Sir Alec Broers

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 two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is an engineer. He might have been a singer. It was a choral scholarship that took him to Cambridge in the early 60s from an upbringing in Australia. At Cambridge, he was at the forefront of the scientific development that led to the onward march of the silicon chip. For 20 years after that, he went to work for IBM in the States, a playhouse for electronics, he called it, and then returned to his university where eventually the post of Vice-Chancellor possibly helped compensate for the colossal drop in salary. Under his regime, investment and government funding are making Cambridge University a high-tech, business-orientated training ground, the envy of academic institutions all over the country. Get universities and industry to work together, he says. Everybody can gain a bit of the best of both worlds. He is Sir Alec Browers. It all sounds so simple, Sir Alec, but I bet it isn't.

Sir Alec Broers1:24

No, it's not simple, but th there's a great deal to be gained on both sides, and I think that's what people are waking up to, that industry that's really doing research can provide wonderful facilities, and then if you have a good idea, an original idea that can really flourish, they can make it flourish.

Presenter1:43

Of course. As I said, that that's in a sense very obvious. But you must have trouble with one side or the other, the academics or the businessmen, you know, who think that the others don't understand.

Sir Alec Broers1:52

Oh, always.

Presenter1:53

Well, which side which side give you most trouble?

Sir Alec Broers1:56

I don't I won't take sides. I mean, we have to work on both sides. But that is a very good point, and that's a lot of academics have worried that they may lose their freedom. I argue strongly against that.

Presenter2:09

But you're you are taking them on in a s in a sense, aren't you? You are stirring up the British academic institution by saying, Come on, wake up, look at this, we've got to go forward hand in hand with business. It's not what they like.

Sir Alec Broers2:21

Oh, a lot of them love it.

Sir Alec Broers2:23

They don't all like it. You you're correct, but a lot of them like it. A lot of them are they're ahead of me in this movement.

Presenter2:24

Only

Presenter2:30

And you've brought all these people into it. You know, you've attracted Glaxo, Wellcome, Marconi, Microsoft and so on on site, and Bill Gates is now in endowing the equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarships, the Gates Scholarships.

Sir Alec Broers2:41

Uh

Presenter2:41

Yeah.

Sir Alec Broers2:41

Yeah.

Presenter2:42

Where do those ideas go? Is that you? Are you the ideas?

Sir Alec Broers2:45

No, no, that's a team of us.

Sir Alec Broers2:47

But I mean a lot of that came through technical context.

Sir Alec Broers2:52

I have to go out there in the end and and

Sir Alec Broers2:55

As the Americans do they ask.

Sir Alec Broers2:58

So you and eventually we're very bad at that. And I was old, I lived in America for twenty years, I didn't still find that very easy to sit down. And I remember asking some one of these great people for money, you know, and you always find that that's the day that their stock fell or something, you know, that you have to finally say, yes, I'd like twelve and a half million dollars for this library.

Presenter3:22

But what, therefore, is your lead role in your mind? Are you are you the leader of an academic institution? Are you the chief executive of a business? Are you a fundraiser? Are you a treasurer? Are you an ideas man? Are you a PR man?

Sir Alec Broers3:35

Yes, I think it's the simplest way to answer that. Certainly all of those things to a certain extent.

Presenter3:44

Tell me about your first record for this desert island. What is it?

Sir Alec Broers3:47

Well, this is uh

Sir Alec Broers3:49

The trumpet shall sound from the Messiah.

Sir Alec Broers3:52

And this is how I got into Cambridge.

Sir Alec Broers3:55

I came over from Australia in nineteen sixty, and on a rather bleak, I think, January or February morning, the choral tests for choral scholarships were held in King's Chapel, and I chose this as my test piece.

Speaker 44:18

What is on

Speaker 44:19

I saw the ten on page I saw

Speaker 44:29

Come on.

Speaker 44:40

One of the table

Speaker 44:48

And it turned out

Presenter5:00

Neil Davis singing part of the trumpet shall sound from Handel's Messiah with the Gabrielli consort and players conducted by Paul McCreesh. That Sir Alec Brose was your audition piece in King's College, Cambridge to get in. But you'd been singing throughout your boyhood in Australia, I understand. Where and how?

