Sir John Wilson

Presenter0:00

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.

Presenter0:08

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

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a man who's devoted his life to helping those who have his own disability, blindness. At the age of twelve, he lost his sight in an accident in the school chemistry laboratory. Undaunted, he went on to win an Oxford Scholarship, and in 1950, at the age of thirty, he mortgaged his home and set up the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind. Since then, he's travelled an average of 50,000 miles a year, helping to restore or save the sight of millions of people all over the world.

Presenter0:59

Last year he received the Albert Schweitzer International Award for Medicine. He is Sir John Wilson. Indeed, a previous recipient of that rare Schweitzer Award was Mother Teresa, Sir John, all of which makes you sound rather saintlike.

Sir John Wilson1:13

Well not a bit. Yes, Mother Teresa uh I I've met her on a number of occasions in in in India. She she's anything but a saint like. She's a most amusing and charming woman.

Presenter1:22

But how much of a surprise was it for you that you found yourself dedicating your life to other people?

Sir John Wilson1:28

I don't think this thing is ever predestined. You know, you you you do it, you do one thing after another. Uh, when I had my own accident which caused my blindness, I naturally began to get involved in the whole skills of blindness. And then from that naturally one goes to take an interest in the thing on a first of all nationally and then perhaps internationally. And it's been a fascinating business. I've loved every minute of it, and it's taken me to so many countries and millions of friends.

Presenter1:46

Mm.

Presenter1:53

But it was as a result of the war that you set out on that tack, in a sense, wasn't it? I mean, you you would have been about twenty when war broke out, and and you set about finding useful jobs for the blind during it.

Sir John Wilson2:03

Yes, yes, I came down from the university and I went into you know, went to London. London was an exciting and exhilarating time during the war, as long as you weren't actually being hit by the bombs. And I got involved in this whole business of what blind people could do in the war effort. We were

Presenter2:17

What could they do?

Sir John Wilson2:18

Well, for example, there are a lot of jobs in munitions where a sense of touch uh is is essential. Um a blind person who is reading braille at normal speed is reading is di d distinguishing twenty five dot patterns a second. Now that is a an industrial talent, if you can find the right job. One job, for example, was a thing called mica splitting. Mica I discovered was the stuff that you put inside the filaments of lamps. And the sighted people who were splitting this stuff by hand in those days were breaking about a third of it. And so we got blind people who were braille readers into it, and cut down the breakage rate radically in in in the first day.

Presenter2:55

Let's talk about music, which which presumably is of enormous importance to you if you're blind.

Sir John Wilson3:01

Yes, it is, I think.

Presenter3:02

Greater importance than decided people, do you think?

Sir John Wilson3:05

No, I don't think it is. But I enjoy it, and I have many, many records.

Presenter3:08

So what's the first piece of music you'll play on your desert island?

Sir John Wilson3:12

The first one will be Basin Street Blues, preferably played by Duke Ellington. That has a story for me. When I went to Worcester College for the Blind, I was then about thirteen, and the place to be was in the band. Well, I spent the whole of one Christmas learning to play a tenor sax. It was about my I was about the size of a tennis axe in those days. And I learned to play this thing, and I went back to school. And I to my delight, I found the person who was playing the saxophone in the band had gone down with a very severe go of flu, and so I took his place just once. Well, I could only play one register on this darn thing, but fortunately Basin Street Blues starts with just one register on the sax. And so there I played it, and I played the thing sort of D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D and I managed it and it was a moment of glory.

Speaker 33:59

But

Speaker 44:16

Won't you come along with me?

Speaker 44:20

To the Mississippi

Speaker 44:25

We'll take the boat to the land of dreams

Speaker 44:29

Streaming down the river to New Orleans, where the bands gather meet us.

Speaker 44:37

Oh, friends do greet us!

Speaker 44:41

Where all those cats, yes, and the swangin' folks meet Heaven owners, they call it basins.

