Leslie Baily

Speaker 10:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plomley. I hope you enjoy listening.

Leslie Baily0:26

Uh

Presenter0:29

How'd you do, ladies and gentlemen?

Presenter0:31

Our castaway this week is an author, a journalist, and a scriptwriter.

Presenter0:35

One of his BBC series is now in its 31st year, and that's the famous scrapbook series.

Presenter0:42

Here's Leslie Bailey. Leslie, is music an important thing in your life?

Presenter0:46

It's important because I enjoy it.

Presenter0:49

Do you play any instrument?

Presenter0:51

I play the piano a little.

Presenter0:54

Still, if you're in amusement? Occasionally.

Presenter0:57

Do you ever use music as a background when you're working?

Presenter1:00

No, never. I dislike background music.

Presenter1:03

Do you think you could adapt yourself to the isolation of a desert island?

Presenter1:09

I think this would be very difficult.

Presenter1:11

These records you've chosen, that pile of eight there, do they follow any kind of

Presenter1:16

Plan or pattern

Presenter1:18

I think if there is any pattern about them, it is that, you see, I'm a journalist. I've always been a journalist, originally a newspaper man.

Presenter1:25

And that means I'm interested in people and events, real events. And I think these discs, in many cases, reflect people and events in my own life.

Presenter1:37

What's the first one you've chose? The first is The Sleeping Beauty, because it reminds me of just this, a great evening.

Presenter1:44

It was after the last war was over when I took my wife and children to see this ballet newly presented with Fontaine at Covent Garden. It was the return with peace of that sort of thing with all its glamour and wonderful dancing. And I like to remember too my children, teenagers, boy and the girl, sitting by my side and watching it for the very first time.

Presenter3:07

The parta deux from the last act of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, Ephraim Kurtz conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. What's your second choice, Leslie?

Presenter3:15

The second is a setting by Benjamin Britton of the very old English song Early One Morning.

Presenter3:22

Do you want to know why, Pete?

Presenter3:25

Well, I went to school as a boy at a place called Sibford, a Quaker boarding school in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, and there I first heard

Presenter3:36

villages singing this sort of song.

Presenter3:40

It songs from our wonderful British tradition of folk songs.

Presenter3:44

And there was also a teacher in the school who awakened our interest in this sort of thing.

Presenter3:50

And this one, early one morning.

Presenter3:53

This old tune

Presenter3:55

has a sort of sweetly sparkling setting, like the early morning in the Cotswolds when the mist softly rises in the valleys.

Presenter4:06

O kiss the God, and fresh are the roses I've cut from the god, and to bind on thy breast.

Speaker 24:17

Uh

Presenter4:24

Oh, don't they see?

Presenter4:31

How could you use?

Presenter4:35

Early one morning, Pete appears in Benjamin Britton.

Presenter4:38

You went to school in the Cotswolds, Leslie. Was that where you were born?

Presenter4:42

No, I was born at St. Albans in Hertfordshire. What was it your first ambition to be?

Presenter4:47

Well, the first thing I ever did, looking that way, was to write and edit and produce a magazine.

Presenter4:55

It was called the BFM. What did that stand for? Dailies, Fortnightly Magazine. How old were you then? Eleven.

Presenter5:04

What was your first job when you went to school? I tried to sell fruit on the dockside at Bristol. What went wrong with that?

Presenter5:12

Well, I only stayed there a week because I sold the fruit too cheaply.

Presenter5:17

We mustn't do that.

Presenter5:19

What was your next job?

Presenter5:20

Uh well eventually after that sort of uh

Presenter5:24

try out this and try out that.

Presenter5:26

was a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Evening News at Leeds.

Presenter5:30

How long did you have that, John?

Presenter5:32

I stayed on the Yorkshire Evening News as reporter and writer on this, that and the other for seven or eight years. I believe you began writing for radio very early in your career.

Presenter5:42

Yes, when I was seventeen, I think. While you were still a julia reporter. Yeah.

Presenter5:47

What was the first script you sold them?

Presenter5:50

The first thing I did was a dramatization of Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, which I wrote for the old BBC station at Belfast. I think it was 1923, it might have been 24.

Presenter6:02

It was produced by a young man who was then as unknown as I was.

Presenter6:08

And his name was Tarun Guth.

Presenter6:11

This is right back in the beginnings of the BBC.

Presenter6:14

And I gather scriptwriting wasn't very well paid in those days. Three pounds for that one.

Presenter6:19

And that was only because it was Christmas, don't you?

