Judge Stephen Tumin

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 three and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a judge. Now aged sixty three, he led a distinguished but largely uneventful professional life until six years ago. He went to Oxford, was called to the bar and became a county court judge in London. And then in 1987 he was asked if he'd take the job of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. He did, and has rarely been out of the headlines since. In a series of vivid and outspoken reports, he's called attention to the inefficiencies and squalor of some of our penal institutions. He wants an end to what he's called the nasty, humiliating nonsense of slopping out and to enforced idleness. What's more, he's been listened to and has brought closer, therefore, the possibility of fundamental change in our prison system. He is Judge Stephen Tumim.

Presenter1:15

Your reports have been devastatingly frank over the years. You've called Brixton a corrupting institution, Dartmoor a dustbin. Do you think the Government got more than it bargained for when it appointed you?

Judge Stephen Tumin1:26

No, because I've also made quite a lot of favourable remarks about prisons, and all I do is to try and tell the truth. I'm not setting myself up to make devastating or critical or offensive remarks.

Presenter1:39

No, but did you make that a precondition of accepting the job, as it were, that you could go where you liked and say what you liked, however unpalatable?

Judge Stephen Tumin1:47

I was asked by Douglas Heard, who was then the Home Secretary, to bring things out into the open. He didn't want it all covered up or hidden away, and he wanted an honest outside independent view of what was going on in the prisons, because they are of necessity a closed institutions, and it's very difficult for a minister to know what's really happening.

Presenter2:09

But they were very much closed before that because of course pre-nineteen eighty two these reports on prisons were were confidential, weren't they? And the chief inspector was a a senior prison governor.

Judge Stephen Tumin2:16

Yeah, and

Presenter2:19

So that perhaps we the public never heard the truth.

Judge Stephen Tumin2:23

No, I think uh it was a result of a famous report on prisons in the late seventies by uh Lord Justice May, which brought out the idea of an independent inspector. And I think it's a very valuable one. I think it's also very valuable to have an inspector who is not part of the profession he's inspecting, so he's not tempted to cover up for old Charlie.

Presenter2:46

Well, we're gonna sentence you to a a term, maybe life, you never know, on a desert island. Will you be a a model castaway? How will you

Judge Stephen Tumin2:53

No, I shall be an absolutely unmodel castaway, because I am the most impractical person in the world. I've still not mastered how to mend a plug, and I am completely useless at doing anything I don't drive a motor car. So that I not that I would have a motor car on a desert island, but I wouldn't be able to do the equivalent, and if I had to cut down trees, I should think they'd fall on me.

Presenter3:14

Well, what you get is something that Her Majesty's prisoners don't on this island. You get a grammophone and eight records.

Judge Stephen Tumin3:20

Yeah.

Presenter3:21

Which record are you going to play first?

Judge Stephen Tumin3:23

I thought we'd play first The Free Juvenile Delinquents by Neil Card from the Ace of Clubs, his play.

Judge Stephen Tumin3:31

I think that the first thing I thought about when I thought about this programme was there must of course be something from Noel Coward. Free Juvenile Delinquents is written, of course, by a somewhat Tory-minded writer, I think, but nevertheless it has some profound truths, and I'm sure, I hope, that it's of interest to Michael Howard, the present Home Secretary, in this particular passage. But there it is. What the answer is to the problem which Sir Nerle describes, I really don't know.

Speaker 24:05

Juvenile delinquents, juvenile delinquents, every now and then when kind old Craig's mention angels have lied to us, we say thanks and don't forget to lie to us. Nowadays the younger generation never has to face brute force.

Speaker 24:27

Some old judged instead the flagination puts us on probation, glory for the souls.

Presenter4:35

The original London cast of Noel Card's Ace of Clubs, singing three juvenile delinquents. You took the job as as Chief Inspector in nineteen eighty seven, as I said, and I think Pentonville was one of the first prisons you visited. How shocked were you by what you found?

Judge Stephen Tumin4:50

I was puzzled, perhaps, as much as shocked.

Judge Stephen Tumin4:53

By the

Judge Stephen Tumin4:54

Lack of sanitation, for example, the fact that you uh couldn't get water or lavatories when you needed to, I thought it was very odd in the late nineteenth century, it might have been acceptable, late twentieth century, I thought it was very strange. It was the smell that hit you, I think. It was the smell that hit me more than the sight. And this often happens. Recently we've been conducting an inquiry into a prison in the north of England where, again, it's been smashed up by prisoners. The thing that really hit me wasn't the broken windows and the broken beds, but it was the frightful smell of agglomerated dirt of years.

