Reverend David Jenkins

Speaker 30:00

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 30:08

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

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a clergyman. He decided he was going to devote his life to God when he was in his early teens, but he never served as a parish priest. At the age of sixty, however, he found himself catapulted into the controversies which pastoral responsibilities can bring, when, after a career spent mainly as an academic theologian, he was appointed to one of the Church's most important bishoprics. His views on the virgin birth and the resurrection caused outrage, while his opinions on current issues, particularly the divisions between rich and poor, infuriated politicians. He remained steadfast through the storms, insisting, as he still does, that he is a man of God, committed utterly to his faith. He is the Right Reverend David Jenkins, the Lord Bishop of Durham. You certainly Bishop came late to public controversy. Was that a great shock to the system when it happened?

Reverend David Jenkins1:26

It was a shock.

Reverend David Jenkins1:29

because the way I came to controversy was simply by bringing before people what, as it were, everybody in the theological colleges, theological faculties, and most of the trained ministry of most of the churches throughout the world knew. And so I thought I was just coming clean about where we were.

Presenter1:47

So you basically were just giving a public airing to something that had had private airings, hundreds of

Reverend David Jenkins1:54

Yeah.

Presenter1:54

Your knowledge

Reverend David Jenkins1:55

That's right.

Reverend David Jenkins1:57

And it came about in the first place on a television programme when I was actually laid on to explain um how nowadays one believed the old traditional doctrine of Jesus being God among us, you see. And uh I I did so, but I n I needed to tidy up about miracles, as it were, and um because I was a bishop designate, um uh there seemed to be hell to pay, and in the first place it was pretty shattering, and of course I was really very angry, though I didn't know that I was, and that showed itself in a depression a good many months later.

Presenter2:27

How did you escape from it all? How did you cope with it psychologically? You say you felt really rather depressed later, but were you able to go out and do anything or go and I don't know?

Reverend David Jenkins2:37

I think three ways really. One, by um relying on my friends who appeared to be far wider than I'd ever thought, but I have a a lovely family and a circle of friends. Um the second was that I had already begun to discover that the the point about prayer really is to, so to speak, withdraw into yourself and find some interior quietness. And the third thing was that I am a a walker and I used to just walk round and round or out into the country and Durham and so on and just let things be.

Presenter3:06

What about music? Was that any kind of riff?

Reverend David Jenkins3:07

Any kind of refuge for you? Well, of course it is, yes, that's right. And I mean, to go upstairs, w which is where the um the record player was, you know, and just sit down and and listen to whatever it was, you know, a bit of Mozart, a bit of Verdi, or if you wanted a bit of fun, a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan and so on. I mean, it it always seemed to me to to take you into a much calmer world, a much deeper world, a much exciting more exciting world.

Presenter3:30

A world which you're going to enter on this desert island. So wh what what's the first record you'll play when you get there?

Reverend David Jenkins3:35

I shall play this this a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. You see, I got keen on Gilbert and Sullivan when I was a boy. It has a great sort of nostalgic association with me because I knew I was going I was in the army, I was going to India, and Dollycart was on in London, and I got to most of them on my embarkation leave, and so it's got that sort of thing as well. And I thought that for today we'd just have a bit out of The Trial by Jury by Gilbert and Sullivan, you know, one of the earliest ones, and it's just great fun. And the particular bit which is an ensemble about a fine dilemma, is Verdian, and of course Verdi is one of my favourites too, and so I loved I also liked Sullivan's spoofs as well as Gilbert's language.

Speaker 44:14

A nice dilemma.

Speaker 44:18

We have here that cause are all our witch.

Speaker 44:24

Borola

Speaker 44:30

And at this stage it don't appear that we can save it. If I to wed the girl I'm love, our bridge will surely be

Speaker 45:01

A nice dinner on I will have a

Presenter5:14

Part of A Nice Dilemma from Gilbert and Sullivan's trial by jury performed by the Doily Carte Opera Company conducted by Isidore Godfrey. Now the Bishop of Durham inhabits the Bishop's Palace in Bishops, Auckland. Can you describe it to me, the palace?

