Dame Anne Owers

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is Dame Anne Owers, until recently the first female Chief Inspector of Prisons. A long time human rights campaigner, she has spent years immersing herself in the problems of people on the margins, those fraught, tangled, and tender areas of human existence where dysfunction and often bad luck come together. Born into a coal mining community in the North East, she went on to study at Cambridge, lived for a time in Zambia, and worked on race relations in Brixton when the riots kicked off. Prison mirrors society, she says, and she believes the principles of prison must be that we are trying to rehabilitate them, and that's for the victims as well as for the benefit of the people in prison. So, Anne Owers, crime, justice, rehabilitation they are areas of contention and areas of high emotion. How do you keep your professional head in amongst all of that? Are you somebody who can leave that in the in the professional area and go home and think about other things, or do you take it with you?

Dame Anne Owers1:36

I think to an extent you've got to be able to leave it behind, but you also need to kind of process it as well. So my husband now would often say when I was Chief Inspector that Fridays when I came back from the prison there would be a kind of splurge of things that I would need to talk about. But you do need to keep that distance clearly and you won't be any good at what you're trying to do if you're totally absorbed in it.

Presenter2:02

And this idea that the the premise of yours that that that all prisoners deserve rehabilitation of course you'll be aware that plenty people think most prisoners deserve to rot in jail. They're not so bothered about the the rehabilitation.

Dame Anne Owers2:14

Of course there are people who quite rightly will never come out of prison, but the majority of the people I saw in prison had come there through a route that was explicable and that you could potentially change. I think one of the things that comes to me very strongly from my own background, myself and my two cousins were the first people in our family ever to go to university. That's not because we arrived from a different planet.

Dame Anne Owers2:37

It's because there were opportunities there for us that were not there for those before, and so what I very firmly believe is that you don't have to stay where you're put.

Dame Anne Owers2:45

Your life isn't necessarily set when you're born or when you're a child, and it can be changed.

Presenter2:50

Now here's the thing. I mean, the title Chief Inspector of Prisons, of course, inevitably sounds very official indeed. But there you were as Chief Inspector of Prisons, not just with a clipboard having meetings. You would go into the cells of prisoners, as I understand it.

Presenter3:05

And sit I don't know where you sat, because there's not many places to sit, and sort of talk to these usually quite young men. Is that the case?

Dame Anne Owers3:11

Yes, that's right. Quite often you'd have to sit on on the loo, because there would be no other space within the cell. There was one occasion that I've often remembered, which was a young man who was uh at risk of suicide. He was cutting himself, he was cutting his arms.

Dame Anne Owers3:25

And the prison staff thought that perhaps he wasn't quite their kind of prisoner, and they might send him on.

Dame Anne Owers3:31

And I remember sitting and talking to him, and him saying to me, Please don't let them send me away from here, because all my life I've been passed around like a parcel.

Speaker 23:40

Hmm.

Dame Anne Owers3:40

And sadly, I think that is true of the parallel lives of many of the young people who end up in prison. Now that doesn't mean we've got to say, Oh, poor things, we need to feel sorry for them. It means that we've got to do some really hard work, and they've got to do some really hard work, to change the narrative of their lives.

Presenter3:56

When you were visiting all of these prisons, did you ever sit and think as you were talking to these young men, what if this were my son? What would have had to have happened to him in the journey of his life, that the story

Presenter4:08

Ends with this.

Presenter4:10

Aren't quite sure.

Dame Anne Owers4:10

Often, because I think what you experience when you talk to people, and particularly young people in prison, is that they have existed in a kind of parallel world. You know, whereas for my children and the children of the people I I know, you know, they're going to school, they're thinking about what GCSEs to take, they're then working out what A-levels to take, what university to go to. Some of the children, young people I see in prison, life's been very different. They've gone into care and they've then graduated into a young offender institution and they'll graduate into an adult prison if we don't do something about it. Because the trajectory from care into prison is a very well trodden one, that path very well trodden.

Presenter4:44

Yeah. Let's go to the music then, Anne Owers. What's your first disc today that we're going to hear?

