Fiona Reynolds

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 two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a conservationist. Her subject, geography, and her interest, the countryside, have always been combined in her career. She's run two of Britain's leading green pressure groups, the Council for National Parks and the Council for the Protection of Rural England. A stint at the Cabinet Office as head of the Women's Unit led to her present job, Director General of the National Trust. In just over a year in the post, she set about trying to change her organisation's somewhat elitist image, indicating the trend new policies would take by saving Sir Paul McCartney's former council house in Liverpool for the nation. But the foot and mouth crisis has dented the Trust's finances. Its Director General remains positive and passionate. What gets me out of bed in the morning, she says, is my unquenchable curiosity about the long, intimate relationship between people and the land. She is Fiona Reynolds. But there has to be some straightforward money-making, I suspect, Fiona, because the National Trust has a large hole in its coffers as a result of foot and mouth, doesn't it? Yes, we do. I mean, last year was a dreadful year, and during the first few months after the foot and mouth crisis hit us, in other words, from late February to about May, we did lose over £10 million. The extra costs, for example, of fencing many of our deer parks off to separate people from animals were absolutely huge. But, you know, thanks to both our staff and their extraordinary efforts, but also the fact that the public was just dying to get back out into the countryside, the end of the year was better, so we managed to claw back some of those losses. How much did you claw back? Well, I think at the end of the year, we reckon it's about four and a half million. Really? So people really went out. Which is much, much better. They absolutely did. But still, four and a half million is still a big hole, and so that's a challenge for us. How are you going to meet it? What are you doing? Many of our properties are opening earlier this year, and we'll have a longer opening season towards the end of the year, just as we did last year. And we are finding that people are hungry to get out into the countryside. Because as I said, you got this job, and within weeks, foot and mouth struck. It was your dream job, and then the nightmare begins. It must have been a terrible experience. It was pretty awful in the sense that it just came like a bolt from the blue. But actually, the Trust responded magnificently because right from the very first day.

Fiona Reynolds1:57

How much

Fiona Reynolds1:58

Well, I think it

Fiona Reynolds2:02

Really?

Fiona Reynolds2:10

How are you doing me?

Presenter2:43

Our staff were out and about helping farmers, getting disinfectant to them, all the things, very, very practical way that really made a difference. But what you did was shut everything down practically immediately, before anybody else had, before the government said you should.

Fiona Reynolds2:50

But what you

Presenter2:56

Well it was a brave decision that because I mean you cut off your own income essentially, didn't you? It was brave and it was necessary because if you remember at the time cases of foot and mouth were popping up all over the country. Nobody knew where it would pop up next. It was a national crisis.

Presenter3:11

Our concern at the time was that there was really an absence of clear instruction to anybody. There was enormous confusion, enormous state of anxiety. And we felt it was right as an organisation to take the prudent course to close, but then straight away to work on reopening and being clear about where it was safe to do so and where it wasn't. And you've also been at the forefront of those who said in the wake of foot and mouth disease that it was a wake-up call. To whom? It was a wake-up call to everybody. It was a wake-up call to the public, because I think we heard things about farming that really had not been exposed before. For example, the amount of travelling that animals were being subjected to. But I think it was also a wake-up call about the link between farming, rather a small part economically, of the countryside, and all the other businesses and all the other ways in which the countryside is supported. So it's agriculture, tourism and the government? Everybody, yes.

Presenter4:08

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter4:10

My first record goes back to my childhood. I'm one of five daughters, and we had a tremendous childhood. Great fun, lots of holidays, climbing mountains. And this is a song by the Galliards, who are a Scottish folk group, singing the Mingalay boat song.

Speaker 44:26

We are waiting by the Harbour. We've been waiting since break of day. We are waiting by the harbour as the sun sets on Mingale.

Presenter4:54

Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor with the Galleyard singing Mingalay Boat Song. Um foot and mouth disease uh Fiona Reynolds wasn't your only problem in those first few weeks as Director General of the National Trust because uh you seemed to have come in for a lot of flack right away, people suggesting that you were of the feminist left and you were going to ride rough shod over the people who put up the cream teas and wore the tweed skirts.

