'I tried to retire but it was too boring': PR supremo LYNNE FRANKS at 76

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Lynne Franks lives in a wonky witch’s house with a green front door in Wincanton, Somerset, with a dog called Bear who thinks Franks is his mother. 

Bear stares at us intensely because, Franks says, ‘He insists on knowing what is going on all the time.’ Bear is black and the cat, Tui, is white. Together they look like a monochrome floor, and when I tell her this she says, ‘So chic!’

Franks knows what is chic: she is a soothsayer who peers into the future. She invented modern PR in the 1970s and 80s so defiantly – she lived her products – that Jennifer Saunders satirised her as Edina in Absolutely Fabulous (we will get to that later). Today, she looks wonderful at 76: round face, clear skin and purple hair, because she is in the transformation business. Wincanton, which is close to fashionable Bruton, is more fashionable now she is here. It is nicknamed ‘Lynncanton’.

Franks is a wanderer: she tried to retire but found it so boring she can’t even remember what she did with the time. She has lived in London, California, Majorca and Oxfordshire, finally settling in Wincanton five years ago.

‘I knew that Bruton was on the up. I thought this would be the next one. I’m good at sniffing things out. I sort of flew in on my broomstick.’ There is a sign in her kitchen that says, ‘Yes, I am a witch’.

Franks is a trailblazer from a family of strong women. Her father was the salt-beef king of Arnos Grove, North London, but he developed PTSD after the war and spent half the year in bed while her mother ran the business. In her family, ‘women had to take responsibility’. Even so, she adds, ‘I never realised how dysfunctional we were.’ 

I ask if she minds, and she says swiftly, ‘I don’t live in that headspace. It made me who I am. I have no regrets, no blame, a lot of love for my parents.’ Later they became healers: ‘And they were happy.’

She left school at 16; before that she would change out of her school uniform in a telephone box and emerge as ‘a little French mod in shetland sweaters and pearls and mini kilts’ to watch the Beatles play the Finsbury Park Astoria. Who was her favourite? ‘Paul always,’ she says, and her voice lowers, and she speaks so seriously I am struck by it. 

I’ve always wondered what Beatlemania was for: what were they screaming at? ‘For them to look at us,’ she says simply.

She began as a journalist at Petticoat magazine and met her first client, the fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, in 1970 when they were both 21. She adored Katharine: ‘I find tall women exotic.’ 

She fell in love with the fashion buyer Paul Howie – he turned up for their first date in Covent Garden ‘in pantaloons and flip-flops and I thought how cool he was’ – and established her company Lynne Franks PR at their kitchen table, working as a shorthand typist until business picked up.

‘I’d found my métier,’ she says. ‘I’m a genuine enthusiast: whatever I’m talking about I really feel it.’ She created London Fashion Week in 1984 and went on to advise Labour leader Neil Kinnock, until Peter Mandelson, who didn’t take to a fellow PR expert, threw her out in 1986. 

Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous

Howie was MD and at its height in the late 80s the company had a £5 million turnover and 50 staff. She talks about it as a time of infinite opportunity. She was part of a new generation, and women had more agency than ever before: ‘Baby boomers coming into a new kind of world, and we thought we could do it all.’

This was the woman Jennifer Saunders, a former client, satirised in Absolutely Fabulous, though Saunders says she didn’t, which makes it rather worse (comics should be both brave and honest). I watched an episode the night before and hated it, because it didn’t make sense: no woman like Edina could run a successful company.

Franks is careful when she speaks about it. ‘I find certain things funny about it,’ she says. ‘I get that I was always larger than life. She [Edina] was a PR and I was a PR; she was a Buddhist and I was a Buddhist.’

At London Fashion Week, she says, she incited the attendees in the catwalk tent to chant for world peace and would even chant for a parking space. ‘I was definitely dressing bizarrely – I was into Soul II Soul. That was my worst look. I was just a bit hurt they hadn’t told me about it [writing a TV show about her].’ 

That is, the exclusion hurt her, not the joke. 

Even so, ‘The stupidest thing I ever did was not go on the show when she [Jennifer] asked me.’ Fashion and chanting aside, she ‘never felt’ she was Edina. She loved her mother, and she loves her children, Jessica and Josh; Edina loved nothing except the bottle and the new, which was a drug to her. That part was cruel, and I feel for Franks, and think less of Saunders for it.

Did the work ever get too much? ‘No!’

She breathes it, astonished that I asked, but concedes: ‘I had to go and have a massage sometimes.’ Even so, Howie wanted to sell the business in 1988 and she agreed. ‘For me it was like a child. I was tired. I could go up to my younger self and shake her but… [and she pauses] would I be alive [if she’d carried on]? I lost a lot of friends too early to Aids. Two best friends died of cancer.’

Lynne in the office in the early 80s with her then husband Paul Howie, daughter Jessica and Sam the shih tzu

She got divorced – ‘we’d grown apart in some ways’ – and in 1992 left the business completely. And that was the first half of her life. PR is an insular world, and she wanted more. She moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote The Seed Handbook: The Feminine Way to Create Business.

And this is the second part of her life: the part she can’t give up on, in which she hopes to forge a more feminist style of leadership one woman – or seed – at a time.

Franks is an old-fashioned feminist. ‘I couldn’t see equality anywhere,’ she says. ‘The shape of the future is a cooperative world, with everything in balance. I don’t think we have a lot of time left. We must create something that is different and comes from a place of heart not head and love not greed.’

Her obsession is women creating businesses at their kitchen tables, as she did: ‘raising up women and community and sustainability’. She still has a consultancy, and she wants ‘to grow lives, businesses and communities together’. 

Lynne in 1961

She takes the idea wherever she goes, coaching women to achieve their potential, from Africa to British prisons to I’m a Celebrity (2007) to her Seed Hub communal space in the house next door, which she also owns.

She is not a member of the fashionable Somerset club Babington House: ‘too posh for me’. All companies have sustainability departments these days: Franks invented the concept and was mocked for it. ‘I was prophetic and plugged into the fact that businesses must be more responsible about the way they do business. They thought I was crazy.

One of my gifts is knowing what’s coming before it’s coming. But you can be too early. 

How do you reverberate so that every woman can take on a transformational shift in her community? If we don’t do it now, it will be too late.’

She would rather talk about the future than the past, but her past is mesmerising, so I push her. 

We go through her photos – some of women from South Africa, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Bosnia who she has helped found businesses, others of male friends she lost to Aids and some of herself. In one she is wearing Chanel earrings, a Chanel medallion and a Chanel T-shirt. I ask her where the clothes are now, and she shrieks because she doesn’t know. I don’t think she cares about money. 

‘Who is that woman?’ she asks of the next photograph: it’s taken in her office in 80s with her children. ‘Look how worried she looks!’

Now she is dedicated to self-care. She regularly shares on Instagram: one of her most recent posts suggested her followers give themselves ‘permission to slow down and breathe’. ‘I’m talking to myself, really,’ she says.

‘We can stretch time: there is enough time for everything. I’ve got to get out of feeling that I must control it all.’ I find Franks exotically warm and inspiring, but she is a fellow journalist: it’s rare I meet a woman who I so want to be happy. When I leave, she offers to drive me to the station. 

‘Bear, do not go upstairs!’ she shouts as she grabs the car keys, and he looks askance at her as we walk out of the door.

Watch Lynne Franks present videos about women and enterprise at seedhub.uk