Prof Hugh Pennington

Presenter0:00

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 nine.

Presenter0:27

My castaway this week is Professor Hugh Pennington.

Presenter0:31

In his youth he was drawn to pathology this was long before Quincy and CSI lent the profession an air of sombre glamour. Back then he was influenced by the work of his uncle, an undertaker. He has spent his professional life trying to understand diseases and how they spread.

Presenter0:46

He's chaired two major inquiries into E. coli, and his influence is felt everywhere, from school kitchens to hospital wards.

Presenter0:54

These days his calm expertise is sought on public health matters including MRSA, C. difficile, salmonella, and now, of course, swine flu. I suppose, Professor Pennington, um, what seems to be a matter of life and death to most of us is just bread and butter to you.

Prof Hugh Pennington1:08

Yes, I suppose I could say that all these diseases are good for my business, in a sense. I wish they weren't, but they are, and new ones come along all the time, which which keep my business flourishing, as it were.

Presenter1:20

Probably more contagious than any infection is public fear itself. How much sympathy do you have for all of us headless chickens who run around worrying if something's going to get the better of us?

Prof Hugh Pennington1:31

Well, a lot of sympathy because a lot of the fear is unjustified. But on the other hand, one does see tragedies as well. So one has to put it into perspective, into balance, and that's often a good way of making people wash their hands, for example. And then you have to live your life anyway, and you have to take risks.

Presenter1:47

Do you wash your hands a lot?

Prof Hugh Pennington1:48

Really? You don't? I don't think so. I th I think it's really when you wash your hands that's the important thing rather than how often you wash them.

Presenter1:51

Really?

Presenter1:57

As you've said, when these anxieties grow among the public, your views are sought, you know, by not just by government advisers, but by journalists, by broadcasters, by public health professionals. I can only imagine you've got a very busy phone right now.

Prof Hugh Pennington2:11

Yes, really quite busy, yes, because the bugs are a driving the agenda. And you know, when swine flu struck, for example, you know, the phone really did get very busy. And uh I'm lucky because I've worked throughout my professional career in on various bugs. I haven't been a sort of single bug sort of specialist, which many micropiologists are.

Presenter2:18

Yeah.

Presenter2:29

Um, speaking of single bugs, is it true you're a you personally are a collector of flies?

Prof Hugh Pennington2:34

Yes, I started off as a kid interested in in natural history and they're they're fantastic little beasts, you know, really pretty under the microscope.

Presenter2:41

Well I

Prof Hugh Pennington2:43

Well, I keep it at home. I'm g I'm going to give it to the university, I think, eventually, yeah, because uh people complain about the smell of mothballs to keep out the pests from the collection, but they don't take up much room because they're very small, a few boxes, thousands of of specimens in those boxes.

Presenter2:58

Um so you're untypical in some ways, uh not least in your choice of music today. I have to say it is an eclectic mix. Uh where does music figure in your personal uh existence?

Prof Hugh Pennington3:05

Yeah.

Prof Hugh Pennington3:07

Well, I like music, like particular kinds of music, as perhaps we'll find out in a few minutes. Slight perhaps slightly unusual tastes. He's brought up in a not in a particularly musical family, although my my twin sister was really good on the piano and played the organ and so on. I had no talent in that direction.

Presenter3:25

We'll ease people in gently then to your choice. Tell us about your first piece today. Well, this is.

Prof Hugh Pennington3:29

Well, this is harpsichord music. This is Bach sonata in D minor. I think for me this just epitomizes, you know, the fantastic talent that Bach had. There are all sorts of different kinds of Bach, and this is the sort I like the best.

Presenter4:35

Andrea Steier, playing the opening of Bach's sonata in D minor. Is it true, Hugh Pennington, that you have banned tea towels from your kitchen?

Prof Hugh Pennington4:44

Well, multi-use tea towels, yes, yes. Multi-use tea towels. Explain. Well, you know, there's nothing better for spreading germs than a grubby old cloth. And it doesn't have to be grubby in the sort of physical sense that you can see it grubby, but when some microbes are on it, when you then use it to dry another plate or something and it's got some bugs on it, well you you just inoculate the plate with bugs. So you're thinking of cleaning it, but actually you're making things dirtier.

