Leonard Rosoman

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 an artist. He'd begun to make a living teaching and illustrating when at the outbreak of World War Two he joined the Auxiliary Fire Service. Here his talent burst into life as he painted what he saw, burning buildings, smoke and fire. All of which led to his being commissioned as an official war artist. Now it was the drama of combat that his paintings recorded, capturing with careful stillness the foreboding of men and machinery preparing to kill.

Presenter0:58

After the war, he returned to teaching, painted murals and theatrical sets, and more recently decorated the ceiling of Lambeth Palace Chapel. A fine draughtsman with a love of colour and size, he's today one of the oldest members of the Royal Academy. Looking back, he says, the vulnerability of life, the precariousness of it, has been a vitally important part of my work. He is Leonard Rossiman. The fragility of life, Leonard, is most obvious, of course, in your wartime painting, and perhaps most of all in one of the most famous, which is in the Imperial War Museum, isn't it, called Falling Wall. Can you describe that painting to me?

Leonard Rosoman1:37

It shows a narrow lane with quite tall buildings on each side.

Leonard Rosoman1:44

Half way along into the picture the left side of the building is falling, directly threatening the two firemen who are operating the hose.

Presenter1:55

The point about that is, is that it's something that you witnessed a as a young man in the war, as a fireman. And as I understand it, it might have been you under that war.

Leonard Rosoman2:06

Oh, very much so.

Presenter2:07

How did that come about?

Leonard Rosoman2:09

But the leader of the team said to me, We're not doing any good here.

Presenter2:13

You weren't putting the fire out. It was a a huge fire.

Leonard Rosoman2:16

Oh, huge, yes. So he said, go back to the pump and he said, bring out the chap there and we'll get him to stay here and I want you to come with me into that building and climb to the to the roof. So I did that. I brought this man back and put him onto the onto the hose. And then we both us two walked across this this narrow lane and went in into a doorway.

Leonard Rosoman2:41

When the most

Leonard Rosoman2:43

absolutely terrifying noise I I think I've ever heard in my life occurred and w what had happened was that where we'd been standing was now full of r absol red hot brick which had fallen from the other side of the lane and sadly and awfully um

Leonard Rosoman3:03

killed the poor boy who'd um taken our place.

Presenter3:07

How long was it?

Presenter3:09

After that awful incident, because it must have been a terrible thing to witness, that you were able to put it on canvas? Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman3:16

Well, I should think uh about two or three weeks. I had to get leave. I c

Leonard Rosoman3:21

I found it almost impossible to work.

Presenter3:24

Did you know then that you had to paint it when you say you found it impossible to work? You mean paint?

Leonard Rosoman3:34

So I started to make some drawings and little studies.

Leonard Rosoman3:38

And these eventually grew into quite quite a large painting.

Leonard Rosoman3:43

And when it was shown, it w it was immediately bought by

Leonard Rosoman3:47

The Imperial War Museum, and it still hangs there.

Presenter3:52

Hm. But, interestingly, you don't like it.

Leonard Rosoman3:55

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman3:56

I don't like it, no, um because

Leonard Rosoman3:59

I think it's too whimsical, I think. I think I've treated it as a as I might treat a a a landscape. I've somehow or other disguised

Leonard Rosoman4:08

The fact that it it is a very

Leonard Rosoman4:12

Intense hard incident.

Presenter4:16

It's the gap between your experience and what you put on canvas. But it is much admired. I think you much prefer, do you not?

Leonard Rosoman4:18

And then

Leonard Rosoman4:20

Yeah.

Presenter4:24

the paintings that you did again in that period, because it was a very prolific period for you, your paintings of machinery. I know there's one of a of a burnt out fire engine that you really like. Now why do you like a a lump of cold metal?

Leonard Rosoman4:28

Here

Speaker 44:28

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman4:32

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman4:39

When I looked at this. Fire engine, the actual fire engine.

Leonard Rosoman4:44

It was surrounded by ash.

Leonard Rosoman4:47

And it took on, you know, the weirdest.

Leonard Rosoman4:51

significance in terms of the machine.

Leonard Rosoman4:55

That the most

Leonard Rosoman4:56

Awful example of the role the machine plays and the results.

Presenter5:03

So it's really the human trauma that's conveyed by an inanimate object, if you like, because it's so wrecked. It's much more symbolic.

