Chris Haskins

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Costaway this week is a businessman, the son of a Protestant farmer from County Wicklow in Ireland. He went to university in Dublin, then crossed the sea to seek his fortune in England. He married the daughter of the owner of a small group of dairies and, together with his newfound family, built the business into one of Britain's biggest food companies. This achievement of great wealth has been tempered by modesty and conviction. At work, he refuses to have hierarchies, preferring what he calls the inclusive company. In private, he's been a lifelong Labour supporter who went on CND marches in his youth and is now a fierce crusader in the pro-European cause. He is the chairman of Northern Foods, Christopher Haskins, a prominent businessman who's a Labour supporter, Chris. There are a lot of you about these days, but I should think it was a pretty lonely position during the course of the 80s, wasn't it?

Chris Haskins1:22

Yes, it was a very lonely position and I have to say even people like me kept a bit quiet at the time of nineteen eighty three when I think it was Gerald Kaufman said that the Labour Party had just written the longest political suicide note in history and I was keeping my head a bit low with regard to my shareholders at that time, but I was a supporter.

Presenter1:37

Yeah.

Presenter1:39

I think the only person who was above the parapet in that sense was Robert Maxwell, really.

Chris Haskins1:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Presenter1:44

But but you were surely

Presenter1:46

deeply compromised in those days, weren't you? Because with Clause four still firmly on the Labour Party's constitution, I mean, how could you support the nationalization of the means of production and lead a publicly quoted company, as you say, I mean, with a with a duty to your shareholders?

Chris Haskins1:58

But I never believed it and I never took it seriously and I don't think very many people in the Labour Party ever took it seriously from Clement Attlee onwards.

Presenter2:05

But I mean it it was there nevertheless, wasn't it? I mean I I don't know if you're suggesting it was notional, it was very firmly fixed.

Chris Haskins2:10

It was there, but nobody believed there was never ever a manifesto commitment to re-nationalize the country or to take over the means of production.

Presenter2:17

But didn't it make your shareholders suspicious of you?

Chris Haskins2:20

Oh, I think the shareholders have always been a bit suspicious until recently. I mean, the their point was to make sure that the share price kept going up. I mean, they were modestly suspicious, but if the share price kept going, then it was okay.

Presenter2:30

Now today, Northern Foods is is the largest supplier of food to MNS, and it also supplies Tesco and Sainsbury. I mean, it what does that mean? Is it possible that we're buying the same yogurt or the same ready meal? It's just that it's got a different package round it.

Chris Haskins2:46

Oh no, not at all. I mean that's one of my continuous problems is everybody wants something different and everybody's jealous of what we supply to other people, but we have to try and make sure that we have a unique proposition for each of our customers when we're selling it under their label. Of course, when we're selling our own brands, then that's unique to us.

Presenter3:03

Yes, but does that mean you have separate kitchens so that you know the the Tesco people can't

Chris Haskins3:06

Separate kitchens, separate factories, separate groups of management, so that we can have people who are working on a Marks ⁇ Spencer factory who are dedicated to the cause of Marks ⁇ Spencer and equally people working for a Sainsbury or a Tesco factory working for that cause. And everybody gets focused and the commitment of the supply, the loyalty between the manufacturer and supply is built on those very close intimate relations.

Presenter3:28

Tell me about your first record.

Chris Haskins3:30

My first record is Beethoven's Ninth. It's a recording made by Leonard Bernstein on Christmas Day in Berlin in 1989, two months after the wall came down. An experience that I never expected to see. And Bernstein, a great radical playing this piece of music, epitomizes that great day.

Presenter4:48

Part of the third movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. nine in D minor from the recording of the concert given in december nineteen eighty nine in Berlin, with musicians from across Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the USA, and it was conducted, of course, by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter5:02

You run Chris Haskins, a highly successful business, a turnover of of two billion, but you don't like hierarchies. You believe in informality. Now how does that work when you employ twenty five thousand people? I can see it working for a family firm, but not with twenty five thousand employees.