Presenter4:49

Duke Ellington and Basin Street Blues, and memories of playing the tenor sax at Worcester College for the Blind, where you went as a boarder, really not very long after you lost your sight.

Sir John Wilson4:58

No, almost immediately afterwards. And of course it's a very good thing to do it that way, because there's so much to do learning Braille, for example.

Presenter5:04

Tell me about the accident itself. How exactly did it happen?

Sir John Wilson5:07

It was in a chemistry laboratory at a school a school in Scarborough. One of the bottles had been mislabelled, and I d I don't remember what was in the darn thing, but it blew up quite spectacularly and blew most of the laboratory out of the window, and uh I th that was how I lost my sight, and they took me to a hospital, and very soon after that I went on to Worcester.

Presenter5:26

So there was no chance of your getting your sight I mean, your eyes were destroyed, were they?

Sir John Wilson5:29

Oh, yes, totally. There couldn't nothing they could do about it. They they wouldn't have been able to even to day.

Presenter5:30

I could not

Sir John Wilson5:34

But uh then of course it was totally impossible.

Presenter5:36

Apparently you were treated with leeching.

Sir John Wilson5:38

Is

Sir John Wilson5:38

Was I one of the last people uh I have often met ophthalmic surgeons all over the world since then, and tell them I was treated with leeches, which sounds absolutely medieval. But um uh until until fairly recently, you know, that was quite a good way of reducing reducing the possibility of hemorrhage.

Presenter5:53

But it obviously it was a a terrible shock for you and I would have thought it a terrible shock to be immediately sent off to boarding school too. I mean, coping with huge changes in your life all in one go.

Sir John Wilson6:02

Well, everybody says that, you know, but I don't remember it that way. And I've met so many people who've gone blind at my sort of years since, and they don't either. I mean, you accept it as a child. A child, I don't think, stops to think about catastrophe. It was a catastrophic on my parents, of course it was. They d me a lot of my time was taken

Presenter6:12

Yeah.

Speaker 36:12

Hmm.

Sir John Wilson6:20

trying to soothe down their anxieties, I remember.

Presenter6:23

But, nevertheless, you you would have had the memory and the expectations of a sighted child. Surely that made the immediate prospect of life really a bit depressing.

Sir John Wilson6:32

Well, I know, so it maybe it ought to, but it that's not the way I remember it. I I remem I I there was so much to do. I mean, quite apart from learning Braille, there was a business of learning how to listen, and how a blind person learns mobility, the the use of sound.

Sir John Wilson6:45

This is the thing which the French call sans dobstak, the sense of the obstacle. And when you're walking along a street you you you begin to get used to the idea of the shadow sound of a tree or a lamp post, the difference between the different echo of when you're b between a a wall on your right and and a hedge. Of course you get used to all sorts of building these things into into panorama, into into views. Um this morning I was thinking about it as I was standing in our garden. Near at hand there's the the people talking. A little further away there's a tree, a sort of white column of sound in the wind. And beyond that, in our in our case, there was there's a sea, and uh at the road a a sort of hush of the of the car as it goes along the road, a sort of tangent across a circle. And then with luck, far out at sea, there there would be the the the toot of a of a of a of a of a boat, uh the sound of a boat, and that s that illuminates the whole scene.

Presenter7:38

Let's have record number two.

Sir John Wilson7:41

That's Bach's Giju Joy Manthes Weiring. Not only because I I love it, but it reminds me of Oxford, and it reminds me of Jean and our wedding. Uh it was uh the sort of thing that was played almost every night in New College Chapel in Oxford, and I think it's a lovely thing. It it was called The Highway to Heaven by one of his contemporaries, and when you hear that continuo going on behind the choir, almost casting a sort of golden light on the choir, it's a wonderful piece.

Presenter9:09

Bach's Geez You Joy of Man's Desiring, sung by the choir of Saint John's College, Cambridge, in fact but you won a scholarship to Oxford, a scholarship. I mean one immediately thinks how on earth did he manage that when he was totally blind?