Reverend David Jenkins5:30

It's a straggly place that started in the twelfth century and went through to the eighteenth century, having been pulled down a good deal in the Commonwealth and then rebuilt by Bishop Cousins at the end of the seventeenth century. So it's a marvellous mixture of things. I think it's got about seventy-five rooms or more in it altogether, including the possibly the biggest private chapel in Europe, which was the medieval banqueting hall, which Bishop Cousins turned into a big chapel. It may even be bigger than the Sistine Chapel in Rome, but of course I don't argue with the Pope. And it's got some lovely eighteenth century rooms, and it's just got a feel about it because it's such a jumble and such a mix. It's not easy for my wife to run, but it's a very lovely place to live in.

Presenter6:13

And do you live can you live there uh the kind of reflective existence suited to such elegant ecclesiastical surroundings? Or or is it uh the a kind of pressure to public life that one might expect?

Reverend David Jenkins6:25

It's pretty pressured, not least because the main domestic staff would be my wife if we didn't battle hard. We get help in from outside and so on. And you can't separate. It's one of those places that you cannot separate off a bishop's flat, so that when people come to call on me, they're quite as likely to trespass on domestic, as it were, as on official and so on. So it's quite a difficult thing, though my wife has worked absolutely magnificently as a sort of cross between house mother, housekeeper and lady of the house, and I think we've made it a friendly place. But it is a a constant tension of it, you know, because if you make people friendly, they stray into all sorts of things you'd rather they didn't stray into.

Presenter7:04

Now you get away from all of them on a desert island. None of these kinds of problems at all. How do you envisage spending your time all alone on an island?

Reverend David Jenkins7:13

Well, of course, at my age, it might very well bring about that sort of thing which is in the spiritual um history of um people from Hinduism as well as people from Christianity, which as you get older, an opportunity to actually settle down and concentrate on all the things you have learnt and reflect and try and be present to yourself and, as I would believe, to God and to the world around you. Mind you, I feel that I wouldn't take kindly to um too much solitude. What I would obviously try to do would be to be very disciplined about it, you know, as soon as the sun wakes me up to get up and do something, and uh then to go round and see what you could see from the horizon and so on.

Presenter7:50

And would you contemplate death?

Reverend David Jenkins7:53

Well, of course, one's at the age I am one's doing that already, I mean, because so many of one's friends retire and a good many of them die, and obviously that would be much in one's mind. I increasingly feel that I suppose the problem on a desert island would be the business of dying on one's own. And I think I'm afraid of dying still. I'm not afraid of death, because I think on the one hand I've had a splendid life and there would be a sense of an ending, and on the other hand, I believe that somehow or other you fall into the hands of God and there you are.

Reverend David Jenkins8:25

Let's have your second record. Ah yes, well that fits in, doesn't it really? It's a bit of Mozart's sexual tatti jubilati sung by that splendid singer Kirite Kanawa and I of course I'm terribly fond of Mozart, both his secular operas and his religious stuff. He somehow seems to me to get the feeling so splendidly and this has just the bounce that ought to be there in exalting in God.

Speaker 48:55

Carcona tu yes to es for merdo es fund merdo sorn déctra.

Speaker 49:17

Was that

Speaker 49:20

Where is what we know?

Speaker 49:23

So I'm taking it off.

Presenter9:49

Mozart's Exhortate Jubilate, sung by Dame Kiri Tecanua with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Sir Colin Davis.

Presenter9:57

Tell me about your family, Bishop. Do does it have a history of men of the Church or religious devotion?

