I once met … Bob Worcester

Sir Robert Worcester, the American-born pollster who founded Mori (Market & Opinion Research International), died last week, aged 91.

Born in Kansas in 1933, Worcester was working for Opinion Research Corporation when he was sent to Britain in the Sixties to open a London office. (OPC had broken away from Gallup whose founder, George Gallop, invented opinion polls shortly before the Second World War.) He founded Mori in 1969 and became a multi-millionaire.

At risk of name dropping (again!), I interviewed Sir Robert (or Bob as he still was) in 2002 for the first issue of The Politico, the short-lived magazine I co-founded with Iain Dale, MD of Politico’s Bookshop in Westminster. Iain knew him and suggested we interview him for a feature called ‘Me and my books’. I think I met him at his home in London. (He also owned what I believe was a small castle in Kent, but if I met him there I would certainly remember!).

The feature was published in the first person. This is what he told me:

I have 4,000 books in my house in the country. The library overspills into my office next door and is organised in sections. Two are devoted to politics, British and American. I also have a media section, a big section on business and marketing, and quite a good selection of natural history books. Finally there’s an eclectic section featuring everything from medical and scientific dictionaries to a group of reference books including two editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

My political heroes are Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. I’ve read a number of books about each and the one that was probably as instructive about both was Gore Vidal’s Burr, a book on Aaron Burr, the assassinator of Hamilton. If you’re serious you don’t just read one book and take it as gospel. You look at several biographies to get a different perspective.

One of the most interesting books about Churchill, for example, was written by his physician Moran (Churchill: taken from the diaries of Lord Moran). That was absolutely fascinating, particularly the section when he told Churchill, in 1946, about the Gallop poll in 1945 which had forecast his defeat.

My favourite biographies are A M Schlesinger’s The Age of Roosevelt, and Theodore Sorenson’s Kennedy. The best books I have ever read are Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and Franz Kafka’s The Castle. I thought Kafka’s was the worst until I got to the end of it. I then put it down and said, “That’s the best book I’ve ever read!”. So I’ve got mixed feelings about it.

On Desert Island Discs recently my first thought was to take The Castle as my book because if I read it enough times and had enough time to think about it I could maybe understand it. But I wasn’t sure so I didn’t. In the end I chose Elly Decker’s The Globes of Greenwich. Her book I thought would teach me astronomy, metallurgy, politics, geography, celestial navigation, physics, some chemistry, and, above all, patience.

I have read John Steinbech’s Travels With Charley several times. It’s a poignant book by an old man who was dying. Taking his collie dog, he started up in Maine, drove all the way across to Washington and Oregon on the west coast, then drove back, looping the great American continent. Ten thousand miles, just meeting people and getting to know America. A very moving book.

I am currently reading an amazing book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J Ellis. It’s about the men who founded the American republic. I am about to read Robert Harvey’s new book, A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence, which is written from a British viewpoint. I also want to re-read a book that was written 35 years ago. It’s called Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787, and was written by Catherine Drinker Bowen. It covers the period around 1787 when the American constitution was drafted.

I am particularly interested in that period because the parallels between then and now for Europe are amazing. There were 13 states, all fiercely independent. They had their own flags, their own currencies, their own parliaments and cultures. Sure, they all spoke English, but it took two weeks to get on horseback from the plain of Georgia to Philadelphia where the congress was meeting. It was even more peripatetic than the European Parliament. They were searching for a role in much the same way that the European Parliament is looking for a role today.

A novel that has made a great impact on me is A Constant Star by Prudence Andrew. It’s about the period of enclosures in England. An entrepreneurial farmer decides that if he could farm with two oxen he could farm four farms, whereas with one oxen he could farm only one. His efforts to break down and amalgamate farms to be more productive came as a great shock to his neighbours. Having been brought up in America, where change was a way of life, the book taught me to understand the innate conservatism that I find here in Britain. It made me much more relaxed and able to deal with English society.

I love bookstores. I can’t go past a used bookstore without going in. That’s how I found my most treasured book, On The Rise, Progress and Present State of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Other Parts of the World by William Alexander-McKinnon, fellow of the Royal Society, second edition. I had never heard of it. I had always thought that the first book on public opinion had been written by Walter Lippman in 1922. So I swallowed hard, paid the £120 that was being asked, and read it with tremendous interest.

I’ve got a first edition of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden that was given to me as a present. I also have a first American edition of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange which is probably worth a penny or two, but books are not an investment for me. I collect books for their content not their monetary value.

When I am travelling I visit bookstores every day; when in London every fortnight. I probably buy three to five books per visit. I rarely use the internet. I had a really sad experience with Amazon. I saw that one of my first editions was remaindered so I thought I’d buy it. It was advertised as ‘unread’ by somebody I had given the book to! Another of my books, British Public Opinion, was being sold, as used, for $5. The reviewer’s comment was, ‘It was cheaper than Mogadon’!

Books give insight and cause for reflection. Relatively few magazines, newspaper articles or television programmes, and virtually nothing on the net, challenges you. If you go to the Reithian formula for the BBC, which to some degree has been lost, books do inform, educate and entertain. They’re hard work but mastering a thoughtful book brings with it a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment.

See also: Sir Robert Worcester, doyen of opinion pollsters who advised Wilson and Callaghan and founded Mori (Telegraph)

PS. Subsequent subjects for ‘Me and my books’ included broadcaster Sandi Toksvig and David Davis MP (now Sir David), who was another of Iain’s friends. If I get a moment I might post those features here too.