Sir John Wilson9:21

Oh, it's not so difficult, not so not so exceptional as all that. Do you know an interesting thing is that blind students at Oxford and Cambridge, over the past thirty years, I think it is, have got one uh two and a half times as many first class degrees, and one and a half times as many second class degrees, as the average of all students.

Presenter9:39

But were there enough books in Braille in those days?

Sir John Wilson9:41

No, they weren't, but I had a reader. I had to choose my course. I'd love to have done philosophy or English, but in fact I did law for the because it was more vocational, and also because the books were available.

Presenter9:53

And you you say you had a reader. What do you mean?

Sir John Wilson9:55

I had a chap who read for me for a shilling an hour in those days.

Presenter9:58

Really?

Sir John Wilson9:58

Really? And uh he used to read these books to me.

Presenter10:01

So you would make mental notes as as he read.

Sir John Wilson10:03

No, I'd make braille notes.

Presenter10:05

Oh I shall be able to do it.

Sir John Wilson10:05

On a braille on a braille machine.

Presenter10:06

So that you could do your revision. You could you didn't have to hold it

Sir John Wilson10:09

Hold it all in your head. No, I made vast Braille notes. On a Braille machine you can write at eighty words a minute. It's a very efficient way of writing.

Presenter10:16

But of course you were coping again with a completely new physical environment, as you had when you went away to school. But this time you're on your own, you know, and you're very much more independent as as a young man at Oxford. How often did you get lost?

Sir John Wilson10:29

It's quite a mobility challenge is Oxford, because, you see, between the lectures you have about ten minutes to get right across Oxford, and Oxford is crowded with talking heads and silent bicycles, and a blind man in a hurry could be rather a menace both to the tourists and to the lampers. And oh, all sorts of odd things happened. I remember on one occasion going through the meadows in Oxford, and I was hurrying to another lecture, and some visitors to Oxford had was having were having their lunch. They'd put their tablecloth out over the over the grass and were having their lunch, and they obviously were speechless at my approach, and I went straight through the lot. Anyway, fortunately they took it well. They opened a bottle and we had a bottle of beer together, and I missed my lecture, but I made a couple of friends that way.

Presenter11:12

So your last year it would have been that that war broke out, didn't it? Presumably that changed everything.

Sir John Wilson11:17

Yes, it changes a lot. I mean, Oxford's a wonderful experience to me, the academic challenge, the sports, those wonder and having come come from a a monastic boys' school, those wonderful, intelligent girls, and the vivid friendships you make. And uh the whole thing was marvellous, but it suddenly changed. I went to try and join the army. I went to a place called the Divinity Schools, where there was a a sergeant uh a disillusioned sergeant who was recruiting people, and he said, Look, mate, I wi th I I think most of the High Command running this war are either blind or deaf, but I'm afraid we haven't got a job for you, mate, and so I took a course in sociology instead and came on to London.

Presenter11:53

Yeah.

Presenter11:54

Let's pause there for record number three.

Sir John Wilson11:56

Record number three is Schubert's C Major Symphony, and the reason why I've chosen that is, first of all, because it reminds me of London. I remember sitting in the Albert Hall when the thing was c was playing, and the bombs came, and the bombs were

Sir John Wilson12:10

were were rhythmically annotating this symphony in a strange way. And later when I went a when I was in Africa, an extraordinary thing, uh the the the the strange haunting sound of the horns as as in the first bit of that symphony. And I I I had got to a place called uh the Lake Mueru, which is a haunted

Sir John Wilson12:29

lake in in Africa, where they say you get you hear the sounds of spirits, and the Africans have been telling me all about this thing all night. I went over the escarpment in a car and going down there, and suddenly I heard this extraordinary haunted music coming up, and I thought, Gosh, this must be something in this.

Sir John Wilson12:45

till I went down to the bottom and I found it was a missionary playing the symphony on his um car radio.

