Ronald Gray, founder and owner of The Hammersmith Bookshop (1948-1963) and Hammersmith Books (1963-2000) died on 30 May at the age of 87. He was a most remarkable person, with a passionate interest in everything relating to politics and to recent history. He developed the vast stock of out-of-print books in Hammersmith Books to reflect ‘the history of the times we are living through, with an emphasis on war, revolution, and peace.’ He had an unrivalled knowledge of the literature on Africa, Vietnam, Latin America, Middle East, Spanish Civil War, genocide, Balkan conflicts, Ireland, crime and punishment, black writers, the Russian Revolution, communism, Labour Party history, Thatcherism, science and society including nuclear issues, censorship and freedom of speech and of the printed word, feminism, radical working-class authors, human thought, espionage, guerrilla warfare, parapolitics, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and so on. To match Ronald’s extraordinary knowledge, Hammersmith Books had an unrivalled stock of out-of-print and hard-to-find books, including several that had been withdrawn for legal reasons, such as the very first unexpurgated edition of Kim Philby’s My Silent War. When Ronald and his wife Anita sold Hammersmith Books in 2000, they estimated that the stock was over 250,000 books. My estimate, based on several visits to their store in Barnes, was that the stock was probably over half a million books. As Ronald Gray once responded to my request for books on espionage in The Bookdealer, ‘we can supply anything you want on espionage, and much more.’ Over the years, he did!
Hammersmith Books provided books to many customers world-wide, including the KGB ‘illegal’ Gordon Lonsdale, who, when he was in Winson Green Prison, began to write a definitive assessment of what SOE had actually achieved in World War II. Ronald was able to supply over 95% of the books Lonsdale wanted. In addition to second-handbook-selling, Hammersmith Books also reprinted several early important books on the Labour Party and on African politics.
Ronald had a particular interest in Germany in the two World Wars and the Holocaust and Nazi genocide, having been a field gunner in the Eighth Army throughout World War II. He was probably the first British soldier to see the 335 victims massacred by the SS in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in March 1944. His pen-sketch of what he saw in the Caves in June 1944 was reproduced on the back-cover of Hammersmith Book’s catalogue on The Holocaust.
Ronald was an avid reader of all things political and para-political, including Lobster, and a great correspondent. He would regularly send me copies of letters he had from Kim Philby, J.B.S. Haldane, Graham Greene, Ivor Montague, and others from the murky world of spooks and traitors. He clearly loved every minute of his post-war life with his deep love of books, politics, music, theatre, cinema, and art. He had a remarkable memory for perceptive quotes, like Joseph Heller writing in Catch 22 about the United States: ‘what does a sane man do in an insane society?’ He was particularly fond of Graham Greene’s description of second-hand book selling: ‘this magic world of chance and adventure…….I would have preferred to have been a bookseller ……theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.’
Ronald Gray was sadly one of the last to epitomise fully O. F. Snelling’s (1982) apt description of the second-hand book-trade prior to its take-over by Amazon and other internet companies: ‘Rare Books and Rarer People.’
Some blogs and websites of Lobster’s writers
- <http://pinkindustry.wordpress.com/> William Clark.
- <http://asithappens.tppr.info/> Tim Pendry.
- <http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com/> Michael (Mike) Carlson.
- <www.picnic-publishing.co.uk/political-blog/> is where I occasionally blog.
- <www.colinchallen.org/> Colin Challen MP.
- <http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/blackchip/index.htm> Richard Alexander
The persecution of Roderick Russell
<www.indymedia.org/pt/2008/04/905423.shtml>
That Web address above is the location of a very significant story. Roderick Russell, a former senior executive of Grosvenor International, the private property company owned by the Duke of Westminster, recounts there a decade-long campaign of harassment of him and his children by Grosvenor or agents working for it. (I presume the latter.)
When Russell left Grosvenor he found himself unable to get further employment. He believes that he was given the black spot by Grosvenor. Over ten years later, apparently trying to get him to shut-up about being blackballed by Grosvenor, a campaign of harassment began: a car rammed into his house, computers wrecked, threatening phone-calls to his children, surveillance, phone taps etc., much of it witnessed by third parties. He has gone the formal route – police, MP – without effect. He thinks the secret state, the police and members of the Labour government are protecting Grosvenor. The documents he presents at the address above show that the police and pols are certainly dragging their feet. Are they afraid of Grosvenor? Spook involvement is implied but not demonstrated, in my opinion. See for yourself. Big stuff.
Grosvenor did not reply to my e-mails requesting an on-the-record statement about Russell’s allegations.