Dame Josephine Barnes

Speaker 10:00

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 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 10:11

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is one of Britain's most distinguished doctors. Although she claims never to have encountered discrimination in her long and brilliant career, the fact remains that she does stand out as a woman who has achieved in a man's world.

Presenter0:42

She decided to make it her life's work to improve the lot of women in pregnancy and childbirth. She worked during the war in the Emergency Medical Service, saw the advent of the National Health Service, and in more recent times the development of Well Woman Clinics and the Test Tube Baby.

Presenter0:59

So effective was that role that ten years ago she made medical history herself when she was made the first woman President of the British Medical Association. She is Dame Josephine Barnes.

Presenter1:12

Dame Josephine, the Hundred and Thirty Ninth President of the BMA, I think you were, was it a complete surprise to be invited? Yeah.

Dame Josephine Barnes1:19

Yes, it was. I was enormously honoured. Of course, you do get a bit of warning, because you get asked first, it goes through various committees, then you do a year as President-elect before you do your year as President. I was absolutely delighted. I thought it was the most wonderful thing. It is uh quite a male bastion, isn't it? Well, the first woman member of the British Medical Association was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and they were so horrified when they found what they'd done that they threw her out and closed the doors to women for quite a long time.

Dame Josephine Barnes1:49

But you forced them open again, or at least they opened now. They opened them for me. No, they opened them very nicely. They treated me wonderfully. I couldn't have had a happier, happier time than I had. No no prejudice? I didn't find any at all.

Dame Josephine Barnes2:01

There were occasions when a man was appointed when I thought I might have got the job, but uh that was up to the people to have the person they wanted to work with, so uh it never worried me very much.

Presenter2:11

Felt that was natural rivalry. Absolutely. Well, there are no men, no women, no prejudices on this desert island of ours. Could you cope, do you think, with life in the tropical raw?

Dame Josephine Barnes2:22

Uh

Presenter2:23

Uh

Dame Josephine Barnes2:23

I've lived in the tropics. I hope there'll be plenty to drink water because after all without water one would would perish, and I imagine there'll be something to eat.

Dame Josephine Barnes2:32

I think you ought to find the food. I think running water is probably naturally laid on.

Dame Josephine Barnes2:37

I'm not very good at killing animals. I'd have to find what food there was.

Presenter2:41

But one would imagine, being a doctor, that you would, in the case of extreme threats like drought or shock,

Presenter2:48

Give yourself a good talking to and sort it out.

Dame Josephine Barnes2:50

Oh, I would, indeed, yes. Oh, I I I have a great wish to survive, and I certainly would do that.

Presenter2:55

Yeah.

Presenter2:56

And the sound of the gramophone playing your favourite music to the palms would, I'm sure, be a great help. It would be essential.

Dame Josephine Barnes3:03

Cause All my life I've lived with music.

Presenter3:06

Can we hear then your first record?

Dame Josephine Barnes3:08

My first record

Dame Josephine Barnes3:10

is played by my son-in-law Martin Neary.

Dame Josephine Barnes3:13

And it's Bach, Fantasia and Fug in G minor. I actually heard this played by Doctor Schweitzer on the organ of New College, Oxford, so it has rather special memory for me.

Speaker 23:31

Yeah.

Presenter4:17

Bach's fugue in G minor, played by Martin Neary on the Winchester Cathedral organ, at twice the pace at which Albert Schweitzer played it, you said. That's about it, yes. Doctor Schweitzer played.

Dame Josephine Barnes4:28

It varies lately. But that, you say, was the original Winchester Cathedral organ? They now have a new one. But this, I understand, was originally the organ in the Great Exhibition of eighteen fifty one, which was then transported to Winchester Cathedral. That was what Martin was playing on.

Presenter4:45

Yeah. Mother

Dame Josephine Barnes4:45

Uh

Presenter4:45

Yeah. It was an auger.

Dame Josephine Barnes4:46

My mother was the second woman fellow of the Royal College of Organists in 1907.