Reverend David Jenkins10:04

Well, it has a history of religious devotion in the sense that both my grandfathers were Methodist lay preachers, and so I've heard both my grandfathers preaching and so on. And as a matter of fact,

Reverend David Jenkins10:15

It might all be in the genes, because after my mother heard my first sermon, after I'd been ordained, all she could say to me was, David, I wasn't listening to what you were saying. I could only remember that when you were a boy you lined up the chairs and preached to them. So you see it may have all been fixed by my grandfather

Presenter10:28

Well how old were you when you did that?

Reverend David Jenkins10:30

Apparently, you know, quite small, I mean before I was ten or something. It's terrible, isn't it?

Presenter10:34

What about home itself? What did your father do?

Reverend David Jenkins10:36

My father was I think his technical name was an insurance inspector with the Scottish Providence Institute, and he worked from the City of London.

Reverend David Jenkins10:43

Um

Presenter10:43

And you lived in in Bickley in Cape?

Reverend David Jenkins10:44

That's right and wrong.

Presenter10:45

And school was the local grammar.

Reverend David Jenkins10:45

Uh

Reverend David Jenkins10:47

No, it was well, it was a bit further up the line, at s at Catford, actually Saint Dunstan's, at Catford, which is still there as a public school now.

Presenter10:53

And how would your teachers then have described the young David Jenkins? What sort of thing did they say in your reports?

Reverend David Jenkins11:01

One of the things that one of them once said was that I was an indifferent calligraphist, which means that my writing was as bad then as it is now. But on the other hand, I got on terribly well with them, especially with a rather senior history master who slummed it by taking 1B, which was where I started. And he and I used to get into the most frightful arguments right from the beginning, and somehow got on well with one another. And so I got terribly interested in history. And I well remember doing a short paper in 3A on Chadwick and health reforms. And he saying to me, Why did you say that, boy? I mean, where did you get it from? And I told him where it got from. He said, oh, well, that's quite interesting. And then I used the word a priori, and he said, what do you mean by that? But you can explain it next week, because he knew I couldn't, but I'd got it right, you know. So there was this sort of. So you were quite precocious. Well, apparently I was, but I enjoyed it so, and my teachers helped me to enjoy it.

Presenter11:49

Some more music.

Reverend David Jenkins11:50

Yes, well this is a bit of fun. I'm very fond of listening to Strauss waltzes and so on, and I thought as a choice we would have this um this accelerationen waltz, because it's not one of the famous ones, but it does have some of the the the splendid um Strauss uh flair in it.

Presenter13:05

Part of Johann Strauss's waltz Accelerationen, opus two, three, four, played by the Vienna Folks Opera Orchestra conducted by Josef Leo Gruber.

Presenter13:15

Can you recall then, Bishop, the precise moment in your teens when you decided that you wanted to be ordained, to dedicate your life to God?

Reverend David Jenkins13:24

I must make a distinction, of course. People dedicate their lives to God in all sorts of ways, and ordination is only one of them. I think it was typical of how I've experienced life, which is um things emerge and I wake up to the fact that I decided something long after I've decided it.

Presenter13:40

But going back to that that moment when you were fifteen, when you decided that you might like to be ordained, did you nevertheless think, well, it might wear off, it might be just a fad?

Reverend David Jenkins13:50

Now that's very interesting you should say that. Actually that had occurred to me when I thought I was converted. You know, that was earlier still, um when I'd heard a very powerful preacher who'd been a missionary in China telling us about God wanted you to do this and the other and I thought, well this means me, you see and so I I think I went through a sort of feeling inside which some people would talk about as giving your heart to Jesus. And I can very well I may have made this up, you know how you do, but it's clear in my mind that when I went to bed that night I said a prayer and I thought to myself, I wonder whether this will be like New Year resolutions, it won't last. And I remember thinking, I don't believe it will be. So I'd got that out of the way.

Presenter14:29

Earlier.

Reverend David Jenkins14:29

Earlier, really.

Presenter14:30

Now your own children, as I understand, and you have four. Um none of them was confirmed in their teens at all.