Presenter4:48

Let's explain.

Presenter5:08

Has your wife objected?

Prof Hugh Pennington5:09

Um she pays no attention.

Presenter5:12

Best policy, I imagine. There's a school of thought that says, of course, a bit of dirt is a good thing, and that one of the reasons our children seem to be constantly sort of snivelling and off school is because they're not exposed to the things that people used to be exposed to in terms of making mud pies and playing in the street and getting a graze and not automatically having it squirted with some antiseptic foam.

Prof Hugh Pennington5:13

Yeah.

Prof Hugh Pennington5:33

Yeah, if I was allowed to swear on the B B C at this point I would swear because unfortunately you can't pick the germs that's in the dirt. And well, we we're not too clean actually at the end of the day. If you look at what the bugs that people actually carry on them, we're a walking sort of culture museum, as it were, you know.

Presenter5:36

And if you want.

Prof Hugh Pennington5:49

There are more cells in our bodies which are bacterial cells than our own.

Presenter5:52

But wasn't it ever thus? I mean, why should we be more concerned about it now than we used to be?

Prof Hugh Pennington5:55

It used to be. It was ever thus. Basically, it's back to the old hand washing. If you haven't wash your hands at the right moment, and you know, this is the big message of the swine flu campaign and hospital hygiene and so on, you'll stop yourself picking up bugs from other people, which is where we pick most of our bugs up from.

Presenter6:11

Of course, people used to take their carpets out, didn't they, once, twice a week and beat them on the line. They used to have the carbolic soap. Did did your mum keep a clean house? Do you remember her doing the housework?

Prof Hugh Pennington6:19

I I remember doing that and washing the front path with the water that had been used to to wash the clothes. There was the recycling going on. People were really very, very clean in those days and really quite obsessed by it. I don't think much has changed except that perhaps it's there's more advertising about it now. In the old days it was a sunlight soap and now it's all these fancy products, but those products are actually no better than sunlight soap in terms of the end result.

Presenter6:42

Uh so your mother was a keen house uh housewife. What what what were your parents' backgrounds?

Prof Hugh Pennington6:47

Yes, she'd been a schoolteacher at one time, got married, gave up school teaching. My father was trained as a landscape architect, left school, went into a small business in Lancaster, which had an office in London, so I was born in London, and then the war came and the office was blown up in Victoria Street, so the business retreated back to Lancaster. He always commuted long, long distances when we lived in Lancaster. He would commute sixty miles to Manchester and back every day and then to Preston twenty miles and so on.

Presenter7:10

Uh

Presenter7:13

So a very hard working man. W was that was that made clear to you? And you said you had a twin sister. Was it made clear to you both that, you know, work was at the root of life?

Prof Hugh Pennington7:20

Yes, I mean there was it was just unsaid in the house that you did work and work hard and my mother was the same that basically yeah, there was a strong um work ethos in the house. And it wasn't forced on us, it was just by example really.

Presenter7:34

And it was clear you were bright. I mean, you passed your your eleven plus, and uh did they talk about what they expected for you?

Prof Hugh Pennington7:40

Well, I think my parents would have hoped that I'd gone into the more kind of well, my f my father was keen on religion, he would hope that I'd be a minister, but I never had any interest in religion at all. And I was no good at Latin, so that ruled out the law, so it had to be medicine. And there'd been a sort of quasi-medical background in the family, that my grandfather had been a chief male nurse in a big mental hospital, and that sort of pushed into the medical direction. So I was the first person in the family to do that. And so there was a sort of inevitability about that.

Presenter8:06

More in a second. For now let me hear about your second piece of music. What have you chosen?

Prof Hugh Pennington8:10

Well, this is jazz as it was introduced into Europe. This is Jim Europe's 369th US Infantry Band playing at Memphis Blues. And this was the all-black regiment in the US that really distinguished itself in the First World War and won Croad de Guerre by the bucketful and was a major, major advance, I think, in terms of getting racial relations in the US right. It took a long time thereafter, but of course now we have Barack Obama as president. And also I like the music.

