Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

by Richard Branson

  Student was a perfect vehicle: it gave us a new lease of life. There was so much to organise. I began to set up an office in my study at school and asked the headmaster for a telephone in my room – he unsurprisingly refused. As a result I had to make telephone calls from a call box, but I quickly discovered a useful trick: if I called up the operator and told her that the machine had taken my money but my call had been disconnected, I was able to get a free call. As well as a free call, I was able to avoid the telltale ‘pip – pip – pip’ as the coins went in. Better still, the operator sounded like a secretary: ‘I have Mr Branson for you.’

  I drew up lists and lists of people to call, and slowly worked my way down them. Most of them rejected the idea of paying for advertising in an unpublished magazine, but gradually I began to find ways of attracting their attention. I would call up National Westminster Bank and tell them that Lloyds Bank had just taken out a full-page advertisement; would they like to advertise alongside Lloyds Bank? Student would be Britain’s biggest magazine for young people, I added. I called up Coca-Cola and told them that Pepsi had just booked a big advertisement but that the back page was still free. I called up the Daily Telegraph and asked them whether they would prefer to advertise before or after the Daily Express. Another tack was to ask an innocuous question that they couldn’t easily deny: ‘Are you interested in recruiting the highest-calibre school-leavers and university graduates?’ No personnel manager would ever admit that they were looking for mediocre recruits. ‘Then we’re publishing just the magazine for you …’

  In order to avoid the operator coming back on the line to cut me off, I learnt how to pack all this into five minutes. I started speaking faster and pushing harder. My voice had broken early, and nobody guessed that they were talking to a fifteen-year-old schoolboy standing in a public telephone box. I gave my address at Shamley Green, and when I sent out letters I wrote them by the dozen and posted them to my parents, who in turn asked Elizabeth, an old friend in the village, to type them.

  My schoolwork was going from bad to worse, but I was giving myself a wonderful lesson in confidence-building. Had I been five or six years older, the sheer absurdity of trying to sell advertising to major companies, in a magazine that did not yet exist, edited by two fifteen-year-old schoolboys, would have prevented me from picking up the phone at all. But I was too young to contemplate failure.

  During the holidays I told Nik all about Student. He was equally excited and agreed to help distribute it in Ampleforth. He would also try to find contributors for it. Nik recognised that Student was really my and Jonny’s creation, so he stood back a little bit, but he was as enthusiastic as we were about its potential. We were fifteen years old and felt we could do anything.

  By April 1966 and the run-up to O levels, I was able to drop a number of subjects that I had no chance of passing and put even more time into Student. To my relief and that of my Latin and science teachers we went our separate ways: ‘He is a very weak candidate indeed at Latin and he has now given it up’ and ‘His interest in science was obviously minimal. Although I am far from convinced that he could not have done better than he did, it was quite evident that he was never going to make much progress.’ I was doing better at history, French and English, but not at maths, which was compulsory: ‘In spite of much apparent effort he is finding difficulty in retaining methods of attack on problems from one week to the next. He will need a lot of luck with the questions in July.’

  However, the main excitement in my life was writing the hundreds of letters which I started sending out from Stowe, and waiting on tenterhooks for the answers. For all my enthusiasm and new-found guile, it took a long time to find any advertisers willing to commit themselves to taking space in Student. Jonny and I sent letters out all summer term, continued in the holidays and through the following autumn term. By April 1967, with my single ancient-history A level looming in the summer (I was to take it after only one year in the sixth form), we were still no nearer pulling a magazine together. Jonny and I had been working on Student for over a year, and all we had to show for it were dozens of letters of support from various headmasters and teachers, and various vague promises to contribute from politicians, but no advertisements or hard copy. I refused to bow to the inevitable. My letter home dated 27 April 1967 apologised for the small amount of time I had spent with my family over Easter:

  It was a wonderful holiday these last four weeks and more was achieved than ever before. I only hope you do not feel too annoyed with me for not being home longer and for not making the time to do more in the garden. I, possibly wrongly, see a divided duty: one to my home, and one to Student. It is a difficult decision. Anything I do in life I want to do well and not half-heartedly. I feel I am doing my best in Student – as well as the time allows. Yet that leaves little time for my other duty. To me I saw a danger of falling between two stools and still do. Of being a failure in everything I had and having to search for priorities if I am to get anywhere. I am also still only sixteen. Although it sounds a terribly ‘I’ thing to say, and I only say it in defence, what do most sixteen-year-olds do? No one I know here did anything more last holidays than I used to do two or three years ago, flicks in the evening, mucking about during the day. What did you do when you were a boy of sixteen? Shoot, fish, swim, go out with girls on one side and possibly your museum and helping around the garden on the other side. You had time to help around the garden. You did not see the world as it is today when you were sixteen. Your career was almost lined up. Today it is one long struggle.

  You say Student is selfish and self-centred of me. ‘Possibly,’ I say. But is it any more selfish than anything else one does in life? It is, in my opinion, a career like anything else. It could benefit many many more people than going to the films etc. It is a beginning to my life like university or your finals were to yours. It might sound really foul of me bringing this up in my first letter, but I’ve had little else on my mind over the last two weeks and felt it made sense to get it down on paper.