Leonard Rosoman5:07

If you got that

Leonard Rosoman5:10

Yes, indeed.

Presenter5:11

than literal, which is why you don't like falling wall, I think.

Leonard Rosoman5:12

Which is why you don't

Leonard Rosoman5:14

Indeed.

Presenter5:15

Let's pause there and uh tell me about your first record.

Leonard Rosoman5:18

When I was in the fire service, this office of ours was on Millbank. The head of it was a friend of mine, a fireman, and uh we we uh noticed that Mara Hess was giving her lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery, so we went to two or three or four. This one, the first movement of Beethoven's piano sonata, was the beginning of of a lovely series which contributed quite a lot to the the life I was leading at that time.

Presenter6:44

Dame Myra Hess playing the opening of the first movement of Beethoven's piano sonata in E, Op. 109, and memories for you, Leonard Rossmann, of uh wartime musical lunchtimes at the National Gallery. It's um it's often the case, of course, with artists that uh they've been determined to draw or paint for a living ever since they were a small child, but not in your case, I think.

Leonard Rosoman7:04

It's never

Presenter7:04

What happened?

Leonard Rosoman7:05

I wasn't tremendously keen on drawing and painting when I was very young, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Leonard Rosoman7:13

I was, I think, rather than

Leonard Rosoman7:17

A rather difficult child.

Leonard Rosoman7:20

It was

Leonard Rosoman7:22

to some extent the sort of chaos in in my family I mean, I I suppose it's a bit hard on any child when their mother and their father split up when he or she is at the age of five.

Leonard Rosoman7:35

You know I was left.

Leonard Rosoman7:37

Very very much alone. My father and my mother were were very strange people, not awful people, but thoughtless and

Leonard Rosoman7:45

miscast in some kind of way. I didn't see either of them, you know, for quite some considerable time, and I did feel

Leonard Rosoman7:53

Very lonely.

Presenter7:54

But apparently, it meant that you were also very naughty. You said that you were a very mischievous little boy. What did you do? What was wrong?

Leonard Rosoman8:00

Yes, I won't

Leonard Rosoman8:02

I was

Leonard Rosoman8:03

Left with

Leonard Rosoman8:05

relations of of my my mother, aunts and uncles and so on, who

Leonard Rosoman8:10

I have to admit, um I mean, I'm not coming out of this very well, I am I know that I have to admit that that um, you know, they were trying to be ve very, very kind to me.

Leonard Rosoman8:21

But somehow or other I j I just couldn't fit in. I didn't feel that I really belonged anywhere there.

Presenter8:28

But tell me how you were beastly.

Leonard Rosoman8:30

When, for example, I

Leonard Rosoman8:33

the doctor in the nose. He was supposed to be dealing with a a particular sty that was on my iron very very painful.

Leonard Rosoman8:42

And I can see it so clearly, and this great big window looking out onto the road and

Leonard Rosoman8:48

A little table in the middle of it all, and even the Asper District was there.

Leonard Rosoman8:53

And um he said, Now come along then um this is not going to hurt. We're g we know we're going to help you and and and make you feel better.

Leonard Rosoman9:03

And I believed him, and I stood there, and of course he squeezed the star on my eye, and it hurt a great deal. So I was absolutely livid, and stepped back and bonked him on the on the on the on the face. My my my record's not great. But your boxing skills led on to fortune, I gather.

Leonard Rosoman9:23

Well, much to my amazement, um

Leonard Rosoman9:26

When I was at school, I won

Leonard Rosoman9:28

medals and so on for for boxing. One wag, a friend of mine, said to me, Well, that is absolutely meaning. What are you? A papy, a mache weight?

Presenter9:42

You you've always been very tiny and wonderful. Well, there you are. No no artistic skills on display at the time, but certainly certainly you could punch your weight, as they say. Let's pause there for record number two.

Leonard Rosoman9:52

Is

Leonard Rosoman9:54

Okay. This is the Kathleen Ferrier, called The Stuttering Lovers, that in a funny, curious sort of way puts an emphasis on my own father, whom I was actually really quite fond of, in spite of his strange behaviour. My own father had had a really rather a ba a bad stutter, although in the

Leonard Rosoman10:17

In the song itself there's not a great deal of stuttering. The idea of the stuttering lovers does do something to me. I think it's got a a weird sort of interest, and I suppose that's mainly the reason.

