It was on the morning of 13 June 1917 that fourteen German bombers launched the first aircraft attack on London. They dropped four tonnes of bombs, most falling within a mile of Liverpool Street Station. Over 837 people were killed and 1,437 injured. The city quickly transformed itself into an armed camp. An outer circle of airfields provided fighter protection; an inner circle of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns covered the capital itself. The annihilation and destruction as well as the anger and resentment that resulted from the Great War were the very antithesis of progress and birth. But it would be the making of Alexander Gross.
‘What is it,’ enquired Sandor of his wife over a breakfast plate of steaming kippers one morning, ‘that brother of yours does, when he is not out bicycling, to make all that money?’
‘It’s not just any bicycling. He is World Amateur Bicycle Champion. And I think you will find that Frank sells geographical maps. Freelance. Door to door – what a chore,’ replied Bella.
Sandor did not hear Bella’s giggles. Money, he thought to himself, is not far away. Not far away at all. And so, in the brazen manner that characterised Sandor Gross’s business style, he pushed away his kippers and left his wife without a word, to arrange a meeting within the hour with his brother-in-law.
Maps. It could have been selling potatoes. It could have been importing tea. Whether Sandor had ever unfolded a map in his life is doubtful. You see, the actual means of accruing a fortune were, to Sandor, quite irrelevant.
To many, Alexander Gross will be remembered as a significant figure in map publishing, but the altruism found in many great pioneers was sorely lacking in him. Although desperate to be one of the people, he had no feelings for the people; he was hardly brimming with enthusiasm to inform the masses and it is doubtful that he cared one jot about revolutionising how Great Britain was depicted. His imagination never toyed with the picture of an Edwardian family setting off in their brand new automobile guided by one of his maps. Sandor Gross considered the profit and the product – and that was all.
And so fate beckoned Sandor down a path marked mapping.
‘I won’t keep you, Frank,’ Sandor said briskly. ‘Now, I’ve always thought I would one day become a publisher. How about I produce the maps for you to sell? I like the idea of the British Isles, the World, London and Birmingham.’
A handshake. A deal done. ‘Quick business,’ Sandor would later tell his daughter, ‘means quick profit.’ In less than a week, he had sold his Brixton shop for a thousand pounds to make way for the development of Brixton Railway Station. He advertised on a Monday for a map draughtsman to work from home and hired one James Duncan, who had just completed his apprenticeship the previous day. Mr Duncan’s task? To draw up a map of the British Isles in one week.
‘With respect, sir,’ he told his new employer, ‘you cannot know the trade. It will take me years.’
‘I will give you more money and hire more people. Then you can give me my map.’
Several more draughtsmen were hired and an office in John Street was leased. One by one, the provincial lamp shops were sold off to pay their salaries.
‘Time,’ the draughtsmen must have muttered amongst themselves, ‘no amount of investment can conquer time.’
Over ten months ticked away. Not one map was ready.
‘It is the detail, sir,’ explained Mr Duncan to Sandor. ‘That’s what takes the time.’
According to Phyllis, in exasperation her father then bellowed through the office. ‘Am I working, Mr Duncan – for my unborn grandchildren?’
Sandor had no need, no interest or inclination to turn his attention to any facts about the profession. Why would he? What size and weight paper to be used. How many sheets to a ream. How many reams for a print run. What type of nibs for the pens. What colour inks. How many square inches to the mile. How best to devise the key.
‘What did I love about oil lamps? Nothing. Maps? I long to see my name printed over and over again at the bottom of each copy. Produced under the direction of Alexander Gross.’
The careful hours devoted to gathering information, checking Ordnance Survey facts, trawling through spelling, changes in borders, countries, routes and names, of places and roads . . . the knowledge that his staff moved with exacting thoroughness did not pacify Sandor one bit.
‘I don’t care what it takes or how you do it – just get the job done.’
Now the product itself provoked a more positive response. Sandor’s ears had twitched as he interrogated Frank. ‘How much can we sell them for? How many can we sell? How fast can more copies be printed, once the first batch is sold?’