Chris Haskins5:16

Well, we actually break it down into twenty-one companies, and all of them have got their own managing directors, and we give as much autonomy as we possibly can do to those managing directors, and they in turn have got to give as much autonomy to the people underneath. The trick is to give people the autonomy, but at the same time to make sure that you have control over the values and the principles and the broad strategies of the business. I mean, we take a great interest in the principles on which the business is run, but we give the power to the people in the businesses to develop and practice those principles.

Presenter5:50

So they don't have to second guess you and what your decision might be in any given situation. They they they have autonomy.

Chris Haskins5:55

Oh yes, and the great trick with the difference between business or business like mine and politics is that our people make mistakes constantly and I welcome them making mistakes because first of all you learn from mistakes and you mustn't punish people for making mistakes. You must encourage people to take the risk which involves a mistake. The trouble with politics is if you make or in this in the public sector, if you're a social worker, if you make a mistake, you get penalized and you get the newspapers banging you all over the head. And that's terribly unfair.

Presenter6:24

But what happens in government where you you now work and chair governmental committees and so on? I mean, those are vertical con uh structures all over the place, aren't they?

Chris Haskins6:32

That's right. And of course, I happen to be working in the Cabinet Office, which is the job I have, amongst other things, is try to get the departments to work across each other to help each other. It's very difficult. Even in our business, getting a managing director of one company to talk to a managing director of another company is extremely difficult. They talk to a competitor sometimes rather than talk to somebody in the same business. Why? Because you give them pride of ownership, and the pride of ownership is terribly important. So if you're the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, you don't want to be outshone by the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health. I'm sure that's one of the things that's going on in trying to sort out the BSE problem.

Speaker 36:51

But why?

Presenter7:07

I see. Next record, number two.

Chris Haskins7:10

My next record is Marilyn Monroe.

Chris Haskins7:14

She reminds me so much of Diana, the Princess of Wales. She was dazzlingly beautiful, she was impetuous, she was outrageous, she was vulnerable, she was tragic, she was charismatic, she was a public icon. But at the same time, she always acted herself, try as she could, she was obsessed with the camera, and this song expresses what they were both all about.

Speaker 37:35

I wanna be loved by you, just you, nobody else but you.

Speaker 37:43

I wanna be loved by you alone, Poop-Poopy-Doo.

Speaker 37:50

I wanna be kissed by you, just you, nobody else but you.

Presenter7:57

Marilyn Monroe and I Wanna Be Loved by You from the film Some Like It Hot. You went, Chris, on your first protest march in nineteen fifty eight when you would have been twenty one. It was the second Aldermaston march, and it it seems to have been a kind of defining moment in your life. Why?

Chris Haskins8:14

It was. Well, it was interesting because the Irish Times I had somehow secured to get five pounds in the Irish Times to write about the Aldermarsen march for them. And it was a compelling moment. I mean, you could just see that there was something extraordinary happening where democracy was alive and well, and something was going to change as a result of this. And I joined the march, and I've been marching ever since.

Presenter8:36

So you felt excited by it? Was it the thrill or was it a sense of power? What was it?

Chris Haskins8:40

There was a theatre about it. I mean it was theatrical, these people. There was also this the sense of commitment and passion about the thing. There was quite a lot of fun. I mean the Aldermaston marches were lots of fun and I used to be my first management job was running the baggage in the Aldermarson marches when I was promoted the next year and the year after and for years I used to move the baggage from one staging point to the next. I learnt one of my great business tricks in Slough one Saturday night where we always had to estimate how many marches there were going to be and we estimated there were going to be 10,000 that day. And it was a very wet day and as we drove up and down along the march it was clear there were a lot more than 10,000. There might have been 20 or even 30,000. And we spent a lot of time trying to explain to them that we couldn't do very much about them and they were becoming very unpacific. So we went to the pub and had three or four pints and when we came back they'd all gone. And they told me the lesson that when you get an insoluble problem, walk away and when you come back it may have been solved.

Presenter9:35

I don't think you can apply that in politics, can you? But i i it in the end all of this activity got you branded a troublemaker, didn't it? Didn't Hugh Gateskill even call you one?

