Professor Peter Hennessy

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. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:46

My castaway this week is the historian Professor Peter Hennessy, Lord Hennessy of Nymphsfield. He's one of the UK's leading contemporary historians, chronicling post-war Britain and, in his words, helping to preserve the curiosity of the species. His in-depth knowledge of British politics was honed over 20 years as a Whitehall correspondent for The Times. He was so good at eliciting stories that 1 PM issued an edict banning civil servants from talking to him, making his name in the process. Switching his press pass for an academic post, he obtained a PhD and became Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London, and he was made a crossbench life peer in 2010. He has written about the intelligence agencies, nuclear weapons and the British Constitution, on which he is an expert. But he's interested in human stories too, as we've heard in his long running Radio 4 series Reflections, interviewing people who made the political weather.

Presenter1:46

He says, I'm happiest with the family, and when a piece of weapons grade gossip that's very funny and not malicious comes my way. Peter Hennessy, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy1:56

Shilla

Presenter1:57

Dominance, a tree to view.

Professor Peter Hennessy1:58

With a

Presenter1:58

Delighted to have you. So you enjoy a delicious slice of gossip, Peter. I mean, is that part of the job description of a historian, do you think?

Professor Peter Hennessy2:06

When I'm being facetious, I would describe contemporary history as gossip with footnotes. Gossip is the lubricant of society in many ways, however we wrap it up.

Presenter2:15

But what about your subjects? Because many of the people that you're writing about are of course still alive and kicking.

Professor Peter Hennessy2:21

Well, one of the joys of being in the House of Lords is that I get to have lunch with my exhibits.

Professor Peter Hennessy2:27

And they'll say things like, we couldn't tell you this at the time, but we can now. I think there's a particular attraction for contemporary history. I hope it applies to the readers as well, Lauren, and it's this. It's rather like going to see a football match on a Saturday. If you've been to the football match and the Premiership match, you'll still watch it on Match of the Day. You'll also read the reports in the following Sunday's newspapers, the next day's newspapers, because you want to see what other people made of your experience. But of course, my

Speaker 12:49

Uh

Speaker 22:49

Uh

Professor Peter Hennessy2:54

Really serious scholarly friends think it's just journalism. But there again that's what I came from.

Presenter2:59

Mm-hmm.

Professor Peter Hennessy3:00

So it's a journalistic approach mixed with an archival approach lubricated by gossip.

Presenter3:05

I do get the sense that you're particularly happy in the archives that you mentioned. Your working life, a lot of it has been spent very happily rummaging through archives and documents, especially the National Archive at Kew, which I know has a special place in your heart. You call it frozen history.

Professor Peter Hennessy3:20

Prozen history is

Presenter3:20

Do you still get a thrill from being so close to the beach?

Professor Peter Hennessy3:23

I love it.

Professor Peter Hennessy3:25

Because you see a document there, and it is f it's frozen history, and you think you tr you warm it up, and you get the people to warm up, and then they talk to you. And the trick is not to look back in anger and shout at them. It's it's all too tempting to say, But surely you realize that. Why didn't you try it this way?

Professor Peter Hennessy3:41

But going back and moving in with them, I think, is a particular pleasure.

Professor Peter Hennessy3:45

It's time for your first disc, Peter. What have you chosen?

Professor Peter Hennessy3:49

The first one is The Slow Train, Flanders and Swan. I grew up in the last of the age of steam.

Professor Peter Hennessy3:55

And perhaps one of my most intense memories, which will cling to the Velcro of memory when everything else has slid off, will be on Shap Fen in a banker locomotive in August 1961, when it was too wet to climb in the Lake District. And with Dad I went up on this banking engine, shoving this express over the top of Shap.

Professor Peter Hennessy4:14

Running back down to T Bay with the wind howling and the rain lashing. Pure delight, pure heaven. No more will I go to Blandford Forum.

Speaker 14:26

Yeah. And more

Professor Peter Hennessy4:27

Yeah.

Speaker 14:27

Do you

Speaker 14:29

On the snow

Professor Peter Hennessy4:30

Train from Midsummer Northum and Lumbyro.

Professor Peter Hennessy4:38

No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat, At Cholton come Harney, or Chester the Street.

Professor Peter Hennessy4:47

We won't be meeting. Okay.

