Professor A H Halsey

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.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and three, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:23

Mike Costaway this week is a sociologist. He was a railway child, born into a poor, happy family that earned its living on the trains. He was clever and won a scholarship to the local grammar, sometimes hiding his new found learning from the family for fear of swanking.

Presenter0:38

He went to the LSE, lectured in America and in the sixties became an education adviser to the government and a champion of comprehensive education. Since then, as an Oxford professor and a former Reith lecturer, by the way, he's turned to other themes, in particular the breakdown of family life. A Christian and a socialist, he says that the family, with all its miseries, is the best thing we've ever devised. Its collapse, he believes, is going to ruin the future. He is Professor AH Halsey, Albert Henry Halsey, but always known to your family as Celley, or for some reason, why Celley?

Professor A H Halsey1:14

No idea.

Professor A H Halsey1:15

It came very early, b before my memory began.

Presenter1:18

But it stuck for eighty years.

Professor A H Halsey1:19

It stuck in the way that often in those days things did stick and people did acquire nicknames which they carry for ever.

Presenter1:28

Uh

Presenter1:29

But this sense of family and the nature of education they've been strong themes in your life, haven't they? And I'd quite like to talk to you about yours first of all, because yours was a very large family, wasn't it?

Professor A H Halsey1:40

Yes, it was a large family eight of us, eight children that is. But the important thing to notice about that is that if you were stuck in the semi-skilled labouring population, it wasn't all that extraordinary, and certainly wasn't extraordinary by comparison with the previous generations. It does rest in the memory as an enormous array of manual skilled labouring men and aproned women, both exercising enormous capacities to survive under poverty conditions.

Presenter2:13

But even worse, as you say, for the previous generation, I understand your father was one of eighteen.

Professor A H Halsey2:18

Yes, isn't it extraordinary to think of the uh he remembers, and I remember, he having to stay in bed while his mother washed his shirt.

Professor A H Halsey2:28

otherwise he couldn't go out.

Presenter2:29

It's impossible to even begin to understand how they could have coped. The poverty must have been great.

Professor A H Halsey2:35

It has always struck me that that mother ought to have been decorated.

Speaker 12:38

Mother

Professor A H Halsey2:40

Just for the sheer achievement of registering the births of eighteen children in the St. Pancras.

Professor A H Halsey2:48

Church register. I mean um and but moreover, she she she raised them all, that that to say they all grew to adulthood. And bore them all.

Presenter2:56

Can you fancy bearing eighteen children, for heaven's sake

Professor A H Halsey2:59

It hardly bears thinking of.

Presenter3:00

And the grandfather, I understand, was was sort of cock of the railway walk.

Professor A H Halsey3:05

He certainly was. He was a bit of a bruiser, but uh he would appear in a waistcoat with a gold chained uh watch uh uh in his pocket, and he would play hell with the firemen if the thing wasn't ready,'cause they were all steam trains, of course, in those days, and then he would set out to break the record, which he man managed to do.

Presenter3:05

He's

Speaker 33:24

He was a driver.

Professor A H Halsey3:24

Oh yes, oh he was a he was an absolutely skilled driver, and he he held the record for for the Thames Forth Express, London to Edinburgh, that is, for several years. That's the great thing about that early childhood, the sense of belonging to almost a caste.

Professor A H Halsey3:43

I mean, the railway people were a cost like group.

Presenter3:47

So you were born in the mid nineteen twenties, early nineteen twenties, and the family then decamped, I think, from London, because you were Kentish town, weren't you? With all these aunts and uncles all around. You decamped to Northamptonshire.

Presenter4:00

Obviously very poor. Foraging for food and fuel and so on. You must have memories of that. What was it? Give me a picture of life in near Corby, wasn't it? As a small boy.

Professor A H Halsey4:09

Yes, it was actually in Liddington, in Rutland, just over the county border. He brought up this whole tribe on two guineas a week. So we did have to forage for food. We obviously went out, as we used to call it, sticking, to fetch in wood, that is to say, to put on fire. And we went out over and over again to fetch mushrooms and blackberries and apples and the the whole of the area, the rural area around, was ripe for foraging.

