Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
A conservationist and birdwatcher, Director General of Nature Conservancy and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund.
Eight records
George Barclay with Charlie Kunz and the Casani Club Orchestra
I'm playing Red Sails in the Sunset because I'm a very bad sailor, but in the course of my life about the environment, I've had to go a long way about the world and I've had to cross many seas and so on. And this, I think, gets the feeling that we in this little island are really only a very small part of the natural world and that we've got to think of ourselves as wanderers, as enjoying the resources of a planet which is pretty small by any by most standards, but which is big enough for us if we use it properly.
The Concert Band and Chorus of the RAAF
I came to live in Portsmouth at the beginning of World War I and I had the si the scene then of the expeditionary force, the old contemporaries, marching through the streets of Portsmouth. So many of them never came back.
I like that particularly because I was 40 meters up, 130 feet up in the top of the canopy in Demerara and nobody had ever done an all-night session at the top of the canopy. I saw the monkeys coming through just by me and so it's a special song for me.
Ewald Böhmer with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Clemens Schmalstich
I would like on my desert island to remember Ludwig and all the lovely times we had together, and this was his favorite music
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
we were having a very difficult meeting of about 20 people which was deadlocked on some shipping problem and suddenly there was a slight pause in the meeting and Hercombe, who was in the chair and I both got up, left the meeting hurriedly, went over to the window and listened to one of the first black red starts to sing in. It wasn't a nightingale, it was a black red start, but we listened to it, just made sure of it, and we came back to the table and everybody was dumbfounded and this difficult argument immediately come to an end. Everybody agreed within two minutes, so never underestimate the power of a bird.
a great deal of our work was in Scotland, and one of the first reserves we got was in what was now called the Road to the Isles. So I have chosen for my next record The Road to the Isles.
I'm not a musical person, but this was the waltz from Othenbach Helen. And Helen of Troy, of course, was a great person who started quite a lot of things. And I somehow got very attached to this melody, and I would like to hear it now.
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 'Pastoral'Favourite
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer
My last record, of course that very great composer Beethoven was obviously a bird lover and the last record that I want is the Pastoral Symphony and I want the part of it where he actually as a composer of music he goes to learn from the quail and the cuckoo and so on and you hear the birds in the Beethoven music.
The keepsakes
The book
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This was perhaps the most important book written this century and far more people ought to read it because we don't know who we are as a human animal unless we understand evolution...
In conversation
Presenter asks
What are the horrible things in the world that come to your mind?
There are so many, it's hard to know where to start. But I think what I would call malign technology technology has been used in a malign way. It's been used to destroy a lot of the environment. It has been used to destroy a lot of people's lives.
Presenter asks
Is there a moment when you recall [the bird watching bug] happening?
Yes, I recall it very vividly. It was a wet day and my parents were passing the Natural History Museum and I said, let's take him in there. And we went into the bird gallery. In the bird gallery, there were wonderful habitat groups of eagles on their rock ledges and so on. And there and then I said, this is what I want to do. I want to watch these birds and I want to learn more about them.
Presenter asks
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 1
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 1
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My castaway this week is a conservationist. In a life which spans our century he's now 91 bird watching has been his passion. It was with him at school, where he preferred it to sport, and in his work, where he rose to be one of the most influential advisers to the post-war Labour Government. He was a Director General of Nature Conservancy, and he helped found the World Wildlife Fund. Mysteriously, though, he has no knighthood, no peerage, but few doubt his stature. Gongs, he says, mean very little to me. All my life is about improving, learning, and understanding, and then applying that understanding to correct the many horrible things in the world. He is Max Nicholson.
Presenter
I think I've quoted you correctly to yourself, Max. Wh what are the horrible things in the world that come to your mind?
Max Nicholson
Picture to yourself.
Max Nicholson
There are so many, it's hard to know where to start. But I think what I would call malign technology technology has been used in a malign way. It's been used to destroy a lot of the environment. It has been used to destroy a lot of people's lives.
Presenter
What kind of technology have you seen, though, come through during the course of the twentieth century, which you believe to have led to these horrible things?