Presenter13:52

The opening of Schubert's Symphony No. nine, The Great C Major, played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the fields, conducted by Neville Mariner.

Presenter13:59

It was after the war, Sir John Wilson, that you began to travel and discovered whole regions in Africa where people were blind.

Sir John Wilson14:07

Yeah.

Presenter14:07

Where was that and why were there so many blind?

Sir John Wilson14:09

That particular country of the blind is a place in West Africa which we went to. Jean and I went after we married and spent some time living in a mud hut there. It's caused by a disease called ocula onchosarciasis, and as nobody could possibly pronounce that, Jean renamed it river blindness. Your wife renamed it. She called it that. We were stuck in the middle of a river and these darned flies, the simulum flies which cause a river blindness by biting you, uh, were pinging against the wi against the window. And Jean said, Look, we'll call this darned thing river blindness and that was when we were staying at one of these villages, blind villages, where all our neighbours were the blind farmers who planted their grain along a straight bit of bamboo. And there was a there was a hemp rope which led the women to the well.

Presenter14:47

And there were

Sir John Wilson14:51

And Jean, of course, was the extraordinary one there, because they I was perfectly all right. They were used to a blind man. You see, they did believe that most of the world was blind. They knew children could see, but that children go blind. And here was Jean in her early twenties, and could still see. She was a monster. She she didn't fall over things. And she had this strange thing called a camera, which she took photographs, which we later used for public publicity.

Speaker 315:13

Hmm.

Sir John Wilson15:14

and launching the attack on river blindness, which was a a terrific thing. It took thirty years.

Presenter15:19

Do you have just to be bitten by one of these flies or touched by one of these flies once to get it?

Presenter15:25

Take a look at the

Presenter15:35

So Jean had become your eyes for you, had she, by this stage? I mean, is is is that the deal? Has that always been the deal between you that

Sir John Wilson15:42

Well yes, you know, we're taught these days that to be independent to disabled people. I don't think that's right. I think it's interdependence. And Jean and I have always worked together. It was an absolute marvel to me when we got married and how how the whole thing changed. You were talking about how it changed when I lost my sight. The th real change was when we got married and were able to do things which I'd wanted to do and she'd wanted to do. I mean, t two together could do far more than we could do done separately.

Sir John Wilson16:08

Record number four. Record number four is

Sir John Wilson16:11

The the drums of Burundi uh and it doesn't have to be Burundi, but the drums of Africa, because I will think of Africa as drums and the if you live in Zanzibar, the the thing they say in Swahili, that when the drum beats in Zanzibar, East Africa dances as far as the hills, and the wonderful rhythm of the drums, which not just a single drum, but the the symphony of drums playing together, the tremendous rhythm piled one on another.

Presenter17:15

Drummers of Burundi. So it was as a result of what you found in Africa and and the lack of coordinated government help for it that you founded the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, which sounds very grand, but at the time, some forty four years ago was presumably a pretty small fry, wasn't it?

Sir John Wilson17:32

Very small fry. It started in a slum office in Victoria Street, where the first job we had to do was to scrub the floors, Gene and I. And I remember that very well because they'd put the colonial office, which was enormously helpful to us, and they'd put on a terrific publicity effort. And so as we were scrubbing the floors, telephone calls came through. We got the telephone on the bit of wire on the floor. And somebody came through and said, Can I please speak to your West Indian desk? So Gene picked it up and said, Yes, this is the West Indian Deskman, you know. And then another chap came through and said, Can I speak to your legacy department? So Gene put it on to me and I put on my sepulchral voice and said, Yes, it's the legacy department. And that's how it started.

Presenter18:06

And you'd mortgaged your flat to set this up.

Sir John Wilson18:08

Well, we had, but it that didn't fortunately last very long.

Presenter18:12

But what was what was the plot? I mean, you you were trying to gain some kind of help for this kind of preventable blindness that you discovered out there.