Dame Anne Owers4:48

The first disc is from the Messiah and its comfort sheet.

Speaker 25:11

Be my free blue.

Speaker 25:37

Long for thee, my people.

Presenter5:45

Philip Langridge singing Comfort ye my people from Handel's Messiah with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner. Why particularly did you want that disc, Anowers?

Dame Anne Owers5:55

My father had a wonderful tenor voice. In fact, he won competitions singing. But in the village where I was brought up, he was also the organist and choirmaster of the chapel, and he would produce and direct amateur operatic productions. Almost every small village, small workplace had its own amateur operatic society, usually doing Gilbert and Sullivan. My childhood was full of my father singing whatever it was he was rehearsing at the time.

Dame Anne Owers6:23

Of course reminds me also of the fact that um

Dame Anne Owers6:26

He actually collapsed and died while he was conducting the choir that my mother and I were singing in. We were rehearsing for Easter Sunday.

Dame Anne Owers6:32

And in the middle of that he died, which was awful for us and obviously is a huge memory for me, but I think for him was exactly the moment. It was what he lived for, was music and singing. How old were you at the time? I was fifteen.

Dame Anne Owers6:50

I was just about to do my O levels.

Presenter6:53

Huge little traumatic

Dame Anne Owers6:54

So it was yes, it was. It was um both for my mother well, for the whole family, obviously. But I think for him was was where, you know, where he was where he loved to be.

Presenter7:04

Now you've mentioned that you were brought up in this very tight-knit mining community, and I do certainly want to talk about that because the journey from there to Cambridge is, you say, the first generation you were born in. Was it nineteen forty-seven you were born in? So you were the first of that generation. Before we do that, though, I'm interested just to put your professional life in a bit more context for people, because of course, although you'll

Speaker 27:13

Yeah.

Speaker 27:15

Yeah.

Speaker 17:15

Yeah.

Speaker 17:17

A general.

Presenter7:24

They'll be familiar with your name. People aren't always sure how folk like you end up in jobs like that. So, let's for a moment just trace that journey. You were Chief Inspector of Prisons, a job that you've just given up. Before that, you led the legal pressure group Justice. You also led a charity that campaigned for the welfare of immigrants, and you have been part of the Church of England's Race and Community Relations Board. Now, I'm wondering.

Presenter7:50

How you feel about the term do gooder? Does it send shivers through your spine?

Dame Anne Owers7:55

Yes, it does, for two reasons. First of all, that I'm not sure that anyone should set out to be a doobadder.

Dame Anne Owers8:01

But also because it's not just about doing the the sort of Lady Bountiful act and the smile and wave and wave and smile. It's about addressing some very, very deep and very difficult problems to which there are no easy answers.

Dame Anne Owers8:15

but which actually demand an understanding of how things work and how people work. And the thing I said I think you said in your introduction, the thing that's always spoken to me is those people who are at the margins, those people who are felt not to matter.

Dame Anne Owers8:31

And the way that as a society we exclude people, we put people in the too difficult tray.

Dame Anne Owers8:37

And unless we expose that too difficult tray and do something with it, it will be not just a problem for them, but a problem for all of us.

Presenter8:44

Let's have some more music then, and Oris, what are we going to hear now?

Dame Anne Owers8:47

We're now going to hear the Kinks uh singing Waterloo Sunset.

Presenter8:51

Now it's obviously a cracker, but why else have you chosen it?

Dame Anne Owers8:55

A number of reasons. First of all, I'm clearly a child of the 60s. This was music that was going on and going around when I was growing up. It was also music that in those compromises you have to do in long car journeys with your children. It was music that was acceptable to them and to us. So it reminds me of my growing up, my children's growing up. But it also reminds me of Waterloo Bridge, which has to have the best view in London and which I've lived near for over 35 years.

Speaker 29:20

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling, floating into the night?

Speaker 29:29

People so busy, make me feel dizzy Taxi lights shine so bright

Speaker 29:38

But I don't

Speaker 29:43

Me no friend

Speaker 29:47

Long aside.