Max Nicholson
Well, almost all of it. The military technology, the the transport technology, the the uh enormous number of things which are made by means of processes involving pollution.
Max Nicholson
We churn out
Max Nicholson
An enormous number of horrible things and we in the environmental movement have been able to stop some of the worst of them, but only the most specific ones. The trouble is that the people who control the political power centers and the industrial power centers and so on don't know and don't want to know about this. Most of the people around the world are getting the message, but the people at the top aren't.
Presenter
The people with power are not listening to the message. So, what was it?
Max Nicholson
Well, I I wouldn't quite say that. They're listening to it, but they're paying lip service to it. They they they sign documents, they make speeches and so on, but uh they don't do so.
Max Nicholson
We have broken away from the principles of nature and we've got to get back to them very soon if we don't want to become an endangered species out of it.
Presenter
Well, more nature and some politics to come, but let's get down to uh to musical business. Tell me about the first record that you'll play on your desert island.
Max Nicholson
I'm playing Red Sails in the Sunset because I'm a very bad sailor, but in the course of my life about the environment, I've had to go a long way about the world and I've had to cross many seas and so on. And this, I think, gets the feeling that we in this little island are really only a very small part of the natural world and that we've got to think of ourselves as wanderers, as enjoying the resources of a planet which is
Max Nicholson
Pretty small by any by most standards, but which is big enough for us if we use it properly.
Speaker 4
Twas down for fisher folk gather I wandered far from the frog I had a fisher girl sing
Speaker 4
And this refrain was her song.
Speaker 4
Red sails in the sunset
Speaker 4
Way out on the sea
Speaker 4
O Carrie, my loved one!
Speaker 4
Home safely to me He saith at the dawning All day I've been blue
Speaker 4
Red sails in the sunset.
Speaker 4
I'm trusting in you.
Presenter
Red Sails in the Sunset, sung by George Barclay with Charlie Kuntz and the Cassani Club Orchestra.
Presenter
You were bitten by the bird watching bug, Max Nicholson, at a very early age. Is was is there a moment when you recall it happening?
Max Nicholson
Yes, I recall it very vividly. It was a wet day and my parents were passing the Natural History Museum and I said, let's take him in there. And we went into the bird gallery. In the bird gallery, there were wonderful habitat groups of eagles on their rock ledges and so on. And there and then I said, this is what I want to do. I want to watch these birds and I want to learn more about them.
Presenter
But you you lived you were born and brought up in County Wicklow, i in Ireland. Was that presumably was good bird watching territory?
Max Nicholson
I left Ireland when I was five. My father was doing a job in Dublin and uh he came back to England when I was five. So
Presenter
So so where did you do your bird watching as a boy?
Max Nicholson
I did um s some of it round the London reservoirs and then we moved to Portsmouth and I did quite a bit in Spithead and then uh I've White and so on. I I got so hooked on the birds, I wanted to know why they did everything, what they did, how they did it, what their perceptions were, what they could see, th how they got the signals and so on. I wanted to
Presenter
It's a very lonely pursuit for a young boy.
Max Nicholson
Well
Max Nicholson
It didn't seem lonely to me because I was with the birds.
Presenter
And you didn't you did it instead of sport at school?
Max Nicholson
School, I understand? Well, um when I went to public school, they put me down on the first the first day of the summer to play cricket. And uh having watched me for half an hour play cricket, they said they I understand you're a bird watcher. If you will undertake always to go birdwatching five miles at least from the school where every day cricket is being played, you will never be put down for cricket in your career.
Presenter
But you've gone as far as to say that bird watching taught you as much as your years at Oxford. Um can that really be true?
Max Nicholson
Yes, I think it is because uh you see if you really watch birds as intensely as I did when you were so young and uh pick up so much, I think that my bird watching has made me uh throughout my life rather quicker in uh picking things up. I pick up signals all over the place when I'm and uh
Presenter
But from human being?
Max Nicholson
Yes, from human beings as well, yes. For instance, a little bird which would go into a glass can migrate 6,000 miles to Africa and come back here and within 48 hours it comes to a wood and it says that part of that wood is the place which will have what I need to bring up five young successfully. And if it guesses wrong, of course, that bird is finally going to become extinct. And I often say to politicians, if birds took as long to make up their minds as you do and got it wrong as often, they would be extinct. Think of that.
