Tony Pocock

Innovative publishing sales manager

Anthony Thomas George Pocock, publisher: born Bombay, India 3 October 1922; OBE 1972; married 1947 Jetteke Estourgie (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1956), 1972 Kate Kellett Carding; died London 14 February 2003.

What were you passionate about? "Charlton Athletic, I think. Football. Is that what your question is?" What about books? What about publishing? "It was a flippant answer just now; it was meant to make you laugh, but it didn't. Yes, of course I was passionate about publishing, and about books, all the time I was a publisher. Passionate about it. Couldn't think about anything else, much. That was what I wanted to be best in the world at, and create for other people."

That was Tony Pocock in a Book Trade Lives recording in July 1999. In the words of Sir John Brown, sometime Publisher of Oxford University Press, Pocock was "undoubtedly the best publishing sales manager of his time".

Tony Pocock stood out from the group of notable men who returned from the Second World War eager to apply their energies to the service of the British book trade, and if he was proud – which he was – to have been one of two Royal Marine officers to command the guard of honour when Lord Louis Mountbatten received the Japanese surrender, it was not from a feeling of triumph, but of gratitude for peace.

To his publishing career, spent principally at Oxford University Press then Faber & Faber, he brought tenacity, integrity, ferocious enthusiasm, and a quality he once described as "theatrical cunning". He was instinctively bossy, but his warmth and relentless encouragement secured remarkable affection and loyalty from colleagues and friends.

Pocock was born in Bombay in 1922, the elder son of Maisie (née Bramfitt) and George Pocock, a chartered accountant with the Bombay Company. The couple had met in Harrods' book department, where Maisie worked after leaving her home in Leeds and driving to London on a motorbike. At five, Tony was vividly impressed by watching Maurice Tate bowl during an MCC tour of India, and at Grenham House prep school in Kent his natural aptitude for games provided a buffer for his shyness and established a lifelong obsession with sport.

Holidays were spent in Streatham with five adored paternal aunts, schoolteachers who introduced him to music and the theatre, but his passion for literature developed at Marlborough while producing an edition of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems on the student printing press run by Michael Howard, son of G. Wren Howard of Jonathan Cape. He knew he wanted to be either an actor or a publisher, and a scholarship to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he spent a year reading English Literature for a wartime degree, followed by four months as a trainee actor at the Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich, helped him to decide.

Pocock saw active service with the Royal Marines at Cassino and in the invasion of France, and met his first wife, Jetteke Estourgie, when stationed in Singapore in 1945. They lived initially in Amsterdam, where he worked for the British Council as a film officer, then in London, where he became an editor for Books of the Film, a paperback division of the Rank Organisation.

One day a former navy colleague telephoned to say that Oxford University Press needed an assistant editor on the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia. After a cursory interview with Lord Norrington, Secretary to the Delegates, Pocock started work in Oxford on 1 January 1951. Apart from commissioning, editing and writing articles – his entry for Nelson attracted special praise – he seized the opportunity to learn the practicalities of publishing from the general editors, Laura Salt and Robert Sinclair. It was Pocock they sent to enthuse about the Encyclopaedia at sales conferences and, when John (later Sir John) Brown succeeded Geoffrey Cumberlege as London Publisher in 1955, he appointed Tony Pocock as sales manager in his place.

At that time British publishers were competing furiously between themselves, and with the Americans, in the burgeoning international market for English language teaching books. OUP's Advanced Learner's Dictionary was its main weapon against Longman's best-selling list. Pocock famously set up innovative barter arrangements with Eastern Bloc countries to surmount the problem of currency restrictions, and became a prominent figure at book fairs in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest until, after an encounter with the woman representing the Czech Import- Export agency, he was warned by the Foreign Office never to return.

His expeditions to OUP's overseas branches – where he would sweep the entire staff off to the opera or a rugby match – imparted glamour and excitement to the sales department of the London office, as did his impartial hospitality at Booksellers Association conferences.

In the recording made for the National Life Story Collection in 1999, he explained how the social life of the book trade was instrumental in forging the network of friendships which proved vital in helping the industry re-orientate itself in the two decades after the war.

The Charter Scheme, conceived over drinks with like-minded colleagues including Ian Chapman of Collins in the early 1960s, controversially sought to reward agreed standards of bookselling with more generous publishers' discounts. The annual hockey match between the staff of OUP and Blackwell's fostered a friendship between Tony Pocock and Richard Blackwell and inspired their successful joint creation of the UBO (University Booksellers, Oxford) group of academic bookshops which skilfully avoided the pitfalls of the later chains. The 1972 report of the Book Trade Working Party, a committee of key publishers and booksellers which Pocock chaired with Julian Blackwell, was prophetic, warning of the demise of small bookshops and signalling the urgent need for co-operation between booksellers and publishers.

When OUP closed its London office in the mid-1970s, Pocock accepted an invitation from Peter du Sautoy to become sales director at Faber & Faber. After building Fabers' international sales division – whose profile he raised while chairing the Publishers Association's European Working Party Committee – he expanded the scope of Fabers' rights department, and was made vice-chairman in 1981. His appointment to the board of Faber Music recognised a deep appreciation of music, which he loved to share.

After retiring from Fabers at the age of 65, he worked with equal passion as a freelance editor of sports books, mainly at Kingswood Press, until 1998. While at OUP he had joined the board of Charlton Athletic, where he helped set up a scheme to equip footballers with alternative work skills.

With support from his second wife, Kate Kellett Carding, whom he met at OUP in 1970, Tony Pocock accepted the frustrations of his last few years with courage, grace and humour. He leaves her, his children Christopher and Caroline from his marriage to Jetteke, to whom he remained close, and five grandchildren affectionately known as "the Dutch fleet".

Sue Bradley