Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
A politician and eloquent Socialist, best known for renouncing his peerage and serving in every Labour Government of the 1960s and 1970s.
Eight records
The guest also refers to this as 'Bunyan's Hymn'.
The transcript has 'Kirsten Flagstadt' and 'Sir Adrian Boat' (Boult).
The keepsakes
The book
Karl Marx
But to read the Bible from cover to cover, and to read Das Kapital from cover to cover, I think would give me a better understanding of the world from which I had been removed in my isolation on the desert island than anything else.
The luxury
kettle and an inexhaustible supply of tea bags
Well, I was going to say, if you allow a kettle and an inexhaustible supply of tea bags I think that's what I'd go for.
In conversation
Presenter asks
How does it affect you, never quite knowing what sentiment you're going to bump into next?
Well, I'm not aware, I see, of being loathed except by uh people with power. Uh certainly going round and in the street and shopping and on my bike in Chesterfield and uh on the bus and the train. People are tremendously warm.
Presenter asks
How do you regard going to the desert island? After all, there are no audiences, no support, no one.
I suppose it would be an opportunity to reflect, and I hope I'd had pen and paper to write and think. Uh but I am a gregarious soul, a family person, and I like uh being with other people, so I suppose I would miss it a great deal, miss the uh community a great deal. Uh but it might be like going into a retreat, uh so long as it didn't last forever and ever and ever.
Presenter asks
Are you a religious man?
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 2
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
Speaker 2
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2
And the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My castaway this week is a politician whose liberal background and right to a title has not prevented him from becoming one of this country's most eloquent Socialists. As a young MP he renounced his peerage and went on to become a member of every Labour Government of the sixties and seventies.
Presenter
In the years of opposition which have followed he has allied himself to the left of his party and ruffled the feathers of its leaders by mocking their opinions and vying with them for office. At the age of sixty three he continues to be an active backbencher, without power, perhaps, but still with influence an influence which his critics say only contributes to Labour's failure to be elected again. He is, of course, Tony Benn.
Presenter
mister Ben, you are both um loathed and loved, with probably few people falling in between the two. How does that affect you, never quite knowing what sentiment you're going to bump into next?
Tony Benn
Well, I'm not aware, I see, of being loathed except by uh people with power. Uh certainly going round and in the street and shopping and on my bike in Chesterfield and uh on the bus and the train. People are tremendously warm.
Presenter
You're never a beautiful
Tony Benn
I think somebody once uh waved an umbrella and said rubbish at me, which is the most violent word used in political controversy among the populace.
Presenter
Would you admit, like any politician or any performer, to having a weakness for adoring audiences?
Tony Benn
No. But I mean, if you open the newspapers for years and find your view attacked and distorted and misrepresented, and then you go to meetings and people respond, it's that that keeps you going, really.
Presenter
Well, we shall talk more of that later, but first of all I want to know
Presenter
How you regard going to the desert island? After all, there are no audiences, there's no support, there's no one.
Tony Benn
I suppose it would be an opportunity to reflect, and I hope I'd had pen and paper to write and think.
Tony Benn
Uh but I am a gregarious soul, a family person, and I like uh being with other people, so I suppose I would miss it a great deal, miss the uh community a great deal. Uh but it might be like going into a retreat, uh so long as it didn't last forever and ever and ever.
Presenter
Are are you a religious man?
Tony Benn
Well, you see, I suppose the most powerful influence in my life is what would be called the dissenting tradition. An ancestor of mine, William Benn, the Reverend William Benn in Dorchester, was ejected from his living in 1662 because he wouldn't take instructions and was a congregationalist. My grandfather, my father's father, was a congregational minister in East London. The Reverend Julius Benn worked in the cholera outbreak. My mother, who is still alive at 92, was the first president of the Congregational Federation. I must be the only man in public life, or indeed anywhere else, whose mother was the head of a Christian denomination. And this passion for justice is one that goes back to the beginning of history and will never be extinguished. And I think that is the most powerful influence. Why do we live in an unjust world and an unjust society when we are all equal in the eyes of God?
Presenter
Shall we pause there then and have your first record? Because I think it's quite apt at this moment, isn't it?
Tony Benn
Yes, I would like um He Who Would Valiant Be Bunyan's Hymn. I think that probably would be the most inspiring piece of music to remind me of the traditions to which I have just referred.