Chris Haskins9:43

My position was bizarre with Gaitskill. He had three issues which he campaigned about. A, he wanted British bombs and British bombs in the atmosphere, and I didn't think that was a very good idea. B, he loathed Europe. He was the one who talked about we can't give up a thousand years of history, and I didn't think that was a very good idea. But C, he did want to get rid of Clause 4, and I did think that was a pretty good idea. So it was very hard to cast, as it were. I was always pro-Europe, and the Left was always anti-Europe. It was a strange alliance between Gateskill and the Left on that particular issue. I was always pro-change clause 4, which is a nonsense. And Tony Blair did something that should have been done thirty years earlier.

Presenter10:21

And so to day you're very happy, are you, to class yourself as a Blairite, or even though you chair some governmental uh committees, do you prefer to retain a maintain a respectable distance?

Chris Haskins10:31

Well, no, I'm I'm delighted with the new government. I mean it's made its mistakes or whatever and it's very inexperienced and it will learn I hope it'll learn from its mistakes. I'll always I think be a little bit independent and feel want to feel free to state my mind and issues and I think that's good for the government and it's certainly probably good for me as well.

Presenter10:51

Tell me about your third record.

Chris Haskins10:53

To me, Lennon and McCartney typified the sixties. They wrote an endless string of brilliant tunes, but I suppose Sergeant Pepper added words to those tunes, and the poignancy, the clarity, and the ironic humour of the words in this song are quite astonishing.

Speaker 111:13

When Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins Silently closing her bedroom door

Speaker 111:29

Leaving the note that she hoped would say more, She goes downstairs to the kid.

Presenter11:38

Chan clutching ha

Speaker 111:41

I'm Kachi.

Presenter11:41

Leave.

Presenter11:42

The Beatles and She's Leaving Home

Presenter11:45

Your family were farmers in County Wicklow. Was it expected that you'd follow them on to the land, or did they always have greater ambitions for you?

Chris Haskins11:53

No, I think my my my father was a a a businessman in the town of Wicklow as well as a farmer and the plan was always that I would go to the farm and my brother would run the mill but unfortunately the mill went bankrupt and he hadn't been to university and I was at university and had all the advantages of that. So he went and lived on the farm and I came to England. But history is a series of accidents as Alan Taylor said and you don't know what would have happened otherwise.

Presenter12:19

And your early history also seems to be one of mild insubordination, both at school and at work, I think. I mean, would you plead guilty to that?

Chris Haskins12:27

Yeah, well I was the head boy of this ridiculous public school, Irish public school run by a very nice English clergyman who was totally bewildered by the whole thing. And I led this in a sort of a mildly anarchic way. I was one of the few head boys who smoked. I they used to beat people in those days in public schools, but I didn't beat people. And there was a genial anarchy about the place which I think sort of made those of us there not very academically brilliant, but we had a great time.

Presenter12:56

But then also when you went, I think, to work in a printing works up north in England, and indeed at Ford Dagenham, you you kind of you stirred it up a bit as you went.

Chris Haskins13:04

A little bit in Delaru. I didn't start up in Ford. I loved working in Ford. I mean, I it was a sort of slight surprise that I would have liked working for this great capitalist American machine. But Fords had a great gift which businesses have to remember. They gave young people a chance to do something early on. And I was at the age of twenty two or twenty three meeting quite senior people in Fords, which would never have happened in an equivalent British business.

Presenter13:24

And then you married. You married the girl you met at Trinity, Gilda, and um her father, Alec Hawsley, ran a company called Northern Dairies. How big was it then as the sixties dawned?

Chris Haskins13:35

It was, I suppose, making three or four hundred thousand pounds. I mean, he'd done the hard work. It had become a public. He'd started from scratch just before the war, and it had gone public in 1956. And they always say the first hundred thousand pounds is the really clever £100,000. And he was a tremendous adventurer, borrowing money up to the hilt with the Midland Bank, and getting bailed out by the Midland Bank and having to sell assets to keep alive. And he got this courage to keep the thing going. So by the time I got to it, it was it was quite a big business.

Presenter14:04

How many people would it have been?

