Professor Hugh Montgomery

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.

Presenter0:33

My castaway this week is Professor Hugh Montgomery.

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His area of academic specialism is intensive care medicine. He is also known for his pioneering genetic research into something called the ACE fitness gene, which determines our capacity for either strength or endurance, in themselves significant achievements.

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But not, it would seem significant enough for today's guest. He is also in no particular order.

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A children's author, an ultra marathon runner, and current holder of the world record for playing piano under water, being part of the dive team that investigated the treasures of the Mary Rose should also get a mention.

Presenter1:09

I am not making this up. He says, I've learned that life can end randomly and pointlessly at any time.

Presenter1:16

I don't want to be on my deathbed and think, Damn, I wish I'd learned to paint and write songs. So then, Hugh Montgomery, you are Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at the University College Hospital, London. You are surrounded then, I imagine, by life hanging by a thread, sometimes a very tenuous thread. It must be an intense experience. Given the things you choose to do along with your professional work, intensity is something that interests you. Extreme, the extremes of life.

Professor Hugh Montgomery1:42

I said Yes, I'd not thought of that, but you're you're right. That's true. I I guess in everything in life I like my food spicy and hot. I d I don't like bland.

Professor Hugh Montgomery1:53

I do like extremes, yes, both in exercise and intellectual challenge.

Professor Hugh Montgomery1:57

and in emotional life as well.

Presenter1:59

So it makes you feel more alive, does it?

Professor Hugh Montgomery2:01

Yes, I'm very, very aware, always have been of my own.

Professor Hugh Montgomery2:04

Mortality, and that's not something that came from the Korea. It probably took me to the Korea, I think. I remember this being a concern even as a child.

Presenter2:11

An ultramarathon running. Just clear that up for me. How long is an ultramarathon?

Professor Hugh Montgomery2:16

I'm not quite sure what the technical definition is, but um the first race I ran was um a hundred kilometers, and I've done a few at a hundred, which is whatever it is, fifty six, fifty eight miles.

Presenter2:26

Where do you have the time for the training for that?

Professor Hugh Montgomery2:28

Well, I I don't train because the one time I trained or tried to train I ended up getting injured. A colleague of mine decided we should run the Marathon de Sable, which is six marathons back to back across the Sahara for a charity. And I thought, well, that is a long way, and maybe I ought to do some training. So I constructed a steady training programme over a year and it just injured me.

Presenter2:47

Uh, with all your other pursuits, the only spare time I guess you have, you're probably sleeping. How how long do you sleep for?

Professor Hugh Montgomery2:53

Um I try not to sleep too much during the week, so I sleep I suppose during the week, um maybe four or five, but I catch up at weekends.

Presenter3:00

Apart from being very, very busy, then, is it also I am not getting these hours back? Once they're gone, they're gone.

Professor Hugh Montgomery3:05

Oh, it's absolutely that. I mean, it's partly the fact that I just say yes to too much and end up having to do it. But but yes, it's a real awareness that sleeping's deadtime.

Presenter3:15

Tell me about your first disc, then, Hugh Montgomery. What are we going to hear?

Professor Hugh Montgomery3:19

Well, you're going to hear the Rolling Stones playing Brown Sugar. I love this one, the hook of the opening chords always gets me. It was part of the soundtrack to my youth, as so many of the tracks we'll hear today are. There is a particular story that goes with this in that I was looking after a patient who'd been ventilated for several years and hadn't ever got out of a hospital bed. And I was phoned up by a colleague to say that there were tickets available for Stones concert. And we smuggled him out of the hospital and took him to the Stones gig in the days when there weren't even portable ventilators. We had to sort of jury-rig one to work. I sat there in terror through the whole concert, panic-stricken that something would go wrong with the ventilator or whatever, and it didn't, and we got him back. And to my knowledge, that was the only time he made it out of honesty before he died. But I remember that in retrospect, has been a really joyous occasion, and it fits in with lots of other good memories of the Stones.

Speaker 44:13

Don't go slave, she bound the cotton fields. Sold in the market down in New Orleans. Scott Old Slave, but no, it's doing alright. Here it went to wham and just around midnight.

Speaker 44:30

I hope you're tasting so good.

Speaker 44:38

Yeah.

