At the time, Glasgow trading houses, long-experienced in servicing the needs of North American slave plantations, were ready to capitalise on new opportunities in the sugar industry arising on the West Indies.

[4] Among the principal beneficiaries of this booming trade were John Campbell (Senior) and Company, which supplied merchandise to the slave plantations along the coast of Guiana, then in Dutch hands.

It was in this role of supplier that the company first began to acquire plantations along the Essequibo Coast of Guiana, from planters facing bankruptcy.

"'I was profoundly shocked by what I found", he said, "the dereliction of the sugar estates and factories, the awful housing of labourers, the racial problems, the arrogance of the Plantocracy".

[2] According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "In British Guiana, Booker controlled 80 per cent of the sugar industry and was involved in a range of activities, including the production of rum, shopkeeping, and drug manufacturing.

"[2] Campbell set himself the task of modernising the business (especially in Guiana), with improved management, localised sugar processing and civilised treatment of workers.

Jagan, himself the son of Indian indentured servants, quickly gained the confidence of the sugar workers, and in Guyana's first general elections in 1953 became prime minister.

He was an old friend and golfing partner of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond spy novels, who had recently been diagnosed as terminally ill with less than a year to live.

During a game of golf Fleming turned to Campbell for advice on securing his estate for his family from heavy taxation.

Thus was born the Bookers Author Division, with the injunction: It should make money, not to mention being entertaining, and there could be advertising interest in it for some of our companies.

Bookers later acquired the copyrights of other well-known authors, including novelists Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley, Georgette Heyer and the playwrights Robert Bolt and Harold Pinter.