Presenter9:52

That was the Kinks and Waterloo sunset. So, as you said, Anna was a child of the sixties and a child originally of this Methodist church going family. It wasn't, though, just about the church. That's probably an important thing to understand. It was about

Presenter10:06

Community was it was about social life, things happened around the church. Tell me more about that.

Dame Anne Owers10:11

Absolutely. Life in the village was constructed, or f well certainly for my family and for many families, around A Church. There were actually three Methodist chapels in what was a very small village. That was where you made friends, you grew up, where you learnt country dancing, and and as I say, where my father and my mother were were part of the the whole thing, from the Sunday school to the choir and so on. So it was it was a social event. It was also where I went to my first youth club, was in the in the basement of the Methodist chapel.

Presenter10:38

And your father was a joiner. Yes. Uh what sort of bloke was he locked in?

Dame Anne Owers10:43

Um he was, I think, a very good joiner. He worked in the shipyards, he worked in the colliery. But I think his real life was his singing and his music, and also writing. He wrote short stories and plays for amateur performance and so on. I think he was one of, you know, many people of his generation who

Dame Anne Owers11:00

Born a generation or two later would have been able to do something quite different.

Presenter11:04

Let's have some more music then, Anne. What's next?

Dame Anne Owers11:07

Next, we've got June Tabor singing The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

Presenter11:11

And you've chosen this wife.

Dame Anne Owers11:13

I've chosen it because it reminds me very much of my grandfather's experience as a young nineteen year old who'd probably never been further than Newcastle in his life.

Dame Anne Owers11:22

He joined up in the First World War.

Dame Anne Owers11:24

And he was immediately sent to Suvla Bay. That was his first experience of being out of the northeast, his first experience of warfare.

Dame Anne Owers11:33

and he went on from there to be in on the Somme.

Dame Anne Owers11:36

and he survived. But he survived with wounds that were internal. He had periods of great depression, and he came back and got on with it in the middle of the depression, in the middle of the miners' strike.

Dame Anne Owers11:49

and with all of those memories which you could never really share with people, and you only knew, almost by inference, how awful it had been.

Presenter11:56

And as a little girl, you you were close to your grandfather. I was very close.

Dame Anne Owers11:58

I was very close to him, yes.

Presenter11:59

What sort of things would you do with them?

Dame Anne Owers12:00

Well, we went for walks together every Sunday. We also went on the same walk. It was not um it it was it was always the same. But we talked a lot and I was I was very close to him, yes.

Speaker 112:13

And the band played Waltzing Matilda

Speaker 112:19

As a ship pulled away from the quay

Speaker 112:24

Amidst all the cheers, The flag waving and tears, We sailed off to Gallipoli.

Presenter12:36

That was June Tabor, and the band played Waltzing Matilda and memories there, strong memories, Dame Anowers, of your grandfather who fought at Gallipoli and went on to fight at the Somme. The bonds, of course, of the people who work and live around us are always strong. And especially you were talking about this community that you were brought up in, this Methodist mining community with three chapels in this tiny area. It's a very strong image.

Speaker 112:59

Paul's in

Presenter13:02

The approbation of our community is very important. The idea that we're abiding by the rules. Did did you feel as you were being brought up that there were things that must be done and things that must not be done?

Dame Anne Owers13:15

I think those communities have a very strong social cohesion and therefore very there are very strong social rules about what you do and don't do.

Dame Anne Owers13:25

I can remember, for example, the rules that were in my grandmother's head about hanging out washing, which were that there shouldn't be too much, because that looked like showing off, but there shouldn't be too little, because that looked as if you didn't have enough. So very strong social pressures, I think, on people. And as a child growing up, you were aware of those.

Presenter13:46

And that Methodist idea of sort of choosing not to sin, you know, that we are all capable of sin, but we are all also capable of making the choice not to sin. I'm wondering in this society these days where sort of everything's allowable as long as you talk about it, you know, that really, you know, it's all up for grabs, would you like a little bit more of that sort of Methodist ideology to be to be ingrained in people's souls these days?

