a post that, it goes without saying, requires very
considerable intellectual ability, as well as astuteness, toughness and
managerial dexterity. And because she has been an immensely successful as
an entrepreneur, she inevitably arouses passions. One rival publisher is
reported as having said of her: “It’s a case of steel-capped shoulder pads”, but
then added: “Gail Rebuck is tough, but anyone in her job would have to be.
She’s very bright, very professional and very, very successful. She’s everything
that the Head of a modern Publishing Group ought to be.”
Gail Rebuck has also been called a “turbo-charged careerist”, “the most
powerful figure in British publishing”, a “champagne socialist” and, then
contrariwise, a “maverick and sexual revolutionary who has risen to the top of a
male-dominated profession”. In 1999 as the Vice-Chancellor has mentioned
she was included in The Observer’s list of the one hundred most powerful persons
in the United Kingdom and the following year was awarded a CBE in the New Years
Honours list. If there is a “glass ceiling” keeping down ambitious and
able women, Gail Rebuck has shown that it can be shattered.
One story told about Gail Rebuck, possibly apocryphal, is that she signed the
contract appointing her Chief Executive of Random House in the delivery room of
St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, on the day her second daughter was born.
But if that is meant to suggest that she is a single-minded business fanatic,
the lie is laid by the fact that she is a strictly nine-to-six person, who
believes that success depends upon what you do at work, not how long you spend
there. In any case, she is very much a family person and enjoys a close
relationship with her daughters and her husband, Philip Gould, Prime Minister
Tony Blair’s close adviser and strategist.
According to the Financial Times, 106,000 new books are released every year
in the United Kingdom, more even than in the United States of America. It
is, says the FT a “brutally competitive” market. Yet not only is Gail
Rebuck an outstandingly powerful player in that market, she is also a successful
mother, partner and public figure.
Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Gail Ruth Rebuck.
Orator: Professor Peter Frank