Sir Crispin Tickell

Speaker 20:00

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 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is a diplomat. The Foreign Office spotted his talents early on and picked him out as one of their high flyers. They employed his skills as an astute tactician during Britain's entry into the common market and much more recently in the restoration of diplomatic relations with Argentina. They relied too on his calming influence to help engineer a ceasefire between Iran and Iraq. A historian who loves science, he amazed his colleagues 15 years ago by taking up the study of the climate. As a result, the cool diplomat is now an expert on global warming. He is Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tekel.

Presenter1:09

It's a wonderful set of Christian names, Sir Crispin. The three C's. Which of them is most used?

Sir Crispin Tickell1:13

Well, I think the only one that is used is crispin.

Sir Crispin Tickell1:16

Charles was a was a little memory that my mother wished to make, I think, of a very eminent translator of Proust, Charles Scotland Creeff. And Cervantes is a nice little family myth that somehow connected with the Cervantes family of Don Quixote.

Presenter1:30

What does your mother call you?

Sir Crispin Tickell1:31

Crispin.

Presenter1:32

No doubt Cervantes, there was a useful name to have when you were serving, as you have done several times in Mexico.

Sir Crispin Tickell1:38

Indeed, I think Mexicans rather preferred it. I remember that when I had to do television or come on the press during the Falklands War, which was taking place when I was ambassador in Mexico, that I frequently appeared as Don Cervantes, which gave me a certain edge in putting things over, because they almost believed I was one of them.

Presenter1:55

And you you're a Spanish speaker indeed, aren't you?

Sir Crispin Tickell1:56

I am indeed a Spanish speaker, because I I had to learn it in Mexico. When Spaniards hear me, they find my Mexican accent rather diverting.

Presenter2:04

And I read that there's a sort of strong Latin American uh streak right down the middle of you.

Sir Crispin Tickell2:09

Well, I've only rarely served in Mexico, but I've visited other parts of Latin America, and I always feel very much at home there.

Presenter2:17

Well, now, you're a man who's travelled the world more than most. Where, I wonder, do you imagine your desert island to be?

Sir Crispin Tickell2:24

I imagine my desert island to be fairly tropical, perhaps somewhere within the let's say north of Cancer or south of Capricorn.

Sir Crispin Tickell2:33

And um I would rather like to think that we'd be in that sort of zone.

Presenter2:37

And its climate, therefore?

Sir Crispin Tickell2:39

Its climate, I suppose, will have a rainy season.

Sir Crispin Tickell2:42

And it will have a dry season, and it will have a time when the winds are blowing in an agreeable fashion, as they do, for example, in the Caribbean, without causing too much discomfort.

Presenter2:50

So it's a climate that you would relish, is it?

Sir Crispin Tickell2:51

It's the climate I would be very happy in, provide it doesn't get too hot.

Presenter2:54

Now you get of course an excellent Horm grammar phone to take with you. What would be the first record that you'd like to put on it?

Sir Crispin Tickell3:01

I think I'd like the first record I'd like to play is one that was very much beloved by my father.

Sir Crispin Tickell3:06

who had a great affection for French medieval songs, and he was a singer as well, and loved to sing. And so the one I would first like to choose is a song that he was very fond of, called Le Prisonnier de la Tour.

Sir Crispin Tickell3:21

My father was a novelist and in many ways he wrote a lot of his books had French aspects to it. And I went to France later myself as a diplomat. And I always had this echo in my mind of this particular song.

Speaker 43:36

Le présonier de la tour c'est tuis ce matain. Gomber, lun li en pas à la mè ce demand. Il segenté de la tour on me tendon les man. Grombert, il ma assemblé que jourve du charcoin.

Speaker 43:53

Little false of his song is a bad world.

Sir Crispin Tickell3:55

Yeah.

Sir Crispin Tickell3:56

Please are there

Speaker 43:59

Isber si le roi sa está à la robe leanter boulorier plus james roi. Is aver sil roi sa está.

Sir Crispin Tickell4:12

Ah this

Presenter4:16

The prisonnied Latour sung by Gerard Calvy and Les Compagnon de la Chanson.