Dame Josephine Barnes4:52

And she went to the Royal College of Music at the age of 16 in 1900. She was.

Dame Josephine Barnes4:56

One of the

Dame Josephine Barnes4:57

few really outstanding musicians I've known.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:00

I owe it her a thing.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:02

that I didn't attempt to be a musician.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:05

Because she told me

Dame Josephine Barnes5:07

in her very positive Yorkshire way that I would never be any good enough at music and I'm very grateful to her for that.

Presenter5:13

Now her organ playing came in

Dame Josephine Barnes5:15

And useful, not least because your father was a clergyman. Yes, and she used to play the organ for him. She actually played at our wedding, which is uh not too many people have their mother play at their wedding, I don't think.

Speaker 15:22

Yeah.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:24

She came beautifully. Where were you brought up?

Dame Josephine Barnes5:27

I was brought up all over the place because my father was a an i itinerant nonconformist minister.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:33

and we moved from Basingstoke to Exeter to Scarborough

Dame Josephine Barnes5:36

And then my father having been a chaplain in the First World War, and having had a very rough time indeed,

Dame Josephine Barnes5:43

managed to get up to Oxford as an undergraduate, a mature undergraduate.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:48

at the age of forty four, with a wife and five children.

Dame Josephine Barnes5:53

And we spent five years in Oxford while he took his degree.

Presenter5:57

Now you were christened Alice Josephine Mary Taylor Barnes, which sounds as if your mother used up all her thoughts on girls' names on you.

Dame Josephine Barnes6:06

Well, my parents did this, and for some reason they called my sister Alice as well, and they called all my brothers Walter after my father. But when they came to the youngest one, my brother David, they ran out of names, and I can remember the terrible discussion as to what he should be called.

Dame Josephine Barnes6:21

In the end he was called David Walter Hugh and the Hugh was to have been Hubert after Sir Hubert Parry who taught my mother. And you, as I say, were Alice. When did you become Josephine? When I was about twelve. I didn't like Alice at that time, except that we were a great family for nicknames and it was shortened to Lally and I didn't like that at all. It's only difficult if you had a sister called Alice as well. Well she was called Rosemary then. So we both dropped the Alice but my I now have a granddaughter called Alice so.

Presenter6:41

Well

Presenter6:47

So you were the oldest of these five children. Presumably through your mother, you perhaps witnessed childbirth at quite close hand.

Dame Josephine Barnes6:55

Did you?

Dame Josephine Barnes6:56

I don't remember having much to do with the process of childbirth at all, or even knowing that my mother was pregnant.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:01

Really? No. Though she herself was very proud of the fact that uh she managed to go on playing the organ right up until almost the day before she had a baby and no one noticed.

Presenter7:11

I wonder why you thought she was getting so plump.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:14

I didn't

Presenter7:14

I don't think one notices, you know. But whatever your experience, you you certainly decided at quite a young age, didn't you, that you wanted to go into medicine, although you didn't specifically.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:23

Oh, I made up that decision at about thirteen, yes. And I never thought of doing anything else. It never occurred to me that I'd do anything else.

Presenter7:30

I wonder why. How did you know?

Dame Josephine Barnes7:31

I was just an idea, perhaps, of service, perhaps some one's a bit idealistic in adolescence, the idea that it was a way in which one could serve the community, and that this is what I wanted to do.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:43

Shall we pause there for a moment?

Presenter7:43

Another record.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:45

I felt I must have some Mozart. I've been bewildered all the time by having to choose eight records from all the music there is and in Mozart in particular.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:54

But I thought we'd better have a bit of piano, so I've chosen the three piano concerto.

Dame Josephine Barnes7:59

which my daughter Amanda actually played in Oxford when she was an undergraduate.

Presenter9:03

Mozart's piano concerto for three pianos in F major, played by Vladimir Ashkenazi, Daniel Barenboim, and Foot Song, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Presenter9:15

Dame Josephine, you went up to Lady Margaret Hall, and you won a first. Did you have to work very hard for that, or were you a natural?

