Mary Stott

Mary Stott0:00

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.

Mary Stott0:08

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

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a journalist and feminist. She started young. In 1926, at the age of 19, she became women's editor of The Leicester Mail. But her career reached its peak 30 years later, when she became women's editor of The Guardian. Here she encouraged many distinguished writers, and the campaigns conducted on her pages led to the foundation of several important women's organizations, such as the National Housewives Register.

Presenter0:56

Her support of feminist issues has been ardent, but never strident. Now eighty seven and a widow, she can look back on a long and happy marriage and a life devoted to making that of other women better. She is Mary

Presenter1:12

Fury is her fuel, Mary. One of your successors at The Guardian wrote about you. Do you still get furious about things? Mary. No. Furious is an angry word, and I'm not an angry person. You're not you're not an aggressive feminist. No, never know. No, I'm not I'm not aggressive by nature at all.

Mary Stott1:24

Snow never

Presenter1:27

But what gets you all worked up? What sort of issues do you care about today?

Speaker 41:30

Yeah.

Mary Stott1:45

And

Presenter1:49

Not very much now, but I still do a bit of writing and I still launch the occasional not angry but rather stirred up letter.

Presenter1:57

But of course some people would say that that the feminist battle is over and it's won. I mean, we have an equality that in your youth you could never have dreamt we'd have to day, we women.

Presenter2:07

Yes, of course we have in in a great many ways, but it's not quite one, is it, when you think of the proportion of women in leading positions compared with the proportion of men and women in Parliament, women in the House of Lords, women in public office. We've not got there yet, really. We've got to go on saying fair show, Japs, fair show. But the leaps and bounds that we've achieved in your lifetime from 1907 to the present day are amazing. Oh, it's amazing, yes.

Mary Stott2:30

Your lifetime from 1900.

Mary Stott2:33

That's not

Presenter2:36

Let's contemplate you on a desert island. You know a lot about loneliness. Well, you know a lot about being alone. Both.

Mary Stott2:38

And all

Presenter2:43

So it doesn't hold any fears for you, presumably?

Presenter2:47

Well, no, not exactly fears, but of course

Presenter2:50

The fact that you've been on your own for many years doesn't.

Presenter2:55

Stop the fact that you are

Presenter2:57

Quite often lonely.

Presenter2:59

I mean, you sit there alone and you read and you pay patience and you knit and you do all the things that you like to do, but you are alone and sometimes sometimes still.

Presenter3:09

It hurts.

Presenter3:12

What about your music? What's the first record you'll play? Oh, the first one is a is part of the Elgar Cello Concerto. I think this is one of the most.

Presenter3:21

beautiful pieces of music I could choose. I I love the cello. My mother decided to have me talk piano when I was quite young, about seven, I think, and one of my brothers played the viola. My father was

Presenter3:36

persuaded by my mother to play the cello, but for some reason I've never understood she never had me taught any other instrument than the and the piano. And I think I would have loved to play the cello. And that's why I would like on my desert island to have a very nice cello piece and the and Jacqueline Dupre playing the Elgar cello concerto movement from that would would be a great joy to me.

Speaker 44:18

This is a new one.

Presenter4:53

Jacqueline Dupre playing part of the first movement of Elgar's cello concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barrenboim.

Presenter5:00

I mentioned, Mary Stott, that precociously you became women's editor of the Leicester Mail at the age of nineteen. Yes, I think it was nineteen. Apparently the first thing you did was put your head in your hands and weep with misery. Put my head on a file tape.

Mary Stott5:11

No misery.

Presenter5:15

And I sobbed, yes. But why? Well, I didn't want to be a woman journalist. I wanted to be a journalist. I didn't want to do a women's page. I wanted to to write anything, to report anything, to sob anything. I wanted to be a journalist.