Sir Alec Broers5:15

Which I have.

Sir Alec Broers5:16

Well, I went to a boarding school to Geelong Grammar and it had a great tradition of music there, and I sung.

Sir Alec Broers5:25

From when I started there was at the age of ten.

Sir Alec Broers5:29

So I did a lot of singing in my

Presenter5:30

But did you want to be a musician?

Sir Alec Broers5:32

Oh, I'd love to have been a musician.

Sir Alec Broers5:34

To be a singer.

Sir Alec Broers5:36

With a voice like Dietrich Fischer Diskow or someone would have been the most wonderful thing one could do. But

Presenter5:41

But but as a boy, when you were singing, did you think you wanted to make music your career, or did you always know you wanted to be a scientist?

Sir Alec Broers5:47

No, I didn't know anything. I knew what I enjoyed doing, and I never troubled myself about those things. I often think my life has unfolded in a rather random way. I don't plan things.

Presenter5:58

But was there an early interest in science? Did you did you start questioning?

Sir Alec Broers6:00

Oh yes.

Sir Alec Broers6:04

technical gadgets and uh I've of often thought one does what one's father wanted to do, not what one's father actually did. And my father was an insurance businessman who went to India in early days, but his great love was radio and grammar phones and and he wrote a column in the Calcutta Times for years reviewing the radios and explaining to people what a super heterodyne was. So I caught it off him so I always loved that.

Presenter6:30

How did he transmit it to you there? What did he use a word?

Sir Alec Broers6:34

Just by

Sir Alec Broers6:36

getting me interested in things and I can remember I think when I was three or four one of my first memories was he showed me that if you took a battery out of a torch and a bit of wire and a bulb and you put a wire on one side of the bulb and held the other s end of the wire on the bottom of the battery and put the bottom of the bulb on the top of the battery it went on and I disappeared to the bottom of my bed for about half an hour playing with this thing and I think I was three and a half or four then. This fascinated me.

Presenter7:03

And then I read that you you ended up making hi-fi sets for farmers in the outback. I think the question that comes out of that is how did they know what a hi-fi set was? If this was 1940s,

Sir Alec Broers7:08

Should become

Sir Alec Broers7:11

Well, because farmers in Australia at all times are very sophisticated people, but in particular at that time it was a great era of the the sheep and the wool. Wool I think in real terms was worth thirty or forty times what it is today. So they were wealthy and they had a lot of cultural interest and they would come into Melbourne and people would tell them and they'd come and listen to this hi-fi set I had. Did you go into business?

Sir Alec Broers7:39

I didn't think of it that way. It was an extended hobby, but I made probably twelve or fifteen of these hi phi sets, and and we charged quite a lot of money for them, and I had a cabinet maker, and we bought mahogany and things so we could make elegant speaker cabinets. It was uh exciting. I enjoyed it.

Sir Alec Broers7:56

Tell me about your second record. When I was at school, because I was musical, I suppose, somebody came up to me and they were looking for people for the band, and so I was drawn in and asked to play the tuba. The funny thing at the time was, and my father treasured a picture of me at this time. I was very small, I'm quite small now, but when I played this tuba and marched down the streets of Melbourne once with the school band, all you could see was the tuba and two legs underneath it. So this is Sousa's march, Semper Fidelis.

Speaker 48:39

Uh

Presenter9:15

John Sousa's Semper Fidelis March, played by Keith Bryan and his new Sousa band. Um I read that you play these Sousa marches in your ears on a Walkman when you go ice skating.

Sir Alec Broers9:27

Yes.

Presenter9:28

Where do ice skate?

Sir Alec Broers9:28

Yeah.

Sir Alec Broers9:29

Recently I've ice skated out on the fens an absolutely wonderful place to ice skate. But when I first I skated a lot when I was young in Australia, in the afternoons when I'd been at university in the morning as a student, and I'd then go to the ice rink for a couple of hours, and then go and sing Evensong in the cathedral.

Presenter9:47

And yet you said that when you were at University Melbourne University, where you read physics, you said that people observing you there would have felt sorry for me. They would have thought I was lonely. Why?