Dame Anne Owers14:10

No no, not really,'cause I think it comes the other way round.

Dame Anne Owers14:14

I I don't I don't think it's about rules. I think it is about people belonging somewhere, and that creates bonds of responsibilities and rights.

Dame Anne Owers14:24

Um I'm not a great fan of of Thou Shalt Not.

Dame Anne Owers14:29

I'm a much greater fan of

Dame Anne Owers14:31

This is how we will make it happen.

Presenter14:33

But of course you know th the question then arises, well, thou shalt not worked quite well, because the one thing it did do was help people know how to behave, what the rules were.

Presenter14:44

and potentially what might happen to them if they didn't stick to them.

Dame Anne Owers14:48

I certainly

Presenter14:48

Uh

Dame Anne Owers14:48

You think

Dame Anne Owers14:50

We individuals, communities need boundaries, and those boundaries need to be clear. That's evident when you're bringing up children. There also has to be the opportunity for joint responsibility, for communal responsibility, for the recognition that within families and within communities,

Dame Anne Owers15:08

You owe things to each other, you support each other, simply the negative.

Dame Anne Owers15:14

isn't going to achieve that. You've got there's got to be the positive as well.

Presenter15:17

So where were the boundaries for you then, as I mean, you you told?

Presenter15:21

That's a terrifically um dramatic ending to your father's life as you as he was conducting the choir, you and your mother singing in it, and your father died. It was was it a heart attack he died of and there you were about to sit your exams. How did you and your sister get back on to to to the job in hand, which was passing the exams and getting to university?

Dame Anne Owers15:41

I think you do it a bit by shutting off, and you certainly did in those days. I can remember my mother rang up the head teacher of my school to explain what had happened, and to say, you know, there may be some difficulties to which the response came back, Yes, but children don't feel that like adults do.

Dame Anne Owers15:57

And I think you were just expected to get on with it.

Presenter15:59

Did you feel quite a bit?

Dame Anne Owers16:01

To an extent, yes. I think what happens is it comes back and hits you later. I can remember when I was at university suddenly getting a panic attack and not knowing where it had come from and realizing, of course, that that this was all part of what you what you have to go through, and it does affect you.

Presenter16:18

Let's have some more music, then. What are we going to hear now?

Dame Anne Owers16:21

We're going to hear in Cosi Sikalali, Africa, which is well known to be the national anthem of South Africa, but it was also the tune was the national anthem of Zambia, and when I left university that's where I went to live.

Dame Anne Owers16:32

And that male close harmony singing was part of the singing I heard there.

Dame Anne Owers16:38

It was then I remember taking the children to see the film of Cry Freedom and

Dame Anne Owers16:44

Them being hugely impressed by the film, but also by the experience there.

Dame Anne Owers16:50

And they then went to the Free Mandela concerts where it was sung. And then I had the great pleasure when I was working at Justice, going back after the Transformation and hearing it sung together with the Afrikaner National Anthem. And it just brought brought a lump to everyone's throat, and it still does.

Speaker 217:06

But since he are free

Speaker 217:18

He's fighting me down.

Speaker 217:21

A yet to Bossi Singh Bossi Singella.

Presenter17:35

Nkose Sikaleli Afrika, from the soundtrack of Cry Freedom. Anne Owers, you mentioned there that you you spent time in your early married years living in Zambia. So you had at that point, of course, you'd graduated from Cambridge and you'd married just as you left Cambridge, is that right? Not

Dame Anne Owers17:51

That's right. Yes, just after we left, and then left straight away for Zambia.

Presenter17:56

Now your mother then had seen you successfully through university. She'd seen you married and about to embark on married life, but she she didn't see more than that.

Dame Anne Owers18:04

No, very sadly she didn't. The last time I saw my mother was on my wedding day.

Dame Anne Owers18:08

Very unexpectedly, and at a very young age, just in her forties, she had a stroke just after we left for Africa.

Dame Anne Owers18:16

And then had a second stroke and died. And she was only 47. She was, yes, yes.

Presenter18:18

And she was she was only forty seven.