Speaker 16:21

Yeah.

Presenter6:22

Nevertheless, you persevere.

Speaker 16:22

Yeah.

Presenter6:24

Yeah.

Presenter6:25

Eventually after the Yorkshire Paper, you you joined a Sunday paper in London. Yes, I was the editor of the radio supplement of the old Sunday referee, which is now defunct.

Presenter6:35

And I was also the wireless correspondent of the London Evening News. That was the pattern for quite a few years: journalism and radio scripts. Yes, and then I.

Presenter6:45

gave up the journalism and went full-time into radio.

Presenter6:49

You were on the staff with the BBC for a few years. Yes, I was on the staff for about 10 years.

Presenter6:54

I joined

Presenter6:56

I think it was in 37.

Presenter6:58

As the first writer, full-time writer on the staff, there are many now, and then later on I also did producing.

Presenter7:07

And since you left the BBC staff, you've been a freelance writer of books.

Presenter7:11

Radio scripts and films. Yeah. Well, I want to talk to you in detail about your career, especially about the scrapbook programmes. Well, let's have another record first. What, Nick?

Presenter7:21

Well, when I was a small boy, going back to them, my favourite book, or one of them, was Alice in Wonderland.

Presenter7:27

I'd like a record of Douglas Cleverdon's production of this.

Presenter7:32

It would cheer me up when betting glum on my desert island because I can imagine myself.

Presenter7:39

Playing this bit where Alice meets the griffon and the mock turtle on the shore of her never-never see.

Presenter7:46

and they introduce her to that delightful dance, the Lobster Quadrille.

Presenter7:52

Now, young lady, you may not have lived much under the sea.

Speaker 27:56

I haven't.

Presenter7:57

And perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster.

Speaker 28:00

I once tasted. Oh, uh no, never.

Presenter8:03

So you can have no idea what a delightful thing a lobster quadrille is.

Speaker 28:08

No, indeed What sort of a dance is it?

Presenter8:11

Why, you first form into a line along the seashore. Two lines. Seals, turtles, and so on. Then when you've cleared the jellyfish out of the way, that generally takes some time. You advance twice. Each with a lobster as a partner. Of course. Advance twice, set to partners. Change lobsters and retard in the same order. Then you know you throw the lobster as far out to sea as you can. Swim after them. Turn a somersault in the sea. Change lobsters again. Back to land again and

Speaker 18:24

Of course.

Leslie Baily8:31

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 18:39

He's hiding.

Leslie Baily8:39

Drop.

Speaker 18:40

Back to that

Presenter8:44

That's all the first figure. I can just imagine myself careering up and down my island beach and hurling lobsters out to sea and dancing the the lobster quadrille, eh?

Presenter8:55

Well on that disc we heard Jane Asher, Norman Shelley and Ian Wallace.

Presenter9:00

Leslie, how did the scrapbook program start? Was it a sudden flash of inspiration or did they evolve out of something else?

Presenter9:06

They evolved out of several other things coming together, different ideas. When was it?

Presenter9:12

1933.

Presenter9:14

Which year did you decide to do first?

Presenter9:16

The first one was strapbooked from 1913, 20 years earlier.

Presenter9:20

How many scrapbook programs have there been altogether?

Presenter9:23

There have been there in nearly a hundred

Presenter9:26

Covering which years? From 1896 up to coronation year 1953.

Speaker 19:27

From a

Presenter9:32

He will never come nearer up to date than ten years.

Presenter9:35

Uh no, if if you bring them too near

Presenter9:38

History hasn't got into perspective. It doesn't have any focus really.

Presenter9:44

How many producers have you worked with during this? Four producers.

Speaker 19:47

Before

Presenter9:49

Charles Brewer was the first. He and I inaugurated the idea.

Presenter9:54

and Vernon Harris has done them for the last ten years.

Presenter9:57

How long does a year take you to research, a new year that you haven't done before?

Presenter10:02

Well, normally I'm working on several other things. I may be writing a book while I'm doing a scrapbook.

Presenter10:08

So it's difficult to work out the time it takes to do a scrapbook. But if I was only doing a scrapbook, I should hate to have less than, shall we say, three months.

Presenter10:19

You've come up with many scoops in these programmes. Which one are you proudest of?

Presenter10:23

I think the biggest was Marconi telling the story of his.

Presenter10:28

Sending the first wireless signal across the Atlantic in 1901. How did you get in?

Presenter10:33

Well, at that time, relations between Britain and Italy weren't exactly...

Presenter10:38

Good.

