Richard Usborne

Richard Alexander Usborne (16 May 1910 – 21 March 2006) was a journalist, advertising executive, schoolmaster and author.

Richard Usborne was born on 16 May 1910 at Simla, in British India, the son of Charles Frederick Usborne, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and his wife Janet Muriel, née Lefroy.

He was educated in England at Summer Fields Preparatory school, Charterhouse School and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a prominent sportsman, competing in association football and squash rackets.

He graduated BA (Literae humaniores) in 1932.

Usborne failed to enter the Indian Civil Service because of a heart murmur, and became a schoolmaster for a while.

From 1933 to 1936 he worked in advertising agencies, and in 1936, together with three friends, he invested in a listings magazine, London Week, later called What's On.

As part-owner and editor, Usborne came up with the novel idea of a restaurant column.

When he described a West End restaurant, the Dieu Donné, as the sort of place where you would say nothing if you saw your wife because she would want to know why you were there too, the owner of the restaurant successful sued for libel.

Usborne abandoned publishing and moved back into advertising, working for the large London Press Exchange.

In 1938 he married Monica, daughter of Archibald Stuart MacArthur of Wagon Mound, New Mexico; they had one son and one daughter.

From the outbreak of war in 1939 until 1941 Usborne worked for the BBC Monitoring Service.

By the late 1940s the magazine was suffering from falling circulation and rising costs; the final issue was published in March 1950.

Usborne then worked on the Leader Magazine before returning to teaching as a master at St Paul's School, where, one pupil recalled, he "taught my youthful generation how to read poetry, to learn to love it and even to write it".

In 1941 he was recruited by the Special Operations Executive and began work in Beirut, spreading pro-Allied propaganda.

He was later recalled home and spent the remainder of the war working for the Political Warfare Executive.

He left the army with the rank of major.

In a 1941 Punch article, "Not in the South", he propounded what later became known as the "Canterbury Block", a ploy for upstaging experts.

In 1946–1948 he had a regular slot as a broadcaster on BBC radio, reviewing books, mostly fiction.

In 1948 Usborne became assistant editor of the Strand Magazine, then edited by Macdonald Hastings.

The Strand was known for first publishing the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and later the stories of P. G. Wodehouse.

Usborne was remembered for giving "warm, cheerful and avuncular encouragement to young and inexperienced budding writers".

This was subsequently incorporated by Stephen Potter in Lifemanship (1950).

In 1952 Usborne wrote his first book Clubland Heroes, published in 1953 with revised editions in 1975 and 1983.

This work sought to reappraise the adventure stories of the British authors Dornford Yates, Sapper, and John Buchan.

Usborne had first read the stories during childhood illnesses, but had retained an affection for them into adulthood.

Despite this, he was not blind to the flaws in these authors' works, describing female characters as "cardboard" and noting that McNeile was "wonderfully forgetful", with characters dead in one book, but being alive in the next.

Clubland Heroes was well received.

E. V. Knox praised "the delightfully satirical way" in which Usborne summed up the characters and exploits of the heroes, Philip Toynbee called the book "a jeu d'esprit that will give great pleasure … a fine piece of gentle but sustained irony", and Punch found it "enjoyable and absorbing to read besides being penetrating criticism".

Work began in 1958.

After the publication of his book Wodehouse at Work in 1961 he became regarded as the leading authority on the works of P. G. Wodehouse.

He published or contributed to nine more books on the subject.

Clubland Heroes brought Usborne to the attention of P. G. Wodehouse, who liked the book so much that he approved the suggestion that Usborne should write a study of his books, in time for his 80th birthday in 1961.

The result was Wodehouse at Work (1961).

His final career move took him back to advertising; he became a director of the advertising company Graham and Gillies, where he remained until he retired in 1970.

Usborne continued to write for Punch during the succeeding decades; his final contribution was a 90th-birthday tribute to P. G. Wodehouse, published in October 1971.

From 1974 to 1981 he was a Custodian for the National Trust.

He adapted eight Wodehouse novels and several other of the author's works for broadcast on BBC radio between 1979 and 1996.

After the death of his wife in 1986 Usborne became a Brother (a resident pensioner) at the London Charterhouse.

He died in London on 21 March 2006, aged 95.

In addition to his day-jobs, Usborne wrote verse and prose for various publications, including Punch, The Guardian, The Times and The Times Literary Supplement.