Presenter18:21

I wonder, you're now in your mid-sixties. For a lot of people who've.

Dame Anne Owers18:24

Oh f

Presenter18:26

had well, I suppose especially it's highlighted when both parents have died when they're young is the idea that you make it past those milestones. Was that one for you? When you when you were forty seven, did you think?

Presenter18:36

Right. So, does life go on after this?

Dame Anne Owers18:39

I think you do. I think you feel yourself very lucky to have passed the milestones. My father was also quite young when he died. He was only fifty six, which for me now seems very young.

Dame Anne Owers18:48

But also I think you feel that you have

Dame Anne Owers18:51

A certain, I suppose, place a certain sort of responsibility. I mean, they.

Dame Anne Owers18:55

They were so important, my father and my mother in my life, that there's there's always part of me that feels that that whatever is happening is partly for them.

Presenter19:05

And there you were as a pivotal moment in Zambia's history, because it had only been w independence had been granted, what, about four years prior to y to you to you getting there. What state was the nation in?

Dame Anne Owers19:12

The guessing.

Dame Anne Owers19:14

It was a very exciting and optimistic time.

Dame Anne Owers19:18

lots of things seemed possible, lots of things were different when there were real movements in society and people were being given, again, chances that they had never had before.

Presenter19:29

Let's

Dame Anne Owers19:29

That's

Presenter19:29

Some more music then. We're on disc number five now, Anne Owers, what are we gonna hear?

Dame Anne Owers19:34

We're going to hear Kirita Kanuwa singing Dove Sono from The Marriage of Figaro.

Presenter19:38

It's obviously very beautiful, but does it have other resonances for you?

Dame Anne Owers19:41

It does. When I first moved to London and we had a house that was almost completely unfurnished, one of the first things we bought was a stereo record player. And I can remember sitting on the carpet because we didn't have at that stage any chairs, which is just as well because there was woodworm in the floor and when we did get chairs the chairs fell through the floor and hearing this amazing voice from this woman whom I'd never heard of, whose name seemed very strange and whose voice is just absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 220:49

We quit a romance on every street.

Presenter21:08

Kiritikenawa is singing Dove Sono from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Schulte. So, Anne Owers, your first son was born in Zambia. That that didn't hold any fright for you, did it? You weren't worried about that? Well, it should have.

Dame Anne Owers21:25

Well, it should have done. I mean, if one of my children was to was to say they were going to do this, I'd be very nervous indeed. There was a mission hospital quite close to where we were, but between us and the hospital there was what's called a drift, something which was normally a steep slope, dry, but in the rainy season could be feet under water.

Dame Anne Owers21:45

And it was the rainy season, and if that had happened we would have had about a hundred mile round trip drive to get to the hospital. But in fact, it was perfectly all right. It was a great experience.

Presenter21:55

And you came back to London and had another two children in I mean, in relatively quick succession. Did you have an idea of getting your children out of the way and then progressing with your career, given given the fabulous education you'd you'd have?

Dame Anne Owers22:08

Uh no, I didn't. I never really had that kind of plan. In fact, I've never really thought I had a career. I I've just gone from one.

Dame Anne Owers22:17

interesting thing that's really engaged me to something else. It was simply what seemed to be right at the time. And I think part of having children young too was about recreating a family.

Presenter22:28

And yes, that's an interesting one. And also this idea of where you were creating your family. You were in a far from affluent part of South East London. You were in a time. So that.

Presenter22:39

I suppose inevitably must have just going about your day to day business connected you with people who some of whom were living on the margin, some of whom were much less fortunate than the rest of us.

Dame Anne Owers22:49

Yes, it was a very mixed community, was Peckham. There were people who'd lived there all their lives. There was a

Dame Anne Owers22:54

A relatively newly arrived West Indian community. There were young professionals coming to buy relatively cheap houses. But yes, I mean, one of the things that happened was that an advice centre was opened in the church hall, which was staffed almost entirely by volunteers. And it was doing the work there that first made me very aware of.

