Paul Hodder-Williams

Paul Hodder-Williams, publisher: born Calcutta 29 January 1910; staff, Hodder & Stoughton 1931-93, chairman 1961-75, consultant 1975-93; OBE 1945; married 1936 Felicity Blagden (died 1986; two sons, two daughters); died Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire 17 June 2007.

Paul Hodder-Williams was one of the leading book publishers of his generation, a gifted manager of people and a fine athlete (rugby and hockey), with a strong religious conviction giving him inner strength and quiet confidence.

Unlike contemporary eponymous publishers - the Murrays, the Macmillans, the Longmans - he had no interest in being "grand" through business relationships with celebrity authors. He was a great team leader, equally natural and straightforward in dealing with people at work, at meetings with senior and junior colleagues alike, at home, at play, through good times and difficult times. The mutual respect this engendered may be the cause or the effect of good management, but in Hodder-Williams's case the atmosphere of such respect he radiated certainly produced good results at Hodder & Stoughton between 1961, when he became chairman, and his retirement in 1975, and which led a book-trade commentator to refer to the firm as "the best middlebrow list in publishing".

Born in Calcutta in 1910, the son of a sometime Dean of Manchester, Paul Hodder-Williams went to Rugby and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he switched from Mathematics to English. He joined the family firm in 1931, becoming a director shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. By this time he had joined the Honourable Artillery Company and served with distinction in heavy ack-ack defending London, stationed in Essex where Winston Churchill's daughter Mary also commanded an artillery battery nearby. They became good friends. Hodder-Williams and his unit crossed into Europe on D-Day plus one and later he played a major part in reorganising the civil administration of Hamburg, for which he was decorated.

In 1945, by now in his mid-thirties, he found Hodder in need of fresh ideas. It had fallen behind its main rival, Collins, whose vigorous young chairman, the fifth William Collins, was ruthlessly determined to be the biggest and the best, leaving the profits to be looked after at the Glasgow end.

When Paul Hodder-Williams became the Hodder chairman, Collins was streaking ahead, while Hodder limped gamely, though not unprofitably, along, content with the tried and true. They still published authors like John Buchan and W.E. Johns, and several leading middlebrow novelists - Anya Seton, Elizabeth Goudge, Stella Gibbons and the gifted Mary Stewart - but the non-fiction list needed updating. Hodder-Williams, with his cousin John Attenborough, was determined to make the change without losing their hold on the popular book-reading public.

The breakthrough came in 1962 with the publication of Anthony Sampson's Anatomy of Britain. This inaugurated a commissioning policy more like that of Collins or Macmillan, in history, biography, autobiography, contemporary issues, psychology, religion and above all true adventure, a field in which Hodder had been market leaders from the day shortly after the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II when they published John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest ("It cost us £1 a foot!" Hodder-Williams said. "But it was worth it."). Francis Chichester, Chris Bonington, Ranulph Fiennes (or Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wyckham-Fiennes, as he was when we gave him a three-book contract in 1970) were names on the mountaineering and adventure list.

Paul Hodder-Williams retired in 1975, to grow flowers competitively for Exford flower show, to a nine-bedroom, unheated house he had bought for his family at the beginning of the war. His wife Felicity, a bishop's daughter he had met and married in 1936, died in 1986. Paul continued at Exford until increasing frailty brought him rather reluctantly to a more appropriate lifestyle.

I worked for and with him for 14 years. We never had a cross word.

Robin Denniston