Shropshire Magazine

The author with some of his published work.

Andy Richardson meets a Ludlow author whose own story is as fascinating as his bibliography

He opens the door looking every inch a dandy. Peter Burden is immaculately coiffured, a silk scarf is tied loosely around his neck and he looks dapper in his casual shirt and slacks. “Jolly good to see you,” he says, as he shows me into his home, in Ludlow.

Before we start our interview, he has something to get off his chest. “I love Ludlow,” he says. “You’d better make that absolutely clear, it’s a beautiful town and I’m very passionate about it.”

That assertion is made because, a few months ago, Burden found himself at the centre of a storm in a teacup, involving Ludlow’s restaurants. He’d launched an anonymous and rambunctious review of restaurants, called Mr Pernickety’s Guide to Ludlow, which had got local restaurateurs in a froth. Three weeks later, he was ‘outed’, following a story in the Shropshire Star.

“Well,” he says, as he takes a knife in his hand, slices a noggin of cheese and thumbs it into fresh crusty bread, “there was a point to all of that. I love eating out, but I hate restaurants that rip people off. I wanted to write a guide that was honest and entertaining. Oddly enough, a lot of the people who read it – and who didn’t know I was behind it – had told me how much they agreed with me.”

But enough of Mr Pernickety. It’s time to unveil the real Peter Burden.

Predecessors

He was born in Surrey and his family had a strong thespian and literary gene, particularly on his father’s side. Among his predecessors are the romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the author of long, visionary poems including ‘Prometheus Unbound’, ‘Alastor’ and ‘Adonais’, who was famed for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron and who was much admired by Karl Marx, among others.

He also has familial links with the Oscar- and Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw; Beatrice Lillie, the comic actress who became Lady Peel upon her marriage to Sir Robert Peel; and Mrs Patrick Campbell, the British stage actress who was related to Sir Winston Churchill.

Warrior’s Son, one of a series of racetrack thrillers.

Burden was a precocious student who passed his A-levels a year early but dropped out of school at the age of 16. The sixties were in full swing and he was the lead singer of a band, The Scorpions, who played at the most fashionable venues of the day. 

“There was me, two guys from Harrow and a guy from Eton. We’d all head off together up the Kings Road. I think they became merchant bankers and the band came to an end.”

The next stop for Burden was ICI’s head offices, in Slough. It was 1965, almost four decades before the same buildings were commandeered by Ricky Gervais and used as the backdrop to his peerless comedy, The Office.

A few years later, the young gunslinger found himself dashing off to Morocco. “I had a girlfriend who went there. I followed her across but by the time I arrived she’d met someone with a yacht, and gone off with him.” Not that the entrepreneurial Burden was too put out. He was thrilled by the fashions he found in Moroccan markets and decided to import djellabas, gandoras and other items. Soon, he’d created a profitable import and export business. 

But, while he had a skill for coming up with new ideas, his connection with the administrative side of business was less impressive. “We took our clothes to Paris, Madrid, London and other places,” he says. “On one occasion, we were coming back through Paris, I was with a guy called Mervyn De Woolf, and we were paid in cash. It was a lot of money. We took it all to the casino and played three:zero roulette, in which the odds are heavily in favour of the house. We blew the lot.”

Next stop was London’s West End, where Peter grew his own
fashion empire. “We launched a brand of jeans called Midnight Blue.” It turned into an instant hit. 

As the seventies gave way to the eighties, Peter’s thespian interest resurfaced and he launched The Talking Tape Company, pioneering a new market selling prerecorded plays.

“I struck a deal with the BBC,” he says. “They’d got all these plays that had never been released, like Arms and the Man, with Judi Dench, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud.

Blockbuster

He visited WH Smith on London’s New Fetter Lane to enquire whether they would stock his cassettes. When he was there, he saw a poster on the wall advertising a new blockbuster. “It was Lace, by Shirley Conran. I looked at it and thought ‘Damn Lace, I can do better than that’.”

Burden’s expose of investigative journalism, Fake Sheiks and Royal Trappings

And so, he became a writer. His first book, Rags, was penned in 1985 and secured him a £20,000 advance. It was an instant bestseller, earning him three pages in Harper & Queen magazine and paving the way for a lucrative career as an author. He wrote a series of racetrack thrillers, with help from former champion jockey John Francombe, before collaborating on three similarly successful titles with Jenny Pitman.

He also ghost-wrote an autobiography for actor David Hemmings, the star of Blow-Up, the 1966 British-Italian film by Michelangelo Antonioni that tells the story of a photographer’s accidental involvement with a murder. 

“David Hemmings died three months into the project, but his wife wanted me to finish it. I grew very fond of him and gave the address at his funeral. I was between Tom Courtenay and Derek Jacobi.” 

Burden’s next project was an autobiography for Leslie Phillips, the archetypal suave ladies’ man of stage and screen. 

He then became an expert on press intrusion, writing a much-lauded expose of the unsavoury journalistic techniques employed by the News of the World: Fake Sheiks & Royal Trappings.

And so to Mr Pernickety. Burden lived in Herefordshire for 20 years, before relocating more recently to Ludlow. “It’s a wonderful town,” he says, without a hint of insincerity. 

“I do plan to write more restaurant guide books – though now my cover is blown, we’ll have to reconsider how we do it.”

Burden (standing) modelling in 1977 alongside a 17-year-old Kelly Le Brock, for the Midnight Blue ad campaign.