UK Forgotten Comic Professionals - Leonard Matthews

I seriously need to find all my old day books from the old days.  It has never been a secret of any kind that I just cannot remember names.  A face, body language I never forget.  It has caused embarassment.

I'll not mention -by name the persons involved- a couple of embarassing gaffs where I sent Christmas cards to two comics creators but got their wives names wrong.  The phone rang: "Look, can you explain to my wife WHY you've called her (name)?"  Explanation and apologies offered.  In a third case I had no idea that the woman I was introduced to was a certain artist's "mistress" as I knew he was married -and I just diverted a disaster!

So, when I was looking at files on my Britcomics group I saw one and read: "Leonard Matthews who, along with Gil Page, told me ALL the ins-and-outs of UK comics!"

I typed that.....but as I kept reading it I thought "Who the **** is Leonard Matthews??"  Well, if I read the file I would know!  Opened up the file and saw the file "OH! Him!"

You see, Leonard was the first person in comics who referred to me as a "packager" -Steve McManus, then editing Crisis/2000 AD had called me "a carpet-bagger of comics in the nicest sense" and introduced me as such to others. 

But ask people today and they will respond with "Leonard who?"

My quest has always been to try to push these people back into UK comickers minds and so I present two very good obituaries (yes, I know) by people much closer to him than I was and you will see why it is important to remember such people!

Incidentally, the magazine with the photo of Matthews dressed as Napoleon that is mentioned? Have never been able to find it "mid 1960s" for a search is like asking someone to go into a bale of hay and look for the odd piece that looks "odd"!

Obituary: Leonard Matthews

George Beal

Friday, 5 December 1997

"Leonard Joseph Matthews, editor and publisher: born London 10 October 1914; married 1944 (marriage dissolved 1947), 1957 Barbara Hayes (one son, one daughter); died Esher, Surrey 9 November 1997.

Halfway through 1962, a weekly news magazine in London appeared with its front page fully devoted to a cartoon. It showed the figure of a man in Napoleonic garb flagged "Napoleon of the Comics". This was Leonard Matthews, the newly created director of Fleetway Publications. A long- standing member of the staff, Matthews had become director in overall editorial command of such weeklies as, Buster, Film Fun, Girls' Crystal, Jack and Jill, Lion, Look and Learn, Playhour, Princess, Tiger and Valiant.

Previously he had worked for an Italian firm which made carpets, and later joined the London department store Whiteley's, where he ran the Whiteley's Dance Band.

The Amalgamated Press had advertised for an editorial assistant, and Matthews, who had a talent for drawing, submitted some of his material. He was fortunate enough to secure an interview with Monty Haydon, a director of the company, who, impressed with his ability, took him on.

The Second World War took him into the RAF, but he also worked for the RAF at the Air Ministry in Kingsway, where he compiled air-training manuals. Fleetway House was not too far away, so he kept his hand in by doing editorial tasks there. He volunteered to fire-watch on the building, and one occasion fire-bombs fell when he and his colleague George Allen (a lifelong friend whom he had first met at Whiteley's) were on watch. They scooped up the bombs and shovelled them over the side. Next morning, Fleetway House was intact, but its next-door neighbour was burned to the ground.

Towards the end of the war, Matthews married. Pat, his wife, had some show-business connection, and they appeared in a short film together, but the marriage did not survive. With the end of the war, he resumed his editorial work and in 1957 married Barbara Hayes, an attractive brunette in the nursery papers department.

The Amalgamated Press was taken over by the Mirror Group in 1958, and renamed Fleetway Publications. Matthews began to reorganise his papers, which now included all the boy's titles, the girl's weeklies and the nursery papers. A small man, he was a keen admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte and, like him, not entirely democratically inclined, but his leadership was tempered with a charismatic quality which quashed resentment. Matthews tended to recruit tall men on to his team.

His capacity to enthuse was enormous and infectious, but he made sure that all under his command knew their place. He expected you to agree with him, and indeed, to do his bidding. As one of his editors, I was given a large, airy office right next to his. Once he called me into his office, and told me of a project he was planning. He asked me to take part in a particular mission for its furtherance. I could not, in all conscience, oblige him, and gave him a definite, and, I hope, polite, "no".

His reaction was, I suppose, to be expected. He nodded gently, said he understood my point of view, and I departed. Next day, Colin Thomas, Matthews's "adjutant", dropped in see me. "Oh, a small thing. Leonard wants to make a few changes in the office locations, so we'll have to move you, old man." I then went down to inspect my "new" office. It was a quarter of the size of the old one, overlooked the fire- escape at the back of the building, and had one tiny window. I had been punished.