Dame Josephine Barnes9:22

I think I worked hard. I was a bit of a swat, I suppose, really. But I enjoyed myself enormously as well.

Dame Josephine Barnes9:28

I pr probably spent rather too much time playing hockey, but that I did enjoy also, tremendously.

Presenter9:33

You won a hulky blue?

Presenter9:36

You've said that, um, getting a first is rather

Dame Josephine Barnes9:39

Rather a burden. What do you mean by

Dame Josephine Barnes9:41

It simply means that people expect a lot of you for the rest of your life.

Dame Josephine Barnes9:45

I think that is the problem. You'll feel you mustn't fail at anything from then on.

Dame Josephine Barnes9:49

Were you the only female?

Presenter9:50

Are you a

Presenter9:50

male to get a first in your year.

Dame Josephine Barnes9:52

Yes. I

Presenter9:53

Why

Dame Josephine Barnes9:54

I will

Presenter9:54

It was only the third to get one at all, I think.

Presenter9:57

So off you went to uh to train at University College Hospital. How many women were there then to men?

Dame Josephine Barnes10:03

There was a special scholarship given to UCH and they reluctantly allowed twelve women a year to come out of I suppose a class of about fifty to sixty.

Dame Josephine Barnes10:14

Why reluctantly?

Dame Josephine Barnes10:15

Well they the London medical schools didn't like having women at all.

Dame Josephine Barnes10:19

I mean, when there was a good enough report in 1952, which said that all the schools should be

Dame Josephine Barnes10:24

co-educational. There was terrible trouble. They all said, What about our rugby teams?

Presenter10:29

Uh

Dame Josephine Barnes10:29

But were they those sort of reasoners? There were

Presenter10:30

There's no strong

Dame Josephine Barnes10:31

A professional.

Presenter10:32

Rich.

Dame Josephine Barnes10:32

Yeah. There was no professional reason, but I think there was a certain amount of perhaps a little chauvinism, could we say.

Presenter10:40

So what was your opinion of your fellow students once you got there?

Dame Josephine Barnes10:43

But

Presenter10:43

Nope.

Dame Josephine Barnes10:43

Uh

Presenter10:43

Obviously, we had great fun. The men included. Oh.

Dame Josephine Barnes10:46

Oh yes.

Presenter10:48

They didn't drink too much beer and play too much rug before you.

Dame Josephine Barnes10:50

Well, if they did, I didn't notice'cause I was doing other things.

Presenter10:54

So when was it, um, Dame Josephine, that you decided you wanted to concentrate on women and children and improving the way they were cared for?

Dame Josephine Barnes11:02

I was very much inspired by a great professor, Francis Brown, who was the first professor of obstetrics, that's a midwifery at University College Hospital.

Dame Josephine Barnes11:13

And I realized that this was what I would like to do. Now the things I liked about it, first of all, when you're doing midwifery, you're looking after pregnant women and delivering babies.

Dame Josephine Barnes11:23

You're looking after people who are normal healthy people doing a normal healthy event.

Dame Josephine Barnes11:28

And of course the delivery of a baby is always the most amazing thing you ever see.

Presenter11:34

Shall we pause there for another record? Your third record, I think.

Dame Josephine Barnes11:38

In 1963, I took two of my children and a nephew to the Edinburgh Festival.

Dame Josephine Barnes11:44

And it was an absolutely amazing year because there was Peter Pierce and Benjamin Britton, there was Barry Tuckwell, there was Norma Proctor, there was Ravi Shankar, there was Yehudi Menuin.

Dame Josephine Barnes11:56

And I did hear Peter Peirce sing accompanied by Benjamin Britton. Benjamin Britton was the most fantastic accompanist I've ever seen. My mother was an accompanist, so is my daughter, but I've never seen anyone accompany like Benjamin Britton.

Dame Josephine Barnes12:10

So I would like to hear a piece from the Winteriser.