Presenter9:11

Jim Europe's three hundred and sixty ninth US Infantry Band and Memphis Blues. Tell me then, Professor Pennington, about this Victorian Lunatic Asylum, which which holds a a small but significant part in your family history.

Prof Hugh Pennington9:24

That's right, it does, because my grandfather went to work there at the end of the nineteenth century. In his first month he slept in the refractory ward with the noisy patients, and that was the test which he passed.

Presenter9:36

That's what all the screaming and shouting.

Prof Hugh Pennington9:37

The screaming and shouting went on endlessly, night and day, and if you survived that, you were hired. He did well and eventually became the the chief male nurse. Do you remember him? I remember him very well, sitting in a chair, complaining about the government in Westminster and smoking his little King Edward cigars. He he sort of mentored me as a young kid and told stories about his life. He was called the Greyhound because he was sent out when a patient escaped, he was sent out to track the patient down because he was a very athletic chap. Those are the sort of stories my grandfather told which are fascinating about the life in the hospital. Where I worked as a medical student myself, when it was in its sort of it wasn't closing, but it was on the verge of being run down.

Presenter10:20

How old were you when you were working there?

Prof Hugh Pennington10:21

I was I was in my late teens, early twenties. That was a very interesting experience as well, seeing you know the these poor unfortunate people who at that time were still incarcerated for long periods of time. Some have been there fifty years as patients.

Presenter10:34

So that would have been in the late 1950s. That was in the late 1950s.

Prof Hugh Pennington10:36

That was in the late 1950s, actually.

Presenter10:37

Did it help to to formulate some some of your beliefs and some of your motivations about what you would spend your future doing?

Prof Hugh Pennington10:44

Absolutely. Well, it drove out any religious belief I had because I could see suffering on a grand scale. And I thought, well, you know, if there's any plan and it has suffering in it, it's not a very good plan. So that sort of finished off religion for me in an organized form.

Presenter10:47

We're side to

Presenter10:58

Which was significant because your father was a very religious man.

Prof Hugh Pennington11:00

Very religious man. He was a very religious man. My mother was very religious as well. And I was brought up in that environment.

Presenter11:06

How much was religion a part of your family life then? I mean, for example, on a Sunday, how many times would you have gone to church?

Prof Hugh Pennington11:11

Well, I went to church twice and Sunday school in the afternoon, so Sundays were not a day of rest at all, you know a day of hard work, basically.

Presenter11:18

Did you talk to your father about the fact that you couldn't share his belief?

Prof Hugh Pennington11:21

Uh not really, no. He sort of realized, I think, that I I wasn't going down the route that he would have liked, but uh I think he accepted that, you know.

Presenter11:21

Uh

Prof Hugh Pennington11:29

I had to be left to my own devices.

Presenter11:32

Let's have some music. What's your third piece of music?

Prof Hugh Pennington11:35

My third piece of music is a sonata for double bass by Henry Eccles. I like double bass music and there isn't that much about it, and this is fantastic double bass music. And the real reason I'm putting it in is that my grandfather, when he worked to work at the metal hospital, he got a bonus for playing a musical instrument in the hospital band and it was double bass and he got two pounds a year extra, which was quite substantial. It was a ten percent decrease on his annual salary. So you know he always spoke about his musical interest. He was obviously very competent musician and this in a sense celebrates that.

Presenter11:58

Please add your

Speaker 311:59

Oh salary

Presenter13:07

The opening of Henry Eccles' sonata in A minor for double bass and string orchestra. So, Hugh Pennington, your uncle, as I said in the introduction, was an undertaker. Did you have a child's sort of dark fascination with with what he did?

Prof Hugh Pennington13:19

Yes, my Uncle Jim was an undertaker, yes, and I got to know him quite well, and uh he made his own coffins and had a big workshop at the back, so we used to go there as a treat. He bought the ice cream parlour next door. There's a little mortuary chapel. You know, he he had a he had a

Presenter13:32

You know, he

Prof Hugh Pennington13:34

quite a a reasonable sense of proportion about his work.

Presenter13:36

Yep.

Presenter13:37

Did you did you ever see the bodies?