Presenter4:51

Flanders and Swan and the Slow Train. So, Peter Hennessy, let's head back to your time as a steam train enthusiast as a child. You're the youngest of four, with three older sisters, and you've said you were very lucky with your sisters. What did they bring to your childhood?

Professor Peter Hennessy5:07

Masses of love

Professor Peter Hennessy5:08

See, they called me Didhams. In fact, they called me Didhams until they were quite old in life.

Presenter5:13

Because there was quite a gap, wasn't there? You were the youngest by some. I was the youngest.

Professor Peter Hennessy5:16

I was the younger I wasn't meant to be there's a Catholic family. I'm the example of the rhythm method not working.

Presenter5:23

So, Peter, you were born in London, 1947, and your father, William, was a chemist. You've described him as eccentric. In what way?

Professor Peter Hennessy5:31

Well, he introduced me to rock climbing and um I remember in in the fifties in Finchley we we he was taking the huge hemp climbing rovers before the nylon ones which were rather chic.

Professor Peter Hennessy5:42

back to a friend's in North Finchley,'cause we'd borrowed it from after in the Lake District.

Professor Peter Hennessy5:47

And he he got on a bus with black shoes, black ankle socks, terrible sort of Colonel blimp shorts, and an open neck shirt. If they'd been a County the equivalent of a County cricket sport for eccentricity, you would have opened for Middlesex, you know.

Presenter6:02

And and what about at home? You know, he he sounds like he was quite a solitary person in some ways.

Professor Peter Hennessy6:07

It wasn't a particularly happy home, because mum and dad didn't get on that well. Dad was a clever man, he was very interesting, and I did love him, but he took a rather dark view of life and human possibility. I think he was a disappointed man.

Professor Peter Hennessy6:20

And Mum, however, was bouncy and jolly, and talked all the time, which irritated him.

Presenter6:25

And what why do you think that was? Why was he frustrated?

Professor Peter Hennessy6:29

When he didn't complete his university degree after the Great War, I never understood quite why. And I suspect he had a habit of telling the bosses how to do their job better than they thought he was in a position to do. So he could be out of work even in London in the nineteen fifties, which took a lot of doing, actually.

Presenter6:47

And tell me about your mother, Edith. How do you remember her?

Professor Peter Hennessy6:51

Exuding warmth. I I I quite I love the chat. Di the what drove Dan up the wall I really rather like, particularly when she got together with her sister, Auntie Molly.

Professor Peter Hennessy7:00

Uh they were sort of Lancashire ladies, but Auntie Molly ran a pub in Newport, and I sit at the end of the table abo in the in the in the flat above the pub.

Professor Peter Hennessy7:08

and listen to them gossiping about the family and blackguarding their husbands and

Professor Peter Hennessy7:13

It's something like Thor Heard on speed actually, but

Professor Peter Hennessy7:16

And I loved all of that.

Presenter7:18

Your elder sister Kathleen first sparked your interest in history. How did it happen?

Professor Peter Hennessy7:22

She was an undergraduate at Exeter when it was part of London University, before it became an independent university, reading history. And Kathleen then trained to be a history teacher. And for Christmas nineteen fifty eight and we've still got it, it's with the family in the Northern Isles at the moment.

Professor Peter Hennessy7:38

Um R. J. Unstead is looking at history.

Professor Peter Hennessy7:41

which was beautifully written with lovely illustrations and drawings. And because of my Catholic childhood, I was quite keen on being a monk for a while. Puberty took care of that, if I could be candid, a few years later. But I remember in particular there was a wonderful drawing of how a monastery worked, its internal spiritual economy and its external rural economy. And Living with History was just the right Christmas present for me in 1958.

Presenter8:06

We've got to make room for the music pizza. Your second choice today, disc number two. What are we going to hear?

Professor Peter Hennessy8:11

The opening movement of Bach's Italian Concerto on the harpsichord played by George Malcolm. I went with mum and dad in Stroud, we moved to Gloucestershire by this stage, in the early sixties, one Sunday afternoon.

Professor Peter Hennessy8:23

To a chamber concert.

Professor Peter Hennessy8:25

And it was just the vitality.

Professor Peter Hennessy8:28

I've never forgotten it. It's also one of those pieces of music, Lauren, which I suppose everybody's got them, where they burst into your head if something good and unexpected has happened to you. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum and it lifts me.

Professor Peter Hennessy8:43

Let's go, eh?

