Douglas Cleverdon (1903 - 1987)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Thomas Douglas James Cleverdon was an English radio producer and bookseller. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford. He then set up a bookshop in Bristol, from there he also published. His first book published was a collection of engravings by Eric Gill, who later made a Book of Alphabets for Douglas Cleverdon. In 1927 he commissioned David Jones to make a set of copper engravings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He published a succession of very finely printed catalogues of books for sale from the bookshop, ranging from early Caxton Press first editions of Jane Austen to modern first editions by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. In 1939 he joined the BBC, where he co-created The Brains Trust with fellow producer Howard Thomas. In 1948, Cleverdon would adapt and produce David Jones’s major poem In Parenthesis for radio, with Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas, for BBC Radio’s Third Programme. In 1954 Cleverdon produced Under Milk Wood, the premier of the Dylan Thomas dramatic poem; according to Jenny Abramsky it had taken seven years to persuade Thomas to write it. After leaving the BBC, he was involved with a fine publishing imprint, Clover Hill Editions, which he had established with Will Carter.