Presenter4:21

Now, you said, Sir Crispin, that your father was a novelist. What did he write?

Sir Crispin Tickell4:26

He wrote quite a number of novels. The first most successful one was the Book Society Choice in nineteen thirty six, which was called See How They Run.

Sir Crispin Tickell4:33

And then the novel for which he became very famous was Appointment with Venus.

Sir Crispin Tickell4:37

in nineteen fifty one.

Sir Crispin Tickell4:39

which was about the kidnapping of a car in the Channel Islands.

Presenter4:42

Didn't you also write or dead?

Sir Crispin Tickell4:43

Yes, but that of course was a work, was a biography and not a novel.

Sir Crispin Tickell4:49

And that was also made into a film with Anna Neagle playing the role of Odette. In fact, it was so successful that they made, I think, two other films of Odette. One, a Danish cow on a Danish island with a Danish heroine.

Presenter5:01

Did all this mean then that the uh Tiquels were really rather comfortably off with all these books and films?

Sir Crispin Tickell5:06

We had our ups and downs like all people who write. In those days the income tax used to charge you your full whack on one year instead of allowing you to spread it over. And so anyone who is in the scribbling profession knows ups as well as downs, and downs as well as ups.

Presenter5:22

Your mother wrote too, I think.

Sir Crispin Tickell5:23

My mother not only does she did she write, she's written quite a number of novels, but also she writes about extrasensory perception, and indeed still does.

Sir Crispin Tickell5:31

And she writes under her maiden name, Renee Haynes.

Presenter5:34

Now, I think it's through her side of the family, isn't it, that you inherit, if you have inherited it, your scientific bent. Um I think she's related to the Huxleys, isn't she?

Sir Crispin Tickell5:44

Yes. Uh my great-great-grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the uh Darwin's bulldog.

Sir Crispin Tickell5:51

And um the huckster tradition, the scientific tradition has always been very strong in the family.

Presenter5:56

Did you know any of them when you were younger?

Sir Crispin Tickell5:58

I knew Julian quite well, and indeed I used to go out and see him and talk to him about things in the last ten years of his life.

Sir Crispin Tickell6:07

I knew Aldous Huxley a little bit, a person who influenced me a great deal as a child.

Sir Crispin Tickell6:12

I remember one of my cousins saying to me that listening to Aldous was like listening to an orchestra playing.

Sir Crispin Tickell6:18

When he began to speak about something, it was as if you begin with the bassoon, that the themes are picked up, the orchestra plays, the strings and the trumpets and everything else, and at the end you have the most extraordinary intellectual experience because of the richness and width of his experience.

Presenter6:33

Now, was it not your um

Presenter6:35

First cousin twice removed, or whatever he might be, Julian Huxley, who gave you a rather special present when you were a small boy.

Sir Crispin Tickell6:40

He gave me a very special present, which was a fellowship of the London Zoo when I was something like six or seven or eight, I can't remember which and that in those days fellows of the zoo were allowed to go into the zoo when others weren't on Sunday mornings.

Sir Crispin Tickell6:53

And this meant that I used to go into the cages and look play with the baby chimps and um

Sir Crispin Tickell6:58

I was allowed from time to time to take things home with me, and I remember in particular taking a pteropin home in the coronation year of nineteen thirty seven.

Sir Crispin Tickell7:06

And I remember also taking a lion cub home for lunch, t bringing it back from the zoo in a taxi and faithfully returning it afterwards and I remember thinking that in spite of those beautiful velvet plush paws, it had extremely sharp claws underneath.

Presenter7:19

But was all that very important to you then? Did it make a big impression on you?

Sir Crispin Tickell7:23

I think I always liked animals and zoology and the natural world, and this was a very good way of expressing my interest.

Presenter7:30

Let's have your second record there.