Presenter4:38

Okay, I want to hear more about your early life, but let's pause there for your first record.

Professor A H Halsey4:43

Well, the first thing is an early memory of Marie Lloyd singing Don't Dilly Dally on the Way, recorded in my very early childhood, and I remember very well my mother singing it in exactly the same voice as Marie Lloyd, because she was a cockney.

Presenter4:59

My old man, said Foller the Vane, And down Dilly Danny on the wall.

Presenter5:08

Away went the van with the old pank in it and I walked behind with the old cobliny behind it.

Presenter5:19

Bailey

Presenter5:20

I lost the way I don't know where to run And of course I had

Presenter5:29

Don't Dilly Dally, sung by Marie Lloyd, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty three. Your mother, Professor Halsey, was obviously a very strong character, drumming that sense of right and wrong into her kids. Was she a clever woman, would you say?

Professor A H Halsey5:41

Oh, extraordinarily clever.

Presenter5:43

It was a native wit. It was just a Tink two

Professor A H Halsey5:52

She would say, Well, what you got, Sega?

Professor A H Halsey5:56

And then she'd take it out.

Professor A H Halsey5:57

And but when we was girls she would say there was so and so and so and so, and then she'd tell some story about how they would go down to Chalk Farm to get milk and that kind of thing in her childhood. She came from the London Irish.

Professor A H Halsey6:12

And

Professor A H Halsey6:13

In that sense she brought a kind of Catholicism into the into the family, which

Professor A H Halsey6:21

I think has to be mentioned because my father brought a uh a Protestantism into the family.

Presenter6:26

So was this the cause of some antipathy in the family, then I think?

Professor A H Halsey6:29

Well, in a way it was. But to me it was a form of adaptation to the realities of life. On the one hand, she was

Professor A H Halsey6:40

one of those cheerful people who thought, literally, God will provide. It was cheerful in hi and he had a tendency towards lugubriousness. Uh he was also clever, but uh

Presenter6:52

But you obviously inherited the brains, because as I said, you were a scholarship or you passed the scholarship to Kitter in Grammar. How were you given the news? And and what reaction did you have?

Professor A H Halsey7:03

It was a very difficult time for me.

Professor A H Halsey7:07

Going to this remote school remote it was in fact only eight miles away uh w was really a kind of desertion.

Professor A H Halsey7:17

Which

Professor A H Halsey7:18

My mother didn't understand at all. Her first insistence was that you had to be

Professor A H Halsey7:24

a good member of the family, that the family

Professor A H Halsey7:27

would be the unit of survival.

Presenter7:30

So you were the traitor, were you? Taking the train eight miles to school and leading a different life?

Professor A H Halsey7:34

I thought so. I felt so. That uh there was bilingualism in it, you see. I mean, I knew that she was fantastically clever in the use of English, but it was Cogni English, whereas the school

Professor A H Halsey7:49

Manners maketh man, and all of that sort of thing, you see.

Presenter7:51

So they told you to change your grammar, did they?

Professor A H Halsey7:54

They would they were in effect saying every day you must despise your parents if you want to get on and you want to join the educated community. And I wouldn't do that. So I was I I learned to be bilingual. I would speak in the received way by the school, and back into the dialect when I got home.

Presenter8:13

So you weren't able to tell your family that you'd learned French or you'd learned Latin. You were required, or you required yourself, to lead a kind of double life. Yes. You were two people.

Presenter8:24

But bound up within that was a sense of the injustice of that situation, yes?

Professor A H Halsey8:29

Very much so. I I used to think of it in those days as how could I possibly be chosen for this scholarship, does it anyone?

Professor A H Halsey8:38

And there are all these likely lads in the village who were just as clever as I was, I thought, at the time and maybe that led me into all kinds of mistakes, incidentally, about comprehensive schools later on. But the injustice was terrible.

Presenter8:51

And the injustice because just because you couldn't speak properly didn't mean you weren't as intelligent as those who did, essentially.

Professor A H Halsey8:59

I must say I learnt that very early because no one could compare in intelligence from anywhere in the education system with my own parents.