Speaker 4
His full is blood.
Speaker 4
There's a new constant sea for sky.
Speaker 4
And the body's gone in true.
Speaker 4
The maiden was real.
Speaker 4
This was not the intent to be a
Presenter
He who would valiant be sung by the Worcester Cathedral Choir.
Presenter
mister Ben, obviously you have a a strong sense of family and of family history. What people always remember about you, of course, is that you renounced the title that you inherited from your father, Viscount Stansgate. How did he come by it?
Tony Benn
My dad was elected in 1906 as a Liberal member. He's a radical Liberal. He was a junior whip before the First World War. And then in the 20s, he resigned from the Liberal Party and joined the Labour Party. He was then elected as a Labour member, was Secretary of State for India in the 29-31 government, was defeated in 1931, got in again in 37. And then during the war in 1940, he rejoined the services. He joined the Air Force at the age of 63, my age, because he felt he wanted to fight against fascism and so on. And then Churchill said to Attlee, we'd like a few Labour peers. And so father agreed to become a peer. Now, my older brother Michael was going into the church as a lovely person, and he wouldn't have been affected by it in any way. And so my father took it, and there were no life peers then. So when my brother Michael was killed in 1944 as a pilot in the RAF, I was saddled with the thing. And my dad was very sad about it and guilty, or quite wrongly so. And so when I was elected to Parliament in 1950, I knew my Commons life was limited by his life. He was then 73. He lived for 10 years. When he died, they threw me out of the Commons. They had a by-election in my constituency.
Tony Benn
And I was re-elected as a disqualified candidate. I turned up in the House of Commons. They threw me out again. They took me to court. They threw me out again. They put the man I defeated in Parliament. There was such an outcry, they changed the law. But it was a very interesting exercise in how the British Constitution works. But I don't come from a long line of aristocrats as they make out. I mean, I come from a Socialist family, and father happened like many people.
Tony Benn
at the end of his life to be made a peer.
Presenter
But he was he was guilty, you say, about having lumbered you with this title?
Presenter
But you discussed what you should do.
Tony Benn
Oh, we planned every bit of it. And in'fifty five, before he died, I introduced a bill in in the commons and uh and he in the lords and Churchill gave a lot of support, uh um wrote me a letter which I circulated in the by-election I've referred to. But it taught me something about the British Constitution, that you never win at the top, you only win when you take the argument out to the public.
Presenter
Let's have another record.
Tony Benn
Yes, A Sheep May Safely Graze. It was played at my brother Michael's funeral when he was killed during the war. Caroline, my wife, who is very musical, chose it for our wedding in Cincinnati in 1949. It's sung by Kirsten Flagstadt and it's the most lovely piece of music, very quiet and peaceful and I think would be a great comfort if I was on your desert island.
Speaker 4
Leave the place of living place.
Speaker 4
Give me save me.
Presenter
Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze, sung by Kirsten Flagstadt, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boat.
Presenter
mister Ben, let's just go back to your beginnings f for a few minutes. Um where were you born?
Tony Benn
I was born in London, next to the Tate Gallery, Forty Grosvenor Rogue. I lived there until after I was married, when I moved to a flat in Hammersmith. So that was really my my base, and uh that's where all my childhood memories come from.
Presenter
I've heard you say before now that you spent all your life on the eighty eight bus route. What does that mean?
Tony Benn
The 88 goes next to the Tate Gallery, and when I married, I moved with Caroline to Stamford Court in Goldhawk Road, which the 88 passes. And then we moved to Nottinghill Gate, which the 88 bus passes. And the 88 bus, of course, goes to the House of Commons. So if ever I write my autobiography, I think I shall call it 88, because that bus has flown. You remember Lady Eden said the Suez Canal flowed through her living room. The 88 bus has flowed through my life.
Presenter
Now you said that uh yours was an intensely political family, a Liberal family, and then your father became a member of the Labour Party. But what were they like uh as a family, as people? And were you well to do for a start?