Sir Alec Broers9:59

Well, because I went to university a year early, and so my year didn't go with me.

Sir Alec Broers10:06

And I was quite interested in in the university course. But I did have these passions for ice skating and music and making high five sets, and so I did not like sitting around and drinking coffee and talking all the time. So I was quite content to be on my own.

Presenter10:26

And then, aged twenty one, you you set sail, literally, for England quite a moment, I would think, pull pulling out of the harbour, family and friends on the dock side.

Sir Alec Broers10:35

Yes. The party comes down to the sh boat, you know, and you have a party and then they all stand in the dock and you l

Sir Alec Broers10:42

Hold on to the paper streamer and it stretches and stretches and then breaks.

Sir Alec Broers10:47

And people I met on the ship coming over were lifelong friends.

Presenter10:52

So you weren't alone on the ship? You were excited by all of this departure, weren't you? You weren't m made miserable by speaking of the ribbon.

Sir Alec Broers10:52

So you won't

Sir Alec Broers10:53

You would exc you would excite.

Sir Alec Broers10:56

And

Sir Alec Broers10:57

Oh, not at all. No, it was the most the most amazing feeling. Because I was on my own. I knew nobody on that boat at all.

Sir Alec Broers11:06

And I met a farmer from Jersey and somebody who worked in the steel business in Sheffield, and they were friends of mine for the rest of my life.

Presenter11:15

So it was um it was kind of not a gap year, but a gap month, character building.

Sir Alec Broers11:19

And a real tha I always say, uh, I can count the lifelong friends I've made on the seven forty seven on the fingers of no hand, you know, but on that boat one made a lot of friends.

Presenter11:32

Record number three.

Sir Alec Broers11:33

Record number three really takes me back to early days in Australia and singing. I think that one of the most lyrical pieces of choral music that I ever sung is the Agnes Dave from Forays Requiem.

Presenter12:42

Part of the Annus Day from Foray's Requiem, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, with the new Philharmonial Orchestra conducted by Sir David Wilcox. So in Cambridge, Sir Alec, in the early 60s, you joined the team under Sir Charles Oatley working on SEMs, scanning electron microscopes, which it seems to me are just well not just, but are super duper microscopes. Can you explain them to me in more detail?

Sir Alec Broers13:09

Unlike most microscopes, you don't put a sample in the microscope and shine light through it and peer at it through a lens. Here you form a tiny little beam of electrons that can be only a few atoms wide, and you scan this little beam across the sample as a spot scans across a television set. That's how a television image is formed.

Sir Alec Broers13:33

And the area you can scan might be a millionth of a metre, and then you display it on a screen a half a metre big, and so you magnify the image by perhaps half a million times by doing that.

Presenter13:47

So you can see something as tiny as the eye of a fly or that. Oh, very easily.

Sir Alec Broers13:50

Oh, very easily. Oh, you see vast detail on the eye of a fly.

Presenter13:53

Hmm.

Speaker 413:54

Yeah.

Sir Alec Broers13:54

So or you will have seen, and everybody's seen scanning electron micrographs in the newspapers and everything, frequently of flies with their all their multiple eyes and that sort of thing.

Presenter14:04

But you apparently then went on to use this SEM, this this electron microscope, in in a different way. You turned it around and used it backwards, and instead of looking at things, you wrote with it.

Sir Alec Broers14:15

Yes, well I took the little beam and and instead of scanning it across the sample to look at it, I started writing things on the surface. And then people came up with these special materials called photoresists that are used to make microchips. And the process of making a microchip is is called lithography and it goes back to the old lithography process where if you are making an etching of some sort, you start with a copper plate, you coat it with beeswax, and then you scribe your picture in the beeswax. You then put the whole thing in acid, and where the beeswax doesn't protect the metal, it etches into the metal and you've got a structure. Now that's exactly what we then did to make structures. But we write, instead of scribing, we write with the tiny electron beam. The difference is that we're etching and making structures that are far smaller than even an optical microscope can do sometimes.

Presenter15:09

So you could squeeze then huge amounts of information onto a a small chip and bingo, we move towards the silicon chip.