Presenter5:29

Men don't have men's pages. They aren't confined to a man's page or to sport or anything. I want to be on the same terms as men, that's why. You did get to sub-edit later on, but that was in the war because all the men were away. Oh, that's right. That was on the Manchester Evening News. Oh, in many ways, the most exciting bit of my newspaper life. You were chief sub? No, I wasn't chief sub. But uh.

Mary Stott5:42

Oh no

Mary Stott5:44

So

Mary Stott5:48

Could you achieve some?

Presenter5:52

Well, look, I was I was a the sub editors, you know, handle the news. They don't write, they handle the news in the right headings. And we had a system at the Manster Evening News wh whereby the uh the Chief Sub had his day off on Saturday, the Deputy Chief Sub took charge, and the copytaster, that was the third man down, was his deputy, there was a list, one person one Saturday, another person, another Saturday. My name got dropped from the list, and I went to the editor and said, Why, it isn't a measure up, isn't it all right? He said

Presenter6:21

No, there's nothing wrong with your work, Mary nothing wrong with your work. But we have to safeguard the succession, and the successor has to be a man.

Presenter6:28

So Mary had to leave. How could I bear it? All the new boys were seated by me. I was sort of mummy to them. I taught them how to do it, how to assess the what would go into a heading.

Presenter6:38

I had a little Miss Waddington's that was my maiden name, Miss Waddington's guide to subvisitors, but any of those boys was going to be my boss on Saturdays. Ridiculous. And so I had to go.

Speaker 46:48

Also.

Mary Stott6:48

Yeah.

Presenter6:49

But journalism was deep-rooted in your family, wasn't it? Yes. Mother, father.

Mary Stott6:52

Oh yes, yes.

Presenter6:54

Yes, both my mother and father were teachers, but my father started a local newspaper in Leicester in the eighteen nineties, I think.

Presenter7:02

And he recruited my mother.

Presenter7:05

whom we married in nineteen hundred to do a women's column. That's where it all started. The writing habits very deeply rooted in our family on both sides. And an uncle too. Oh, my uncle Harry, yes, he wa

Mary Stott7:12

Numbers

Presenter7:16

It was he who gave me my start, really, I think. I think he encouraged the editor to take me off in the first instance, but he certainly gave me my start in doing a bit of make up and subbing and things like that.

Mary Stott7:28

What was the

Presenter7:31

Yes, I do. I've got a I've got a a a school notebook filled with cuttings, and my first piece.

Presenter7:37

which was written on the evening of the very day I started on the Leicester Mail was Miss Constance Hardcastle's Pupils' Concert.

Presenter7:46

And it was they were uh she was a singer, so you see it was all singing and I adored singing myself, so I thought I was very good at criticising singers. So it was a review by Mary Waddington. Did you get the byline?

Mary Stott7:54

Yeah.

Presenter7:57

No, possibly CMW critics would get their initials but not their full name.

Presenter8:04

Oh, yes. Well, this is Elizabeth Schumann singing Richard Strauss's Morgan. And this is nothing to do with my newspaper life, it's to do with my chief hobby. Certainly one of my chief hobbies, and that's singing.

Presenter8:18

I discovered I could sing when I was aged about seven and I was hold holding the door open in uh my primary school and singing whatever it was, the hymn, and my teacher, my former mistress, said to me, You've got a nice voice, Mary and so I thought, Oh, can I sing? and I started singing and and quite quite young I started uh playing for myself to sing, you see,'cause I had piano lessons from an early age.

Presenter8:44

And I think that one of the things I used to be able to play and absolutely adored was Morgan, Strauss's Morgan. It's a most beautiful song, and Elizabeth Schumann always was one of my favourite singers. I'd love to hear it on my desert island.

Speaker 49:15

No favour.

Presenter9:57

Elizabeth Schumann singing Richard Strauss's Morgan.

Presenter10:00

You were twenty one in nineteen twenty eight, Mary, the year in which women first got the vote on the same terms as men.

Speaker 410:06

To men

Presenter10:06

Can you you must have been one of the first women. I mean, can you remember the atmosphere? Can you remember the

Mary Stott10:11

Oh, what's it?