Presenter5:17

Well, as far as I'm concerned, the press said a lot of things that bore no relationship to me, my background, my passion for the Trust, and to some extent I guess you just have to accept that going into the public domain that that might happen. But I suppose the link was the spell when the women's unit. And it was irritating, actually, to have some of the things said. But there was mention, wasn't there, of the Trust having an elitist image and of its need to show more I don't know if you said this or not, but certainly it was quoted as a need to show more relevance to minorities. So in a sense, you'd lit your own touch paper with all of that, haven't you? Well, I think what the issue was was that the Trust is an organisation with marvellous public support. We have nearly three million members. But our statute makes very clear that we exist for the benefit of the nation. So one of the things we've been doing for a very long time, and I'm certainly a great champion of it too, is ensuring that we draw in groups of people for whom perhaps this is a new experience. And some of our new properties, like the workhouse, for example, that's opening up near Southall, is a great way of bringing in people to see a different face of the public. But that, of course, is exactly the point, isn't it? That in a sense what was being implied there was that perhaps the National Trust had OD'd, if you like, on fine architecture and how the rich Lived in the past, and that you were going into workhouses and prisons and finding out how the destitute lived too. And that's very much what you believe to be right, isn't it? I don't think it's possible to OD on the great houses because they are just fabulous for lots and lots of people. But I think what's happening, and we see it in the interest of television programmes like Simon Sharma's, is that people are really fascinated by history. And history increasingly is not how the great families lived or kings and queens, it's about how ordinary people lived. And the Trust has been moving in this direction. I'm certainly a great fan of it. I think it's a very important complement to our other work. But it is exactly that. It's complementary, it's not a substitute. You've got a group of back-to-back 19th-century houses in Birmingham, I think you have. We have.

Fiona Reynolds7:10

We

Presenter7:11

Yes, I mean the houses obviously were lived in throughout the 19th century and in some cases and right at the beginning. I mean they were actually rather high quality houses. People had come from real poverty in the countryside to what were then artisans' houses in the centre of a booming city. But actually as time went on eventually they became slums. And so we can show the transition and the way people lived at different points in Birmingham's history. And it is an extraordinary story and a very interesting one.

Presenter7:42

Record number two is the Agnes Dave from Foray's Requiem. Now, I was a viola player for many years. I love this, partly because it's the violas that have the tune, and it always is a wonderful moment when the violas have the tune. I sort of felt in some ways that being a viola player was how my professional life developed as well. The violas are absolutely essential to everything that happens, but you don't always give them the tune. And my sense now of transition perhaps to the National Trust, where I'm just inching into the first violins.

Presenter9:13

The opening of the Annus Day from Foray's Riquiem, sung by the Cambridge singers with members of the City of London Sinfonia, conducted by John Rutter. Music is obviously has always been a very important part of your life. Was this parents at home? What how did you play? What did you play? Music was always around at home. My father was actually quite a good amateur pianist, and my mother sang beautifully. So I can remember as a child waking up in the morning with my father and the harmonious blacksmith or something on the juicy joy of man's desiring to get us all out of bed in the morning. And of course we all learned instruments and we all did a bit, but I used to sit me down and try and play piano duets with him. Not very well, I hasten to add. But then I started to learn the violin at primary school and then was lucky enough to start to have private lessons when I went to secondary school and my music teacher Alan Broadbent was a the music teacher at rugby school.

Presenter10:05

And he drew together some of his pupils to create a small chamber orchestra. And really, throughout my entire secondary school life, that's really what I did, really. But they also obviously bred into you a passion for the countryside. How did they do that? Well, our family holidays were all somewhere Snowdonia, the Lake District, occasionally Scotland, all in places where the thing that we would do would be to get to the top of the highest mountain or visit the waterfalls, or really walking and being out and enjoying the countryside was absolutely their great love and I suppose instilled all of that in us. Many were children, we moaned about it because we were only allowed to be on the beach for perhaps one day out of the week. But it was a terrific childhood and it was great fun and we went to some marvellous places. What was your favourite? I don't know, Newlands Valley in the Lake District, you know, the Beatrix Potter landscape where Mrs. Tiggywinkle's farm was. I can still picture family holiday after family holiday camping in a tent with the rain pouring down, but then these amazing landscapes all around us. So this was five of you, five daughters, all tramping along in father's footsteps across muddy fields, wasn't it? Oh, absolutely. My father was just passionate about all kinds of things. He was an amateur historian, archaeologist. And I mean, for example, he would take us to explore where an archaeological dig was going on. We'd all come back plastered in mud from head to foot. But he was at the same time talking to us and enthusing us. So it was great fun, but it was probably a lot of mud and a lot of rain as well. Record number three. Oh, record number three is almost the signature tune of this small chamber orchestra, Rugby Symphonia. It's a Mozart Devotimento. I can remember playing it first of all on a summer school when I must have been about 14. But it's still today, the orchestra reconvenes every year. It's still the signature tune, and it's just absolutely lovely.

