Dame Glenys Stacey

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights' reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:41

My castaway this week is Dame Glennis Stacey. She spent almost 40 years in public service, much of it as a regulator. It's often her job to tell the government of the day truths they don't want to hear. She specialises in the invisible work that underpins many of the assumptions we make every day, that our food will be safe to eat, our justice system fit for purpose, or that exam results can be trusted. Her job is to create a system of checks and balances that can withstand crises and the political vicissitudes of any given moment. In a world where quangos, watchdogs, and select committees don't always get the best press, she's a powerful advocate for their ability to hold institutions to account. She says, fairness is at the root of it all. You walk into chaotic situations and create order out of them. Dame Glennis Stacey, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. So tell me more about the appeal of walking into those chaotic situations and creating order. Most people would run a mile. Why don't you? Well, I think in a lot of these jobs, you're walking into an organisation that, in one way or another, needs some sort of help. And if you've got the experience and you can sort out some of those really grisly problems that have been lying around for a while, it is very satisfying to make things work better, but also to show good people that are working hard in difficult circumstances that it can actually get better, that they can have someone a champion who'll make it work for them and for wider society. You never, in an interview for a top job, really get told quite what the issues are. You know, you have to get through the door and find out. Have there ever been any particularly nasty skeletons? I've had situations where it turns out the organisation is almost ludicrously underfunded, for example, and then you're pretty quickly into a battle to get that sorted. That can often involve some rather testing conversations with ministers and perhaps one or two appearances before a select committee to sort. Can you give us any examples?

Presenter2:36

The Criminal Cases Review Commission, that was set up from scratch. I was its first chief executive. Terribly exciting to be looking at miscarriages of justice, but it turned out that the presumption made, the funding presumption, was that we could review a miscarriage in three days of work. Well, if you look at something like Bentley or Hanrati, you know, when those cases arrived, they arrived in great furniture vans. We were simply not going to be able to do it any at that time. That was a completely wrong assumption, and we had to get that sorted. You've been described as a serial regulator, and you've worked across a huge variety of institutions and sectors: animal health, probation, criminal case reviews, as you mentioned, exam qualifications. They're all very complex and they're all very different worlds. What do you need to succeed in them? Well, you need a jolly good tool bag, really. You bring something to the party, but equally, there are a lot of good people there working alongside you, and they've got the knowledge and the technical expertise in the subject that you're in. But I do find increasingly in my life that knowing what you're talking about matters. You know, so you're not speculating. You've got the evidence there to show. Knowing what you're talking about, underrated these days, I think.

Presenter3:45

Maybe, maybe you're right. It doesn't get enough press. You're going to share eight wonderful tracks with us today, and it's time for the first. Tell us what we're going to hear and why you've chosen it. It is going to be Loch Lomond. And the reason I've chosen this is because I've got such fond memories of Scotland. As a child, both my parents were working, and my brothers and I, we were shipped off to Glasgow, where my father's sisters lived, usually for the whole of the summer holidays. And there was a freedom up there. And I had cousins that were just that little bit older than me. So I thought they were just fantastic, you know, stylish and edgy and fun. And we just did things that I wasn't quite allowed at home. What kind of thing? Well, getting up in the middle of the night and raiding the kitchen.

Presenter4:28

I remember making crisps, frying up potatoes at two o'clock in the morning with my cousin, because he said you could make crisps and I didn't believe it. I thought they came out of a packet. So it was just fun, great fun.

Dame Glenys Stacey4:41

By yon bonny banks and by yon bonny breeze, Where the sun shines bright

Speaker 24:50

Ron Ronald.

Dame Glenys Stacey4:54

Where me on my throat

Speaker 24:56

True love wherever want to give.