Sir John Wilson18:19

Yes, I came back absolutely convinced that we could do a lot about these causes of blindness. First of all, there was this river blindness, which quite clearly was preventable. You had to get rid of those darned flies.

Presenter18:29

Spray the river.

Sir John Wilson18:30

Yes, play the river, and this was something which was clearly possible, and which later the World Bank took up and the World Health Organization. And now the thing is virtually under control in that country of the blind we went to.

Sir John Wilson18:41

There are children growing up, a new generation of children with sight of the normal expectation.

Presenter18:46

So what other causes of preventable blindness are there?

Sir John Wilson18:49

Well, trachoma is one of the greatest. It is a the thing which you get right across Africa, right across Asia, and it is the main cause of poor sight amongst children, particularly in the Middle East where it is some 4% of the population. Now that is something which you can attack with antibiotics, which you can change uh behavioural habits.

Sir John Wilson19:10

And this is being done in some seventy countries.

Presenter19:12

And then there's the blindness that you've called the most obscene of all, and that's caused by malnutrition. Now, is that

Presenter19:19

Does that occur mainly in children?

Sir John Wilson19:21

Yes, it is a lack of vitamin A.

Sir John Wilson19:24

Maybe during the mother's pregnancy or during the early

Sir John Wilson19:27

early life of the child, and is the the greatest cause of blindness amongst new amongst children in the early years. That we've been attacking first of all in Central Africa and later across India. And again, the thing is gradually coming under control.

Presenter19:42

So by the end of the fifties your society, which had begun in this rather scruffy little flat, as you describe, in in the back end of London, w was a leading player in the global strategy to eliminate these kind of preventable blindnesses, was it?

Sir John Wilson19:55

Yes, it was. Previously, th ophthalmology had been thought of in terms of what one ophthalmologist does to a uh to a patient. We got the idea that it is what

Sir John Wilson20:04

Well, what the sort of science of ophthalmology can do on a global basis against the causes of blindness, and that is how it has developed subsequently.

Presenter20:13

Next piece of music.

Sir John Wilson20:14

Next piece of music is the Jatarang. Now this this is the water music of India and

Sir John Wilson20:20

Um

Sir John Wilson20:23

On on a table they will have about thirty or forty glass tumblers and jars, each filled up to a certain level of water, so they give a different tone. Now they play it rather like you might play a xylophone, uh with a a stick thing, or sometimes with their fingers. Now this jilterang it sounds pretty awful when you hear it very close at hand. It sounds jingly and

Sir John Wilson20:46

Really, really repetitive, but hear it over the water at night.

Sir John Wilson20:50

or hear it in the courtyard of a Nepalese monastery, and it is magical.

Presenter21:51

Anil Mohili playing Indian water music on the Jal Terang.

Presenter21:56

Um sounds of India there, obviously, where back in the nineteen fifties, John, you and the then Prime Minister Pandit Nehru conceived an idea which would take help to thousands of people living in remote areas, far from the help any hospital or clinic could offer. Can you tell me about it?

Sir John Wilson22:12

Yes, well, you see, by that time we'd established the technology. But the technology is no good unless you can deliver it. And I was talking about this to Pandit Nero when I met him in New Delhi for the first time, and he said you'll know one of these days.

Sir John Wilson22:23

You must use a train to get this thing across. The train system in India, with its sixty five thousand kilometres of track and oh, thousands and upon thousands of stations, is the obvious link between rural areas of India, and it's into rural areas we needed to get the programme about two and a half years ago three years ago.

Sir John Wilson22:41

Uh the Indian government gave us the basic

Sir John Wilson22:45

The structure of a train.

Sir John Wilson22:46

And that we've developed into the Lifeline Express. We call it that because it's the name of a television programme in India. That Lifeline Express uh it travels to the remotest parts of India with the capacity of a modern hospital. And in a single month

Sir John Wilson23:01

It dealt with some fourteen thousand people. It restored sight, movement, or hearing to

Sir John Wilson23:08

one thousand two hundred of them.

