Professor Heinz Wolff

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:09

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

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a scientist and inventor. He escaped Nazi Germany with his father, came to Britain and joined the Medical Research Council where he stayed for thirty years. There he developed his talent for inventing things in order to solve problems, an ability which won a popular airing on the BBC television programme The Great Egg Race, which he presented for nine years.

Presenter0:51

In the early eighties he founded the Institute for Bioengineering at Brunel University. There his inventive ability was allowed full flow. A box for experimenting in outer space, a voice machine for people who can't speak, a safety system for deep sea divers. These and many other inventions have made his department not only an important research unit, but a highly successful commercial operation as well.

Presenter1:15

He loves to popularize science, and cheerfully boasts that he can make mechanical and electrical devices last almost indefinitely. He is Professor Heinz Wolff. So when did you and your wife last buy a vacuum cleaner, Professor Wolf?

Professor Heinz Wolff1:31

Um, not for a very long time, because I I feel somehow my manhood is challenged by a piece of domestic equipment which doesn't work.

Presenter1:40

But you actively enjoy the sitting down and the taking of something to pieces and the working it out. I mean, do you lose all sense of time? Are you having a time?

Professor Heinz Wolff1:47

I don't think I can say anything at the time, but I'm I enjoy doing it. I also enjoy getting dirty.

Professor Heinz Wolff1:52

And there's two ways of getting dirty. There's um getting dirty in the garden, which is uh something which I I have long agreed with my wife was woman's work and getting dirty under the car.

Professor Heinz Wolff2:04

which on greasy the greasy kind of dirt is much more satisfying, which I really like and find immensely relaxing.

Presenter2:09

Hmm.

Presenter2:10

But you first in this country came to public attention, I think, because you it was back in the sixties. You made Richard Dimbleby swallow something on Panorama. Yes. What did he swallow?

Professor Heinz Wolff2:18

Yeah?

Professor Heinz Wolff2:20

Well, and little little bit of of prehistory for that. In those days Panorama was sort of tomorrow's world as well. And at that time I was one of the people who had developed a tiny radio transmitter which you could swallow.

Presenter2:36

Why would you want to swallow a radio transmitter?

Professor Heinz Wolff2:37

The gastroenterologists in those day those days were much interested why had people had pain in their tummies.

Professor Heinz Wolff2:45

Because it's well known to physiologists that you have no pain fibers in your gut, and therefore you should not feel anything.

Professor Heinz Wolff2:51

And it was thought that this might be due to large um differences in pressure in different parts of the gut. So they wanted to have a device which which one could swallow, which would then follow the thirty feet or so of gut and radio out the signals of what the pressure was.

Professor Heinz Wolff3:06

And I gave one of these to a Trip Dimblebay because they had picked this up as being an interesting device.

Professor Heinz Wolff3:12

And I had brought a little receiver with me, which was tuned in such a way that when I poked him in the stomach, so as to increase the pressure inside his gut, it um produced um a squeal. So there I was, poking his stomach and producing appropriate noises on the on the receiver.

Presenter3:28

What was the first thing you ever invented? I mean, did you invent anything as a wee boy?

Professor Heinz Wolff3:32

Yes, I I remember, for instance, for some reason which I don't now remember, inventing a device uh to stop film overheating in a in a film projector. And my father, who was really quite keen to to encourage this kind of thing with me, actually got some serious physicist to come and talk to me.

Professor Heinz Wolff3:49

who was, I think, slightly put off that he was faced with a five year old or six year or six year old rather than than a Madame Morsais person. Perhaps I should add at this point here that I owe a great deal to my father in terms of being a scientist at all.

Professor Heinz Wolff4:02

Because my father was a frustrated chemist who for a variety of reasons wanted to be a chemist when he was young and read law and philosophy and so on when when he came of the appropriate age, but he had kept all the equipment of his chemistry laboratory when he was a boy, and on Sunday mornings we did chemistry.

Professor Heinz Wolff4:19

My little chubby fingers as a four or a four year old whereout a word a test tube.

Professor Heinz Wolff4:23

with a lump of sugar on the bottom, and I would wave it gently, getting the right sort of touch of a chemist, above a spilled flame, and make a salt of toffee. Now this smell of slightly burning sugar is still totally evocative and and means chemistry and science to me.