Sandor’s least concern was always his staff. To gain an understanding, an empathy, with the quiet men whose contentment lay in the laborious charting of coastlines and mountains, streets and churches with as much care as if they were engraving the gravestones of their loved ones was, for their employer, an indulgent misuse of his working day. They, in turn, may have held ‘the Guvnor’ as he was known, in high regard, but they reserved still greater reverence for their art. Untouched by his agitating presence, their pens did not falter as they pressed on at a professional pace.
However, their dedicated eyes and measured, methodical hands only served to unnerve Sandor. If ever a man’s character might be custom-made to suit his business, the meticulous nature of mapping and the boisterous Sandor Gross could not have been a more ludicrous mismatch.
As any cartographic old-timers will tell you, the reason that draughtsmen remain silent is because if they chatter there is a chance that droplets of saliva may rehydrate the ink on their boards, ruining hundreds of hours of work. And so to silence. For just as the offices were calming by their very noiselessness (save the rips of paper turning and ink brushes swilling in water jars), so Sandor could not stop himself from acting as bellows to a feeble fire.
Slamming doors.
Shouting.
Walking with heavy footsteps.
The financial research, the production planning, the structures, the discussions, the signings and any number of prudent details crucial to founding a prosperous business, Sandor glided over with a sniff.
It is unlikely that father – or in later years, daughter, too – even when hanging on the edge of bankruptcy, ever had a true grasp of the enormity of their commitments. In his favour though, Sandor may have chased fast money and success as if it were his salvation, but he never abandoned his staff while they slaved through the hours. Unlike his brother-in-law Frank Crowley, whose idea of sound business practices included long liquid lunches and an afternoon nap, Sandor was rarely out of earshot of his office. For despite the grand image of himself as the proprietor, the director, the chairman and the English City gentleman standing triumphant in his dreams, Sandor dismissed the notion of entrusting his future to anyone other than himself.
If I fail, he thought, the humiliation will settle only on my shoulders. If I achieve some status in society and I am recognised as a luminary in Britain’s upper classes, then the applause and adulation can swell only in my belly.
To have delegated or shared the business would have gnawed away at his pride. For no matter how much Sandor succeeded in being the English businessman, he was also driven to display the traits of an immigrant: insufferable self-reliance and self-motivation. At whatever cost.
How much better it would be to think of Sandor’s motives as testing the stamina of his daughter every time he challenged her inefficient thinking, rather than believe him to have been a belligerent tyrant. But in all honesty, Sandor failed to grasp why he should have held the women in his life in high regard, and his reasoning deteriorated even further when they showed the slightest bit of intelligence, wit or independence. It is clear from Phyllis’s memoirs that Sandor was a sour and arrogant man who never so much as tipped a nod at either his wife or daughter’s achievements.
Yet be careful not to dilute any picture of Phyllis by seeing her as a sweet innocent, dipping her toes in the choppy waters of the busines
s world. She knew perfectly well that, albeit diminutive in stature, she cut a formidable figure. Were we to fault her style, it would be that she failed to perfect her father’s art of bluffing or elaborating on subjects about which she knew nothing. Most of her map publishing skills (and she would be the first to admit this) were gleaned from the wisdom of those in her circle – from the youngest apprentice to her father’s old-timers. Risk was, for Phyllis and her father before her, attractive and compelling. Yet sometimes it paid off and sometimes it did not.
Within a day of Sandor being forced to lay off his entire staff, Mr Duncan put his final touches to the map of the British Isles. Produced under the direction of Alexander Gross were the words written in a fine hand in the bottom lefthand corner of the map.
Sandor summoned his wife to see the finished products. One hundred maps were varnished and mounted on cloth and rollers, to be used in boardrooms. The technical term, Frank informed Bella, was CRV or Cloth Rolled Version. Another one hundred were cut to fold in hard cases, for desks. And to avoid the additional cost of dispatching pink-cheeked salesboys, Sandor and Bella united in pitching their sales wits against Frank. Lazy by nature and not averse to mooching for several hours over a Cuban cigar and a decent brandy, Frank’s mistake in the race was to have made discreet appointments with company chairmen, heads of banks and institutions.