Sir Alec Broers15:18

Yes, th that was the whole exciting business at the very beginning of the silicon chip.

Presenter15:23

Now, were you the first person to do this, to prove that you could miniaturize in this way, or were you part of it?

Sir Alec Broers15:28

There'd been some preliminary work done in Germany, but I think we in Cambridge were the first to do that very high resolution electron beam lithography, which we did in'sixty one,'sixty two.

Presenter15:40

So it was a huge contribution. Little doubt about that. Well, I know.

Sir Alec Broers15:44

In retrospect it was one it was an important contribution. But when you look at something like the silicon chip, you could find, oh, hundreds of people who made pivotal contributions. But it was a contribution. It was a little rung in the ladder at at the early stage of that.

Presenter16:00

And you did it. It was the subject of your PhD and and within hours you were gone. Never, never has a brain drained so fast, it's been said. What happened?

Sir Alec Broers16:09

I didn't write up in time. Like most PhD students, I was optimistic about how quickly I could write up. So I had to rewrite furiously for two or three months. By which time, my job in America at IBM was beginning to fade away. They were wondering whether I was ever going to turn up. So when I finally submitted and I had my oral examination, I couldn't waste any time. So I had the oral examination in the morning and I got a plane to America in the afternoon. And when I walked into the airport, there was a woman from the Board of Trade doing interviews of people leaving. And she asked me what I'd been doing. Did I get a degree here? Yes, I did. And now I'm leaving for America. Yes, I was. And when did you get the degree? And I was able to look at my watch and say, well, about three and a half hours ago, I hope.

Presenter16:59

Record number four.

Sir Alec Broers17:00

Well, record number four sort of takes me across the Atlantic because when we went to America we landed in that sixties era, you remember, with uh

Sir Alec Broers17:10

the Vietnam War and all the rest of that business. And there was something about America as well, the freedom, and one person we listened to quite a lot who represented that time in many ways is Janice Joplin. And Janice Joplin to me and Bobby Magee is one of the classics.

Speaker 417:29

They are near Selena's Long I let him slip away

Sir Alec Broers17:31

Go home.

Speaker 417:34

He's looking for that home and I hope he finds it

Speaker 417:39

When I train all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday, to be holding Bobby's body next to mine.

Speaker 417:50

Reading is just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing. That's all that Bob left me.

Presenter17:59

Janice Joplin and me and Bobby Magee and memories of America and Free Rolling Along and you went for two years and you stayed for twenty. What kept you?

Sir Alec Broers18:08

Oh, I just never looked up.

Sir Alec Broers18:12

The IBM Research Lab at that time was quite new.

Sir Alec Broers18:17

And there was a great belief in the future of science and technology and we could do anything we liked, provided we were moving forward.

Presenter18:26

So it was an electronic playground. Oh, that's the best.

Sir Alec Broers18:27

Oh, it's the best playhouse in the world.

Presenter18:29

And they paid you well, too.

Sir Alec Broers18:30

They paid us very well, you know.

Presenter18:32

You pioneered their nano science. Um you coined the term, I think, didn't you, out there?

Sir Alec Broers18:37

Well, we kinda d with respect to lithography, but that was some years later. That was in uh nineteen seventy six.

Sir Alec Broers18:46

We made some wires then. If you took one of those wires, sixty four thousand of them would have to be bound together to make a human hair.

Sir Alec Broers18:55

Very small.

Presenter18:57

And what could you write on that? What could you scribe on such a thing?

Sir Alec Broers18:59

Well, th they were metal wires, and what we'd do, you see, you put on the surface of something a coating of metal, and then we'd write protecting lines on the top, and then etch away the rest with an iron beam is what I did. It's like sort of atomic sandblasting. So for a game at that time, as it was the bicentennial, I wrote USA 1976 all inside a half a micron. And a half a micron is now the size of the smallest wires on a on a chip. So th these were but these were small wires and that was a fun thing. And at the time somebody I was working with said, why don't we call this nanolithography?

Presenter19:37

Nano meaning one thousand millionth, I think.

Sir Alec Broers19:40

Yeah.