Presenter4:40

Tell me about your first record.

Professor Heinz Wolff4:42

I should say perhaps that music actually doesn't mean a great deal to me. So almo all my records are chosen not from the point of view of the quality of the music or the artistic quality, but because they are milestones which for some reason or other, just like the smell of burning leaves, feed my nostalgia and remind me of some particular occasion in my life, or produce a particular state of mind in me.

Professor Heinz Wolff5:08

And my first record is Eddie Culvert playing Never Say Goodbye, because it soars, it liberates me. I feel like a bird or a gull who can who can manage to fly.

Presenter5:47

Eddie Calvert playing Never Say Goodbye with Norrie Paramore and his orchestra and chorus, and an image of Heinz Wolff floating free as a bird above his island. Um you've invented things, Heinz, for the spaceman, the diver, the disabled, as I indicated at the beginning, but uh you believe, I think, that they are more than having people with particular problems, they have something in common, don't they?

Professor Heinz Wolff6:09

Yes, and what they have in common is that they all have to operate in an environment which is basically hostile to them. The astronaut, of course, lives in space. He has no gravity, so he floats around in the spacecraft. So he certainly is in an environment which is very alien to people on Earth.

Professor Heinz Wolff6:27

much the same is true of a diver. A diver is in dark water, he's frightened, he's cold, he is breathing an unusual atmosphere. So he's walking at a border line of what is possible for an individual to. And if you happen to be an elderly gentleman or an elderly lady and you've got arthritis,

Professor Heinz Wolff6:46

And there's all this world with traffic and so on, you're also a bit frightened. You can't quite cope, you can't grip the things with other cubic people grip, you can't get us away fast enough.

Presenter6:54

So you make them the toolkits, really? That's what you're a supplier of toolkits.

Professor Heinz Wolff6:56

That's what I mean.

Professor Heinz Wolff6:58

Right? In fact, I'm glad you used the word toolkit because in the seventies I invented a buzzword called tools for living rather than an aid for the disabled. And this was not only simply a word of how to describe these things, it was also a philosophy in that we all use tools, but the toolkit which they require is different. Rather than saying that they are ill or suffering from some disease, and society somehow or other, through the medical services, has to go and help them. So tools for living is also a way of giving respect to people who have a disability of some kind. And I think that is more important than the actual gadget.

Presenter7:39

But but would you have to be I mean, as you sat in in the the Bioengineering Institute at at Brunel, which you'd set up, did you have to be commissioned by doctors or pe or or help the aged or whoever? Would people come to you and say, look, please, can you invent something?

Professor Heinz Wolff7:54

Yes, it happens always. Most of it is funded by making an application to a charity usually, so possibly to a government finance body, research council, and saying this is what we want to do. It's going to cost so much money and this is what we expect the result to be.

Professor Heinz Wolff8:08

There have been occasions with some charities where they've said, look, it's a s serious condition. It's really up to us to try and make the last two or three years of their life as pleasant as possible, because we can't actually cure the disease.

Professor Heinz Wolff8:24

And we produced a catalogue of kinds of things which could be done with reasonable expenditures of money.

Presenter8:30

But does that mean that that you're self financing?

Professor Heinz Wolff8:33

Yes, the the Institute ever since its inception has been totally self-isolating.

Presenter8:37

Doesn't that mean you've made a lot of money?

Professor Heinz Wolff8:39

Uh no, it doesn't unfortunately we had a lot of we didn't make a lot of money. We managed to we managed to b break even. But I should say perhaps um that one of the things which made it which made it possible is that over the last fifteen years I've always managed to make an appreciable sum of money from from from media sources, not doing this kind of thing, but doing after dinner speeches and or inventing games for companies and so on.

Professor Heinz Wolff9:02

every penny of which has gone into the Institute, and this has put to provide financial lubrication.

Professor Heinz Wolff9:08

which made it very much easier to run.

Presenter9:09

But give me a

Presenter9:11

The s the single example that gave you most pleasure. Sitting in Brunel, someone came along, posed a problem, it was seemingly intractable, but ultimately you solved it.