Tony Benn
I was brought up in what you would call a comfortable middle-class background. I had a very close family. My father was 20 years older than my mother, a tremendous family man. My mother, very devoted. I had an elder brother, Michael, to whom I was absolutely devoted, and a younger brother, David. It was a very close family, always very close. And in the evenings, we used to have musical evenings, rather a Victorian habit. I used to wind up the old gramophone and play records. And that has persisted and continued with my own family and my wife, Caroline, a very close relationship with her family. And it has been a very supportive thing through all the trials and tribulations of life. To have a family seems to me to be very helpful.
Presenter
And your mother is ninety two and and still living?
Tony Benn
Oh, yes, yes.
Presenter
What does she think of everything that's happened to you? What does she say to you? Does she feel pleased, or does she feel disappointed by the way your career has gone?
Tony Benn
Oh, I think she's a well, first of all, don't relate her only to me. I mean, she's a person very much in her own right.
Presenter
Is she never critical of you when you go to see her? Does she say, Oh, Tony? or does she call you Tony?
Tony Benn
No, she calls me James,'cause my father can never remember my name, so he used to call me James and Alexander and various other things. And uh that James is the one that stuck. That's a new media myth you'll have to pursue now, but she always calls me James.
Presenter
New lady
Presenter
Ouch.
Presenter
Does she never say Look, James, what have you been up to now?
Tony Benn
Oh, she's very supportive. But I mean we have discussions and uh you mustn't think that uh family discussions are you know political in a narrow sense. It's a continual mutual influence.
Presenter
No certainly. However, she happens to be the mother of a son who was at one point talked about as a possible Prime Minister.
Presenter
And that is not in the end what he became, and therefore there must be a sense of
Tony Benn
How do you know? But no, I think the point really is this. There are two types of political life. There is the search for status and the search for influence. And I did decide, I suppose, quite consciously, that just climbing up the slippery pole in the hope of getting somewhere was not really a satisfying existence. I've had all the fruits of office, but I have tried to use such experience as I have to encourage other people. And if I had an epitaph, I would like people to say he encouraged us.
Presenter
Your third record.
Tony Benn
Please.
Tony Benn
My third record is Michael Flanders and Donald Swan. Now Michael and Donald and I were at school together and this is Slow Train. And I think for a lot of people who have that same nostalgic love of steam, and I say this as an old Minister of Technology, Slow Train has got all the nostalgia, all the memories, and of course this marvellous singing by Michael Flanders and the playing by Donald Swan. So Slow Train.
Speaker 4
Millersdale for Tideswell.
Speaker 4
Kirby Maxlow
Speaker 4
Mao Cop and Scholar Green
Speaker 4
No more will I know To Blanford Forum and Morty Ho.
Speaker 4
On the slow train from mid-summer nautum.
Presenter
Yeah. And mouse Yeah.
Speaker 4
Maybe.
Presenter
Michael Flanders and Donald Swann singing Slow Train.
Presenter
So, Tony Benn, you went up to Oxford, you became President of the Union, the war intervened. You were in the Navy, weren't you?
Tony Benn
Well, I was in the RAF first and I got my wings uh uh and became a pilot in the RAF in nineteen forty five and then the war ended. My war career was not one uh th uh of any distinction, but I did serve for a number of years and then I went back to college.
Presenter
Now at which point then did you meet your wife?
Tony Benn
Well, she came over on a summer school from Vassar and uh we met on august second, nineteen forty eight.
Tony Benn
And somebody had introduced her, told me she was there and said you'd like to meet her, a man called George Harris. So I went and had tea with her and then, being a shy person, took me nine days to propose, and I proposed on a bench in Oxford. And I bought the bench for ten pounds later. And it stays in our front garden. We sat there and the clock at St. Philip and St James had just struck midnight. And I proposed to her, and then she went home and did her postgraduate degree. And then I went over in 49 and we were married. So we've got a 40 ruby wedding this summer.
Speaker 4
Could you wear it?
Tony Benn
And she has been, I think, the principal, without any question, the principal influence in on the major questions. So we've had a very happy partnership.
Presenter
Have you gone on being desperately romantic throughout it?
Tony Benn
Well, I am a much more sentimental person when I sit and watch The Railway Children, which is one of my favourite programmes with my daughter, Melissa. She turns and sees the tears rolling down my cheeks when Daddy appears after the cloud of steam and so on. I think a capacity to cry is a very necessary part of humanity. People are different, but I happen to be very sentimental. Probably a weakness actually. Perhaps I should have identified that as a weakness. If I'd been less sentimental, I might have climbed further up the pole.