Presenter9:07

Record number two.

Professor A H Halsey9:08

This is my father, really. It's the nightmare.

Professor A H Halsey9:13

Orden's Nightmare, and music by Benjamin Britton, of course, and it came out in the thirties, and I remember it very well. It gives you exactly

Speaker 19:19

Uh

Professor A H Halsey9:20

Uh

Speaker 19:20

Yeah

Professor A H Halsey9:20

The

Speaker 19:20

Yeah.

Professor A H Halsey9:20

Yeah. Uh

Speaker 19:21

atmosphere of the house in which we lived.

Speaker 19:23

This is the nightmail crossing the border, Bringing the check and the postal order Letters for the rich letters for the poor The shop at the corner of the girl next door Pulling up beatok a steady climb The gradient's against her but she's on time

Presenter9:50

Stuart Legg, narrating WH Orden's nightmare with music by Benjamin Britton. Wonderful atmosphere, isn't it? Absolutely super. Um you had, I I understand, a very inspiring English master at Kettering Grammar who taught you the magic and majesty of the English tongue. How did he do that?

Professor A H Halsey10:07

It's very d difficult to reinvoke all of the atmosphere of the classroom, but I do remember him coming in for the first time. He said, Look, here are two letters.

Professor A H Halsey10:20

One begins with thank you for your expression of discontent of the eighteenth Altimo.

Professor A H Halsey10:27

that sort of language. And the other one I received only last week from my carpenter.

Professor A H Halsey10:34

And it said

Professor A H Halsey10:35

Dear mister Kirby, your box is ready. Yours faithfully.

Professor A H Halsey10:41

I much prefer the second one, and I thought that is it. This man is my sort of master he's going to be a bridge between this school and my family.

Professor A H Halsey10:53

And he was.

Presenter10:54

Yeah.

Presenter10:55

Your grammar school, therefore, did very well by you, didn't it? It introduced you to these kinds of things. It gave you a feel for the language. It tried to help you bridge the divide, as you said. It taught you your French and your Latin and history and so on.

Presenter11:10

Why would you then later on, when you're an education adviser to the Labour Government, seek to dismantle such schools?

Professor A H Halsey11:17

But I didn't.

Professor A H Halsey11:19

I wanted everybody to have the same experience. I wanted a combination of the grammar school and the technical school for everybody and not the elementary schools. Those are the things that I wanted to be.

Presenter11:32

But it didn't happen like that.

Professor A H Halsey11:33

Oh no, no, no, it didn't.

Presenter11:34

Yeah.

Professor A H Halsey11:36

I think that the main reason was that I romanticised the cleverness of other children.

Professor A H Halsey11:42

And I d I did that, I suppose for understandable reasons, by the experience of my own family, and didn't appreciate and and really understand what those kitchen seminars were really like, how it taught me how to conduct a uh an Oxford University seminar.

Presenter11:59

So you were getting something that the others weren't?

Professor A H Halsey12:01

That's right.

Presenter12:02

So you were encouraging, giving people the opportun what you were trying to do is establish equality of opportunity, but are you saying that a lot of those children weren't up to seizing that opportunity the way that you did?

Professor A H Halsey12:10

I still don't know about that. It seems to me that it should have been the ambition, and should still be the ambition, that we gave that experience to everybody. But the sort of mistake that I made was in thinking that they would all progress as easily as all the rest. And so it's quite clear to me, having really, really thought about it, that some children are more apt learners than others.

Presenter12:36

Absolutely. And going back to your own personal experience, you've written about this, that you got very bored if things didn't go at your speed, if you had to hang around for a child who was less able while the teacher dealt with them.

Professor A H Halsey12:46

Which I didn't appreciate at the time, but yes, I mean, that is a truth which I think has to be accommodated. But is that a fundamental fund?

Presenter12:53

Is that a fundamental problem with the comprehensive system then that in fact the result of it was, although it was ideologically absolutely correct, it actually leveled down instead of leveling up?

Professor A H Halsey13:04

Well That's arguable. You see, if you look at the actual statistics of the examinations taken by children now, compare them with children then, of course, we've actually raised the standards of people not rather than reduced them.