Max Nicholson
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Tell me about record number two.
Max Nicholson
I came to live in Portsmouth at the beginning of World War I and I had the si the scene then of the expeditionary force, the old contemporaries, marching through the streets of Portsmouth. So many of them never came back.
Max Nicholson
And there
Max Nicholson
So uh my second song is Temporary.
Max Nicholson
It's day we're singing.
Speaker 4
It's a long way to Tifferary. It's a long way to go. It's a long way to Tifferi.
Speaker 4
To the sweetest girl I know
Speaker 4
Where will that source work?
Speaker 4
It's a long, long waiting disarm.
Presenter
It's A Long Way to Tipperary played and sung by the Concert Band and Chorus of the RAAF.
Presenter
You you would have been
Presenter
Ten years old, I think, Max. Just 10 years old. When the war broke out. What was your.
Max Nicholson
Just answer.
Presenter
Reaction as a young boy, because one's heard time and again that a lot of young boys at the time really wanted to go and fight in that war. They thought it the heroic thing to do.
Max Nicholson
Oh, they did and of course for two years the war was run entirely by volunteers. It was only in the middle of the war that conscription was brought in.
Max Nicholson
But um nobody had any idea what carnage there would be. I can't I can't speak without emotion of the incompetence of the generals we had in the First World War, in sharp contrast to the ones in the second.
Presenter
And at at what stage did you realize that, as a young man, did you realize that there had been a terrible slaughter?
Max Nicholson
Well, you couldn't open the newspaper. Column after column, name after name, and all those people were alive last week and dead now. Horrible, horrible.
Presenter
And that's obviously something that's stayed with you throughout your life.
Max Nicholson
Yes, I feel that uh those of us who lived on had a
Max Nicholson
an obligation to do something.
Max Nicholson
to make up.
Presenter
How obvious was it in in in in the circles you moved in that there were fewer men around in their twenties, that there were m greater gaps?
Max Nicholson
Oh, it was painfully obvious, and it was even more painfully obvious, that there were a lot of what we called the old gang who would have been retired, who were still occupying po posts of responsibility ten years after they should have been retired. Tell me about record number three.
Max Nicholson
When I was at Oxford, I had a double life because I was not only doing a degree in history, but I was continuing my ecological and ornithological work. And I was very keen to go out to distant parts on an expedition. I then founded an Oxford University Exploration Club, which first of all went to Greenland under Dr. Longstaff. And then we said this is an awful place, there's hardly a tree in sight, let's go somewhere where the trees are. The next place we went to was the tropical rainforest.
Max Nicholson
And that that was in Demarura. And that that is why I would like to play next this song I'm rather rather fond of down in Demarura.
Speaker 4
The man who had a hospital had a hostile
Speaker 4
That poor horse he went and died alum down
Speaker 4
Raw raw and here we
Speaker 4
Here we sit sat.
Max Nicholson
I like that particularly because I was 40 meters up, 130 feet up in the top of the canopy in Demerara and nobody had ever done an all-night session at the top of the canopy. I saw the monkeys coming through just by me and so it's a special song for me.
Presenter
Stuart Robertson singing it, down in Demerara.
Presenter
Now, perhaps not least because of your views on the First World War, you you became rather political, you became um something of a journalist, you started to write you wrote for the Weekend Review, which eventually became the New Statesman, I think, didn't you?
Max Nicholson
Death.
Presenter
And like columnists today, you liked telling politicians what they should be doing. Did did they take any notice?
Max Nicholson
Well, they did, because some of the younger ones, like Walter Elliott and Harold Macmillan, who was afterwards, of course, Prime Minister, they read us with great attention. And they came to the editor and said, this is all very well, but we have to do things in Parliament and say where we stand. You just tell us where we're wrong. You come along and you never have to say what you would do. And so my editor turned to me and said, they're quite right. We must tell them. We must get out a national plan for Great Britain. And so I was put on to do this, and it came out in February 1931. It had a considerable impact. You'd have been about 20.