Presenter
Huh.
Presenter
Let's have another record.
Tony Benn
Well, I think next I would like to play Paul Robeson singing Lord God of Abraham from the film Proud Valley. Paul Robeson was one of the great American socialists. The American government took away his passport. He wasn't allowed to leave the country. It was during the period of the Cold War and McCarthyism. And my father and I were on a committee to get his passport back. And when he got it back, he came to tea at the House of Commons. And I met him there, and he walked in. It was like an electromagnet going through a pile of iron filings. People just detached themselves from the crowd to be near him. And I recall that. But this particular thing is from a film Proud Valley where he was a black Pennsylvania miner in South Wales. And he made great friends with the Welsh miners, of which I'm an honorary member, I'm proud to say. And this is from the film of Paul Robeson singing this solo in the Welsh Choral Society meeting. It's lovely.
Speaker 4
Lord God of Abraham
Speaker 4
Oh enemy Lord
Speaker 4
Answer me, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, O heal, oh heal me.
Presenter
Paul Robeson singing Lord God of Abraham from the film Proud Valley.
Presenter
Let's talk about your political career, mister Benn. You were elected in nineteen fifty for Bristol South East Stafford Cripps old seat.
Tony Benn
That's right. He'd sat there from 1930 to 1950 and then he was dying of cancer and I got in at the age of 25. I was very, very lucky. And I was there for thirty-three years until they abolished my constituency in the 1983 redistribution. So that was a very big influence, the the the the Bristol constituency.
Presenter
Now by nineteen sixty four you were in the Wilson Government, fourteen years after entering the House. In fact, you were in all of his governments and Callaghan's, weren't you?
Tony Benn
Yes, I was.
Presenter
Which was the most exciting time for you of those years?
Tony Benn
Well, it was all very interesting. I really did two jobs throughout the period under various names. I was Postmaster General, which Hedru at the time was responsible for BBC and Broadcasting Policy, the job they transferred to the Home Office. And then later I was Minister of Post and Telecommunications in the second government, which was the same job. And then I was Minister of Technology, Minister of Industry, Secretary for Energy. So I was always in the industrial area. And I did find that extremely interesting. I mean, one of the reasons why my views were radicalised was that I did spend 11 years trying to implement a policy that, quite candidly, was the SDP policy.
Presenter
What you're saying is that you were forced by Wilson to put in into effect SDP policies?
Tony Benn
Well, no. I mean, I'm not blaming him. No. I went in thinking that we could, uh, by a bit of adjustment solve the problems. We couldn't.
Tony Benn
And we ended up with the most horrific centralized pay policy in the winter of discontent, and the whole thing really became unwieldy and unacceptable and unjust, so that I was radicalized by my experience at the top, whereas many people begin as radicals and then are sort of become made moderate sort of you'd call it by the experience of office. The opposite happened to me.
Speaker 2
Beautiful.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Presenter
It is difficult to understand, and I think it was difficult for your colleagues at the time to understand during the years of sixty eight to seventy two, for example, how
Presenter
In the early part of that period you were the the eager technocrat that you describe, you were in favour of membership of the common market, you were welcoming Barbara Castle's reform of the trade unions in place of strife. And then by nineteen seventy two, by the the second half of that period, suddenly you're against all of those things, you're considering resigning your privy councillorship, you are I think you wrote in your diary at the time you wanted to strip yourself of what the world had to offer.
Tony Benn
And I think what happened during those years was that in the working week I was trying to be a practical minister, but in weekend speeches I was thinking much more deeply about these things, and it didn't happen suddenly. You see, you mustn't think it was just a question of opportunism, which is what is sometimes thought. I think that in the course of life people do change their view. And what you have to do is to examine very carefully whether it was a genuine and authentic and serious decision to reach based on experience or whether it was just hopping all over the place. I think there is a continuity of thought in favour of more democracy, more internationalism, a higher degree of sort of moral judgment in politics, and that these are the guiding lights which you could trace back over well, right back to my childhood. I think if I had to defend myself before the throne of the Heavenly Grace, I think that's what I would say on the day of judgment.
Presenter
Shall we pause for a record there?
Tony Benn
Yes, now Joan By is singing Joe Hill.