Speaker 44:39

Just like a younger child

Presenter4:43

That was the Rolling Stones in Brown Sugar. As I mentioned, Hugh Montgomery in the introduction then, you led the team that discovered this. It's called the Ace gene or the jock gene, they call it. That was back in 1998. And it gives people the propensity for either strength or endurance. How much then, given that we know that you have endured extreme situations, whether it's ultra marathon running or skydiving, you yourself, do you experiment on yourself? Are you monitoring yourself through any of those activities?

Professor Hugh Montgomery5:09

Well we have. And in fact one of the groups I work in, directed by my colleague Mike Rocott, looks at extreme physiology and for a lot of those sorts of things you have to be the subject ethically. So when we were building up to the Everest expedition of two thousand seven and I was on the Troy Oyu trip, that's an 8,200 metre peak the year before, we were beta testing the experiments and the ethics demanded really that you had to be a doctor, you had to be a mountaineer who climbed regularly at very high altitude and that you had to do the experiments on yourselves first because really the only way of knowing if it was safe was to do that. So we were all subjects for our own experiments. So what did you find out about your own genetic predisposition? Yeah, well the bit that I do know is I've got the wrong genes entirely for endurance or indeed for mountaineering, which I guess just goes to show it isn't down to one.

Professor Hugh Montgomery5:58

But yes, I've got the genes that really predispose to strength.

Presenter6:02

What about going 110 hours on a piano underwater then? You currently hold the world record for playing piano underwater, as I understand it. You were 19 when you did it. That must have taken.

Professor Hugh Montgomery6:11

So that must

Presenter6:12

not just a degree of idiocy, but a degree of fitness too.

Professor Hugh Montgomery6:15

Well, I think no doubt no fitness involved at all. I mean the the idiocy you're quite right about and it's been a it's a fundamental personality flaw of mine that I've still seem not to have outgrown, which is to either randomly suggest that I should do things and then it's too late, you've volunteered for them, or to say yes to things that you later regret.

Presenter6:34

I was being playful there about the idea. Of course, you were doing it for a very good reason. What was it you were raising money for?

Professor Hugh Montgomery6:39

Well, we were actually trying to get money for the first portable ultrasound machine in those days. We're also familiar with the fact that ultrasound machines now, some of them are down to the size of a paperback book, but in those days they were the size of a sort of horse and cart. And I think that first one was

Professor Hugh Montgomery6:54

I think eighteen thousand pounds, including its discount, and that was a lot of money in those days. And we did raise it all, I guess'cause no one had seen such a thing before. And neither will they again, I doubt. It it's not something I'd commend.

Presenter7:06

Intensive care units are sharpest end really of the NHS. It would be worth, g given your status within the NHS to ask you just briefly what your opinion is generally of the NHS right now, especially particularly ANEs and ICU units.

Professor Hugh Montgomery7:20

Well the first thing I should say is that I am and remain an enormous fan of the NHS. I think it's so easy to criticise it and inside it I see the flaws too. But if you compare it to pretty much any health system in the world it is extraordinary. I think it's got to be rethought. The cost of it is huge. The internal inflation is massive. The technologies are more expensive and it's not going to be deliverable. An ITU bed in Britain for full care is around £3,000 a day. In my view, cutting the chase, we must maintain those services, but we're going to have to go to investing in prevention. That's public health. It's not sexy, but it's really important. Lifestyle change and so forth. And palliation, making one's terminal time more comfortable.

Presenter8:09

Let's go to the music. Tell me about your second choice this morning, Hugh.

Professor Hugh Montgomery8:10

Tell me the

Professor Hugh Montgomery8:13

Well this is Kate Bush and the song I've chosen is The Man with the Child in His Eyes. I was a huge Kate Bush fan as a teenager, not just the fact she was foxy and I was one of those teenage boys who had the Kate Bush in the blue leotard poster on my wall. Ah yes. But Kate Bush, like one of my later choices, is really a poet. I listened to a lot of Kate Bush, particularly on my Mary Rose days when I was a diving on the rose as a teenager.

Professor Hugh Montgomery8:40

and it makes me feel melancholy and sad.

Professor Hugh Montgomery8:44

comfortingly sad, and I'm always in awe of talent such as this. I understand she wrote this song when she was only thirteen, and its maturity now is still exceptional.

Speaker 48:57

He's here again.

Speaker 49:00

The man with the child in his eyes

Speaker 49:11

A man with a child in his eyes

Speaker 49:21

He's very understand

Presenter9:24

That was Kate Bush and the man with the child in his eyes. And you said, Hugh Montgomery, that that was particularly for you redolent of diving and the Mary Rose. You were only well, you said a teenager, a young teenager. You were just were you fifteen when you were? Yes, I was fifteen.