Professor Heinz Wolff9:25

I suppose I could quote something which would be quite complicated to explain, so I won't attempt to do so, but which is a recent example. Well, a space agency asked us to produce a piece of equipment

Professor Heinz Wolff9:40

which would allow quite complicated things to be done to cells which had been frozen on the ground and were going to be taken up to to a space station, very, very sleepy, so they didn't did because they were frozen, not knowing what's happening to them.

Professor Heinz Wolff9:53

And well, the intention was to do an experiment which we could compare cells which were experiencing normal gravity to cells which weren't experiencing any gravity at all. So we had to develop something which at first appeared to be incredibly complicated. In fact, some colleagues and myself between us managed to devise a system which really used Victorian technology. It was all done with springs and levers and pistons and cylinders and didn't contain any electronics at all.

Professor Heinz Wolff10:24

Elegance in engineering is one of the things which I lecture students on. That a piece of an engineering solution can be just as elegant and as creative as an old master or a symphony or a novel. And getting this across to engineers who tend to be feel that they have no they're not expected to be creative is quite important. And I for one

Professor Heinz Wolff10:50

Can look at an elegant solution and get the same kind of fisson down the back of my spine.

Professor Heinz Wolff10:56

Now this is really good, as somebody else might get by sitting in a in a concert hall and finding a piece of music or looking at the picture.

Presenter11:04

Tell me about your second record.

Professor Heinz Wolff11:06

Well, my second guy called

Professor Heinz Wolff11:08

It's not really technological at all.

Professor Heinz Wolff11:11

It's Marlene Dietroy singing Lily Marlene. Now this has this app this appears to two characteristics. One of them is it is sentimental. And I there is no doubt that I have nostalgic and sentimental and so on, which scientists I suppose really really ought not to do.

Professor Heinz Wolff11:24

She's also got a way of delivery. And I don't know whether there's an English word for this. In German it's called schnodrich, which it seems look sounds nasty, but it's a way of sort of streetwise somebody who's seen the world. And Marlina Dietrech in these particular records combines this attitude of being streetwise and really also being rather sentimental.

Speaker 411:52

Outside the barracks, by the corner line

Speaker 411:57

I'll always stand and wait for you at night We will create a world for two

Speaker 412:07

I'll wait for you the whole night through For you lame alley

Speaker 412:17

For you

Presenter12:18

Oh Lily.

Presenter12:22

Marlena Dietrich, singing Lilly Marlene. You were born in Berlin, Heinz, in the late twenties. I read that at the age of five you asked your father who are the Jews. You obviously were beginning to to hear or see things that made you feel uncomfortable.

Professor Heinz Wolff12:36

Um I was five in nineteen thirty three.

Professor Heinz Wolff12:39

And I remember vividly the torchlight prof uh procession which went down to Kofesendam, where we were where we which was on the main road in Berlin, where we lived.

Professor Heinz Wolff12:48

And I can see that um people were I mean, my relations and so on were pretty depressed about the situation. And for some reason I had got into my mind, having heard talk about the Jews, that there were people with rather Chinesey eyes wearing red berries. Now how this how this how this could have come about, I have no idea.

Presenter13:07

So are you saying you felt different then from the Jews who were being persecuted? Did you feel it was more unfair?

Professor Heinz Wolff13:11

No.

Professor Heinz Wolff13:15

Prior to Hitler, the Jews were primarily Germans.

Professor Heinz Wolff13:19

and Jews a long way after that. They had assimilated to a degree which was probably greater than anywhere else. And the consciousness of being Jewish, I think, was very much triggered off by suddenly finding themselves to be the persecuted race. I mean, when only has to think about it, both my father and my uncle, who were close school friends, actually volunteered for the country during the First World War.

Professor Heinz Wolff13:43

So there was I mean, there was no question that that uh they were Germans. And many people stayed longer than they need have done and paid with their lives for that, because they could not imagine

Professor Heinz Wolff13:55

that Germany could actually do the kind of things, which it was finally seen that it indeed it could do.

Presenter13:58

Yeah.

Presenter14:02

Your father um was a lawyer. He was very active in helping Jews get out of Germany during the thirties, the second half of the thirties anyway, wasn't he?