Dame Anne Owers23:16

Some of the problems, some of the hidden problems that people that I live very close to are experiencing. Let's have some more music then. What are we going to hear now? We're going to hear a chorus from the Christmas Oratorio. And particularly why.

Presenter23:28

Have you chosen this?

Dame Anne Owers23:28

Yeah.

Presenter23:28

Uh

Dame Anne Owers23:29

I've chosen it because I simply love the music. I love the way that Bach uses the human voice and the orchestra and it all weaves together. I love Counterpoint. It's something that my husband and I listen to quite a lot. We were listening to it just before Christmas as we decorated the Christmas tree. And do you still sing in a choir? No, I don't. I have to say, I don't sing well. I mean, I love singing, but I wish I had a wonderful voice.

Presenter24:57

The Monteverde Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Elliott Gardner, performing Herr Vern der Stoolzen Finder, Lord if proud enemies rage from Bach's Christmas Oratorio. So, Annowers, you were appointed as Chief Inspector of Prisons in it was 2001. We are very fond as a nation of putting people in prison. During your time in the job, the prison population I don't know if it was just the male prison population increased by around about 20,000. That's a lot of people in prison. Do you ever worry?

Speaker 225:25

That's a lot.

Presenter25:29

That in the end, you know, the politics will decide how time in prison is spent and how many people spend their time in prison, and that it is to a degree time.

Presenter25:39

Maybe not wasted, but maybe not well spent either.

Dame Anne Owers25:42

I'm very clear that decisions about sentencing, decisions about how you use prison, those are political decisions, and they're quite rightly political decisions. But I think it's part of the job of an inspector to point out the consequences of what's happening. And the thing that saddened me greatly in the time that I was doing the job is that I think our prisons became better places.

Dame Anne Owers26:01

But they also became places that soaked up a lot of money and into which we put a lot of people. And my view is.

Dame Anne Owers26:09

A lot of that money could have been better spent.

Dame Anne Owers26:12

Doing things that stopped people getting there in the first place and therefore prevented their being victims of crime.

Dame Anne Owers26:18

That provided alternatives, for example, for people with mental illness, and crucially also put money into the support afterwards, because you see so many people coming out of prison, and for some of them, they do want to be different, they do want life to be different, but actually, life is the same, and some of the support that they've got in prison doesn't exist afterwards.

Presenter26:38

Are you one of those people who believe that we have got to as much as we need to listen and understand and try to fix something that is broken, we also need to apportion blame. We need to say to people, You've made a mess of it, and you need to take the responsibility for your actions.

Dame Anne Owers26:51

Yeah.

Presenter26:51

Yeah.

Dame Anne Owers26:51

I'm much keener on responsibility than I am on blame.

Dame Anne Owers26:55

One of the things that worries me about prisons is that they can take away responsibility from people. You put somebody in prison, they don't have to be responsible for themselves, when they eat, what they wear, whatever. They don't have to be responsible for what they've done. They don't have to be responsible to their families and to their communities.

Dame Anne Owers27:11

And prison can actually be a way of people not accepting responsibility for what they've done. And that's why I think some of the interesting moves in Restorative Justice, for example, are about a much more painful experience of actually confronting what you've done and sometimes confronting the person you did it to and not blocking it out. So I think responsibility is absolutely crucial.

Presenter27:31

Yes, I mean the problem for all of us, of course, is where the high emotion that I also touched on comes in. You know, when people read in their newspapers that a prisoner is going to be called Mr Gunn rather than Colin Gunn, you know, there was a case recently of somebody saying that he wanted the prison officers to call him Mr. or you know, we know that our Prime Minister, David Cameron, says he feels ill at the thought of certain prisoners being given the vote. Those are the things that get up our nose and under our skin when we feel that people who've made our world a worse place are somehow being granted the rights that actually only come once you've earned them.

Dame Anne Owers28:05

I think there is an important thing about earning. I think there's an important thing about punishment.

Dame Anne Owers28:09

If we think about it more deeply, what kind of behaviour do we want to model to people whose own behaviour has often been seriously deficient? Do we want them to go out of prison thinking that if you have power over people then you can use it to make them feel humiliated?