Sir Crispin Tickell7:33

When I was at my prep school,

Sir Crispin Tickell7:36

One of the music masters was practicing a particular piece of music which he enjoyed very much and I think that he was also courting one of the people at the school, the sister at the school and she had developed a tendency to like Beethoven and he encouraged this. The result was that he used to play to her and by inference to us the Emperor Concerto and so some of my earliest memories are hearing him practising very successfully it must be said the last movement of the Beethoven Emperor Concerto and it would be nice to hear it now.

Presenter9:05

Part of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. five, played by Arto Rubinstein with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.

Presenter9:13

Um you are obviously, Sir Crispin, if I am allowed to say, jolly bright. Let me, uh, saving your blushes, uh, say here that you won a scholarship to Westminster School, a scholarship to Christchurch, Oxford, and uh a first in history thereafter. Pretty classic stuff.

Presenter9:27

At what point did you decide that what you were going to do with this this learning and this qualification was go into the diplomatic service?

Sir Crispin Tickell9:35

I hesitated a long time because when I left Oxford I had the opportunity of becoming a Don.

Sir Crispin Tickell9:42

And Louis Namier, who was the great cham of British eighteenth century politics, invited me to work with him on the history of Parliament, and I was tempted by it.

Sir Crispin Tickell9:53

But I had to do my national service. By the time I had done that and come back from from being a soldier in the Middle East,

Sir Crispin Tickell10:00

I wanted to do something which was more connected with real life.

Presenter10:03

But did you have I mean, is it possible to say did you have the makings of the diplomat, the qualities? I'm not quite sure what they are. Perhaps you would tell me. I mean, were you a careful listener?

Sir Crispin Tickell10:13

I'm told, although of course this may be quite wrong, that I became top in the examinations for learning, but bottom for character. And so I don't quite know whether what conclusion you may draw from that. Perhaps they thought I was a bit too brash, or that I said too obviously what I think.

Presenter10:31

This this is the interview to go into the FAST.

Sir Crispin Tickell10:34

Um but anyway

Presenter10:35

I wonder what your failings were?

Sir Crispin Tickell10:37

Well, you better ask them, not me.

Presenter10:39

Well well, define define anyway for me the the qualities of a good diplomat. I mean, what's your personal definition?

Sir Crispin Tickell10:46

I think that it's very wrong to think that a diplomat is sent abroad to by someone to lie for his country.

Sir Crispin Tickell10:52

I think it very important the diplomat should be straightforward.

Sir Crispin Tickell10:55

that they should understand the other person's point of view, but never at the cost of abandoning their own.

Sir Crispin Tickell11:01

And I think that diplomats should

Sir Crispin Tickell11:04

very in general terms should have a wide view of life, so they should be good at lateral thinking and see the connections between things and not just the subject on which they are focusing. I found many times in negotiation that at a difficult point, if you can turn the conversation onto things that don't seem to be connected but sometimes are, it very much helps you towards a conclusion.

Presenter11:25

Let's have your third record there. What is it?

Sir Crispin Tickell11:27

Well, I wanted to play something which has particular value for me because my first diplomatic posting

Sir Crispin Tickell11:34

was to The Hague.

Sir Crispin Tickell11:36

Uh when I was the third secretary.

Sir Crispin Tickell11:38

and the Dutch are very musical.

Sir Crispin Tickell11:40

And they particularly like chamber music, and indeed so do I.

Sir Crispin Tickell11:44

And I remember a very happy concert that was that my wife and I were able to arrange in our own house in The Hague when we found uh some uh musicians who weren't playing professionally. And they came to the house and they played one of the most beautiful of the string quartets by Vorjak, which is the American quartet.

Presenter12:54

Part of the slow movement of Vorjac's string quartet number twelve in F the American, played by the Delmay string quartet. Tell me, Sir Crispin, do so called high flyers in the civil service

Presenter13:06

know that they're thought of as such. Are they aware that they bear that label?

Sir Crispin Tickell13:10

Well, no one ever told me that, but um it's nice of you to hear to hear you saying that about me, but I certainly was quite unconscious of it at at the time.

Presenter13:17

So w was it really going to Mexico that that that began to make you feel rather confined by the conventions of of your background when you went to Mexico in what, nineteen fifty eight, wasn't it?