Prof Hugh Pennington13:39

No, never saw the bodies, no. He talked about it as a business. I got to learn about how there was a kind of cartel of undertakers in Lancaster that shared out all the Who's Got It when somebody important died. At least that's the impression I got, anyway.

Presenter13:52

D do you think it helped to maybe form a sort of more of a matter-of-fact approach to health and the fact that at one point it it happens to us all? That's right.

Prof Hugh Pennington13:59

That's right. Part of life is death, as it were, and and Uncle Jim was that was his business, and maybe that was it. Yeah.

Presenter14:06

You went to St. Thomas's then, you studied medicine. You won a fistful of awards. I probably don't have time quite to read them all out. Um you were clearly a very, very bright thing.

Presenter14:19

What didn't you enjoy?

Prof Hugh Pennington14:21

Well, I think I enjoyed most of it. I'd never wanted to be a general practitioner.

Presenter14:26

Because

Prof Hugh Pennington14:27

Well, I didn't think I was all that good at interacting with people on a personal level. Well, nowadays, medical students are trained exhaustively in good communication and so on. In those days, you were just thrown in at the deep end. And so you had to go and tell people that they had a month to live and so on. And you weren't given any kind of advice on how you should do that. It was up to you. You had to learn. Unfortunately, it wasn't you who was learning. It was the other person who was suffering because of your inexperience. But I didn't want to do that.

Speaker 314:38

Mm.

Prof Hugh Pennington14:55

Surgery never never attracted because I don't have that kind of personality.

Presenter14:59

Do you mean that kind of surgeon as God?

Prof Hugh Pennington15:01

Well, yes, Surgeon is a a strong personality.

Presenter15:05

You're never going to sport a a bow tie and a natty waistcoat.

Prof Hugh Pennington15:07

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, never quite saw myself as that strong personality really telling a patient that they had the answer, the surgeon that is had the answer. Never felt confident enough to do that. I'd much rather be in the laboratory. It was a career in pathology.

Presenter15:21

That you were first minded to do. Um, it's always curious, I think, when people who are trained in medicine choose to work with the dead rather than the living. Why was that?

Prof Hugh Pennington15:32

Well, I f I I just felt that was a more int interesting intellectually interesting part.

Prof Hugh Pennington15:38

I suppose when I started doing medicine, in many areas there was rather little we could do for patients. You know, if your kidneys failed, y you died. I got into the bacteriology where

Prof Hugh Pennington15:48

Well, the bugs are living and there's a bit of risk from catching them when you're working with them.

Presenter15:52

and questioning all the time.

Prof Hugh Pennington15:54

And questioning as well. And I'd always had a fairly strong curiosity bump. And th you could see that microbiology, for example, there were still vast number of unanswered questions, and it was a good place to go to try and get answers to some of them.

Presenter16:07

Give us some music, what's next?

Prof Hugh Pennington16:09

Yes, it's Vivaldi, which is another of my favourite composers, but let's go a little bit out of the usual seasons and all that kind of stuff, and have Andrea Scholl, who's a counter tenor, singing one of Vivaldi's cantatas. Now, my father was a very good singer, and I think at one time he could have been a counter tenor, but in the 1930s, you know, to be a professional counter tenor, I don't think there was very much business for you. So, in a sense, this this sort of reminds me of my childhood when singing in the choir and all that kind of stuff. But this is fantastic music anyway.

Speaker 316:46

Oh great, good warm glory like mother.

Speaker 316:56

Septrabuskier.

Speaker 317:01

Speculable spiken boy

Speaker 317:18

God's here on

Speaker 317:22

Uh

Presenter17:27

Andrea Scholl singing part of Vivaldi's cantata, Cesade o my cesade. So it was most of the sixties then, Hugh Pennington, that you were installed at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. Did you have a wild time in your si in the sixties?

Prof Hugh Pennington17:39

Yeah, I suppose we did have an interesting time. I was lucky to be a houseman there. And I was a house physician on the medical unit. That was thought to be an easy job. So I had to run the bar because it was. Was that the important part of the house? I suppose that was more important, yes, because there was a lot of drink taken in the house. And the sherry came with a drip set. It was served through a drip set in the middle. Yes, you press the button and the sherry came out until you took your finger off the button. And we had pims on Sundays on the roof of the, you know, in the summer and so on. And one or two of the housemen were very hard-worked, so they would just sit in their residence all evening just drinking their G's and Ts and.