Speaker 410:38

A wee bit over the lean, my lads, a wee bit over the green The birds went into the poor man's corn, I fear they'll never be sun, so sun, so sing, me lads, I fear they'll never be seen

Speaker 410:53

So out comes the Bonnieweed lass, and she was once so fair, And she went into the barn and scorned to see the Swift up

Speaker 411:03

We laughed to see if the birds were there.

Speaker 411:08

So out comes a bunny we lad, and he was a fisherman's son, And he went into the barman's corn to see if the lance was done the bum the there, we lance, To see if the lance was there

Leonard Rosoman11:13

I'm not sure.

Speaker 411:23

He put his arms around her waist, And kissed her cheek and chin. Outspoke the bunny whale.

Leonard Rosoman11:26

It's tough.

Presenter11:31

Kathleen Ferrier, accompanied by Phyllis Spurr, singing The Stuttering Lovers and Memories of Being a Boy. Well, now, how, Leonard Rossmann, did you come to go to art school? Was there family opposition? Why did you suddenly announce you wanted to be an artist?

Leonard Rosoman11:45

Well, there was an awful lot of family opposition. I was sent for by the my father and my grandmother to talk about this. My grandmother said, Now, Leonard, you know you've got a wonderful opportunity here. You've got Harry's business, which has been offered you with um great love.

Presenter12:04

This was the furniture business I think your father was in the furniture business.

Leonard Rosoman12:05

Furniture storage and whatever.

Presenter12:09

And you had no desire to go into this at all? None.

Leonard Rosoman12:12

No, none.

Leonard Rosoman12:14

But my grandmother, being the formidable lady that she was,

Leonard Rosoman12:19

wasn't having any of this, and she said to me, Well, Leonard,

Leonard Rosoman12:22

If you're so foolish as to

Speaker 412:25

Uh

Leonard Rosoman12:25

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman12:26

Refuse Harry's.

Leonard Rosoman12:28

Wonderful offer.

Leonard Rosoman12:30

Why don't you do something sensible?

Leonard Rosoman12:33

Why don't you make biscuits'? for example'? And I said,'Biscuits Why biscuits'? and she said,'Well, you idiot, because they're made of flour and water, and you make a hundred per cent profit.

Leonard Rosoman12:46

So that that fixed me.

Leonard Rosoman12:49

But at the end of the day my father said I'll make a deal with you. We'll send you to an art school for a year, but, you know, I can't go much further than that.

Presenter13:00

And he sent you to Newcastle. But what happened after a year when the money ran out?

Leonard Rosoman13:03

At the end of the year, against all the odds, against all the general opinion, I won a a scholarship for four years. It meant that I didn't have to pay any fees, or my father didn't, at all.

Presenter13:17

What did the family say to that?

Leonard Rosoman13:19

Well, my father couldn't believe it.

Leonard Rosoman13:22

Nisilma, that's extraordinary. And what did grandma say?

Presenter13:25

Uh

Leonard Rosoman13:26

Well, they never quoted grandma to me.

Presenter13:29

She's probably still banging on about biscuits, truthfully too.

Leonard Rosoman13:31

And I didn't get the opportunity to save. See?

Presenter13:37

Record number three.

Leonard Rosoman13:39

Well, Ellington, Duke Ellington.

Leonard Rosoman13:41

I was very impressed with this. I thought for the first time, you know, that I'd chosen something original. I think that was the first perception I had of, you know, what it meant that lifted this work out of the sort of normal category.

Presenter14:59

Duke Ellington and the Washingtonians and Black and Tan Fantasy, and that was recorded in 1927. So, Leonard, five years at art college, and by this time you're a young man of twenty-three, you come out from uh Newcastle, come back to London, and you've got to make a living. I read that you ended up designing toffee papers, making painting posters for shell mechs. You can be sure of shell, hm?

Leonard Rosoman15:20

That's right.

Presenter15:21

Like a do you did it scrape a living, all of that?

Leonard Rosoman15:24

Scrape is a is a good word.

Presenter15:26

And you taught some too, didn't you? And you and you illustrated books and so on.