Professor Heinz Wolff14:09

Yes, he um he was what we might call i in in those days it would have been constructive, creative accounting, uh because there was a um a a catch twenty two situation.

Professor Heinz Wolff14:20

That most countries, and I must say to my shame, including Britain.

Professor Heinz Wolff14:26

wouldn't let people in without them being able to show that they had enough money to not be a burden on the rates.

Professor Heinz Wolff14:32

The Germans, on the other hand, who had exchange control um very ha very heavily policed wouldn't allow you to take any money out. So it was a question really of setting up deals for people which gave them credit balances abroad, possibly by importing uh material which was in fact worthless.

Presenter14:48

But the family must have lived in fear of the Gestapo finding out.

Professor Heinz Wolff14:52

Um, yes, it's cause of it became increasingly difficult after nineteen thirty eight in the Gestagnart. But I remember there being uh Haus Zuchrunk, as they are called, there were really house searches before that.

Professor Heinz Wolff15:04

When fairly genial policemen came along and searched the house, and in and on those occasions fortunately never found anything um incriminating,

Professor Heinz Wolff15:13

Uh but after the Costana, if you remember, it was nine cert nine thirty eight, when all the synagogues were burned and shop windows were were broken.

Professor Heinz Wolff15:21

Things were becoming a little tighter and there was a time after my mother died in Sidney who who died of natural causes in 1938 when my father and I slept in a different location every night.

Presenter15:31

When did you finally get out?

Professor Heinz Wolff15:33

We left Germany on I think something like the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth of August.

Professor Heinz Wolff15:38

with his intention of staying in Holland,

Professor Heinz Wolff15:40

Until um our uh visas for America would come through.

Presenter15:45

This is just a week or so before the outbreak of war.

Professor Heinz Wolff15:47

Yes, yes. And then I think to their disgrace, much as I like the Dutch,

Presenter15:47

And then I think

Professor Heinz Wolff15:51

They said, look, if you don't get out very quickly, we send you back to Germany.

Professor Heinz Wolff15:55

And that really sets the alarm bells ringing.

Professor Heinz Wolff15:58

And with by rushing to Rotterdam, we got on a ship,

Professor Heinz Wolff16:02

and on the s on the ship docked in Gravesend at about eleven o'clock in the morning on the third of September, just as the first aerial signs, which was false alarms that happened, were blowing.

Professor Heinz Wolff16:14

So we really cut it out of file.

Presenter16:17

Code number three.

Professor Heinz Wolff16:19

Well my third my third record is um Elaine Page and Doin Cry for um Argentina, because it's a sheer verve and power which he puts into the song, which I admire.

Speaker 416:33

Pray for me, Argentina.

Speaker 416:38

The truth is I never left you All through my wild days My mad existence I came to you for our medicine

Speaker 416:52

Don't keep your distance.

Presenter16:53

Ah Uh

Speaker 416:55

Uh

Presenter16:57

Elaine Page and Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.

Presenter17:00

So you were eleven years old, Heintz your mother was dead, you were suddenly living in a strange country whose language you could hardly speak and, what's more, you lived in fear of losing your father, too, didn't you?

Professor Heinz Wolff17:11

Yes, we actually we came over as a family of five with my aunt, uncle and cousin. So that wasn't a question of being lonely.

Professor Heinz Wolff17:19

But looming in the distance was the question that in what was an was a bit of understandable panic, we were technically enemy aliens, and it was thought that Fifth Columbus would have been smuggled in amongst us.

Professor Heinz Wolff17:34

And there was a tendency to intern uh men.

Professor Heinz Wolff17:37

Now

Professor Heinz Wolff17:38

I somehow felt that if my father was on turn that I would be able to accompany him and um I kept a little suitcase packed so that that that um I would be ready. Of course i this would not have happened.

Professor Heinz Wolff17:50

The decisions were taken by a sort of kangaroo court, which operated in the cycle sheds of Godeskin police station.

Professor Heinz Wolff17:57

So

Presenter17:57

So how did your father get past the kangaroo cult?

Professor Heinz Wolff18:00

Well, my father put on a p a pair of dark glasses, had a walking stick, appeared in front of the kangaroo court, leaning heavily on my shoulder, by which time I was twelve.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:11

It was clear that he wasn't going to be a danger to king and country.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:15

And he was not interned.