Reverend David Jenkins14:37

No, that is right. We were very anxious that they would find their own way. And also, being an academic by then and chaplain of a college, you don't take children to college chapel on the whole. It that might upset the fellows and might bore the children and so on. So they went to the local church and so on. So there was a bit of a difficulty about sharing and we just left it, though I do remember on one occasion um uh my two sons who are the older ones ca my wife said they called on her one morning she used to sort of meet them while she was drinking her tea at at breakfast, you know, uh I mean in bed and they well had a chat about the day and they uh solemnly informed her that they didn't on the whole want to go to church and they found it really boring, but on no account were they to be counted among the atheists, you see. And this sort of thing was around.

Presenter15:19

But one of your sons is now studying for the church, isn't he?

Reverend David Jenkins15:21

No, no, one of our sons is ordained, yes, indeed. Yes, he is ordained, and at the moment he's um chaplain at Nottingham University.

Presenter15:23

He is now ordained.

Reverend David Jenkins15:28

Uh

Presenter15:28

Record number four.

Reverend David Jenkins15:29

Well, record number four fits into the family thing because I've always Verdi I'm very fond of, and I've always thought that Verdi had a special relationship with his daughter. I believe that is so, though I've not read up the stuff. And there are some marvellous pieces where father and daughter suddenly surge into terrific music. And this bit which I've chosen is in Simon Bocanegra, where Gobby, who is singing the part, addresses his daughter and there's this marvellous Felia piece. And so it's a part out of Simone Bocanegra with Tito Gobby and Vittoria de Los Angeles.

Speaker 416:08

Do you love me tonight?

Reverend David Jenkins16:11

And

Presenter17:05

Part of the aria Filia Atal Nome Palpito, from Verdi's Simon Bocanegra, sung by Tito Gobbi and Vittoria de Los Angeles, with the orchestra and choir of the Opera Theatre of Rome, conducted by Gabrielle Santini.

Presenter17:19

So, Bishop, you were an officer in the Royal Artillery, and spent some time in in India which meant that you didn't take up your Oxford scholarship until you were, what, about twenty two?

Reverend David Jenkins17:29

Where are we? 1947. That's right. Yes, precisely.

Presenter17:33

Yes. And and you also met your wife at university, your wife Molly, the sister of an old army chum. Was she, may I ask, the only woman you ever considered marrying?

Reverend David Jenkins17:34

I spend

Reverend David Jenkins17:43

Yes, yes, that's true. Um

Reverend David Jenkins17:46

Um I met her because my army friend got engaged to what turned out to be Molly's friend at Durham, and in those days if you went on a walking tour with an engaged girl, you didn't have to go on your own. So he had to take his sister to chaperone, and he knew that his sister might feel bored, and so he co-opted me with

Presenter18:07

And again, it's part of this sort of natural flow of your life, things falling into place.

Reverend David Jenkins18:10

Yes, it is.

Reverend David Jenkins18:11

And we met on the Roman wall and discussed archaeology and then found we were interested in other things.

Presenter18:16

You had a rather mystical experience, though, didn't you, not long before you were appointed Bishop of Durham. You received what what I suppose might be called a sign.

Reverend David Jenkins18:25

Well, of course I only read that backwards. I didn't know at the time that I was going to be invited to be Bishop of Durham, but I was on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, for which I have now great affection, and I was walking round this island in a sort of meditative frame of mind, and as I've now told, when I got back to the road, I saw a playing card lying with its face down, and before I picked it up, I had an uncomfortable feeling that it would be what it was, which was the Joker. And I remember thinking, because of the Holy Islands and the prayers and so on, God is going to play some trick on me, and I think that's true. But of course, I've only read that as being highly significant in the fact that it was some months later that, rather contrary to my expectations and hope, I received a letter from a certain Prime Minister, signed Margaret Thatcher, saying that she wanted to give my name to the Queen to be the Bishop of Durham.

Presenter18:51

Yeah.

