Neville Armstrong

British soldier, literary agent, and publisher / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Neville Spearman Armstrong (20 October 1913 – September 2008[1]) was a British
soldier, literary agent, and publisher. In the 1940s and early 1950s he was in
partnerships with others, then from 1955 he operated his own publishing company
called Neville Spearman.

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Early life
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The son of a tea planter in British Ceylon, Armstrong was born there in 1913.[1] His
parents, John Spearman Armstrong and Dora Mary Brooke Booth, only daughter of
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Booth, had married in January 1913 at Colombo.[2] His grandfather, Charles
Spearman Armstrong, born in 1847, had been a pioneer in growing tea and cinchona,
the source of quinine, and had planted 750 acres of tea on an estate called Rookwood,
near Hewaheta.[3]

When he was ve, Armstrong was sent to England to be brought up by an unmarried

aunt, while his parents stayed in Ceylon with their other three children.[1] He arrived at
Tilbury on the SS Herefordshire on 8 August 1919.[4] His Armstrong grandparents had
already retired and settled in England at West By eet, and his grandfather died there in
1924.[5][3] Armstrong subsequently had a public school education, but he passed no
examinations, and on leaving school he joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After
struggling to become an actor for four years, he left the theatre. Margaret Rutherford
commented on this: "You mean, dear boy, the theatre left you."[1]

In October 1939, Armstrong and his wife were registered at 17 Marloes Road,
Kensington; he was a journalist, she was a guest house manager.[6] In 1940, he enlisted
in the British Army and for two years was a clerk in the Egyptian western desert.[1] On
21 July 1943, Armstrong was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Indian
Army,[7] after revealing his origins in Ceylon, although unable to speak Urdu.[1] Given
command of a Rajputana Ri es platoon with a Bren light machine gun, he fought at the
battle of Monte Cassino in the spring of 1944. After that, he was posted to the Indian
Army's Intelligence Corps in Delhi.[1]

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Career
After the war, Armstrong became an impresario at Bolton's Theatre, South Kensington.
This made little money, and he next tried his hand at working as a literary agent, which
led him into book publishing. He went into a short-lived partnership with John Calder as
Spearman Calder,[1] then in 1948 Armstrong formed a publishing partnership with Peter
Owen called Peter Neville. Owen was then aged only 21.[8] In 1955, Armstrong launched
his own London publishing house, under the name of Neville Spearman Publishers.[1]
One of his rst publications under that name was the collected poems of Trevor
Blakemore.[9]

An obituary described Armstrong as “one of the last of the gentlemen publishers, who
produced books mirroring their own whims and tastes”. Over forty years, he published
more than ve hundred books, with a wide range of subjects, which included chess,
cookery, espionage, ction, ying saucers, poetry, reincarnation, sex, spiritualism, and
wrestling. They included a translation of Sartre's Intimacy and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger
Man.[1] In publishing Donleavy’s work in 1956, Armstrong insisted that it needed to be
heavily censored, to avoid the author, publisher, and printer from being prosecuted
under the Obscene Publications Acts.[10]

Armstrong was managing director of Neville Spearman Ltd. and Neville Spearman
(Educational) Ltd. He was also a director of The Holland Press Ltd. and R. & B.
Advertising Associates Ltd.[11][12] He sold the Neville Spearman companies in 1985.[13]

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Personal life
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In 1937, at Westminster, Armstrong married rstly Margaret Gosschalk (1909–1999).[14]

There was a child of this marriage, but the couple separated about 1958.[1]
In 1964, Armstrong's mother killed herself. He then joined the Samaritans as a
volunteer and was trained by Chad Varah.[1]

Armstrong lived in Jersey, Channel Islands, from 1973 to 1976, after which he lived part-
time in Su olk.[13] He shared his life with Lili Munk for more than thirty years, and in
1999, after the death of his wife, they were married in a Buddhist religious ceremony on
the lawn of the house at Great Walding eld, Su olk, where they had lived since the late
1970s.[1]

Armstrong died in September 2008 at age 94.[1]

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