Presenter9:44

Part of the First Movement, a box Italian concerto played by George Malcolm. So Peter Hennessy, you were a good eavesdropper as a child. I wonder how that helped you discover more about politics?

Professor Peter Hennessy9:56

I can trace it back to the early 60s when my grandma in Liverpool lived through a great age and I can't remember it was whether her 100th birthday or 101st, but my reactionary old uncles and aunts in Liverpool, who I was very fond of, but they were terribly right-wing, were denouncing every conceivable Labour politician they could remember. And I think Harold Wilson had just become leader. And I remember thinking, it can't be as simple as that. And I went back home to Gloucestershire and got all the books I could on post-war British politics out of the library and discovered indeed that it wasn't quite as simple as that.

Presenter10:26

You've credited the welfare state with being instrumental in shaping your view, your outlook on life too. When did you first realise how important it was?

Professor Peter Hennessy10:37

I realized quite early on that dad being unemployed a lot of the time, we we reli we lived off state benefits. And he was forever deriding the welfare state. And I used to think this is a bit odd because without the welfare state we'd be stuffed.

Presenter10:50

There was also the shadow of the Cold War, which loomed large over your childhood. How much did you know about what was happening? And were you worried about it, frightened?

Professor Peter Hennessy10:53

Which link

Professor Peter Hennessy11:01

I was worried once or twice but even at the time of the Cuban missile crisis I thought we'd somehow muddle through. But we all you didn't have to have a degree in physics to know what a thermonuclear bomb did, the hydrogen bomb. The enormous destruction that we visited on our islands in a matter of minutes if it had all gone wrong.

Presenter11:18

And what did it feel like years later when you were able to read newly declassified documents about that time?

Professor Peter Hennessy11:25

Well, they still carry a chill, they really do. And then when I got access to the World War III bunker under the Cotswolds, and when you go in there, you see a kind of 1960s telephone exchange. A judge would have been down there with royal pardons already signed to reprieve looters so you wouldn't have to execute them. It's the most extraordinarily terrifying place. And when you go into the small little room, it's not like Doctor Strangelove's big board, this being Britain, as a kind of Ikea number, tiny, with a table and a viewing area. That's where the retaliation would have been launched from if a British Prime Minister and the Inner War Cabinet had got down there in time. When I did the rounds of the literary festivals, I love the literary festivals, where the secret stayed, quite often somebody would wait till the end and come up and say, I was part of that, you know, and I did this bit. And I always wondered about that bit you were talking about, because it was all done on a need-to-know basis.

Speaker 212:17

Uh

Professor Peter Hennessy12:19

And I'm ever one lady.

Professor Peter Hennessy12:21

I was very moved by this. She said, I lost my husband a few years ago, and he was a doctor, and he was assigned to one of these bunkers for three months. He'd have to leave myself and the family.

Professor Peter Hennessy12:31

Did it matter what he was doing down there? I said, it really did matter. Yes, it did.

Professor Peter Hennessy12:36

And she said, I'm so relieved you've told me that. I mean, I was deeply moved by that, and so was she.

Presenter12:41

Peter Hennessy, it's time to hear your next piece of music, your third choice today. What is it and why are you taking it to your island?

Professor Peter Hennessy12:48

George Folly.

Professor Peter Hennessy12:50

Why don't women like me? Now Georgia's always mattered to me. I grew up in that kind of strange period between music hall, which I was too young for, and Beatles. And I love rock climbing. I was terrible at it. But my great friend from school, from my time there, Howell Thomas, who was very graceful on the rocks. He was in the Lake District one foul wet day on Great Gable, just round from the Nape's Needle.

Professor Peter Hennessy13:12

And he was what we used to call gardening. He'd gone off I don't think he'd gone off the route, but the gully was full of muck and moss and he was flinging it out, you know. I couldn't see him.

Professor Peter Hennessy13:21

I was linked by the rope, and he said, Sing window cleaners, will you? This voice came from somewhere up on the rock, you know, carried down by the wind.

Speaker 113:25

Somewhere up on the rock.

Professor Peter Hennessy13:29

And he obviously wanted me to reassure him that everything was all right. And I stood there on my ledge, thinking, Now I go window clean in, to earn and on this Bob, you know, classic George. And so it stayed with me, George, for me, throughout. And um it's indescribably awful.

Professor Peter Hennessy13:45

But anyway, here we go.

