Ernest Hecht obituary

Ernest Hecht, who has died aged 88, was the last of the great émigré publishers and, remarkably, Souvenir Press, which he founded in 1951 in his parents’ spare bedroom with a £250 loan from his father, was still proudly and indefatigably independent at the time of his death.

A fall after a party marking Souvenir’s 65th anniversary had forced Hecht to run Souvenir from his home in west London rather than from its office-cum-shop near the British Museum in Great Russell Street, where passers-by stop to marvel at the eccentricities on display in the window – books on cats and dogs jostling for attention with offerings from Nobel laureates such as Knut Hamsun, Pablo Neruda and Albert Einstein, or Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories butting up against Noam Chomsky and Michel Odent.

For Hecht was nothing if not eclectic, believing firmly that, while it was a publisher’s first duty to remain solvent, “You have the freedom, and I’d be inclined to say, the duty, to publish books of a minority interest and titles whose time may not yet have arrived or ideas that challenge received wisdom”.

Eccentric he most certainly was (and proudly scruffy, Arsenal cap and scarf his customary attire, even to Buckingham Palace), but he had the sharpest of brains and a quite terrifying memory. Until the last, a meeting with him (most likely involving champagne) required that you be on your mettle, fully up to speed on events in publishing and the world beyond, and able to offer at least a modicum of gossip.

Young Ernest arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport on the eve of the second world war, the first refugee from Moravia in Czechoslovakia and perhaps the only one to survive having vomited over the neatly pressed uniform of a Gestapo staff member. His father, Richard, who was in the textile business, had preceded him and his mother, Annie, followed. The family settled in London but the boy was soon evacuated to Wiltshire and Somerset. Hating the countryside, as an adult he scarcely left London, aside from his years as an undergraduate at the University of Hull, where he studied economics and commerce and played lots of sport.

After leaving Hull, he thought he spotted an opportunity – publishing theatrical souvenir programmes. He produced one, on Marie Rambert, before realising that he was knocking on the door of a closed shop. Turning instead to sport and memoirs, he had an early bestseller with The Password is Courage (1954), a wartime memoir by John Castle, brought to the screen with Dirk Bogarde. Then he suggested that the TV playwright Arthur Hailey turn to fiction and a franchise was born.

Soon the new pop phenomenon began to enthral teenagers and Hecht saw a gap in the market: Brian Epstein and the Beatles, plus Cilla Black and Cliff Richard were early signings. The Book Collector magazine considered that Souvenir “invented” rock’n’roll publishing in the UK.

Sport, particularly football, was Hecht’s great passion and he published many books by and about sporting heroes, such as the footballers Matt Busby and Pelé, whose literary agent he was for a time. This provided him with an excuse to travel the world. Brazil was a particular favourite, and there he came to know not only its footballers but also many of its musicians, including Gilberto Gil.

He was now in a super-league of his own, a globetrotting publisher who flew first class, occasionally on Concorde, collecting ideas and authors at every port of call and sometimes in-flight. He was also a producer of plays and concerts, in Britain and Europe, working with figures as diverse as Brian Rix, Sinéad Cusack and Barbara Cook.

An iconoclast, Hecht was inevitably attracted by other rebellious spirits, from Che Guevara to Thor Heyerdahl. He championed Elaine Morgan and her aquatic ape theory of evolution, and published authors who challenged the status quo long before it became de rigueur to do so: James Lovelock on Gaia, books warning of the dangers of BSE, the cancer risks of living under electricity pylons.

After a chat in the directors’ box at Arsenal with a friend whose child had been born with brain damage, Hecht invented the Human Horizons series on living with disability – at one stage it was the biggest such list in Europe and won praise from medical professionals. His curiosity was boundless and he was always alert to developments in health and wellbeing, sex, childbirth, psychology and spirituality.

If his diverse passions fuelled his publishing, publishing in turn fuelled his charitable endeavours, pursued quietly via the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation, set up in 2003 and supporting a wide range of charities that help the vulnerable, the young and elderly people, many of them connecting the arts with health and well-being.

Hecht received the Neruda medal from the government of Chile; was made a member of the Order of the Rio Branco by the president of Brazil; and appointed OBE in 2015. He was granted honorary fellowship of University College London in 2006.

An ever-generous host, he was a loyal friend to many, offering ideas and advice but also stern criticism when he felt it was needed. He was wise and witty, a great anecdotalist with a mind like a steel trap, who forgot nothing. No one would say he was easy – but for Hecht, sparring was all part of the sport.