Speaker 1
And
Presenter
twenty seven at the time, so it was quite precocious of you, really.
Max Nicholson
Well, I was told to do it.
Presenter
Uh
Max Nicholson
But did they
Presenter
They take any notice.
Max Nicholson
The politicians? Yes, they did. They did. Harold Macmillan started a thing called the Next Ten Years Group, which was modelled on what we had put. I think having been born under the sugarloaf, the air I absorbed as a baby was the air which makes one again the government. And I've always been again the government, even when I've been in it.
Presenter
So you remain again the government whatever colour
Max Nicholson
Yes, I'm still agin the government motor.
Max Nicholson
Oh yeah, yes, I do, yes. With some misgiving.
Presenter
But you're a true floating voter by the sound of it, are you?
Max Nicholson
Yes, very much so. And what the Americans call mugwamp.
Max Nicholson
Yeah, a a a mug wump has his mug one side of the fence and his wump the other side.
Presenter
Record number four.
Max Nicholson
Curious enough, I've always found time to pursue all these public affairs things and at the same time to pursue my ornithology. And um when um
Max Nicholson
Hitler started making real trouble for the Jews. He had on his list one Ludwig Koch, who was a singer and also eminent in the grammar phone world. And he had to get out of Germany at forty-eight hours' notice. And he came to England and he he had a curious line.
Max Nicholson
in making records of birdsong. But he didn't really know much about birds. And so I had to go to a little hotel in Woking with Ludwig. And we went out on Chobham Common. We were going out very early because we had to record the curlew at about four o'clock in the morning. But Ludwig was very nervous that I wouldn't wake up in time and he got the number of my room r wrong. So he he burst into a room which he thought was mine and said in his German accent, come, it is time. And unfortunately, in the bed in this room, there was a young woman.
Max Nicholson
Who might easily have misunderstood it, but very luckily for Ludwig, she just, it was Derby Day and she just won a sum on the Derby, so she took a very short view of it. I would like on my desert island to remember Ludwig and all the lovely times we had together, and this was his favorite music, I Pergowanger binisch Jah.
Presenter
Part of Mozart's Der Fogelfenger binisch Jah, sung by Ewald Bohrmer with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Clemens Schmarlstisch, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty seven.
Max Nicholson
That's interesting. That was the very year that we recorded this curloop.
Presenter
The curlie
Max Nicholson
Uh
Presenter
Which ran for a long time, didn't it?
Presenter
Yeah, it's not about it.
Max Nicholson
Natural history pressure.
Presenter
So so we're in the late thirties now, and and you, Max, were in no doubt that there would be another war. What what made you so sure? I mean, you couldn't stand the appeasers, could you? What made you so sure you were right the war was going to happen?
Max Nicholson
Oh, because I had very good contacts in Germany, especially on this group. People who knew and were told things that were top secret with Hitler and came through to us very quickly. And so we had no illusion about that. In fact, we formed an air raid defense league about 1936. And we formed a post-war aims group. We thought that we couldn't fight the war without knowing what we were fighting it for. Everybody must know what we were fighting it for. And so the first meeting of our post-war aims group took place in Chelsea at the beginning of August 1939. War was declared at the beginning of September.
Presenter
You spent the second half of the war, I think, in in the Ministry of Shipping, and so you got to go to all the big conferences. You went to Cairo and Yalt and Potsdam in the end, didn't you?
Max Nicholson
The Quebec
Presenter
So you saw a lot of the key players in the war at at uh close quarters. Who did you find the most impressive? Which of them?
Max Nicholson
Oh, I would say undoubtedly the Chief of General Staff, General Allenbrook, Sir Allenbrook, as he was at the beginning of the war, he was a most wonderful, calm and collected man, a first-class soldier and a very long-term strategist. And he sometimes had to stay up till two o'clock in the morning arguing with Churchill against some madcap scheme. If Allenbrook stuck to his guns, Churchill always gave in in the end. But he was a wonderful man and we all owe a great deal to Allenbrook.
Presenter
And he was a fellow bird watcher, wasn't he?