Dame Glenys Stacey5:05

By the funny, funny boy

Presenter5:16

Loch Lomond, sung by Sir Harry Lauder. Taking you back to Holidays in Glasgow. Dame Glennis Stacey, you just stood down at the end of your five-year term as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Probation. What was your biggest challenge in that role? The first, I think, is that the way probation is being delivered at the moment simply doesn't cut it. And we were inspecting and seeing some really rather dismal performance.

Presenter5:40

A first challenge was to make sure the inspectorate itself could inspect well enough and fairly enough to make sure that it was making really solid, valid judgments about what it was actually seeing. Secondly, I think it was to set standards for probation because actually government had changed quite radically how probation is delivered and part of that it had thrown sort of expectations out of the window. So we had to really start and say what good probation should actually look like. But then thirdly, and I suspect over time most importantly, it was persuading government that in privatising much of probation, although it may have had good intentions, it actually wasn't working out as intended and things did need to change. The system was, as you say, part privatised in 2014. Private companies started monitoring low and medium risk offenders and your report, as you also said, was pretty damning. You said it was irredeemably flawed. What's the impact of the feelings in the system on something like 250,000 people who are being supervised? That's right. About a quarter million people are subject to probation services each and every year. And if those services aren't delivered well, then yes, they're more likely to re-offend. The prison population is likely to go up as well. But more than that, if you think it through, those that are committing domestic violence, their wives, partners, and families are living are feared every day of yet another assault. People are living in insecure lives. More people will be sleeping on the streets and homeless and begging and so on. The social implications of poor probation services are quite profound. We tend to focus on the simple issue of re-offending. I understand that. But the wider social effect of poor probation services, it is very serious indeed. So what's going to happen as the result of your recommendations? So government has decided to move towards a unified model with much more of it now being provided through the National Probation Service, which is a state-run service. So we're going to get a more consistent model for probation delivery and it should be at a higher standard than we're experiencing at the moment because the National Probation Service are performing to better standards. But it's not straightforward to make this move. Twenty-one companies now need to come in, for example.

Dame Glenys Stacey7:16

Founders.

Presenter7:53

Into the NPS, so it is quite technically challenging to do it. Robert Buckland, the Justice Secretary, recently at the Tory Party conference promised that the Tories would fix the sentencing system and make sure serious criminals face tougher jail terms. What would the impact of that be on the service, from your point of view? Well, it's difficult to say for certain, but one might imagine that those then being released after a longer sentence may have less of a commitment to reforming their lives. There may be some resentment built up during prison time as well.

Presenter8:24

Time for your next piece of music today. What's it going to be? We're going to hear a really old ditty, Scarlet Ribbons, Harry Belafonte, and I've chosen it because this was an important song to me when I was a small child. My father was a painter and decorator, worked hard at work, but my mother had a load of projects for him at home as well, you know, redoing the kitchen or building an extension. But he was always singing and he used to belt this out.

Presenter8:49

perhaps while wallpapering the ceiling and looking at me and smiling. We had a lovely, happy household. My parents were just great parents.

Speaker 38:56

O

Dame Glenys Stacey8:57

All the stores were closed and shuttered.

Dame Glenys Stacey9:05

All the streets were dark and bare.

Dame Glenys Stacey9:14

Our town no scarlet ribbons.

Dame Glenys Stacey9:21

Not one ribbon.

Presenter9:29

Scarlet Ribbons, sung by Harry Belafonte. Dame Glenn is Stacey. Tell me a little bit more about home life. You were born 1954 in the West Midlands in Wolsall Wood. It was you and your two brothers. We already know that your dad was a crooner, and I know that you learned quite an important lesson from hearing your dad sing while he worked. What was that? That's right. So I suppose innocently I was watching him working and singing once at home and I said.

