Sir Sydney Kentridge

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.

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

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My castaway this week is Sir Sidney Kentridge, Q C.

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Widely regarded as a leading advocate of the twentieth century, he continues to make his mark in the twenty first.

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He recently appeared for the first time in the European Court of Justice, and at the end of last year he spent the actual day of his ninetieth birthday working in the English Supreme Court.

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South African born, he was first called to the bar there at the end of the forties, and played a leading role in some of the most significant political trials of the apartheid era.

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Understated, controlled, relentlessly rational, and with devastating cross-examination skills.

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The verdict of one of his clients, Nelson Mandela.

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He himself says I hope there's only one thing about my professional life of which I've boasted, and which I think as a lawyer is unique on my part. I've acted as an advocate for three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't think anyone else has done that. I don't think they have, Sir Sidney. Remind us then of who the three Nobel Peace Prize winners are that you've acted on behalf of.

Sir Sydney Kentridge1:35

Well, of course, they were all South Africans. The first one was Chief Albert Letulli, a wonderful man who was in the fifties and early sixties the President of the African National Congress. The second was Nelson Mandela himself. I acted for him in a treason trial where the leaders of the African National Congress were put on trial for treason in South Africa. And then finally, uh Archbishop Desmond Tutu, another great man. So it was three great men as well as being three Nobel Prize winners.

Presenter2:11

You are not somebody, I gather, who likes to take much credit for being a great man yourself, but there surely cannot have been many people who, at the age of ninety, find themselves doing a day's work in the Supreme Court. To what do you attribute this extraordinarily long career?

Sir Sydney Kentridge2:25

Well, I think it was really that I couldn't do anything else. My wife had a theory that everyone should change his occupation at least every twenty five years and um I couldn't quite do that, but I decided that the best thing I could do by way of change was to try and carry on my occupation in a different country, and so I came to the English Bar.

Presenter2:49

Let's turn for a moment to the music then. How important is music in your life? Has it played a part throughout?

Sir Sydney Kentridge2:55

Oh, it's been a very important part. I've never been able to play an instrument, but music has always been a part of my life and my wife's life. And in our earlier married years we used to listen to a lot of pop music, but somehow we never kept up with modern pop.

Presenter3:14

So tell me then about this first uh tune that we're going to hear this morning. Why is this important to you?

Sir Sydney Kentridge3:18

Well, both of us thought that of the popular non operatic singers the greatest was and is Ella Fitzgerald. It's a wonderful voice and she used to sing wonderful songs.

Speaker 43:31

In olden days a glimpse of stockings was looked on as something shocking. Now heaven knows

Speaker 43:43

Anything goes.

Speaker 43:48

Good authors too who once knew better words, Now only useful letter words, Writing prose

Speaker 44:00

Anything go

Presenter4:02

That was Colporter's Anything Goes sung there by Ella Fitzgerald. So, Sir Sidney Kentridge, your many clients have included people like Geoffrey Archer, the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay, the Pro Hunt lobby. Um necessary, of course, to put your opinions to one side in court. Do you find it easy to do that?

Sir Sydney Kentridge4:18

Well, I don't know whether easy is the right word. It's just part of the barrister's professional approach to his job. There are two aspects to it. Once, as barristers, and this applied in South Africa too, we have something called the cab rank rule, which means that if we practise in a certain field, we've got to take any client, whether we like his personality or his political or religious views. The second thing about it is that if you're too close to your client, you may lose objectivity. You can't simply be your client's mouthpiece.

Presenter4:57

I wonder, Sir Sidney, to what extent are you concerned about the British Government's recent moves to restrict legal aid?

Sir Sydney Kentridge5:04

When legal aid was introduced in Britain after the Second World War, Britain led the way. It's no use having rights unless you have access to a court in order to enforce them. Your right to claim redress is valueless unless you can be represented in court. My fear is that uh there will be people who will have genuine cases entitled to go to court but unable to find legal representation because of the cost of it.

Speaker 25:29

Yeah.

Presenter5:29

Mm.

Presenter5:36

Time now for your second piece of music, then. Why have you chosen this?

