William Leslie Webb

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William Leslie Webb (born 22 August 1928), was a literary journalist, and foreign correspondent specializing in the politics and culture of Eastern Europe. He spent most of his working life at ''The Guardian, where his writing appeared in one form or another for over sixty years. After inaugurating the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1965, Webb helped establish, and chaired, the first Booker Prize in 1969. He was also on the three-man panel that in 1994 selected Salman Rushdie as the winner of the Booker of Booker Prizes. From 1967 to 1987 Webb edited the paper's annual round-up of its best articles, The Bedside Guardian.

Biography[edit]

Webb was born in New Mills, Derbyshire and brought up in Manchester, along with his sister, Jill. Their father, Gordon, was a long-distance bus and ambulance driver, and their mother Jenny, an occasional music teacher. Webb won a scholarship to Manchester Cathedral Choir School at the age of 9, becoming head chorister. With the advent of the Second World War, he and his classmates were evacuated with the Choir School. After the war he returned to the city, the Choir School closed and he finished his schooling on a scholarship from Sale Grammar. National Service took him into the army, and as a sergeant in the Education Corps of the Household Brigade he was stationed in Germany. He then went to Trinity College Dublin to read German and English Literature. Here he developed a life-long passion for Irish literature and met and fell in love with Shelagh Harrison, a Canadian dancer and philosophy student who was researcher for her father, Frank Llewellyn Harrison's, Dictionary of Music (1952). At Trinity, Webb conducted the College Singers and considered a career in music, but he was offered work as an assistant editor on the Limerick Weekly Echo so he and Shelagh, who were married in 1950, moved to Limerick. A year later he became a journalist at the Irish Times and then returned to Manchester after securing a position as a newsroom journalist at the Manchester Guardian. At this time the paper's newsroom in Cross Street was home to a notable generation of journalists that included Neal Ascherson, Michael Frayn, David Marquand, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Michael Parkinson, Hella Pick, Brian Redhead, W. J. Weatherby, and Richard (Dick) West. Most influential of all was Norman Shrapnel, who Webb admired enormously, describing him in his obituary as "the much-imitated master of a whole generation of Guardian writers".

After their fourth child was born, Bill and Shelagh moved from Didsbury to Heaton Moor in Stockport to a longstanding Guardian home, previously occupied by the families of Moorhouse, Shrapnel, and Gerard Fay. This house on Princes Road is the setting for Janet Frame's novel, Towards Another Summer (2006), written after she spent a weekend there in 1963 just months before the Webbs moved in. In Princes Road they became part of a social group that included people who worked at the Manchester Guardian, Granada Television and Manchester University. Among their friends were Sheila and Peter Worsley, a sociologist who coined the term "third World", and Sonia and Brian Jackson who, in 1962, published the influential polemic, Education and the Working Class.

Literary Editor[edit]

In 1959 Webb became the Guardian's Literary Editor taking over from Anthony Hartley, who he had been assisting for some time. In the years that he was Literary Editor at The Guardian (1959–1988) Webb exerted a significant influence on book culture, supporting independent publishers and arguing against what he saw as the middle-class parochialism of much English literature. To counter this, he opened the book pages to writers such as Rushdie, Angela Carter, and the writer he described as "this English symbolist, this storm-dreamer".^[1], J. G. Ballard, who became his lead literary reviewers, while historians and cultural critics such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, A. J. P. Taylor, and Raymond Williams were deployed to anatomise the state of the nation. He had disputes with successive Editors of the paper about the content of his pages which they considered too politically radical or not populist enough. There were even complaints about too many "funny foreign names" when he began reviewing and or interviewing writers from Central and Eastern Europe such as Czeslaw Milosz, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Christa Wolf, Gunter Grass and Gunter Kunert, but he stood his ground and was famous for defending his writers, on occasion going so far as to choose a smaller font size in order to fit in as many words as possible^[2]

Foreign Reporting[edit]

As it transpired, Webb's knowledge of writers from behind the Iron Curtain were of benefit to The Guardian. When Alexander Dubcek's government in Czechoslovakia came under threat from the Soviet Union in the mid-Sixties, The Guardian sent Webb to report because many of the main actors of the resistance movement were writers and cultural workers, and his interest in Czech literature meant he had contacts few journalists in the West could call on, including writers such as Skvoercky and Ivan Klima who played key roles in the Prague Spring. Following his front-page reporting of the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Webb wrote a series of articles on the culture and politics of Germany, Hungary, the Solidarity/Solidarność movement in Poland, the Soviet Union, the break-up of Yugoslavia, and the war in Bosnia. Webb also wrote a further series about politics that made use of his literary relationships and featured interviews with prominent writers. These looked at what was happening in America^[3], (including an interview with Saul Bellow), Canada^[4] (interviewing Margaret Atwood), Egypt^[5] (interviewing Nagib Mahfouz) and Libya. His reporting, particularly about Eastern Europe, was revelatory for many, and admired by Ballard, among others

Obituaries Editor[edit]

In 1988, in a move that Doris Lessing, Tariq Ali, John Calder, Ballard, Rushdie^[2] and many other writers and publishers decried, Webb was forced to step down as Literary Editor by the paper's then Editor, Peter Preston. Preston felt that Webb's pages were too abstruse and did not include enough popular or celebrity writers, and he wanted to set up an Obituaries page and believed Webb's wide political and cultural knowledge would make him ideal for the job. Webb was made Assistant Editor at The Guardian and, along with Christopher Driver, jointly established an Obituaries page for the paper. One of the earliest obituaries Webb wrote was of his son, William Llewellyn, who died the same year. He also wrote major obituaries and appreciations of many important cultural figures including Williams^[6], Thompson^[7], Carter^[8], Havel, and of Guardian journalists and editors such as Shrapnel, and Frank Edmead.

Post-Guardian Years[edit]

In 1991, after leaving the paper Webb became The Guardian Scott Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. He continued to write for the paper and also for other publications including Index on Censorship, the Hungarian Review of Books, and the Hungarian Quarterly, In 1994 he went to Yugoslavia to report on the war for the British Council. Shortly after leaving the paper, Webb set up an informal 'Old Guards' club for former Guardian workers which met regularly at a favourite haunt of journalists, The Gay Hussar in Soho. He also spent much of his time working on a book, Borderlands, about the shifting countries between Russia and the rest of Europe, but this was never finished. As he liked to say, "the book became a boat", two in fact which he enjoyed sailing, often with old Guardian friends such as John Fairhall, up and down the Deben. He also resumed his love of choral music, joining the Esterhasy Choir, and he became a regular correspondent to the Guardian's Letters Page.

Webb published his last article in the Guardian in 2011. It was written in Sana'a, and was a joint byline with his grandson, Tom Finn, who was working as a freelancer in Yemen during the Arab Spring.

Bibliography[edit]

Editor, The Bedside Guardian, nos 16-36, 1967-1987

Introduction, The Manchester Man, by Mrs G Linnaeus Banks, 1970

Introduction, Writers Against Rulers, by Dusan Hamsik, 1971

Press and Politics in East Central Europe, 1992

Editor, An Embarrassment of Tyrannies, 1997

'Who Goes Home?', The Fall of Communism and the Rise of Nationalism, edited by Ruth Petrie, 1997

(as Bill Webb) 'Calder vs. the Old Boys', In Defence of Literature: For John Calder, 1999

Salman Rushide with W.L. Webb, ICA Guardian Conversations,1989

References[edit]

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