Christina Foyle, who has died aged 88, concealed a will of steel behind a genteel-little-girl tone of voice and choice of vocabulary. At least two substantial contributions to literature can be laid at her door. She kept Foyle's, one of the largest bookshops in the world, alive while others were closing in the face of the challenge of the electronic media, and sustained it even when it was challenged by Tim Waterstone, who opened his flagship shop next door to her in Charing Cross Road, London. She also conceived and introduced the Foyle's Literary Lunches. Ladies and gentlemen up to London for a day's shopping combined it with a lunch, usually at the Dorchester or Grosvenor House, followed by speeches by notables, from Bertrand Russell through to Margaret Thatcher, singing the praises of a chosen book. The author spoke and mingled, at modest risk. The idea proved to be far more successful than the literary lectures, without food or drink, started by her father, William Foyle. He had given up clerking for the great legal advocate Marshall Hall to start the bookshop in 1904, when he was 18.
Educated in Switzerland, Christina joined the business even younger, when she was 17, and was the only one of Foyle's three children to stick with it. She was devoted to her father and his shop, and was introduced to writers such as Shaw, Kipling and Wells when they talked with her father while book-buying. She thought that others might enjoy such chats, too, and the lunches followed.
Her style of management, as she assumed increasing control of the bookshop, was paternalistic and autocratic. As assistants she employed a large floating population of youngsters who often seemed to learn English and book titles on the job. She paid them the worst wages outside the catering industry but often entertained them at her large country home, an abbey inherited from her father in Essex. As book trade unions flexed their muscles in the 1960s, she fought a determined rearguard action. One young assistant/guest she had entertained over the weekend joined a strike for higher wages on the following Monday morning. He was given his cards and Miss Foyle never spoke to him again, though he annually approached her at the Frankfurt book fair in the hope of a reconciliation.
It showed something of the attitude to the business, healthy or otherwise, of its proprietor. Foyle's was never a public company: Miss Foyle disliked the thought of being accountable to shareholders as much as to trade unions; would-be buyers of the store, like industrial organisers within the company, were rapidly shown the door. It was only in latter years that wages kept pace with modern expectations, and a public balance sheet was something with which she never had to come to terms.
In her eighties, she was still reading at least a book a day, drinking only champagne and declining even to try to cook. In her little girl voice, she made it a boast that she could not boil an egg. She could and did, however, employ an excellent chef, who was one of the many attractions of Beeleigh Abbey, her home in Maldon. Once asked how she would cope if she lost her chef, she gently explained that there was always milk, champagne and smoked salmon in the fridge. This Marie Antoinette impersonation was eventually challenged by the law as well as by custom. Some members of Usdaw, the shop assistants' union, took her to an industrial tribunal, who found her management practices mystifying, and said so. Miss Foyle, who did not deign to attend the tribunal, talked of vipers in her bosom. Later, in 1990, Foyle's was fined £23,000 for infringements of fire regulations, which Usdaw claimed were due to "crass, eccentric management". Miss Foyle riposted that it was a shame how people let their political feelings "spoil things". But had she been less inflexible by nature, there is little doubt that Foyle's would have disappeared years ago, to be replaced by yet another bland office block.
Her autocracy was put firmly behind a love of books. She once rebuked Hitler, newly in power in Germany, for having Jewish books burned. She offered to buy them instead. Hitler declined, but was careful to couch the refusal in extremely diplomatic terms. She married a childhood friend and Foyle's employee, Ronald Batty, who predeceased her, but had no children. Throughout her long and single-minded life she was used to deferential treatment, and usually received it. - (Guardian Service)
Christina Foyle: born 1911; died June, 1999. 9994904