Presenter18:17

Tell me about your fourth record.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:20

Well, it's called music music music.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:22

And it recalls to me a time when everything appeared to be alight with the world.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:29

I was at Oxford. I wasn't at the university, but I was working an extraordinary interesting job with the hospital.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:37

Uh I had a motorcycle.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:40

and I had a girlfriend, and it was a warm summer's day.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:44

And I was sitting on on the back step of the house where um um my digs were.

Professor Heinz Wolff18:49

And in the background, belting out from the house, was his tune.

Speaker 418:54

Want is kissing you and music, music, music

Speaker 418:58

Hello, sir, my dear come closer. The nicest part of any melody is when you're dancing close to me. So put another nickel in the nickelodeon. All I want is loving you and music music.

Presenter19:23

Theresa Brewer and Music, Music, Music. So, Heinzworff, you were a lab technician at the Radcliffe Infirmary and then you went on to join the Medical Research Council. You were inventing things as you went, machines to count blood cells and being really extremely clever, but you had no qualifications. You'd had a place, I think, at Oxford, but they'd asked you to delay because of people coming home from war. Then you were going to go to Cambridge, but that all went wrong, didn't it?

Professor Heinz Wolff19:47

Yes, it went wrong largely because I didn't at the time when I was first muted have the required credit in Latin, in spite of having done rather well in my high school certificate. I think this is how fate works of course, because at Cardiff, where I had worked just before starting my university career, I'd met a very personable, very good-looking staff nurse.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:12

who subsequently turned out to be my wife.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:15

I do not know if I had gone to Cambridge.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:18

Whether with all the other distractions in Cambridge, this relationship would have lasted.

Presenter20:24

Record number five.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:25

My fifth record is called sailing.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:28

And I I really met it first as the um a theme song uh to a television film about the About Ark Oil. But it it um it happened to occur at a time of of a what we might call a naval adventure of my own.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:44

because my wife and I had acquired

Professor Heinz Wolff20:47

uh a converted lifeboat. And during this rather hot summer we had her up and tresses in a boatyard.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:54

with all sorts of fouling on the bottom.

Professor Heinz Wolff20:58

And we worked in this boatyard together. We went to have breakfast, went together, took a packed lunch. Sometimes our children joined us. Then we scraped the bottom to the point where ultimately we were able to re-float it. It was undemanding work. The weather was nice and we were doing something constructive. It's very important in my life that what I do I believe to be to some purpose. This is why I don't go jogging and things of this kind, right? Because I cannot bear going to walks just for the sake of going for a walk. And there appeared to be an acceptable purpose in doing so.

Speaker 421:34

I'm fine.

Speaker 421:37

I am flying.

Speaker 421:41

Wild.

Speaker 421:45

Cross the sky.

Speaker 421:48

I am flying.

Speaker 421:52

Passing high.

Presenter22:00

Two

Presenter22:01

Rod Stewart and Sailing. Now the Great Egg Race ran from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty six. Why the Great Egg Race? Where does the title come from?

Professor Heinz Wolff22:12

Um it's actually quite a complicated story.

Professor Heinz Wolff22:15

Certainly my motive was to have a programme where people were seen to be creative.

Professor Heinz Wolff22:20

in front of the camera, something was unrehearsable.

Professor Heinz Wolff22:24

And we happened to to find out about an experiment which had been done or a competition which had been run in America on ener energy efficiency lines of making an egg travel on some sort of carriage for the maximum distance with all from all the power derived from a tiny rubber band.

Professor Heinz Wolff22:40

So because the BBC didn't have the courage to have an all-problem solving program, which we'd also worked out that we would the first few programmes were mixed. And then we had the courage to say, well, to hell with eggs, we now make this a proper problem solving program, where people are given a problem of which they had no previous inkling. They're given a kit which has so many components and tools in it that there is no single solution. There is no right and wrong way of doing it.

Presenter23:13

You know, I mean, let me give an example for those people who didn't see it. I mean, I remember one where

Professor Heinz Wolff23:13

Yeah.