Sir Sydney Kentridge5:40

Well, what I've chosen now is uh a duet from Mozart's Magic Flute. I now feel the Magic Flute is the opera in which we find the deepest feelings of all Mozart's operas, because although i in some ways it's a pantomime opera, that's where he really expressed what I feel as his true feelings about life, love, and not simply love between man and woman, but also a love of humanity. The duet between Pamina and Papagheno really seems to me to encompass it all.

Speaker 46:35

Desentre midsulfen ist done, dear fiber is the free.

Sir Sydney Kentridge6:44

Beautiful.

Speaker 46:50

Still for still.

Speaker 46:58

The Liban Deutsch.

Speaker 47:00

Dealing on

Presenter7:14

By Meron Werglier Liebuffuland from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, sung there by Bryn Terville, and Maya Pershen with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sir Charles Macarris. So, Sir Sidney Kentridge, let's go back a bit. You were born in South Africa, in Johannesburg, in nineteen twenty two. Tell me a bit about your family. What was your father like?

Sir Sydney Kentridge7:32

Well, my father only married at the age of forty, so I never knew him as a young man. He was an attorney, and he was very active in the Labour movement, and the time when there was real trouble was in nineteen twenty two, before I was born, when there was a great strike of white miners on the Votwatersfront, and the strike was eventually put down by a military force, and martial law had been declared, and consequently people were arrested and detained without trial, and my father was one of them. He was never charged with anything, but he was in prison, and as far as I could make out, he had a pretty bad time there. And we always had in our house, in a little frame, a blue ticket, and that was the ticket that people were given when they were imprisoned, and that was always a family souvenir, that prison ticket.

Presenter8:34

And as you grew up, did he talk to you a little bit about politics?

Sir Sydney Kentridge8:38

Yes. He first became a member of parliament in nineteen fourteen, and in nineteen twenty four he was elected to a Johannesburg constituency, and he held that seat until his retirement in nineteen fifty eight.

Presenter8:55

And tell me about your mother.

Sir Sydney Kentridge8:57

Unlike my father, who was very impractical, she was a very practical woman. She was the one who drove the motor car. She uh was very good with her hands, not not only in sewing and knitting and leather work and weaving, but also in doing household repairs, which my father could never do, and in that regard I'm afraid I've rather taken after my father.

Presenter9:21

You would have been, I think, seventeen when war broke out. Uh how important did that seem to you? Did it seem very

Sir Sydney Kentridge9:25

The war broke out just before a little before I turned seventeen, and I still remember as one of the worst moments listening to the German broadcast of Hitler entering Paris.

Presenter9:29

Right.

Sir Sydney Kentridge9:39

And it seemed for a time as though it was going to be all over. And then, of course, we used to hear Churchill's speeches. And it was the bright light in a dark world for those of us who didn't want Germany to win.

Presenter9:57

Let's have some music. Sir Sidney, let's hear your third disc of the morning.

Sir Sydney Kentridge10:01

I came to England in nineteen forty six. I went up to Oxford on a grant from the South African Government, and it was my first experience of England. Now, in South Africa, I'd heard a radio programme about Glindbourne. And in 1947, Glindbourne reopened, and I managed to get a ticket. And it was far more than I had ever paid for a theatre or concert ticket. It was two guineas. And I got to Glindbourn in a dinner jacket. And even more wonderful, the opera that was on was Lux, Orfeo and Euridici, and the Orfeo was Kathleen Ferrier, and I've never forgotten that. And so my next record is Kathleen Ferrier singing the great aria quefaro sensa uridice from that opera.

Speaker 411:18

Our horse attack

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We're gonna

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Holy danger.

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Four dear.

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Please for the

Presenter12:01

Quefarosenza Eoradice, sung by Kathleen Ferrier, with the Southern Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Fritz Stiedre.

Presenter12:09

So I'm wondering, Sir Sidney Kentridge, you you conjured up this wonderfully English image there of you at Glinebourne. What did you make of England?

Sir Sydney Kentridge12:17

Strangely enough, although it was so new, it was also very familiar. In South Africa in my time, we were very much part of what was then called the British Empire, and all the books we read were English books, I mean from Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, the Billy Bunter stories, and the other thing about it which may seem rather silly, but we used to play Monopoly. So when I came to London I knew that Mayfair was very up market, and the old Kent Road was very down market and so it's as though one was seeing for the first time what one knew a lot about.