Leonard Rosoman15:32

At that particular time the English scene was

Leonard Rosoman15:36

a bit unhappy because it was, you know, roughly the scene when abstract expressionism broke in from America and the visual illustrative quality that certain English painting contained was rather frowned upon. However, a small group of English painters were doing quite a lot of really very very interesting illustrative work and I got attached to them and enjoyed their company.

Presenter16:06

So then war broke out, and we talked about your work in the fire service. That led to your exhibiting yourself. That led to your being spotted, as it were. Now who spotted you and asked you to become a war artist, an official war artist?

Leonard Rosoman16:22

It was Sir Kenneth Clarke.

Presenter16:24

And could you choose where you went?

Leonard Rosoman16:26

No. I had to go to North Africa and then down to Australia in Sydney.

Presenter16:32

to work on the fleet there in the the war against Japan.

Leonard Rosoman16:34

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman16:36

Try.

Presenter16:36

And what was your brief? What was the brief of a war artist? What were you there for?

Leonard Rosoman16:41

It was um pretty wide open.

Leonard Rosoman16:44

You were left absolutely free. They didn't dictate do this and do that.

Presenter16:49

Or how you did it. They just wanted you there to do what inspired you in the moment. That's right. Wonderfully wide brief.

Leonard Rosoman16:50

No.

Leonard Rosoman16:52

That's right.

Leonard Rosoman16:56

Wonderful.

Presenter16:56

I want to hear about the results in just a moment, but let's pause for record number four.

Leonard Rosoman17:00

Yes, this is um Oklahoma, which had a great success in London. At the time there was a magazine, a rather good one, called Contact Books. They asked me if I would be interested in illustrating an article that they were publishing on uh Oklahoma. It was really quite an important commission for me.

Speaker 417:24

Every night my honey lamb and I sit alone and talk and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the sky. We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is plant. And when we say

Speaker 417:42

We're only saying you're doing fine, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, okay.

Presenter17:53

The title track from Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, sung by the original Broadway cast. So it was nineteen forty four, Leonard. You'd have been thirty one, and you were the official artist, war artist, on board HMS Formidable off the Japanese coast. It must have been terrifying.

Leonard Rosoman18:08

It was the sort of apprehension that goes with you're faced with something that you desperately want to do, but you're not quite sure how to do it.

Leonard Rosoman18:19

But you you know, you want it so much that you really conquer the fear if if if you possibly can.

Presenter18:26

Where where were you positioned? Where would you have been on on board? Where did you sit and pay?

Leonard Rosoman18:27

Uh

Leonard Rosoman18:30

Like everybody else on the ship, I had an an alarm station. Mine was r on the top deck of this island, it was called. It seemed to me Rosman sticking sticking out of the top in the most dang dangerous place. However I got over that.

Presenter18:47

Well, quite but you must have felt incredibly vulnerable, since I did. You could see everything.

Leonard Rosoman18:49

That's why I didn't think it was.

Leonard Rosoman18:50

Not leave.

Presenter18:51

not least that which was coming.

Leonard Rosoman18:53

That's right.

Presenter18:53

Oh.

Leonard Rosoman18:54

Yeah.

Presenter18:55

And yet you didn't paint any action pictures, did you? I mean, I mentioned in my introduction that that

Presenter19:02

Y your pictures are full of foreboding, but they're full of stillness, aren't they?

Leonard Rosoman19:06

Is that right? I saw countless examples of horror and flame and so on and so on. But

Presenter19:12

You didn't want to paint that?

Leonard Rosoman19:13

I didn't want to paint that one.

Presenter19:14

And wh why not? Was that, do you think, because of the the the fire experience you've described earlier on?

Leonard Rosoman19:20

I hope it isn't.

Leonard Rosoman19:22

I mean, I want to show the violence. I want to show how it affected people who were actually involved in doing something else, taken unawares, for example.

Leonard Rosoman19:37

And from my little alarm station, looking down on this flight deck like a great football field,

Leonard Rosoman19:44

There were alarm stations, and I painted a lot of those.

Presenter19:48

And and the planes themselves sitting there with their their wings folded. Yes, like little hornets right. So so you were seeing it through the machinery, I think the machinery of war was what you

Leonard Rosoman19:50

Yeah, with their wings folded.

Leonard Rosoman19:53

That's right.