Sir Crispin Tickell13:17

Yeah.

Presenter13:28

You you had until that point really trodden a fairly conventional path, hadn't you, as we've heard academically and intellectually.

Sir Crispin Tickell13:34

I think that's true. Going to Mexico is not unlike going to the United States. The first thing that you have is an immense sense of space.

Sir Crispin Tickell13:42

Far from our little Europe with its railway lines crossing, criss crossing at every corner and every single field cultivated and every town well inhabited, you suddenly come across space, and one of the things about Mexico is its astonishing beauty.

Sir Crispin Tickell13:57

Both the highlands, most of them 8,000 to 10,000 feet, it's 2,000 volcanoes stretching from one coast to the other.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:05

Its tropical lowlands, and of course, the relics of this amazing civilization.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:09

um which uh are there for all to see even now.

Presenter14:13

And you've seen much of it on foot, I think,'cause you're a mountaineer, aren't you?

Sir Crispin Tickell14:16

Yes, I like climbing mountains, and I've been up most of the volcanoes in Mexico at one time or another.

Presenter14:21

Have you the the the lady and the man, I think they called it.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:24

Well, there are two volcanoes that used to be visible all the time from Mexico City. One is the one that's called Popaca Tepital.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:31

um which is called which in in Aztec means he who smokes.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:35

and the other one is called Ishta Siwattl, which is the sleeping lady.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:39

And this male and this female are both very interesting volcanoes. One is still very much alive.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:46

That is to say, Popaka Tapital. And when you get to the top, which is about 18,000 feet, there's some very nasty smells and some jets of sulphur and all the rest.

Sir Crispin Tickell14:56

Ishtar Siwatl, as befits her sex, is a rather calmer mountain to climb, not quite so high.

Sir Crispin Tickell15:01

But when I got up there I was told it was extinct, but I found a little place where there was a very powerful smell indeed of sulphur, and it's perfectly obvious to me that there is the remains of a crater at the top of this mountain which is about seventeen and a half thousand feet.

Sir Crispin Tickell15:15

You climb up her knee, you walk up her leg, and finally you arrive at her bosom, which in fact is the topmost point.

Presenter15:21

She's quite voluptuous, is she?

Sir Crispin Tickell15:23

She's quite voluptuous and her head is laid well back, as if she's offering herself to the world.

Presenter15:29

It wasn't uh really until a good fifteen years later, I think, when you were forty five, that you set out to study a science formally, although, as we are hearing, you had begun to to take interest in all these different things. And you took a sabbatical from the FO and an undergraduate course at Harvard in what, in meteorology, in astronomy, what was it?

Sir Crispin Tickell15:48

I went to Harvard, as you say, a sabbatical year, and there I was singing for my supper by giving seminars on arms control and the European community and those kinds of things. But I wanted to study climate change and world affairs because I've always been interested in the relationship between science and politics, and this seemed a good subject. Not everyone else thought so. I had a certain amount of arguing to do before this particular thought was accepted. But once it had been accepted, of course, the first thing I had to do was to find out about climate.

Sir Crispin Tickell16:18

And a friend of mine at MIT was very kind and gave me a good deal of tuition in meteorology.

Sir Crispin Tickell16:24

And I read a great deal and at the end I put together a series of lectures on climatic change and world affairs.

Sir Crispin Tickell16:32

which I later put together as a book which was published by Harvard University.

Presenter16:35

But your friends must have thought you were entirely dotty. I mean, surely they expected you to spend your time writing about with a NATO or with a Europe.

Sir Crispin Tickell16:43

I think some people do think I'm on the eccentric fringe, but in fact this was quite an interesting thing to have done. Do you think you're on the eccentric fringe? No, I do what interests me. And if some people if other people think the same, that's fine, and if they don't, that's fine too.

Presenter16:55

And today you're an acknowledged expert, as I've said, with a view on the the future of the world, its climate and its inhabitants, as we shall hear in just a moment. But I'd just like to pause there for your next record. What's that?