Presenter12:56

The opening of Mozart's Divertimento in D major, played by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner. You met your husband through music as well, Fiona, is that right? Yes, yes. He was one of the other members of this chamber orchestra. So, I mean, I met him, I was about twelve and he was probably about fourteen or fifteen, so it's one of those sort of can sound rather corny, but actually we were just friends for a very, very long time. And you joined the National Trust aged 18. Yes, and I was a student. And again at university, this was Cambridge, Newnham College.

Fiona Reynolds13:19

And you joined the national

Presenter13:26

Were you there always committed to spending did you think you were going to spend your career using your geography, using your interests? Well, I suppose that was the time when I suddenly realised it might be possible, because you know how it is, you do your degree and all your friends are thinking about careers in the city or applying for companies and the sort of graduate entry schemes. And at that point, I said actually quite clearly, no, I didn't want to do that. Really, this was 1979, 80. There weren't a lot of jobs coming up, so in some ways, I was at that point striking out slightly against what others were doing. But I was very lucky, a job for a tiny, then tiny, charity called the Council for National Parks was advertised. And I went to London for the interview, which felt quite a scary thing to do, and amazingly got the job. And that was really the start of really everything else, because it was tiny, but in the right place, at the right time. And the enormous upsurge of public interest in

Fiona Reynolds14:21

Mm.

Presenter14:25

Environmental issues, conservation issues were absolutely happening at that time. But before that, I as I understand it, you've been bashing around the fens of Cambridgeshire, sedge cutting.

Speaker 314:30

Yeah.

Presenter14:36

Oh well, yes, no, that was that was the sort of practical end of it, if you like, in I think Chippenham Fenn. So yes, it was great fun and I always ended up with lots of blisters'cause I wasn't the most practical of of people. What do you have to do then?

Speaker 414:36

Jump it off

Presenter14:49

Oh, you have to take a scythe and you have to cut reed to clear scrub vegetation so that the reed bed can flourish. And we're still doing that actually. I wrote the National Trust at Wiccan Fen, we have a most amazing restoration programme there. It's a tiny, precious area of Fenland shrinking because of the pressures of intensive agriculture all around, but we are embarked on a most wonderful programme of acquiring adjacent land to recreate reed bed and a habitat that otherwise would be completely lost. Tell me about your next piece of music.

Presenter15:21

Well, the next piece of music is a in a sense, it's it's perhaps a slightly sentimental one because this is the Mendelson's octet, which my husband and I had our honeymoon in Snowdonia, and we had just happened to have it on a tape in the car.

Presenter15:35

And so my memory of uh that time and indeed that whole summer is of driving or going off on a walk somewhere with our backpack in the back of the car. But actually this wonderful music sort of played loudly echoing through the hills and it just captures for me a very special time.

Presenter16:50

Members of the Vienna Octet playing the opening of Mendelssohn's Octet in E flat major. Memories for you, Fiona Reynolds, of your honeymoon in Snowdonia. You were already by then, of course, cutting your campaigning teeth at the Council for National Parks, learning how to lobby politicians and other influential bodies about conservation.

Presenter17:08

Protection of the species and so on. Your timing was very good, wasn't it? Because I think it was just almost exactly about then that green issues began to move centre stage. Yes, they did. I mean, the Wildlife and Countryside Bill itself was, I think, the subject of more amendments than any other bill had ever had recorded, and largely in the House of Lords, interestingly enough, because there were endless debates going on all hours of the day and night about which species of birds should be on which annex, but also fundamentally issues around the sorts of protection the countryside needed, whether it was against ploughing of moorland on Exmoor, which was a very provocative issue of the time, or protection of hedgerows. And it was really, again, the awakening of the conscience of the nation around whether we were really looking after the countryside as well as we should be. So did you develop to a small extent a sense of power that you could, if you marshalled your arguments carefully, begin to win battles against big commercial developers, I suppose?