Professor Hugh Montgomery9:35

I was. Yes, I was fifteen.

Professor Hugh Montgomery9:38

It's a huge regret. I I see the world now being so wrapped in red tape and limitation and restriction, and none of those adventures I had as a child I'd be allowed to have now. I mean the fifteen year old starting diving in the Solent, treacherous water, dark, strong currents, and we were diving on our own. And your parents didn't mind.

Presenter9:56

Mind

Professor Hugh Montgomery9:57

My parents were fortunately very supportive. I they're both very different personalities, but in retrospect I imagine they lived in terror for a lot of what I did at that age. But I used to disappear off.

Professor Hugh Montgomery10:08

For the diving seasons on the Rose, and they were some of the best of my life, I have to say. I still can't imagine or get much better than that.

Presenter10:15

Your father then, James Nelson, was a pediatrician. Tell me more about him.

Professor Hugh Montgomery10:19

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery10:21

So he was raised in a poor part of Northern Ireland. His father was a ship's captain, and he and his brother both studied medicine, and he became a paediatrician.

Professor Hugh Montgomery10:31

And I suppose if I was to put one word to my father, it would be integrity. He was a compassionate, hard working, absolutely honest man, but without that sort of puritanical streak that you might suspect I would apply. He was a warm man with a deep sense of commitment and really an extraordinary clinical ability.

Presenter10:54

Bring it.

Presenter10:56

Did you ever go through a period where you wanted to reject what your dad stood for, or was it always the case that I'm I w I would like to go into medicine, I'd like to try to be the brilliant man he is?

Professor Hugh Montgomery11:06

I never wanted to reject any of his values. I think I struggled to meet them and.

Professor Hugh Montgomery11:14

Still do. His moral compass was so strong. There is a story where it's quite a small thing.

Professor Hugh Montgomery11:23

But I remember he was on duty twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, so if he got called in as kids we often had to go with him. And I remember one such occasion when we were walking through the hospital car park

Professor Hugh Montgomery11:34

and he walked across the car park to pick up a crisp packet that was on the ground. And I'd already worked out that he sort of was the big boss there, and that he was probably quite important in the hospital. And I said to him, Dad, but what do you do that for? And I remember him stopping me, and it was clearly something he wanted to learn. And he said, uh some there's nothing too small for a truly big man.

Presenter11:55

What about your mother? She was a nurse in Uganda. Yes, yes, before she met your father.

Professor Hugh Montgomery11:59

Yes, she was a pediatric nurse. She was raised in London in the war. She went off to nurse in Uganda. And the story goes that my father needed a put up bed and he was at Great Ormond Street and some one said that there was this nurse who could lend him one.

Professor Hugh Montgomery12:14

And uh that's how they met. And they were married and uh we were born that not long after, I think three of us.

Presenter12:20

What happened to the bed?

Professor Hugh Montgomery12:21

I still have it. It still works. It was an old army one. And it was great. Still very comfortable.

Presenter12:22

Do you know?

Presenter12:27

Let's have some more music, Hugh Montgomery. Tell me about this your third of the morning.

Professor Hugh Montgomery12:30

So this is Alan Parsons project, Old and Wise, and it's one of the albums I had when I was young.

Professor Hugh Montgomery12:37

And it's a song about some one dying.

Professor Hugh Montgomery12:40

It speaks to me because of this issue of of mortality that I've been so aware of. You know, I I'm there isn't a day goes by when I'm not aware of of the fact that my end is coming and trying to work out how that places me in the world.

Speaker 412:57

There are shadows approaching me

Speaker 413:06

And to those I left behind.

Speaker 413:11

Wonder you to know?

Speaker 413:15

You've always shared my deepest thoughts You follow where I go

Presenter13:32

That was the Allan Parsons Project and Old and Wise. You said as we went into that, Professor Hugh Montgomery, that the finite nature of existence was something that struck you when you were very young. That's unusual, I think. How young were you?

Professor Hugh Montgomery13:44

I can remember.

Professor Hugh Montgomery13:46

one instance, and I guess I must have been

Professor Hugh Montgomery13:49

eight or nine.

Professor Hugh Montgomery13:50

and I remember we were in a car on a family holiday in Brittany, and I remember suddenly it hitting me, and almost panicking, to think all of this will come to an end. I can remember it in exquisite detail, exactly where we were and what the view was, and there was nothing that I can think of that would provoke the thought.