Presenter12:58

Why was it law that you chose? And I will not accept the answer because it was the only thing they would let you do.

Sir Sydney Kentridge13:04

Well, as I said, my father had been a a solicitor, although his first love was politics. So the law it was always possible, but I really knew very little about it. My first actual contact with law was at the end of the war in Italy. I was in the South African forces, and the chief legal officer came to me one day and told me that he wanted me to prosecute in two court martials. I said, I know nothing about the law. He said, Well, I'll give you a little book on criminal law and I'll tell you what to do. And it seemed to me one of the most interesting and exciting things I'd done. And I thought then, yes, I definitely want to be an advocate.

Presenter13:49

Now tell me, when and how did you meet your wife?

Sir Sydney Kentridge13:52

I met her in nineteen fifty at a tennis party in Johannesburg. She was still a student at Cape Town University.

Presenter14:01

How did you manage to catch her eye? Are you a good tennis player?

Sir Sydney Kentridge14:05

No, I wasn't a particularly good tennis player, and I'm not sure that I caught her eye. She caught my eye.

Sir Sydney Kentridge14:12

I somehow persuaded her to marry me, I suppose my most important piece of advocacy.

Presenter14:19

Did it take a while?

Sir Sydney Kentridge14:20

Yes, it did. So she was a very independent minded girl.

Presenter14:24

Sixty one years later you obviously made a very good case for it.

Sir Sydney Kentridge14:28

Yes, although I must tell you my wife said to me when she agreed to marry me that it would be for three years. She couldn't commit herself for more than three years. And at the end of three years I didn't say anything and she didn't say anything and so every three years it was just tacitly renewed.

Presenter14:48

What a very splendid and sensible idea. For now, we're going to play some more music, Sir Sidney. We're on your fourth of the morning. Tell me about this.

Sir Sydney Kentridge14:56

Well, I think my wife and I in the early days of our marriage must have heard it on the radio, and we bought the record. And in those years, for some reason or other, it just became our favourite record. It's called The Dark Eyed Sailor, and it's sung by this beautiful Irish tenor.

Speaker 415:17

May walk all in the garden, A brisk young sailor she chanced to spy. He stepped up to her, he stepped up to her, He said, Fair maiden, can your fancy eye

Sir Sydney Kentridge15:18

Yeah.

Sir Sydney Kentridge15:22

Yeah.

Sir Sydney Kentridge15:25

Ah

Sir Sydney Kentridge15:26

Yeah.

Sir Sydney Kentridge15:33

Yeah.

Speaker 415:40

I have a love, a dark I sailor, His pleasing tongue did my heart and snare. Genteel he was, not a rake like you are, Who would attempt to do a maiden harm?

Presenter16:03

That was The Dark Eyed Sailor sung there by James Johnston.

Presenter16:07

So, Sir Sidney, it was the late fifties when you were asked to represent a young Nelson Mandela. He was one of a number of people arrested and tried at what became known as the Treason Trial. Tell me about that.

Sir Sydney Kentridge16:21

Well, the trial ran for over three years, and they were mostly African National Congress people. And in those days, in a treason trial, the law permitted the Minister of Justice to nominate three judges to hear the trial. There were no juries, of course, in South Africa. But at the end of the case, the three judges unanimously acquitted all the accused.

Sir Sydney Kentridge16:48

Now that was a very remarkable thing, that these judges exercised judicial independence and applied the law in spite of their own political views.

Presenter16:59

At the time, what did you make of the young Nelson Mandela?

Sir Sydney Kentridge17:03

Well, right from the start it seemed clear that he had the qualities of leadership. A lot of the accused people were perhaps more experienced than he was, and at that stage I wouldn't say they deferred to him, but they always seemed to listen to his view on something. I was the counsel who led his evidence in chief, and what became clear was an intellectual stature. He didn't go in for political slogans. He listened to each question, and he always gave a thoughtful answer. Whether it was an answer which the judges were going to like or not, it was a thoughtful answer. And by the end of that trial it was perfectly clear that he was going to be one of the great leaders.