Presenter17:53

Was that the important part of that was?

Presenter18:05

It really

Presenter18:23

Anesotizing them so.

Presenter18:26

So you found yourself, is this right, up in an asbestos hut on the roof of St. Thomas's?

Prof Hugh Pennington18:31

That's right. I was when I graduated was offered a job in the bacteriology department, which which had been founded after the Second World War, and it was an asbestos shed on the roof of the medical school where we timed our experiments by looking out the window at Big Ben and a really nice place to work actually, even if we had to close the windows when we left in the evening in case the wind blew and took the roof off because it was such a sort of temporary building.

Presenter18:51

Right.

Presenter18:53

Um so you were growing up, of course, and and beginning to study at a time when so many of the diseases now that that are, thankfully, treatable, were simply not treatable. I mean, how did that influence the the sort of the medicine you did and your attitude to it?

Prof Hugh Pennington19:07

Yes, one could see that there were lots of changes, lots of changes for good. One was very optimistic. Antibiotics had really, really begun to work. We're discovering all these viruses, making vaccines against them. And it was nice to be in on the ground floor, and particularly in virology, which is a subject was just beginning to really take off technically and scientifically, and deliver in terms of things like polio vaccine, eradicating smallpox and so on.

Presenter19:31

Was that what it was that really sparked your uh imagination then?

Prof Hugh Pennington19:34

Well, it was it was really nice to be a player in that kind of field. And then of course the the trick is to get a niche in that field where you can deliver something yourself, because it's very competitive. Science is very, very competitive.

Presenter19:46

Let's have some music then.

Prof Hugh Pennington19:48

This is the turn of Hungarian folk music, and I like Hungarian folk music, and this is Hungarian folk music from Romania.

Speaker 319:55

Mm-hmm.

Prof Hugh Pennington19:56

A lot of Hungarians live in Romania and and they've had a hard time under Ceachescu, but I think they're having a better time now.

Prof Hugh Pennington20:02

I'm an Englishman living in Scotland. I've never had a hard time because of that. But still, I'm not a native Scot. I'm just a Scot by domicile. Well, these are Hungarians keeping their traditions going in Romania. I used to play this music on my car radio when going up to a little house on the Murray Firth with my two daughters, and they would call this the poll tax music because when the poll tax was being imposed on Scotland by Mrs. T as a sort of experiment, it didn't work, but it didn't do her any good. But anyway, this is what my daughters called it.

Presenter20:22

It was being imposed on them.

Presenter21:02

That was so unusual. The Hungarian function when the cabbage is served. And you said, Hugh Pennington, you used to play that in the car to your daughters. Are they are they still speaking to you?

Prof Hugh Pennington21:12

They still refer to this this Poltax episode and they indulge me by allowing me to listen to it from time to time, and they know it's it's it's it's almost a signature tune of mine. And of course, Hungarian music also celebrates Sebelweis, who's the patron saint of

Prof Hugh Pennington21:28

hospital infection, who is a Hungarian nationalist in his own right.

Presenter21:31

Under those terms we will indulge you then. Some of your earliest research was into small pox. Is it true that you studied at the lab which saw the last fatal case of smallpox in Britain?

Prof Hugh Pennington21:42

Yes, I'm afraid to say it was a very tragic business. I was asked to examine a PhD thesis in the lab in Birmingham, which unfortunately the virus escaped from and killed somebody. And the tragic thing is that the research was high quality and it was being done really to put a line under smallpox. They rushed the work through because the lab was going to be closed because of worries about safety. And that was probably the main reason why the virus got out. And it had very tragic consequences because the person running the lab also felt very personally responsible too.

Presenter22:18

Uh the smallpox virus, it only survives now in two laboratories. Is that right? Why do we need to keep it?

