Many who knew Laurie Purden, who has died aged 93, called her a “one-off”. In her long career she inspired, entertained and informed during what was known as the golden age of magazines.
Fleet Street newspapers – which remained black and white – kept their expensive printing machines active by creating publications that had colour pages to attract advertisers. This resulted in circulations that were, in some cases, in the millions – matched by the profits reaped by the proprietors.
Laurie, born in Tunbridge Wells in 1928, was the second daughter of Constance (nee Sheppard) and George Purden, a stationery salesman. She went to Harecourt, a local school run by sisters Jessie and Ann Lake who encouraged her interest in English and literature. She developed awareness of fashion and style from watching her mother, a sketch artist, draw clothes for advertisements and the slip covers of the popular dressmakers’ paper patterns (long before photography in publishing).
After completing a shorthand and typing course at 16 she found her first job in London, at the publishers George Newnes, as junior secretary of the Woman’s Own editor, the erudite James Drawbell, author and playwright (three plays were made into films). She discovered a forte for fiction. On Home Notes, a Newnes weekly overseen by Drawbell, Laurie’s job was to combine bought-in artwork (uncredited then) with sent-in or bought-in short stories from the US. If none were suitable she wrote them herself, often in her lunch hour. Later, as Assistant Editor, she handled fiction on Woman’s Own as well.
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Marriage to Keith Kotch in 1957 changed the course of her future. He worked at Hulton Press, publishers of the much lauded Picture Post, run by the Reverend Marcus Morris. This priest-turned-publisher in 1950 had produced Eagle, a boys’ comic, followed by Girl, Swift and Robin for older children. He would effectively influence a wide variety of readers for years, and his backing allowed Laurie to play an essential part too.
Morris liked attractive women and Laurie was, in olden-day terms, a glamour puss – stylish, well groomed, always looking impeccable. He enticed her to join Hulton to work on Girl, then she edited Housewife, a glossy monthly created in 1939 as a rival to Good Housekeeping which American publisher Hearst had brought to Britain in 1922.
She focused on women’s interests, making the home a base for happy living, employing specialists who became household names: Constance Spry (flower-arranging), Rosemary Hume (founder of the London Cordon Bleu Cookery School), and Phyllis Digby Morton (beauty and fashion). Journalist Anne Scott-James, mother of historian and former Telegraph editor Max Hastings, wrote about etiquette.
When Odhams Press took over Hultons in 1957 Morris went to the National Magazine Company as editorial director. Laurie left Hultons and Housewife to have her daughters, Emma and Sophie, in 1962 and 1963, and in 1965 Morris drew her into the Hearst stable.
She worked on Vanity Fair and House Beautiful before he appointed her editor of Good Housekeeping where she modernised the content, making much of the tried-and-tested resources of the Good Housekeeping Institute which reassured readers about home products on the market, and helped them gain or expand cookery and interior design skills. The circulation soared and in 1973 Laurie received the MBE for services to women’s journalism.
That year Morris bought Astra Press, owner of the first DIY magazine for women, Womancraft, as a sister magazine for Good Housekeeping. Laurie, editor in chief, expanded the craft elements while “softening”, as she described it, articles involving plumbing, cement or bricks. Research revealed that readers were intelligent, educated, hardworking married women with children. In three years it seemed to have established itself in newsagents when it was sold to IPC to be merged with Sewing&Knitting. In 1978 Laurie moved to the same company as Editorial Director of Woman’s Journal, inheriting Woman&Home at the same time.
With both monthlies she felt she had found the way to make women more independent, to find their voice. She had an innate instinct for what readers liked to see and read and both publications thrived over the decade of Margaret Thatcher and “Women of the Year” lunches. She introduced annual fashion shows at the Savoy aided by favoured designers such as Roland Klein who became a close friend. They took the shows on the road, greeted enthusiastically by readers in other parts of the country who couldn’t get to London, and ran successful reader offers of some of the featured garments.
After she retired in 1988 Woman’s Journal had three three successive editors, but the magazine aimed at the older, more glamorous market, closed in 2001. It was just the start of other dramatic changes. The National Magazine Company (renamed Hearst UK) bought Gruner+Jahr, the German UK group that published the weekly Best and monthly Prima, produced today alongside Good Housekeeping. EMAP went to German publishers Bauer, and IPC/Reed Elsevier known colloquially as the Ministry of Magazines was gobbled up by Time Inc (subsidiary of Time Warner in the US). Today one company, Future, owns most of the magazines on newsagents’ shelves, having acquired those companies whose names were synonymous with such publishing in the last half of the 20th Century.
Everyone who worked for or with Laurie will remember her good humour, her laugh and her signature with its flourishing L which grew larger as macular disease developed. For someone whose visual skills were part and parcel of her career the diagnosis was a terrible shock. She died after a 10-day stay in hospital for what was thought to be a routine investigation. Widowed in 1979, she never remarried. Her daughters Emma and Sophie survive her, as do grandchildren Macy, Ned and Betsy, and stepson Nick Kotch. Her sister predeceased her.
Roma Laurette Kotch (nee Purden), MBE, born 30 September 1928, died 31 August, 2022. A memorial service will be held at St Bride’s church, Fleet Street, on February 8, 2023.
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