Stephen Meredith Potter (1 February 1900 – 2 December 1969) was a British writer best known for his parodies of self-help books, and their film and television derivatives.
After leaving school in the last months of the First World War he was commissioned as a junior officer in the British Army, but by the time he had completed his training the war was over and he was demobilised. He then studied English at Oxford, and after some false starts he spent his early working life as an academic, lecturing in English literature at Birkbeck College, part of the University of London, during which time he published several works on Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Finding his income inadequate to support himself and his family, he left the university and took up a post producing and writing for the BBC. He stayed with the BBC until after the Second World War, when he became a freelance writer, and remained one for the rest of his life.
His series of humorous books on how to secure an unfair advantage began in 1947 with Gamesmanship, purporting to show how poor players can beat better ones by subtle psychological ploys. This sold prodigiously and led to a series of sequels covering other aspects of life. The books were adapted for the cinema in the 1960s and for television in the 1970s.
Biography
Early years Potter was born in Battersea, London, the only son of Frank Collard Potter (1858–1939), a chartered accountant, and his wife Elizabeth Mary Jubilee née Reynolds (1863–1950).Grenfell, Joyce, "Potter, Stephen Meredith (1900–1969)’", rev. Clare L. Taylor, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2008, accessed 22 May 2010 (requires subscription) He attended Westminster School from age 13 to 18, during the First World War. As he reached school-leaving age he wrote in his diary, "If this war doesn't end soon I shall have to join the beastly army and lay down my blooming life for my blinking country."Potter's diary, quoted in Davis, Russell, "The master-shipwright", Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 1980, p. 1185 He volunteered for the army, was trained as an officer and "passed out" (graduated) as top of his company. He was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards as a second lieutenant just as the war was ending, and did not see active service.Davis, Russell, "The master-shipwright", review of biography of Potter by Alan Jenkins, Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 1980, p. 1185
Potter was demobilised in 1919, and spent a few months in his father's office learning book-keeping, before going to Merton College, Oxford, to study English. His family paid for his university education, a fact that put him in the shadow of his elder sister Muriel (later a form mistress at St Paul's Girls' School, then headmistress of South Hampstead High School),Imogen Holst: A Life in Music, Christopher Grogan, 2007, The Boydell Press, pg 17The A.M.A.: The Journal of the Incorporated Association of Assistant Masters in Secondary Schools, Volume 31, Incorporated Association of Assistant Masters in Secondary Schools., 1936, pg 316 who had won a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford,Oxford University Gazette, volume 51, 1920, Oxford University Press, pg 134 and had taken a first-class degree. Potter achieved only a second-class degree in English language and literature. On the strength of this he was offered the post of talks producer at the BBC, but turned it down as it was based in the provincial city of Birmingham, where he had no wish to reside. Potter instead tried to earn a living as an elocution teacher in London, advertising "Cockney accents cured", but attracted only one pupil. He then tried his luck as a tutor and schoolmaster before becoming private secretary to a well-known playwright, Henry Arthur Jones.
Lecturer in English literature In 1926 Potter began teaching English literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. On 7 July 1927 he married Marian Anderson Attenborough (1900–1981), a painter professionally known as Mary Potter. There were two sons of the marriage Andrew (1928–2008) and Julian (1931–2013). The family at first lived in Chiswick, London, before moving to a flat in Harley Street.Bessborough, Madeleine, "Potter, Marian Anderson (Mary)(1900–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, May 2009, accessed 22 May 2010 (requires subscription)
Potter's first book, The Young Man (1929), was an autobiographical novel, which was well-reviewed. The Manchester Guardian wrote, "a brilliant performance ... a distinguished contribution to intellectual fiction.""Books of the Day", The Manchester Guardian, 25 October 1929, p. 7 In 1930 he wrote D. H. Lawrence: A First Study, the first book-length work on Lawrence, which appeared in print within a few days of the death of its subject; unfortunate timing, because it seemed like an inadequate memorial rather than what it was intended to be, a critical reappraisal. It also suffered from a regrettable misprint, rendering the heading "Sea and Sardinia", as "Sex and Sardinia". This was soon amplified by rumour into "Sex and Sardines", none of which helped Potter's reputation as a serious writer. Potter's most comprehensive critic was the friend from whom he had inherited the Cape commission, G.B. Edwards, in Middleton Murry's Adelphi.Edward Chaney, Genius Friend: G.B. Edwards and The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, Blue Ormer 2015 After this he concentrated in his next four works on Coleridge. He edited the Nonesuch Press Coleridge (1933), praised in The Times as "the best anthology that has ever shown Coleridge as poet, philosopher and critic."Books