Dame Glenys Stacey9:38

Please and

Presenter9:53

It must be great to enjoy your job so much. And he said, no, actually, I hate it. But it's what I do to earn a living. And it was a real shock to me at the time that people did jobs that they didn't particularly enjoy in order to earn a living. Of course, it makes a load of sense, but at the time, it was a real lesson for me, and I respected him for that. And it sounds like your dad had quite an optimistic attitude, like both your parents did. They did. They worked to achieve things. I lived on a council estate, and my mother was the only woman I knew that worked, and she worked in a factory, and she did it to get things for us as a family. So by the time I was in junior school, they had a caravan south of Western Supermare, and we used to go there every other weekend. We went out a lot on trips, we had a car. They were purposeful in building a good life for us. What were you interested in when you were little? Well, I desperately wanted a dog, but wasn't allowed that. I did a lot of reading. I had library tickets, so I just was allowed to go and get anything. I got into a bit of deep water once when I got Byron, not realising quite what I was going to be reading. And then into my teens, I had a great English teacher who used to just bring a great hold full of books and just tip them out on the desk, and you could take what you liked. So I liked things like C.P. Snow, read a good amount of Dickens, and, you know, Day of the Triffids. That was just wonderful. You know, those sorts of books that really give you a chance to look at new experiences in life from a different perspective. You moved to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset when you were a teenager. That can be quite a tricky age to relocate. It was. It was a bit of a shock to the system. I was 15 and I'd been in quite a progressive school and then moved to a girls' grammar school, which seemed to me at the time to be tremendously old-fashioned. So, yes, that was a bit of a struggle. I had a friend there, Mary. She happened to move from London at the same time, and so we were natural soulmates and we loved music, so we would save our pocket money and get to see whatever bands we could. Well, speaking of which, it's time for your next disc. Who's it going to be? Oh, this is T-Rex and Ride-a-White Swan. Fantastic. When T-Rex came along, they were just so different, and you know, they were just gorgeous as well. Mary and I went to see them at the Colston Hall, and it was just such a fantastic experience. And is it true that you were invited backstage? Tell us about that. Oh.

Presenter12:16

Yes, we did get an invite backstage. We didn't go because Mary's father was outside in the car patiently waiting to pick us up. Probably just as well. But yeah, we were a bit thwarted. This would have been a very different episode of Desert Island Escs potentially. Possibly. I might have had a different like altogether.

Presenter12:34

We're a tall lad, got the trade in the old days.

Speaker 312:38

Wear a tail hat and a tattooed gown Ride a white swan that the people of a bell dream Wear your head long, baby conquer

Speaker 312:52

Put your bright star in a place around your forehead Say a few spells and maybe there you go

Speaker 312:59

Take a black cat and they sit you on the shoulder, And in the morning you'll know all you love

Presenter13:07

T-Rex and Ride a White Swan. Dame Glennis Stacey, you once described yourself, I think, as the living embodiment of social mobility. To what extent was that potential spotted early by your school teachers? Well, I'm not sure I had it on show particularly. I don't think I was that bright at school. When I was in junior school, I recollect our class being told that we were never going to get anywhere because the way we spoke, we all had West Midlands accents. I remember thinking at the time, well,

Presenter13:35

There you go then. Never mind. I wasn't that ambitious. What about at home? What did your parents think you were going to achieve? I think my parents were really proud when I passed the 11 plus and went to grammar school. But they expected me to leave after my O levels because that's what girls did at the time in their view. So I think their expectation was that I'd leave school, get a reasonable job and then marry a decent guy. You did leave straight after your O levels. And what a first job you walked into.

Dame Glenys Stacey14:01

Us?

Presenter14:04

Yes, there was an explosives manufacturing factory not far from where I lived, and so I went along as an assistant scientific officer. I must say that I didn't cover myself in glory there, and I left after about eighteen months. I looked in the local paper and saw a job advertised. It was actually looking for trainee legal executives, and I thought that sounded really grand. And indeed, I loved it. And I was very fortunate actually. One of the partners I was working for

Presenter14:34

Took me to one side one day and said to me, Look, you can continue doing the job you're doing, but you'll get the least interesting work.

