My stepfather, Jim Powell, who has died aged 74 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, enjoyed a career in advertising and also ran his own pottery business for 20 years before achieving success as a novelist and historian later in life.
On the publication of his first novel, The Breaking of Eggs, in 2010, when he was 61, he was selected as one of 12 Best New Novelists by BBC Two’s Culture Show. He went on to write two more novels, Trading Futures (2016) and Things We Nearly Knew (2018). At the time of his death, he had just completed a fourth, While the Music Lasts, charting the past half century through interlocking lives of a group of acquaintances against the backdrop of the socio-political changes of the period.
Born in London to James Powell, a solicitor, and his wife, Fiona (nee Michell-Clarke), Jim was educated at Charterhouse school in Surrey and studied history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1971. He narrowly missed becoming president of the Cambridge Union to Arianna Stassinopoulos, later co-founder of the Huffington Post. During one university vacation he worked as an office boy for the Beatles at their Apple offices in Savile Row, London.
After Cambridge, he joined a London advertising agency, Wasey Campbell Ewald. There he managed lucrative accounts, including New Zealand lamb. Aged just 31 he was appointed managing director of the Michael Bungey agency.
Jim had always said he would not remain in advertising for ever, and in the mid-1980s he set up a pottery business, Holdenby Designs, in Northamptonshire and Stoke-on-Trent, manufacturing ceramic tableware by designers including Suzanne Katkhuda, Carol Dunstan and Rachel Barker, and selling it in Europe and south-east Asia.
Some of the designs are on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum. He continued in the business until the early 2000s.
Jim served for about 10 years as a Conservative member of Daventry district council, and he also joined the Samaritans. He helped his friend Francis Pym, the former foreign secretary, with his book The Politics of Consent (1984). In 1987 Jim stood as Conservative candidate for Coventry North West in the general election. In subsequent years, however, his disenchantment with the direction of Conservative party drove him leftwards.
In 2012, Jim married the writer and editor Kay Sayce, gaining two step-daughters, Emma and me, and subsequently four step-grandchildren. The Powells divided their time between their home in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, and a farmhouse in south-west France.
Jim’s great-grandmother was the daughter of the novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock. His research on her life led to the discovery of the family’s involvement in the cotton trade in the 19th century; he turned his research into a PhD thesis, completed for Liverpool University in 2018 and a paper, Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War (Liverpool University Press, 2021), which was lauded by historians in the field.
In addition to reading and writing, he enjoyed his four small grandchildren, cookery (especially rich puddings), researching his family history and generally being with people and making the most of life.
He is survived by Kay, Emma and me, and by his step-grandchildren.