Dame Josephine Barnes12:13

which I understand they took ten years before they decided they could record it.

Speaker 212:22

Uh

Speaker 212:34

Each troint is item shop.

Speaker 212:43

I'm tensing.

Speaker 212:57

This of wonders leave a

Speaker 213:03

Mm

Speaker 213:05

Erst sword eat freight and lighter sword

Presenter13:19

Peter Peers, accompanied by Benjamin Britten, singing Der Lindenbaum from Schubert's Winteriser.

Presenter13:25

Dame Josephine, I presume that pregnancy and childbirth pre-war and during the war years with no health service, no state care, could be

Presenter13:34

For the impoverished a pretty terrible business.

Dame Josephine Barnes13:36

It was very difficult, yes.

Dame Josephine Barnes13:38

They were supposed to pay unless they were very poor indeed.

Dame Josephine Barnes13:41

And we had the lady armours who then eventually became the social workers of today, who used to go round and collect the money.

Dame Josephine Barnes13:49

I worked during the war partly at Queen Charlotte's, and I started at the old building in Marylebone, which has recently been demolished.

Dame Josephine Barnes13:58

And that was during the Blitz in nineteen forty. And the German bombers used to come over and they'd turn and then they'd go for Paddington, Marylebone, Euston, King's Cross, Liverpool Street. And of course we were right on that line. We were never hit. My sitting room was hit, but I wasn't in it fortunately.

Dame Josephine Barnes14:15

But what we had to do, of course, during the air raids, and particularly during the fire bomb raids, was to get the women out of bed.

Dame Josephine Barnes14:22

This was

Dame Josephine Barnes14:23

considered to be terrible, the old lying in period.

Dame Josephine Barnes14:27

Women had to lie in bed. I remember when I was first in Cambridge, they had to lie in bed for three weeks. We got them up and we found they did much better. We got them up really, so that if

Dame Josephine Barnes14:36

If the place caught fire we could get them out.

Dame Josephine Barnes14:38

And I think that really was the beginning of early rising after childbirth and we got people out of bed after operations.

Presenter14:45

What do you think about the young women who seek to have their babies at home, not to go into hospital at all these days?

Dame Josephine Barnes14:52

I don't like home deliveries. I've done them and I was always terrified, partly of course because I did for eleven years a flying squad when I used to tear around North London looking at women who'd got into serious trouble and that put me off having babies at home forever.

Presenter15:07

Going back to the war years, so you were saying that all medical attention had to be paid for. Presumably if a family was pretty poor, the last thing they could afford was for mum to go to the doctors.

Dame Josephine Barnes15:16

That was the last thing that happened, yes, because you see the men, the working men, all had national insurance.

Dame Josephine Barnes15:22

But there was nothing for the women, and one did see

Dame Josephine Barnes15:25

poverty such as uh one can't imagine nowadays going

Dame Josephine Barnes15:30

one Sunday night to a delivery which wasn't quite right and finding that the bedclothes had been put in porn and the bed was covered with newspapers, that sort of thing.

Presenter15:41

And did you, as part of this flying squad, did you lose any mothers or fathers?

Dame Josephine Barnes15:45

I lost one mother who unfortunately had died before I got there, but in eleven years I didn't lose another, which wasn't too bad.

Presenter15:51

Or child?

Dame Josephine Barnes15:52

No, no, the babies were all fine. They were always put in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. There was no cot, but uh they went in the bottom drawer.

Presenter16:01

With a a little bit of sheeting underneath.

Dame Josephine Barnes16:02

That's right. Or newspapers if there was nothing else.

Presenter16:05

It's actually the perfect place, isn't it?

Dame Josephine Barnes16:07

Very good place, yes.

Presenter16:09

What was the mortality rate then? You say you didn't lose any children, but um

Dame Josephine Barnes16:13

Oh, it was pretty high. I can't tell you what exactly it was in those war years.

Presenter16:17

I wonder what it is now, do you know?