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:08

I say to my research fellows that they should remind themselves every now and again by just taking a walk from the University down to Parliament Square, and they'll pass endless bronze statues of people and no one will know who they are. My father always used to say, you know, the worms will get you.

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:23

So I'm s I suppose there's an element of me that that recognises a lot of life is futile.

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:28

Um

Presenter14:29

Were you an intense child then? If if you I mean, it it it I think it is highly unusual, it'd be fair to say, for a child of eight to be thinking such thoughts. Did you then find that you felt slightly s separate and intense from other people?

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:41

That's a very good question. I think you'd have to ask other people if I was intense. I think.

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:47

I lived life intensely

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:50

And internally, definitely, and

Speaker 114:52

Yeah.

Speaker 414:52

Mm-hmm.

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:53

I did and still do enjoy

Professor Hugh Montgomery14:57

Solitude and relish the chance to interrogate myself and think.

Presenter15:05

Everything I read about your childhood leads me to believe that it was a very happy, vivid time. I mean, you know, what what were the pets you had?

Professor Hugh Montgomery15:10

Need em.

Professor Hugh Montgomery15:12

Oh, goodness, so well, I only had snakes. I kept pythons, which fortunately my children have inherited love of. We have a snake and a gecko, amongst other things. My sisters had guinea pigs and

Presenter15:23

In the same tank, are they one?

Professor Hugh Montgomery15:24

Well, there is a food chain that could happen in our in our houses. There's a gecko and a snake, a cat and a dog. Oh, yeah. And you could see that one could indeed eat the other all the way up the chain.

Presenter15:29

Oh yeah.

Presenter15:34

There's a children's story book in that for you if it happens.

Professor Hugh Montgomery15:36

Thank you for that one. You'll take your ten percent. As children, I guess we had lots. My sisters had guinea pigs and hamsters and things. We were quite self-sufficient in some ways. We had chickens and ducks and indeed a goat, several goats. Again, a mark of my father's doing the right thing. He had children who were allergic to cow's milk. He found that some weren't allergic to goat's milk. There was no commercial supply, so he kept goats to supply to his patients. Did he dig it in? Yeah. There'd probably some re legislation against that now as well.

Presenter15:55

If

Presenter16:00

Pity he would take it in.

Presenter16:03

Well, doubtless. Time for some more music then. We are on your fourth. Tell me about your fourth.

Professor Hugh Montgomery16:08

Tell me about your fourth. This is Dar Straits, and it's Telegraph Road. And this one i is embedded in my D N A. I listened to this until the track wore out.

Professor Hugh Montgomery16:20

I would put it on ex when I was revising for what were then O levels, A levels, and it's increasing re it increasingly resonates with me. I I in the late nineties, I suppose, I suddenly started

Professor Hugh Montgomery16:32

getting an understanding of the wider world and particularly in environmental issues, something I'm now very passionate about. And this song is a story about a man on a track walking thirty miles with a sack on his back and finding a place for himself and then that becoming destroyed and how the simple pleasures he had were lost in unemployment and how that beautiful wilderness was desecrated. So it speaks to me in a different way now than it did when I was fifteen.

Speaker 417:05

Mind

Speaker 417:06

The KVR

Speaker 417:08

There was hard times and there was a war

Speaker 417:12

Tell her I'm sang a song about the world outside

Speaker 417:16

Telegraph Road or Sobey.

Speaker 417:20

And so I

Speaker 417:21

Uh

Presenter17:28

That was Dire Straits and Telegraph Road. So, Professor Hugh Montgomery, you started off your professional life then at London's Middlesex Hospital, medical school that was. A lot is said about the life of a junior doctor, the incredible long hours, the stress. Indeed, we've brought in legislation to limit that. How did you find it? What sort of hours were you working?

Speaker 117:35

Good.

Speaker 117:37

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery17:49

Well, to answer in reverse order, I I loved my junior medical life. And this will sound a bit strange. We were working the long hours that people did work in those days. So

Presenter18:01

Just remind us of how long it was.

Professor Hugh Montgomery18:03

Uh Yeah.