Presenter5:27

And I think you you used the term of yourself that you didn't want to become a lavatorial bore, but you made it your first priority to get sanitation improved, didn't you?

Judge Stephen Tumin5:36

Yes, that's right.

Presenter5:37

And that's supposed to happen. There are supposed to be lavatories in cells. The aim is by the end of 94.

Judge Stephen Tumin5:42

Well, access to laboratories, there are a number of ways of doing it, it's not necessarily in the cell.

Presenter5:46

Hmm.

Judge Stephen Tumin5:46

Uh by the end of 1994, the government has declared that they will have it done.

Presenter5:51

But presumably the thought is unless you attack those kind of basic standards, how can you expect the prisoner to reach any other kind of standard?

Judge Stephen Tumin5:58

You're absolutely right. This is a necessary condition. It's not the end and the wonderful result. But until you get reasonable standards of self respect and cleanliness, I don't think you can do much else.

Presenter6:03

And

Presenter6:10

But did you have a sense of guilt as well, that perhaps as a judge you'd sent people there little realizing exactly what kind of life you were committing them to?

Judge Stephen Tumin6:18

I was astounded by my attitude as a judge when I thought about it later. I knew nothing of prisons. I'd hardly ever been there. And most judges, even today, say to me, Why should we visit prisons? What's it got to do with us? Do you think they should do so, Morgan? I think they should. I think we should have a criminal justice system by which people learn what other parts of it actually do, so that if you say Pentonville, you've got a picture in your mind. So that if you say community service, you know what it means. I think that's essential in sentencing.

Presenter6:50

Let's have your second record.

Judge Stephen Tumin6:52

The second record is the Prisoner's Chorus from Fidelio.

Judge Stephen Tumin6:57

Fidelio is really the ultimate work on prisons and prisoners and their problems. The cry to the dawn may be corny, it may be played very often and so on, but it's the real basis of what prisoners are all about, the desire to escape, to get out, to get, again what I've said, no doubt it's not unreasonable, fresh air and the call for fresh air. What sanitation the poor prisoners in Fidelio had in the depths of their cell, I don't know, and I suspect not very much. But that's against a background where I don't suppose Beethoven did either. But now there's no reason why, at the end of this century, we shouldn't have reasonable physical conditions.

Presenter8:41

The Prisoner's Chorus from Act One of Beethoven's Fidelio, sung by the Vienna State Opera Chorus with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter8:49

And a novel reason, if ever I heard one, for taking the prisoner's chorus, to remind you of slopping out. You're you're you're not a musical man, you confess.

Judge Stephen Tumin8:53

But you're

Judge Stephen Tumin8:56

I'm not a musical man. I go more than that. I'm really tone deaf. I'm a books and pictures person and not a music man.

Presenter9:01

You're a voracious reader.

Judge Stephen Tumin9:03

I'm a pretty voracious reader, a pretty voracious looker.

Presenter9:05

Julio.

Presenter9:07

Who who are your particular favorites then in books? Oh my

Judge Stephen Tumin9:11

Life certainly is since Oxford. It's Laurence Stern, it's Thomas Love Peacock, it's Max Birbohm who've come first.

Presenter9:19

So it it's humor.

Judge Stephen Tumin9:20

It's humour, but with a particular style to it, I think. And in painting Blake, which is.

Judge Stephen Tumin9:27

more humour than one might imagine when you look at an island and the moon and so on and and Picasso, who's uh got the wit that really pulls him through, combined with everything else.

Presenter9:39

So it's what is it's a sense of irony, it's a satirical eye, it's all of those things, is it? Which is

Judge Stephen Tumin9:44

I think it is. It's perhaps watching an observer rather than taking part. I don't know about that.

Presenter9:50

Is that something perhaps that you you seek to emulate yourself?

Judge Stephen Tumin9:54

I don't know about seeking to emulate. No, I don't write particularly well. And although my taste is perhaps a dandy taste, what now we call a high camp taste in literature and always has been I'm very scruffy myself, and I don't I'm certainly not a dandy in any other sense.

Presenter10:10

But this all goes back to your boyhood, doesn't it?

