'Over my dead body': Booker prize archives reveal unknown judging battles

The winner of the 1976 Booker prize was decided on a coin toss, the prize’s former administrator Martyn Goff has revealed.

The winner that year was David Storey’s tale of a Yorkshire mining community, Saville. But according to an interview with the late Goff, made public in a new film from the British Library drawing on hundreds of hours of audio interviews about the prize’s history, Storey only won because the judges – novelists Walter Allen and Francis King, and poet Mary Wilson (who was married to PM Harold) – couldn’t agree on a winner.

According to Goff, Wilson had largely recused herself from the judging, because she had “begun to get a little bit tired, as Malcolm Muggeridge did, of the amount of sex that was beginning to appear in novels”. Muggeridge had pulled out of judging the 1971 award over the amount of sex he had to read about.

“She was sort of leaving it to the other two judges. And they could not agree and she didn’t want to vote, and we got to a total stalemate,” said Goff. “Eventually one of the other two judges said, ‘Well, I’m in favour of one of the two books’. The other said ‘I’m in favour of Storey’, and the only thing we can do – and this has never been revealed before – is to toss for it, and they spun a coin and that was the winner.”

The British Library film is part of a new online archive marking the prize’s 50th anniversary, bringing together documents, images and videos from its history. Along with the unusual way in which 1976’s winner was chosen, the archive also reveals the scorn with which Rebecca West, who judged the prize in 1969 and 1970, regarded the contenders. In one letter, West dismisses John le Carré as writing “according to formula”, Kingsley Amis as “curiously disappointing”, Wendy Owen as “a half-wit” and Melvyn Bragg as “grossly over written”.

“Refuse to take oath that I read this soap opera to the last page,” West writes of Pamela Hansford Johnson’s entry, while another book is dismissed as “really scandalously bad”. One writer’s “genito-urinary system keeps on coming between the reader and the page”. In a particularly scathing comment, West admits she “cannot make out what” PH Newby’s Something to Answer For – which would win the prize that year – “is about”.

West was not alone in her dismissals of contenders: the archive reveals how in 1985, when Keri Hulme’s The Bone People won, judge Joanna Lumley had told Goff that the book was “over-my-dead-body stuff” and “its subject matter [child abuse] finally indefensible”. The archive features the letter Goff sent to Lumley after the decision was made, confessing that he “felt like donning riot gear” when writing to thank her for taking part in the judging.

The archive also unveils the pitfalls of using an Autocue: in 1983, the novelist Fay Weldon was chairing the judges, and used an Autocue to give a speech at the ceremony that mercilessly attacked the publishing industry. “We are the raw material of your trade. You do tend to forget it, you know. You forget that books need writers: that there are very few of us; that we are quite tough, but perhaps not as tough as you think,” Weldon said. “I think you’d do without us altogether if you could.”

Weldon had intended to end on a softer note, but the ceremony’s power was cut by trade-union action at 10pm and her autocue went black. In the archive, she recalls, “just before I got to the 'you are all honourable men' bit. And so because you are reading it, you don't know where you are, so I just sat down and said, 'That is really all I have to say.' So they didn't get that bit. And they were so incensed. And the head of the publishing union came over and hit my agent. It was a wonderful evening!”