Max Nicholson
Yes, he was also a birdwatcher, yes, and um
Presenter
Bird watching got you on in your career. Do you suddenly find that very distinguished chaps suddenly turn out to have this this hobby in common?
Max Nicholson
No, we didn't.
Max Nicholson
Well, sometimes, but uh uh it would be wrong to think that it's ever given me a leg up in my career.
Presenter
Record number five.
Max Nicholson
Our headquarters was in Berkeley Square House and it so happened that almost at the time when the popular hit A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square was loosed on the world, we were having a very difficult meeting of about 20 people which was deadlocked on some shipping problem and suddenly there was a slight pause in the meeting and Hercombe, who was in the chair and I both got up, left the meeting hurriedly, went over to the window and listened to one of the first black red starts to sing in. It wasn't a nightingale, it was a black red start, but we listened to it, just made sure of it, and we came back to the table and everybody was dumbfounded and this difficult argument immediately come to an end. Everybody agreed within two minutes, so never underestimate the power of a bird.
Speaker 4
That certain night.
Speaker 4
The night we met
Speaker 4
There was magic abroad in the air.
Speaker 4
There were angels dining.
Speaker 4
Epper
Speaker 4
And the nightingale sang.
Speaker 4
Bargri Square
Speaker 4
I may be right, I may be wrong.
Speaker 1
I may
Speaker 4
But I'm perfectly willing to swear that when you turned and smiled at me
Speaker 4
A nightingale sang in Barclay Square
Speaker 1
Nightingale
Speaker 4
That lingered over London town.
Speaker 1
Good over done.
Speaker 4
Poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown.
Speaker 4
How could he know we two were so in love?
Speaker 4
The hold-on world seemed upside down.
Speaker 1
Hold on work.
Speaker 4
The streets of town were paved with stars. It was such a romantic affair.
Speaker 4
And as we care
Speaker 4
And said good night.
Speaker 4
A nightingale sang in barkliers.
Presenter
That was Turner Leighton, and a Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.
Presenter
But but the man who really impressed you, Max Nicholson, on the domestic front, was Herbert Morrison, wasn't it? He was he was Lord President of the Council in the Attlee Administration.
Presenter
Why was he so special in your view?
Max Nicholson
He was a wonderful man because he was a doer, he was an activist. He was very easy to talk to and if you convinced him that something that he passionately wanted to do wouldn't work, he would immediately drop it and unlike almost any other minister that I've ever met, he would never bring it up afterwards.
Presenter
So we get to 1952, and you were still, of course, in your 40s then. You'd worked at the heart of government, you'd travelled the world, you'd met and knew some of the most influential people of your age. But as far as I can see, you quit. You turned your back on all of this rather exciting life, and you became Director General of Nature Conservancy. Now, why?
Max Nicholson
Well, I was a charter member. I was a council member and we appointed another man as the first director general, but he couldn't cope with it and he left very early. And then the chairman came to me and said, well, the vice-chairman came to me, said, well, we've got a very simple decision to make. Either we pack the thing up or you come in and run it. Which shall it be?
Max Nicholson
So it was blackmail, was it?
Presenter
So the black
Max Nicholson
Well, I it wasn't like me because I had in a Kurdish way I think I'd already made up my mind that with a Tory government b uh on a rather do nothing.
Max Nicholson
program, it was too much of a change. I was an activist and so I was happy to build up this new thing and nobody knew what conservation meant, nobody ever heard of the environment. Everything was new. We had to train our people from scratch. Everything was
Presenter
Um
Max Nicholson
Yeah. Yeah.
Presenter
Uh
Max Nicholson
But
Presenter
Uh
Max Nicholson
Uh
Presenter
Yeah.