Presenter14:42

And you won't be paid very much either, so you ought to think about getting qualified as a lawyer, and to do that you need to get to university. And I was going out with a guy who needed to get A-level English, so we went to night classes together. Not the most romantic thing, is it? But anyway, and we split up halfway through, but I thought I'll have a go at A-level law, so I bought a couple of textbooks and registered myself to take it.

Presenter15:08

You said earlier that you weren't very ambitious as a young person, but I'm wondering when that started, because you're obviously applying yourself there and taking steps towards a bigger, brighter future. What I discovered there was I really loved the law. Not just the black letter of the law, but the way it played out. It's all about people and relationships, really. The black letter's one thing, but you know, how someone behaves in a relationship or how they give evidence in a witness box, you know, it makes a difference to the way the law is applied. You made it to university rather at the last moment, I think. What do you remember about your first day?

Dame Glenys Stacey15:17

Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey15:18

Yeah.

Presenter15:42

I remember being aware of

Presenter15:46

The range of people at university, you know, there were lots of people from all different backgrounds, including quite privileged backgrounds.

Presenter15:53

and a lot of very well educated people, and I felt a bit daunted by that, and I didn't really know how to study. So I was aware.

Presenter16:02

This was going to be quite tough. I'd worked for about three years and a month, so I was eligible for a full grant, and in fact, that turned out to be more money than I'd been earning through working in the pub and the legal firm, so I felt relatively well off. It's time for your next disc. Why have you chosen this one?

Presenter16:20

So I've chosen Peter Gabriel Salisbury Hill, and I've chosen it because it's just such an uplifting song.

Presenter16:27

Once I was married with children, we used to play this year after year. Everyone sang along with it. And I think it's a strong message really that life can send all sorts of unexpected sort of events in your way and sometimes they can turn out really well.

Dame Glenys Stacey16:43

Climbing up on Salisbury Hill I could see the city light

Dame Glenys Stacey16:53

Wind was blowing, time stood still.

Dame Glenys Stacey16:57

Eagle flew out of the night.

Speaker 316:58

Flew out of the night

Dame Glenys Stacey17:01

He was something that you observed.

Speaker 217:01

He was

Dame Glenys Stacey17:05

Came in close, I heard a voice.

Dame Glenys Stacey17:08

Standing, stretching every nerve.

Dame Glenys Stacey17:13

I had to listen, had no choice.

Presenter17:17

Peter Gabriel and Salisbury Hill, all about embracing the unexpected, Dame Glennis Stacey. So you graduated from the University of Kent in 1977 and the next few years saw you become a solicitor, marry your first husband and become a mother too, first to Jess, then 18 months later to Tom. Yes. What was the plan? Were you expecting to combine work and family life or not? Because many women wouldn't in those days. That's right. At the time the expectation was that you left work and I did, although I did do a couple of mornings a week of work from home. Things did change though for me when my son was two because my then husband unexpectedly was made unemployed and so it was pretty clear to us that the sensible thing to do was for me to get back to work. I was a solicitor, I could earn enough money to keep the family.

Dame Glenys Stacey17:34

Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey17:40

That's right.

Presenter18:03

How did you greet the prospect of going back to work? Oh, I I wasn't looking forward to it at all. I remember telling my mother about it and uh her approach was suitably robust. You know, she said, Well, you've spent years studying at the state's expense. It's about time you went to work and

Presenter18:17

paid it back. Short trip there. That's right. But you know, when I went back to work I did find it hard initially just to be away from my children. And I did find this new determination in me. I thought the next time a promotion opportunity comes up I'm going to apply for it. And that was the first time I'd felt any sort of ambition.

Dame Glenys Stacey18:19

Short trick that.

Presenter18:37

You made the move from private law to your first big job in nineteen ninety seven. As you mentioned, that was as CEO of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. How did you come to apply? I'd been working in uh the job I was then in for about ten years while the family were growing, and I came to a point.

Presenter18:55

People listening might have recognised this, they might have come to it themselves. Or I just woke up one day and thought, hang on a minute, I'm working really hard and I'm vastly underpaid.