Tony Benn
Joe Hill was a Swedish trade unionist, went to the United States and was executed on a trumped-up charge. And Joan Byde, one of my favourite folk singers, sings this song, which Paul Ropes has also recorded and one of the most famous songs of the international labor movement. And it contains within it ideas of the immortality of ideas, which I think are immensely inspiring.
Speaker 4
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, Alive as you and me Says I, But Joe, you're ten years dead I never died, said he I never died, said he
Presenter
Joan Byers singing Joe Hill.
Presenter
You said, mister Benn, there, that your change of political heart was not opportunism. Your critics, of course, have said that it was that what you were seeking to do was to appeal over the heads of the Parliamentary Party to the people beyond your power base as you saw it.
Tony Benn
I think it is true that the government, which includes all parties and both houses, both sides of the House of Commons, have got a certain sort of vested interest in keeping things as they are, and yet we live in a society, in particularly in a world of bitter injustice. And that challenge has to come. So it isn't a power base exactly. It's that you try to represent the people who are suffering injustice and clamour at the door for justice with them. And of course, if you say opportunism, I mean if the opportunism was thought to escalate you to the top of the Labour Party, then we're very successful. Indeed, most people would argue that it was because I pursued this particular view of politics that I didn't go further on the ladder, whatever that may mean. So in that sense, it was done from commitment and not from any particular desire to advance myself, because it certainly hasn't had that effect.
Speaker 2
Sh
Presenter
Well in
Presenter
No, but you were not to know that at the time. Perhaps there was a moment in the early seventies when you felt that you could in that moment take control of the party.
Tony Benn
No, I've never believed that. I've never, never believed that. And indeed, the people who have sacrificed their view in order to get to the top have very often really left no footprints in the sands of time. I really think I have chosen quite consciously to go to give people confidence in themselves and not confidence in me.
Presenter
But you've gone on challenging.
Tony Benn
The leadership. Ah, yes, but that's a different thing because you see elections are a platform, aren't they? And uh I think people see elections much too much in terms of the outcome.
Presenter
So that when you stood against Dennis Healey for the deputy leadership in eighty one, and against Neil Kinnock last autumn for the leadership itself, you were not necessarily seeking to replace them, but simply for your challenge to be heard? Is that what you're doing?
Tony Benn
Oh, well, obviously if you stand, you're standing seriously. It's not what one might call a frivolous candidature. But in the case of those two candidatures, they did have, because of the number of meetings and opportunities to make speeches and so on, they had an impact on the opinion, not only of the Labour Party, but I think of the public as a whole.
Presenter
But your critics would say that your impact is to destroy the Labour Party's chances of getting into power because you constantly rock the boat.
Tony Benn
Constantly.
Tony Benn
But isn't it funny that they never say that about the people who leave the Labour Party and swing to the right? Have you ever heard Roy Jenkins described as the man who destroyed the Labour Party? Have you ever heard David Owen described as the man who destroyed the Labour Party? Have you ever heard Shirley Williams described? It's only when you speak for a certain point of view that that argument is used. And the truth is that people who come up with ideas that are unacceptable to the leadership
Tony Benn
are always denounced. And I think very often maybe the boat rockers turn out to be the people who are building the craft that will carry the crew into the harbor of victory a few years ahead.
Presenter
I think we'll um leave politics there and ask you for your sixth record.
Tony Benn
Well, Mahalia Jackson, singing We Shall Overcome.
Tony Benn
It is the great song of the popular movements all over the world, but it is also very, very much the women's song, and that's why I chose Mahalia Jackson to sing it.
Speaker 4
We shall
Speaker 4
Yeah, Lord La, is our one.
Speaker 4
One Speed Day.
Speaker 4
He shall all overcome.
Speaker 4
One day.
Speaker 4
We shall all welcome one day.
Speaker 4
We shall overcome.
Presenter
Mehalia Jackson, saying We Shall Overcome. You've mentioned, mister Benn, the many myths that surround you. You are, it seems, the sort of man about whom stories abound. Um for example, they say that you're constantly wired for sound.
Tony Benn
That's one of the myths that I've got a tape recorder in my breast pocket and anyone who says anything I am recording this I might add and I shall record the program when it's broadcast and if I ever had the time would be able to study with microscopic care the programme.
