Sir Miles Thomas

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.

Sir Miles Thomas0:26

Uh

Presenter0:32

How do you do, ladies and gentlemen?

Presenter0:34

Costaway this week is a businessman.

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One of our best-known industrialists, he's used to adding up in millions. Here is Sir Miles Thomas. Sir Miles, could you resign yourself to loneliness and isolation?

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Oh, yes, I think so. I'd rather enjoy.

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prepared to rest on a desert island, providing it wasn't too long, you know?

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How big a part does music play in your life?

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When I was born in North Wales, and my ears were sailed from a very early age.

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with sweet sounds of music. Wales is the land of song.

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And all through my life music has been a pattern in the thread. Have you any practical skill? Do you play an instrument or do you sing yourself?

Presenter1:14

No, I can just about work a gramophone, which uh makes me a good um

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Castaway for this programme. Do you play it very often?

Presenter1:22

Oh yes indeed. I like it because you're not a captive audience, so to speak. You can put on whichever record you want instead of being tied to any particular piece.

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Did you have any plan in choosing these aid records?

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Yes, I've chosen them from

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uh part of my life

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Which are

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Dear to me, so to speak. You will find as we go through them that they are in a kind of orderly sequence. What's the first one you've chosen?

Presenter1:49

Well, I think it'll be very appropriate if I chose a good Welsh tune called March over the Men of Harlech.

Sir Miles Thomas2:06

Ah, Kahil, the foe advancing, for its steeds are proudly francing.

Sir Miles Thomas2:14

Helmet in the sunbeam glances

Sir Miles Thomas2:32

Amid the pain from the rocks rebounding, let the war resounding. Some men all, come recall the haughty force around.

Speaker 12:36

On the rocks rebounding, let the water sounding.

Speaker 12:43

Come on, let's go

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The March of the Men of Hallig

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David Lloyd.

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the band of the Welsh guards.

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So Miles, as an expert in efficiency matters, what are your views on music as a background?

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I think it helps a lot.

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Music while you work is a very good thing.

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What's your next record?

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Oh well

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I think I better go back to my early upbringing.

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which was in Derbyshire. My father died when I was one of my mother, who was a Derbyshire woman.

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Brought me up with a lot of uncles and aunts and one of my earliest memories of being taken to the Sheffield Pantomime.

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where I heard of Miss Florrie Ford.

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singing a song called Obadiah Do.

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And you know, the lyrical content of that and the beat.

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It's not so very different from what we're getting nowadays.

Sir Miles Thomas3:42

When young Obi Dyer was twenty-one, fell in love as most young fellows do, Regular every Thursday afternoon.

Sir Miles Thomas3:53

He'd call upon his sweetheart, Lucilo. He in the darkly would find her seated on a quaint old swing. With true love, devotion, he'd set the swing in motion, and he loosed the eye.

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Florrie Ford singing Oberdia.

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Sir Miles, what was it your first ambition to be?

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Oh, I wanted to be an engineer. My mother wanted me to go for one of the respectable professions like the church hop.

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the law or medicine.

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But my fingers wanted to go into engineering and so I did.

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You did when you were at school. Yeah.

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As what?

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I went

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to a firm in Birmingham called Bellison Morecombs as a premium pupil in engineering.

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And there I was taught to use the ordinary workshop tools, files and things of that sort, and also to run machine tools.

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Oh, then I joined the army. I became a private in an armoured car battery.

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I prefer to do my fighting, sitting down and standing up. That's why I went and presented to with Medicard.

Sir Miles Thomas5:01

Yeah.

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Where did you serve?

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Well, after periods of training with the Veteran Machine Gun Corps at Bisley, we went out to Germany, East Africa.

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And I had about a year there, very uncomfortable.

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time because we were short of food.

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And from there

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I went up to Cairo.

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Applied to the Royal Flying Corps.

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for a commission and as I've already done my officers training course.

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Why is it school?

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I became a cadet and learned to fly. Yes, and you were awarded the DFC as a fighter pilot.

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Yes, but that was about a year later because

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in between getting my wings and going on an active fighting fly in Mesopotamia.

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I was a stunt instructor at Heliopolis in Cairo.

Speaker 15:47

Hello.

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Yeah.

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When the war was over, you came back to England?

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Yes, I came back to England in...

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March 1919.

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And I had a permanent commission.

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But I found there was no flying.

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And I got very bored with seeing the sheep all over the aerodrome at North Help.

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And so I remembered that I'd written a series of articles.

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Promotering papers.

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Before the war, when I was a school.

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And I applied to these publishers and happily

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I got a job on a motoring paper.

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and thereby achieve my ambition of making motor cars keep me instead of me keeping them.

