Shell’s advertising was handled by Ogilvy & Mather Mayle recalled his “one skill was writing good letters” and he sent one to David Ogilvy in New York. “Speak English forcefully enough and they will understand you.” He recalled accompanying his boss to Paris, and receiving instructions on how to behave. On his return to the UK, he took a trainee job with Shell, in their public relations department in London. He was educated at Brighton college, where he boarded unhappily, and left at 15 to join his parents in Barbados, where his father had been posted, and where Peter took his O-levels. His father worked for the foreign office and his mother part-time as a beautician. Mayle, who has died aged 78, conveyed his enjoyment with an exuberance that reflected his training as an advertising copywriter in effect, he sold Provence first to Britain and then to the world. Mayle’s relaxed amusement with the French villagers appealed to traditional British frustrations at dealing with their neighbours, and more important, it linked into what the writer George Mikes once described as the English love of enduring hardship: the lavender-scented pleasures of Provence came only at the cost of adapting to life among the locals.
It might be seen as the starting point for the tidal wave of books and reality programmes about cooking, travel and property speculation.
“Do another 250 pages of that,” his agent replied, “and I’ll find a publisher.” The book that resulted, A Year in Provence (1989), became a bestseller, was adapted for television, and spawned a series of sequels as well as a flood of imitators.Ī Year in Provence tapped in to the rising affluence of the British middle class, and its growing appetite for a lifestyle beyond Elizabeth David and a week’s holiday on the Côte d’Azur. Months later, he wrote his agent a long letter explaining his lack of progress on his fiction by detailing the tribulations of dealing with the French. In 1987, Peter Mayle and his third wife, Jennie, moved from Devon to a farmhouse in Ménerbes, in the Luberon region of Provence, which they intended to refurbish while he worked on a novel.
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