Presenter13:20

And of course people do.

Presenter13:21

say of you he is the father of comprehensive education.

Professor A H Halsey13:28

Did I say

Professor A H Halsey13:30

One of the uncles, one of the granduncles, perhaps. There were lots of other people who were just as keen on it as I was. Not necessarily for the same reason.

Presenter13:40

But just just on the comprehensive point, are you saying that your judgment now is, in hindsight, that it was obviously well motivated, but it was wrong?

Professor A H Halsey13:52

I believe in the first half of that sentence, and I'm not sure about the second half.

Professor A H Halsey13:56

As to say it was it was well motivated.

Professor A H Halsey14:00

There were all sorts of problems attached to it which we didn't face.

Professor A H Halsey14:03

Record number three. Well, this is John Bunyan's hymn. I learnt it early as a code for the whole of life to be a pilgrim.

Professor A H Halsey14:12

And it really is to do with the Protestant work ethic, the stint.

Professor A H Halsey14:18

The idea that we all have to put in everything that we can.

Professor A H Halsey14:24

And this expresses it perfectly for me.

Speaker 314:39

Steve Pain does sweet voice rings.

Speaker 315:03

The fear of men's head.

Presenter15:18

John Bunyan's He Who Would Valiant Be sung by the choir of Saint Paul's Cathedral conducted by John Scott.

Presenter15:24

You left school at sixteen, Professor Halsey. What was your first job?

Professor A H Halsey15:29

Well, uh there were two jobs offered. One was to be um sorting clerk in the post office, and the other one was to be a sanitary inspector's boy, which I preferred.

Presenter15:39

Bit of a letdown after all that education though. I mean, you must have aspired to something greater than that.

Professor A H Halsey15:41

Mr.

Professor A H Halsey15:43

Well, it was all that was available after all it was the war.

Presenter15:46

So you I mean you couldn't have gone to university'cause nobody could have afforded it.

Professor A H Halsey15:51

Like in putting it too mildly, my mother would have said, It's not for the likes of us.

Presenter15:56

In the end though, of course, I mean, the war was over. You went on, you got an education for yourself. I think it was in your mid-twenties, you went to the the LSE and you studied education. And your academic career has obviously

Professor A H Halsey16:03

Yes.

Presenter16:07

flowed from there. As a sociologist, did you ever consider politics as an option?

Professor A H Halsey16:11

Oh, yes.

Professor A H Halsey16:13

I was very strongly invited to join the Labour Club and the Socialist Club, which is Communist really. And I went along to a few meetings and then very, very firmly decided that that was sharp elbows stuff and I didn't ever want to do that. I would want instead

Speaker 116:22

There we go.

Speaker 116:26

And then I didn't

Professor A H Halsey16:30

to pursue some sort of academic life that would enable me to live out the same political ambitions, but without the elbows. Something more moral, you're suggesting. If you like. I didn't think of it that way. I just thought

Presenter16:43

Thought it would be more comfortable, that was all.

Presenter16:47

obviously saw a way in which you could influence the politicians with your sociology. I suppose that's what sociology is really, isn't it? It's to inform us as to how we can behave in the best interests of society.

Professor A H Halsey16:59

Yes, over a very wide range of things. In those days, sociology thought that it could really preside over economics and politics as well. And so I wanted to understand how society

Professor A H Halsey17:12

was what it was.

Professor A H Halsey17:13

what sort of animal I was, in what sort of country.

Professor A H Halsey17:18

And what sort of things could make it better?

Presenter17:21

And working close to politicians, as you did do for a great bulk of your academic career, what kinds of animals did you decide they were? Were they the rather cynical people you'd first thought?

Professor A H Halsey17:32

Not entirely. They it certainly wouldn't start out that way and they uh they certainly led double lives in the sense that you could press one button and you get an idealistic person, and you press the other button and you get a low cunning uh politician.

Presenter17:47

And a sense of, you know, if you don't like my principles, I've got others.

Professor A H Halsey17:52

Yes. Whereas I couldn't bear that.

Presenter17:55

I quote number four.