Dame Anne Owers28:24

Or do we want to put before them a different way of behaving?

Dame Anne Owers28:29

That's not about being nice. It's about

Dame Anne Owers28:34

Making demands. It's about challenging. It's about trying to change people.

Presenter28:38

Have you yourself ever been a victim of crime?

Dame Anne Owers28:41

Yes, of course. You can't live in London for over thirty five years and not have your house broken into, have your purse taken, have your children sometimes being attacked, and yes, and it makes you very, very cross.

Presenter28:51

Yes, well that's the problem, isn't it? Of course. Of course it does.

Dame Anne Owers28:52

Of course it does. And that's absolutely right. Where where I live in London, just two years ago, a young man was stabbed to death out literally outside our house. And you're very close to that when you live in a big city.

Presenter29:05

And what about your own children, then? Three a mother of three. As we know, your children are now grown up, and in fact you you're a grandmother. But were they explained the rules? Did you bring them up as Methodists, for example, as you were brought up?

Dame Anne Owers29:16

Um, no, my husband was a Church of England vicar, my first husband, and so they were brought up in the Church of England. Um

Dame Anne Owers29:23

We tried to do what all parents do, which is to grip boundaries to make them turn into responsible adults.

Presenter29:32

Let's have some more music, and what's next?

Dame Anne Owers29:35

What's next is the Bach double concerto for oboe and violin. And you've chosen this because? I've chosen it because I think it's just a wonderful piece of music. And the adagio, which we're going to hear, has that amazing yearning quality.

Presenter29:41

Yeah.

Dame Anne Owers29:48

It's just a piece of music that always stops me in my tracks.

Presenter30:50

Part of the adagio from Bach's double concerto in D minor performed by the German Bach soloists, led by Helmut Winschermann. So one of the problems, of course, about giving up a big job is that it leaves a it leaves a hole in your life, I suppose. Uh wh what are you going to do next? What does the future hold on?

Dame Anne Owers31:07

Well at the moment I'm still doing work on prisons, but in Northern Ireland and in other countries, one of my colleagues who's also doing this with me said it's a bit like methadone maintenance, you know, it's a way of managing down the addiction. And the other thing that's taking up a lot of my time at the moment and which is really interesting and exciting is being chair of Christian Aid. And most recently I went with Christian Aid to the Congo at DRC where

Dame Anne Owers31:32

You know, being someone who supports human rights doesn't just mean you might get a bad newspaper headline or someone out there might not like you, it might can mean that you get killed.

Dame Anne Owers31:42

And I think for me it's part of that narrative we talked about earlier, which is

Dame Anne Owers31:46

The

Dame Anne Owers31:47

responsibility we have for people who live at the margins, for people whose lives matter.

Dame Anne Owers31:54

And his lives matter to them and and should matter to the rest of us.

Presenter31:56

And what about the rest of your life then? Your your first marriage ended in divorce and you remarried uh just towards the end of your fifties. Um where where's where's time for all of that? Where's time for romance and laughter and love?

Dame Anne Owers32:09

Well, I think that's the other thing, that we are trying and I hope we will succeed in creating more time for each other. We've had a couple of wonderful trips to Africa. We'd go walking and that and spending time with the grandchildren, of course, who are growing up.

Presenter32:24

You have four grandsons as they have.

Dame Anne Owers32:25

I have four grandsons and also two stepchildren, too.

Presenter32:30

Your husband's a journalist, is that right? That's right, yes. Right. So does he give you advice about the press? I mean, given that you work in such an incendiary area, and as you said by your own admission, you know, it's it's highly politicized, the area of prison and our prisoners, does does he sit and give you a little bit of

Dame Anne Owers32:31

He was like

Presenter32:44

Spin advice or for of an evening?

Dame Anne Owers32:46

Certainly not spin advice. But yes, we do talk about how that works and how and also an understanding of how the press works, which I think sometimes people in my kind of jobs don't understand. We don't always agree about how you might present something, but certainly he's been a great source of strength and wisdom to me.