Presenter19:10

There is of course there was of course the other business, the the boat from the blue.

Reverend David Jenkins19:15

Yes.

Presenter19:15

Uh which was the strike of lightning that set fire to Yorkminster three days after your consecration as a bishop.

Presenter19:23

Many people, as you know, saw that as a demonstration of divine discontent.

Reverend David Jenkins19:27

Yes. I could never take it at all seriously. I mean, my first reaction was that God was trying to get at General Sin, and I didn't blame him, but he'd missed them because they were there about two days later or something. It's perhaps the wrong tone, and yet I feel there's a side to this where you have to keep your sense of humour and proportion. And of course, it was really quite clear to me that the God who I believe is shown to me in and through Jesus is not that sort of vindictive, bad-tempered, angry old man.

Presenter19:36

Yeah.

Presenter20:03

Next piece of music.

Reverend David Jenkins20:04

Yeah.

Reverend David Jenkins20:06

Yeah, this is a bit of fun. I when I um I took a job for a while in Switzerland, you know, and worked for the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Um and since then um my wife and I, indeed the whole family, have been in in love with Switzerland and we go for holidays and so on. And so I thought I would like to take to my desert island, you know, just some of this um Swiss music when they yodel and when you get concertinas and people just enjoy themselves and I can associate it with um real folk festivals that I've been to, not the tourist stuff, but up country and and and this really seen the people coming from the different villages and doing their yodeling and playing their long Alpenhorns and so on. And this is just a small piece of a of a Swiss yodling song.

Speaker 420:59

Holy Drupal, holy dooly, holy holy, holy doo.

Speaker 421:11

Holy wall, walla, holy boo, holy, walla, holy boo, holly, walla, holy boo.

Presenter21:43

On Top of the Mountains, a Swiss yodling song. It was, of course, misses Thatcher who in nineteen eighty three put your name forward as a possible candidate to succeed as Bishop of Durham. Do you suspect she wished she'd never done that, as things turned out?

Reverend David Jenkins21:59

I'm not entirely clear, because I gained the impression that she was very scrupulous, in fact, about uh letting the Church of England do what, in due form and after due consideration, it thought it should do. Um I gained the impression later, um, when some of us bishops were invited to meet her, that she was genuinely hurt and disappointed, that we seemed to misunderstand what she was after, and how

Reverend David Jenkins22:28

Christian her motive was, how deeply she was concerned about the freedom and the flourishing of the individual, and that therefore she felt that she was not getting the support and perhaps the positive criticism that she might have hoped.

Presenter22:42

But you you had really been quite critical. You had called her social policies wicked and selfish, hadn't you?

Reverend David Jenkins22:47

Yes, that was because of of a particular concatenation at the time of that budget, when, as far as I remember, there was a budget which brought down the higher tax bans and therefore greatly benefited the people at the top, which went with certain things to do with social security regulations, which, whatever was the intention, one had plenty of evidence on the ground was making the worse off, worse off, or cutting people out and calling them to drop out at the bottom. And I think it was a third thing which I don't remember now, and therefore I felt it right to say that this combination had to be described as verging on the wicked, though I did try to make the point that this was a criticism of the policies, and I was couldn't comment on the motives of the persons concerned.

Presenter23:29

But you commented on the person of Ian McGregor, who was uh the chairman of the Coboard at the time and a a Thatcher appointee. You called him an elderly imported American, which

Reverend David Jenkins23:39

It was quite rude, really. I suppose it was. It didn't occur to me at the time. It seemed to me to be a very precise description, and was meant to mean that surely we could have done with somebody a bit younger to handle this difficult situation. We ought not if you have imported somebody, you have imported him in order to do down something which is around locally, and that his he whether he was an American or not, his style of business and dealing with unions was American, so it was meant to be s purely descriptive. Of course, I also said things about Scargill standing down, and I had picked up this hint from actual conversations with local miners who seemed to feel that this was a quarrel foisted on'em by the government and headed up by MacGregor, and Arthur Scargill was perhaps going too far the other way, and if only w we could have got both MacGregor and Scargill out of the way, we might have found a much more sensible solution.