Speaker 213:46

Yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy13:47

Now I know I'm not handsome, no good looks or wealth, But the girls I chase say my flame face Will compromise their health Now I know fellas worse than me, bow-legged and boss eyed

Professor Peter Hennessy14:03

Walking out with lovely women clinging to their side Network women like them, like men like those Why don't women like me?

Professor Peter Hennessy14:14

Look at Empress Joseph.

Presenter14:16

George Formby, Why Don't Women Like Me? I have to say, Peter Hennessy, you had quite the twinkle in your eye when you were describing that song. You you did use the phrase indescribably awful, but from the look on your face I knew that was a compliment.

Professor Peter Hennessy14:28

Loved every bit. Savoured every word.

Presenter14:32

Peter Hennessy, as you told us, when you were twelve the family relocated from London to the village of Nympsfield in the Cotswolds. Why did you make the move?

Professor Peter Hennessy14:41

Dad had read in the Universe, the Catholic newspaper, an advert for an old s s sixteenth century coaching inn.

Professor Peter Hennessy14:49

and a Catholic family were renting it out. So we lived there for a few years. I was I it was quite high up, seven hundred feet up, and the winters were quite fierce in those days, particularly the nineteen sixty three winter. Exquisitely beautiful place.

Presenter15:03

Your father had an ambition to be s we would call it self-sufficient these days. What was his plan?

Professor Peter Hennessy15:09

Well, it was to make enough to live off and to send me to Downside, the Catholic public school. And that all failed. But as it was, thank God he went the potato crop went wrong, so I went to Marling School, which suited me wonderfully well. And we had three streams of teachers. We had those who'd come in in the 30s when to get a teaching job in the slump was a great thing. Those who'd come back from the war and done the crash training course. I mean, think what they'd seen and heard and done by the time they were 23. And Eric had come in, Eric Pankhurst, on the first to be educated under the 44 Education Act. He came from a big family in the Potteries that couldn't have afforded to send him to Oxford.

Professor Peter Hennessy15:48

And adol adolescent boys are not the most self aware, I don't think, but I was aware of that. I knew how fortunate I was to be lifted on the tide that they produced for me.

Presenter15:58

Eric Pankhurst was your history teacher and he became a real guiding light for you. How did he inspire?

Professor Peter Hennessy16:04

Inspire you.

Presenter16:04

Yeah.

Presenter16:05

Yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy16:05

He would send me about every three months a brown paper envelope full of cuttings of things newspaper cuttings that he thought that I just might not have had time to read. And it's about five years ago now, I think he died, and I went to speak in his honour in the Methodist church in Stonehouse in Gloucestershire.

Professor Peter Hennessy16:23

And I mentioned this. I said, Eric would send me these packets, and one arrived not long before he died. And over the tea afterwards, his his Shirley, his widow, wonderful lady, said, You're wrong about Eric. He was working on another envelope for you when he died. Now that's unsurpassable, Lauren. He was trying to broaden me still.

Presenter16:41

It's time for some more music, I think. Disc number four. What are we going to hear next?

Professor Peter Hennessy16:46

And why have you chosen it? Schubert. Somebody described listening to I was probably Beethoven, but it certainly applies to this bit of Schubert as eavesdropping on genius.

Professor Peter Hennessy16:56

And this for me is the closest I ever get to eavesdropping on genius.

Professor Peter Hennessy17:00

It is beauty beyond description.

Professor Peter Hennessy17:02

And it's the Adagio.

Presenter18:04

Part of Schubert's string quintet in C major, performed by the Amadeus Quartet with cellist Robert Cohen. Peter Hennessy, you read history at Cambridge and a few years later started your career as a journalist at The Times. Now you chose Whitehall as your beat. Why?

Professor Peter Hennessy18:20

Charlie Douglas Hume, the home editor, said, find something to work up that we don't cover much in the paper. And so I decided I'd have a crack at Whitehall. And I thought that wouldn't it be wonderful if as a journalist one could do on a weekly basis, perhaps even a daily basis, report these great institutions as institutions, as a kind of amateur anthropologist.

Presenter18:39

But just to paint a picture of what it was like in those days, it was notoriously a very closed shop. And obviously, not everybody liked the idea of you asking tricky questions, including Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister. So he issued a memo banning everyone in the civil service from talking to you. How did it actually happen?