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And it was as a journalist that you began to call on William Morris, who was later Lord Naphew.

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That's right.

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I used to go to Oxford.

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Describe his new metacar at the end.

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And Morris asked you to join his company. What quality was it you think that he saw in you that made him think that you should be with him in industry?

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Well, in those days I possessed a very good memory.

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And I wrote accurately about something that about a car that I had seen.

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Whereas the handout given to all this journalist was wrong, and the other boys wrote it up wrongly.

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Morris was attracted to my accuracy.

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Also in those days I was a fairly good car driver because I did nothing else but drive cars and

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describe how they went and that kind of thing.

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And it was actually while we were trying out his very, very first

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Maurice Six.

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Between Oxford and Coventry.

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That Maurice said it was a pity that I didn't live in Oxford, so I said, why?

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And he said, well, then you could come work with me.

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And I thought, I'm not fascinated where I live.

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He said, Are you married? I said, No.

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Is it all right? I'll ring it up one of these days.

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And that's how you came to join the Morris Organization. That's how I came to join the Morris Organization. Well, having got you in industry, let's break off here for your third record.

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Oh, my third record goes back to the time when I was learning to be an engineer.

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Very popular tune called Chinatown by Chinatown, played right at the beginning of the 1914 war in the Birmingham.

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Grand or Empire, I forget which, but it's a memorable tune.

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Chinatown, My Chinatown, a 1915 tune given a newish treatment by Jack Teagarden in his orchestra.

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You joined the Morris motor organization sometimes. Which year was this? 1924. And you married Morris's secretary. Yes, that's right. As a matter of fact.

Sir Miles Thomas8:52

Uh

Speaker 18:52

Hahaha

Presenter8:54

I didn't know it at the time, but my future wife wrote my letter of engagement. Within a very few years, you were a director and the general sales manager.

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You stayed with the Northield organization during its years of expansion.

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When you were happy as an executive, didn't you want to design and create technically yourself? I was happier when I became a managing director of Wolseley Motors in Birmingham.

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Then I was a sales manager for sales director if you like of Maurice Bethesda because

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As a managing director, I could of course give expression to my creative urge.

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And uh oh, I enjoyed those days very much indeed. Well, by nineteen forty you were managing director of the whole Nuffield Empire. How many factories and major subsidiaries were involved?

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During the war, it went up to 63.

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Factories that I had to look after. And you turned the whole lot over to war production, of course. Oh, indeed, yes. We stopped making motor cars altogether. We made some army trucks.

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But otherwise.

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We made

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Everything.

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Okay.

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Airplane

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Can

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anti-tank weapons

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Shells by the thousand and fuses by the million.

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When did you leave Lord Naville?

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1947, November the 17th, 1947. Yes, after 23 years. Yes. Why?

Speaker 110:15

Yeah.

Sir Miles Thomas10:15

Uh

Presenter10:16

Well, I found that making moticurs after the war was a very frustrating job. You couldn't get steel and you couldn't bring out new designs.

Presenter10:25

So what do you do? Well, the government asked me if I'd join a body called the Colonial Development Corporation, which was for doing industrial expansion overseas. And almost at the same time, the then Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, Sir Godfrey Huggins, as he was, asked me to go out and do an industrial survey of Central Africa.

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Which I did.

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became fascinated with the idea of looking at the world through a wider window.

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And um

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When I came back from doing these extra mural tasks,

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I found that

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I've been living a very constricted life, so to speak, almost in fetters.

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And so

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Lord Napier and I had a talk about it and we decided to

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Pod?

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Very friendly. I mean, I I've seen him right up at the end of his days.

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And um

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Very soon, be I see.

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asked me if I'd be their chairman through the then Minister of Civil Aviation, Lord Nathan. BOAC wasn't a bit of a mess at that time. Well, it depends what you call a bit of a mess. If you call losing £8 million a year a bit of a mess, then I'm with you. But you've got BOAC out of the red. Yes, indeed. How long were you chairman? From 1949 to 1956. What's that?

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Eight years and ten ministers. Well, then you became chairman of a very large chemical firm. Would you say that

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Product really is a material that you can go from motor cars to air transport to chemicals and you'll find the same problems.

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At that kind of level, you find the same problem. Mainly because you're dealing with people rather than with things. Of course, you've got to have enough knowledge of...

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Much cars in a place in chemistry, not to be fooled by somebody who's looking down the wrong end of a test tube. But no, basically it's very much the same. Let's have record number four. What next?

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Well, my next choice of record

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is an old traditional French tune called Parliamoire de Mar.

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Because um on my desert island I would like to think back.

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to what I would call my romantic middle age.