Presenter19:41

It sounds, of course, like a very narrow subject, but I think you made it quite broad, not least because of the freedoms IBM allowed you. How did you build bridges? How did you expand all the applications of that?

Sir Alec Broers19:53

Well, you see, this machines that I've built over the years were two things. They were either lithography machines or they were microscopes.

Sir Alec Broers20:02

And at that particular time I had the most wonderful sort of side research running with some biologists. And we looked at viruses and could see how these bacteriophage attached to uh cells in a way that other people hadn't been able to see they were so small that we needed a very high resolution microscope to do it.

Presenter20:22

Meanwhile, back in Britain, as you looked at us across the Atlantic, I wonder how how you felt, because here traditional engineering was down turning, and we didn't seem prepared to invest in microelectronics. You must have looked at us and shuddered, did you?

Sir Alec Broers20:38

It was quite distressing in a way, yes, because when I came to England in nineteen sixties Britain was the mecca for this. I mean the first television broadcasts, colour television broadcasts, the stereogrammer frame record all the high quality audio equipment was British.

Sir Alec Broers20:57

So it was distressing to see over the years how it eroded away and people were just not prepared to invest.

Presenter21:05

And you've gone as far as to say that's a disgrace.

Sir Alec Broers21:07

I have, yes.

Presenter21:10

Next record.

Sir Alec Broers21:12

My next record takes me back to my mother.

Sir Alec Broers21:17

She was a pianist.

Sir Alec Broers21:19

She went to the Royal Academy here, and was a very fine pianist, won a lot of the competitions at the Academy.

Sir Alec Broers21:28

And she played Chopin a lot.

Sir Alec Broers21:30

Sometimes at home, after a dinner party or something, she'd sit down at the piano and the place would stop. And this was a waltz she played, one of Chopin's waltzes.

Presenter22:39

Part of Chopin's waltz in A Flat Major, opus sixty four, number three, played by Peter Donahoe. So you came back, Sir Alec Browers, after twenty years you took this huge reduction in income that I keep mentioning, said to be a five fold drop. Came back to Cambridge to become Professor of Electrical Engineering. Why?

Sir Alec Broers22:57

Well, that's a question that everybody asks me, and so I'm practised in its reply, but I notice that my answer is never the same.

Sir Alec Broers23:05

A key to it was that the rubber band of fascination that tied me to Cambridge had never gone away. My first sort of creative research had been in Cambridge. And the idea of returning to that world. My world in IBM had got quite complicated. I was in charge of a lot of people by then. I was nominally an executive. I was still doing research by ducking back into the lab every evening at weekends. But it was getting more and more difficult. So I came back to cut away the controls that I felt were controlling me in IBM. I was obliged to do too many organizational things.

Presenter23:41

But that was at 84, you came back, and it was 12 years later that you became Vice-Chancellor. I wonder.

Sir Alec Broers23:43

Yeah.

Presenter23:48

where it was along the line during the course of those twelve years.

Presenter23:52

Um

Presenter23:53

That you resolved the ambition to do that to get your hands on power. When did you think if I could get my hands on this place, I could turn it around, I could do something here?

Sir Alec Broers24:02

Never.

Sir Alec Broers24:04

My life has always been one of sort of reversing up through organisations, as I say.

Presenter24:10

But I can't believe it just happened to you. You must have.

Presenter24:14

Put that together in your mind at some point.

Sir Alec Broers24:16

I've become very interested in trying to solve this problem that I saw, which really started as a problem of the standing of technologists and engineers in Britain. And I couldn't understand this. Not that it was so poor. That it was so low, and that people didn't understand. Didn't understand that the most exciting science in many ways takes place at the frontiers of technology. And there's this idea that only the purest science is intellectually respectable. Whereas that's absolutely not the case. But I'm also very interested in the in

Presenter24:28

Not that it was so poor.

Sir Alec Broers24:50

broad cultures and and I think the way that the way out of that dilemma is to make our technologists into broader people.

Sir Alec Broers24:58

And Cambridge is a magnificently broad place. So I took it on, uh firstly, because, you know, it's um such an a uniquely marvellous institution, Cambridge, and one could not turn it down.

Presenter25:14

Next piece of music.