Prof Hugh Pennington22:24

Well, there's been an enormous argument running for years about that, whether we should keep it or not. Those who say we should keep it is that well, we should have it just in case we need to go back to it. And then those who say we can destroy it say, well, we have all the genetic data recorded on databases. We don't need to actually have the actual virus. And there's merit on both sides. I think possibly it's time now to just put the two lots of viruses in the incinerator. The worry is that maybe some ill-conditioned person has made off with a bit of the virus. But I think those worries are probably not particularly shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Presenter22:59

And that would be somebody w would have uh reason to want to to to take the virus in order to to to spread it for I mean, essentially terrorist purposes.

Prof Hugh Pennington23:06

That's actually terrorist weapons. There was a lot of worry a few years ago that it was going to be a bioterrorist weapon. Actually, it wouldn't be a terribly good one because it spreads relatively slowly. We have a very good vaccine against it. So we can cope with an outbreak which would be probably rather slow running. So it would not be a very good bioterrorist weapon at all. It's the fear that it would engender that would be the real worry, rather than the actual damage the virus would do itself.

Presenter23:13

Why is that?

Presenter23:31

More about pandemics later. For now, let's have some more music. What have we got now?

Prof Hugh Pennington23:36

Well, when I went to Aberdeen, I thought that it would be quite easy to understand the Aberdonians, having lived in Glasgow for ten years.

Presenter23:44

An easy mistake to make.

Prof Hugh Pennington23:45

That yeah, nothing could be further from the truth. You know, the Abaddonian accent is it's almost like a foreign language in some ways, the different words, pronunciations really, really very, very different and and so on.

Presenter23:56

As you say, you had worked in Glasgow for ten years, so you were familiar with Scottish accents. But when you went up to Aberdeen, for example, I mean, how would people let's say greet you differently?

Prof Hugh Pennington24:04

Well, they'll say, you know, foos you do's, and the answer to that is pecking a war, pecking a war. And of course, foos you do's means how are your pigeons? Of course it does. And pecking awaits, well, they're happily pecking away at the pigeon meat, as it were. And Nipster pluck. This was recorded in Aberdeen in the Tivoli Theatre. And it's about a farm worker being hired. And of course, this was the feature in the northeast of Scotland. Farm workers were hired every year. And hard life, picking the stones off the fields, living a you know, cold in the winter, cold in the summer, bad diet, and so on. And I think this epitomises the rugged independence of the farm worker despite all these hard times.

Presenter24:12

Yeah.

Presenter24:14

And pecking.

Speaker 424:56

'Twas on the Fetimus market day, The snow lay on the ground, When a fairmer he came up t' a lad, and offered him ten pound. But mind ye neep stay pluckin' out a muck, and a hunter of the jobs were by, And seeing the gweed wife she's laid doon, You wouldn't mind milking the kai. You wouldn't mind milking the cow.

Presenter25:17

George Elric and Annie Shan Scott and her band, and Nepstypluck. Um you have said, Hugh Pennington, that I think patients have an obligation to be whistle blowers. All their lives depend on it.

Presenter25:30

Do you think that's realistic, that when people are at their most vulnerable in hospital, that they they feel in a position to say something's not right here, I'm not pleased, people aren't doing their jobs properly.

Prof Hugh Pennington25:41

No, it's really very, very difficult for them to do that. I mean, they may may not feel up to it because they're sick in the first place. And then of course they're they're really under the care of a doctor and a nurse and they perhaps don't want to offend them or criticise them. But when it comes down to things like hand washing, I I have met patients who have watched people coming in and not washing their hands and so on. And that's the time when perhaps something should be done about it. If people did, most won't, but if more did, I I think things would be better.

Presenter26:11

You yourself have said that that you would cross your fingers if you had to go into hospital. I mean that's that's very worrying to the rest of us because it it shows that in fact where often we do have concerns where we shouldn't simply because of media hype or misunderstanding when it comes to the state of our hospitals we are justified in being worried there's more of a chance that we'll catch something in there than we will in our own homes.

Prof Hugh Pennington26:31

I'm afraid that's true, yes, that hospitals are still quite dangerous places. And I think the affection that people have for them is obviously right in the sense that they're a refuge when you get ill, you're going to be cured there or treated, but also they sometimes add to your problems because the bugs that, for example, that I'm interested in have them as their happy homes.