Presenter18:03

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery18:04

At its most, one-in-one, so on duty continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no days off or holiday. Some jobs like that, others which could readily be 120 or 130-hour weeks. And certainly it was routine in those days to do what were known as long weekends. You do sort of day, day, day, night, day, get through to Friday, and you'd be on call from seven on a Friday morning till eight or nine o'clock on a Monday night. And it sounds

Professor Hugh Montgomery18:31

It sounds a bit strange to say they were glorious days, but they were. I think we forget that that generated a team spirit. Everyone in the hospital batted together. When you got to see someone in a casualty department at two in the morning, they said, I'm so sorry, Doctor, you must be very tired, as opposed to, I know my rights, I've been here for half an hour. People said, thank you. I was able to establish relationships with patients. I'd admit them, I'd look after them all the way through, and I'd see them die or leave. And that's so enriching. And our current juniors are deprived of those pleasures by having their hours restricted.

Presenter19:10

Are you telling me that you have junior doctors working under you who might say, I really would love to do the shift pattern that you did?

Professor Hugh Montgomery19:16

I don't think it's necessary to do the shift patterns we did actually, but I think absolutely there are large numbers say to me they would like to go back to that continuity and team feel. And I don't think it needs to go back to being potentially no sleep for four days because, you know, much as I felt that my decision making was very good but slower, it probably did have more errors in it.

Professor Hugh Montgomery19:39

But a lot of medicine is not just knowing your facts, it's integrating things and seeing a lot of them. And if you were on the shop floor, seeing them day in, day out, your sixth sense and your shortcuts for knowing that's what this person's got, this is what I need to do now, became quicker and quicker, and they're much harder to generate in short hours and limited exposure, and you can't get them from books.

Presenter20:02

As we know then, you live a a very full life. I mean, an impossible number of jobs, lots of pursuits. You're married to Mary. She is a pediatrician working in childhood intensive care. You've got two sons, Oscar and Fergus. Where is your family life? What what bit of time do you have to have a family life?

Speaker 420:15

Yeah.

Speaker 420:18

Uh

Professor Hugh Montgomery20:24

That's a good point. Yes, I guess I hadn't really seen myself as a father. The children came along and of course like every parent I wouldn't change that at all. And we've found a peculiar way of working which is that my wife got a new job in Birmingham. My work stayed in London and I therefore live in London during the week and I go up to Birmingham for weekends. What that's made me do is stop work on Friday nights. So I don't work, unless I'm on call for the hospital, I don't go off to try to write a paper at weekends. I'm full-time dad. And it's much, much healthier for all of us.

Presenter21:01

Let's have some music then. Tell me about this.

Professor Hugh Montgomery21:03

So this is Suzanne Vega. It's a tape I wore out pretty much in my youth. And it was one of a handful of tapes I took when I went to work in Africa. I was working in a hospital in KwaZulan Tal out in sort of rural Africa, one of two doctors for I forget how many patients now, many, many hundreds. And I'm not a surgeon, but you did have to operate. There was no one else. And again, I can remember listening to it in a mountaineering expedition at Pumori. And I remember both those occasions thinking, you know, life really gets no better than this.

Speaker 121:38

You come from far away with pictures in your eyes.

Speaker 121:44

Of coffee shops and morning streets in the blue and silent sunrise But night is the cathedral where we recognize the sign

Speaker 121:57

We strangers know each other now as part of a whole design.

Speaker 122:03

Oh me like a baby that will not bother us.

Presenter22:10

That was Suzanne Vega with Gypsies. So Hugh Montgomery Another absolutely engaging part of your professional life has been the work that you have done on let's call it the will to live. That it's not just everything that's going on physically, it is also where.

Speaker 122:21

The death

Presenter22:26

One's psychology and personality and view of life interacts with what's going on physically, which is when people choose.

Presenter22:34

You say to either.

Professor Hugh Montgomery22:34

Yeah

Presenter22:36

combat what's happening or to give in to it.

Professor Hugh Montgomery22:38

Yes.

Presenter22:39

Now you see this is highly controversial, isn't it? And it's a very, very difficult thing to talk about, because on the one hand, it c it would be fair to say that y you risk sounding like somebody who thinks that people choose to live or die.

Professor Hugh Montgomery22:53

Um yes, I suppose to distil it, I think

Professor Hugh Montgomery22:58

They do sometimes.

Professor Hugh Montgomery23:01

I it's sometimes over-egged, so you get relatives saying, Oh yes, Dot, but they're a fighter.

Speaker 123:04

You get

Professor Hugh Montgomery23:07

And it's sometimes hard to explain that the disease process is so overwhelming that the emotional component of that won't protect them.