Presenter17:57

He has referred to your brilliance and your courage in the courtroom at that time. Can you describe uh the scene in the courtroom when they were acquitted?

Sir Sydney Kentridge18:06

Well, the whole court was crowded when the judgment was given, and there was a sort of sigh that went through the court, and then the crowd outside the court they were jubilant, as of course were all the accused who'd been acquitted. And I would say that although the counsel didn't dance about, we were pretty pleased ourselves.

Presenter18:29

We have a clear sense of of the importance of justice in your life, but there you were also living in a country where human rights were clearly being so blatantly disregarded for the majority of the population. How did that sit with you?

Sir Sydney Kentridge18:42

Well, for people who thought like me, it was not merely unpleasant, but enormously depressing, because there seemed to be no possibility of real political change in South Africa. But as an advocate, one did feel there was something that one could do, not to change the system, but to do something to help the people who were caught up in it. And then even if one didn't win, one could, through the court proceedings, somehow expose what was being done, not only to your particular client, but to black people in South Africa.

Presenter19:26

Let's take time for some music, then. We're on your fifth disc of the morning, Sir Sidney. Tell me about this.

Sir Sydney Kentridge19:32

The next one is actually a piece of Mozart from one of his horn concertos, but it's in the vocal version of The Great Flanders and Swan. Apart from being very funny and very clever, I thought they were both very good musicians, and um both my wife and I used to listen to Flanders and Swann.

Speaker 219:55

I once had a whim and I had to obey it To buy a French horn in a secondhand shop I polished it up and I started to play it In spite of the neighbours who begged me to stop

Speaker 220:10

To sound my horn, I had to develop my own boucher. I found my horn was a bit of a devil to play, so artfully wound.

Speaker 220:20

To give you a sound, a beautiful sound, so rich and round.

Speaker 220:24

Oh, the hours I had to spend before I mastered it in the end.

Presenter20:30

That was ill wind by Flanders and Swan.

Presenter20:33

So, Sir Sidney, you said that an important part of your work as an advocate was to expose what was going on in your own country at the time. You did that very effectively during the Steve Beeko inquest. Steve Biko was a black activist who had died in police custody. Can you tell me about the inquest and how it came to be heard really all around the world?

Sir Sydney Kentridge20:53

Yes, to my surprise, and I think surprise of everyone in South Africa, that this became an international corps celebre. And what one was able to do there was to reveal the absolute inhumanity of the treatment metered out by the security police to someone who was in their custody.

Presenter21:17

It was the case that as you were representing the family of the late Steve Biko, you were required to be talking both in Afrikaans and also in English, and one of the great benefits of that was that the foreign press were able to understand what was going on.

Sir Sydney Kentridge21:33

Well the courtroom was full of pressmen, but the police officers gave their evidence in Afrikaans, which of course I understood perfectly well. I put my questions in English. They of course understood English perfectly. They'd give their answers in Afrikaans. And in between the questions I would give an indication in English of what their answer had been. And it's quite right that I had the suspicion that perhaps they thought that if their answers were in Afrikaans they would not be understood by the foreign press. But the other reason I did it, of course, was that Mrs Biko, the widow, and also Biko's mother, who were in court, they did not understand Afrikaans, and I certainly thought that they were the ones who ought to understand everything that was going on.

Speaker 221:51

Yeah.

Speaker 222:19

Yeah.

Presenter22:28

The struggle in South Africa, of course, was an armed struggle for the ANC. They they let off bombs and there was violence involved. Innocent people were killed. Did you have personal concerns about defending those cases?

Sir Sydney Kentridge22:41

Many of the black activists and white activists for whom I acted were people for whom I had great respect. Some of those who were concerned in bombings and such like I didn't particularly admire or respect but, as I've said, they were entitled to have a defence, and one did it as objectively as possible.

Presenter22:46

Yeah.

Speaker 222:46

Okay.

Presenter23:04

Does

Presenter23:08

Let's have some more music then. We're on your sixth track of the morning. Tell me about this.