Presenter
What had been cut out is it true that every morning when you lie in bed you project a photo slide of your day's engagements onto the ceiling?
Tony Benn
I've never heard that one. So no, I thought you must have uh you must have worked that one up for yourself. No, I I've never heard that one. It's a good idea actually. It's uh uh well I'm not sure it'd be quite complicated to set it up.
Presenter
Must have uh it must have worked out well that feels
Tony Benn
Well, it's nice to be able to kill something I've never actually heard before. That really is nice.
Presenter
Now, do you drink a mug of workman's tea made straight into the mug on the tea bag on the R every R?
Tony Benn
Well, um unless I have to do it more often. I mean I I I can sometimes go for an iron and indeed in this interview I've had two tiny cups of coffee. I did once work out that the amount of tea I drunk would have been sufficient to displace the QE two when I had an idle moment and a calculator. And I'm very fond of tea. But then you see I'm a teetotaler and a vegetarian and so on and all the concentration is on the tea, isn't that odd? I mean it must be because they don't want people to hear what you're saying. So if you can make Mr. Bernard slightly mad, projects his engagements on the ceiling, he has mugs of tea, then you're not really listening to what he's saying.
Presenter
But from everything you say, it must be terribly difficult for you to go on, to get up up every day and go out there and face all these people who are meant to believe that you're some kind of crank.
Tony Benn
I mean, one of the great illusions is that people take the slightest bit of notice of what News Night or uh the Daily Mail or The Sun say. I I promise you, if you followed me round uh and uh just g got the sense of of warmth. I mean, how on earth do you think I've survived? If people really did wave their fists at you, but they don't
Tony Benn
Now I'm not saying that they support my views, that'd be a great error, but I think at the moment I feel as if I live in Rhodesia under Ian Smith, where he thought that everybody agreed with him except for that old troublemaker, Robert Mugabe, and then when there was uh an opportunity, it all went differently. So it's a very different world I live in. And truthfully, I wouldn't be so cheerful if I really was having to avo avert my eyes when I went along the street, because there were so many people who'd rolled up copies of the Daily Telegraph waiting to bash me on the head. It's
Presenter
It's obviously a very hopeful world you live in. If you you mention the name of Robert Mugabe, who eventually came to power. Um you mention building the craft that will sail into the future. So you um you have an eye still to the future and to your own success.
Tony Benn
Oh, well, not so much my own, because one of the nice things about getting old is you don't want anything. I mean, I d obviously I don't want a peerage, I don't want cash, and I don't want office personally for myself. And of course, if you don't want anything, you're very, very much stronger. And I'm enormously optimistic about the future. But of course, there are a few little things we've got to clear up, and there are a few little problems. I think one of the problems, if you're a socialist, is this, that people at the moment, after this terrible experience of the last ten years, where an awful lot of people have suffered, you know, the roller coaster of Thatcherism, they want a convalescence.
Tony Benn
They want security. And at the same time, in order to give it, you've got to make a lot of changes. And therefore, when I look ahead, because we've talked a lot about the past, I think how can you reassure people that the old values of decency and treating each other as brothers and sisters and peace, how can they be reintroduced and rebrought in moral values brought into society without giving people another ten years of a roller coaster?
Presenter
Your seventh record.
Tony Benn
Well
Tony Benn
Where are we? I think the world turned upside down. It's rather good after all I've said about security and convalescence. But you see, we've got a tremendously strong radical tradition right back to the Peasants' Revolt and the Levellers. And this is sung by Roy Bailey. I first heard him in Burford Church in 1976 when I gave a lecture on the Levellers. And Roy Bailey sang this song, The World Turned Upside Down. And it is about a little group known as the Diggers, who were the first socialists, who went to St George's Hill in Weybridge in Surrey and set up their little settlement. And from that day to this, these people who never held any office at all and were destroyed by the soldiers went in and chased them off their land. These people are still an inspiration 300 years later.
Speaker 4
We come in peace, I said.
Tony Benn
Please
Speaker 4
To dig and sew.
Tony Benn
The day uh
Speaker 4
We come to work the lands in common and to make the waste grounds grow this earth divided.
Tony Benn
Divide the
Speaker 4
We will make home
Speaker 4
Though it will be a common treasury.
Presenter
In the common treasury.
Speaker 4
Hello.
