In search of beauty

A publisher, innovator and shrewd businessman with strong connections to the Liberal political establishment, Edward Hudson was the visionary founder of COUNTRY LIFE 125 years ago. Clive Aslet revisits his remarkable life

- Clive Aslet

EDWARD HUDSON would enter the COUNTRY LIFE offices like a whirlwind. Staff who had temporarily put their feet on the table—on press days, they might not go home before midnight—took them down again. Bells rang; pages that were typeset by the compositors in the attics of the building and printed by presses in the basement were rushed into his presence: each one was personally approved by the proprietor. ‘His energy was tremendous, and was almost in the nature of bustle,’ remembered Bernard Darwin, employed in 1908 to write on the important early COUNTRY LIFE subject of golf, ‘…he could be brusque if anything or anybody was not up to time.’ Even worse would have befallen the individual who suggested that production standards could be allowed to slip: the hurry did not prevent Hudson from taking infinite pains to exact the best result from his team. ‘After this hectic time, Mr Hudson would dash off elsewhere, and the office would once more settle down with a gentle sigh.’

COUNTRY LIFE, founded in 1897, was the love of Hudson’s life, only rivalled—before his late marriage—by the grand amour he developed for the glamorous Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia, to whom he was briefly engaged. (He bought her the Montagnana cello she is shown playing in the portrait by Augustus John, initially commissioned by Hudson and now owned by Tate.) It became the centre of a publishing empire, with COUNTRY LIFE Books reusing plates from the magazine and a diffusion range, feminine and domestic, in Homes and Gardens.