Professor A H Halsey17:58

Well, Louis Armstrong is the answer. Louis Armstrong was very characteristic of those days, and uh almost I could have chosen any one of uh Louis Armstrong's, but uh th this is the Savoy Blues, and demonstrates his fantastic capacity as a trumpeter.

Presenter19:08

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and Savoy Blues, and that was recorded in 1927.

Presenter19:14

Your Reith lectures, Professor Hawsey, back in 1977 were about the changes in British society, and of course there have been even more since. Your major concern, it seems to me, in the last decade has been about the demise of the family, which should be a sacred institution but is no longer such. Can you explain to me, if you would, the ways in which you think our attitudes have become wrong-headed as far as the family is concerned?

Professor A H Halsey19:41

It seemed to me that individualism has gone mad.

Professor A H Halsey19:45

I was brought up under conditions where there was a enormous acceptance of duty.

Professor A H Halsey19:52

If I compare my mother's life with those of my children and grandchildren.

Professor A H Halsey20:01

the the females. I ha have a deep sense that they're much more discontented than she ever was. And that was partly because she just took it for granted that that was her fate.

Presenter20:12

And what about the male? You mentioned the female. The male in all of this, of course, to day behaves very differently from the way in which you and your father and your grandfather before you would have behaved. Now

Presenter20:24

Men can come and men can go. Men can father children and men can walk away.

Professor A H Halsey20:28

Well, for all its imperfections the old system was at least as good a system, if not a better system, than the one that we have now.

Presenter20:37

Although by your own admission things were pushed under the cop.

Professor A H Halsey20:40

Very often. I mean, the more you go into it, the more you realize that the male sinfulness

Presenter20:40

They are

Professor A H Halsey20:46

has been a pretty constant.

Professor A H Halsey20:49

force in human society.

Presenter20:52

And of course the interesting thing is that these developments that you point at are born of what society would claim to be advances in the nature of society. So it's women's rights, it's abortion laws, it's divorce law reform so that women aren't trapped in terrible marriages any more. What you seem to be suggesting is that all of these advances that we as adults would say we had enjoyed have been to the detriment of the children.

Professor A H Halsey21:18

Yes, we, as it were.

Professor A H Halsey21:20

May justice

Professor A H Halsey21:22

between women and men, but at the cost of failures of every kind on the part of the children.

Presenter21:28

But has it not all been inevitable in this history of the second half of the twentieth century, as we've become more affluent, we've moved away from World War, we have communicated, we have become more liberal?

Presenter21:42

You know, the nuclear family didn't stand a chance of surviving all of that, did it?

Professor A H Halsey21:46

You're you're absolutely right. Should have been a sociologist, shouldn't you? Um this is um this is all true. But you've left out the most important thing, and that is that things change anyway.

Professor A H Halsey21:59

And I would have thought that it was perfectly possible that there will be a new generation who will say we're going to turn our backs on this sort of thing.

Professor A H Halsey22:08

We're going to have mo much more relational solidarities.

Professor A H Halsey22:13

We're going to live together much more amicably, we're going to enter into much more tight contracts, etcetera, etcetera.

Presenter22:20

Now there's no evidence for this. This is your innate optimism, hm?

Professor A H Halsey22:23

Well, maybe it is, maybe it is, maybe it is.

Presenter22:24

I want to talk to you some more about what you think we should do about it, but let's pause and have another piece of music.

Presenter22:30

What's your next record?

Professor A H Halsey22:31

Margaret, my wife, and I used to go often to Covent Garden and Saddler's Wells.

Professor A H Halsey22:37

In order to remind ourselves of that, I want to hear Kirsten Flagstadt singing.

Professor A H Halsey22:45

Uh Leap stop from

Professor A H Halsey22:47

Tristan Solna.

Presenter23:47

Part of the Liebestaut from Wagner's Tristan undesolder, sung by Kirsten Flagstadt with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Fortwingler. So you have a a certain optimism, Professor Halsey, that society can save itself from this abyss towards at one point you felt it was heading. Give me some practical sociological suggestions. What can we do to save ourselves?

Professor A H Halsey24:09

Let's take one.