Professor Peter Hennessy18:59

My friend Douglas Allen, who became a great friend of mine, was head of the civil service, and I went to see him and I said I'm hoping to start writing on the civil service. And he thought he'd tell number ten and he sent them a memo. So all these are declassified now in the National Archive. So Harold asked Robert Armstrong, who became Cabinet Secretary later, to send round a memo on his behalf, the Prime Minister's behalf, telling everybody in every policy division in Whitehall I wasn't to be talked to.

Professor Peter Hennessy19:24

And I went in to see Charlie Douglas Hume and I said, You know about official secrets, don't you? D having been defence correspondent.

Professor Peter Hennessy19:31

Harold has banned me.

Professor Peter Hennessy19:33

He said, Well, why is he banjo? I said, You told me to find something to write about. I'm just about to start writing. They've heard about it.

Professor Peter Hennessy19:39

And they're trying to shut me out. He said, this is magnificent. Just go back and hit them. Just do it.

Professor Peter Hennessy19:43

So owe it all to Harold, really?

Presenter19:45

Yeah, and and you said the documents have been declassified now. You must have seen them.

Professor Peter Hennessy19:50

Oh yeah. What was that? And I've I've got Robert's memo saying the Prime Minister instructs me to ask you and all that.

Presenter19:51

And I d

Professor Peter Hennessy19:56

And um I I was a bloody nuisance to them really. I was quite proud of this though in a pushy sort of way because

Professor Peter Hennessy20:03

In'seventy five, I think it was, the incomes policy, that was the year of incomes policy, they hadn't recruited enough people to do the security betting in Whitehall, and they were falling a year behind.

Professor Peter Hennessy20:13

So I wrote this up as a story.

Professor Peter Hennessy20:16

And there was a case, a recent case, which I knew about and alluded to, carefully disguised.

Professor Peter Hennessy20:21

But then that made them realise I really did know about a particular case and also the problems they were having.

Professor Peter Hennessy20:27

And I'm on the f tube coming into work one day. And you know how on the London Underground, Lauren, people think that nobody else is listening, even though you're up each other's armpits, you know? This chap said to me, um,

Professor Peter Hennessy20:37

I read something very interesting about you the other day. The Cabinet Office have sent anal an analysis round about you,'cause that story you had about positive vetting falling behind, it was a bit near the bone, you know. So they wondered who else you were talking to.

Professor Peter Hennessy20:51

And they're a bit worried about you, so they've done a bet on you.

Professor Peter Hennessy20:54

And they've obviously got your wife's file from the post office because she was working in telecoms then. I said, yes, but what does it say?

Professor Peter Hennessy21:01

It says it's okay. In Cabinet Office language it says you're a bloody nuisance, but in the end you're on the side of the Queen. I was so proud of that line, because it's not a bad job description. Blanche then.

Presenter21:11

Yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy21:11

Yeah.

Presenter21:12

It's time to go to the music, Peter.

Presenter21:14

Disc number five. What are we going to hear next?

Professor Peter Hennessy21:17

Tom Lehrer the Elements. I grew up with Tom Lehrer because of those older sisters getting the L P's of the

Professor Peter Hennessy21:22

Before I went to Harvard on a Kennedy scholarship in 71, I met Brian MacArthur, who was just about to move from being the Times Education correspondent to setting up this new Times Higher Education supplement.

Professor Peter Hennessy21:34

And he said to me, Send me some articles from my America page. And I think the second one I sent him

Professor Peter Hennessy21:41

Was on Tom Lehrer, who lived quite close to where I had we had an apartment. I said, I want to do a profile of you portraying you as Harvard's greatest single contribution to Western civilization this century. Do I detect a note of flattery in your voice? he said.

Professor Peter Hennessy21:56

And I've got into journalism because of Tom. Mr. Lehrer, thank you so much. I owe you everything.

Speaker 122:04

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, anicoli, odimium, neptunium, germanium and iron ambericium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium, and lanthanum and osmium, anastatine and radium, and gold, protactinium, and indium and gallium.

Speaker 122:19

And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

Speaker 122:23

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium, aboron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium, and strontium and silicon and silver and samarium, abyssothromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.

Presenter22:33

The Elements Tom Lehrer. Peter Hennessy, you went through a low point as a journalist in 1977. I mean, what happened?