Chris Haskins14:05

At that time it would have been four or five thousand. Remember the food industry was very, very labor intensive at that time. Everything had to be lifted and pushed and shoved, whereas now it's all done in forked trucks and robotics or whatever. So it was already a big business. But he used to claim, whether it was right or wrong, that he knew the name of all the four thousand people.

Presenter14:21

Record number 4.

Chris Haskins14:22

Is actually a friend of my father-in-law, Paul Robeson. He was the first all-American footballer. He became a lawyer, he became a great singer, he became a great actor, and he gave it all up in order to fight for civil rights. He was the worst victim, probably of McCarthyism. His passport was taken away from him in the 1950s. And eventually, he got it given back and came to England in 1958 and stayed with my father-in-law and the family. And I think this song, Joe Hill, really is what Paul Robeson was all about, both his voice and, of course, his beliefs.

Chris Haskins15:02

Uh

Speaker 115:02

I dreamed I saw Joey. Last late. Alive as you and me

Speaker 115:11

Says I, but Joel, you're ten years dead. I never

Chris Haskins15:17

Says he I never but diens

Presenter15:26

Paul Robeson singing Joe Hill, and that was recorded in nineteen fifty eight. It was apparently sheer chance, Chris Haskins, that um Northern Dairies, as it went on being called until the seventies, struck up a business relationship with Marks and Spencer. How did it happen? Tell me.

Chris Haskins15:41

I was living in Belfast at the time and I happened to be in London for some reason and I came back on the plane to Belfast and I sat beside a very garrulous, noisy person who I discovered was was from Marks and Spencer, and I asked him why he was heading to Belfast. He said, Oh, we're planning to open a store in Belfast. Do you know anybody who might be able to help us? So I said, I've just got the company.

Presenter16:01

Wonderful. And today you're their major supplier. How does the relationship work? I mean, would they, for example, come to you and say, look, we think we should have more Indian or Italian ready meals to offer? And then you create a selection and they choose.

Chris Haskins16:14

Yes, I mean at the end of it the strategy for what they sell is theirs. I mean they will say well we're going to put a lot of money into recipe dishes we call them and then we would do a lot of the development. So we have lots of chefs who spend a lot of time in places like Harry's Bar in Venice justifying themselves alongside Marks and Spencer people that this is all in the course of duty or whatever.

Presenter16:36

They put that on their expenses.

Chris Haskins16:37

They put that on their expenses and it's a jolly good investment and they travel the world getting new ideas and it's very interesting when I first came into the food business in 1962, the British were probably the most unadventurous eaters of foods in the world. Today, if you come to London and if you go to a supermarket like Mark Suspensor or Tesco or Sainsbury, you'd see the most exciting and adventurous range of food any of any city in the world except perhaps New York.

Presenter17:01

It is. It's a huge market, isn't it? But these recipe dishes, as you call them, ready meals, T V dinners we used to call them

Chris Haskins17:07

Yeah, we don't call them T V D

Presenter17:09

Uh

Chris Haskins17:09

Uh

Presenter17:09

Uh

Presenter17:10

Ma mainly what they are, perhaps. But people don't like spending a long time cooking, do they? I mean, I think it's true that you can't create a a ready meal that takes forty minutes to warm up. It's got to be pretty quick, hasn't it?

Chris Haskins17:16

You can't

Chris Haskins17:22

Yes, I mean a lot of people put them in micro oven, microwave ovens, which take three minutes. I don't do that actually. We put them in a conventional oven, maybe it's sentimental reasons, which take twenty minutes to half an hour. But yes, I mean we do the preparation of vegetables, which people no longer want to do. Family sizes have got smaller too. I mean collect preparing a f a meal for a family of seven, which Childa used to do when we had small children, was one thing. But you don't want to go to the bother of preparing potatoes and vegetables and buying single pieces of meat for cooking when there's only two of us. I mean the vast the big market is portions of one and portions of two. Maybe there's something slightly lonely about the thing.

Presenter17:53

I mean the

Presenter18:00

But it's not only because families are smaller, is it? It's because families don't eat together any more. I mean, that is what the supermarkets and the nature of the food that we buy today encourages us to do. It encourages us to spend less time in the kitchen and less time together.