Professor A H Halsey24:10

It's not so well known that the aging of the population leads not only to dependency ratios and all those sorts of things, but also to an enormous advantage.

Professor A H Halsey24:23

And that is that there are more people over sixty five in good health than there are people under fifteen.

Professor A H Halsey24:29

Now take that and use it.

Professor A H Halsey24:33

They could be used to buttress up the education system by starting.

Professor A H Halsey24:39

all kinds of clubs and societies to do those parts of the curriculum that how now have to be left alone.

Presenter24:47

Like what?

Professor A H Halsey24:48

Parenthood. Parenthood, but also I'm talking about art and sport and civic education, h how to be a good committee person and so on and so forth. It would give the enormous advantage to children to have their educational horizons broadened and would make for a happier society and it isn't impractical.

Presenter25:09

And you would give the children back those role models, which, again, with single parent families and so on, they have lost, which I know you believe in very strongly.

Professor A H Halsey25:15

Which I know you believe in, I think.

Presenter25:21

But it's interesting that the other things we were mentioning just then, you know, the lessons in parenthood and citizenship and so on, are the kinds of things that have characterised New Labour. Certainly when Tony Blair was Shadow Home Secretary, he was beginning to talk about that moral vacuum which you seem to be talking about. I mean were you feeding in these views there? You sort of sound as if you're singing from the same.

Professor A H Halsey25:44

Yes.

Professor A H Halsey25:46

Here and there, not with the exception of of Tony Blair.

Presenter25:46

B

Presenter25:50

Because one thinks, too, of uh for example, when Jack Straw was home secretary, he was talking about having a curfew of young boys on the streets, making parents responsible for the misdemeanours of their children. Again, this is this is your theme, is it not?

Professor A H Halsey25:54

Do you?

Professor A H Halsey26:02

Well, I don't like that particular example of it because that's a very negative kind of example, whereas what I'm putting forward is a positive hope for the future, which is practically based.

Presenter26:14

Yes, but if parents have become irresponsible because they haven't had the role models themselves, they've got to be re-taught to be responsible for their children.

Professor A H Halsey26:21

That seems to me to be the case.

Professor A H Halsey26:24

As was so so so much else in politics, you have to give up the present generation and aim for the future one.

Professor A H Halsey26:30

Record number six.

Professor A H Halsey26:32

I want we haven't talked about this so far, but one of the things that informed my life as a young person was sport.

Professor A H Halsey26:40

And I, without any distinction, managed to play rugby football and cricket and so on. And I was very, very struck, therefore, by the film Chariots of Fire, and I want to listen again to the background theme song of that film.

Presenter27:26

That is Van Gellis and Chariots of Fire from the film soundtrack. When was society at its best then, in your view, Professor Hawsey? If you could put the clock back.

Presenter27:37

When was the best time to have lived?

Professor A H Halsey27:39

It's always a good idea to of course put the clock forward, but if you're talking about the past, my view as an English person would be that it was in the period of Attlee's government immediately after the Second War, which is not nearly so much celebrated as it should be, because there, on a much poorer basis, at about a third of the income that we have now, they set out on a tremendous ambition to have health, housing.

Professor A H Halsey28:09

Education and welfare

Professor A H Halsey28:11

put before everybody in the land. I mean

Professor A H Halsey28:15

There is something about the spirit of solidarity.

Professor A H Halsey28:20

of togetherness, of looking after each other, which has been definitely lost in the period between Attlee and now.

Presenter28:28

Yeah.

Professor A H Halsey28:28

Yeah.

Presenter28:29

What we still have, even six years into a Labour Government, is our honours system.

Presenter28:35

Um you must have been offered one or two or three or four of those in your time.

Professor A H Halsey28:41

Well, I've always taken the tawny view of that.

Professor A H Halsey28:43

A self-respecting cat doesn't tie a tin can to its own tail, so I wouldn't want any of those things.

Presenter28:49

So you've turned them down.

Professor A H Halsey28:50

Oh, yes, of course.

Presenter28:51

All of them. All the time.

Professor A H Halsey28:52

Uh

Presenter28:52

No.

Professor A H Halsey28:53

Okay.