Presenter23:17

The s the problem was they had to take an aerial photograph of an oil rig.

Professor Heinz Wolff23:21

Yeah.

Presenter23:21

And they didn't have a helicopter to do it from

Professor Heinz Wolff23:23

So, with plastic bags,

Presenter23:25

Balloons, yes, bin liners and a little sort of instomatic camera.

Professor Heinz Wolff23:29

Yeah, I mean they were they were old where it where they had to be a real invention.

Presenter23:34

What conclusion did you draw about the creative genius? I mean, was it was it more in the artisan than in the professional, or more in the female than the male? Could you

Professor Heinz Wolff23:42

Um

Professor Heinz Wolff23:44

It's certainly prof professionals like engineers weren't particularly good at it. I I suspect, because it wouldn't actually occur to an engineer that a nice low friction bearing could be made by sticking knitter needles through a pickeled onion when he had been been um taught that the style should be ball ball bearings and so on in it.

Professor Heinz Wolff24:05

I suppose one of the most impressive events I can remember was when we had a naval team made up out of an officer and a couple of ratings.

Professor Heinz Wolff24:14

When it became quite obvious early on that one of the ratings knew very much more about how to do the problem than the officer did, and the officer.

Professor Heinz Wolff24:22

quite explicitly subordinated himself uh to the rating.

Professor Heinz Wolff24:27

In fact, for me watching it, the social dynamics of the teams, of whether they try to operate by consensus or by having a natural leader.

Professor Heinz Wolff24:34

was almost as interesting as what they actually well as what they actually made.

Presenter24:38

Record number six.

Professor Heinz Wolff24:39

Well my next record, not unreasonably, is a theme music to the Great Air Grace, which I can generally say has changed my life. Because whilst I might have had a moderate amount of fame or notoriety due to my scientific and technical work,

Professor Heinz Wolff25:01

Certainly, um no day passes uh when I'm not recognized in the street.

Presenter25:36

The theme music to The Great Egg Race written by Richard Denton and Martin Cook.

Presenter25:40

Um tell me, Heinz Wolf, about you and God, because an awful lot of scientists one talks to

Presenter25:47

Say that there simply isn't any room for God in the world as they understand it. Are you one of them?

Professor Heinz Wolff25:52

No, I'm not one of them. Um I've I I feel that I've made my bargain uh with God or the Deity or however I like to call it.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:01

that I find no uh contradiction between being a scientist and therefore being a rational person.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:08

and believing in God, because however rational you are, you ultimately come to a point, whether it's a Big Bang or whatever your particular theories, cosmology might be, where there really has to be something else.

Presenter26:21

But surely the Big Bang theory and the Garden of Eden are are mutually exclusive.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:21

But sure.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:26

Yes, they are only mutually exclusive in the sense that they are ways of explaining things to people at a different

Professor Heinz Wolff26:33

level of intellectual development or d diff different level of scientific development. And I don't I certainly wouldn't claim that the Bible was a true historical record. The sheer beauty

Professor Heinz Wolff26:44

of the physical laws or the biological laws or D N A.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:49

Require greater.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:51

And I think if if anything it the more beautiful you find nature has put together.

Professor Heinz Wolff26:56

the more important it becomes to s to suppose that all this has been put together by somebody, or invented by somebody, if you like.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:04

Becquer number seven.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:06

Um my next record is one which you can't buy in a shop and which even the BBC archives haven't got in stock.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:13

Because it's a one-off.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:15

It was made by my wife for me around 1958 or 1959. Now, I relatively recently, within the last four years, was very ill. I temporarily died, had a defibrillator put into my chest, was in Hammersett Hospital for some time, and my wife visited me every day, at least twice.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:38

And I recognize there the depth of the relationship between my wife and myself.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:46

I I mean this had it had always been good.

Professor Heinz Wolff27:49

But somehow or other this this business of having a skirted death on one hand

Professor Heinz Wolff27:55

and her absolute devotion in coming to see me so many times.

Professor Heinz Wolff28:00

Perhaps underlines this. And I think it's an interesting phenomenon to me anyway, that after forty-four years of marriage.

Professor Heinz Wolff28:08

it can still produce this this um deep reaction in me.