Dame Josephine Barnes16:19

What we call perinatal mortality, which is deaths at birth and in the first week, is below eight per thousand, whereas when we first surveyed it in nineteen fifty eight, it was thirty-five. And maternal mortality is down or I think it's one per hundred thousand. It's very, very small indeed.

Presenter16:36

So for women, perhaps more than any other section of society, the advent of the National Health Service after the war was of the most incredible benefit.

Dame Josephine Barnes16:44

It was a a tremendous benefit, yes. The idea

Dame Josephine Barnes16:49

of a health service free to all at the moment of delivery was the most splendid idea.

Dame Josephine Barnes16:55

Yeah. Uh

Presenter16:55

Some more music if

Dame Josephine Barnes16:56

I must have some Beethoven, and opus a hundred and thirty five, quartet number sixteen.

Dame Josephine Barnes17:02

It's just about the last piece of music that Beethoven wrote, and it contains the phrase, Mus Essein, must it be? And the answer, S mus sein, it must be. Perhaps on a desert island if you were feeling a bit melancholy, that might be significant.

Presenter18:15

The end of Beethoven's String Quartet No. sixteen, opus one hundred and thirty five, played by the Amadeus Quartet.

Presenter18:22

You mentioned earlier, Dame Josephine, what an exciting business childbirth is. Have you gone on feeling that that kind of thing?

Dame Josephine Barnes18:29

Always thrills me. It always thrills me to see a baby born. I think it's the most marvellous, marvellous thing you ever see.

Presenter18:34

Um

Dame Josephine Barnes18:35

To see a normal birth when the mother knows what she's doing is just the the best thing of all.

Presenter18:40

When you talk about a mother knowing what she's doing, are you talking about a mother giving birth naturally or with

Dame Josephine Barnes18:44

Yes, giving birth naturally, one a mother who has been taught how to do it properly.

Presenter18:49

Without the help of drugs.

Dame Josephine Barnes18:51

Well, with or without. I'm not against giving people drugs. I don't see why people should have pain when they're having babies. There's no need to.

Presenter18:57

But of course the the the natural childbirth lobby would say that you should shun all drugs and that you should experience some pain because that is part of the the joy of childbirth and the joy of motherhood.

Dame Josephine Barnes19:08

I think that's absolute nonsense, I must say. In the what, fifty odd years since I became a doctor, I think natural childbirth has been rediscovered every five years.

Dame Josephine Barnes19:18

Starting with Dick Reid, who used to lecture to me when I was a student. But I am president of the

Dame Josephine Barnes19:24

Obstetric physiotherapists, the physiotherapists who prepare women for childbirth, and they are marvelous people. And I think they can do so much. But one

Presenter19:32

What do you think about all these other ideas that crop up from time to time, giving birth in the dark or under water?

Dame Josephine Barnes19:41

I think they're gimmicks. Some people like them. I think everybody who's done this, from Grantly Dick Reid onwards, has added something to our comprehension of how we should best help mothers and how babies should be born. But I still think that the most important thing, surely, when you are looking after a mother having a baby, is her safety.

Presenter20:02

You were also something of a pioneer of pethidine, weren't you?

Dame Josephine Barnes20:04

I did some of the early work on Pecidine, yes, indeed. I wrote a paper about it in 1947. And one of the things we did was we had a bit of a fight over this with the Home Office.

Dame Josephine Barnes20:14

to allow the midwives delivering babies at home to use pessidine.

Dame Josephine Barnes20:18

That was at least something towards these poor women, who were being delivered at home with no pain relief whatsoever.

Presenter20:24

And something of a pioneer in the um blood transfusion line too, I guess.

Dame Josephine Barnes20:29

Well, I wasn't really a pioneer, but uh when I was a medical student a blood transfusion was a sort of major operation. We used to go to the operating theatre.