Presenter28:53

Lord Halsey.

Professor A H Halsey28:54

Yeah.

Presenter28:54

Could have had.

Professor A H Halsey28:54

Ab abs absolutely all of them.

Professor A H Halsey28:58

Not negotiable.

Presenter29:00

So Lord Halsey will never exist in your lifetime. Um your parents would have been incredibly proud to have thought that you'd got that far, wouldn't they?

Professor A H Halsey29:09

I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure. Uh I I remember immediately my father reporting on the First War, in which he was a private from the first day to the last, saying we never knew who to shoot first, the bloody uns or the bloody officers.

Professor A H Halsey29:27

And that was where I got that from, you see.

Presenter29:27

What's

Presenter29:29

Yeah.

Presenter29:31

Record number seven.

Professor A H Halsey29:33

Well, it's really re returning to u undergraduate visits to the opera. And I remember Joan Hammond singing in Madam Butterfly with enormous, enormous pleasure.

Speaker 329:53

The baby little trouble to hear with call, he with call. The dear baby lie online, dear little orange blossom.

Speaker 130:15

What names he used to call me when he

Presenter30:47

Joe Hannon singing one fine day from Piccini's Madam Butterfly. You mentioned, Professor Halsey, your strong religious influences. What about your own faith as you've gone on and you now enter your ninth decade? Um i is is it undiminished despite your scientific

Presenter31:04

Basis Your Scientific Discipline.

Professor A H Halsey31:07

In one

Professor A H Halsey31:09

important respect i is not diminished i in the slightest. Um but of course the the gradual revelation of uh Darwinian and genetic uh forces makes one really rather disbelieving about the historicity of uh of one's religion, so I don't care too much about that.

Speaker 331:27

Right.

Professor A H Halsey31:34

What what really uh drives me at any rate is the sense that we have a purpose.

Professor A H Halsey31:44

All of us have a purpose, you have a purpose, I have a purpose in life, which can't be explained in those terms.

Professor A H Halsey31:50

You just know that it is so.

Professor A H Halsey31:53

That is a faith that will never die as far as I'm concerned.

Presenter31:57

Tell me about your last record then.

Professor A H Halsey32:00

Well, let's let's listen to a bit of Mozart, shall we? I mean, uh that's the Benedictus, isn't there, from the Requiem. And that might be um a very good thing to take.

Professor A H Halsey32:14

To what you're condemning me to?

Presenter32:20

Amen.

Presenter33:14

Part of the Benedictus from Mozart's Requiem with Arline Auger, Cicilia Bartaly, Vincent Cole and René Pape, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Viennese State Opera Choir conducted by Sir George Schulte. Now if you could only take one of those eight records, which is going to press you a bit.

Professor A H Halsey33:30

I think it would have to be the last, the eighth.

Presenter33:31

Uh

Professor A H Halsey33:32

Play. A bit of Mozart, yeah.

Presenter33:35

What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare.

Professor A H Halsey33:39

Yes, I'm glad to have those. And and I want to add to it, uh perhaps to surprise you, Thomas Moore's U uh U Utopia, or the English translation of Thomas Moore's Utopia.

Professor A H Halsey33:50

It's a a a Renaissance reform of of London in which a modern

Speaker 133:51

Yeah.

Professor A H Halsey33:56

Welfare society is created, admittedly, uh a non-Christian one.

Professor A H Halsey34:03

even though he was a great Catholic, as you know.

Professor A H Halsey34:06

And I would love to.

Professor A H Halsey34:08

I have a program in which we reverse the roles in which I

Professor A H Halsey34:12

You had read Thomas More, and I would say to you, Now what do you think is good and bad about that?

Presenter34:19

And your luxury. We allow you one luxury in this awful kind of hell that we're going to post you out to.

Professor A H Halsey34:25

There have to be a radio, what we used to call a wireless, it would be a terrible deprivation to me that would be the worst deprivation to be robbed of radio form.

Professor A H Halsey34:36

I I do listen to that with great appreciation over and over again.

Presenter34:41

Professor Albert Henry Halsey, Chelley Halsey, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 334:53

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