  I was lucky. I always felt that I could speak to my parents as if they were my closest friends. Rather than closing down on me, they reacted very well to this letter and we kept open our lines of communication. At about this time I noticed that a good many of my friends stopped confiding in their parents, but I never felt embarrassed or rebellious towards mine. They always encouraged me to go ahead and do whatever I wanted to do, and if they did not always praise my projects they never expressed less than sympathy and support. The last thing my father wanted to do was to spend his weekends building a cage for my budgerigars, but he never told me. My mother was extremely keen to help me with Student, and wrote articles, gave me pocket money that she could scarcely spare and thought of people whom I should approach. Once when I told her that I wanted to get in touch with David Frost, she spent weeks asking all her friends whether they knew anyone who knew anyone who knew David Frost.

  Then we had our first breakthroughs: we received our first hard copy, a £250 cheque for an advertisement, and Gerald Scarfe agreed to draw a cartoon for us and be interviewed. Student was finally changing from a gleam in my mind’s eye to a real magazine.

  * * *

  The other thing that changed from a bright gleam to a reality was sex. I had a number of girlfriends during the holidays and came tantalisingly closer and closer to losing my virginity at parties, when the lights went out and everyone lay around on cushions.

  I finally found a girl who was reputed to go the whole way, and at one party we slipped upstairs into a remote bedroom. I was amazed when she let me push up her skirt and take off her knickers. As we began to make love, she started to moan and groan. She was clearly having a very erotic time. I was pretty pleased by how well I must be performing since she was panting and tossing her head from side to side as she fought to control her breathing. I put up a great show and finally came with equally impressive gusto, roaring and shouting and huffing and puffing. Then I rolled off her. To my astonishment she carried
on panting, apparently having what I took to be ecstatic multiple orgasms. Just as I was beginning to feel a little bemused and somewhat redundant, I finally realised that she was panting for a reason.

  ‘Asthma!’ she wheezed in breathless panic. ‘Inhaler! Ambulance!’

  Happily my first steady girlfriend was healthy and Dutch. Rudi was a Dutch ‘revolutionary’, and in my last term I invited her to Stowe: she slipped into the school grounds and secretly pitched her tent in the middle of the wood. For one glorious week I crept out every night and walked past the lake to the woods where Rudi would be smoking pot and cooking over a tin stove. We lay out under the stars and talked about what we would do to change the world. Rudi was passionately interested in world politics. She became Student’s grandly titled ‘Dutch overseas correspondent’ and went on to write some powerful pieces about the Baader Meinhof terrorist gang.

  After dropping all subjects except ancient history, I had even more time for Student magazine. Soon Jonny and I were regularly taking the train to London to interview people. However, I had to take my A level, and I was having difficulty remembering facts that struck me as meaningless and abstract. I had bought some fact-file cards on ancient history which contained all the necessary information about Greece and Rome. In preparation for the exam I cut the edges off these and put them in various pockets, even sliding one under my watch strap. When I looked at the questions in the exam, the most difficult thing was remembering which pocket the relevant facts were in. Then I pulled the card out of my pocket and held it curled in the palm of my left hand as I wrote with my right. As it happened, I was too preoccupied with Student to care about what grade I achieved. I was just intent on leaving Stowe as quickly as possible and starting life as a journalist in London.

  When I left Stowe in 1967 aged almost seventeen, my headmaster’s parting words to me were: ‘Congratulations, Branson. I predict that you will either go to prison or become a millionaire.’

  The next and final time I heard from Stowe was six months later in a letter from the headmaster dated 16 January 1968:

  Dear Branson,

  I have been pleased to see that the press have given you a good send-off and I was very interested to see a copy of your first issue. May I send you congratulations and all good wishes for the future.

  Yours,

  R Drayson

  The first issue of Student was published in January 1968.

  3 Virgins at business

  1967–1970

  AT THE END OF the summer term, 1967, Jonny Gems and I moved into the basement of his parents’ house in Connaught Square, just off the Edgware Road in London. We managed to persuade Vanessa Redgrave to change her mind from merely sending us her best wishes for the success of Student to giving us an interview. The interview was a turning point for us since we could now use her name as a magnet to attract other contributors. As the list of contributors grew to include people like David Hockney and Jean-Paul Sartre, it became correspondingly easier for me to persuade some of the possible advertisers that Student would be a worthwhile place for them to appear.

  Jonny and I lived in the basement all summer. The room was dark, dank, and sparsely furnished. We slept on mattresses on the floor. The place quickly began to look a complete shambles, scattered with papers, dirty coffee cups and fish-and-chip wrappers. We were always hungry. Sometimes we would slip upstairs to raid Jonny’s parents’ fridge. Mum would occasionally burst in through the door carrying a picnic hamper.

  ‘Red Cross delivery!’ she would shout. ‘When did you two last wash?’

  We would spread a counterpane on the floor and pile into her picnic.