Leonard Rosoman19:57

So the machinery of war was what you

Presenter20:00

We're attempting to capture.

Leonard Rosoman20:01

T yeah.

Presenter20:01

But there's also and I know this has been said about your work there's a despite the great open spaces in the football field of the flight deck you described, there's a kind of sense of claustrophobia about it as well.

Leonard Rosoman20:08

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman20:11

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman20:12

I'm I'm pleased you noticed that because it's that's very important.

Presenter20:16

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman20:16

The There be some music.

Leonard Rosoman20:18

Well, it it it's um a piano trio that I've um over the years been enormously fond of. One would hear

Leonard Rosoman20:26

The Ravel

Leonard Rosoman20:29

And this of course gave me enormous pleasure. I mean, imagine you're at sea and you're learning something about Ravel.

Presenter21:38

That was the opening of Ravell's piano trio played by the Floriston trio.

Presenter21:43

We mentioned, Leonard, earlier on the precariousness of life being a theme of your work, and you must have got to know on board HMS Formidable many servicemen, pilots who didn't return from a mission. I mean that's a good question. Awful space of time, I presume, in the wake of a a sortie when you

Presenter22:03

Wait to count them back in and they don't come.

Leonard Rosoman22:06

One of the most

Leonard Rosoman22:08

Moving and

Leonard Rosoman22:10

Tender.

Leonard Rosoman22:11

Examples of it was when Flight was was out on a sortie.

Leonard Rosoman22:17

I suppose I know that. Six or seven planes, something like that. They were coming back s singly. They were all back except one.

Leonard Rosoman22:26

The feeling was, you know, that this guy wasn't going to make it, when suddenly a great cheer went up, because they'd had a call from him or something, and he'd he'd been hit, and was slowed down, and was on his way back, and eventually this this plane appeared.

Leonard Rosoman22:46

I'll never forget it because, you know, it was like the the incident was sort of spotlit and

Leonard Rosoman22:52

There was always, as you probably know, a a formula about taking off and and coming back to the plane, and he appeared ahead of the aircraft carrier, and then circled it,

Leonard Rosoman23:06

and came up uh astern and everybody was holding their breath because it you know the getting slower and slower and slower.

Leonard Rosoman23:14

And to everybody's horror, he misjudged it.

Leonard Rosoman23:19

and couldn't land and went on.

Leonard Rosoman23:22

took off and went on and made another circle.

Leonard Rosoman23:26

Just as he was approaching,

Leonard Rosoman23:29

The very stern of the ship.

Leonard Rosoman23:31

He fell into the sea. The whole plane fell into the sea and he was lost. And it was really an awful moment and an example of how anything can happen in in in these circumstances.

Presenter23:47

Tell me about record number six.

Leonard Rosoman23:49

Yes, this this brings back memories of the time when I was teaching at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Leonard Rosoman23:55

and um I'd done a certain amount of work for a friend of mine called Dickie Buckle, and he eventually started uh an idea of putting on a very big exhibition

Leonard Rosoman24:08

in the art college and he wanted me to d to design a a setting for it. They gave me about ten

Leonard Rosoman24:15

students as assistants and we started off.

Presenter24:18

So these were murals. This was all over the art school walls. That's right. So closed the whole art college.

Leonard Rosoman24:19

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman24:20

Yeah, so

Leonard Rosoman24:21

That's right.

Leonard Rosoman24:23

And you see some of these paintings were huge, I mean, you know, twenty and thirty feet wide and so on. Eventually it was opened and it was a a great success. In fact, it was so much of a success

Leonard Rosoman24:39

that they repeated it and put it on in London.

Presenter24:42

How could you move the walls of Edinburgh Art School to London?

Leonard Rosoman24:46

No, you can't. That all the things had to be designed again.

Presenter24:51

Repainted him.

Leonard Rosoman24:52

Repainted.

Presenter24:54

And so this is Sleeping Beauty, Memories of Memories of the Diagilev Ballet.

Leonard Rosoman24:57

That's what I'm saying.

Leonard Rosoman24:58

That's right.

Presenter25:56

That was part of Act Two of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, the panorama played by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormondy. You spent Leonard Rosserman more than twenty years teaching at the Royal College of Art and I know hundreds of students passed through your classes, but extremely notably David Hockney. What would you have recognised about him when you saw his work? Presumably you saw his portfolio.