Presenter19:05

And I thought, well, what am I going to do about it? So I went home that evening, got a map out, drew a circle around where I was living at the time, and I thought, the first opportunity that comes within that circle, I'll make myself apply for it. And it was first chief executor of the Criminal Case Review Commission and was very fortunate in getting it. What did the job involve? It was setting up this organisation from scratch. So this was to review alleged miscarriages of justice after the debacle of the Birmingham Six. And so when I joined there, we had a chairman and little else really. And you also arrived to a huge backlog of cases. What were some of the most memorable? Han Ratti, everyone will perhaps know of Han Ratti. That was a murder conviction that his family were appealing. There was a long-standing common view that Han Ratti was innocent of the murder and he was hung for it. As it turned out, we did have irrefutable evidence that he had committed the crime. We were very surprised to find it. This is modern day techniques using DNA. We did get an order from government to be able to exhume the body. That was a first. But we did get to the root of it.

Dame Glenys Stacey19:49

His family

Presenter20:15

It's time for your next piece of music. What are we going to hear? Oh, we're going to hear a Wagner piece, The Ride of the Valkyries. This really has a great deal of resonance for me about a period in my life, two thousand and seven.

Presenter20:27

When I was chief executive of an organization called Animal Health, and we dealt with

Presenter20:32

a small outbreak of foot and mouth disease. I was the field commander for the response to that.

Presenter20:39

But the deputy chief vet at the time, Fred Landegg, was hugely experienced, and sometimes when you're in the heat of the moment a bit of levity helps. And Fred had this tune on his phone. This was his ringtone. Yeah. And whenever I heard it I knew that something was afoot, but he was on top of it.

Dame Glenys Stacey20:53

Yeah.

Presenter22:01

It really is the perfect ringtone, part of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir George Schulte. Dame Glenna Stacey, so by 2007 you were dealing with a much-feared outbreak of foot and mouth. The 2001 outbreak had been absolutely devastating. What was the day-to-day atmosphere like? The organisation has two jobs. It deals with emergencies, but day to day it's actually working hard to

Presenter22:27

make sure that a good number of regulations, all about the safety of the meat on your plate, really, are adhered to by farming. So vets were busy day to day anyway. Now a good number of them

Presenter22:40

Had actually, if you like, they'd got war stories about 2001. Some of them had left home on a Friday afternoon to check out a herd and come back eight months later. You know, it had been a really traumatic experience. Some of them, maybe about one in ten, actually had been broken by it. So there was definitely a really strong legacy there. But these vets knew what they were doing. So when I got there, I did think to myself, well, the next big test will be the next big outbreak of an exotic disease. Fortunately for me, we had three years before we then had. It was actually a bout of avian influenza. Do you remember? We had about a dozen influences. Yeah. But we were ready. Tell me a little bit more about 2007 then, because you're dealing with the situation on the ground. What was that like day to day?

Dame Glenys Stacey23:18

Doesn't five by one, yeah.

Presenter23:27

So it's all run from London. You're there for the duration. We were encouraged, I think, to try and get one day a week off, but that's actually enormously difficult, particularly if you happen to live in the North, as I did at the time. You might go home, get your washing done and come back again.

Presenter23:41

You're meeting at seven in the morning at noon and at perhaps seven at night, stand-up meetings. You're discussing what you've done overnight, what you're about to do. The chief vet would be making the key decisions and also facing the public and the media and politicians as well. There would usually be daily meetings at Cobra, which I would attend with the chief vet, and then private meetings with the prime minister as well. It's very important in these situations that you keep the faith of the prime minister that you are on top of this disease. Obviously, most prime ministers don't have a deep knowledge of one exotic disease or another, so they're at a disadvantage. So, part of it is simply explaining what you're doing and why, and what is likely to perhaps happen. Didn't you have to ask Gordon Brown for a day off so that you could get married? Yes, foot and mouth 2007 came at a very inconvenient time for me. And my lovely husband was left before the wedding organising my flowers and agreeing the table seating arrangements. Let's have some more music. This is your sixth. I've chosen Saint-Sans Piano Concerto number two in G minor. I went to see it performed live at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham with my husband, and I was just so uplifted and moved by it. It's a tremendously difficult piece to perform, and to see the pride and relief and joy on the faces of the pianist and the orchestra and the conductor as it concluded, I'll never forget it.