Sir John Wilson23:10

It was very much like a as a Biblical scene. Blind people saw again, deaf people talked.

Sir John Wilson23:18

And children who had been crippled from birth walked again. There were some wonderful things. I mean, I remember the first on the first time the train about two years ago went to a remote part of India, there was a girl who was seventeen, and she was crawling about on all fours, having been a polio victim from birth, and being being mocked in the v in in in the village and by the in the market place, and she was really feeling she was at the bot bottom of everything. They were able to restore her to an upright movement again, and this last time we had a telephone call from the village saying uh that this girl was getting married. So could the train please come back and help to celebrate the wedding.

Presenter23:54

And and this is just an operation that's performed on the train while it's parked in that particular siding by that particular village.

Sir John Wilson24:01

Yes. We have some sev some seventy volunteer surgeons worked on the train during that one I'm talking about. We can deal with cataracts, obviously. We can deal with middle air operations.

Sir John Wilson24:11

And we can deal with

Sir John Wilson24:13

Orthopaedic impairment.

Presenter24:15

But you only have one Lifeline Express.

Sir John Wilson24:18

We only want one Lifeline Express. We've now been offered some sixteen different trains, but it's not our job. When we found out IMPACT, which is the United Nations effort against all disabilities, we said our job is to demonstrate. It is not to do. It's the job of the governments to do this. We establish a possibility with their help. But then we don't get out of it and let them follow it, because that's the only way you get something that's affordable and sustainable.

Presenter24:42

So the causes of preventable blindness you now know about, and you can perform these operations for the to cure the effects of polio and for temporary deafness and so on. What's your latest venture? What are you trying to find out about now?

Sir John Wilson24:56

Recently we've been to villages in mountainous areas of Nepal and the Philippines and Central Africa where one child in eight is born brain damaged.

Sir John Wilson25:06

It comes from a lack of a minute trace of iodine during the mother's pregnancy, and it is so easy to prevent. Uh in twenty-two villages of India, simply by adding iodine to common salt, they've reduced the number of children born brain damaged from ninety-two per thousand to eleven per thousand, and I would hope that by the end of the century some nine hundred thousand children who are brain damaged every year won't have to be.

Presenter25:30

Record number six.

Sir John Wilson25:31

Record record number six is a rather different sort of record. It is These Things Shall Be. It is the bit over the top in a way, because

Sir John Wilson25:41

Let me just read the the actual first first uh thing. I've got it here in Braille. These things shall be, a loftier race than e'er the world has seen shall rise, with flame of freedom in their soul, and light of science in their eyes. Now that may sound a bit over the top these days, but I wanted to put it in, because, you know, the United Nations started with that sort of idealism. To my way of thinking, it is the only mechanism which can stumble forward towards some sort of solidarity. I mean, no other no other thing in the world could have eradicated smallpox, and I don't think any other mechanism

Sir John Wilson26:14

could do what we want to do, which is, over a period of fifteen years, to reduce by one third

Sir John Wilson26:20

The prevalence of

Sir John Wilson26:22

Disability of avoidable disability in developing countries.

Presenter27:23

The London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, and John Ireland's These Things Shall Be.

Presenter27:27

I said at the beginning, John, that you and Jean have travelled about fifty thousand miles a year for more than forty years now. You've been to about a hundred and thirty countries, and you're still at it. Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, Nepal, and the UN General Assembly, to name but a few, are in the diary for this year.

Presenter27:44

Your own blindness has undoubtedly drawn attention to your work and probably opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed, but there must have been times

Presenter27:53

When it's been deeply frustrating, when you would have given anything to be able to see.

Sir John Wilson27:58

It's often been deeply frustrating, but I don't think it's had that consequence. I remember once day when I was in Africa, a chief saying to me, When we hear that goats can fly, we like to see one of them doing it. A typical African saying. And I don't think I've ever felt like that about it. Uh Je Gene and I, quite honestly, uh I've Jean has compensated for any any shortcomings my blindness could have caused. And together and I do think the very fact that

Sir John Wilson28:23

In a sense, I'm a demonstrator as well as an advocate.