Dame Josephine Barnes20:38

And when I worked at Windsor Hospital, which I did, we lined up all the people at the all-night bus station opposite. We enrolled them all as donors. So if we needed blood, we had to call somebody in, take the blood, and then give it to the patient. It was all very primitive. Blood in bottles didn't arrive until really the beginning of the war. When I worked in Oxford in 1941, it was wartime. There was a great shortage of doctors, and we all had to do everything. I used to go once a week and bleed the donors in the new Bodleian Library, which in fact was opened by Queen Mary the day I got my medical degree.

Dame Josephine Barnes21:12

But there were no books in it, so we uh laid the donors out on couches and we took the blood from them.

Dame Josephine Barnes21:18

It was uh quite an interesting session.

Dame Josephine Barnes21:22

He had everybody from the Dean of Christchurch down to s I think Stephen Spender was one. I don't think that's a breach of confidentiality.

Presenter21:30

And then you became a consultant, I think just after the war, at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, a hospital for women in in London, where you're still the consultant, aren't you?

Dame Josephine Barnes21:39

Well, I'm what is called consulting. I don't work there any more, but I did work there for thirty years, yes.

Dame Josephine Barnes21:45

And we had quite a battle to keep the hospital open, which we did.

Dame Josephine Barnes21:48

It's had to change its style slightly recently, but there is the promise that any woman who wishes to see a woman doctor is guaranteed that she will see a woman doctor.

Dame Josephine Barnes21:59

This was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson's original idea, of course, way back in eighteen sixty six of a hospital for women staffed by women.

Dame Josephine Barnes22:06

And that has gone on ever since. Some more music, please.

Dame Josephine Barnes22:10

We're going back to Bach.

Dame Josephine Barnes22:12

These are the motets and I think they're the most wonderful music and my reason for choosing this record is that it's the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, which includes my granddaughter Nicola.

Speaker 223:16

Shouldn't we or freely craft and shoot?

Presenter23:23

The Bach motet Com yezu com, sung by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, directed by Richard Marlowe, and including Nicola Neary, your granddaughter, Dame Josephine. How many grandchildren do you have? Eight of them.

Dame Josephine Barnes23:35

I'm afraid I must admit.

Presenter23:37

Uh

Dame Josephine Barnes23:37

Why are you afraid? Well, you know, there's all this talk about population explosion and so on, but uh I love them all dearly.

Presenter23:44

You had three children of your own during and just after the war. Did you ever consider giving up work and becoming um a mother and a housewife?

Dame Josephine Barnes23:53

No, I couldn't have done it. I'm not terribly good at looking after young babies. At least I'm in

Dame Josephine Barnes24:00

Spending a whole day with a young baby is is not is not my choice at all.

Dame Josephine Barnes24:05

And I

Dame Josephine Barnes24:06

decided that the best thing to do was to stay at work and employ the people who knew how to look after babies to look after my children.

Presenter24:13

That's still quite difficult though, isn't it? Because it requires a deal of organisation and delegation, which is perhaps a job.

Dame Josephine Barnes24:18

Oh, it did. I mean, I did my best. I mean, I always took the children to school in the morning. I always tried to get back so that I could help them with their homework in the evening.

Dame Josephine Barnes24:27

and spend as much time as I could with them.

Dame Josephine Barnes24:30

I must admit my eldest daughter

Dame Josephine Barnes24:33

was occasionally put in the back of the car and taken to the hospital while I did a cesarean, but it didn't seem to do her any harm.

Presenter24:39

So you've never harbored any um regret that you made the wrong sacrifices? Not at all.

Dame Josephine Barnes24:43

No, sir.

Presenter24:43

Uh

Dame Josephine Barnes24:43

Two.

Presenter24:44

Never know.

Presenter24:45

Of course, among the the many things you went out to do in those days was to uh calculate how much babies cost mothers in financial terms. What did you discover at that stage?

Dame Josephine Barnes24:57

We worked out the cost of having a baby, or rather what people spent.

Dame Josephine Barnes25:01

And this was in the nineteen forties, so it was probably just after the war, where there was still probably clothes rationing, remember, so that there were uh limitations on what you could buy. Mother having her first baby spent on average thirty pounds and subsequent babies twenty pounds.