Professor Heinz Wolff28:12

And I feel that when I'm on my desert island I won't be quite lonely.

Professor Heinz Wolff28:17

This is the record which I would play to myself quite often.

Speaker 428:20

One day you'll come along.

Speaker 428:23

The man I love

Speaker 428:26

And he'll be big and strong, the man I love.

Speaker 428:32

And when he comes my way, I'll do my best to make him stay.

Speaker 428:42

We'll build a little home Just went for two

Presenter28:49

My Castaway's wife, Joan Wolfe, singing The Man I Love, and she recorded that on a do-it-yourself job in Oxford Street in the late fifties, early sixties, I think. You really are, Heinz, just the chap for a desert island, really, aren't you? Because you're happy to find your way round practical problems, you know, you're resourceful, you can cope.

Professor Heinz Wolff29:08

Um yeah yes, I mean I've as a challenge. In fact, I think I could probably make a reasonably um good job of making myself shelter and and and catching food.

Presenter29:17

And you can cook, I understand.

Professor Heinz Wolff29:19

Yes, sir, rather like cooking and chemistry are getting much the same thing.

Presenter29:21

Folly?

Professor Heinz Wolff29:22

Uh yes, you have don't have to be quite so accurate in cooking.

Professor Heinz Wolff29:26

But cook I I find that cooking uh

Professor Heinz Wolff29:29

Quite pleasurable. I'm not that I do it all that often, but I have a of all I've got hardly any artistic talents. I can't play a music instrument and I can't really draw and I can't paint.

Professor Heinz Wolff29:38

But I can cook by tongue. And I've I've eaten something. I can perhap make a fair imitation of it. I if I was sick, there would be a problem, and you wouldn't I think the rules of this programme wouldn't allow me to take a record um with a name such as How to Take Out Your Own Appendix.

Presenter29:56

If there is such a thing, you can't help it.

Professor Heinz Wolff29:56

There is such a thing. You can't tell it.

Presenter29:58

But you know, by and large, all things being equal, I think you should set sail to morrow, really, don't you?

Professor Heinz Wolff30:05

Yes, I I mean, I I I think as a challenge, in the same way as I I would like love to be an astronaut, in fact occasions have occurred when this might have been possible, but I wasn't prepared to go for two years' training. Now, if I could set set sail tomorrow

Professor Heinz Wolff30:20

I'd be all right. If I had to train for two years to go to Pleasant Island, I don't think I'd want to go.

Presenter30:24

You're off, that's it. Last record before you go.

Professor Heinz Wolff30:27

Well my must must record is um midnight in Moscow. It isn't exactly a desert island sort of situation, um but uh I went to Japan uh at a time when the Soviet Union was still in in full control and a friend of mine and I decided to do it the hard way and travel Trans-Siberian and came to a town called Nahotka.

Professor Heinz Wolff30:48

near Vladivostok near Vladivostok, there was a tidy cruise steamer of two or three thousand tons, which went from there to Yokohama.

Professor Heinz Wolff30:56

The sea was flat, the Pac Pacific was calm.

Professor Heinz Wolff31:00

And every night the crew of the ship, who didn't really have very much to do,

Professor Heinz Wolff31:05

Would double as a band, and I look back at this um with some real pleasure.

Presenter31:40

Midnight in Moscow, played by Kenny Ball and his band. If you could only take one of those eight records with you, Heinz, which one would it be?

Professor Heinz Wolff31:49

I think it would have to be my wife's. I think so, don't you?

Presenter31:52

What about your book?

Professor Heinz Wolff31:54

Well, I'd I'd like permission from the authorities.

Professor Heinz Wolff31:57

to amalgamate my book and my luxury.

Professor Heinz Wolff32:03

Because you'll have to make a specialty for all men.

Professor Heinz Wolff32:06

I think a p um desert island of whatever kind is really terribly boring. The same palms, the same same surf, the same uh reef on the outside.

Professor Heinz Wolff32:15

So my book would have to contain as many as possible of town scenes, country scenes, aerial views maybe of of countries, and some are their uses as a as a way of keeping in touch with the rest of the world. Because I would ration myself to one page a day.

Presenter32:32

Professor Heinz Wolf, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 232:44

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