Sir Sydney Kentridge23:13

One of my favourite composers, I would say perhaps my favourite composers, has been Schubert.

Sir Sydney Kentridge23:21

And in this case I've thought that some of his piano music would be very comforting on the desert aisle, and I've chosen his impromptu number three.

Presenter24:24

That was Alfred Brendel playing Schubert's impromptu number three in B-flat major. So, Sir Sidney Kentridge, we've heard a lot about your legal activity, and there's more to come. We mustn't leave out, though, the extraordinarily important work that your wife did throughout the decades. She set up a legal centre that enabled black people to access the justice system, isn't that right?

Sir Sydney Kentridge24:44

Yes, that's right. My my wife Felicia was also an advocate, but she got the idea of founding a completely new form of legal aid. There was no official legal aid in South Africa, and her idea was to get together a firm of lawyers who would act, not just taking the cases as they came up, but looking for test cases which, if they won it, could affect the lives of literally tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands of black persons. And she succeeded in doing that. And this organization, the Legal Resources Centre, did most wonderful work and it's still in existence thirty years on. And the legal problems that poor people have in South Africa are different now, but they still need legal representation. And certainly what she did in South Africa was far more lasting and important than anything I did.

Speaker 225:33

And

Presenter25:51

Where was the time for family life? Because there you were both with these hugely responsible careers, and yet you had four children, and somehow managed to find the time to bring them up. Do you remember much about family life in those early married days?

Sir Sydney Kentridge26:05

Yes, there was a lot of family life. One of the things that I did through all their childhoods was read to them. We read the whole of Great Expectations and we read Emma and David Copperfield. We read all of those aloud. And uh f that's one of my main memories of my children's childhood.

Presenter26:29

It would be fair to say that a lot of us have um a belief that there is a degree of flamboyance about many Q C's when they're in the courtroom. But I'm thinking now of a very flamboyant person that you represented. I'm thinking of Desmond Tutu.

Sir Sydney Kentridge26:42

Well, that was before an inquiry set up by the Government into the work and finances of the South African Council of Churches, of which Desmond Tutu was then the leader. The Government's case here was that Desmond Tutu's theology was a cover for subversive propaganda. But what I really remember about it is this. I asked him a few introductory questions, and then he, so to speak, took over his own evidence. He went into the witness box with only one document, namely the Bible, and starting in Genesis, going through the Old Testament and then the New Testament, and showing with literally, in this case, chapter and verse, what the basis was of his theology and why he thought that apartheid was anti-Christian and in fact a heresy. And he did it with such intellectual power and such moral strength that a very hostile set of inquirers

Presenter26:47

Yeah.

Speaker 227:25

Yeah.

Speaker 427:25

Yeah.

Speaker 227:37

Hold on.

Sir Sydney Kentridge27:59

were really simply silenced. There was no answer to him.

Sir Sydney Kentridge28:04

He's a humorous man, he's a very kind man, he is a man who believes in conciliation, but there's real steel underneath it.

Presenter28:17

Let's have some music, so Sidney, Sue, tell me about this.

Sir Sydney Kentridge28:20

Well, it's Janet Baker singing one of Berlioz's songs. It's called Absinthe. It's it's a song of longing, and I've always found it a very moving song. One wouldn't want to have too many songs like that on the desert island, but uh this is one I think which would make one think back.

Presenter29:45

Absence by Birdio is sung there by Dame Janet Baker, with the new Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbara Raleigh. So, as we know, Sir Sidney Kendridge, you have lived and practised at the law here for more than thirty years in Britain. You you you must have watched then the end of apartheid from these shores.

Sir Sydney Kentridge30:02

It was amazing, of course. But you know, I often went back to South Africa, and in fact, my wife and I remain dual citizens. We've kept our South African citizenship, and in nineteen ninety four we went back to vote, and it was a remarkable experience, standing in long queues at the polling booth, substantially of black people who had never ever voted before in their lives. And it was a wonderful sort of day, that polling day. Everyone seemed to be cheerful and happy.

Presenter30:38

I want to ask you about the time when you returned to South Africa. Nelson Mandela was inaugurating the new Constitutional Court there, and you yourself had an important role in it. Did you share words on that day?