Presenter23:16

Yes, there are people who very strongly object. I'm thinking particularly anecdotally of cancer patients that I would know who would say, it is not a fight. It is being fought on me and in me, but I am not fighting it.

Professor Hugh Montgomery23:24

It is being

Professor Hugh Montgomery23:28

I would agree with that. Right.

Presenter23:29

Right. Particularly when it comes to cancer we're talking about. Yes. Right.

Professor Hugh Montgomery23:31

Yes. Right. But in I've seen it. I suppose the first time I was really aware of this with with was with patients who I saw make the choice. And I can give you a personal account of a woman when I was a house officer. She was 87 and she was one of the first patients I admitted and she was absolutely terrific. We got on terribly well and I used to examine her every day and she would joke with me, but it went wrong and she became deeply unconscious. And every day I came in the nursing staff would say, Oh, hi here, and they say she's still here.

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:02

And it got to day five.

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:05

And I suddenly thought, I wonder if she's hanging in there for me? Strange thought. But I went up to her and I drew the curtains and I said

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:12

You know, we got on very well.

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:15

But you're not letting me down if you die.

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:17

You are allowed to die, and you don't have to do this for me and she stopped breathing there and then, at that moment, and I don't believe that was coincidence.

Presenter24:26

Hugh, I don't know if you're familiar with it, and indeed I suspect it might be an old Scottish expression, the expression of turning your face to the wall when somebody decides. Is that a question?

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:32

When some

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:34

Yes.

Presenter24:35

It's a very, very old fashioned phrase, but it would be your belief in all that you've seen throughout your years of of practice that people choose the moment of their dying often?

Professor Hugh Montgomery24:44

Yes, I think it's not to say it's universal. I wouldn't want to say that we've all, as you say, I mean, it would be foolish to suggest that people can overcome. grave diseases and so forth b by that. But I think there are circumstances where perhaps less the fight to stay there, but more the willingness to to yield.

Professor Hugh Montgomery25:03

And then when people yield, things stop.

Presenter25:05

Okay, let's take uh time for some music now. Tell me about your sixth choice.

Professor Hugh Montgomery25:10

This is Joan Armour trading Me, Myself, I. I probably wouldn't have revisited this song had it not been for this programme. It's an upbeat song. If I'm stuck on a desert island, I'm going to need to manipulate my emotions with music,'cause music really is just a drug for me that I use to change the way I feel. And this would be one that would make me remind myself that I actually do like spending time on myself, that this might be a blessing to

Professor Hugh Montgomery25:36

be given that time to think and maybe to feel happy in that.

Speaker 425:44

I wanna go to China and to see Japan

Speaker 425:52

I'd like to sail the oceans before the seas run dry.

Speaker 426:00

I wanna live by myself. I just rubbed it up.

Speaker 426:07

Leave us.

Presenter26:13

That was Joan Armour Trading and me, myself, I. So, Hugh Montgomery, how would you take to being described as a polymath? I very deliberately didn't um put it into the introduction when I was telling people about you today, but is it something that you accept? You know you're a high achiever in very many fields.

Professor Hugh Montgomery26:30

Well, I'm not sure I'm a high achiever in that many fields. I'm interested in a lot of things and I'm prepared to try.

Presenter26:36

Come on, you've climbed Everest, you've written books, you've done pioneering genetics research, you're a head of ICU teaching.

Professor Hugh Montgomery26:44

I think it's certainly true that I remain interested in a lot of things and it is something I try and do, learn a new skill every year. I did a course in particle physics a few years ago and reminded myself that I'm an absolutely useless mathematician and conceptual physician. I have no idea. I got to the end of it and really I'm not sure I knew much more than I started. But then the next year I did a course in closed magic which was much more fun.

Presenter27:07

There's a cheer that's gone up around Britain to find out that you're really bad at something. And apart from particle physics, what else have you failed miserably at?

Professor Hugh Montgomery27:08

But the cheek

Professor Hugh Montgomery27:11

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery27:15

Oh, I'm useless at navigating. I I have an unerring confidence and certainty in the right direction, which is invariably wrong. I'm practical in no way at all. My wife does the DIY. I mean, she wouldn't trust me with a screwdriver. I I would find it hard to change a plug. So there are a vast number of things I'm

Professor Hugh Montgomery27:34

I'll do.

Presenter27:34

Tell me about your seventh disc this morning then, Hugh Montgomery.