Presenter26:10

The second movement of Sanson's piano concerto number two in G minor played by Stephen Hough with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. And that's for your second husband David. He's a keen pianist. Did he play piano for you when you met? Was it part of the wooing process? Oh, definitely, and I fell for it. Which piece won you over?

Dame Glenys Stacey26:32

Peace.

Presenter26:33

Rhapstein Blue, I think, when I heard him play Gershwin, who would not be moved by that. It was very difficult not to put it on my eighth, but he didn't give me a ninth.

Presenter26:43

Dame Glennis Stacey, you've said that being a regulator is not always a recipe for popularity. No. Well, in 2011, you became the chief executive of the exam regulator Ofqual. You implemented the government's changes to the design of the GCSE English exam in 2012 and many students didn't achieve the grades that they'd expected. And you and OfQual received huge criticism. In fact, you were taken to court in case you eventually won.

Presenter27:08

You said it was a very difficult time for you professionally. How did you get through it? I think it probably was the most difficult time of my career, because it was very plain that something unfair had happened.

Presenter27:20

Regulation had not been able to prevent that unfairness happening.

Presenter27:24

And that's a sober reflection for me, that you can't always make things right. Just to explain, in that case, a new qualification that had been designed some years before had been examined for the first time in twenty twelve. The national results looked healthy. But underneath that there were huge variations between schools. Now my first thought as a regulator regulating was that these pesky exam boards must have done something awry, but actually they had not. They had acted fairly and awarded fairly.

Presenter27:55

We were therefore at a loss to know exactly why these variations had occurred school by school, but we did set about finding out why. We had to build new systems there to interrogate very large data sets school by school, class by class. And there we found that while the situation was complex, there were a number of changes to the qualification which perhaps not every teacher had fully understood. But it was also clear that a good number of teachers had been overenthusiastic in the way they had marked students' coursework. So really it was a question of trying to explain that, but we were not successful in the sense that proceedings were issued against us, and then it was a question of making sure

Presenter28:39

we were able to get our position across in those proceedings. Is one of the downsides of a job like yours the fact that the public only really hear about it when something's gone wrong, when somehow it's failed?

Presenter28:50

Well, if you call that a downside, yes, but the public have an expectation that things shouldn't go that wrong that often, you know, and my job is to make sure they don't. I mean, I don't expect to have the public

Presenter29:01

Praising me for that. I think a quote from you was that the most you can expect was grudging respect. I was probably at off-core when I said that.

Presenter29:09

Yes, being a regulator it is quite a nuanced job. You need to have very good political antennae and you need to take a measured view of the evidence that you are collecting. And it really requires a fair amount of hindsight, clearsight and foresight and a bit of luck to get that right. Let's go to the music. It's your seventh. So I've chosen I Shot the Sheriff by Bob Marley. I think it's a great song. I loved it when I was at the Criminal Case Review Commission where it was surprisingly rare that someone actually acclaimed their innocence when they applied to us. They might say that they'd had an unfair hearing or they'd been stitched up by the police.

Presenter29:46

It wasn't often that they started by saying they were innocent, interestingly. But sometimes you'd get a situation where someone would say to you, Well, I didn't commit that particular crime because I was committing a much worse one at the time. And it's a pretty good alibi, really.

Dame Glenys Stacey30:01

Uh

Presenter30:02

Yeah.