Sir Sydney Kentridge30:50

Oh yes, yes. But uh when he made his opening speech, his first words and what he said, he said with complete factual accuracy, he said, The last time I entered a court of law was to find out whether or not I'd be sentenced to death.

Presenter31:12

Extraordinarily powerful it must have been to watch that.

Sir Sydney Kentridge31:14

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter31:15

As I understand it, um your son is William Kendridge, who's a very uh well regarded artist, and he lives in in South Africa. When when you go back now to South Africa, maybe to visit him.

Presenter31:26

A lot of people think that South Africa is in a sorry state right now. It it has not fulfilled its potential in in terms of the amount of violence, the amount of black people still living in poverty. What what do you make of it now when you travel home?

Sir Sydney Kentridge31:40

I believe it is disappointing after the euphoria of the Mandela years. What one finds in government is a loss of the idealism that had motivated the African National Congress in its days in opposition and its first years in government. And I must add this although people say that you can't go on blaming apartheid forever, I think one has to bear in mind that the forty years of apartheid, which included, for example, a deliberately inferior education for black people in South Africa, is going to have an effect that may take two or three generations to eradicate. So I'm not a pessimist about it, but um it's difficult to avoid some feelings of disappointment.

Speaker 232:09

Ever

Presenter32:37

We've concentrated so much today, almost inevitably, on a lot of the work that you have done in South Africa, but but we must be careful not to represent that as uh in any way the bulk of your career. You've spent so much of your life working on on company law, on criminal, on commercial cases. I'm wondering, as you enter your retirement then and you leave work behind after almost sixty-five years, will you have more time, do you think, to spend with your family, four children, nine grandchildren?

Sir Sydney Kentridge33:05

The real question is whether they'll want to spend more time with me.

Presenter33:09

And do you think they will?

Sir Sydney Kentridge33:12

I wouldn't like to say it.

Presenter33:14

I'm worried about how you will fare on this desert island as well. Do do you think you'll be bored to tears?

Sir Sydney Kentridge33:20

Well, if I didn't have the music or the books, I would probably be bored to tears.

Presenter33:25

Right. We're going to come to your books in just a second. For neither, I must ask you to introduce the last thing that we're going to hear this morning.

Sir Sydney Kentridge33:26

Come to

Sir Sydney Kentridge33:31

Well, when I was eight years old, and I remember the date, on the third of january, nineteen thirty one, my father took me to watch the Test match between the MCC and South Africa. Now, I can't remember the scores in last summer's Test matches, but I can tell you the score that every English batsman made. And from that time onwards, cricket has been one of my great loves, and I would miss that very much. And so my last record celebrates the West Indies win over England in the early 1950s at a West Indian Calypso sung by the wonderfully named Lord Beginner.

Speaker 434:20

Cricket, lovely cricket.

Speaker 434:23

At last where I saw it.

Speaker 434:26

Cricket, lovely cricket.

Speaker 434:29

And lost where I saw it.

Speaker 434:32

Yadli tries his best.

Speaker 434:35

For that one details.

Speaker 434:38

They gave the crowd plenty fun, the second Tess and West Indies won With those little pals of mine

Presenter34:51

That was Victory Test Match, also known as Cricket, Lovely Cricket, by Lord Beginner. So, Sir Sidney, we come to the point where I'm going to give you the books. You get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along. What would you like to take?

Sir Sydney Kentridge35:04

Well, I will enjoy reading the Bible, and I'll enjoy reading Shakespeare, but my extra book would be The Jeeves Omnibus of PG Woodhouse. Apart from being very entertaining and funny, it's a wonderful example of English prose style.

Presenter35:22

Right, you may take that, and a luxury too.

Sir Sydney Kentridge35:24

When my luxury is a rather boring one, I would like an endless supply of coffee and a machine to make it.

Presenter35:31

Oh, that's quite oblite, yes, you may have that. And one disc from the eighth. Which one would you pick out as the one to save?

Sir Sydney Kentridge35:37

Oh the magic flute one.

Presenter35:39

Right, it's yours. So, Sidney Kentridge, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Sydney Kentridge35:44

Thank you.

Presenter36:20

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.