Professor Peter Hennessy22:41

Be terrible, yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy22:42

Somebody brought a name into the paper, The Times, of the alleged fourth man in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby affair.

Professor Peter Hennessy22:50

And I was asked to check it out.

Professor Peter Hennessy22:52

And this chap's name came up in the early days and was ruled out pretty well straight away. And the deeply unprofessional thing was me just concentrating on the early bit, when for some reason he was suspected,'cause he knew some of them. And I made the terrible mistake professionally it was unforgivable also in human terms it was,'cause it brought distress to his surviving family.

Professor Peter Hennessy23:11

And the story went out under my name, and immediately somebody who I still won't be able to name called me in and told me about Anthony Blunt.

Professor Peter Hennessy23:18

Before that had emerged. So I realised I made a mistake on a Herculean scale. And I persuaded William, William Reesmog, the editor, to let me recant and apologise to the family in a letter to the Times itself. I deserved to lose my profession. That was so, such an awful thing to have done. And it bothers me to this day. And when the Hitler Diaries came in, a few years later,

Professor Peter Hennessy23:44

The Times was going to break the story on a Saturday morning so that the Sunday Times would do the big spreads from the diaries. And it it stanked to me there was something wrong with this. I having read diaries before I wrote one myself, it was all too neat. It was one Sunday Times review scoop after another to get you through several months of scoops, you know.

Professor Peter Hennessy24:04

All on the same notebook kind of notebook, as if Hitler had gone into Woolworths in Berlin.

Professor Peter Hennessy24:10

In July 39, saying I'll never be busy for the next five years. I'll just buy a stack of notebooks. It's not like that. It's mess.

Speaker 124:15

Good

Professor Peter Hennessy24:17

and I ref I declined to write the story.

Professor Peter Hennessy24:20

And Charlie Douglas Hume, the editor, called me in and said, you don't believe a word of this, do you? I said, no, I don't. So I said, can I cash my check-in on this one? Because I went to the stake a bit for that story when we got the wrong fourth man. And the problem then was we didn't just stop and start and go right back to the beginning and say, are we sure of this? Well, that's what I'm doing now. Are we sure of this? But it didn't make any difference.

Presenter24:44

And and you were right, Peter, because th those the Hitler diaries were forgeries.

Professor Peter Hennessy24:48

They were, yeah. I wasn't greeted with the hosannas of a grateful a grateful paper when I did that, but I tried to do that as a way of, I suppose, purging myself. But I'm still to this very day, Lauren, ashamed of what I did.

Professor Peter Hennessy25:00

It's time for disc number six, Peter. What have you gone for? This is Chas and Dave, London Girls. Now, I'd be lost without Enid, my wife, and my daughters, Polly and Cecily. And this song, they would sing, well, I would join in, mind you, on our long car journeys to the north to see my sister Terry, who's the only one of my sisters surviving now, because we lost my sister Kathleen as well, as Maureen, when she lived in Yorkshire, in our old Vauxhall Cavalier, going up the A1, the Great North Road.

Professor Peter Hennessy25:30

We'd put Chas and Dave on the tape and belt out London Girls, because that's what my girls are, London girls. And I can see I'll see them grinning away, shrieking this song.

Speaker 125:41

Some people sing about Deutsche girls and girls from California They might be alright for a night, alright, but don't trust them, I won ya I've been to the East and I've been out west and I've been all the world around But I ain't seen none come anywhere near the girls from London

Speaker 225:58

And now

Speaker 126:00

Yeah.

Speaker 226:00

Give me a land and girl every time.

Speaker 226:05

I'm gonna find one of me

Speaker 226:10

Uh

Presenter26:11

London Girls by Chat and Dave.

Presenter26:14

Peter Hennessy, in 1992 you left journalism for academia and became Professor of Contemporary History at the University of London. Now the Constitution is a subject that's fascinated you both as a writer and as a teacher. You have used the word squishy to describe it in the past, which I rather like. Why are you so enthralled by it?

Professor Peter Hennessy26:34

It was so elusive because it's unwritten, you see. And I felt like um Mel Cowd and Gertie, Someday I'll find you. Moonlight behind. I've still not found it. In my who's who entry I've got under recreation searching for the British Constitution. It's sad really, isn't it? I don't think I ever will find it.

Presenter26:49

Not at all. Not at all. Well, you and and some people say you're the closest thing we've got, you know, in in those key moments you're you're the person that that we turn to when there's a hung block.