Sir Crispin Tickell17:07

Well the next record that I chose was one that brings back some of my Mexican. Past.

Sir Crispin Tickell17:12

Mexican music contains many elements, but among them the use of instruments in rather unusual ways. And what I wanted to play now was an extract from harp music, which is played at the festival at Veracruz on the coast, which is meant for light-heartedness and dancing and interesting sounds.

Presenter18:22

El Zapa Teado, Veracruz Carnival Music.

Presenter18:25

You gave a lecture last year, Sir Crispin, at the Royal Society, in which you envisaged a world in turmoil, with huge numbers of refugees, Africans running into Europe, Chinese into the Soviet Union, displaced by the climate. Can you explain that?

Sir Crispin Tickell18:40

I think that the world is moving into a very serious condition with the changes that are taking place in climate.

Sir Crispin Tickell18:48

It's very easy for people to say that the problems over climate are measurable and they've happened many times before, because that is quite true. But what we've got is not just the likelihood of a change in climate, which will change rain patterns and produce droughts where there was rain and rain where there were droughts. That is something that has been managed many times before in the Earth's history.

Sir Crispin Tickell19:08

What is, I think, serious is the combination of factors. And there are three factors which are now coming together. The first is human population increase, which is, if you look at the graph, something absolutely astonishing. That we should be moving from a population of 2 billion in 1930 to a population of 8 billion in 2025. You can see the extraordinary steep curve represented by increasing population numbers. You've got that factor, which means that there could be standing room only unless something nasty happens.

Sir Crispin Tickell19:37

You have the factor of environmental degradation, which of course is closely linked to it, whereby a soil soils are less fertile.

Sir Crispin Tickell19:44

The Green Revolution, which produced a lot more food in the 1960s and 70s, has got a natural term. You can't keep on producing new plants to produce new things because you thereby change the genetic store of plants.

Sir Crispin Tickell19:57

And you have deserts advancing in different parts of the world, in some parts of Africa, for example, by a rate of about seven kilometres a year.

Sir Crispin Tickell20:05

And on top of those two factors, two factors very powerful in themselves, you have the prospect of climate change caused by our placing in the atmosphere of a number of gases, which will change the way in which the weather system works. And the combination of these things could mean that people who have been living within a measurable distance of a coastline might find that the sea levels would rise because of the melting ice at the poles. People who've been living in

Sir Crispin Tickell20:30

Not particularly fertile areas could find those fertile areas turning into desert or turning into scrubland. All these things could mean that you could get a world on the march.

Presenter20:40

So in your view it it is highly likely, is it, that, as you put it, something nasty will happen?

Sir Crispin Tickell20:47

I think the science, which is going to be better established after the report of a panel later this year, and other panels no doubt in the future, all points towards climatic warming with largely unpredictable results.

Sir Crispin Tickell21:01

And I think in Britain, public opinion is already very sensitised to this problem, more perhaps than in other parts of the world.

Presenter21:09

But how vulnerable do you believe man to be?

Sir Crispin Tickell21:09

How far?

Sir Crispin Tickell21:10

Man to be. I believe man to be, like any other animal species, he's vulnerable to changes in his circumstances. And if you put together degradation of the environment, population increase and climatic change, you're mixing a pretty potent cocktail for disaster.

Presenter21:25

Do you think he'll be tested beyond his endurance?

Sir Crispin Tickell21:27

No, I'm sure the human beings will survive, but I think a lot of people are going to get damaged in the process, and that's what we ought to be thinking about.

Presenter21:34

Record number five.

Sir Crispin Tickell21:35

Well, the record I wanted to do this time was something which is a one that flows from my concern for the environment.

Sir Crispin Tickell21:42

In August last year, the actor Robert Redford put together a conference in the mountains of Utah.

Sir Crispin Tickell21:51

in the United States at the place that he's called Sundance, where he brought together a number of American and Soviet scientists to talk about the problems I've just been referring to. And for reasons best known to the organizers, I was invited along.

Sir Crispin Tickell22:04

And one evening we went up after dark to a place where we could see the snowy peaks on each side, and we could hear the rivers running, and it was beautifully green, and it was a clear night, getting a bit chilly.