Max Nicholson
Da
Presenter
Art. So it was quite exciting. But, nevertheless, you you've also said that uh the ceilings in some Whitehall offices, and I'm quoting you, must have been damaged by the force of the sighs of relief that went up when you left, because they were so relieved to see the back of you. Why were they so relieved? Were you were you
Max Nicholson
Well, because I was a permanent civil servant aged in my middle 40s, I had a long way to go. They couldn't get rid of me from the civil service. There was no way they could get rid of me. And they were terrified. They knew what an activist I was. And all the civil servants took a very contrary view to me. And they were wondering how on earth they could possibly get me out of the civil servant. And suddenly, overnight, this mad fellow got out himself too. They were so grateful. Next piece of music. It so happened that when I went into the Nature Conservancy, I was so fed up with Whitehall that I wanted to make my headquarters not in Whitehall but in Edinburgh. I found I couldn't do this because I couldn't trust what some of my ex-colleagues in Whitehall were going to get up to while they were out of my sight. But a great deal of our work was in Scotland, and one of the first reserves we got was in what was now called the Road to the Isles. So I have chosen for my next record The Road to the Isles.
Speaker 4
A far cruel is pulling me away, As take I will make to the road.
Speaker 4
For far cool in circles in the bunk.
Speaker 4
As step I will the sunlight for me load, Shore by Tumble and La Crana and La Harbour I will go By Heather's ranks with heaven in their wiles.
Speaker 1
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 4
If it's thinking in your inner head, braggarts in mustep, you've never smelt the tangle o' the aisles. Oh, the far coolins are putting love on me, as step-I will make crummeth to the eyes.
Max Nicholson
That's very dear to me. I must tell you that every time I go into Scotland I feel at least twenty per cent better than when I'm in England.
Presenter
And that was Stuart Robertson singing The Road to the Isles. Now, apart from your work at Nature Conservancy, you also, as I said at the outset, helped to set up the World Wildlife Fund, which always seems to have attracted support from royalty, Prince Philip and the King of Spain and the Queen of the Netherlands, to name but three. Very good PR. Why do you think it's always been able to do that? What's the trick of it?
Max Nicholson
In April 1961, I drafted what is now effectively the constitution of the WWF and I devised the machinery and I managed to persuade Prince Philip, who was then rather at a loss for what he should be doing. And this was this just suited him to be able to
Max Nicholson
But presumably before then he didn't
Presenter
Know much particularly about w wildlife and ecology.
Max Nicholson
No, he was he had a some interest in it, but he uh he is uh he never does anything with uh by halves and he rarely mastered everything about it in uh the remarkably short term.
Presenter
Now, your other connection with royalty is the Silver Jubilee Walkway. Tell me first of all.
Max Nicholson
Tell me first of all what it what it is. I was made chairman of the Environmental Committee for the Queen's Jubilee. So we thought a bit and we'd be making walkways, nature walks through the woods. And we said why not make a town walkway which would take people to all the historic sites along the Thames. Now the walkway not only extends twelve miles through London but it has various spurs and so on.
Presenter
But it it took seventeen years, eighteen years, I think, in the end, to complete. It was only completed at the end of last year, wasn't it?
Max Nicholson
Yeah, yes.
Presenter
And it is said that it's one of London's best kept secrets, that few people know about it. Do you do you feel it's rather unexploited?
Max Nicholson
No, well, I don't regret that it isn't war-trodden. Many, many thousands of people do use it. But it's.
Presenter
What, twelve? Miles long, you say, the whole walkway.
Max Nicholson
Have have you trodden it? No, because uh uh unfortunately uh when I came back from um leading this
Max Nicholson
UN party in Baluchistan, I got polio, and so my walking is rather limited, but I have got round the world a good deal. I've even been to the South Pole since I had polio, so and of course the South Pole is a a very curious point in the environment. There's not an awful lot to see when you get there, but nobody told me that at that time women were not admitted to the Antarctic continent at all, and that there were a lot of American servicemen herded in this canteen and this living quarters at the South Pole. And the result of this was that the South Pole had, I don't know if it still had, the largest collection of nude pinups in the world. A very fine collection which everyone's taking to see.
Presenter
Record number seven.
Max Nicholson
I'm not a musical person, but this was the waltz from Othenbach Helen. And Helen of Troy, of course, was a great person who started quite a lot of things. And I somehow got very attached to this melody, and I would like to hear it now.
Speaker 1
Uh
Speaker 4
Um
Presenter
Part of the waltz from Offenbach's Helen with the Savoy Hotel Orfeynes. Well, now, Max, d describe this desert island of yours to me. How do you imagine it to be in an ideal world?
