John Brown
Queen Victoria’s lover or 1859 slave abolitionist, John Brown is a name to be reckoned with. Intelligent, energetic and with a mission. Just like our Norland-based publisher and ex manager of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain John Brown, who has lived in, or near, Notting Hill his whole life.
Once a captain of the publishing industry, having founded his eponymous Ladbroke Grove-based magazine publishing house in 1987, which he ran for 17 years, Brown has now divided his life into two halves, one for profit with a photographic book publishing company Bob Books, among other ventures, and the other half not-for-profit, chairing a charity which refurbishes computers and then sends them off to Africa, where three million students and 50,000 teachers have already benefitted from receiving computers. “This really works, which is a thrill,” says Brown, who is also a governor of the Kensington Aldridge Academy and Trustee of the School for Social Entrepreneurs.
The Brown family have a long history in Norland. In 1910, Brown’s grandmother, Dorothy Braddell, a designer and decorative artist who was married to Darcy Braddell a prominent architect, bought 8 Lansdowne Road for £500.
Having been sent to the Dragon School when he was eight and then as a boarder to Westminster School, he decided to study for a business degree in printing. Though as so often with specialising young, once he finished, he decided he didn’t want to be a printer, but a publisher.
By this time, at 22 after a fairly dull job at the publisher Hutchinson, he was introduced by a friend to John Reid Enterprises, Elton John’s manager ,where he worked initially as a motorcycle messenger before becoming a production assistant on a series of concerts in Edinburgh for amongst others Elton John, Billy Connolly and Queen. “It was the best job I ever had” he enthuses, “It was huge fun.”
A day arrived though when he received a message from the established publishing house Jonathan Cape, to “Come in and have a chat”. When he was offered a job, Brown says: “I made the difficult but wrong decision to take the job. I should have stayed in the music business.” He was bored after two years and took off for the USA. He fell in love with America and he spent 1976 - 1980 in New York’s West Village, gathering a host of great stories working as a chauffeur, which he loved but left as he wanted to get on with his career.
He returned to Notting Hill, moving from St Helens Gardens to Lancaster Road and worked for Eel Pie publishing, founded by musician Pete Townshend of The Who. It was a perfect combination of music business and publishing.
When Eel Pie sold in 1983, Brown went to Portobello Road-based Virgin Books where he published rock music books. “Virgin was fabulous,” says Brown, “Everyone was under 30 and anybody who had an idea could do it.” He stayed there for nearly five years. “Virgin unearthed my latent entrepreneurial instincts. I was always having business ideas.” He decided to set up his own magazine publishing company, encouraged by his publisher father Sir John Brown, known as Bruno, whose advice was that he should work for himself.
So, in 1987, Brown arranged a modest loan from Branson and set up John Brown Publishing with just two products, Virgin’s in-flight magazine which was called Hot Air. “We were going to call it Low Life, but we realised British Airways [whose in-flight magazine is High Life] wouldn’t get the joke.” The other was the comedy magazine Viz produced by the eighteen-year-old Chris Donald and his younger brother Simon in Newcastle. Brown thought Viz was brilliant: “It was one of the two or three astonishing moments in my life,” says Brown, “I had an unbelievable sense of excitement, hardly daring to move.” He contacted Chris and Simon and flew up to see them in Newcastle, arranging for Virgin to publish Viz before transferring the title to John Brown publishing. By 1990 Viz became the second highest selling title in the country (after the Radio Times) selling well over a million copies an issue.
While all this excitement was going on Brown met his future wife Claudia and moved to Elgin Crescent. He added more titles, including Gardens Illustrated and Bizarre magazine as well as greatly expanding the contract side of the business with titles for Waitrose, Sky and many others. He eventually sold his business in 2004.
In 2006, he founded Bob Books also based in Ladbroke Grove. Always on the go, he works with charity founder Cormac Lynch, on Camara which uses refurbished technology to enhance education in some of the world's most disadvantaged communities. Unwanted computers are collected from companies, up to 50 at a time, are checked and made good by computer engineers and sent out in containers to Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and Lesthoto. “There is a big demand,” says Brown, who literally bristles with interest and energy for this new project.