Judge Stephen Tumin10:13

I think it does. I had a fairly solitary boyhood. My mother died when I was ten, and my brother was away in the war, and I was an only child at home. My father travelled a lot. And I had a up my boyhood really in Oxford. A lot of it was spent in Blackwell's bookshop.

Presenter10:32

And you had a good friend and mentor there, didn't you, in the bookshop, deep in the vaults of Blackwell's.

Judge Stephen Tumin10:35

Deep in the

Judge Stephen Tumin10:37

David Navalzer Blackwells was a marvellous man whom Mr Schoenfeldt, who was the antiquarian buyer for Blackwells, a refugee from Hitler. He was a little tiny man with gold-rimmed spectacles right into his head. I don't believe he could ever have taken them off and an acid turn of phrase, and he was extremely agreeable and fun.

Presenter10:57

So he he was agreeable, not acid, with you.

Judge Stephen Tumin10:59

He was never acid with me. He sold me books at outrageously low prices, and said you may take this for half a crown, and produced a a first edition of Peacock's Grill Grange on that basis, which I still got.

Presenter11:11

And did you see him, though, being acid with others?

Judge Stephen Tumin11:13

Yes. I remember his employer, Sir Basil Blackwell. The very first time I met Mr Schumfeld, he took me into his office to show me something, and in came Sir Basil with a copy of a book in his hand, and said, Schumfeld, Schoenfeld, I've just bought a a Machiavelli first edition. And Schumfeld

Judge Stephen Tumin11:31

fondled it over, turned the pages with infinite contempt, and said, I hope you didn't pay too much, Sir Basil. Well now that was very much the world of Schoenfeld, worldly, a very good fun and in so far as I had a tutor in Oxford, I think it was he rather than those provided by my college.

Presenter11:51

Shall we have your next piece of music?

Judge Stephen Tumin11:53

The next piece of music is a a very happy one from Valmouth, and it's Fenella Fielding singing only a passing phase. I like to say that I remember from Valmouth more than anything, both Fanella Fielding and Clear Lane, both of whom meant a tremendous lot because they got across this whole adaptation of the sort of dandy books I'm talking about into music. And I learned something which most people have learned much earlier, that you can translate from one medium into another and really enhance it and make it work.

Speaker 212:30

There was the gardener at the towers, And he had a way with me as well as flowers.

Speaker 212:38

It was only

Speaker 212:40

A passing fate

Speaker 212:44

Because I lighted on his brother who had come to do some plumbing job or other But it was only

Speaker 212:54

A pause in

Presenter12:57

Vanella Fielding singing Only a Passing Phase from Sandy Wilson's Valmouth. So, Stephen Tumin, you went up to Worcester College in nineteen fifty on a history scholarship, and then, in your own words, drifted into law through sheer laziness.

Judge Stephen Tumin13:11

Yes, I think that's fair enough. I never really remember consciously thinking of doing anything else very much. My father was a barrister. He was the administrator of the Oxford Circuit. He was well known in his profession, and judges and barristers used to frequent our house. He did something else to me very helpful. He used to give me lists of books to read from time to time. He had a good library, which I now have, and the books he suggested were always happy ones.

Presenter13:41

So life went to plan, really, didn't it? You were called to the bar and you married and you had children and you were on the Oxford Circuit doing a bit of crime, some celebrity divorces, pop group contracts, and so on. But you never took silk. Why was that?

Judge Stephen Tumin13:52

Come.

Judge Stephen Tumin13:56

Uh I had high blood pressure and problems later a heart attack and that was a reason for going on the bench, which I I did uh after a while, rather than take silk.

Presenter14:09

Hm. So you became a a county court judge?

Judge Stephen Tumin14:11

And then became very healthy.

Presenter14:12

Did you?

Judge Stephen Tumin14:12

Well you control

Presenter14:14

Well, you controlled your own life and ended court early, didn't you?

Judge Stephen Tumin14:16

That I think is right, yes. Yes.

Presenter14:17

But

Presenter14:19

And then some ten years later, as I said at the beginning, came the call from Douglas Hurd to become uh chief prison inspector. Um you demurred at first.

Judge Stephen Tumin14:30

Yes, I wasn't enthusiastic. I didn't know quite what an inspector was except somebody who collected tickets. And I was very happy in a London County Court. It meant if you finished early, you could get on your bicycle at Willsdown Hill and go down to the garrick for lunch. It seemed a very agreeable way of life. And I was involved in various matters in the art world and and in writing. And

Judge Stephen Tumin14:53

I didn't really want to change.