Fiona Reynolds17:54

See

Presenter18:05

I think the exciting thing was the way that organizations were coming together to achieve exactly that, with good research and good arguments and a well-founded case. Actually,

Presenter18:17

People were listening. Nevertheless, you know, battles can be lost, and you moved, as we've said, to the Council for the Protection of Rural England, and I see.

Fiona Reynolds18:17

Thank you.

Presenter18:24

That that it exists to promote the beauty and tranquillity of rural England.

Presenter18:29

The problem is that both of those things can be disturbed all of the time by house building and by roads. And it goes on, and the government has recently run the right to do exactly that, to build houses where it decides to. Well, exactly, because the other thing that was happening throughout the 80s and 90s, just as public interest in the environment and countryside was rising, so was development pressure. I mean, development pressure for new roads, for new quarries, for housing development. Really, in a sense, more intense pressures than I think the countryside had ever experienced. And CPRE was absolutely in the thick of that debate. I mean, big campaigns about where and how new housing should be built. And it was a very, very difficult time, and we lost as many battles as we won. And if the government has recourse to the law and the law comes down on the side of the government, there's nothing any of you can do.

Presenter19:14

Well, at one level, of course, that's right. But I think what's really interesting, and if you look back over the twenty years in which I've been involved, public opinion can play a big role. I mean, it is now more difficult to ride roughshod over planning designations or develop in national parks than it was twenty years ago. Record number five.

Presenter19:34

Record number five is Robert Spate reading from Wordsworth. These are very special words for me, and not least because of his associations with the Lake District, which from my childhood. These words I think though capture for me one of the reasons why I do love the hills and the mountains, why I do care so much about the countryside.

Fiona Reynolds19:55

Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains

Fiona Reynolds20:00

and of all that we behold from this green earth.

Fiona Reynolds20:04

Of all the mighty world of eye and ear

Fiona Reynolds20:07

Both what they hath create, and what perceive.

Fiona Reynolds20:11

well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense the anchor of my purest thoughts.

Fiona Reynolds20:19

The nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart

Fiona Reynolds20:23

and soul of all my mortal being

Fiona Reynolds20:28

Nor perchance

Fiona Reynolds20:30

If I were not thus taught,

Fiona Reynolds20:32

Should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay?

Fiona Reynolds20:36

for thou art with me here upon the banks of this fair river.

Fiona Reynolds20:41

Thou, my dearest friend,

Fiona Reynolds20:44

My dear, dear friend

Presenter20:47

Robert Spate reading part of Wordsworth's line composed above Tinton Abbey. So you rose high, Fiona, through these pressure groups and then you crossed over from the voluntary sector into the heart of power, into central government, because you were running the women's unit in the Cabinet Office. That was a completely different thing for you to do all of a sudden. How did you fit in there? Yes, it was, but it was again born of curiosity in a way, because this job came up advertised in the newspaper, and I just thought that would be really fascinating to find out how government worked from the inside. And again, I applied for the job and was absolutely amazed to get it, but went in on a three-year contract and found it absolutely fascinating. Except that then the job of your dreams came up, sort of two years in, as director of the National Trust. Well, yes, it did. I mean, I the contract would have come to an end after three years anyway, but the National Trust job was completely irresistible. How much of a dilemma was it, though, for you?

