Cyril Ray was prepared to turn his hand to anything. In the early 1950s, when he was on the staff of The Sunday Times, his colleague Godfrey Smith recalled* : “he wrote the Atticus column and the Autolycus saleroom column, he was also Christopher Pym, the reviewer of thrillers … he understudied Harold Hobson and Dilys Powell as dramatic critic and film critic respectively … he was even, for one or two heady weeks, Sarah Bellamy, the chief features editor of the women’s page.”
And at the same time he was working as a freelance for W&A Gilbey, producing a regular magazine for their customers. 1956 marked the centenary of the foundation of the firm by Walter and Alfred Gilbey on their return from the Crimea. To mark this, Cyril Ray was asked to put together pieces that had already been published in the magazine in a hardback book, The Compleat Imbiber. It is a handsome volume, as I will show you, starting with endpapers by Hoffnung, an introduction by Cyril Ray and containing some thirty-eight articles by such a diverse group that I will show you them all.
If you are fond of a drink and like reading about it too, this book will most likely appeal to you. When you finally put it down, there is something to look forward to. There are a further fifteen volumes, the final one published shortly after Cyril Ray died in 1991.
Evelyn Waugh, Simon Raven, Roger Longrigg, Laurie Lee, Peter Carrington, John Julius Norwich, Kingsley Amis are just a few of the contributors. The Compleat Imbiber 3 has a story by William Sansom, A Putting Up of Pints, Number 9 has Richard Usborne Browsing and Sluicing with Bertie Wooster and Number 14, The Gourmet’s Love-Song written by PG Wodehouse for Punch in 1901.
Gilbey’s commissioned one more book to celebrate their centenary: Merchants of Wine by Alec Waugh. In spite of his once illustrious reputation as a novelist, until he was over-shadowed by his brother, Evelyn, it is a dull tome. I have almost every novel of Alec’s and they are worth reading. Meanwhile, W&A Gilbey merged with another firm in 1962 and were taken over by Watney Mann ten years later which is now part of Diageo.
Cyril Ray’s series of Compleat Imbibers is a fitting and enduring tribute to the family firm. My grandfather was fond of saying, “any port in a storm – even Gilbey’s”. It was what he served when the Louth Hounds met at Barmeath.
* In his introduction to The Compleat Imbiber 15.