Presenter14:55

And did you think you'd be any good at inspecting?

Judge Stephen Tumin14:57

No. I think that judges have absolutely no talent in the ordinary way, and I said this, I remember, to the Home Secretary, for uh administering, for running things. They have a clerk who bosses them about, tells them where to go, puts their clothes on for them in the courts and so on. And uh I don't think really judges know much about running an office.

Presenter15:18

And you couldn't drive either.

Judge Stephen Tumin15:19

And I couldn't drive either. And of course most of these persons are in the country. And I said this to the Home Secretary, who said rather crossly, Well, I expect we'll have a driver. So that was all right.

Presenter15:29

But you took it in the end.

Judge Stephen Tumin15:30

I took it in the

Presenter15:30

Uh

Presenter15:30

And it's w a role which has brought you a certain celebrity, as I said. Has it also perhaps brought you um a sense of purpose, if you like, which might have eluded you professionally before that?

Judge Stephen Tumin15:42

I don't think I had a sense of purpose before that. My aim was rather Max Bierbone wanted simply to pass muster. But this job I think is very interesting. I think it's something which I can get changes made to some extent. I mean there's a very strong, sharp limit to it. It's not for me to try I'm I have no control over what is actually done in the prisons. It's for me to give advice, not to make sure the advice is carried out. But having said that, it would be folly to suggest otherwise. I can in fact get some influence. And if all these new plugs are flushed and pulled in the future, then I think that's an example something that I'm proud of.

Presenter16:24

Next piece of music.

Judge Stephen Tumin16:25

The next piece of music is Elizabeth Webb singing This Is My Lovely Day from Blessed the Bride. What it draws to my mind enormously powerfully is the figure of a great mentor, and if I may say so, a friend of mine, the late Sir Alan Herbert, A.P. Herbert, who was a famous writer who wrote Bless the Bride.

Judge Stephen Tumin16:50

What I remember about him was in nineteen seventy he was eighty.

Judge Stephen Tumin16:54

And he had an eightieth birthday party given for him on a launch which went down the River Thames to Greenwich. And as it went there fell in behind it naval launches with shapely wrens standing at attention. Ships were dressed all over outside on the embankment by the Temple, as he's a barrister as well. And when we got to Greenwich, off we got, and there Allan turned round, and I think it was off the cuff, and asked Liz Webb, who was one of his guests, to sing This Is My Lovely Day.

Speaker 217:26

S must pay.

Speaker 217:29

And who can tell if fate means well for the sky is light?

Speaker 217:46

You will remember too that this was our love.

Presenter17:55

Elizabeth Webb singing This Is My Lovely Day.

Judge Stephen Tumin17:58

A. P. Herbert is a rather underrated writer now, and I think he's really due for a revival. His greatest book is The Secret Battle, about the shooting off and killing off of people in the First World War and France, which he saw through, and particularly about the awful position of conscientious objectors. But he taught me a great deal about politics. He taught me that he started his campaigns with Poem and Punch, but politics were about getting things done to him, about campaigns, not about just being something or not rocking the boat.

Presenter18:31

You once let out that that, in your view, in most prisons, a quarter of the inmates should never be let out, and the other three quarters ought to go home.

Presenter18:39

Um perhaps not the most diplomatic of remarks, but do you think it's essentially true?

Judge Stephen Tumin18:44

I think it's a bit gimmicky, really. It's rather sort of only connect, like Ian Forster sort of remark. I'm not sure, but it isn't a bit of a cocktail party observation. There are a lot of people in prison who don't need to be in prison. There are a lot of people in prison, or few people in prison, whom you dread they are coming out. One feels this is very they're still dangerous.

Presenter19:03

Yeah.

Presenter19:06

That's what I mean by by essentially true, really. I mean, obviously the the murderers, the rapists, the armed robbers and

Judge Stephen Tumin19:10

Yeah.

Presenter19:11

you would feel should stay in but it's these other people that concern us, isn't it? It's it's it's the thieves, the vandals, the burglars, who perhaps don't benefit from being in there, because it's rather like a crime school and they'll only get worse.