Presenter26:51

Um um

Prof Hugh Pennington26:51

Uh

Presenter26:51

You yourself have have uh published some fairly compelling uh evidence of it, especially when it comes to the politics. And it's really politics with a big P of the way that hospitals are managed, of meeting targets, where, for example, somebody with an infection finds themselves in hospital, goes into accident and emergency and then is

Prof Hugh Pennington26:59

If the

Presenter27:08

Shuttled around the hospital to get them out and off the waiting list target of sitting in an accident emergency.

Prof Hugh Pennington27:14

That's right. There are unintended consequences of targets. Their targets themselves are quite right and proper that nobody should hang around in casualty or in A and E longer than they should. But on the other hand, they have to have a place to be sent to. One of the hospitals that had a very big C. diff outbreak, the ward rounds by the doctors were described as safari rounds because they had to hunt to find where their patients had been sent because there was so much of a problem in accommodating the patients in the hospital. And of course, we can go back into the early 20th century and see the same problem in mental hospitals like the one where my grandfather worked. They had the same problem with dysentery there. Patients are being moved about. Recommendations came in about 1910 that they shouldn't be moved about unless there was a compelling reason. Unfortunately, we haven't quite yet learnt that lesson. It seems simple, but at the end of the day, we just don't seem to have got that trick right yet.

Presenter28:03

You came to the public's attention when you headed up this first inquiry into a big outbreak of E. coli in Scotland. More than twenty people I think it was that died in that outbreak. And then you went on to head up another inquiry in Wales. It was a young child, I think, that died then. How comfortable are you with being a ve the very public face of science? Because what you are reporting on and investigating into are the areas of medicine and science that touch people at the most important level.

Prof Hugh Pennington28:31

Well, it it can be very uncomfortable, and you know, particularly meeting some of the people who've been affected by these things is obviously well, at the end of the day, one has an obligation, I think, to do this. And if I could add something in the way of recommendations which will make things better in the future, well, I felt I had a moral obligation to do that to the best of my ability.

Presenter28:53

The fact that you had to do a second inquiry after the first one, though, does that not tell us that you might well put forward uh your recommendations and you may be uncompromising in your terms, but people aren't always willing to implement them?

Prof Hugh Pennington29:05

Well, that's right. I mean, I felt deeply well saddened but embarrassed having to do an inquiry ten years after the first. It's it's back to this issue of learning lessons that we always go around saying we must learn lessons. But unfortunately, we may even learn the lessons, but we seem to forget them.

Presenter29:18

We may, but

Presenter29:20

Let's have some music then. Tell me about your next piece.

Prof Hugh Pennington29:23

For me personally, popular music went off around about nineteen twenty nine. It's never really recovered. Well, it you know, it just went down the downhill. I think the epitome of jazz for me and the epitome of popular music is the Man City Blue Blows and you know, it's got a fantastic sort of group, you know, Glenn Miller on trombone and then Gene Cruper on the drums and Coleman Hawkers on the tenor and Eddie Conter on the banjo, need I say more, but I think it starts with Red Mackenzie on the comb.

Speaker 330:38

Da da da da da da da.

Presenter30:42

The Mound City Blue Blowers and Hello Lola. You've got, as you have mentioned, two daughters, the ones that were trapped in the car listening to the Hungarian music. Have they followed you into medicine?

Prof Hugh Pennington30:49

I'm giving music.

Prof Hugh Pennington30:52

One has, yes. My younger daughter's yes, she's she she went she's training to be a neurologist. So she's been through the the mill of the junior doctors saga and so on, but has come out and uh she's she's basically looking to be perhaps a neurologist with a bit of a research bent. Uh she didn't want to be a microbiologist.

Presenter31:10

And your other daughter?

Prof Hugh Pennington31:11

Well, she's an environmentalist really, with anarchist tendencies, and at the moment sh her main interest is um looking after the interest of asylum seekers in Glasgow.

Presenter31:19

Um, we ha I mean, your selection of music hasn't been outwardly romantic. I'm wondering, given that you've been married to is it forty odd years to how long have you and Carol been?

Prof Hugh Pennington31:27

Yes, yes, since the sixty mid-sixties, yeah.