Professor Hugh Montgomery27:37

Oh, okay. Pink Floyd. I've chosen Comfortably Numb. I could have chosen any Pink Floyd song. I've been to endless numbers of their concerts. I managed to get myself a job as a medical officer with my wife, actually then girlfriend, at Earl's Court, where I got to see eleven shows every night. And my children have been to see the war recently.

Professor Hugh Montgomery27:56

It's fabulous music from extraordinarily talented musicians, and it's opera.

Professor Hugh Montgomery28:03

That's what Floyd is. It's it's opera and when it's staged, you see it as that.

Speaker 428:36

Got it.

Presenter28:40

That was Pink Floyd and Comfortably Nun. So Hugh Montgomery, as you told us you have built time into your life along with your wife for for family time now. You don't write a paper on the weekend, you don't as much unless you're specifically on call and end up in the hospital of a Sunday evening. The times when you're all together as a family, what are the things you enjoy doing most as a family?

Speaker 128:48

Uh

Speaker 428:48

Yeah.

Speaker 128:48

We don't

Speaker 428:53

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery28:55

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery29:02

Well isn't it glorious? I mean I enjoy doing the things that my children enjoy doing and of course because you know because of their upbringing of the genes, strangely enough a lot of the things they like to do are things I like to do. Oh wonderful. So yes they're both very physically active. They're both passionate about wildlife. They'll walk as far as you want to walk in the worst of weathers. We holiday in a small island off the west coast of Ireland. It sounds very posh. It's not. It's isolated. It's got a house with no water, gas or electricity. But the key thing is there's no one else there. And so from the age of eight my elder son has been spearfishing to catch the food.

Professor Hugh Montgomery29:38

And building the fires to cook the fish on, and it's those things I enjoy enormously.

Presenter29:46

Tell me about your final piece. What is this?

Professor Hugh Montgomery29:49

This is important for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it's a song that's orchestrated and played and sung by a friend called Jeremy Sassoon.

Professor Hugh Montgomery29:57

And not only is it because it's him.

Professor Hugh Montgomery30:00

and because it's very beautiful.

Professor Hugh Montgomery30:02

But because it's called The Things We've Handed Down, it's about legacy, it's a father's view, in this case of a daughter, of looking at the baby and wondering what they'll be and which of the good bits and the bad bits they've got from you and what their life will be like. And therefore it makes me think of all of those things on my own children.

Speaker 430:23

Will you laugh just like your mother?

Speaker 430:26

Will you sigh like you're a man?

Speaker 430:30

Will something skip a generation?

Speaker 430:34

I've heard they often can

Speaker 430:38

Are you a poet or a dancer?

Speaker 430:42

Devil or Clown.

Speaker 430:47

Or a strange new combination of the things we've handed down.

Presenter30:53

Yeah.

Presenter30:57

That was the Things We've Handed Down, a Mark Cohn song sung by Jeremy Sassoon, your friend, Hugh. Um I'm going to give you the books now. You get to take the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and one other book to the island. What would it be?

Speaker 431:01

Q.

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:06

And then one

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:08

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:09

Um it's the S A S Handbook of Survival.

Presenter31:12

Right.

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:13

And it's the best book on survival that I know of, and it's a practical manual of how to do it. And as I've said before, I'm very impractical. So I'm going to need a bit of wisdom there about how to look after myself.

Presenter31:23

And that was that.

Presenter31:25

It's yours. You're allowed luxury, too, of course. What will that be?

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:28

If I'm allowed it, I'm going to take my spear fishing kit, and that's because I can look at the marine life, it'll open up a completely new world for me. It will give me some sport as my recreation, and if I get lucky I'll even get to eat the odd fish.

Presenter31:41

Yes, you've snuck it under the wire of my thing as a sporting development.

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:43

Have I seen that?

Presenter31:46

I'm shifting uncomfortably in my seat though, but you may have it. And if you had to save just one of these eight disks that we've had this morning, which one would be your disc to save?

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:49

Thanks.

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:55

I think I'm going to go for Jeremy Sassoon.

Presenter31:57

The final one we heard this morning. Professor Hugh Montgomery, thank you very much for letting us hear your Tesla Island disc.

Professor Hugh Montgomery31:58

Yeah.

Professor Hugh Montgomery32:02

Thank you very much for having me.

Presenter32:44

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

Presenter32:47

You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co.uk slash radiofour