We celebrated our 30th anniversary on 21 November 2007 with a party at One Marylebone Road (formerly Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, designed by Sir John Soane), London NW1

Thanks to you all for coming.

A small business can’t survive and flourish for 30 years without some quite good ideas, and employing quite a lot of good people, without commissioning quite a lot of good writers and illustrators and photographers, without associating ourselves with some pretty impressive organisations like the RHS, Oxfam and the V&A, without using the services of quite a lot of good printers, distributors, sales people, book shops, not to mention bankers, lawyers, photo copier menders, landlords and so on, without quite a lot of friends all over the world in fact.

So first of all, and with real humility, a huge and heartfelt thank you to everyone here and to many hundreds, even thousands, who for one reason or another are not here tonight. I’m not going to single out many individuals, for obvious reasons, but to everyone who received an invitation, to those who we forgot to send invitations to, and to those who came anyway, even without invitations, thank you.

Absent friends. Well of course there is one very special one, though in some ways she doesn’t seem very absent at all, and I can still hear her voice over my shoulder constantly asking, are you sure?, will it work? Do you really think so? Is that right?

And of course I reply that I’ve no idea really, but I hope so. And so far the show is still on the road. And to a very great degree that is because of her imagination, her drive, and almost most important, her careful nurturing of staff, of authors and of resources.

But the first absent friend I want to single out for special thanks is Lord Weidenfeld.

I well remember when Frances first started going to see George for breakfast. Pretty early in the morning, it was, so early in fact that when she came back, hungry and thirsty, I was still eating mine, and she said that he’d only given her one tiny cup of coffee, and nothing to eat.

But he’d done something much more generous and imaginative. He’d offered to set her up in her own company. And though she initially only owned 10% of it, it only cost her £10.

So around 30 years ago tonight our spare bedroom was emptied, and for a year or so the business was run from there. And two years later in 1979 the first books were published, having been sold in what now seem like prodigious quantities – indeed even then seemed like prodigious quantities – I especially recall 18,000 copies of an enormous book in Dutch – at Frankfurt the previous year.

By that point the company had relocated to rather raffish offices in Mortimer Street, in a building used by various recording studios and music companies. So there was always the tantalising, and never satisfactorily resolved challenge, of perhaps meeting some slightly washed up rock star… I remember Sandie Shaw, and Marianne Faithfull, in the lift.

But Frances was also pregnant, rather unadvisedly you may think, but then she was 36, and she was never someone to shirk a challenge. The problem was (as it often was, and still is) that some of the huge sales had been made at tiny margins. So the business plan, which had forecast profits in year 3, if I remember rightly, was somewhat adrift.

She decided to conceal the pregnancy by investing in a series of large and somewhat shapeless, but strangely glamorous dresses from Laura Ashley. So when our son was born six weeks premature one evening, after a full day in the office and just around the corner in U.C.H, only half her colleagues knew that she was pregnant at all. So its more than just a professional pleasure to me that we’ve recently agreed to do a huge book on Laura Ashley, her company and its designs.

James was not only premature, but he was tiny by the standards of those days – 3.5lbs. So for the first six weeks of his life he lived in the amazing neo-natal unit at UCH. This suited Frances down to the ground, as she was discharged after three or four days and was able to go straight back to work knowing that her son was in excellent hands 400 yards away from the office, and that she could see him before work, after work, and at lunchtime.

Different times, different customs, as the French say, but only 27 years ago. And he didn’t suffer too much. He’s here tonight, 6 inches taller than me, and currently training for the marathon.

The mid and late eighties saw the business prosper and grow; allowed Frances to buy out George Weidenfeld’s interest; allowed her to establish a children’s list when she couldn’t find books in the shops that she wanted for her own children, 3 of them by now. And by the end of the decade the business had graduated from a packaging company, that essentially sold complete editions to others, into a full fledged publishing business in the UK. But 75% of the business was still overseas.

As anyone who has ever depended on export business will know, this is a truly magical source of revenue. They want improbably large quantities, then they want more. And in Britain in the 1980’s and early 90’s they paid in currencies that usually turned out to be worth more than one expected, as the pound lurched from one crisis to the next. But magic in both senses of the word. Now you see it, now you don’t.

At this point we published our first (and regrettably so far only) book that was to sell over a million copies, and those mainly in America. Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace was, and remains, truly a milestone and a totem for the company. An emblem of, and a metaphor for, the liberal, humane, and contrarian values which Frances believed in so strongly from her earliest years, and which the company still tries, however inadequately, to promote and to support.

But the later 90’s were an increasingly difficult time for publishers like us, and when Frances died so suddenly in 2001 the company was facing some very real difficulties with its co-edition markets both shrinking and becoming more competitive at the same time.

So it’s a great tribute to my colleagues that we have managed to keep the wheels on the wagon and reorient the business over the last six years or so, in such a way that 75% of our revenues are now earned in the UK, and still to grow it so that last year was our most successful year ever; last month, October was our most successful month ever; and although its only the 21st of November today I can confidently say that barring some cataclysmic event in the next week or so this month will be even better than that.

I don’t want to be vulgar about money, but while on the subject it might interest some of you to know that this rather magnificent ex-church we are in tonight was built by John Soane in the 1820’s for exactly the same budget as we planned to spend on tonight’s party. Other times, other customs indeed.

So, to revert to where I began, thanks are due to far too many people and organisations for me to be able to name them all, but two more slightly improbable ones should I think be singled out.

I never thought I’d say this in public, but I have to say that Lloyds Bank have been the most generous, supportive, co-operative and imaginative colleagues ever since the company was set up, and I’d recommend them to any budding entrepreneur. We don’t even owe them money any more so that is a genuinely unforced tribute.

And finally Wainwright. Well talk of being in the right place at the right time. I won’t bore you with the story of how and why we came to be his publisher, I’ll just say thank you to the family for unstinting support and encouragement, and thank you to Thwaites Brewery of Blackburn whose newly launched Wainwright Ale is here (as a limited edition – I’m not sure if there is still any left) tonight, but is to be had in two or three hundred pubs, mainly in Lancashire, and should be available nationwide in bottles next year.

When a publisher’s books start to be celebrated by brewers who pay royalties for every pint sold, it seems to be time to stop talking, if not publishing, so if I may I’ll just offer a toast.

To the next thirty years!

Thank you.