Obituary: Stephen Brough

Born 28th June 1951. Died 23rd September 2023

Profile co-founder Andrew Franklin remembers his business partner and friend Stephen Brough.

Some people in publishing are peacocks, always strutting around but perhaps not doing much. Others, less visible, make all the difference and are the bedrock on which great companies are built. Stephen Brough was just such a man: he could do everything—a jack and master of all trades without whom Profile Books would never have come into existence or thrived.

Stephen was born in 1951, the year his Irish father was appointed a consultant chest physician in Leicester. He was always deeply attached to his Irish connection and until he was in his mid-teens, family holidays were mostly spent at his grandfather’s Georgian villa set by the Martello Tower at Seapoint on Dublin Bay.

In a gap year after school he earned money as a hospital porter and worked in a bar on the Costa Brava. For the most part it was huge fun, especially as the holidaymakers were out to make the most of their two weeks away. But some days had to be spent fobbing off the local police or dealing with angry holidaymakers who had arrived to find that there was no accommodation for them. Both experiences helpful for publishing.

Next he read Law at Exeter University. Drugs were discovered along with scrumpy. Women became very much part of his life—a great, civilising influence on those who had been at all-boys schools.

After Exeter, Stephen and most of his friends moved to London, where he enrolled at the College of Law to do his Bar exams. After qualifying as a barrister—another useful skill in publishing—Stephen took pupillage but he hated the stuffiness so he quickly left.

Unemployed, he became a painter and a minicab driver operating out of Hammersmith. He learned to drive with one eye on an open copy of the A–Z and he developed his own method of charging—some who could clearly afford it paid over the odds, while others, such as clearly hard-up pensioners who needed to get to the doctor, travelled free.

Stephen decided to try his hand at journalism and his first “real job” was a project officer on Holiday Which?, the Consumers’ Association’s travel magazine. In 1976, Stephen joined the team who put together the quarterly magazine. In the nine years he was with Holiday Which? he got to travel widely: it was a dream job and it was there he met Liz Allix, the in-house designer of all the Which? magazines, whom he married in 1978.

In 1985, after he failed to be appointed as editor of Holiday Which?, Stephen negotiated redundancy. He moved deftly to take charge of a series of business travel guides that the Economist were planning to publish.

In 1990, Stephen was taken on to the Economist payroll as editorial director of its book division. But the lead times involved in the book business, and the low level of profitability, led the Economist to close its in-house book arm in 1993 and franchise the Economist books to Hamish Hamilton, the Penguin imprint of which I was the publisher. Stephen again negotiated redundancy, and became the editorial link between the Economist and Hamish Hamilton.

Not long after, in 1995, when Penguin made me redundant, I suggested to Stephen that we start a publishing company together, persuading the Economist to move its book publishing to the new company. Stephen handled the negotiations and on April Fool’s day 1996, Profile opened for business in a couple of scruffy rooms at the top of a building in Marylebone.

Although Stephen had never thought that he might start a business and suspected that the company would run out of money within five years, he gave it a go. After toying with names such as Foreword and Miracle (so that whenever a book was published it could be said, “it’s a miracle”), Profile was adopted. Profile was soon recognised as a powerful new force in independent publishing and, apart from a modest £35,000 first-year loss, has been profitable ever since.

After the huge worldwide success of Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves in 2003 growth accelerated, both organically and through the acquisition of the HarperCollins UK business list, Serpent’s Tail, Third Millennium (now renamed Profile Editions) and Souvenir Press. By 2023 the company employed 65 staff and this year saw it achieve record sales of £18.5m and an operating profit of more than £2m. Stephen retired in 2015 but remained on the board as a non-executive. His children apart, Profile was his proudest achievement—as was the fact that it remained true to the simple three-point “mission” statement he invented in the early days: “To produce good books, make money and have fun”.

In his retirement years, Stephen carried on with much of the pro-bono work he had started while still part of Profile, including mentoring students at the School for Social Entrepreneurs and young members of the Independent Publishers Guild; and being Treasurer of the Wynkyn de Worde Society’s Charitable Trust, which provides bursaries and apprenticeships for students in the graphic arts.

In December 2019, he was operated on for bowel cancer but in late 2022 it became clear that the cancer had returned and was now terminal. He is survived by his wife, Liz, his daughter, Eleanor, and son, Tom, and two grandchildren.

The funeral is private for the family. There will be a memorial service in early January.