Presenter24:34

So, as far as you're concerned, you

Presenter24:39

have been and are doing your job, and giving the lead on moral and soci social issues is absolutely the right thing for a bishop to do, even when those social and moral issues are bang in the middle of the political stage.

Reverend David Jenkins24:51

I should have thought more than ever when they're bang in the middle, because if they are bang in the middle of the political stage, then they ought to be matters of great moral importance, of significance for our neighbours and our community and our society. And and therefore that's the place for a bishop to be who is seeking to bear witness to the God of the Gospel, who is concerned with the well being, the welfaring, the future of all men and women. It's very much a question of the two commandments, you know. I mean, that is to say, love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself, and that's what politics ought to be about.

Presenter25:24

Record number six.

Reverend David Jenkins25:26

This is a piece of Brahms. I'm very fond of Brahms because I think it's marvellous the the depths he goes to and the beautiful tunes he has and the way he builds them up and this is an example out of the slow movement of his fourth symphony.

Presenter26:41

Part of the slow movement of Brahms Symphony No. Four in E minor, opus ninety eight, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karrian.

Presenter26:50

It was, of course, your remarks in early 1984 about the virgin birth and the resurrection and the incarnation which created the greatest controversy. There were you, a bishop designate, who was apparently denying the literal truth of some of these things. Do you think that you were guilty, perhaps, of underestimating the stir that it would cause?

Reverend David Jenkins27:13

Well, clearly I was. I think I was formed by my experience of the controversies in the nineteen sixties over Honest to God and John Robinson, when I thought that these things had been gone through in a much more open and less threatening way, and I hadn't realized that there was a sense in which public opinion and church concern and so on had almost regressed. So I was surprised at the violence of it, yes.

Presenter27:35

But the problem was that that that the effect it had was that you undermined people's faith, didn't you? The people who did believe literally that Mary was a virgin, suddenly their faith was shaken because a bishop said this was not necessarily so.

Reverend David Jenkins27:50

Yes, that was a matter of great pastoral concern to me, but it was also of concern to me that people got to grips with what they really believed. It is necessary to understand that questioning the literal virgin birth is something to do with an understanding of the way the New Testament is built up, and how those two stories at the beginning of Matthew and Luke are plainly stories made up out of the Old Testament to bear witness to the reality that Jesus was God. And therefore, questioning the literal virgin birth is not questioning the truth of incarnation, God being the man whom Jesus was, and similarly, raising doubts about depending on the empty tomb, because I mean the tomb may have been empty, but why? So questioning the empty tomb is not questioning something which I believe very fiercely and deeply, which is that God had raised up Jesus, that the man Jesus in his personality and his promise and his presence had gone through death and was alive the other side of it, speaking of a whole possibility for us and for the whole world. Record number seven.

Reverend David Jenkins28:54

This is a singing of a piece of Thomas Tompkins by the choir of Moreton College, Oxford, and it has two connections for me. One is that the conductor is Bernard Rose, who was a colleague of mine when I was and he were fellows of Queen's College, Oxford, and so there's great associations with Oxford. And then the whole Tompkins thing and the choir is in this great tradition of English choral church singing, which means such a lot to me, and I'd love to have a good example of it, especially conducted by a friend on a desert island.

Presenter30:28

Thomas Tompkins' My Shepherd is the Living Lord, sung by the choir of Maudlin College, Oxford, directed by Bernard Rose, with Christopher Gower playing the organ. It does seem these days that the new Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, um is now in the controversial ecclesiastical seat. Men of the church do seem to be very controversial these days, where they didn't seem to be so twenty years ago.