Presenter25:16

But what you discovered for that survey became the basis, did it not, of the maternity grant?

Dame Josephine Barnes25:21

With maternity grant, maternity allowance, and in to some degree, I think, uh family allowance for children too, yes.

Presenter25:28

Shall we pause there and have your sixth record?

Dame Josephine Barnes25:30

I feel I must have something a bit more modern, and I would like some Elgar.

Dame Josephine Barnes25:36

And what better than Jacqueline Dupre,

Dame Josephine Barnes25:39

playing the El Garcello concerto, again one of his late works. I did hear her play it in the Albert Hall, and uh it was an experience not to be forgotten.

Presenter26:51

The beginning of the third movement of Elgar's cello concerto in E minor, played by Jacqueline Dupre, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbaroli.

Presenter27:00

Can I ask you, Dame Josephine, because I think it's a question which constantly arises, your views on the upper time limit on abortions. It is, as we know, twenty eight weeks in law, but there are attempts from time to time to reduce it. What do you believe to be the correct time limit, given all medical expertise now?

Dame Josephine Barnes27:20

I was very privileged to work with Dame Elizabeth Lane.

Dame Josephine Barnes27:23

On the Committee on the Working of the Abortion Act in 1974, I also before that had worked with the Church of England Board of Social Responsibility on Abortion. Now on the Lane Committee, we concluded.

Dame Josephine Barnes27:34

quite positively that twenty four weeks was the right limit.

Dame Josephine Barnes27:38

That was published in 1974. One gets in a way a bit disillusioned when you work for the government like this.

Dame Josephine Barnes27:44

If that had been brought in, then perhaps there wouldn't have been that so much need for the Alton Bill, which, however,

Dame Josephine Barnes27:50

I think was directed against abortion as a whole. What do you

Presenter27:53

What do you say to the uh those anti-abortionists, those who say that any thetis once conceived has the right to life from the very beginning of conception?

Dame Josephine Barnes28:02

Well, I would say that they are entitled to their views. We, after all, live in a democratic society, and the Abortion Act itself contains the conscience clause.

Dame Josephine Barnes28:12

which means that no one who has a conscientious objection need have anything to do with the termination of pregnancy.

Dame Josephine Barnes28:19

But on the other hand, I fear that there are situations in which termination is necessary. I did an abortion counselling service for about four years and I learnt an awful lot about it, about women's attitudes to abortion. Mostly they were women either

Dame Josephine Barnes28:36

single women who'd been deserted by their boyfriends, or older women who had too many children.

Dame Josephine Barnes28:43

And we didn't necessarily agree to abortion in every case, by no means. We counselled them very carefully.

Presenter28:50

But in in practice it is perfectly possible for a woman, if she finds her pregnancy socially inconvenient or unacceptable, for her to find an abortion, isn't it?

Dame Josephine Barnes29:01

It always was, but whereas in the past she had to go to the back streets.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:08

And the knitting needle and all the unpleasant things, terrible consequences we used to see. I mean, I've seen two young women die and one very nearly die following a back street abortion. That has virtually disappeared. That's one good thing.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:22

I would entirely agree with those who say that we have too many abortions, because I after all am concerned with the family planning doctors and the family planning nurses.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:31

And we are trying to persuade people to

Dame Josephine Barnes29:34

have a more responsible view to pregnancy and childbearing.

Presenter29:38

Your seventh record, please.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:40

I have a passion for opera, and I must have an opera.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:44

Of all the operas I like, I have finally decided that it must be full staff.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:51

Bairdie's full staff, written when he was eighty years old.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:54

Almost his last work.

Dame Josephine Barnes29:56

My daughter Amanda has done the new translation, which the English National O Opera will be doing this month, and uh I would therefore like to hear a bit of the last act.

Speaker 230:19

You are

Speaker 230:40

Yeah, tea.

Speaker 230:44

Undeter.

Speaker 230:48

O D T

Speaker 230:53

Medson October.