Speaker 110:38

Good.

Presenter10:39

And we were afraid he would not fall into our net when we had the idea of getting this story from him for a scrapbook.

Presenter10:48

And one day we heard he was actually leaving the country the following morning and in fact he did leave and never came back again.

Presenter10:56

So I went down to his offices and

Presenter10:59

With one of his staff, we got together and

Presenter11:02

We worked out a script from the archives information there.

Presenter11:08

And we put this script onto the great man's desk.

Presenter11:11

When he came into work the following morning, there it was, and we thought, well, it's now or never.

Presenter11:16

And we feared he would just throw it away.

Presenter11:20

And in fact he picked it up and very charmingly sat on the table and picked up the microphone and told the story of that great event. That was quite a school.

Presenter11:31

Let's have record number four now. What have we got next?

Presenter11:34

I'd like a song from the 20s. This is when I was what they now call a teenager.

Presenter11:40

I went to Cheltenham Grammar School in my teens.

Presenter11:44

and what it was to be one of the swells of the sixth, strolling up and down the promenade gardens on a summer evening.

Presenter11:51

With one's hair sleeked down like Herbert Sutcliffe's, and one's trousers creased as sharp as a razor, and an eye for the girls, and an ear, of course, for the tunes of the twenties, our tunes.

Presenter12:02

Let's have one to remind me of my twenties youth.

Leslie Baily12:07

I love him in the morning

Leslie Baily12:10

And I love him.

Leslie Baily12:14

I love him, yes I love him.

Speaker 112:16

Uh

Leslie Baily12:18

When the stars are shining bright

Leslie Baily12:22

I love him in the morning

Leslie Baily12:25

And I love him in the fall But last

Leslie Baily12:31

Come back

Leslie Baily12:32

I loved him best.

Presenter12:36

Last night on the back porch, the Andrews has

Presenter12:40

Leslie, it's thanks to you and Scrapbook that we now have a recording of King George V opening Wembley exhibition.

Presenter12:46

Well, I wouldn't say it's thanks to me, it's thanks to one of our listeners. We had done a scrapbook of the Wembley year in which we said that there was no recording at all of the King opening that exhibition because recordings weren't

Presenter13:01

dumb in those days.

Presenter13:03

And this lady said we were wrong because her husband

Presenter13:07

was a technician.

Presenter13:09

who had himself privately recorded the king in his own back porch.

Presenter13:14

On his own machine. And so she had a record of the king, and she very kindly sent us a copy of this. And the next time we did a scrapbook of that year, we put that record in. I hope the BBC is keeping for posterity all the stuff you've dug up. Oh, yes, everything is kept.

Presenter13:31

Let's have record number five now.

Presenter13:33

I'd like a record by the famous Huddersfield Choir.

Presenter13:37

Because this has associations with my years in Yorkshire as newspaper reporter and working at the early BBC studio there that leads on all sorts of things.

Presenter13:49

And I married leads less.

Presenter13:53

Uh

Presenter13:54

To remind me of all this, I'd like a disc of the Huddersfield choir.

Presenter13:59

singing in their wonderful fashion something from Messiah, because this work is surely one of the wonders of the world and would lift up my island spirits.

Presenter14:10

for that reason alone.

Presenter15:12

And The Glory of the Lord from Handel's Messiah, the Huddersfield Choral Society and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.

Presenter15:21

We've been talking a lot about the scrapbook programmes, but there have been many other successful series that you've been concerned with.

Presenter15:27

Yes, well there have been other series, there was Dear Sir, The Letterbox of the Air.

Presenter15:33

Which I edited. There was Leslie Bailey's logbook, a series which came on soon after tape recorders were first used for interviews without scripts. And of course, that.

Presenter15:47

in the first place and brought as many

Presenter15:49

Um

Presenter15:50

Unexpected results. You went all over England on that program, I didn't remember. Oh, yes, I went everywhere I could where there was a story. I remember one story.

Presenter16:01

I went to a an old smithy in uh

Presenter16:05

Warwickshire, where there was an old blacksmith

Presenter16:08

and also a young apprentice.

Presenter16:10

who had never shooed a horse in his life.

Presenter16:13

And I wanted to interview this lad and get out of him the difference between the old blacksmith and the new agricultural engineer.

Presenter16:22

So I said to him.

Speaker 116:23

Yeah.

Presenter16:24

How many years have you been a blacksmith? Oh, but they don't call you a blacksmith nowadays, do they?

Presenter16:30

And he said, no, they call me Titch.