Presenter10:14

It's going to vote in nineteen twenty nine, which will win the Wazza general election.

Presenter10:20

And I was still twenty one. It was just before my twenty second birthday, and so I got up very early in the morning, because I thought, well, if I get to the polling station just after it opens, maybe I'll be the very first woman to vote at the age of twenty one. So I dressed myself up in a scarlet jumper, because I was voting Labour.

Presenter10:38

And I went off to the polling station. Proud as punch. It was a wonderful day. Never forget it. And and what sort of causes began to be won in those early years after you got the vote? Oh, well, yes, there were various things, sort of the custody of children and the terms on which one could be divorced. That was the time when a woman could not sue for divorce except in the country of her husband's domicile. Well, you see what a long way we'd got to go before it was even for women and men in in marriage and matrimony. And the same about the custody of children. Oh, those were the the most important issues. But there was an awful lot of things we had to fight for. Wasn't there also the the right to work after marriage? Oh, yes, yes. In the civil service, I think, they didn't get the uh

Mary Stott11:20

Yeah.

Presenter11:28

Right, to work after marriage until after the war, after World War Two.

Presenter11:33

I mean, woman was not allowed to work in many areas if she was married, not just not allowed to, given the sack.

Mary Stott11:39

Give them

Presenter11:40

It doesn't seem possible, does it? It doesn't. And I also read that that she won the right to the co-op divi. Could she not even claim that before? No, that's right. The co-op women perhaps that I was deeply associated with the Cooperative Women's Skills campaign, and that was one of the things they were

Mary Stott11:41

Natasha.

Mary Stott11:47

People never do that.

Presenter11:57

They had to fight for it right to the Divi. They spent the money, but you didn't earn it, you see. It's not yours, it's your husband's. Oh, outrageous. But importantly, from nineteen twenty eight

Presenter12:08

Men who were in authority had to listen to women. I mean, can you?

Presenter12:13

Do you remember a sense of victory or a sense of relief or perhaps a conviction that this was just the beginning?

Presenter12:20

Oh, I think one felt I felt I don't I can't speak for all my friends but I felt that we now had not only the right, but the chance to make our opinions known and our influence felt, yes.

Presenter12:33

Record number three.

Presenter12:35

Oh, I'm now I'm going to have one of my very favourite things the trio, the famous trio of my young days, Cortibo and Casals, playing the Schubert's piano trio in B flat.

Presenter12:49

I can remember hearing Corto, Thibault, and Casals think of it.

Presenter12:53

I don't know when I was only a girl.

Presenter12:56

Still perhaps even a schoolgirl.

Presenter12:59

In the great De Montfort Hall in Leicester, and this beautiful music and these three wonderful players is something that stays with me and I'd like to take it to my desert island.

Presenter13:59

Alfred Corto, Pablo Casaux, and Jacques Thibault playing part of the second movement of Schubert's piano trio in B flat major.

Presenter14:06

You were not, Mary Stott, by your own account in your autobiography, a very attractive child. You um you wrote How sad for my mother to have a graceless daughter I mean, w w were you really so graceless?

Mary Stott14:17

But wait

Presenter14:20

It sounds conceited, but looking at photographs of us when young, I don't think I was all that plain. I think in my teens I got rather plain. But you see, the trouble was that then

Presenter14:32

Straight hair was very unfashionable. And my mother used to put my hair into curling rags every night, and when she'd taken it out in the morning, it fell straight in about ten minutes. Both my brothers had beautiful, curly hair. And the younger of my two brothers, who were both older than me, he was very beautiful, there's no doubt. And so compared with him, I was plain, and I always thought of myself plain. And in a way, so in a way, I think it's quite an advantage. Why? Well, you have to earn being liked. You don't get being liked just because you're pretty. But you had to work against more than that, didn't you? Because you were also very timid. I mean, physically frightened of all sorts of things. I was very shy. Yes, yes, nervous, yes. But so that when you eventually went out, as you did.