Presenter30:59

Gerine Devon singing une duo tre from Verdi's Falstaff with the R C A Italiana Opera Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter31:10

We are now, Dame Josephine, of course, as women well looked after by the Health Service. Well woman clinics screening for breast and cervical cancer is something we've come to expect. Do you believe that such developments do only good?

Dame Josephine Barnes31:23

I think they do more good than anything than harm, shall we say, but they certainly do good, yes. I think that.

Dame Josephine Barnes31:30

The problem with the National Health Service has always been that it started as a national disease service and that we have not spent nearly enough time on preventive health, on telling people how to look after themselves and how to remain healthy.

Dame Josephine Barnes31:44

You see, the trouble with screening is, and this is what we found when we did the maternity surveys.

Dame Josephine Barnes31:50

But you've got to screen everybody. And it's the people who don't come for screening are the ones who get the cancer. I mean, the women with cancer of the cervix mostly have never had a smear test.

Presenter32:00

But is it possible that the the Well Woman clinics and the doctors' surgeries are full of women who know that they ought to come along and get a screening, and it is perhaps the others who ought to be there who are who suffer from fear?

Dame Josephine Barnes32:13

A piece of research I would like to do, and I would hope we can do it sometime.

Dame Josephine Barnes32:18

is to research those people who don't come and they are the people of course

Dame Josephine Barnes32:24

who tend in later life to get cancer of the cervix. And that I would like to know. Why they won't come.

Dame Josephine Barnes32:30

Shall we have your last record?

Dame Josephine Barnes32:32

Well, my last record is the um recording of the coronation of nineteen fifty three.

Dame Josephine Barnes32:40

I have chosen this partly because it opens with the anthem I was glad by Sir Hubert Parry, who was one of my mother's teachers at the Royal College of Music.

Dame Josephine Barnes32:49

I can remember the day she came in looking very sad, and telling me that Sir Hubert Parry had died.

Dame Josephine Barnes32:54

My son in law Martin was actually singing, and our great family friend, Sir William Harris, was conducting. So I have a lot of reasons for hearing this, and also, perhaps, if I might say, as a very humble tribute to Her Majesty for all she's done for us in the years since then.

Speaker 233:47

It's just a light.

Presenter34:12

The anthem I Was Glad by Sir Hubert Parry, sung at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth I Second in nineteen fifty three. Now, Dame Josephine, which of those records, chosen with such care and with so many family connections, which of them would you choose to have with you? Oh, I must have the coronation.

Dame Josephine Barnes34:27

Oh, I missed her coronation. Definitely. Because for one thing we had I was glad at my daughter's wedding as well.

Dame Josephine Barnes34:36

So I must have it.

Presenter34:38

And you always find it very moving. Yes, I do.

Presenter34:41

Have you chosen a book because um you have the Bible and you have the complete works of Shakespeare?

Dame Josephine Barnes34:46

Can I have the 1611 Bible, please? The authorized version? Yes. None of the nonsense that they've done since. And I would like to have...

Dame Josephine Barnes34:56

All the scores of all the music.

Dame Josephine Barnes34:59

found, so I can study the scores as I listen to the records.

Presenter35:03

What a good idea.

Presenter35:05

Right, we shall bind those together for you, and we shall also offer you a luxury. What should that be?

Dame Josephine Barnes35:05

Bye.

Dame Josephine Barnes35:11

I would like to have

Dame Josephine Barnes35:13

A solar powered word processor with a printer and lots of paper, and an instruction book show me how to use it, so that I can write the great book I've never had time to write.

Presenter35:24

What is it about, you know?

Dame Josephine Barnes35:26

I would start off by writing more about myself.

Dame Josephine Barnes35:29

Really for my children and my grandchildren. And I might even have a go at a novel, I think.

Presenter35:35

Right. We shall supply all of that and we shall also say thank you, Dame Josephine Barnes, for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Dame Josephine Barnes35:42

Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a great honor to do this.

Speaker 135:53

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio forward.