John Adams

John Adams presided over Country Life for 15 years, seated in the princely offices designed for the magazine by Sir Edwin Lutyens, overlooking Covent Garden market and modelled on Wren’s Hampton Court Palace. The huge sash windows, the antique furniture, the Lutyens wheelback chairs all gave a positively armigerous aura to the office.

Adams, who had begun his career as a schoolmaster, edited the magazine in schoolmasterly fashion, attaching to a rigid timetable which involved slipping out to a barrow boys’ café in Covent Garden for coffee, where he could pick up snippets about the magazine’s unpredictable proprietors, George Newnes. Though he was shy and exceedingly cautious, Adams was a considerable talent-spotter. Among those who worked in the Country Life editorial offices were Simon Jenkins, who became Editor of The Times, and Marcus Binney, now this paper’s Architecture Correspondent.

A key move was to recruit Mark Girouard as architectural editor in 1958, though Girouard’s pioneering but relentless articles on spiky Victorian country houses were quite a test for him — as were some of those of his successor, John Cornforth, on extravagant interior decoration, tassles and all, by John Fowler. When a photograph of a kitchen was published in an article on the house of the decorator David Vicary, Adams appeared in the architectural office to say that members of the Athenaeum had complained.

The magazine’s role as a champion of the nation’s architectural heritage grew steadily under Adams. He also upheld its reputation for outstanding architectural photography, employing the magazine’s last staff photographer, Alex Starkey.

The first question many people asked about Country Life was who chose the girls-in-pearls on the magazine’s frontispiece. The answer was that the sub- editors or secretaries would pick six pictures which Adams would take home at the weekend to his wife, who would make the choice. A sweepstake would be run on the outcome.

Adams attached great importance to securing regular correspondents on a wide range of subjects, many of whom, under his benign editorship, were to achieve astonishing longevity. Frank Davis on salerooms and collecting was a particular favourite, continuing into his nineties. Christopher Lloyd began his famous column In My Garden in 1962 at £12 a week for half a page and has never missed a week since.

Ian Niall, the author of A Countryman’s Notes, with his Cairn terrier Susy, was seen by Adams as the irreplaceable cornerstone of the magazine. There was Eason-Gibson on cars, Geoffrey Grigson on books, Penning-Rowsell on wines, Pat Cotter on bridge — all sound men on their subjects. Arthur Hellyer and Anthony Huxley also wrote regularly on gardens. Other recruits were the art critic Christopher Neve and the naturalist David Tomlinson.

It was a formula, reassuringly familiar, but Adams was cautiously progressive, using some of the first magazine colour for interiors (particularly in the Country Life Annuals, a favourite of his) and embarking on country houses in France Germany and Italy as well as America.

Topicality was not the concern it would be with a weekly magazine editor today and a large number of articles were sent in on spec. For many of his staff the enduring image of Adams is of his smiling, bespectacled face appearing round a panelled door (no open plan in those days) clutching a typescript and saying: “Can I have an opinion?” The magazine carried a very large stock of articles, necessary because when the property market was booming and house advertisements flooding in, editorial pages could increase dramatically.

These were days when articles were hand-subbed, their lengths calculated with the “Reggie reckoner”, named after the art editor (who had begun as the lift boy), and some contributors’ copy came in manuscript form, none of which caused the slightest problems at the printers.

Having fended off attempts by the magazine’s owners to move Country Life out of its Lutyens premises, he took early retirement on grounds of health in 1973 and the magazine was ignominiously moved the next year to a high-rise block in Southwark. The great Osbert Lancaster made the speech at his leaving party at the Fishmongers’ Hall, wittily conveying how everything that truly mattered in life was to be found in the abstruse letters page of Country Life.

Adams’s father died when he was only four. As a boy he had a beautiful singing voice but when put up to sing an important solo a few years later he faltered, as the song was all about a loving father. Growing up in Oxford and reading Classics at Balliol, he went on to teach at Stonyhurst and, after a spell in the RAF when he was injured, at Wellington College. He was also a leader writer for the Manchester Guardian, going on to become a leader writer for The Scotsman in 1944-46 when he left to join Country Life, becoming deputy editor in 1956 and Editor two years later. His passions in life were birds and bird-watching, and though he never wrote a book he regularly reviewed books on ornithology, wildlife and travel in Country Life under his initials JKA.

His wife Margaret predeceased him. They had no children.

John Adams, magazine editor, was born on June 3, 1915. He died on February 23, 2003, aged 87.