‘Tactics, Bella, learn from me about tactics,’ Sandor nudged his wife, as they marched into every office from Trafalgar Square to Ludgate Circus. In each one they deposited a map and a price. Within two hours they returned – to collect the map, or the money.
‘One, two, three left unsold out of one hundred is excellent,’ announced Bella.
Frank shrugged at his own effort of selling ten. Sandor did not consider this a satisfactory outcome, and paced the floor. And this is where he then made a crucial mistake. Do not fire your brother-in-law. I repeat, do not fire your brother-in-law unless you want to make an enemy of your wife.
‘Why would you not give Frank a second chance?’ Bella wept later that evening. ‘Do you know nothing of fair play?’
‘It may be more mundane, my dear,’ Sandor told his wife, ‘but I’d rather use wholesalers and shops than rely on that ignorant bastard for my livelihood.’
The idea had most likely come to Sandor mere seconds before he met Lord Burnham. In the pit of his belly a tumbling, a falling. A half breath as Sandor teased out his inhibitions and seized upon a plan. A political animal he was not, but ambition reversed his thinking. His left eye, quivering around the crowded reception, landed on the tall, proud gentleman surrounded respectfully by three smaller men, all riveted by whatever little anecdote he was telling.
Never had Sandor felt such an outsider. I want to stand alongside them, he thought savagely. To nod, to challenge, to be a wit.
Other guests may have been honoured to be introduced to Mr Alexander Gross, the successful new map publisher, but this achievement had already lost its lustre for him. ‘There is Lord Burnham!’ exclaimed Aunt Rosa. ‘My, look how they fawn over him.
‘Introduce me now.’
‘I beg your pardon? Now?’
‘Yes, do it now, for mercy’s sake.’
For as luck would have it, Sandor’s aunt, Rosa Grosz, was a leading journalist on Budapest’s newspaper Petzer Lloyd and had been selected for a foreign exchange with correspondents from the Daily Telegraph newspaper in London. And there, among the correspondents, mingling with his guests, was their host, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Lord Burnham. And here came Sandor Gross, his Aunt Rosa steps behind.
‘Do you know the exact meaning of the word ‘Balkans’, Lord Burnham?’
No sweeteners. No humour. No social graces, Lord Burnham must have thought. And yet by all accounts, he laughed when Sandor accosted him.
‘Who doesn’t? It means trouble,’ he replied easily.
‘Well, it is the trouble I have in mind. Have you ever thought of reproducing maps to pinpoint news?’
‘No newspaper has ever tried it.’
‘Then why not the Daily Telegraph? The Ottoman Empire is crumbling. The Balkan States are on the verge of revolt. I could supply you with the detailed maps you’ll need – at a moment’s notice.’
Perhaps it was his audacity that won the peer round. But it is more likely that Lord Burnham caught a whiff of a new gimmick, one that would give him an edge over his rivals. Sales would soon pick up with the start of war in Europe, and what paper would the public want to buy? The Daily Telegraph.
CHAPTER FIVE
Charting the Changing Face of Europe
Turn it upside down, twist it to the west and then to the east, try to flatten it and ease out the creases. Do what you can to make it any the clearer, but a map will not provide any answers, it will only provide choices – for rarely will it reveal a single road or lone path to any one destination. Perhaps four or five are marked, some spindly, criss-crossing rivers, or entangling small villages and some are bolder, running smooth and broad like a confident smile. Once your eye has flicked back and forth from one road to the other, exploring the options, measuring the quickest way, you reach a decision and set off. What you do not yet know is whether your choice was, in fact, the right one.