Presenter33:06

You you mentioned your recent trip to the Congo. Of course, it is one of the most dangerous places on earth right now. Duh does he ever say Anne?

Presenter33:12

Not not the Congo.

Presenter33:14

Um

Dame Anne Owers33:14

He does get nervous, yes. That's certainly true. I also, just before.

Presenter33:16

Get it.

Dame Anne Owers33:20

Christmas went to Kabul to do some training for the Afghan Human Rights Commission, which is um which part of his job is inspecting prisons out there. So there have been some pretty edgy places. But I don't take unsensible risks.

Presenter33:34

Yes, you do you look like a sensible person with your head screwed on, but are you a sort of secret adrenaline junkie then? Do you quite like being in these dangerous places?

Dame Anne Owers33:40

Not at all. I am a not very secret coward. So no, not not at all. I'm not not physically brave at all.

Dame Anne Owers33:52

But I rely on being with people who know what they're doing. And.

Presenter33:57

Doctor. Do you

Dame Anne Owers33:58

Risk.

Presenter33:58

And presumably you have to go through all the sort of hostage uh training and the hostile environment training, all that sort of stuff.

Dame Anne Owers34:05

Yes, certainly. But I mean I'm not really in a situation where that is going to be a great risk.

Presenter34:11

Well, you see hostile environments. I'm thinking now of the island. Potentially quite a dangerous place to be. Do you think you'll meet the challenge when I cast you away on this desert island?

Dame Anne Owers34:20

I think I could meet some of the challenges. I think I am not, and and um if my husband were here, he would be nodding furiously as we spoke. I am not a terribly practical person. I can do it, but uh it's not my greatest strength, so that would be a disadvantage. And I would just miss people hugely as well. I'd miss the spoken word.

Presenter34:42

So a final disc for comfort then? Let let's find out what your final disc is going to be.

Dame Anne Owers34:46

A final disc is sperminalium.

Presenter34:46

Yeah.

Dame Anne Owers34:48

It's something that I've heard performed live on a number of occasions, along with my husband, but also along with a group of people, including a very dear friend who died not very long ago.

Dame Anne Owers34:59

It will always remind me of those those occasions and of what one of us said as we sat there that it's like being drowned in sound.

Presenter36:04

The opening of Thomas Tallis's Span in Allium by the Sixteen, directed by Harry Christophers. So we come to the books, then, Anne Owers, the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, and your book will be what?

Presenter36:17

Uh

Dame Anne Owers36:17

This is even more difficult than choosing eight records. You're talking to somebody who packs at least two books more on holiday than she needs and then picks up two more in the airport just in case you run out of reading material. So choosing a book is just a nightmare. What I would choose is a book of poetry. The cadences of poetry, the way it's done, I think that would be something that would comfort me quite a lot.

Presenter36:27

Uh

Speaker 236:27

Okay.

Presenter36:38

So, a good bulky anthology of British poetry, that'll do it for you. Okay, it's yours. And a luxury as well.

Dame Anne Owers36:40

Okay.

Dame Anne Owers36:43

Yeah.

Dame Anne Owers36:44

Ever since I was little I've always written, mostly for my own pleasure, sometimes for other people, sometimes for work. It's something I love doing.

Dame Anne Owers36:51

It's something that in this generation now I can't do on paper because I can't I I never used to write very well and I can hardly write at all now. I would love to have a solar powered word processor.

Presenter37:02

No internet access, you know.

Dame Anne Owers37:04

No internet access. No, I I accept that. I I understand all of that. But if I couldn't talk to other people, I'd at least be able to talk to the screen.

Presenter37:11

Right. A good, simple, straightforward word processor is yours then. And um the one disk that you would save. Which one disk would it be?

Dame Anne Owers37:18

I think if it was the whole of the Messiah it that would be it, because it's the first thing I ever sang w with my father conducting, and there are as well as Comferty, there are just so many things that would remind me of a lot of events.

Presenter37:32

It's yours. Dame Anne Owers, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you for asking me.

Presenter38:23

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter38:26

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website bbc.co.uk/radio4.