Professor Peter Hennessy26:58

Well I'm now going to do the biggest name drop you've ever had on your wonderful programme. Oh, let's have it.

Presenter27:02

Hello.

Professor Peter Hennessy27:03

The Queen came into my seminar. Isn't that good? In nineteen ninety two, just after I got to Queen Mary in the Mar down the Marlin Road, to open our new building. She's patron of the college she was, rest her soul.

Professor Peter Hennessy27:14

And we were reading Questions of Procedure for Ministers, which is now the ministerial code which has caused Prime Minister Johnson all that bother. And I remember the Queen's very good at signalling it's time to move on to the next bit of her programme. And she said, the British Constitutional has always been puzzling and always will be. And I thought, but didn't say, well, you're it, Marm. And if you don't know what it is, how are we going to find out what it is? But it brought great consolation to my students that even the Queen didn't know what the Constitutional was.

Presenter27:43

After Her Majesty died last year, you gave an interview here on Radio Four where you talked about the end of the post war epoch with a great deal of emotion. I wonder whether you were surprised by your personal response to this historic moment, to her passing?

Professor Peter Hennessy28:00

I was partly surprised, the inten the intensity I f I knew I would be shaken by it, because apart from family, and now just Terry, the one who's left, she's the the con my continuous memory.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:13

and I've always admired her deeply.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:15

But I was shocked by how much I felt it. And when I did weep.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:20

And I knew I would at some point, but I didn't know when it would be, and it was when her coffin passed the cenotaph. It was the juxtaposition of the two that set me off.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:29

I'm feeling it now, bet.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:31

We don't know what her politics were, her private politics at all, or what she thought about this or act bit of the welfare state or not, but she was the queen of the post-war decencies.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:40

And she never put her foot wrong constitutionally. Not once did she put her foot wrong. So I.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:46

I I find it very hard to be a a detached constitutional historian w when we lost the Queen.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:52

But

Presenter28:52

What's he Yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:53

Next piece of music, Peter. It's disc number seven.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:56

It's the Skyboat song.

Professor Peter Hennessy28:57

the pure version, I call it, to which is the drums and pipes.

Professor Peter Hennessy29:01

I went to Scotland with Maury, my younger sister, and dad and mum, in a hired Ford prefect from Finchley.

Professor Peter Hennessy29:08

Covered in camping equipment before the motorways, it was a Herculean journey and Dad's erratic driving. The Sky Boat song always brings it back, and I used to sing it to the girls. They'd sing Sing Speed Bonnie and I'd do speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing, all this. And I'd do the thunder crashing and the waves roaring.

Professor Peter Hennessy29:25

Baffled our foes stand on the shore, follow they will not dare And I'd have the foes swearing in a kind of Glaswheet and Socky Hall Street on a Saturday night

Professor Peter Hennessy29:34

Having it up like mad for the girls, but this is the pure version, which goes straight into me and stays in.

Presenter30:09

The Skyboat Song The Pipes and Drums of Leenish. Peter Hennessy, you started writing a diary during the Covid pandemic and you've kept it up ever since. What do you write about and and what do you get out of writing it?

Professor Peter Hennessy30:22

It's a necessary humiliation for a history because you go back and you see what you got wrong. Because it goes onto the page like hot magma from a volcano. Particularly if I'm cross, the kind of cathartic flow of magma. And you can get things terribly wrong. And also because not too well these days with a bit of Parkinson's and other things, I can't get into the archives, which as you say, I love very much. So my primary source is that diary.

Presenter30:47

Looking back on devoting your career to studying and chronicling your own times, how do you see them from a personal perspective? Do you think this has been a good period to be part of?

Professor Peter Hennessy30:59

I wish my generation could have done better for the country.

Professor Peter Hennessy31:03

I don't believe in a generational guilt. I don't believe that at all. It's just that with our upbringing and what we were taught and the quality of our universities and our schools.

Professor Peter Hennessy31:13

and the quality of the health provision. We should have had more of the instinct of the late forties generation than we have, the wartime late forties generation. I think it's still there. It's just beneath the surface, and Covid brought it out. The better angels of our nature were suddenly flapping around everywhere.

