After problems with the importation of Chance — an issue was barred by Australian Customs on the grounds of obscenity and upheld by court order — Powell moved his business to Hong Kong where his magazines were printed.

He left the Herald after a September 1994 Media Watch episode identified allegedly plagiarised material under his byline, insertions which, according to Powell, had been made by a junior colleague while he was on leave.

He was the seventh child[1] of Calvinist Methodists[2] Thomas Norman Powell, an Inspector of Schools, and his wife Blodwyn (née Hughes).

[8][9][citation needed] After discharge, he worked in various jobs including as a truck driver[10] and circus hand,[9][11] before joining local paper Wallasey and Wirral Chronicle in 1955.

[15] It published a mix of original and reprinted works, with its opening slate being William Saroyan's Rock Wagram, Richard Gehman's Sinatra and His Rat Pack, a Dixon of Dock Green novel, and Something Fresh by Wodehouse.

[16] Mayflower also published paperback editions of science fiction works, starting with Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, as well as approximately two film tie-ins each month.

[15] During the production of the fourth issue of satirical magazine Private Eye from late 1961 to early 1962, Powell provided the creative team with a free room in Mayflower's Covent Garden warehouse (later the site of The Roxy nightclub).

[17][18] By late 1962, Mayflower's biggest success was the UK paperback edition of Richard Gehman's Sinatra and His Rat Pack, with 300,000 copies sold.

Police raided G. Gold & Son's Magic Shop in London, seized 171 copies, and charged the retailers under Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which allowed for trial without jury.

Despite supportive testimony of many expert witnesses, the recency of the Profumo affair, Gold's association with the "Soho smut market", and the book's low 3s 6d cover price all contributed to a guilty verdict after two minutes' consideration by magistrate Sir Robert Blundell.

[22][24] After liberals, the media, and the literary world protested, and an all-party motion in Parliament condemned the verdict, the Obscene Publications Act was altered to give publishers the right for a trial by jury.

[26]: 118  He did this partly by offering author Harold Robbins, whose previous UK paperbacks had been published by Corgi, the massive advance of £32,000 when the standard payment of the time was approximately £4−5,000.

Weybright continues that, on the night of the 1966 UK General Election, Powell: ...parked his Rolls-Royce conspicuously in front of Annabel's, the nightclub, which occurred to him as a splendid way to celebrate a socialist victory... — a young man in a Liberty-print shirt, with a Rolls-Royce, who had openly described himself as a lout, but with no company bank account except for deposits from New York and California to cover deficits and keep the enterprise alive.

[34] Irving Wardle, the English writer and theatre critic, noted in the New York Times Book Review: If the [British publishing] boom is ending, one can date it to the departure for Australia this year of Gareth Powell.

Powell was not a popular figure among the old-style bookmen, and terms ranging from "whizz-kid" to "lout" were freely bandied about in print (He was a working-class boy, which made it worse).

"[39] — but this application was refused after direct intervention by Immigration Minister Billy Snedden, who stated "People of affluence are not entitled to an assisted passage".

[44] Chance also published the work of some of Australia's best young photographers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Rennie Ellis,[41] and was somewhat of a breakthrough in its high standards of printing quality, photography and design.

Ltd. v. Forbes, Justice Helsham, who was unsure what 8-page comic strip Barbarella was about but suspected lesbianism, decreed that the November 1968 issue of Chance was obscene and should be destroyed.

[45][46][47] Australian Censorship: The XYZ of Love noted that the judge "overlooked the fact that a few doors away from his court, a cinema was showing Barbarella which included some lines of dialogue he found particularly offensive in the strip".

[4] Powell stated that the Equity Court decision was causing him to have "second thoughts about the whole future of girlie magazines in Australia", and was considering whether he should either stop publishing Chance, or move its headquarters overseas.

[12] In September 1994, the ABC's Media Watch television programme, under host Stuart Littlemore, aired an accusation that copy appearing under Powell's byline had been plagiarised.

[66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73] He also wrote for a variety of Australian and international periodicals including the Hong Kong Standard and the China Economic Review (for which he was also associate publisher),[74] writing thousands of "Industry Updates" for the latter.