Education
He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford.
He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford.
In both fields he was associated with numerous leading cultural figures. He then set up a bookshop in Bristol. From there he also published.
His first book published was a collection of engravings by Eric Gill, who later made a Book of Alphabets for Douglas Cleverdon.
In 1927 he commissioned David Jones to make a set of copper engravings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Other books published include Vigils by Sassaoon, Uncle Doherty by TF Powys and Art and Love with engravings by Gill.
He published a succession of very finely printed catalogues of books for sale from the bookshop, ranging from an early Caxton title via Jane Austen first editions to modern first editions by Forster, Woolf and Eliot
In 1939 he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation, where he co-created The Brains Trust with fellow producer Howard Thomas. From 1945 he was in the department headed by Laurence Gilliam.
Later, in 1948, Cleverdon would adapt and produce David Jones"s major poem In Parenthesis for radio, with Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas, for British Broadcasting Corporation Radio"s Third Programme.
In 1954 Cleverdon produced Under Milk Wood, the premier of the Dylan Thomas dramatic poem. According to Jenny Abramsky it had taken seven years to persuade Thomas to write lieutenant At around this time he also worked with Henry Reed on the Hilda Tablet cycle of plays.
He produced programmes for them featuring Max Beerbohm, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith and many other poets.Sylvia Plath wrote Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices for Cleverdon, in March 1962.
After Plath"s suicide, Becker looked after Plath"s children until relatives arrived and Nest Cleverdon supplied extra clothes for them. There are at least 232 scripts produced by Cleverdon archived.
After leaving the British Broadcasting Corporation, he was involved with a fine publishing imprint, Clover Hill Editions, which he had established with Will Carter. "Fifty Years"; in: The Private Library, 1978.
Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association.
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