Remembering Sebastian Walker
Hugh Cecil
Ten years ago I illustrated a series for Walker Books, Teddy Tales, which I based on stories which I had told my children about their toys. Doodling bears' faces had been an old habit of mine, forgotten for nearly 30 years and going back to the time when I wrote a chronicle of an imaginary bear kingdom. This was a parody of the kind of history that we were taught at school, in which kings were constantly levy- ing taxes, putting down revolts, beheading their opponents, and going off their heads. C.S. Lewis, who read it when I was still a child, wrote and told me: 'I'm not surprised Bestar 1st went mad. I hate people who are always founding things.' The hero, how- ever, of these 'annals', was King Carl, 'ugly, fat, eccentric, but — brilliant, kind, success- ful.'
In his football jersey and joke crown, King Carl was in fact not unlike the late chairman of Walker Books, who died last week — my brother-in-law, Sebastian Walker, who created Britain's most suc- cessful children's book publishing house, and was certainly the most imaginatively kind of men.
Not that Sebby was fat, save rather so in the last year or two of his life when his ill- ness gave him the opportunity to give up taking the exercise which he had always loathed, and when he continued to relish his food and drink to the full. Eccentric he certainly was. Who of those with him at the time can forget him leading a troupe of children through Cromer, performing vig- orous balletic dances in the middle of the street in order to hold up the traffic so that they could cross to 'the best, my dear, fish and chip shop in the town'?
His appearance was too engaging to be described as ugly — but it certainly fulfilled none of the accepted canons of beauty. The ski-jump nose; clowns' lips; Mephistophe- lean eyebrows; and latterly a thick beard which gave him the look of a beneficient bogey man. When clean-shaven his appear- ance had something in common with that of the famous German double agent, Richard Sorge, 'the man with three faces'; and indeed there were three faces to Sebby too. There was the fantastical outrageous joker who always brought the party with him; there was the shrewd daring business- man who enlisted not only his powerful acumen but also his fantastic and engaging sides to engineer a brilliant deal and to weld together a dedicated publishing team; and finally there was the music-lover and accomplished pianist, the man of sensibility and culture, who, though he read little habitually in his later years, was always steeped in French literature and revelled in being trilingual.
Like all truly successful people he had to have his own way, right or wrong. Only one person — himself — could exercise any control over him and he often let himself off the leash, careering away on wild escapades. His driving became so terrifying that even he had to admit that he was not safe behind the wheel. Even into his forties he could be seen at parties rolling about in paroxysms of laughter. When he resumed control, however, his grip was absolute. In his last illness, a week before he died, when a man of lesser will would have been quite immobile, he hauled himself out of bed to go off for a weekend at Badminton, where he was always happy. After that he decided that it was time to face the end on his own, sustained by the love that he knew that his many friends felt for him.
Images of him flick through my mind at his thirtieth birthday in a restaurant, commanding me, in comically didactic tones, 'Do eat your potato, my dear. Don't you know that under the skin there is a tiny, tiny little drop of vitamin C in it ?': at the wedding party he gave for his sister Mirabel and me when we were married in 1972, balancing claret bottles on his head; at the Bologna children's book fair in 1982, holding three different telephone conversa- tions in succession, with publishers, in English, Italian and German; and after the same fair, completely exhausted, following a 90-hour week of selling, selling, selling, looking unaccustomedly pale, in a dressing- gown, speechless but happy — for that was the turning point when Walker Books began to leave all its rivals behind; and at Walker Books itself, in the same year, when it was in unprepossessing offices above an Indian restaurant off the Totten- ham Court Road.
That was a happy place, reached by a dangerous iron staircase through a cloud of spicy curry smells and past the baleful glare of a colony of wild cats who had settled there. Those wicked cockney cats! — there is a wonderful Walker book to be written and illustrated about them. In the office there was Sebby, continually, it seemed, on the move and on the telephone, just back from some fabulous deal in America or off to Frankfurt to clinch another. His team was devoted to him; the atmosphere of the company — even by the time it quadrupled in size — was quite unlike that of most publishing houses. There was excitement about new ideas, perpetually being tossed about, a feeling of joint endeavour — even before he made employees, authors and illustrators part-owners of his company. One could hear talk ranging from whether it would be better to have the latest co-edi- tion printed in Singapore or Italy, to whether a bear in an illustration should be allowed to have a cigarette hanging out of its mouth (it was, but in a later edition it was expunged). My particular friend was the artistic editor, Amelia Edwards, under whose tutelage Sebby placed me, having equipped me with a magnificent box of watercolours. Sometimes there was a feel- ing that we were in a children's book Sebby himself seeming like some miracle- working magician and some of the editors looking as if they were dressed for the cir- cus, propelling themselves about the floor of the office on their swivel-seated chairs. Even the occasional crisis or personality clash, which occur in any business, never disturbed the fundamental integrity and cheerfulness of the firm.
The final vision of him: a few days before his death, lying in bed, joking, full of inter- est in what my family and I were going to do during our next holiday. We were off to Italy, I told him. He remembered about his difficulties with the Italian language when he first started learning it. The trouble was he had learnt most of his Italian from opera. He found himself apologising to his hosts once when he arrived late for dinner at their villa with 'The autostrada has betrayed me!'
His own autostrada did not betray him. Some wild turns of the wheel sometimes took him off on tricky byways, but funda- mentally the course on which he was set ran true; and, thanks to his brilliant for- ward planning and a first-class team, he has made sure that his company is able to con- tinue without him, irreplaceable in count- less ways though he is. His imprint is on Walker Books.
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