Presenter30:03

All around in

Dame Glenys Stacey30:05

My own

Presenter30:06

Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey30:06

Uh

Dame Glenys Stacey30:07

They're trying to track me down.

Dame Glenys Stacey30:12

They want to bring me in.

Dame Glenys Stacey30:15

Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey30:17

For the killing of a DVD

Dame Glenys Stacey30:22

For the last

Presenter30:26

Would I say that?

Dame Glenys Stacey30:33

I shot the share

Dame Glenys Stacey30:35

Sherry if the buttons wear it was insulting

Presenter30:40

I Shot the Sheriff by Bob Marley and the Whalers. Dame Glennis Stacey, you're now working as a founder member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and you're looking into the digital space which is apparently very difficult to regulate. What do you think are the biggest challenges facing us there? Well this is an enormously exciting role actually. So we've got enormously large data sets now in the public and private domains and also we've got the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and the issue for us as a country is to make sure that those things are used and developed for the public good. Terribly difficult to work out how one might actually regulate it but this organisation created by government is trying to get a grip on that and doing some very good work.

Presenter31:24

Do you think as we spend more time online and in the digital world, our expectations about public life being regulated are changing? I'm not sure. And one of the things that we're doing is seeking public opinion. So do you know how your data's used? Do you care? I mean, we can assume that people don't know and that they do care, but it may not be quite like that in reality. I do think that we are very used to the convenience actually of how we use the Internet, particularly now. And some of the controls that might help to steer things in the right direction might make that experience slightly less convenient for us, and we may not be patient about that.

Dame Glenys Stacey32:00

Same

Presenter32:01

Very interesting area. Remains to be seen. You received a damehood for your services to education in 2016. There's nothing like a dame. How was it to be one? I was absolutely thrilled. I love being a dame. The damehood was for service to education, but also, in effect, for doing some quite difficult jobs over quite a period of time. And I thought that was great to be recognised for doing difficult jobs that aren't always in the public eye. We've still got one more disc to go, so let's enjoy that now. This is from Mozart's Cosifantuti, just a beautiful piece of music and singing. This is where men are going off to war, and it's a bit of a lament, but actually, in typical opera style, they're not really going at all. So there's a sort of tongue-in-cheek aspect to it as well, but it is tremendously moving.

Dame Glenys Stacey33:00

A screen on board.

Speaker 333:03

Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey33:23

Oh sweet.

Speaker 233:24

The breath is free.

Speaker 233:29

Uh

Dame Glenys Stacey33:29

Yeah. Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey33:29

Happy Christmas.

Presenter33:55

Part of Suave Sia Elvento from Mozart's Cozy Vantute sung by Renee Fleming and Sophie von Otter and Michaeli Pertussi with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Sir George Schulte. So Dame Glenistace, it's time for your next challenge. Isolation on your desert island. What's the first thing that you'll do when you get there? I'm going to take a good look around and see where I'm going to start planting my garden. So you're a keen gardener? I have come to gardening late in life, but yes, I really do enjoy it. Well I'm going to give you two books to take with you, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You can also have one of your choice. What would you like?

Presenter34:33

I'm going to take the Oxford Book of English short stories. It's a lovely thing, great variety of stories in there. So I'll be able to choose the right one for whatever mood I'm in. And what about the luxury item? I heard that you feel I've been rather too lenient in adhering to the rules on this one. Well, I am a regulator. I'm bound to be reviewing it. Go back to doing it. Yes. Well, I hope this is going to fit the criteria then, but I'd like to have a selection of seeds. I will be very keen to create some sort of garden and to nurture things along. So hopefully you'll let me have those. I certainly will. Absolutely. And finally, if you were forced to save just one of the eight tracks that you shared with us today, which would it be? Salisbury Hill, because it's so uplifting and it's about a life-changing event.

Dame Glenys Stacey34:50

So I'm bound to be reviewing it to doing it.

Dame Glenys Stacey35:04

And I salute.

