Neville Armstrong

Neville Spearman Armstrong (20 October 1913 – September 2008 His grandfather, Charles Spearman Armstrong, born in 1847, had been a pioneer in growing tea and cinchona, the source of quinine, and had planted 750 acres of tea on an estate called Rookwood, near Hewaheta village, now located in Central Province.

When he was five, Armstrong was sent to England to be brought up by an unmarried aunt, while his parents stayed in Ceylon with their other three children. His Armstrong grandparents had already retired and settled in England at West Byfleet, and his grandfather died there in 1924.

In October 1939, Armstrong and his wife were registered at 17 Marloes Road, Kensington; he was a journalist, she a guesthouse manager. In 1940, he enlisted in the British Army and for two years was a clerk in the Egyptian western desert. after revealing his origins in Ceylon, although unable to speak Urdu. In 1955, Armstrong launched his own London publishing house, under the name of Neville Spearman Publishers.

An obituary described Armstrong as “one of the last of the gentlemen publishers, who produced books mirroring their own whims and tastes”. Over forty years, he published more than five hundred books, with a wide range of subjects, which included chess, cookery, espionage, fiction, flying saucers, poetry, reincarnation, sex, spiritualism, and wrestling. They included a translation of Sartre's Intimacy and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. He published the first sexual instruction book "Your Erotic Fantasies!" by Graham Masterton, under the nom-de-plume Edward Thorne.

Armstrong was managing director of Neville Spearman Ltd. and Neville Spearman (Educational) Ltd. He was also a director of The Holland Press Ltd. and R. & B. Advertising Associates Ltd. He sold the Neville Spearman companies in 1985. There was a child of this marriage, but the couple separated about 1958. He shared his life with Lili Munk for more than thirty years, and in 1999, after the death of his wife, they were married in a Buddhist religious ceremony on the lawn of the house at Great Waldingfield, Suffolk, where they had lived since the late 1970s.

Armstrong died in September 2008 at age 94.