Speaker 421:27

Uh

Fiona Reynolds21:41

How much of a dial

Presenter21:43

Not a great dilemma when actually push came to shove. I mean, to work for the National Trust was just beyond comparison with anything else. So I have to say, I didn't hesitate too long when off with the chance. But the truth of that was, of all of that experience, was women's unit plus director general of the National Trust means that you became very high profile and it means that people started to ask you personal questions. It meant that people started to want to know about how you ran your life because you had three children by then. And of course the truth was that your husband had become a house husband in Inverted Commons. Well again it wasn't as difficult a decision as people might think because at the time my third daughter was born in 1995 I was very happy at CPRE. He at the time was working in industry, he had to travel a lot and he wasn't having anything like as much fun as I was at work. So in fact when we sat down and said look we've got two very small children a third on the way we thought one of us really wants to be with the children more and it didn't take long actually for the choice to be that he would do that. But it's a job actually particularly the National Trust that the children love too because actually our holidays, family holidays and things very often out and about doing things they find that tremendous fun too. So do you re-enact your own childhood with them? Are you leading them sort of up and down hills and they're complaining? We are absolutely. Oh do we have to go on another walk and all that stuff? Absolutely. But I don't know. Maybe that's what all parents do eventually. I think so. Record number six. Well this is this is really about the children because this is Finz's Dies Natalis which is the most wonderful music but the words are by Thomas Trahan.

Fiona Reynolds23:04

We are absolutely.

Speaker 323:06

So they

Presenter23:26

And they are words which really are about greeting a newborn baby. And they are just the most beautiful words. And we played this when my all of my daughters were born. And so it's very much tied up with our gar greeting of our daughters as they came into the world.

Speaker 423:43

These little limbs, these eyes and hands, which here I find This panting heart, wherewith my life begins

Speaker 424:00

How have ye been Behind what curtain away from me hid so long?

Speaker 424:12

Are wars in whatever

Speaker 424:15

That's my new maiden.

Speaker 424:32

When a silent eyes are many thousand a thousand years

Presenter24:39

The opening of the salutation from Finzay's Dies Natale is sung by Wilfrid Brown with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Christopher Finzay.

Presenter24:47

Mr President, earlier, Fiona, that foot and mouth disease was a wake-up call. What are you now telling people in high places? We know you know them, we've heard you know how to lobby them. What are you saying to them they should wake up and do? We're very clear. We're saying that things have to change. Agriculture policy needs to change. Funding needs to be available to support the environment, not to support production. But we're also encouraging farmers to think about using the market to create demand for local food, for high quality food, for many farmers converting to organic people willing to pay for it?

Fiona Reynolds25:21

In f

Presenter25:24

There are big issues about why food is expensive and one of the things we feel is that transport costs are a big part of that. So we're talking about local abattoirs, we're talking about not transporting cattle many hundreds of miles across the country. Is that sort of exactly and what's wonderful about being at the National Trust is that actually we can put some of those ideas into practice. Because you have tenant farmers. We have nearly two thousand tenant farmers on 600,000 acres of land. For example, at our shops and restaurants we're able to source more of our products locally, and that's something that we feel is a really important part of people reconnecting with food and where it comes from and the contribution it makes to the landscape and to the environment. And there's a willingness of the public to pay for it, to buy it, you say.

Fiona Reynolds26:02

And there's

Presenter26:05

So you're persuaded, the farmers are persuadable. Is the government? That's the million dollar question. Now, of course, the treasury is quite an important factor in that, and I hope that they will see the merit of our arguments. But it is in a way that's not. I think they will. I mean, that's the point. The Treasury is the important factor in all of it. Do you think your voice is being heard, what you're saying? I think we've got a better chance than we've had for a very long time, and we're going to keep arguing and keep making the case. But above all, we're going to keep showing that it can be done and that it works on the ground. That's the agricultural side of your role, but of course, you've also got the tourism side, haven't you? Because thousands and thousands of people come to you every day. Do you have a a fundamental conflict really, you personally, on this, that you're fundamentally, as we've said, a conservationist, and yet

Fiona Reynolds26:20

I think they've

Fiona Reynolds26:26

I think we've got

Presenter26:50

Tourists can be the enemy of conservation. It can be a conflict, but the argument in a way is pretty straightforward. It's the argument about the goose and the golden egg. I mean, if we develop tourism to the point where we've lost the sort of integrity of the product, if you like, to use a jargon term, then I think we have created something that's a monster. But actually, for many people, and again, Foot and Mouse showed this, it's not the sort of huge tourism complexes plonked in the middle of the countryside. It is actually people's capacity to go out to

Presenter27:22

walk along country paths to go to the pub for lunch or whatever it is, it's that low level tourism that actually is the real source of economic benefit. So I think it is possible to reconcile the two, and I think again, we can show how that can be done.