Sir Crispin Tickell22:18

and a and a little group, a musical group headed by Paul Winter, played some songs. And one of the most interesting ones he played was one that is based on the noises made by whales when they communicate under water.

Sir Crispin Tickell22:30

So he begins the piece you're about to hear with the sounds of the whales and then from those whales, whale sounds, the mother talking to her children, he constructs what I think is a very beautiful piece of music.

Presenter23:33

A lullaby for the baby sea pups played by The Paul Winter Consort

Presenter23:37

You are the man, Sir Crispin, who is um credited with the greening, as it were, of the Prime Minister. You it was, they say, who persuaded her that environmental matters mattered. Do you take that credit?

Sir Crispin Tickell23:49

I don't take that credit because the Prime Minister was trained as a chemist and she understands these issues better than anyone.

Sir Crispin Tickell23:56

It is true that I have spoken to her about these things on a number of occasions, but she, I think, is the person who makes the decisions and she understands this problem better than anyone else.

Presenter24:06

Were you was it not you, though, who were behind misses Thatcher's famous speech in september nineteen eighty eight to the Royal Society, her first green speech, as it were, this turning point in Thatcherism?

Sir Crispin Tickell24:17

I feel very reluctant to lay claim to anything because the Prime Minister has many advisers on these matters. I was one of them and glad to be one of them. But the decision to say what she did was hers, and I think I prefer to leave it like that.

Presenter24:30

Right. Now when you and she met for only the second time, I think in nineteen eighty one, The earth, I believe, moved.

Sir Crispin Tickell24:36

Ah, that was when I was ambassador in Mexico.

Sir Crispin Tickell24:39

She made a little she came to the Cancun Conference, which is Cancun being a rather nasty seaside town on the edges of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Sir Crispin Tickell24:49

um a sort of modern Miami transpl transplanted to Mexico, where they had a a conference on what have now been called North-South problems, which means the major economic problems of the world. And after that had happened she came up to Mexico City and she spent a night at uh my embassy because I had just arrived there as ambassador.

Sir Crispin Tickell25:06

And we had a dinner for her?

Sir Crispin Tickell25:08

in which we provided all Mexican food.

Sir Crispin Tickell25:11

Which she um

Sir Crispin Tickell25:12

Seem to enjoy.

Sir Crispin Tickell25:14

And then as we were got to the dessert, the earth began to move, and we held on to the tables, and the lights swung in the air, and an earthquake indeed took place, which lasted for about three minutes.

Sir Crispin Tickell25:25

And it was quite an experience. Indeed, when the Prime Minister went next morning to call on the President of Mexico, he said to her,

Sir Crispin Tickell25:31

I provided everything for you that Mexico can provide, including, madam, an earthquake.

Presenter25:36

And you carried on, eating dinner throughout it, did you?

Sir Crispin Tickell25:38

We carried on eating dinner, not least because there was nothing else that seemed sensible to do.

Presenter25:42

They say she admired your coolness under fire.

Sir Crispin Tickell25:44

I think that is a mythology. We were all very happy to continue our dinner because we didn't have any reason not to.

Presenter25:52

Let's have your next record.

Sir Crispin Tickell25:53

Well, the next record I wanted to play was one that I am particularly attached to, which is a string quartet from Browns.

Sir Crispin Tickell26:01

The Brahm string quartets in my lexicon

Sir Crispin Tickell26:05

are among the most subtle and interesting pieces of music ever invented.

Sir Crispin Tickell26:09

and they give me boundless pleasure.

Presenter27:11

Part of Brahm's String Quartet, Opus fifty one, Number One, played by the Milos Quartet. Now, something else rather impressive other than being in an earthquake with misses Thatcher happened to you while you were our man in Mexico. You were knighted. Can you describe the scene?

Sir Crispin Tickell27:28

It was the the scene was was very simple, which was that after the Falklands War, the Queen made a visit to Mexico, an unofficial visit to Mexico, and in a way it helped put back our relations with Latin America. It was a symbolic visit because it helped to put our relations back with the Latin American countries, most of whom had been very divided about what had happened during the Falklands War.