Sir John Wilson28:26

Uh is is helpful in this thing. For example, I remember when we were adapting Braille to African languages.

Sir John Wilson28:33

Uh this was a difficult thing to do. It it required a lot of academic prowess from people who knew a lot about it. But when you got down to it, I remember I I went to Tanzania and I was demonstrating Braille on the on the radio and the chap a village chief said would I come out to his village and show it the next day? So he sent me a car. We k went out and he took me right in the middle of a field. I said would you read some braille? So I got out my braille and read it, feeling a bit daft reading it in the middle of a field with nobody else there. And he put me back in the car and said thank you. And I said to the interpreter, whatever had he done that for? He said we haven't had any rain in these parts for three years and he's tried the bishop and he's tried the rainmaker and he thought a bit of braille might do some good.

Presenter29:12

You're now seventy five?

Sir John Wilson29:14

Yes.

Presenter29:14

Do you envisage retiring, or or isn't it that kind of work?

Sir John Wilson29:17

I'd like to, but I don't quite know how to do it.

Presenter29:19

You'd like to?

Sir John Wilson29:21

Yes, I sometimes think I would. I like to travel rather less.

Presenter29:24

Next piece of music, number seven.

Sir John Wilson29:26

Number seven is the the last train to San Fernando. It's a it's a it's a Calypso. And it would remind me so well of all the

Sir John Wilson29:35

Marvelous groups of disabled people I've worked with across the world, particularly the Calypso, because most of many of the Calypsonians, as they call them, in the West Indies, uh are themselves blind and they have helped us enormously. When Jean was coping with

Sir John Wilson29:49

Brubella, this German measles thing. We needed to get it across that people had to have their immunization. And one of them wrote this: I've got it written down here.

Sir John Wilson29:58

What is desmystification about this thing called immunization?

Sir John Wilson30:02

It means that when you're going out with a fella you'd better have your rubella.

Sir John Wilson30:06

And he wrote that and it became a sort of theme song right throughout the West Indies for a time.

Speaker 430:11

Live strange or San Fernando.

Speaker 430:15

Last trail to San Fernando.

Speaker 430:18

And if you miss this one, you'll never get another one in the last train to San Fernando.

Speaker 430:27

Yesterday I met with Sweet Dorothy.

Speaker 430:31

She said tomorrow, I'm joining in matrimony.

Speaker 430:35

And if you ask

Speaker 430:36

Right, you can take me out tonight. It is wine and dimes I'll get back in time.

Presenter31:01

A good old Hissy seventy eight recording of The Last Train to San Fernando by the Trinidad Calypso Troubadours. So it's you and the elements on a desert island, John. How are you going to make out?

Sir John Wilson31:12

Well, I hope you'll find for me a fairly small island, and one which hasn't got any snakes.

Sir John Wilson31:16

and a good deal of fish to fish with, and I think I probably could make out.

Presenter31:20

You must know about the worst excesses of tropical life, really. I mean, you've you've lived in the tropics often enough, haven't you?

Sir John Wilson31:25

It's just the snake.

Presenter31:26

It's just the snakes you don't like.

Sir John Wilson31:27

I do say, well the snakes, you can't hear them, you see. The the thing that blind farmers and uh hate more than anything else is snakes. And at one time we had a ridiculous idea of trying to develop guide mongooses, uh but it didn't work. The mongoose just got too wouldn't do it.

Presenter31:41

So y you'll survive on this island, rattlesnakes or whatever permitting. Um but it would also inevitably be a time for reassessment, for looking at the cards that life has dealt you and wondering if they were fair or if you've played them fairly, and so on. What kind of conclusions would you come to on that, I wonder?