Mary Stott15:09

Physically frightened of all sorts of things.

Presenter15:16

into the world, you know, and and and became financially independent. You earned your own living really quite earlier, which was quite avant garde, you know, in in the nineteen twenties. You know, it it wasn't just avant garde, it was a triumph of will, presumably. Well, yes, I had to because it was it was Godsend of me becoming a journalist, really,'cause uh

Presenter15:34

When you're when you're a journalist, if you're a reporter or any kind of writer, you have to have to talk to people. You have to, whether you want to or not. And so I learned, you see, I learned to be pleasant to people and to approach them and not be nervous about it. And then in your late twenties you met a man called Ken Stott, a reporter on the News Chronicle. Kay, you always called him. Was it that simply that you hated the name Ken? He didn't like Kenneth, which was his name of course. And I didn't like Ken, and he always signed himself K-Stot, so I I got in the way of calling him Kay Stott. And what kind of man was he? I mean, can you describe him? What was he like? He was, unlike me, he was very good looking.

Mary Stott15:53

Yeah.

Presenter16:13

He was a very, very lively person, very highly intelligent. And you've you've written about your marriage since that that you were liberated by marriage, liberated from fear of inadequacy. Yes, I think that's right. What does that mean?

Mary Stott16:28

Yeah.

Presenter16:30

I thought I was plain.

Presenter16:32

I wasn't an or didn't think I was att attractive.

Presenter16:35

Jaman?

Presenter16:36

I didn't feel that I was all that competent at many things.

Presenter16:41

See, I'd had very very clever relations and my mother was a great charmer and I never thought of myself as a charmer.

Presenter16:49

But uh my husband thought I was attractive in every way. Thank goodness.

Presenter16:55

Intelligent, right?

Presenter16:57

Love a book.

Presenter16:58

So we have some more music.

Presenter17:01

The next one.

Presenter17:03

is from Ben Britton's War Requiem. This is partly because of my husband. My husband didn't have a musical upbringing, but he was really by nature musical.

Presenter17:16

And his two favourite composers were my two favourite composers, and we were very lucky.

Presenter17:22

Johann Sebastian Bach and Benjamin Britton. So the one I'd like to have on my desert island of Britons is from the war requiem, the Lacrymosa, because uh it was first performed, I think, in Coventry and we couldn't go, but the second performance was in Yorkminster and we made a special journey to York and Kalina Vishnevskaya, who's a famous uh soprano, Mostropojewit's wife, wasn't she? She sang the Lacrymosa.

Presenter18:49

The Lachrymosa from Benjamin Britton's War Requiem, sung by Galina Vishnevskaya, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Benjamin Britton.

Presenter18:58

You had a daughter, Catherine. You worked in newspapers full time and part time. And then it was after the war, in nineteen fifty seven, you applied for the job as women's editor of The Guardian, Mary. It was then, of course, The Manchester Guardian. Why did you want it so much? I mean, you who resented being compartmentalised as woman.

Presenter19:18

It was because I had many guardian friends.

Presenter19:22

and Guardian Friends, and I knew that the a new editor had been appointed, Alistair Hetherington, and I thought, Oh, well, the one women's page

Presenter19:32

in the world worth doing.

Presenter19:35

for a feminist like me is a women's page of the Manchester Guardian. Why don't I have a go at that? I'm not going to get another job as a news sub editor,'cause obviously people are prejudiced against women.

Presenter19:46

So

Presenter19:47

Alastair took me out to lunch.

Presenter19:49

And he offered me the dorm. What was the page like in nineteen fifty seven?

Presenter19:53

I did have always I had comment pieces. That was very important to me.

Presenter19:59

To have comments from intelligent women. But you also had comments from real people, as it were, didn't you? You printed readers' art. That was, I think, my chief contribution to the Guardian Women's page, was to draw in the readers.