Sir Crispin Tickell27:51

and Her Majesty's yacht Britannia came to Acapulco.

Sir Crispin Tickell27:54

And we sailed up the coast, which is very nice.

Sir Crispin Tickell27:57

And to my pleasure and surprise, when we got to La Paz, which is just at the tip of the long appendage of land then as Lower California,

Sir Crispin Tickell28:06

The queen signified her intention of knighting me.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:09

And I was very embarrassed because it being unexpected, I hadn't got with me the kind of clothes that one normally associates with these ceremonies.

Presenter28:16

What you didn't know she was going to do it then?

Sir Crispin Tickell28:18

Yeah.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:19

And so I had only an open-necked shirt with short sleeves and um a tropical sun outside to accompany me.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:25

But Her Majesty was kind enough to knight me in the drawing room of Britannia.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:31

and she was able to overlook

Sir Crispin Tickell28:33

My open necked shirt and my short sleeves and my tropical air.

Presenter28:36

When had you expected to be knighted, as it were?

Sir Crispin Tickell28:39

I don't think that I ever expected to be knighted. You don't sort of think of these things in advance.

Presenter28:42

I didn't mean when had you expected the ceremony to occur. I take it you knew you were going to be made a knight that morning.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:43

I meant

Sir Crispin Tickell28:49

That morning.

Presenter28:50

You were told that morning, and done that afternoon.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:51

Yeah.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:53

That's right.

Presenter28:54

A memorable occasion.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:55

A memorable occasion.

Presenter28:56

Let's have your seventh record.

Sir Crispin Tickell28:58

Well then the next record that I chose is one in which Victoria Los Angeles is singing a piece from the Foray Requiem.

Sir Crispin Tickell29:07

It's a particularly beautiful piece of music, and I'd like to hear it again now.

Speaker 430:09

Where's my

Presenter30:12

Victoria de Los Angeles singing the Pied Yesu from Foray's Requiem with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra conducted by Andre Cluitance.

Presenter30:21

Will you survive, Sir Crispin, on your desert island? Are you at root a practical man?

Sir Crispin Tickell30:27

I am not a particularly practical man, but I have usually discovered that if I have to I can manage like anybody else.

Presenter30:32

You disappoint me saying that. I'd read that you were exactly the kind of chap to go into the jungle with.

Sir Crispin Tickell30:37

I don't know whether I should be a good person to go in the jungle with, but I'd like to go well prepared.

Presenter30:41

A non-panicker.

Sir Crispin Tickell30:43

A non-panicker possibly, but at the same time I wouldn't claim to be the world's most practical man.

Presenter30:47

I understand you eat in your New York residence, often from the weed borders of Central Park. That sounds uh resourceful.

Sir Crispin Tickell30:55

That is a very nice fairy tale, but based on a little bit of fact, which is that in my position I have to do a lot of official entertaining. And my cook is an enterprising lady who once went on one of those tours of Central Park on a Sunday morning with one of the people who used to live there. And the Commissioner for Parks in New York very sensibly decided that this poacher should be turned into gamekeeper. And so this man was persuaded to take people on tours to show what plants were edible from Central Park.

Sir Crispin Tickell31:24

And so he took my cook with him, and she went all over the place, and she saw what indeed could be found to eat in Central Park.

Sir Crispin Tickell31:32

Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times the following morning and saw her picture on the front page, the reason being of course that another member of the party had been a member of a person from the New York Times.

Presenter31:42

But what is there to eat in Central Park, and indeed can it be edible?

Sir Crispin Tickell31:45

Well, there are things that are edible, although I suspect they need a good deal of washing. But the oyster mushrooms, I can tell you, are extremely good.

Sir Crispin Tickell31:51

Because she's been back once and she cooked an excellent lunch which the French ambassador exclaimed upon with relish. And the only difficulty was that I later received a letter from the Parks Commissioner to say sure the ambassadors were sufficiently well paid without having to plunder the resources which should have gone more properly to the poor.