Judge Stephen Tumin19:23

I think there's a big class of prisoners we don't think about clearly enough. I think they are the male prisoners under thirty who failed at school, or school has failed them, and who failed in their relationships with families and particularly with women. And what they need is proper teaching. They need to learn to read and write and do arithmetic. They need remedial teaching. They need to learn how to deal with drinks and drugs and AIDS. They need to see their families and to build up links with the community. All these are essential jobs.

Presenter19:53

How do you explain to yourself and to everyone else the the suicides that occur, and quite often on remand, really, aren't they, these young men sitting in their cells awaiting trial? How much do you believe it's because they're demoralized by the fact that they've been caught and they're not quite sure what the future holds? Or or or that in fact they're depressed by the the immediate physical circumstances in which they find themselves?

Judge Stephen Tumin20:15

I think there's a lot of them who are depressed by being the first time in prison and completely lost and sad, and it's a tragic business if they take their lives. One of the terrible things about our system, or lack of system, is long waits on remand. I don't know whether magistrates realise very often quite the distress that's caused by waiting for an uncertain date. Prisoners are always saying to me, I don't know when I'm going to be tried.

Judge Stephen Tumin20:42

Uh

Judge Stephen Tumin20:43

They may be exaggerating, but there is a genuine worry, concern, anxiety which must be a source of the greatest anxiety and depression to people.

Presenter20:53

Record number five.

Judge Stephen Tumin20:55

This is uh a singing of African hymns by immigrants, not ordinary prisoners, from Zaire who.

Judge Stephen Tumin21:04

sang these songs when they were on remand in Pentonville Prison in London.

Judge Stephen Tumin21:09

The

Judge Stephen Tumin21:10

Immigrants are people who've come here to seek refuge because of political persecution at home. It takes branches of the Home Office apparently a very long time to know how genuine they are, but apparently they know more about it if they've been in prison for a year awaiting a decision. And there it is. But when I talk of remands having the horrors of uncertainty. The immigrants have this in an extreme way, and I think you can feel it in the songs that they're singing.

Speaker 222:06

Sinai is faithful.

Presenter22:34

Immigrants from Zaire went on remand at Pentonville Prison, singing an African hymn. So the model Tumim jail has um education, properly paid work, activity centres, less locking up, a structured existence, as you say. Now many of those things are apparently available at the Wolds, near Hull, Britain's first private prison, which you've recently heavily criticised.

Judge Stephen Tumin22:57

Well, I've heavily praised it as well as heavily criticised it, which is a fairly balanced approach. It's got excellent staff, it's got a splendid staff relationship with prisoners, but it's got a philosophical problem which it hasn't yet resolved, which is what do you do with prisoners who haven't been convicted and don't want to do anything very much and don't want to work.

Presenter23:19

But the but the problem is, as as the hardliners would see it, is that the the regime that you're approving, that you're advocating,

Presenter23:26

has been taken advantage of by the prisoner. I mean, apparently there it's been said they've become lazy and rather corrupt, easy access to drugs, even making love to their visitors in the visiting room because somehow the regime was so lax. Surely that can't be right.

Judge Stephen Tumin23:42

No, it isn't right, of course it's not right. But they're not prisoners in the sense of convicted villains. These are people who may be acquitted. So it's very difficult for the Governor and his staff to turn round and say, Now you've got to go and do this, now you've got to go and do that.

Presenter23:55

But the principle remains the same. I think people would say that that if you make the fundamental argument is, if you make life too comfortable for for prisoners, then they might even begin to enjoy it that that in fact the whole business of putting them in prison is is to deprive them of their comforts.

Judge Stephen Tumin24:10

I don't believe that anybody other than a complete lunatic, and there are not very many of those in this sense, actually commits a crime in order to get into prison, because it's cosy in prison. But having said that, I found it depressing when I walked round late in the morning of midday at the Worlds and found the curtains drawn because the prisoners hadn't got up. That is. Is appalling, and it ought to be like a good secure hostel where.

Judge Stephen Tumin24:38

It has rules in where you get up in the mornings and where you get on with things.

Presenter24:42

Record number six.

Judge Stephen Tumin24:44

Record number six is Jerusalem, and that's Blake's Jerusalem. And I choose that because it's a perfect song for a tone-deaf selector, it seems to me, because it's enormously powerful, enormously straightforward, enormously emotive. I'm not a member of the WI, but I nevertheless have never heard it without pleasure. One of the reasons I suspect it always seems to come in services when I attend them in church very soon before the end, and you know very soon you're going to get out like the prisoners in Beethoven into the fresh air. But it's a a great and moving occasion, and Blake is my favourite poet, and I think Blake's Jerusalem is really my favourite noise.