The paths that beckoned Phyllis Pearsall on her life’s journey appeared to her as young as two years of age. It is true that the first of these might have guided her to a cosy role as a wife and mother, her days uncomplicated by business concerns. The second path beguiled Phyllis into the world of mapping. It was her parents’ world – a grand world of oceans and mountains, that encompassed the slipperiest of details, from the smallest speck of a house number in a tiny street terrace, to sizes and scales as big as the universe, charting battles in foreign lands and wars over foreign seas.
It was an unexplored world, and as a little girl she would try to piece it together as it flashed past sun-filled rail carriages as Mr and Mrs Gross bundled their children on last-minute trips across Europe to Austria, Hungary, Italy and France.
Every snapshot of experience, be it the bloated body of a little drowned body bobbing among the debris in a Venice canal, or the Polish count who shot himself dead on the beach in front of his fiancée after losing his fortune in Monte Carlo, Phyllis would see or perhaps learn to see through her mother’s compassionate eyes.
‘There’s always too much for my eyes to take in,’ Phyllis would declare as an older woman, and it was spoken with a sense of panic which seemed to increase, rather than decrease with age. Even on her regular trips from her home in Sussex to the National Portrait Gallery in London, she would concentrate on looking at only one or two portraits. ‘That is quite enough,’ she would say after an hour, as if her insight into those people she had focused on was as much a burden as a delight.
Her father’s eye had a harshness to it, a meanness which, despite an instinct for adventure, could not help but dissect a hotel or a dining cart or a theatre for opportunities, whether it be of the business or female kind.
Whether Phyllis ever regretted the influence her parents had on her life can only be guessed. She certainly never criticised them in that respect. As for role models, Phyllis could not have wished for stronger ones when it came to Sandor and Bella’s enlightened approach to work. Imagine that your father, pressed and polished from his black shoes to his winged collar and morning coat, stepped into the office with his umbrella neatly rolled and flipped open his gold pocket watch to check his punctuality – 8 a.m. – every morning without fail.
One hour later, your mother, having overseen your breakfast and instructed the nurse, swept into those same offices at 55 Fleet Street, Geographia, named after a shop your father had once passed in Berlin – Photographia. Your father’s desk was set square in the middle of his large office; in that same office, in an alcove, your mother was seated at a smaller desk. When they returned together from the City, they greeted you at 6 p.m. They were business partners. They were the new breed of middle class; aspiratio
nal and ambitious. But for a young woman and a mother at that, to have been in professional employment of her own volition and with the blessing of her husband was almost unheard of then.
Together Bella and Sandor oversaw their new map publishing firm which, until its expansion after five years, worked exclusively for the Daily Telegraph. The pair were, according to Lord Burnham, ‘making milestones in newspaper history’.
Sandor greedily anticipated that the rumblings in Eastern Europe would flare into bloodier conflicts and thus secure his fortune, according to his son Tony, who wrote in his diary:
In the end wars did him a world of good. Everybody wanted maps into which to stick little pin flags to mark the battle lines, defeats and victories. So you can see I was brought up more or less as a rich man’s son.
After three mapping scoops, Sandor signed a five-year contract with the Daily Telegraph. The first was his 1908 map of Bulgaria after Prince Ferdinand proclaimed himself Tsar and his country independent of Turkey; this was chased by his map of Bosnia-Herzogovina after Franz-Josef annexed it to his Austro-Hungarian Empire in celebration of his Diamond Jubilee; and finally Geographia produced a map of Crete when its Assembly voted for union with Greece.
The flurry of commissions brought in by Sandor ruffled Mr Duncan’s cartography department. The speed and demands of a newspaper had been a revelation to their time-sensitive work. They wilted under ‘the Guvnor’s’ new Stop Press mania and were pushed to cut, to mask, to join, to fudge, their professional training compromised, their reputations at risk.
‘Do not dare tell me you will not finish on time,’ Sandor railed.
‘Better get it out inaccurate than not get it out at all,’ Sandor was warned in turn by Sir John Le Sage, editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Sandor returned later to the office on most nights, having stopped off at an Embankment stall so that he might ply his men with ham rolls and tea and his own supply of cherry brandy.
Mrs P's Journey Page 4