Sir Alec Broers25:15

Well, the next piece of music again takes me back to to the United States, where I used to listen a lot to music of all types. I'm very Catholic in my music tastes, and I've always liked jazz, and I became fascinated with Keith Jarrett. Keith Jarrett plays solo piano a lot. He he plays in groups. But he would just sit down at the piano and play for an hour or more, quite extemporaneously. And I've chosen part of what he played during a concert he gave in Bremen in nineteen seventy three, where he's been playing very monotonously on one note or around one note, and then breaks into the most wonderful sort of lyrical jazz.

Presenter26:52

Kith Jarrett playing at Bremen in nineteen seventy three. It sounds terribly glamorous, Sir Alec, this this this job you're doing, but I sus suspect, if you're honest, that the paperwork and the committees and and the politics of it all drive you mad on occasions, don't they?

Sir Alec Broers27:05

You must have been talking to some of my friends. Yes, the committees and the paperwork drive me mad.

Presenter27:10

This is when you go ice skating.

Sir Alec Broers27:12

Yeah, so well if there's any ice, I want to sailing or something.

Presenter27:16

But look, you've lived professionally through a huge revolution in electronics, haven't you? I mean, w we all remember back in the sixties there w we used to see those James Bond films with sort of full of rooms full of computers and equipment and now it's all contained. You tell me that that the size of what we now use electronically is only as large as it is because of the size of the human hand?

Sir Alec Broers27:38

Exactly, that's one of the things, and the other is the resolution of the human eye.

Sir Alec Broers27:43

And we couldn't have a very small screen because we couldn't have the detail on the screen. So a laptop computer's size is is primarily determined by the size of that screen and the resolution of the human eye, how small it can see things, and and by your big fat fingers.

Sir Alec Broers27:59

Well not yours, but

Presenter27:59

It was not.

Presenter28:01

But what else? Wh what else can happen to us? You tell me that we've things have been invented that we don't want. In in a way, of course, we dictate exactly what does take off and what doesn't, don't we?

Sir Alec Broers28:12

Oh, yes, and over the years there have been big mistakes made in technology. AT and T poured money in the sixties and seventies into a picture phone, and nobody really wanted this thing. You'd have to comb your hair and make yourself look respectable, and besides, you you know, you'd have to control your facial expressions.

Presenter28:30

So what happens in the end, do you think? Do you think we will be able to take something as small as this stopwatch in my hand and travel the world with it and be able to do everything with it that we want, answer the telephone, close our curtains back in London, or whatever we want to do?

Sir Alec Broers28:46

Some in the older generation think that won't happen, but it will. You you've got to just look at the young people keying in a short message onto their phones using nine keys to get the alphabet in, uh to realize that young people will become very slick at this, and it'll be very easy to contact with a hand held device, uh your master control system, which again will be a tiny thing, but it'll be massively powerful. And if you want to control your lights, or put the blinds up and down, or turn the television on and off, or let the dog in and out, you'll probably be able to do it without any trouble.

Presenter29:23

Background.

Sir Alec Broers29:23

Um Yeah.

Presenter29:23

Tatten.

Sir Alec Broers29:24

Yeah.

Sir Alec Broers29:24

Well, record number seven is a song from the Auvergne. My wife Mary loves these these songs and used to listen to them a great deal. So I I'd always have one of these along to remind me of of her. And this is a delightful little song where a young married girl is being given some advice and told that she will make love much better with a glass of wine than a glass of spring water.

Speaker 429:53

Layo de Ruzotevoromore, Layo de Rutzote Moro More, Laio de Ruzote Moro More, Laio de Ruzote Moro More, Nekal Papero Kilayo Kilayo, Negal Predent Buuto Kilayo de B, Nekal Papero Kilayo Kilayo, Negal Prenbuto Kilayo de B

Sir Alec Broers30:03

The Moro Morn!

Sir Alec Broers30:10

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 430:21

Surafiliotto, sebul morida, picudo, suno filiotto, sebul morita, eligal padunaduke laio de ratza, aymaromiluroke laio debi, elikal padumaduke laio de ratza, aimaromilura kelayo debi.