For the Holidays – Successes of the Year, A Selected List", The Times, 27 July 1934, p. 8 This was followed by an edition of Sara Coleridge's letters to Thomas Poole, Minnow among Tritons (1934), which Potter edited from the original manuscripts in the British Museum.The Times Literary Supplement, 19 July 1934, p. 507 In 1941 he wrote a play, Married to a Genius, based on the Coleridge marriage. In 1935 he published his most important contribution to the subject, Coleridge and S.T.C., a discussion of the duality in the poet's nature, "not merely the earlier and the later, but the true and the false, and the exciting and the nauseating," as John Middleton Murry put it in a review in The Times Literary Supplement. Reviews were good, but with reservations that Potter oversimplified the dichotomy in Coleridge's nature (The Observer) or else did not explore the underlying reasons for it (TLS).de Sélincourt, Basil, "Two Beings in One", The Observer, 28 April 1935, p. 5
In 1937 Potter published The Muse in Chains: a Study in Education, a humorous satire on the academic teaching of English literature. G. M. Young wrote of it: "if I were suddenly commissioned by some Golden Dustman to organize a new University, I think I should send for Mr. Potter and offer him the Chair of English literature forthwith."quoted in ODNB article Other reviewers thought Potter's suggestions more entertaining than practical.de Sélincourt, Basil, "The Teaching of English", The Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1937, p. 7 Potter's humorous insights into academic life were widely praised. He wrote of George Saintsbury: "It is recorded that for eighteen years he started the day by reading a French novel (in preparation for his history of them) – an act so unnatural to man as almost in itself to amount to genius."The Muse in Chains, quoted in Hart-Davis, Volume 3, 30 March 1958
BBC writer and producer Potter first wrote for BBC radio in 1936. Finding that his academic career, although promising, was insufficiently well paid to support his family, he resigned from Birkbeck in 1937 and the following year joined the BBC as a writer-producer in its features department, originally concentrating on literary features and documentaries. In the same year he joined the Savile Club, known for its artistic and especially literary members, who have included Hardy, Kipling, and Yeats. He was a leading player of the club's idiosyncratic version of snooker, and some of his later "gamesmanship" ploys are thought to have originated in the Savile's games room."Savile Snooker", Savile Club website. The rules of Savile Snooker, formulated by Potter, can be accessed here.
At the outbreak of the Second World War Potter was sent by the BBC to work in Manchester. Later in the war years he and his wife moved south, living in a farmhouse in Essex where she found more scope to pursue her career as a painter. In 1943 Potter collaborated with Joyce Grenfell on a gently satirical comedy feature "How to Talk to Children".University of Bristol Theatre Collection It was well received and they made twenty-eight more "How to ..." programmes, including "How to Woo" and "How to Give a Party". In 1946 "How to Listen" was the first broadcast heard on the newly created Third Programme.Joyce Grenfell, his co-author, wrote in the ODNB article that this feature was called "How to Listen to Radio", but comparison with the published programme listings (e.g. The Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1946, p. 2 and The Times, 30 September 1946, p. 6) shows that the title was "How to Listen" tout court. At the end of the war, Potter took on a number of concurrent literary tasks. These included drama critic for the New Statesman and book reviewer for the News Chronicle.
Gamesmanship and freelance writing A ten-day power-cut at the beginning of 1947 prevented any broadcasting and gave Potter the opportunity to dash off a book. To the despair of his publisher he was a far from methodical author: every Potter manuscript was "a mass of dirty bits of paper, vilely typed, corrected in illegible biro, episodic and half-revised."Hart-Davis, Volume 4, Letter of 7 February 1959 This book, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating, illustrated by Frank Wilson, was published in 1947, and sold prodigiously.Lowrey, Burling, "The Timelessness of Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship", Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1993, pp.718–26
It was the first of his series of books purporting to teach ploys for manipulating one's associates, making them feel inferior and thus gaining the status of being one-up on them. From this book, the term "Gamesmanship" entered the English language. Potter said that he was introduced to the technique by C. E. M. Joad during a game of tennis in which Joad and Potter were struggling against two fit young students. Joad politely requested the students to state clearly whether a ball had landed in or out (when in truth it was so obviously out that they had not thought it necessary to say so). This nonplussed the students, who wondered if their sportsmanship was in question; they became so edgy that they lost the match."Potter, Stephen", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003, accessed 22 May 2010 (requires subscription) With the success of Gamesmanship, Potter left the BBC in 1949, ended his existing journalistic commitments, and briefly became editor of a weekly, Leader Magazine.Sleeve notes for the Penguin edition of The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship The magazine closed in 1950, and thereafter he was a freelance writer for the rest of his life.