Reverend David Jenkins30:51

Yes, isn't this partly to do with the fact that on the one hand, in a negative sense, the many Christians seem to be unnecessarily on the defensive because things are changing so rapidly, so they get sort of jumpy about other people raising questions about the faith instead of seeing that the capacity to raise questions about the faith is itself an expression of faithfulness. And on the on the positive side, it is because I think people are beginning to get interested in the fundamental questions, the deep questions, you know, is there a God, what sort of resource have we got, uh, what are we really about? and so on.

Presenter31:24

You patiently, I mean you used the words

Presenter31:26

Excitement and enjoyment quite often. You patently enjoy your job very much. You've held it for seven years now. You're sixty-six. You you could retire if you wanted to.

Reverend David Jenkins31:35

Yes, that's right, I'm past sixty five.

Presenter31:35

Uh

Presenter31:37

But I suspect you're not going to.

Reverend David Jenkins31:40

I am planning, at any rate, w we've got a programme in the diocese which I think I'm concerned with for the next two years. It can only go I can only go on for three. I think we'll just see how we go. Um at the moment I feel that I have things to offer and I get on with people and it would be running away to get out, um attractive in many ways as, you know, retirement and concentrating on a few things is.

Presenter32:05

Yeah.

Reverend David Jenkins32:05

I code number eight.

Reverend David Jenkins32:07

And now we come to uh something from Haydn, from one of Haydn's masses. I have become more and more enthralled by Haydn and his masses, and I always have the picture when I'm listening to them, that I was told in some book or other that Haydn to to compose always put on his best suit and said his prayers before he started, because composing was very like going to church, and and and there's something deep and exciting in Haydn's Masses, and here's just a bit, it's a sanctus out of one of the masses, the Harmonia Messa, which I think um speaks for itself.

Speaker 432:43

Slide race.

Presenter33:39

Part of the Sanctus from Haydn's Harmonia Messa, sung by the choir of Saint John's College, Cambridge, with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by George Guest. So, Bishop, you have to choose one of those eight records. If you could only take one, which one would it be?

Reverend David Jenkins33:55

Oh, it would be the Haydn. I think if you list had the whole of the record, with the whole of the Mass. You see, you've got the celebratory side of the Mass itself, and then you've got all Haydn's ingenuity and different levels and so on, and it would bear listening to, and listening to, and listening to.

Presenter34:10

And it would enable you to survive.

Reverend David Jenkins34:11

Oh, very much so.

Presenter34:12

What about your book? We we have the Bible and we have the complete works of Shakespeare waiting for you.

Presenter34:19

What extra book would you like to take?

Reverend David Jenkins34:20

I would like to be able to take a book which I fear I won as a school prize, which is The Complete Short Stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Presenter34:26

I thought you were a May Grey man.

Reverend David Jenkins34:28

I am a Magray man, but you see, each book of those is just a short story, isn't it? Whereas this one has got, I think, I don't know how many pages in, and has got all the stories in, and some of which I I I read again and again out of sheer joy because of some uh neat remark of Holmes about such as you see, my dear Watson, but you do not observe, and various other things that turn up, and I think I'd thoroughly enjoy it.

Presenter34:49

Night.

Presenter34:51

And your luxury.

Reverend David Jenkins34:52

Well, I wonder whether I'd be allowed it,'cause it might sound to be practical, but that's binoculars. But I didn't want it for scanning the horizon,'cause I hope I wouldn't. What I would want it for, you see, was so that I could watch the birds, and especially watch them in detail. I've discovered with birds feeding in the garden, if you watch carefully, it's fascinating watching what different tits will do, and and there's a different there's a chaffinch which is really quite bold and one that isn't, and so on. So I think if I could have binoculars so that I could watch closely, I would find all sorts of fascinating things to keep me occupied for days on end.

Presenter35:23

Binoculars strictly for watching the birds.

Reverend David Jenkins35:25

That is right.

Presenter35:26

David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Reverend David Jenkins35:30

Thank you.

Speaker 335:39

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