Presenter25:44

We hope that our home reflects

Speaker 225:51

Uh

Speaker 226:06

Uh

Speaker 226:07

Uh

Presenter26:27

Jerusalem sung by the massed English Male Voice Choir at the Royal Albert Hall.

Presenter26:32

Um don't we lock up more people as a percentage of population than any other European country?

Judge Stephen Tumin26:37

Well, that's said to be so. I'm not sure about the Eastern European countries, but we lock up.

Judge Stephen Tumin26:42

much higher than anybody else in Western Europe, Verleuvan the United States.

Presenter26:44

Very good.

Presenter26:46

But what you're asking for obviously is is a whole new philosophy that we have to ask ourselves why are we locking these people up?

Judge Stephen Tumin26:54

I am.

Judge Stephen Tumin26:55

I'm perfectly contented with the philosophy set out in the prison statement of purpose. It's up in huge blue and white notices in every gate, and it requires the prisoner to be kept securely. That's the first duty of the prison service, else you're running a school or a college or the BBC, but you're not running a prison. Secondly, it requires prisoners to be treated with humanity. And that seems to me obvious and speaks for itself. The third point is it is our duty to help them to lead law-abiding and useful lives in custody and after release. Now, that is awfully difficult. It's not saying anything about punishment. That's for the courts, not for the prison service. It's not saying anything about forcing them, treating them as if they were ill. It's saying help them to lead proper lives. And that's where

Judge Stephen Tumin27:44

My approach to it would come in, but I think it's also the accepted approach.

Presenter27:49

So the punishment is simply the deprivation of freedom. The whole business of being in prison i is a is a process of rehabilitation, which you don't believe happens enough.

Judge Stephen Tumin27:57

You don't believe

Judge Stephen Tumin27:59

I don't think it ever has happened enough. I avoid the word rehabilitation because it sounds a bit soppy, but help them lead law-abiding and useful lives seems to me to have it very clear. It's the best statement of purpose of any institution. But it requires a change of attitude or concentration of attitude. I think the government has already accepted that attitude in its white paper, so I'm not even sure about a change of attitude. And I certainly feel that the prison service during the last few years, while I've been around, have improved enormously in their attitude to prisoners. So prisoners are given more self-respect and do treat the staff with more respect. When I talk to groups of prisoners, they tend now to be far more respectful and sensible and friendly about staff and not complaining and whinging than they used to be three or four years ago.

Presenter28:49

So they spot that something's being done.

Judge Stephen Tumin28:51

I think they spot an improvement, but when you have an improvement like this, it's very important it should continue.

Presenter28:57

Next piece of music. It's not music, is it? It's poetry.

Judge Stephen Tumin29:00

The next piece of I don't think even John Bettmont would call it music he's reading part of Cornwall in his childhood from his autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells.

Judge Stephen Tumin29:13

Betchman to me is the poet of place, partly because I in my life have shared the places he selects Hampstead, where he was a child, Oxford, and North Cornwall. But the poet of place has chosen here a particular place to which I am very devoted, what one might think of as the sacred coast from Polzeph over Greenaway to Damer Bay, round Bray Hill, left or right, ferry across from Rock to Padsdow, and then the final pleasure, the little bookshop, the second-hand bookshop in Padsdow, which is so marvellous.

Judge Stephen Tumin29:50

I'm been felt associated with North Cornwall rather in a Bitchman way for many years. I didn't, as he's about to describe to us, have my childhood there, although I went when I was quite young. My wife did have a lot of childhood holidays there and knew it before I did. But during our whole thirty-odd years of married life we've been there and had a connection with North Cornwall and been there I think more or less every year.

Judge Stephen Tumin30:20

Then before breakfast

Speaker 230:20

Breakfast down toward the sea I ran alone, Monarch of miles of sand, its shining stretches satin smooth and vain.

Speaker 230:30

I felt beneath bare feet the lugworm cast

Speaker 230:33

and walked where only gulls and oyster catchers had stepped before me to the water's edge.