Chris Haskins18:14

Well, there's always a claim that supermarkets can change public opinion. I would argue that supermarkets, like Mr. Murdoch, actually follow public opinion. They don't create public opinion. Public opinion moves in very strange ways. I mean, these supermarkets haven't actually stopped people going to church, I don't think, by opening up on Sundays. I suspect that people had stopped going to church going to church a long time before Tesco started opening on a Sunday.

Presenter18:39

But answer me this, and I I don't know the answer myself, but I I have a sense that a plain roast chicken that you roast yourself, it's not ready prepared for you, and potatoes that you peel and a couple of green vegetables would possibly be both more nourishing and cheaper than for four people than four ready meals.

Chris Haskins18:59

Yes, well we always cook our own vegetables. We always cook our own potatoes.

Presenter19:05

Is this we the company, or we the family?

Chris Haskins19:06

we the family would we would I we I would we would buy a lasagna and a tagliatelli, because frankly, us to make it fast a lasagna taglle properly is quite difficult. But cooking them fresh is undoubtedly in vegetables much better than reheating vegetables.

Presenter19:20

And cheaper.

Speaker 119:20

Uh

Chris Haskins19:22

May it will be cheaper, but reheated vegetables are very hard to make work, whereas reheated meats and protein is it's quite easy to do actually.

Presenter19:31

Record number five.

Chris Haskins19:32

It's a song out of a musical called King Kong, which came to London in 1961, the year after Sharpeville, from South Africa, played by an all-black cast at a time where apartheid was tightening its grip. Mandela was still free, but you had a terrible sense of doom and you felt it watching these actors as they played. I remember a young actress in tears at the end of it, and you felt something awful was going to happen. And yet you could feel at the same time the exuberance of black South Africa. Shortly after that, Jill and I joined the ANC, and we were members of the ANC right through, still are, I think. And we never believed that we'd see the day when Mandela walked down that road outside Cape Town in 1990, a free man.

Speaker 120:18

Be smart, be wise, look at all those guys With cavish ears and fungal eyes A big fat nose that is twice its size Do you want to be like that

Speaker 320:36

No!

Speaker 120:37

Forget that title bowd and prize and if you do

Speaker 120:45

Realize boxing is a no-good

Presenter20:49

Uh Uh

Speaker 120:49

Uh

Presenter20:49

Be Smart, Be Wise, sung by Ben Massinger and others from the nineteen sixties production of the musical King Kong.

Presenter20:58

Europe, Chris Haskins, you've said is your last crusade. You believe Britain should have been prepared to go into the single currency on the first wave, and of course you've lost that one, but you fight on. The problem is that the business world itself is divided on this, and isn't that the problem, that it it feels risky because there isn't any consensus either in the business world as there isn't in the political world?

Chris Haskins21:20

Well, like all great crusades, you start from a m minority position and you hope to end up in a majority position. Three or four years ago, what you said would have been right. The minority of business people would have probably been sceptical about the idea of a single currency. But in today, today's evidence shows that the vast majority of the members of the CBI and the British Chamber of Commerce, as well as the TUC, are all in favour of the single currency.

Presenter21:44

What is your vision, though? You you believe that Europe should be or will be a a kind of collection of cities, don't you?

Chris Haskins21:50

Yes, I mean I think that is the nation state is going to disappear in my view in the next fifty years. I don't think there's going to be a great European state. That is just not going to happen. And I do believe that there's going to be more devolvement within Europe towards a Europe of one hundred cities where we can all identify with a city and we can all culturally have a centre there, economically have a centre there. And we're going back to a concept which existed 600 years ago in Italy. It seemed a very civilized concept and I think it will come.

Presenter22:26

That of course is exactly what terrifies people. The idea that that our boundaries will disappear, the idea that we will only cleave that we will lose our identities.

