Lawrence of Arabia by Paul May

It's several years now since I wrote on this blog about the publishers called World's Work Children's Books. You can read that post here but, to recap, I'd always been intrigued by this publisher who produced high quality illustrated children's books throughout the 1960s and 1970s, mainly reprints of US editions, and then disappeared. 

I finally got around to doing some proper research back then, and among the things I discovered was that The Windmill Press where the books had been produced had been established in the 1920s by the publisher F N Doubleday. Everyone called him 'Effendi" because of those initials. Doubleday wanted to set up a press in the healthy surroundings of the Surrey countryside. He found a suitable site after some searching and apparently took the architects and a couple of friends for a picnic of smoked salmon and champagne in bluebell-carpeted woods on the hillside above the planned location. Those friends were TE Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling.

RIBA Ref No RIBA72832 The Courtyard

Windmill Press, Kingswood, Surrey. 1929

Photo: Sydney W Newbery

If you enlarge the photo you can just see Kipling's fishpond.

Check out the Google link below to see the courtyard today.

Lawrence suggested that the windows on the ground floor should go right to the ground to provide maximum light and a lovely view for the workers inside. Kipling suggested a fish pond and later provided fish from his own pond at Batemans. Back when I wrote about this I was planning to travel across London and see what was left of Effendi's vision, Lawrence's windows and Kipling's pond, but I somehow never got around to it.

Then one day last autumn I noticed that the film of Lawrence of Arabia was on the TV and I watched it. It's very entertaining if you haven't seen it, what with Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn racing around on camels with thousands of extras. And shortly afterwards I was thinking about where we could go for a birthday weekend in January and I remembered that during the pandemic we'd been planning a trip to Weymouth that had never happened and I started looking at hotels. When I came across The Lawrence of Arabia Hotel (sea-views, Arabian breakfast!) how could I resist?

And, having booked the hotel, I remembered my plan to visit The Windmill Press. After a bit of searching on the map I found the spot and learned that it was now occupied by an investment management company called Fidelity International. I couldn't work out if the old buildings were still there and decided not to call and try to arrange a visit in case they said no. Instead, I got my folding bike and caught a train. 

It was a very cold and misty day in early January. I arrived at Epsom Downs station and cycled past the racecourse with the grandstand looming out of the mist. Tamworth and Kingswood were villages once, but London has overwhelmed them. I cycled through suburban streets and then through a vast, up-market private housing estate where the houses are planted in the forest and surrounded by trees. I finally emerged by the road that led up to the Windmill Press, or it did once. Now it led up to security barriers. I could have just ridden past them but as I hoped to get a close look at the buildings I pressed the buzzer and spoke to the security guards.

They sounded puzzled. They would speak to their boss but they thought it was unlikely. I got cut off. I called back. 'Oh, yes. My colleague is on his way out to see you. He'll explain.'

The front of the old building, 2025. Nice to see that the windows are the same.

Looking away from the entrance towards countryside

I saw a man in a hi-vis vest approaching and I pushed my bike towards him. He said he'd had a word with his boss and I couldn't come in. I suggested I could take some photos from the entrance and he replied that he couldn't stop me. It was a public right of way. I tried a bit of chat about Lawrence and Kipling but he didn't seem to know who they were. He walked away quite slowly. I pushed my bike past the barriers and there was the original building at the end of the driveway. As I fiddled around with my camera I kept catching sight of the security guard trying to keep a covert eye on me, presumably to make sure I didn't approach too closely. Lawrence's windows are still there, but Kipling's pond is gone. Happily, someone has posted a photo of the current arrangements in the courtyard inside the building on Google Maps. Effendi would have been astonished, though he'd probably have been even more astonished by the multi-storey car-park that has recently been constructed in the grounds. And in those grounds the fund managers stroll at lunchtime, presumably very much as those lucky workers at the Windmill Press used to do.

At the beginning, the workers had to catch the train to Kingswood and then walk a couple of miles, but many later moved out to the suburbs, helping to drive the growth of Kingswood and Tamworth. But the tide of London housing stops short of Effendi's workers' Utopia and the site still feels as if it's on the edge of the countryside, despite the fact that Reigate and the M25 are only just out of view. 

A week later we made our way to Weymouth. The Lawrence of Arabia Hotel is a kind of shrine to TE Lawrence. The hosts are extremely knowledgeable and the breakfasts and sea views are excellent. On the way there we stopped for lunch at Kingston Lacy, where the National Trust property naturally has a second-hand book shop. I went in and almost the first thing I saw was this copy of Under Black Banner by Geoffrey Trease. I opened it and discovered that it was published back in 1951 and printed in Great Britain by The Windmill Press Ltd at Kingswood, Surrey.

More on Geoffrey Trease next month . . .