Max Nicholson
Well, it's one of the outer small islands of the New Hebrides in the Pacific. This is, of course, a tropical island and it has the usual palm trees and so on, and the usual sandy beach. But it also has a lot of migratory birds and it has a wonderful lot of fishes round it. It's got a coral reef. So I think I should be quite happy there. And I don't mind if I'm marooned on this coral island for as many years as you like. I'm perfectly happy by myself. A very odd person that way probably, but I so much goes on in my head and so on that I don't feel lonely. And so I think I would have not too much difficulty in knocking up shelter on this very in this very good climate. And there would be plenty of food. And so what more do you want?
Presenter
Well, they'd be the birds. You couldn't do without the birds.
Max Nicholson
Oh, there yes, but there are some very fine uh waders and um uh seabirds coming down or uh that you can watch from the shore.
Presenter
So you're not entirely self-sufficient. You couldn't manage without the birds, could you?
Max Nicholson
J oh no, no, I
Presenter
Take that for granted. And are you going to see a bird there that you've never seen and always wanted to see?
Max Nicholson
I haven't thought of that. I probably will, but I haven't thought of that. I have to find out.
Presenter
Tell me about your last record.
Max Nicholson
My last record, of course that very great composer Beethoven was obviously a bird lover and the last record that I want is the Pastoral Symphony and I want the part of it where he actually as a composer of music he goes to learn from the quail and the cuckoo and so on and you hear the birds in the Beethoven music. So what could be better for me?
Presenter
Part of Beethoven's Symphony No. Six in F major, The Pastoral, played by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer. Now, if you could only take one of those records, Max, which one?
Max Nicholson
Well, if you let me take the whole of it, I will take the pastor.
Presenter
Right. Bast or symphony. And what about your book? You've got it there.
Max Nicholson
Yes, I am very keen on this book by a curious man who was both a Jesuit priest and a very good scientist, Pierre Tayard de Chardin, who wrote a book
Max Nicholson
uh years ago about um fifty years ago called The Phenomenon of Man uh and Julian Huxley introduced me to this and uh Julian Huxley thought and I agree with him
Max Nicholson
This was perhaps the most important book written this century and far more people ought to read it because we don't know who we are as a human animal unless we understand evolution, understand how life has gone on and Tyard described all this in the Phenomenon of Man and you can read it and it makes you think every page starts you thinking. So I can turn over this book as often as I like and there will always be some new thought train of thought.
Presenter
What about your luxury?
Max Nicholson
Well, my luxury, obviously, I want to see the birds passing and so my luxury is obviously binoculars.
Presenter
Max Nicholson, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.
What was your reaction [to the outbreak of World War I] as a young boy?
Oh, they did and of course for two years the war was run entirely by volunteers. It was only in the middle of the war that conscription was brought in. But um nobody had any idea what carnage there would be. I can't I can't speak without emotion of the incompetence of the generals we had in the First World War, in sharp contrast to the ones in the second.
Presenter asks
Why did you leave [your exciting life in government] and become Director General of Nature Conservancy?
Well, I was a charter member. I was a council member and we appointed another man as the first director general, but he couldn't cope with it and he left very early. And then the chairman came to me and said, well, the vice-chairman came to me, said, well, we've got a very simple decision to make. Either we pack the thing up or you come in and run it. Which shall it be?
Presenter asks
Why were [the civil servants] so relieved [when you left]?
Well, because I was a permanent civil servant aged in my middle 40s, I had a long way to go. They couldn't get rid of me from the civil service. There was no way they could get rid of me. And they were terrified. They knew what an activist I was. And all the civil servants took a very contrary view to me. And they were wondering how on earth they could possibly get me out of the civil servant. And suddenly, overnight, this mad fellow got out himself too. They were so grateful.
“We have broken away from the principles of nature and we've got to get back to them very soon if we don't want to become an endangered species out of it.”
“It didn't seem lonely to me because I was with the birds.”
“I think having been born under the sugarloaf, the air I absorbed as a baby was the air which makes one again the government. And I've always been again the government, even when I've been in it.”