Chris Haskins22:36

But the nation state has created so much violence in Europe over the last two or three hundred years. I mean, there is very little that can be said in favour of the nation-state and the relationship between one nation-state and another. I mean, being being part of a nation is fine, but when you have arguments with other nations, it's not so good. And we have learnt in the last fifty years that by diminishing the role of the nation-state in favor of a concept of Europe, we have achieved an unprecedented peace in Western Europe and unprecedented prosperity. Now, I don't think that we're going to end up with a completely

Presenter23:13

But we're still nation states, that's what people would say to

Chris Haskins23:15

We are still, but we have had to recognize shared sovereignty in this country and other countries since the war. Partly it is because of the bomb, partly it is because of the scale of financial markets. It is no longer possible for one country to look after its economic or political destiny on its own. That is a reality of life. We are members of NATO. We have to belong to the European Union. We have money flying from one part of Europe to another. We have the Americans own all the banks in the Americans and the Germans and the Swiss own the banks in London, BMW.

Presenter23:48

Indeed, and it all works quite well. Why change it? Why go even further, P?

Chris Haskins23:52

Well, part the process it works well because the process has been going on. But I mean we only agreed to a single European market in 1986, an act signed famously by Mrs Thatcher. And the single currency, for example, is no more than a logical extension of that. And the fears about a single currency are greatly overstated. Ireland, for example, shared a single currency with Britain from 1922 to about 1980. It shared nothing else. I mean, the Republic of Ireland, Devil Era, was a violent enemy of Britain. There was an economic war between Ireland and Britain in the 1930s, but they did share a common currency and it appeared to work. I can remember people getting terribly excited about decimalization in 1972. This was going to be the end of the world as we know it, and all these foreign ideas of metrication or whatever. And it was a six-day wonder.

Presenter24:43

Record number six.

Chris Haskins24:44

Um

Chris Haskins24:46

Very simply, Dvorak, I seem to have an obsession with America, a love of the place, a sometimes a contempt for the place, but you can't get away from the excitement. This piece gives vivid images of the wide open spaces of Midwest America.

Presenter25:52

Part of the second movement of Dvorak's Symphony No. Nine in E minor from The New World, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Carrion.

Presenter26:00

Farming is your first love, then, Chris Haskins. How many acres do you own these days?

Chris Haskins26:05

We have a farm in Yorkshire, just near Beverley, of 800 acres. Some people might call that a prairie. It's largely an arable farm. But we do have a suckler herd of cows as well. And my wife ran that for many years. And my son, Paul, now runs it. And my second son, Daniel, has gone back to run the other farm, the family farm in Wycliffe.

Presenter26:25

Your father's farm.

Presenter26:27

Obviously you're you're a rich man, but you've hit the headlines on uh some occasions for not taking as much money as you might have done out of the company. I mean you let me try and put some figures on it. I think you take something like one hundred and eighty five thousand, whereas your opposite number at say Unigate would take several hundred thousand. Now what what's the reason for not taking as much as you're deemed to have earned, really?

Chris Haskins26:48

Well, two things. I mean, my opposite number was employed to run a very difficult business when he went there. It was in serious problems, and therefore he had to be recruited from the market. Nobody's going to recruit me from the markets. I mean, I'm unemployable, I suspect, anywhere else except in Northern Foods. Secondly, I have a lot of shares in Northern Foods. I mean, I've been in this business all my life. It's almost a family business. I don't need the money. And thirdly, there is a problem. I think that salaries have got out of control here and in the United States. People are concerned about it. Governments can't do very much about it. I'm not saying all salaries are out of control, but there are too many almost obscene payments going on. And I think business has got a job to set an example as politicians have. And perhaps that example isn't being set as well as it might be.

Presenter27:41

And what's the most extravagant thing you've ever done with your money?

Chris Haskins27:46

Well, I don't know. I suppose I paid uh

Chris Haskins27:48

a hundred and ninety pounds for Susan Marks and Spencer the other day, which rather shook me. I'm used to buying s suits for ninety pounds. Um but I haven't bought motor cars or jewellery or I really don't know.

Presenter28:02

Mecca number seven.

Chris Haskins28:04

Record number seven is another American one. Pete Seeger was a great folk singer, great radical.

Chris Haskins28:13

Player in the 60s, in the civil rights movement in the 60s. And this song is about the ban which took place in those days in Alabama, which forbade black people from sitting at the front of the bus. They had to sit at the back of the bus, and the front of the bus was reserved for whites. If you miss me at the back of the bus, you can't find me nowhere. Oh, come on over to the front of the bus. I'll be riding up there. I'll be riding up there. I'll be riding.