Sir John Wilson31:58

I can't imagine. I I I am not very good at contemplation. I don't think I'd be very good at summarizing.

Sir John Wilson32:04

or drawing conclusions from a career.

Presenter32:06

You're one of life's doers, obviously.

Sir John Wilson32:08

I don't know about that. I mean, I I I don't do things from a philosophy. I never have I know one ought to, but I've never been able to develop a philosophy. Just you just build one thing on top of another and see if it works. And if it does, you'll try and repeat it.

Presenter32:21

Last record.

Sir John Wilson32:22

The last record would be the Bach B minor Mass, and I want that for sheer enjoyment. It doesn't remember anything. It is just, to my mind, one of the supreme bits of music of the world. And I want the Sanctus there in the middle, this great, swaying, surging, wonderful.

Sir John Wilson32:38

claim of life. And why I'd like it, I think, is that on you know

Sir John Wilson32:43

If the desert island's anything like the sort of tropical things I've been in, it isn't silent. It's full of an enormous noise the whistling and the shrieking of the birds and the gibbering of the monkeys and the honking and grunts of all sorts of peculiar animals.

Sir John Wilson32:57

And I'd rather like occasionally to play the B minor mess just to show them what humans could do when they really try.

Presenter34:05

Part of the Sanctus from Bach's Mass in B minor sung by the B B C Chorus with the new Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klempere.

Sir John Wilson34:12

You know, so I hope that this island, when we get to it, we may just occasionally have a tropical storm, because of the wonderful sound of it. I was in Nepal not long ago, during the monsoons, and the thunder bellows through the valley, and the foothills stand out in a sort of silhouette of sound, and a great slow echo comes back from the Himalayas. It it is wonderful. So just occasionally I'd like to have a loud noise on the island.

Presenter34:34

Right. And when the noise dies away and the sun comes out and you sit there and you

Presenter34:39

Got time to open a book, a Braille book, presumably. I mean, the the Bible and Shakespeare were intending to supply in Braille, which I

Sir John Wilson34:46

Well, you're going to have quite a problem there, you know, because it's a hundred and twenty-seven volumes in Braille. The two together, a hundred and twenty-seven volumes. I worked it out in the catalogue the other day. So

Presenter34:55

Well, I think you'll only be allowed, therefore, a very slim volume of something else of your own choosing. What what'll that be?

Sir John Wilson35:01

I I wondered about that, and I wo what I'd like to take, because it'll last a long time, is a book on chess strategy. I always wanted to play chess better than I do play chess, and I'd like a book on that, because I think I could improvise a chess board in the draw it in the sand, and we'd have cocoanuts for the castles, and we'd have shells for the for the knights, and that sort of thing. I could easily make that, and I'd love to really study chess and its strategy, because it's always fascinated.

Presenter35:25

So you're reading about chess, or you're playing it, and the sun is shining. What what music will be playing? If you could only take one of these eight records, which one would it be?

Sir John Wilson35:34

Oh, it'll be the Bach B minor Mass, because, apart from that Sanctus, there is the Credo and the and the Agnes Dei, and there's the wonderful affirmation at the end. I think it's an absolutely wonderful piece. Yeah.

Presenter35:44

And what about your luxury?

Sir John Wilson35:45

Well, I bet I bet this is something nobody else has asked for. I'd want to take a sonic probe. Now, a sonic probe is looks like a a torch. It's recently been developed for as a guidance device for the blind. It's it sends out a a hi a supersonic sort of sound, which you can't hear, but it it raises the echoes and collects them back again. And it'd be a wonderful way of getting round the island. But even more, I could use it to tell whether there were coconuts in the coconut tree.

Presenter36:10

And and would it tell you if there's any milk in them, too?

Sir John Wilson36:12

No, I'd have to I don't but I wouldn't I wouldn't have to climb the tree if there weren't any coconuts and it would tell me that and then I could find the milk inside the coconuts.

Presenter36:20

Sir John Wilson, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Presenter36:31

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