Leonard Rosoman26:22

Uh

Presenter26:23

What would you

Leonard Rosoman26:24

Well, there there was always an extraordinary professional quality about it. It was way ahead of its time in the sense that he was doing certain things and he was the only one doing it.

Leonard Rosoman26:40

And can you teach someone like that, or do you just give them their heads? Well, it's a good question, that, because I think in fact.

Presenter26:43

Okay.

Leonard Rosoman26:46

It can make things rather difficult.

Leonard Rosoman26:49

I found it a difficult task because

Leonard Rosoman26:53

There was a a kind of ability on the on the part of David.

Leonard Rosoman26:58

Who

Leonard Rosoman26:59

seemed to have a sort of natural command.

Leonard Rosoman27:03

I mean, he wasn't a great display man. He wasn't sort of throwing everything out and and and trying to make a great impression. In a way, there's a a a quietness about him. And you know, this this exists now. Uh I see him quite a lot because he's two doors away from me. He's got two small dogs, and uh uh a painting appeared two or three years ago of these two dogs just sitting on the floor. I mean, there's nothing spectacular about it, but

Leonard Rosoman27:34

There's something so tender

Leonard Rosoman27:36

and his capacity to

Leonard Rosoman27:39

not to display his talents in any kind of strong way, but to to make a statement which somehow has something very special.

Presenter27:50

And you, of course, have gone on making your statements, and I think I worked it out that you were 75 when you painted the ceiling of Lambeth Palace Chapel. And it's a vaulted one at that. It must be very difficult both physically and artistically. I can imagine you sort of must make you feel quite sick standing there staring at the ceiling, painting it with your head tipped backwards. Yes, it is.

Leonard Rosoman27:58

And it

Speaker 428:06

Standing there, staring at the ceiling, painting it.

Speaker 428:09

Yes.

Leonard Rosoman28:10

Uh

Presenter28:10

And how can you do you have to keep coming back down the ladder to stand back and look at it in time you see it? If the sound of the corner is.

Speaker 428:10

Is it

Leonard Rosoman28:11

Let's go.

Leonard Rosoman28:15

Continue.

Leonard Rosoman28:17

Yeah

Leonard Rosoman28:19

The apex of the ceiling was forty feet above the ground, and the whole chapel was encased in a sort of close network of scaffolding, so in order to see w what we were painting or had painted,

Presenter28:34

which was the life of Saint Augustine scenes.

Leonard Rosoman28:36

That's right.

Presenter28:36

That's right.

Leonard Rosoman28:37

We had to clear a lot of the scaffolding away, and then all eight or nine of us go down and lie on our backs on the nave and um see it for the first time, perhaps.

Presenter28:47

D.

Presenter28:49

So you you had to take and then put the scaffolding back up again because you wanted to change something.

Leonard Rosoman28:51

We got

Leonard Rosoman28:53

That dry.

Presenter28:53

But I presume also because the ceiling is vaulted that the figures will distort unless you paint them in a certain way.

Leonard Rosoman28:56

Guest

Leonard Rosoman28:58

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman29:00

We all had very detailed and accurate studies to work from, but coping with the with the curve of the vaulted ceiling meant that at some point or other, when you actually carried out

Leonard Rosoman29:14

The information that was on your study, you had to deal with something that was created for the first time.

Leonard Rosoman29:22

On the the surface of the ceiling. And it really was quite a big

Presenter29:24

Amazing. Are you proud of it? Is it one of your best pieces of it? Yes, I think.

Leonard Rosoman29:28

Yes, I think it is.

Presenter29:29

Record number seven

Leonard Rosoman29:31

Now we come to a fifties.

Leonard Rosoman29:33

Certain sounds.

Leonard Rosoman29:35

hit one, you had to stop and and listen. They were very, very powerful. And Piaf's singing La Viengose was was one of these.

Speaker 429:48

Des you qui pour des rir qui se pairs to sabout one on the fortress aux tour.

Speaker 429:57

Dol Moquel La Palmia.

Presenter30:18

Edith Giast singing La Vienrose. You've been married, Leonard, for the last eight years to your second wife, Roxanne. You you fell in love with her through a mottled glass panel, I understand.

