Deaths

ANTHONY LEONARD SHEIL (T50) 18th May 1932 – 10th January 2017 was son of Jerry, a soldier and Flora (Dorrie), a Canadian railroad heiress.  They lived at Heyford Manor in Northamptonshire where they rode horses and hunted, and in 1935, they moved to Ireland after inheriting the Confey Stud in County Dublin, which had produced winners of the Grand National, Derby Stakes and the 2,000 Guineas.

After four years training racehorses Jerry Sheil was recalled to the British Army at the start of the Second World War.  Aged seven, Anthony waved goodbye to his father who went to fight in Egypt, Italy, France and Germany.  They never saw each other again.  In the last days of the war Brigadier Sheil drove over a mine and was killed instantly.  Aged nearly 13 Sheil made an entry in his diary, which belied his profound distress: “Daddy killed in action. Went out and played cricket in the nets.”  The truth of the incident was not revealed to him until the end of his life when he came across a German journalist’s report of that fateful day in May 1945.  It was recorded that Brigadier Sheil, having seen his driver fall asleep at the wheel, had offered to take over.  Minutes later he drove over the mine that killed him while the sleeping driver survived the explosion.

Whilst at Ampleforth, Anthony started running a book.  One of his teachers, listening to some drinkers in the local pub discussing the odds of the upcoming Grand National, overheard the barman saying: “The best odds you’ll get are from Anthony Sheil up at the College.”  Rustication followed but did nothing to dampen his fascination.

After National Service, Sheil went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Greats before studying for the Bar and with a fellow student, James Kinross, began reading manuscripts for pin money.  It occurred to them that reading and placing manuscripts with publishers was more fun than the Bar and in 1962 they set up a literary agency in Grafton Street.  Their first authors were military writers and historians to whom Sheil was drawn by his father’s army career.  His first fiction writer was John Fowles whose novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman were the big literary books of the late 1960s and 1970s.  He moved the agency to Doughty Street, absorbing two others on the way, which netted him representation of the bestselling romance novelist Catherine Cookson.

In 1974 he set up a New York agency with his old friend Gillon Aitken and in 1986 he created a foreign rights agency with Paul Marsh.  By the early 1990s he had teamed up with Sonia Land.  In the process he represented outstanding writers such as Paddy Leigh Fermor, who combined everything he admired in a man: military endeavour, an earthy erudition and a love of Greece. In 1984 Sheil bought a house on the island of Andros to which he would retreat to take marathon walks and swims.

After a long bout of success there came a period of reckoning in the 1990s.  Only the sudden deaths of his father and later, in 1974, his sister, Denyse, could have given him the character to suffer with great stoicism the breakdown of his first marriage, the loss of his agency, a cancer operation, and the move from his London home.

The reward for withstanding these hard times came towards the end of the millennium.  In 1997 he married Annette Worsley-Taylor, who for many years was the driving force behind London Fashion Week, and together they embarked on a very happy 18 years together until she died suddenly in 2015.  Sheil joined Aitken Alexander as an associate agent and brought some of his writers with him.  He was still doing big deals at the age of 83.

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Rest in eternal peace.