Chris Haskins28:44

Oh, come on over to the front of the bus.

Presenter28:48

I'll be right up there. Pete Seeger and If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus recorded live at the Carnegie Hall in nineteen sixty three. Almost all your music, Chris, is from the sixties. It was obviously very important. What would you have been in your twenties, early thirties?

Chris Haskins29:03

Yes, I mean it was only after I'd chosen all the pieces that I realized that was a very huge decade for me. I mean I changed dramatically from the sort of conventional right of center Protestant boy of the fifties to being I wouldn't say wildly left but free thinking, radical, disrespectful by the end of the sixties. And of course it was a hugely important decade in the 20th century because it was the sixties when we actually stopped letting off bombs in the atmosphere. Who would think that any government today could stand up and say that letting off nuclear bombs in the atmosphere was a safe practice? And yet we were told that. And that stopped in 1963. The whole issue of race in America stopped during the 1960s. There was an enormous change in the world and people would go back and look at that and say that was the moment of truth when the world got civilized.

Presenter30:02

And it was the it was the decade when you decided that there was only one way to go about life, and that was to stand up and be counted.

Chris Haskins30:10

I suppose so. I mean, I've enjoyed this. I mean, they they're being if you've got a big ego and you like uh talking as I'm talking at the moment, you have to have a platform and by and large you have a platform if you talk something different from what everybody else is talking.

Presenter30:23

Last record.

Chris Haskins30:24

Well, again it comes from nineteen sixty three.

Chris Haskins30:27

The First World War was probably the most pointless war of all.

Chris Haskins30:32

Millions of soldiers seemed to be sacrificed for nothing.

Chris Haskins30:36

There were an extraordinary number of beautiful tragic songs written for those soldiers, and Joan Littlewood's show in nineteen sixty three absolutely caught the flavor of the futility and yet the heroic beauty of these songs.

Speaker 130:54

And when

Chris Haskins30:56

Yeah. They ask us how dangerous it was.

Chris Haskins31:03

Oh, we'll never tell them.

Speaker 131:08

We'll never tell.

Presenter31:10

They Didn't Believe Me from Joan Littlewood's production of the musical Oh, What a Lovely War. Now, Chris, if you could only take one of those eight records with you, which one would you choose?

Chris Haskins31:19

I think it would have to be the Beethoven. Uh he's the most universal songster of the whole lot of them and he's as European as you can get and he has been around for two hundred years and he'll be around for another two hundred.

Presenter31:31

What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Chris Haskins31:34

I thought about a

Chris Haskins31:36

Lots of things. I thought about Vicky and the New Statesman profiles of 40 years ago. There are beautiful pictures that he drew of great figures and beautifully written profiles. But I came down to Sean O'Casey and a collection of his plays, Juno and the Paycock, Captain Boyle, Joxer Daly, all of those characters and the language, the bitterness and the humour. And the he was another O'Casey was another nutter, you know, he was a lifelong Communist who lived in Torquay and used to write letters to the Irish Times, disgusted Torquay, and everybody wondered who this was.

Presenter32:07

And what about your luxury?

Chris Haskins32:10

My luxury is, you know, I'm not allowed my dogs. I thought of bringing Lord's Cricket Ground and I could spend all day at Lord's Cricket Ground and then write about the pay write about it at night.

Presenter32:13

I

Presenter32:20

What if you bump into John Major, he's got the oval on this arm?

Chris Haskins32:23

Oh, I see. So well, that would be at least we have that in common. We have a few more things in common perhaps. But eventually I decided just a pen and paper and I could write my profit forecast for the company. I could try and write a book, which I'd love to do, but I haven't been able to do. And maybe eventually write a message because, you know, milk bottles float around, they get lost, and maybe one will turn up on this island, and I'll put a message into the milk bottle and it will get back to its depot, as I'm sure it will do, and somebody will come and collect me.

Presenter32:54

Chris Haskins, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 333:05

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