Sir Miles Thomas12:43

Only one

Sir Miles Thomas12:47

For did a madam south.

Sir Miles Thomas12:53

God of a good

Sir Miles Thomas13:02

Holy God.

Sir Miles Thomas13:06

I am afraid of the world.

Sir Miles Thomas13:12

The rubber?

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Polymoire d'Amour song by Lucien Boyer.

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You are a prodigious worker, Zamiles. You're chairman, president, or director of innumerable firms and organizations. Can you take your mind away from your work when you close your office door at night?

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I can do, yes, and particularly at weekends. That's why I'm enjoying myself on your desert island, isn't it? But I'm not thinking about anything else but nostalgic memories. What are your relaxations?

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Or during the season I shoot.

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I do have a guard name, but I haven't got very green fingers.

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And I'm a do-it-yourself chap. I like messing about with the small tools in the house.

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You are now in your middle sixties, Sir Miles. Have you any thought or intention of retiring?

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No, I I wouldn't know what to do if I retired.

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Fine. Let's have record number five now.

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All that again. And you see, I'm using these records on my island as a kind of manual of memories.

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And this one that I've chosen, Ciglietta by Von Blom.

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I first heard him played by a band in the Esbershaire Garden.

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in Cairo and they had a

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trumpeter or a long way away behind a clump of palms or something like that.

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Balmy tropical night.

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And that

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made me think that I was really beginning to get

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on, so to speak, in civilian life.

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Cislietta played by the Bohemians. I'm sorry we couldn't manage the distant trumpet for you. What next?

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My next record is hors d'oeuvre.

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Uh I know it's been revived, but I'll tell you why I

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Remember it.

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When the war was over and we were coming away from Mesopotamia,

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We thought we'd better become a little socially adept.

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And dancing was all the crazy.

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And we

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When I say we, I mean

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R F C

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Flying pilot

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We've got a manual on dancing and we've got a grammar.

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And one of the tunes of those days was Hors d'Ouvre.

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And we also managed to acquire some nurses from Baghdad General Hospital.

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And they wanted to learn to dance too, so we had several.

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Pleasant hours listening to Ordov and learning how to twinkle. Have you ever heard the term twinkle in connection with the foxtrot?

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Takes you back, doesn't it?

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Hors d'oeuvre, a twinkling performance by Sid Phillips and his band.

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Now Sir Miles, the fact that you're a do-it-yourself man is a big asset to you as a castaway. You could look after yourself all right.

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Oh, I think so, yeah, above the land.

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I go searching for coconuts and yams, I think. Sweet potatoes. I used to eat those in the USAF.

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Do you fish?

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He has.

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Could you build some kind of a craft?

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I try and do a contiki with some

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Pauling down palm trunks and hollowing them out with fire and everything. Literally, I can't take it. You'll try and get away. I try and get away, yeah.

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You know, I don't really like being alone, uh, not for very long.

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We got to record number seven. Now watch that.

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Well, here's my choice. It's a Noel Card medley, is he?

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People my age

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Noel Card really means a very great deal because he did set

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An atmosphere of living.

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In the Teen War period. So let's have a lot of neural kind, particularly as.

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Uh one of his um

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Best Junes is someday I'll find you, which I think is very appropriate for a castaway. And very comforting. Yes, indeed.

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Part of a Noel Card Fantasy by the Malacrino Orchestra. And now, Sir Miles, we'll come to your last one. What's that going to be?

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Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but all through this talk we've had, right?

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I've been harking back to old tunes that have been revived.

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I should take on my desert island.

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Frank Eiffie's version of Don't Blame Me. Now here you'll have a tune that was originally

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Occurred popularly around about 1930, I think, and now 34 years afterward, it's come back dressed up in this new form. And when my

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Young teenage granddaughter wonders why know the words of the latest pop-head.

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She doesn't know that I have heard it two generations.

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Before

Speaker 219:19

Don't blame me for falling in love with you I'm under your spell, but how can I help it? Don't blame me.

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Frank Eifield singing Don't Blame Me.

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If you would only take one of these eight disks, which would it be?

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I think I'd take an old card one because he's got a medley of tunes on.

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And it does represent

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a mode of life, a mode of living.

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in my middle age.

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And one luxury to take with you.

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Desert Island, all sandy.

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Luxury

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I know, a case of toothpaste, highly flavoured. Well, all right, but there's nothing worse than trying to brush your teeth with sand, I shouldn't.

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and one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare.

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Can I have a series of

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I mean the same book in several volumes of course.

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Winston Churchill's war memories. Right.

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And thank you, Sir Miles Thomas, for letting us hear your choice of desert island discs. I've had a very pleasant interlude in the sunshine of your smile. Thank you well.