Sir Alec Broers30:26

Yeah.

Sir Alec Broers30:34

Yeah.

Presenter30:49

Netania Devre, singing Lao de Rosto, part of the Trois Bouret from Conteloube's Songs of the Auvergne, conducted by Pierre de La Roche. You're a man, it seems to me, Sir Alec, well prepared for this desert island. Big on self reliance, I think, eh?

Sir Alec Broers31:03

Well, I do like self-reliance on expeditions and things. I spent a lot of my life trying to get onto a desert island.

Presenter31:12

By water, yes.

Sir Alec Broers31:13

By water, yeah. You sail. I sail, yes.

Presenter31:16

Yeah.

Sir Alec Broers31:16

Passionately.

Presenter31:17

How far and where?

Sir Alec Broers31:19

Well, I've all over the place, and I trekk down islands, but my boat's unconventional. It's just a big open boat that's converted really up for camping on it.

Sir Alec Broers31:29

But we can trail it on the road and take it places. So we've sailed it all around the Mediterranean, and we've sailed around the Lophotin Islands above the Arctic Circle and that sort of thing, and I just love doing that.

Presenter31:42

You don't like doing anything the easy way, do you?

Sir Alec Broers31:46

Well, I don't like having thousands of people around. And if you have a unique way of getting somewhere, very often you can find yourself without lots of people around. That's why I like to be. I mean, my idea of lovely islands, for instance, in the Baltic, where there are forty thousand islands between Sweden and Finland. And to sail in there is magic, because you can find islands that are uninhabited. You can find anchorages where you can't see

Sir Alec Broers32:14

Sign of human life anywhere.

Presenter32:16

And you never fear for your life, Elder?

Sir Alec Broers32:19

Um no, not when I'm out there.

Sir Alec Broers32:22

I at times, yes, there have been occasion. There have been occasions when I said I won't ever do it again. If I get in, I promise myself I won't ever do it again. But only a couple of those. Yeah, one's f can be very cautious today and there's very very good equipment. M my boat is laden with electronics. I know exactly where I am. I have up-to-date weather forecasts, particularly with the web now. And so you don't do things that are silly. You stay in harbour, but occasionally you get caught.

Presenter32:47

Have you ever had to be rescued?

Sir Alec Broers32:48

No.

Presenter32:49

You take that for a while.

Sir Alec Broers32:50

I would hate that. That would be failure of a bad sort.

Presenter32:55

Tell me about your last record.

Sir Alec Broers32:57

Well, my last record is the what some people refer to as the Canon Quartet from Act One of Beethoven's Fidelio. I think it's one of the most beautiful and lyrical pieces of music ever written. Rather incredible that it's Beethoven. And I I wanted really felt I should have something from Mozart, but I wanted something from Beethoven as well, and in some ways I think

Sir Alec Broers33:22

This is what Beethoven wrote that was most like Mozart.

Speaker 433:27

Praise you.

Speaker 433:31

Here's the

Speaker 434:14

Uh

Speaker 434:19

This one is dream.

Presenter34:24

Eddie Gleenbacher, Inge Nielsen, Court Moll, and Herwig Pecoraro singing part of the quartet Mir istso Vunderbar from Act One of Beethoven's Fidelio, with the Nicholas Esterhazy Symphonia conducted by Michael Hallas. If you could only take one of those records, which one would you take?

Sir Alec Broers34:41

Oh, the last one, as is often the case. It's such a beautiful piece of music that one could listen to it again and again.

Presenter34:44

So

Presenter34:48

What about your book?

Sir Alec Broers34:50

I understand I can't take my big scientific encyclopedia. No, no, no more reference books. No more reference books. That's very unfair. Um I'll go for Tolstoy then, a very big book. I will take war and peace.

Presenter35:03

And what about your luxury?

Sir Alec Broers35:05

Chocolate. Lots of chocolate. Can I have lots of chocolate? Of course. Of all types. I couldn't live without chocolate, I think.

Presenter35:09

Of course.

Presenter35:13

Sir Alec Burris, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Sir Alec Broers35:17

It's been fascinating talking with you.

Speaker 335:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

Speaker 335:30

For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four