My former colleague Hugh Nowell, who has died aged 98, was for many years a senior figure at Grosvenor Books, a publishing company connected to the Moral Re-Armament movement.
A co-founder of the firm in the early 1960s, Hugh continued there until his retirement at the age of 70 in 1997. During this time he worked as joint chief executive and then managing director.
Grosvenor Books published – and still publishes – a variety of Christian and non-Christian titles, including children’s books and magazines. Among its most successful releases was Listen to the Children, a book about family life by Annejet Campbell, which was published in 11 languages.
Born in Runcorn, Cheshire, Hugh was the son of John, who ran the family tannery business, and Margaret (nee Vanes), who before her marriage had been a private tutor to the children of the Maharaja of Bangalore in India, where she was born.
Hugh’s father had trained for the Methodist ministry and both his parents had been strongly influenced by the the Oxford Group, a Christian organisation also known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA).
Hugh had what he called a “significant conversation” at the age of 13, and his Christian conviction was strengthened at Kingswood school, founded by John Wesley, which was evacuated from Bath to Uppingham in Rutland during the second world war.
At Queen’s College, Oxford, where he studied chemistry from 1945 to 1949, he met daily with fellow student members of the Oxford Group, and in his second year he cycled to Paris and hitchhiked to Switzerland so that he could attend the opening of the group’s international centre in Caux, under its campaigning title of “moral and spiritual rearmament”. On graduation he worked with the Oxford Group rather than join the family business.
High spent the next 14 years volunteering for the MRA in various capacities, supporting himself financially with the generous contributions from well-wishers, until in 1963 a colleague asked him to take on the publishing and marketing of MRA’s literature. Grosvenor Books was launched that year.
Aside from his work with the MRA, in 1971 Hugh co-founded, with his friend Bill Porter, the International Communications Forum, a media ethics thinktank with the aim of bringing moral values to the publishing industry.
Hugh married Carolyn Crary, a Californian MRA volunteer whom he met at Caux, in 1957. She died in 2022, and he is survived by their sons, John and Kent.