Presenter
The World Turned Upside Down, sung by Roy Bailey. We've said, I think, several times, mister Ben, or you have, that you're sixty three years old. Would it be a frightfully sexist thing to say you don't look it?
Tony Benn
Well, I don't agree an ageist thing to say.
Tony Benn
Because I suppose when you get to this age, people say, talk about the veteran, the old man, as a form of abuse, which is the equivalent, I suppose, of sexism. But I love it. I wouldn't take a day off my life. I wouldn't go back to yesterday. And if I'd known what fun it was to be 60, I'd have done it years ago. Somebody said, if I'd known what fun grandchildren was, I would have had them first. And I've got now five grandchildren, little granddaughter. All my children are very, very happy and very supportive. And so I've never been happier in my life.
Presenter
I have read you are a model husband, a model father, and a model grandfather.
Tony Benn
I don't know about that. I'm a happy father and a happy grandfather. And it's very nice. Uh people who have the uh advantage of a family do gain a lot and uh and you see uh in your children of course development. All my children are active.
Presenter
They do write nice things.
Tony Benn
politically and doing work that they enjoy. So you c I c I couldn't ask for more, really. I hope I live to a great old age. My father lived to eighty three.
Tony Benn
Uh my mother is ninety-two, so I suppose I should run to the mid-eighties and as somebody once said at my age, yeah, I still haven't decided what I'm going to do when I grow up.
Presenter
Let's have your last record.
Tony Benn
Well, the last record is a piece of music, a madrigal, written by my son Stephen, who's very talented. He wrote it when he was 19, and he's written a great deal since. It'd never ever been broadcast before. But when my daughter-in-law Rosalind Hilary, my second son's wife, died very tragically of cancer ten years ago, he played it at the funeral.
Tony Benn
and he p played it at his own wedding in the crypt of the House of Commons only last October. He was the bridegroom, and also he went and sat down at the organ and played this lovely madrigal. And when I die I hope and believe that will be played on the organ.
Tony Benn
in the little church in Saint Lawrence where my ashes will rest. So I can think of nothing that I would want to listen to more than The Madrigal by Stephen Benn.
Presenter
Madrigal, composed and played by Stephen Benn. Is is that, then, mister Benn, the record you would choose as your favorite of the eight?
Tony Benn
Oh yes. I've heard it many times in the church and I've heard it uh and it's very, very restful. My mother's favorite piece of music too. And of all the pieces I've chosen, I would like that to be able to listen to that. And if I was not rescued before my time came, that's the record I'd put on as I took my last gasp.
Tony Benn
after I'd had my last cup of tea.
Presenter
Oh, I see. Is that your luxury?
Tony Benn
Well, I was going to say, if you allow a kettle and an inexhaustible supply of tea bags
Tony Benn
I think that's what I'd go for.
Presenter
And a mug.
Tony Benn
Well, a mug. I suppose I might be able to drink out of a coconut if there wasn't one. I didn't know I was allowed a mug as well.
Presenter
Oh yes, I think.
Presenter
You haven't told us about your book?
Tony Benn
Well, um, the two books that have most influenced me in my life I have not read.
Tony Benn
The Bible who's read the whole Bible?
Tony Benn
And Das Kapital, who's read the whole of Das Kapital. But those two books, the moral teaching and the political analysis, are the great influences, whether we know it or not, in our century. And I suppose Complete Works of Shakespeare, I think, you'll give me, which I would read the bedside reading. But to read the Bible from cover to cover, and to read Das Kapital from cover to cover, I think would give me a better understanding of the world from which I had been removed in my isolation on the desert island than anything else.
Presenter
Tony Ben, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Speaker 2
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio form.
Well, you see, I suppose the most powerful influence in my life is what would be called the dissenting tradition. An ancestor of mine, William Benn, the Reverend William Benn in Dorchester, was ejected from his living in 1662 because he wouldn't take instructions and was a congregationalist. My grandfather, my father's father, was a congregational minister in East London. The Reverend Julius Benn worked in the cholera outbreak. My mother, who is still alive at 92, was the first president of the Congregational Federation. I must be the only man in public life, or indeed anywhere else, whose mother was the head of a Christian denomination. And this passion for justice is one that goes back to the beginning of history and will never be extinguished. And I think that is the most powerful influence. Why do we live in an unjust world and an unjust society when we are all equal in the eyes of God?
