Newspaper Article

Obituary: Alan Pryce-Jones Literary editor who internationalised the TLS

Willett, John

2000

Overview

My first impression of Alan Pryce-Jones, editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1948 to 1959, who has died aged 91, was delightful, but none too serious. It was spring 1945 and Pryce- Jones, critic, writer, journalist - and then lieutenant colonel - arrived north of Venice at the British 8th Army headquarters. We gaped as he and Guards Colonel Jocelyn Gurney filled the officers' mess with London gossip. Then he flitted on to Vienna, where the British wing of the allied commission took over the Hapsburg palace of Schonbrunn. He knew that city well because his then wife Poppy (Therese Fould Springer) was of French/Austro- Hungarian Jewish descent and had had extensive property interests. The couple had lived in Vienna before the 1938 Nazi takeover, and, indeed, an administrator had remained to look after the Fould- Springer estates. Alan went to visit those lands in Slovakia, narrowly escaping arrest by the Russians. Postwar, Pryce-Jones was proposed by the TLS editor, Stanley Morison, as his successor. Morison, having turned the magazine into something tough and intellectual, handed it over to a serious, hardworking man, whom few outside international Vienna would have recognised. Pryce-Jones became seemingly rooted into the establishment; an Old Vic and National Portrait Gallery trustee, on the Royal College of Music council, a BBC Third Programme broadcaster and librettist of Lennox Berkeley's 1954 opera, Nelson.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Deaths / Editors / Pryce-Jones, Alan (1908-2000)