Sir Crispin Tickell32:10

I told him this was only a one-off affair and I was merely proving a point, and we proved it rather well.

Presenter32:16

Well, now retirement beckons, I think, later this year, and uh then well, it's hardly retirement because you've become the warden of an Oxford college and a rather appropriately named one.

Sir Crispin Tickell32:25

Yes, I'm going to re retire from the diplomatic service in August.

Sir Crispin Tickell32:30

And I'm then going to be warden of Greene College, Oxford. And Greene College, Oxford is a is a graduate college which specializes in science and medicine, and I shall look forward very much to doing that. In fact, going back to that crossroads where I took the other turning,

Sir Crispin Tickell32:45

In my very early youth when I decided to go into diplomacy rather than academe, now I have the opportunity to go back and to and to go back to academe and do some writing and some thinking, which are things that are somehow rather hard to do when you're struggling in the press of events.

Presenter32:59

Do I nevertheless sense a certain sadness, as it were, at ending your diplomatic career?

Sir Crispin Tickell33:05

You sense a certain sadness, but I don't think you sense too much sadness, because there are so many interesting things to do that I have always all through my life I've looked forward to the next thing rather than lamented the present or looked back nostalgically upon the past.

Presenter33:20

Let's have your last record.

Sir Crispin Tickell33:21

Well, my last record is rather different from the other ones, but it has some significance.

Sir Crispin Tickell33:27

It first it shows the affection I have for the United States and the traditions of the United States and above all the deprived people of the United States because there are many more poor people in the United States than people in Europe sometimes realize and secondly because it shows a very healthy scepticism about what higher authority whether it be governments, scientists, politicians or diplomats like to tell people. Scepticism is a very important element of life and this song shows it very well.

Speaker 433:57

Nessa Saraviso. We ain't messing up.

Speaker 234:01

Yeah, that's a f ⁇.

Speaker 434:02

Sarah Soul

Speaker 434:05

Hey Tail are you children, the devil's a villain, but it ain't necessarily so.

Presenter34:12

Francois Clemens singing It Ain't Necessarily So from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Lauren Marzell.

Presenter34:21

Sir Crispin, you have to choose one of those records which you'd uh like to take with you more than any of the others.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:26

Of course, it all rather depends on how long you're going to leave me marooned there. And to do it.

Presenter34:30

Until you escape.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:32

But I think that the one that I will probably like to hear most is the Brahm string quartet, because I think that every time I listen to it I hear something different in it.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:40

And some of the others make a message, they have a pretty tune.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:44

They are significant in different fashion. But this one is a sort of like a like a jewel that you would look at from many different sides and see it differently every time.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:54

And your book.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:55

Well, I believe that you're going to give me a copy of Shakespeare.

Sir Crispin Tickell34:59

And you're going to give me a copy of the Bible? Correct. Well, those are both very productive and interesting volumes, and so I want something rather different. And what I shall choose is Asimov's Guide to Science, because I can think of no better, compendious volume which brings up to date everything that is happening across the entire scientific spectrum.

Presenter35:17

And your luxury.

Sir Crispin Tickell35:18

My luxury also is very simple, and it derives from the fact that I'm going to be alone on this island for a long time.

Sir Crispin Tickell35:25

And it'll be night time for half a day.

Sir Crispin Tickell35:28

and during that night time I shall want to look at the stars.

Sir Crispin Tickell35:31

And so what I want to choose is a telescope.

Sir Crispin Tickell35:34

And a telescope by itself isn't very much good unless you have some means of powering it, and therefore I'd like a solar powered telescope and of course a little star handbook to accompany it, so as to tell me what latitude I am on and what I should be si what I should be looking for and seeing.

Presenter35:49

A second book I spot there.

Sir Crispin Tickell35:51

I think somehow it's part of the equipment that comes with the telescope.

Presenter35:54

I shall turn a blind eye to the book in the bottom of the box. Sir Crispin Tikkel, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Crispin Tickell36:01

Thank you.

Speaker 236:10

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.