Presenter20:14

They did contribute a lot. But that was a radical move. I mean, no one used to print stuff that was written by amateurs inverted commerce. They were talking to one another. And out of the women's page of th as as I edited it,

Mary Stott20:20

Nine.

Mary Stott20:22

Yeah.

Presenter20:31

All sorts of things developed, you know, organizations like the National Housewives Register and

Presenter20:37

Preschool playgroups, that was one of the most important ones I did. It was started, I think. And there was a th thing for the bereaved, you know, that was really wonderful the way the readers responded. It's been said that you saw it all as a kind of club and you were its leader. The readers saw it as a kind of club. Yes, that's right. They've often told me so. So it was marvellous, really, that at the age of fifty, which you were when you took over in'fifty seven, that you actually found yourself in what sounds to have been your journalistic element. Yes, yes, it was. I like people to know.

Mary Stott21:00

Took over in fifty-seven that year.

Presenter21:10

that I was fifty when I took over the Guardian women's page, because people so nowadays so often think that you're quite past it at fifty. Dear God, I mean some of the best years of my working life were between fifty and I may say fifty and seventy fifty and sixty because I went on writing for the Guardian long after I retired, pretty regularly.

Presenter21:34

Shall we have some more music? Record number five.

Presenter21:37

I'd like to remind myself on the desert island of

Presenter21:40

Of the happy times I've spent playing two piano duets. One of my favourite two piano duets is this C minor Bach concerto. It is lovely, and I I think it'd be absolutely essential to have some Bach on the Desert Island, because I know my mother called him mental arithmetic, but he is a wonderfully

Presenter22:00

Oh, I suppose you could say a sort of a mathematical composer in a way, and yet he can write so tenderly as well. I think the undoubtedly to me the greatest composer who ever lived.

Presenter23:04

Part of Bach's concerto in C minor for two pianos played by Paul Badura Skoda and Jurg Demus with the Vienna State Opera conducted by Court Reydel.

Presenter23:14

So, Mary Stott, through the pages of The Guardian you gave women a voice and you helped them bring about change. That's really what I meant when I said at the beginning that you were always ardent but never strident. Did did you find yourself

Presenter23:28

Alienated by the cause when in the seventies it became rather strident, when the feminist cause became women's lib.

Presenter23:36

I wasn't alienated by women's lip. I rejoiced in it. But there were there were quite a there was quite a section of very strident feminists, mostly at the American end.

Presenter23:47

who were very anti men. I couldn't be that kind of man hating feminists. Those are the feminists I dislike. But women's the women's liberation movement, it started off again in the late sixties and came to England, I think, about nineteen seventy.

Presenter24:03

I was one of the s people who started a

Presenter24:06

Group called Women in Media, and I worked very enthusiastically for that. But the nature of it was altogether through the seventies it was much tougher in style, more aggressive, wasn't it? Not more aggressive than the suffragettes, dear. Oh no. But more aggressive than you had been. I mean, it one would describe your approach perhaps as low-key, as pragmatic. Oh, yes. Well, we demonstrated, and we lobbied.

Mary Stott24:17

Yeah.

Presenter24:33

I suppose it we didn't. Uh we didn't throw stones through windows like the suffragettes. No, and we weren't. I mean, there there was a section of the women's libbers who really I found very tiresome.

Presenter24:44

How much more then do you think attitudes are going to change? I mean, if you could predict the 21st century, how great, again, do you think the changes will be in the attitudes between the sexes? Oh, I think the change is coming steadily, steadily. And I think, you know, in the early decades of the next century, I think we should be very much on equal terms. I'm not worried. I'm sure that men and women are going to stand side by side and hand in hand. I feel quite confident about that. More music.

Presenter25:11

One of the best aspects of my life is that since I was a s a schoolgirl, I've sung in choirs. And the great thing is, of course, that uh

Presenter25:20

I started singing soprano, not not much in choirs'cause I could sing I could read music and hold the whole apart, so I sang alto in choirs almost from the beginning. My voice got lower and lower and lower, and so I decided I'd have to sing bass, and so now I sing with the basses, who at first thought it very funny and in Iceland who thought it frightfully comical, and now they don't think that at all,'cause they know I can read it and sometimes better than they can.