Leonard Rosoman30:28

Yes. Well, my studio has a little hallway, and the the door that leads out on to the courtyard outside is is made of glass.

Leonard Rosoman30:40

And as I walked into this little hallway I was absolutely

Leonard Rosoman30:44

Taken aback, I think is the right word words. The whole of these glass panels

Leonard Rosoman30:50

were absolutely bright red.

Leonard Rosoman30:53

All all over them. And I thought

Leonard Rosoman30:56

What on earth is this? And when I opened the door

Leonard Rosoman31:00

There was

Leonard Rosoman31:02

Roxanne.

Leonard Rosoman31:03

wearing the most wonderful red, bright, bright red suit,

Leonard Rosoman31:08

which had glowed through the panels.

Leonard Rosoman31:12

And I thought this was

Leonard Rosoman31:15

Not at the time, of course, but later on I thought, well, what a wonderful way for a painter to meet his future wife

Presenter31:22

Particularly a man who loves colour as much as you do. Yes, yes, indeed. You're an orange man as much as you're a red man, I think. That's right, an orange man.

Leonard Rosoman31:25

Yeah.

Leonard Rosoman31:27

That's right. Yeah.

Presenter31:30

Uh

Presenter31:31

So there's going to be plenty of that on your desert island, of course. Yes, indeed. Brilliant sunshine, if you choose the right island. Absolutely.

Leonard Rosoman31:36

Yeah.

Presenter31:37

But I presume, if you're so happily married, you don't go?

Leonard Rosoman31:41

I want to go, but I'd like to come back.

Presenter31:44

No, well, we can't guarantee that. But you could draw and paint for huge numbers of undisturbed hours. Has that got an attachment?

Leonard Rosoman31:46

But uh

Leonard Rosoman31:51

That's right. That's wonderful.

Presenter31:54

Tell me about your last record.

Leonard Rosoman31:55

The last record, yes.

Leonard Rosoman31:58

I got a gal in Kalamazoo. Well, there's a little weird story about this because Roch Rohan actually was born in Kalamazoo. And I when I first heard this, I was absolutely staggered. I mean

Presenter32:11

I mean

Leonard Rosoman32:12

Anyway, I thought, you know, there wasn't really a place called Kalamazoo's extraordinary name. It had never been mentioned before in relation to the Roxanne.

Presenter32:22

Anyway.

Leonard Rosoman32:22

Anyway, um there there it is, and I think it's an absolutely wonderful song, and when I and I put it on, um Roxanne immediately comes down from upstairs, and we gloat, if you like, uh on this on this wonderful song.

Speaker 432:40

What a girl of real pimperoo.

Speaker 432:47

I'll make my bed for that freckle-faced kid. I'm hurrying to

Speaker 432:53

I'm going to Michigan to see the sweetest girl in Calabas.

Presenter33:09

Ben Miller and his orchestra and I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo. If you could only take one of those eight records, Benard, which one would you take?

Leonard Rosoman33:17

I think it has to be the Kalamazoo.

Presenter33:21

Memories of Roxanne's birthplace.

Leonard Rosoman33:22

That's right. Uh

Presenter33:23

Why not? Put you in a good mood, anyway on your island. What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare.

Leonard Rosoman33:30

Yeah.

Presenter33:30

S

Leonard Rosoman33:31

The book that I'd like to take is by James Joyce.

Leonard Rosoman33:34

and it's called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I've had it in my possession for a a long, long time.

Leonard Rosoman33:41

It did something to me when I first read it. It remains with me in in a in a very, very s strong, powerful way.

Presenter33:49

And what about your luxury?

Leonard Rosoman33:51

My luxury is a sloping lawn.

Presenter33:56

Any particular sloping long?

Leonard Rosoman33:59

But I'll tell you why.

Leonard Rosoman34:01

Uh we have a tiny little house in in uh Hampton St Long Isle.

Leonard Rosoman34:05

and it has a very, very big sloping lawn of absolutely wonderful grass. I was really hooked on this lawn for quite a while, and then I started painting it.

Leonard Rosoman34:20

And you've no idea what happens to people when they're standing on a on a sloping lawn. So please, can I have a sloping lawn for my luxury object?

Presenter34:32

You can. Leonard Rosamond, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Leonard Rosoman34:36

Thank you.

Speaker 334:44

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