Presenter31:30

Is there any of this music here for her?

Prof Hugh Pennington31:33

Um

Prof Hugh Pennington31:34

Well, I don't think she dislikes the Hungarian folk music and she likes Vivaldi and she likes Bach and um and I really asked her about the jazz. I think she regards that as just my interest. But um

Presenter31:45

And what about the flies? Does she mind the flies?

Prof Hugh Pennington31:47

Um

Prof Hugh Pennington31:49

No, she didn't mind that because collecting flies took you to nice places, you know, took you to the relic Scottish forests and and the seashores and and sand dunes and really nice interesting places. Used to use her as bait for the blood sucking flies and she didn't like that very much. She she wasn't impressed by being a bait for the big bloodsuckers flies.

Presenter32:08

What did you actually do? What you called it on something delicious?

Prof Hugh Pennington32:09

You just stand there, you know, in the sun and wait till this thing comes and hits you on the back of the neck. Then you collect it for my collection.

Presenter32:16

And that's love, that is.

Prof Hugh Pennington32:18

Well, I suppose you could say that's right, that's right.

Presenter32:20

Let's have your final piece of music then. What have you chosen here?

Prof Hugh Pennington32:22

Well, this is this is the Kelty Clippy, which is a a a song written about the Five Coalfields, basically. My wife's family actually comes from from Ochterderan, which is right in the centre of the Fife Coalfield. But also it it's about this sort of Scottish woman, this sort of you know, feisty kind of take no nonsense.

Presenter32:39

And a clippy, just to be clear, somebody takes the tickets on the buses.

Prof Hugh Pennington32:40

Who takes the tickets on the buses? Yes, was it was the bus conductress. You didn't mess with a clippy. You didn't mess with a clippy. It's been my privilege most of my scientific career to have a woman boss, actually. And women mentors in my career have been very, very important. And they've had to work hard. They've had to be like Kelty Clippy and take no nonsense from the silly men around them and all this kind of stuff. So it celebrates that as well.

Presenter32:44

You didn't mess with the clipping.

Speaker 433:05

There's none that can compare Wi my Lily old fennins. She's my body, Maggie Blair. Oh, she's just a kelty cluppy. She'll know that nay advice. It's a drap-dider wobbile your head and I'll punch your ticket twice. Her faither's just a waster. Her mother's on the game. She's just a kelty cluppy. But I love her just the same.

Presenter33:34

Joe Aitken and the Kelty Clippy. So, Hugh, I'm going to give you well, I am going to give you the Bible. Do you want to take the Bible?

Prof Hugh Pennington33:40

I might as well take the Bible yesterday.

Presenter33:41

And the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take your own book too.

Prof Hugh Pennington33:45

Yes, I want to take the Cabinet Encyclopedia of Dionysius Lardner. And he was a Victorian publicist of science. And he got the most fantastic set of authors to write this encyclopedia. He got Walter Scott to write a bit history of Scotland and really the top names of the day. And it's also got astronomy in it, so you can look at the stars. And it's 133 volumes. So I think if you'll allow me 133 volumes, I think it'll keep me reading for a while.

Presenter34:12

We'll get letters, but I'm sure maybe somewhere we can find a single bound edition as huge as that will be. And you're allowed a luxury as well.

Prof Hugh Pennington34:21

Well, I'll stick to my pathological interest in one of those Victorian brass microscopes.

Presenter34:26

Oh, how beautiful.

Prof Hugh Pennington34:27

So I can look at the the animal kils in the ponds, if there are any ponds well, there has to be some water suppo supply on this island, and look at all those fantastic kind of you know, water fleas and things like that, which uh they're linked with the world because they blow around in the dust and everywhere in the world has pretty well the same sort.

Presenter34:45

It's yours. And if you had to pick just one uh of the eight discs, which one would you pick?

Prof Hugh Pennington34:51

I think it would have to be the bark um that I started with because, you know, bark just epitomizes music for me and I don't believe in a soul, but if I had one it would calm it.

Presenter35:01

Professor Hugh Pennington, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Prof Hugh Pennington35:04

Thank you.

Presenter35:04

Thank you.

Presenter35:12

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