Presenter27:37

Pickle number seven.

Presenter27:39

Record number seven goes back to some extent to my childhood because my father was actually quite a good amateur pianist and he used to play this and I struggle to sometimes in the middle of the night when I want to wind down before I go to bed. I try very hard to play this or one or two other pieces. This is a very special to me for that memory of my father.

Presenter29:00

Maria Tipo playing the opening of the second movement of Bach's Takarta, a Daggio and Fugue in C major, arranged by Bussoni for the piano. As you said before now, Fiona, the National Trust isn't just a pretty face. You know, it's a it's a big employer, it generates a lot of jobs and social and economic benefits in the countryside. It seems odd, therefore, that it doesn't have a a public position on fox hunting, and those in favour of fox hunting, as we know,

Presenter29:25

I agree that it generates a lot of jobs and it's very much part of the rural social scene. Why don't you take a view on it? Well, we do in the sense that we allow fox hunting on our land where it's traditionally taken place, or in some cases was land that was given to us by a donor family. It was with that express intent that hunting should happen, and in some places exactly the opposite. But you haven't fought the battle either for or against it. No, but is that why you're caught, are you? It's a difficult one because there are very strong views on both sides of the equation. Some people passionately in favour, some people passionately against. And in a very large membership organisation like ours, you know, one would expect there to be very different views internally. But you've taken views on other controversial issues, whether it's on access or hedges and subsidies and organic and factory farming, you know, versus we've just been talking about road development and so on. Why not on this one?

Fiona Reynolds29:46

You haven't thought the bat

Fiona Reynolds29:47

No, but

Fiona Reynolds30:01

Is that shifted?

Presenter30:13

Well, I think what is clear is that where the Trust has our own statutory objectives for the preservation indeed of the countryside and of the long-term care of special houses and our heritage, where it's very clear that there's a public policy line that is driven by our duties and our responsibilities, I think that it's obvious that we sh can and should take a view. And of course our view is always based on our practical experience. But I don't think that hunting in a sense comes into that category, so we don't express a view.

Presenter30:41

Foxes apart. I don't know if there are going to be any on your desert island. I suspect actually you'll be entirely at home in the wild, really, won't you?

Presenter30:49

Well, I'll enjoy it, that's for sure. I mean, it'll be a um I'll be very excited about exploring. I'll probably enjoy it for a while, yeah. And are you intrepid? Are you a gambler? Would you, you know, set out to see like Tom Hanks in Castaway and trust your luck? Oh, I am intrepid. I mean, in uh, if my father used to point me at a cliff face or at a cave entrance, and I would be the first of the five sisters to sort of want to try and, you know, explore it or whatever. So, yes, I'm I think I'm quite intrepid. But I don't know how long that would last alone on it as a time.

Fiona Reynolds31:03

Oh I am interested.

Presenter31:20

Last record. The last record is from Peter Grimes, which is a wonderful opera and evokes not only this amazing sort of atmosphere of the sea and of the coast, but actually of Suffolk, another part of the country that that I love.

Presenter32:35

Oh, hang at open doors the net from Act One of Benjamin Britton's opera Peter Grimes, performed by the chorus and orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. Now, if you could only take one of those eight reports, Fiona, which one would you take? Oh, the pain on the face

Presenter32:50

Very difficult, but I I'm going to go for the Finzi. That's the naming of your children. Yes, it is, but it's also the combination of beautiful music and words and the family. And I think it just captures for me perhaps what they're all really about. What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare.

Presenter33:10

My book is The Making of the English Landscape by W G Hoskins, which was new in the fifties, a completely new way of looking at history and geography. It is the story of how the landscape and our impact on the landscape has evolved. I love it. And your luxury.

Presenter33:28

My luxury? Well, if I'm allowed it, I would love to have a complete set of Ordnance Survey maps of Britain, because I think Ordnance Survey maps are just wonderful works of art, but you can read into them so much about the history of the landscape, about where and how people lived, about the great houses and their impact, but also the towns and cities. And I just think that you know I'm going to have to look after myself on this island and I think they'll give me lots of encouragement.

Presenter33:58

Fiona Reynolds, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 334:09

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