Presenter35:14

I think this is going to be a life changing event for me being on this island, so I'll take that one. Dame Glennis Stacey, thank you very much for sharing your desert island discs with us. Thank you for the chance.

Presenter35:33

I wish Glennis every success in cultivating her island garden. At least she'll have plenty of sun and perhaps a bit of rainwater too. As a keen gardener, I'm sure she'd be interested to know of the many horticulturalist and green-fingered experts who've been cast away before her. The Desert Island Discs back catalogue includes Monty Donne, Christopher Lloyd and Sue Biggs. In 2015, Kirstie Young interviewed the garden designer Dan Pearson.

Speaker 335:56

Tell me then about the very first.

Speaker 335:59

little bit of garden that you ever worked on.

Dame Glenys Stacey36:03

I had um a troll collection when I was oh I only had about one troll at a time.

Speaker 336:08

Troll, like the little dolls, the little with the crazy hair.

Dame Glenys Stacey36:09

With the crazy hair.

Speaker 336:10

Yeah.

Dame Glenys Stacey36:11

Uh

Dame Glenys Stacey36:11

and the constant smile. And I used to make troll gardens which were basically three bricks with a slate and then a roof on the top. And after a while, I was probably about five, I realized that actually the gardens were much more interesting than the trolls were because the things that were on the top were growing. And I was incredibly lucky to have very supportive parents. My mother grew the vegetables and dad grew the flowers. And we had a wonderful neighbour called Geraldine Noyes who was a retired history teacher. And she said, come into my garden whenever you want, the door's always open. And she had this amazing garden. She was a naturalist.

Speaker 336:51

So this then, you say around about five, that would have been the m the mid sixties. You were born in nineteen sixty four, and it seems to me that your parents your father was a fine art lecturer and also a painter himself, and your mother had a background in uh textiles and design. Was your house inside? Was it full of your dad's paintings and your your mum's work?

Dame Glenys Stacey37:08

Um it was a ma a house of makers, really. Mum was always making something, and Dad had a studio in the garden which he'd go out and retreat into that smelt of oil paint and you know all those lovely things that you remember from being a kid. And he would spend time with us in there if we wanted, but we kind of roamed around in the garden.

Speaker 337:27

And so this garden was in Hampshire. Was it was it a was it a big garden? Was it a fancy garden?

Dame Glenys Stacey37:31

No, it was a fairly modestly sized garden in a collection of houses in Woodland and we actually moved from that house along the lane to this extraordinary garden in 1976. It was an acre that had been overwhelmed and overgrown and an old lady called Miss Joy used to come out of the hole in the hedge every autumn with her windfalls and homemade hats and she was a wonderful decrepit character, quite frightening. And when Miss Joy eventually had a series of strokes, my mum managed to get us in to help clear the house up and the house was the most extraordinary place with curtains rotted up from the floor and a keebia vine that had got in underneath the skirting board inside the house and the old lady who'd lived there had planted the garden very beautifully we discovered as we started clearing the garden. So for me it was a complete paradise because we'd clear, you know, fell a laurel or push through some bamboo and find a winter sweet growing in brambles beyond it. We had this wonderful magical thing underneath all the undergrowth.

Presenter38:38

Dan Pearson, and you can find that programme and over two thousand more on BBC Sounds. Next time I'm casting away the actor Wendell Pearce, who you may know better as Bunk Morland from The Wire. He's a real music lover, so join us to hear his Desert Island Disc Choices then.

Speaker 239:07

Hi, I'm Alastair Souk and I want to tell you about The Way I See It, a brand new podcast from BBC Radio 3. It's a 30-part series in which we're throwing open the collection at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to some of the sharpest creative minds of our time. We'll be speaking to comedian Steve Martin, writer Roxanne Gay, musician Steve Reich and many, many more. I'll be your guide throughout the series, so join me as I explore one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world. If you'd like to hear more, just search for The Way I See It on BBC Sounds.