Changes occurred at Fleetway House. The Hulton publications - Eagle, Girl and Robin - fell within the Matthews orbit, after being taken over by the Mirror Group, which in turn, incorporating Odham's, Newnes and other companies, became IPC, the International Publishing Corporation. Matthews, strong personality as he was, felt eventually that he had no choice but to leave the company. He would shortly have been able to take early retirement, in any case.

He did not, of course, actually retire. Within a month or so, he had set up his own publishing and production company, Martspress, accompanied by a few of his old staff. One of his first moves was to buy up some old titles, among them Men Only, a mildly saucy pocket-sized monthly issued by Newnes. Matthews appointed as its editor Tony Power, who had edited children's comics at Fleetway House. Men Only had been slowly fading, and its demise seemed imminent. Power, out for an evening, met Paul Raymond, who ran night-clubs. The outcome was that Matthews sold the title to Raymond, who turned Men Only, still with Power as editor, into a hugely successful publication.

Matthews devoted his attention to juvenile publishing, this time as a packager, producing a complete magazine or book for any publisher who required it. First among such publications was Once Upon a Time, issued by City Magazines.

With the passage of time, Matthews's operations lessened. His company continued production, mostly with books for children, with the able assistance of Elizabeth Flower, his former secretary at Fleetway House."

 The Independent newspaper also carried an obituary

Obituary: Leonard Matthews

Jack Adrian

Friday 05 December 1997

"Leonard Matthews did me a good turn, writes Jack Adrian. Thirty-odd years ago, as Editorial Director (Juveniles) at the old Fleetway Press (then the biggest fiction factory in the world), he wrenched me out of the comfy but terminally boring editor's chair of a glossy county mag (all balls, blooming Soroptimists and baying drunks in DJs) in Stoke- on-Trent to the sub's seat on Lion ("King of Story- Papers!") in swingin' London. 

 

My one boast on joining Fleetway was that I was the first bearded employee ever to be taken on by Leonard, a notorious detester of beards - who, only weeks later, suddenly sprouted a facial growth of his own. This was not because in some bizarre and deeply psychological way he fancied me (Leonard's sexual arrangement, both domestic and extra- curricular, were creative, but not that creative), merely that, in his Napoleonic way, he wished to demonstrate he could do anything his underlings did.

That was Leonard all over. A cocky little bantam, he liked to have very tall men as minions, dashing around at his beck and call although, like all monumental egocentrics, he was convinced everyone was plotting against him. Thus life as a minion, however tall, could be nasty, brutish and short. Ruthlessness was an essential part of his psyche. Having, through chronic overwork and emotional pressure, turned one of his editorial apparatchiks into an alcoholic, he fired him - for being an alcoholic.

A man more at ease with legend than reality, Leonard was convinced that vicious thugs such as Dick Turpin, Claude Duval and Rob Roy were in fact paragons of high-minded virtue and benevolence. This was thanks to the swashbucklers he'd read as a boy: Stanley Weyman, Rafael Sabatini, Harrison Ainsworth, as well as all the cheap story-papers lauding the exploits of other arrant scoundrels. But he turned this obsession to good effect during the 1940s and 1950s in the comics and story-papers he edited and was associated with, dragooning some of the finest illustrators of the day, both British and European (C.L. Doughty, Steven Chapman, H.M. Brock, Eric Parker, Geoffrey Campion, Arturo del Castillo et al), into drawing superb historical picture- strips about Turpin, the Three Musketeers and a host of other characters in weekly serial form, or as beautiful one-off 64-page pictorial "novels".

Leonard was a packager par excellence, churning out anthologies and annuals and year-books, then changing around the contents and churning them out again. Like all despots he could shift into purblind mode. Great events - with which he had no possible connection - at times passed him by.

In the late 1970s, when George Lucas's Star Wars was vast and you had to be a New Guinea caveman not to know the names Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and all, he buttonholed me to write some stories for an "exciting new project" he was working up for W.H. Smith. It was science fiction. "I've got a very good title," he said. "I'm surprised no one's used it before - `Star Wars'."

I said I thought George Lucas might not be too impressed to have that galaxy-famous title pinched. There was a puzzled silence on the phone.

"Who's George Lucas?" said Leonard.

 He had, nevertheless, a formidable editorial talent."

That he did.