Presenter16:34

Mm.

Presenter16:36

And of course, there's your great personal enthusiasm that we all know about for Gilbert and Sullivan. A very successful radio series. In fact, several, I believe. The life story of Gilbert and Sullivan, yes.

Presenter16:47

And you you turned those into a book. Uh the ESA book, uh the Gilbert and Sullivan book, and the film that you wrote with Sidney Gilliard. That's it. Indeed, the scrapbooks have been films too, haven't they? Some of them. Two scrapbooks have been filmed, yes.

Presenter17:01

I think we've got now to record number six. Well, in order to have the lion's share of all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas,

Presenter17:08

I choose the brilliantly arranged medley of tunes from them.

Presenter17:12

by Charles McCarris.

Presenter17:15

for the ballet Pineapple Poll, which incidentally Charles McCarris was conductor of one of the Gilbert and Sullivan series on the air.

Presenter18:22

The opening of the Pineapple Pal Ballet music.

Presenter18:25

Charles Macedon conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter18:28

Leslie, what are your hobbies?

Presenter18:30

Oh, uh painting and sailing. Well, sailing would be useful on this island. Could you build a boat?

Presenter18:36

I'd have a shot at it. You could build a shelter at any rate. Yes, I'd try it. Do you think you would look after yourself fairly well generally? Can you get food?

Presenter18:44

Levoffer land, I'm a very bad gardener.

Presenter18:48

Any good at fishing?

Presenter18:50

Yes, that's how I can fish.

Presenter18:52

Would you try to get away on this boat?

Presenter18:54

That depended where we were at this island. You wouldn't know where you were. Well, then I think I'd stay on the island.

Leslie Baily18:59

Well there are

Presenter19:01

Don't blame you. Let's have record number seven.

Presenter19:04

When you asked me to suggest these records, I felt at first of asking for some music that I'd never heard in my life, because I can quite imagine that on the islands you'd get sick to death of hearing them.

Presenter19:16

Um but then on on the other hand if I

Presenter19:20

suggest something I've never heard, I may be sick of it when I hear it.

Presenter19:24

So what do I do? I think I choose.

Presenter19:26

Elgar's violin concerto because

Presenter19:29

I know this to some extent, but not nearly enough. I once used it in a scrapbook, 1910.

Presenter19:36

weaving this music in and out of words describing the countryside and its beauty and its quietness.

Presenter19:43

This means I've played it over myself a good many times and each time I've found a new beauty in it.

Presenter19:50

Yet I know that I hardly know it at all, so I'd like to do that on my island.

Speaker 119:51

Right.

Presenter20:55

The closing passage of the second movement of Elgar's violin concerto, Yehudi Manuena Soloist.

Presenter21:01

What's your last record, Leslie?

Presenter21:04

Rekhbenilov's second piano concerto.

Presenter21:06

Here again is an association with something that happened to me. It was Munich year 1938, a crisis night.

Presenter21:16

and I went to a prom concert at the old Queen's Hall. The newspaper posters outside told that we were close to war, and we all expected the heavens to rain fire upon us at almost any time.

Presenter21:29

and one wondered how long this hall would last and the people in it and the music.

Presenter21:34

and I went straight into Queen's Hall to this music,

Presenter21:37

I walked into another world.

Presenter22:38

The opening of Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto.

Presenter22:41

Venomoisevich with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Hugo Rignard.

Presenter22:46

There are your eight records, Leslie. If you could only have one, which would it be?

Presenter22:51

I think the Red Man are not.

Presenter22:53

And one luxury to take with you to the island. I think I'd like a full set of woodworkers' tools.

Presenter22:59

Hi, aye.

Presenter23:01

These could be very useful, I I'm sorry, but uh Well, you see, there's another thing about this. My father, my grandfather, my great and my great great grandfather were all skilled craftsmen in wood and metal. And sometimes I feel as a journalist

Presenter23:17

That by not following such a profession, I have deserted a rich family tradition.

Presenter23:23

Well, all right, you can take these tools to decorate your doorposts.

Presenter23:26

But you mustn't use them for making boats or houses or anything. Oh, what a shame.

Presenter23:33

One book then.

Presenter23:34

Come hither, a collection by Walter de la Mer of poetry of every kind by every kind of author.

Presenter23:41

Right. And thank you, Leslie Bailey, for letting us hear your choice of desert island discs. Thank you, Roy.

Presenter23:48

Goodbye, everyone.

Presenter23:53

Yeah.

Leslie Baily23:59

Uh