1500th ISSUE OF THE HOUSE MAGAZINE

In the 1500th issue of the House Magazine, published 21 November 2014, four "old hands" share their memories of working on the magazine over the years

My contribution is as follows:

"From The House Magazine’s earliest days it was necessary to attract large scale corporate advertising to make the publication viable (though never profitable). A year after Mike Thomas and I started it in 1976, the British Railways Board came to us with a series of advertisements with strongly political messages which ran at weekly intervals – ‘The most cost-effective railway in Europe’ was one such example.
There was one ad which we ran on 22 May 1978 that caused a huge storm. It was inserted by BRB’s chief freight manager, Frank Paterson, had the headline ‘In 1978 Highway Robbery still exists on a huge scale’, and depicted a lorry driver dressed as a burglar privately extracting money from the wallet of a hapless motorist......."

Continuing with the theme of "How the House was built", Lord Cormack, (formerly Patrick Cormack, MP) looks back on his role in the gestation and growth of the magazine.