B. G. Henry

Brian Glynn Henry (1926 – 2003) was a powerful figure in TV and newspaper advertising in the UK in the 1950 and 1960s.

Brian Glynn Henry was born in February 1926 in Liverpool and was educated at Stowe School under JF Roxburgh from September 1940 to April 1944 where he obtained School and Higher Certificates, and later at Trinity College Cambridge where he obtained an Honours Degree in English.

During the World War II Brian Henry served in the Navy. First as a rating in home waters, and later, after he was commissioned, as a Sub-Lieutenant, RNVR, in the Far East including eight months service as First Lieutenant from 1943 to 1947 in the 273rd Infantry Landing Craft Flotilla.

In 1946, aged 20, he navigated one of HM ships over 10,000 miles from Plymouth to the Philippines. Later, from February to September 1948, Henry served under Lieutenant-Commander HGV Meller, Assistant Secretary to the Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet.

He returned to Cambridge to complete his course and then took his first jobs as a temporary assistant in London University Library, St Marylebone Borough Library in London and at AC Nielsen Marketing Research Organisation in Oxford.

In February 1949 Brian Henry was offered a job in the Advertisement Department of The Star, London’s leading evening paper, selling space for Classified Advertisements at a wage of £7 per week. It was a career he took to immediately. He wrote to the Secretary of the Cambridge University Appointments Board in May 1949:

“It seems strange that I should have been looking for almost any job in which selling was not required and then should have found this one so much to my liking. In actual fact, what I am doing now is selling, and, moreover, selling the most difficult commodity of all, namely, advertising space. To my surprise it suits me splendidly, which goes to show, I suppose, that you never know what you can do until you try”.

In May 1949 he was transferred to display advertising, where he took over responsibility for all client work in the area of TV, radio, electrical as well as advertising agencies and publishers. Within two years, aged 25, he had become the youngest Advertisement Manager in Fleet Street with 65 people under his control.

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