  One day she brought us £100 in cash. Mum had found a necklace on the road near Shamley Green and taken it into the police station. When nobody had claimed it after three months, the police told her she could have it. She knew we had no money, so she came up to London, sold it and gave us the money. Her £100 paid off our telephone and postage bills and kept us going for months. Without it we could have collapsed.

  Peter Blake, who was famous for designing The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album cover, drew a picture of a student for our first edition. It was a plain white cover with only two splashes of red: on the title, Student, and the red tie the student wore. As well as giving us this illustration, Peter Blake also gave us an interview. He began in arresting style: ‘A very pretty girl with no clothes on is a marvellous subject, and one I’m particularly interested in. It is one of those things, along with perspective and anatomy, which teaches you how to draw.’

  While I rapidly considered the advantages of becoming an artist, he went on to point out the dangers of ‘student power’ – which struck a controversial note at the time:

  I don’t think the students should have any more power over the teachers than they have already. Just at the moment I don’t really like students as a group of people. I think they rather overrate themselves. They seem to talk a lot and protest a lot, and have too many rights. I think one could get overinvolved in the activity of being a student. After all, students are not so important – they are really only there to learn how to be adults. Students shouldn’t feel that they have to complain.

  Perhaps because we were so young and not as aggressive as the usual professional interviewers they faced, some of our contributors made very revealing and graphic remarks. Gerald Scarfe described his work: ‘I’ll always draw – it’s a matter of energy. I could never stop. It’s as much a part of me as eating. When I get an idea it has to come out – it is like being sick, a bodily function.’ When I asked Dudley Moore what he thought of students he answered: ‘The only thing I hate about your generation is your age.’ He had been an organ scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, but when I mentioned classical music he said: ‘I’d much rather roll about in the mud with six women all day than sit down at the piano.’

  Mick Jagger and John Lennon also agreed to be interviewed. Both were demigods to the student population. Student gave a grandiose introduction to the Jagger interview:

  Recently Melody Maker wrote: ‘Jagger is rather like Dostoyevsky’s brother Karamazov who, when told by his venerable brother that pain must exist so that we might learn of goodness, replied that, if it was necessary that one small child should suffer in order that he should be made more aware, he did not deny the existence of God, but merely respectfully returned his ticket of admission to heaven. That is Mick Jagger’s kind of rebellion.’

  I can’t imagine what we were thinking of when we quoted that. I certainly didn’t understand it.

  I nervously went along to his house on Cheyne Walk, and was shown into the living room by Marianne Faithfull, who then tantalisingly disappeared upstairs. Mick and I smiled at each other genially but were both equally at a loss for words:

  RB: Do you like giving interviews?

  MJ: No.

  RB: Why did you ask Student to interview you?

  MJ: I don’t know. I’ve got no idea. I don’t usually give interviews. I mean, hardly ever.

  RB: You’re not interested in politics?

  MJ: No.

  RB: Why not?

  MJ: Because I’ve kind of thought about it for a long time and decided that I haven’t got time to do that and understand other things. I mean, if you get involved in politics you get really fucked up.

  RB: Do you think people can be influenced by music?

  MJ: Yeah, I think they probably can because it’s one of those things – it’s repetitive, the same thing over and over again. It gets into your brain and influences you.

  Our interview with John Lennon was another ‘classic’. Jonny and I went along together, and Jonny tried to make a literary allusion:

  JG: A critic has written about ‘A Day In The Life’ as a kind of miniature Waste Land.

  JL: Miniature what?

  JG: TS Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land.

  JL: I don’t know about that. Not very hip on me culture, you know.

  Ironically, the interview with John was a
lmost the end of Student. After Jonny and I had met him, I had the idea of asking whether John and Yoko would provide the magazine with an original recording which we could distribute with Student as a flexidisc.

  I contacted Derek Taylor, The Beatles’ press officer. At that time, The Beatles had just set up the Apple Foundation for the Arts, with the idea of funding struggling artists and musicians. Most of Derek’s day was spent sitting in his office in Savile Row, interviewing a long procession of supplicants, all with a hundred different reasons why they thought The Beatles should give them money. He was like a lord chamberlain at the court of the king. A sweet man, Derek would listen patiently to every request, no matter how far-fetched or nonsensical.

  When I told him what we wanted to do, Derek agreed without a moment’s hesitation. John and Yoko would be delighted to provide something, he said. He introduced me to Ron Kass, the managing director of Apple, and to a manufacturer of flexidiscs, and we arranged a delivery date.

  I rushed back to Connaught Square with the good news. Not only did we have a John Lennon interview: we would soon have an original, unreleased John Lennon song. It was a fantastic promotional coup for Student. We contacted Alan Aldridge, the most fashionable illustrator of the day, and commissioned him to design a special front cover, leaving a white space where the flexidisc would be attached. And we made plans to print 100,000 copies of the magazine – our largest ever print run.

  The weeks went by, and still no record arrived. In mounting anxiety I called Derek. ‘Don’t worry, Richard,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a few problems. But I promise you’ll get something.’ In fact, I could hardly have chosen a worse time to tax the Lennons’ goodwill. Yoko had just lost the baby she was expecting; John had been busted for possession of cannabis; and the couple were lying low at their mansion in Weybridge.