Presenter asks
How did [your father] come by [the title Viscount Stansgate]?
My dad was elected in 1906 as a Liberal member... And then Churchill said to Attlee, we'd like a few Labour peers. And so father agreed to become a peer... So when my brother Michael was killed in 1944 as a pilot in the RAF, I was saddled with the thing... When he died, they threw me out of the Commons... But it was a very interesting exercise in how the British Constitution works.
Presenter asks
What does [your mother] think of everything that's happened to you? Does she feel pleased or disappointed by the way your career has gone?
Oh, I think she's a well, first of all, don't relate her only to me. I mean, she's a person very much in her own right... she's very supportive. But I mean we have discussions and uh you mustn't think that uh family discussions are you know political in a narrow sense. It's a continual mutual influence.
Presenter asks
When you stood against Dennis Healey for the deputy leadership in '81, and against Neil Kinnock last autumn for the leadership itself, were you not necessarily seeking to replace them, but simply for your challenge to be heard?
Oh, well, obviously if you stand, you're standing seriously. It's not what one might call a frivolous candidature. But in the case of those two candidatures, they did have, because of the number of meetings and opportunities to make speeches and so on, they had an impact on the opinion, not only of the Labour Party, but I think of the public as a whole.
“Well, I'm not aware, I see, of being loathed except by uh people with power. Uh certainly going round and in the street and shopping and on my bike in Chesterfield and uh on the bus and the train. People are tremendously warm.”
“Well, you see, I suppose the most powerful influence in my life is what would be called the dissenting tradition. An ancestor of mine, William Benn, the Reverend William Benn in Dorchester, was ejected from his living in 1662 because he wouldn't take instructions and was a congregationalist. My grandfather, my father's father, was a congregational minister in East London. The Reverend Julius Benn worked in the cholera outbreak. My mother, who is still alive at 92, was the first president of the Congregational Federation. I must be the only man in public life, or indeed anywhere else, whose mother was the head of a Christian denomination. And this passion for justice is one that goes back to the beginning of history and will never be extinguished. And I think that is the most powerful influence. Why do we live in an unjust world and an unjust society when we are all equal in the eyes of God?”
“There are two types of political life. There is the search for status and the search for influence. And I did decide, I suppose, quite consciously, that just climbing up the slippery pole in the hope of getting somewhere was not really a satisfying existence. I've had all the fruits of office, but I have tried to use such experience as I have to encourage other people. And if I had an epitaph, I would like people to say he encouraged us.”
“I think what happened during those years was that in the working week I was trying to be a practical minister, but in weekend speeches I was thinking much more deeply about these things, and it didn't happen suddenly. You see, you mustn't think it was just a question of opportunism, which is what is sometimes thought. I think that in the course of life people do change their view. And what you have to do is to examine very carefully whether it was a genuine and authentic and serious decision to reach based on experience or whether it was just hopping all over the place. I think there is a continuity of thought in favour of more democracy, more internationalism, a higher degree of sort of moral judgment in politics, and that these are the guiding lights which you could trace back over well, right back to my childhood. I think if I had to defend myself before the throne of the Heavenly Grace, I think that's what I would say on the day of judgment.”
“Oh, well, not so much my own, because one of the nice things about getting old is you don't want anything. I mean, I d obviously I don't want a peerage, I don't want cash, and I don't want office personally for myself. And of course, if you don't want anything, you're very, very much stronger. And I'm enormously optimistic about the future. But of course, there are a few little things we've got to clear up, and there are a few little problems. I think one of the problems, if you're a socialist, is this, that people at the moment, after this terrible experience of the last ten years, where an awful lot of people have suffered, you know, the roller coaster of Thatcherism, they want a convalescence.”
“Well, I don't agree an ageist thing to say. Because I suppose when you get to this age, people say, talk about the veteran, the old man, as a form of abuse, which is the equivalent, I suppose, of sexism. But I love it. I wouldn't take a day off my life. I wouldn't go back to yesterday. And if I'd known what fun it was to be 60, I'd have done it years ago. Somebody said, if I'd known what fun grandchildren was, I would have had them first. And I've got now five grandchildren, little granddaughter. All my children are very, very happy and very supportive. And so I've never been happier in my life.”