Presenter25:43

having done it so long. But uh the one I'd like to have,'cause I think it's such a a heart warming thing, and I've sung it not so very long ago, is is uh Haydn's creation, The Heavens Are Telly.

Presenter26:51

The Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir David Wilcox, and the Heavens Are Telling from Haydn's Creation.

Presenter26:59

Kay, your husband died, Mary, very suddenly in nineteen sixty seven. He was only fifty-six.

Presenter27:06

Which means that you've been a widow nearly as long as you were a wife. How much do you still miss him?

Presenter27:13

Yes.

Presenter27:14

Yes, he was a very good friend. I mean, apart from being husband suffer everything, he was a a good an ideal sort of partner. I don't remember us ever having a real row. I suppose we had little disagreements. But, of course, I've always had a I've always had a watchword, never let the sun go down on your wrath. And if we had had a disagreement, I wouldn't have dreamed of going to bed without making it up. You you wrote a few years after he died that sorting out his belongings was, as you described it, a brutal job of butchery. And you wrote sometimes I moaned like an animal.

Speaker 427:48

Good.

Presenter27:49

And and one can hear that and understand it. Uh uh i it's however much is written and talked about widowhood, and I know you've done quite a lot of that publicly, I mean, no one can be saved from that pain, can they? No, no. Sometimes I I think it's like losing a a leg, you know, losing

Mary Stott28:00

No, no.

Presenter28:06

an essential part of you.

Presenter28:08

And you never I mean, people do get over it, of course, and some people marry again quite quickly.

Presenter28:13

But uh I haven't and I've never met anybody I've wanted to marry since he died.

Presenter28:19

No, it's still it's still very much in my thoughts.

Presenter28:23

You wrote, too, that you maintained, at that point in those few early years after his death, a careful façade, but that inside your will to live had collapsed. I mean Oh, yes, in the first months after he died.

Presenter28:38

I would gladly have gone. I mean, stopped eating or something. But you see, I couldn't, because my daughter had troubles of her own. I had to stand around to be my daughter's friend. There was no was no escape for me. But if if I had if she'd been, you know, happily married and in Australia or something

Presenter28:58

I think I would just have stopped eating. I didn't want to live.

Presenter29:01

There's no point. What was I going to live for?

Presenter29:03

No. No point. And how long was it before your life ceased to be what you what you called that dreary, meaningless trudging? Well, I I say to me that after about six months you begin to be sort of sort of mildly interested in the thing. It comes in months it comes. I always I always said, you see, because a lot of lot of widows wrote to my page and I knew their at second hand, so to speak, I knew what it was like, widowhood, because so many of them had poured it out in my pages.

Presenter29:33

But I always said that it took it would take two years to get back on your feet, and that's about what I found, really. And then you said or you have said that a new person began to emerge, and and was that a kind of person that wouldn't have emerged otherwise had he lived? Well, she was there. But you see, when you're married

Mary Stott29:46

Why did he live?

Presenter29:50

Naturally, whether you're a man or a woman, you put your partner's interests very high on your list, and I don't think I would have become a a really active campaigner as I did after Kay died.

Presenter30:03

If it hadn't been that I was on my own, I had to find something to take up my life, didn't I? Shall we have record number seven?

Presenter30:10

This record I want to take with me is I want to take it with me to remind me.

Presenter30:16

And that

Presenter30:17

It wasn't only women who had to get themselves free.

Presenter30:21

It was the Negroes in America, and I was always very interested in in the emancipation.

Presenter30:28

of the Negroes in America. It meant a lot to me and I quite young, and I think it was through my mother, I became quite addicted to the Negro spirituals, and I've got a lovely book of Negro spirituals, which I think was my mother's, or at least she gave it to me. And so to remind me of all this period of our lives, I thought it would be wonderful to have Paul Robeson, the one of the greatest of all basses, singing Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.