Speaker 230:39

The morning tide flowed in to welcome me the fan shaped scallop shells, the backs of crabs, the bits of driftwood, worn to reptile shapes, the heaps of bladder rack the tide had left, which lifted up, sent sand hoppers to leap in hundreds round me, answered Welcome back

Speaker 230:59

Along the links and under cold bray hill Fresh water pattered from an Iris marsh, And drowned the golf balls on its stealthy way Over the slates in which the elvers hid And spread across the beach.

Presenter31:15

John Betcheman reading part of Cornwall in Childhood from his autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells. I wonder if your Desert Island, Stephen Tumin, will be anything like that.

Judge Stephen Tumin31:24

Well, it'd be lovely if it was, uh especially if it had the little secondhand bookshop and pads here at the end of it.

Presenter31:31

You've um recently signed up for another term in your job, as it were. Are you working harder than you've ever worked in your life?

Judge Stephen Tumin31:34

As it were.

Judge Stephen Tumin31:37

Yes, much harder. And almost everything you do when you go out and talk to people, go out to dinner, go and lecture, go and speak, go and listen, is part of a job.

Presenter31:46

And what's more, you believe it to be an important job rocking the boat, as you might say.

Judge Stephen Tumin31:51

The whole point about rocking the boat is how far do you rock it. Do you rock it so that the waves just don't come in, or do you cut it short of that? I've got to be uh careful, I think, to some extent of what I say. My job is to tell ministers candidly the truth, which I hope I do. It's not only uh the Home Secretary, but it's the other Ministers, but with all of them, there is a limit, and I've got to play within my limits. And really quite a lot of time is spent in the Inspectorate of Prisons in discussing how far it would be useful and proper and constructive to go without rocking the boat so that the salt water comes in.

Presenter32:27

Uh

Presenter32:31

But just to finally mix the analogies, you quite like making waves, don't you?

Judge Stephen Tumin32:35

I'm overjoyed.

Presenter32:38

Last record.

Judge Stephen Tumin32:39

My last record is again from Prison. It's a West Side story sung by prisoners at Wandsworth and partly, I think, by Primnico Opera, that company, but the actual singing in this piece is by prisoners. Primnico Opera

Judge Stephen Tumin32:58

at Wandsworth is an extraordinary novelty. It may not sound much to people outside, but five years ago, Wandsworth, which has always been celebrated for very fierce, almost military like control, they wouldn't have had anything like this those years ago, and now

Judge Stephen Tumin33:17

I think it's splendid. It brings the public in to see what's going on. It gives the prisoners a real feeling of possibility for the future.

Speaker 233:26

We offer so trucky, we're very upset We never had to love that every turn on again

Judge Stephen Tumin33:27

Very upset.

Speaker 233:32

We may not delay but

Speaker 233:34

I'm not so deep down inside this very good, very good, very good.

Speaker 333:50

Well that's a touching good story. Let him tell it to the world. Just tell it to the giant.

Judge Stephen Tumin33:55

Yeah.

Presenter33:56

Wandsworth Prisoners singing Officer Krupke from West Side Story. Well now, Stephen Toomim, if you could only take one of those eight records.

Judge Stephen Tumin34:05

I think it must be what I regard as my favourite noise, which is Blake's Jerusalem. It also brings to me uh the poet whom I think is the best in English, and uh uh some music which I can understand.

Presenter34:11

Yeah.

Judge Stephen Tumin34:20

Now that's pretty rare.

Presenter34:22

And your book.

Judge Stephen Tumin34:24

It's just from Shandy.

Judge Stephen Tumin34:26

I read it at sixteen when I had flu, and both Shandy and I survived that experience. I've read it ever since. I think what it taught me then was that people who were long dead were not necessarily dull, and that is a lesson which is very important in adolescence, and it did afterwards too.

Presenter34:47

And your luxury.

Judge Stephen Tumin34:48

My luxury uh is connected with it, I fear. It's uh Nollikin's bust of Stern. Uh it's an extraordinary object. It was made by

Judge Stephen Tumin35:00

a rather curious but talented sculptor from England, made in Italy in seventeen sixty six. It was made in Terracotta. The great advantage of it on a desert island is I can talk to Lawrence Stern, and there's no danger of an answer. He can't reply from a statue.

Presenter35:17

So it's all the volumes of Tristram Shandy and a bust of their author, Laurence Sterne.

Judge Stephen Tumin35:22

That's right.

Presenter35:24

We'll put them there for you, and you can set sail when you like. Judge Stephen Tumim, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Judge Stephen Tumin35:30

Thank you.

Speaker 335:38

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