Professor Peter Hennessy31:29

And the clapping uh for the health service and the banging of the pots and pans. That was the sound of a people rediscovering themselves. I do live in hope, Lauren, I really do. There are some days of the week when I think I've

Professor Peter Hennessy31:40

I'm Pollyanna to a fault, you know, bonkers, Pollyanna. But I still think it's there for the taking, because we haven't changed that much beneath the surface. The country's brimming with good and decent and capable people. We're better than this, you know.

Professor Peter Hennessy31:52

We really are better than that.

Presenter31:54

Well, your optimistic spirit is going to come in very handy, Peter, because I'm about to cast you away on your desert island. You're going to need it. How do you think you'll get on there? Will you try and establish a rhythm to your day early on?

Professor Peter Hennessy31:58

Doesn't I

Professor Peter Hennessy32:05

I think I'll be hopeless at the practical things and uh I shall miss the family unbearably, the grandchildren and the girls and Enid and

Professor Peter Hennessy32:12

And my sister Terry. Well, uh I'll miss Terra uh vast quantities of people really,'cause I'm a fairly gregarious soul. I'll just have to be brave about it, won't I?

Presenter32:20

Well, on the upside, I was I was wondering whether, you know, the island might have its own history, perhaps artifacts, maybe even records of previous inhabitants. I wondered whether you might go on the hunt for them.

Professor Peter Hennessy32:29

Whether you might join the hot

Professor Peter Hennessy32:31

Wouldn't that be fun i if I came across a cache of documents that would change how the way we saw something?

Presenter32:37

Mm.

Professor Peter Hennessy32:38

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Presenter32:38

Well, we can give you one more track before we send you there, Peter. Your final choice today. What have you gone for?

Professor Peter Hennessy32:44

It's Brahm's German requiem, How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts It's to remind me of my faith, if I need reminding and I don't want to say something facetious or silly on the threshold of the Pearly Gates. It might offend people, you see. So this'll this will get me in the right frame of mind, rather than upsetting the archangels with some wise crack.

Presenter34:04

Brahms, how lovely is thy dwelling place from the German Requiem, the Festival Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Thomas D. Rossen.

Presenter34:13

So, Peter Hennessy, the time has come. I'm going to send you away to the island. I'm giving you the Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare to take along with you, and another book of your choice. What would you like?

Professor Peter Hennessy34:24

It's Ted Hughes's poetry in the making.

Professor Peter Hennessy34:27

I've always wished I could write poetry.

Professor Peter Hennessy34:29

I've spent my entire life shaping words and paragraphs, but I can't do it or not so far. And I'll have all the time in the world to try and get a bit of poetry working, you know. Wouldn't it be wonderful? A late flowering burst of poetry.

Presenter34:42

You can also have a luxury item. What have you gone for?

Professor Peter Hennessy34:45

Yeah.

Professor Peter Hennessy34:45

Unlimited quantities of quality white paper.

Professor Peter Hennessy34:49

and one fountain pen with enough black ink to see me through, so I can write the diary, I can have a go at the poetry.

Presenter34:57

Oh, they're yours. Let your words flow like a river.

Professor Peter Hennessy35:00

Yeah. I hear you.

Presenter35:00

And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves if you had to?

Professor Peter Hennessy35:07

Chasn' Dave, because I've got to have Enid and the girls with me. I've just got to have them there with me.

Presenter35:12

Professor Peter Hennessy, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Professor Peter Hennessy35:16

It's been a delight, Lauren. Thank you so much.

Presenter35:36

Hello, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Peter. I wish him lots of luck with the poetry. We've cast away many historians, including Professor David Olishoga, Professor Sir Simon Sharma, and Professor Margaret Macmillan. You can find these episodes in our Desert Island Discs programme archive and through BBC Sounds. The studio manager for today's programme was Emma Hartz. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be the actor and writer Simon Pegg. I do hope you'll join us.

Presenter36:20

I hear sobbing and I absolutely knew that nobody

Professor Peter Hennessy36:26

Everybody else was in the house.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:28

Uncanny.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:30

It's back. The on-duty flight lieutenant came in white as a sheet.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:35

And he said it's back.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:38

Season 2

Professor Peter Hennessy36:40

Featuring brand new stories of real-life encounters with the supernatural.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:45

I had never been so scared in my life.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:48

I don't believe in ghosts, but I believe in what was in that house.

Professor Peter Hennessy36:53

Subscribe on BBC Sounds if you dare.