Speaker 330:59

What alone's the trouble I've seen?

Speaker 331:06

Nobody knows my sorrow.

Speaker 331:15

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.

Speaker 331:22

More hallelujah. Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down. Oh, yes, Lord. Sometimes I'm almost to the ground.

Speaker 331:48

Oh yeah, slow.

Presenter31:56

Poor Robeson, and nobody knows the trouble I've seen. You're eighty-seven now, Mary, a grandmother, a campaigner still, and you've fulfilled a childhood ambition because and you wrote, let me quote, that you wanted to become respectworthy enough, important enough, to be the sort of person invited to present prizes.

Presenter32:17

Well why did you want to become that kind of person, and has it lived up to its early promise?

Mary Stott32:21

From this

Presenter32:23

I don't remember writing that. I don't know.

Presenter32:26

I suppose when I I went to a very good school in Lesser Wiggeston Grammar School for Girls, and we used to have splendid prize givings in the great de Montfort Hall, and we always used to have very respectworthy people, mostly female, I'm glad to say, to present the prizes, and I suppose that became a sort of uh oh, a mother figure, you see, which you if you're good enough to present the prizes, you're quite a good public character, that's at that point.

Presenter32:49

That's the explanation of that one, I think. And tell me about aging. I is is that a frustrating business?

Presenter32:56

Yes, I'm afraid I think it is. I've been quite active.

Presenter33:01

in right up into my eighties. But the m older you get, the the more you you sort of crumble, you know, physically and mentally you you lose you lose your full power and you get very fed up and you can't remember things and when you get tired just walking to the bottom of the garden and all that sort of thing. It's it's quite hard to put up with the crumbling of your faculties.

Presenter33:22

And you're a member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.

Mary Stott33:25

Yeah.

Presenter33:26

Does that mean that that when you judge your too great a burden on yourself, let alone others, that you will put an end to it?

Presenter33:34

I hope that I shall be able to do that, yes.

Presenter33:37

For their sake, not for ours, for their sake, entirely.

Presenter33:41

Let's have your last record.

Presenter33:44

My last record is something.

Presenter33:46

I would like of course it isn't possible I would like to be able to have When I Go, whenever it may be, wherever it may be. And it's the last uh the last chorus from the uh the Bach St. John Passion. It's something that I think ought to be played at

Presenter34:03

Almost anybody's funeral. It's a lovely farewell priest. Goodbye now. How lovely, how lovely the future is, how lovely the past's been.

Speaker 434:31

Let's go.

Presenter35:08

The choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the Philomusica conducted by Sir David Wilcox, and the chorus Rest Calm, O Body, Pure and Holy, from Bach's and John Passion.

Presenter35:18

Which of those eight records, Mary, would if you could only take one, would it be? Oh, the last one, of course. I'd have to have that as a sort of you know,'cause I'd when I get to my desert island I'll be quite an old lady, so I'd like a nice one to say goodbye with.

Presenter35:32

What about your book? I've decided I'd like to take with me Arthur Koesler's The Act of Creation.

Presenter35:39

it's a quite important and learned book. Arthur Koesler was a wonderful thinker and a wonderful writer, and I've got it, but I don't think I've ever read it through. It's a very large book, and I think it'd last me a long while on the desert island and give me plenty of food for thought. So that's the one I'll have, please.

Mary Stott35:56

And your luxury.

Presenter35:58

Oh, my luxury were lots of painting gear. I do I've since for oh, twenty years or more now, I've been a hobby painter of watercolours and I want lots of nice watercolours, lots of nice good painting paper and paint brushes. Painting the sea is very difficult and very exciting. And of course with lots of skies, and I'm quite good at skies.

Presenter36:18

Mary Stott, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Presenter36:22

Thank you.

Mary Stott36:31

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.