Hammond Innes

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This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

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What part of the country do you come from?

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I was born in Sussex, and I've lived most of my life, when I'm in England, in the south of England.

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But uh the inners side Hammond Innes is my surname, you've seen Hammond

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At some stage I hammond managed an inners. And uh the inners sign uh

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is the Celtic sign.

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And I think the Inners Clan is the

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is about the smallest clairn area in Scotland. It's nine miles by three.

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Uh, just east of Inverness, near Culladen. You still feel the Scots Hills cooling? Ah, yes, this is very strong, very strong indeed in me. Not only the Scots Hills, the sense of

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Uh, love of islands, love of the sea. This is what has taken me sailing. Um there's fascination, complete fascination with the sea. It creeps into almost all my books. You went to Cranbrook. Did you show any literary bent at school?

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Well, before Cranbrook, uh at the age of nine I was telling stories at my prep school in the dormitory.

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Uh I started the first school magazine on one of those, tapping it out on one of those

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But in those days you had a circular

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Typewriter rather like a telephone. You prodded the letter and worked it round to the position and then dabbed it down.

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Yeah.

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And I did a whole magazine on that basis. It took me ages.

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Uh then at Cranbrook itself, I was fortunate, this was just after the First World War and the average ability of teachers was pretty low, but I had a man, a wounded man, out of the army who was absolutely dedicated to Shakespeare, to literature, and he passed on very fairly impressionable age.

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uh a great love of words and poetry and

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drama in the big wide sense of Shakespeare and the best of the plays. And I wrote I did actually write a play before I left school.

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What and

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What did you do when you left school? Well, I came out in the middle of the depression. I was dead set on on going into journalism at least, anything that was writing.

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But uh papers in those days were firing, not hiring, but I was very fortunate

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I answered an advertisement and it turned out of course to be circulation and nothing to do with journalism, but the circulation manager

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was so convinced that I was determined that he slung me at the editor, and I started on a city newspaper, which is now the Financial Times, but it was then called the Financial News. I started at seventeen and six a week.

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Can't say I'm much like city journalism, but in retrospect it was the most marvellous training because

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Within three years, instead of still being a Cub reporter, I covered this was paper was run on a shoestring, I covered every branch of writing from the splash to the front page to features.

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to doing miserable little chores, to being on the sub's desk, the whole lot, and interviewing people.

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Uh it enabled me to learn.

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How to go into a new country

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And

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Without any knowledge

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uh literally in a very short time to get to grips with the guts of that area taught me a lot and it taught me to be ruthless, absolutely ruthless, about cutting one's own work.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Were you writing for yourself at that time?

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Oh yes, I was writing

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I'd start in the mornings

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Go to work about eleven, finish work at half past seven in the evening, come back and write till midnight. I wrote four books between nineteen thirty-four

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and nineteen middle of nineteen thirty seven whilst working at a newspaper and also getting married.

Presenter4:03

Were they successful?

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They earned thirty pounds.

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H.

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Huh.

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Oh. And I've killed them now, you know.

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They're finished, they're out of print. But I was learning how

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That's right.

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Then the war started you joined the Royal Artillery. Did that put a stop to writing?

Hammond Innes4:21

No, no, within eight months of joining the army I began

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Writing in the middle of the night on a gun site on Kenley Aerodrome. This was whilst the Battle of Britain, the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, was still going on in the skies. And I wrote, it was.

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Not a very good story, but Attack Alarm is still selling.

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And it's got the atmosphere. The atmosphere is all there of the Battle of Britain. I think it was the only novel written about The Battle of Britain.

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uh whilst the thing was actually going on.

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Then you were commissioned and your military duties took all your time.

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Uh yes.

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Uh

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You were with the Eighth Army?

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I was out in the Middle East. Did my first real travelling at His Majesty's expense during the war. Yes.

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When you were demobilized, did you go back to your old job?

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Well, no, they offered me

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Exactly the same I told you the paper was run on a shoestring. They offered me exactly the same money as I was getting six years before when I joined up.

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And the editor even allowed me to pay for the lunch. Oh, well that was that. That was that. And very kindly my publishers offered me.

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That was that.

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Three hundred pounds a year guaranteed. Sounds

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A very small amount, but it was enough to live on then. Three hundred pounds a year for three years. And you were a full-time writer? And I was a full-time writer and I

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I paid for it all in the first year. Bravo. Now, all your novels have been adventure stories, what used to be called high adventure.

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Yes, I think that's f

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Uh

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Fair enough, there are stories, certainly.

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Uh

Hammond Innes6:02

Yeah.

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Uh How many have there been?

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Uh

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Uh excluding those first four? Yes, excluding those first four in the ones I recognize. Um I counted them up for some reason.

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Uh I happened to count them up only about three days ago. Uh the one I'm working on now, the other

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Australian one is the twentieth. Novels about fur trapping in Hudson's Bay, whaling in the Antarctic, Berlin Airlift. You've always researched your background material on the spot.

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Oh yes. Uh and

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I go to the background first, before thinking about the story. Does your wife go with you on your travels?

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Always when she can. She is

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quite as mad on travelling as I am, and it's very important she's a wonderful critic on the hearth, and it's very important to me to have her with me. She's a writer herself, she's a playwright. Now, among your own novels, which are your favourite?

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I always answer this by saying the last one, or the one I'm working on, uh because the one you've just done, or the one you're working on, you know the struggle and the hard work. Uh this Australian book, for instance, I threw away

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Eight months' work, thirty five thousand words.

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I was telling myself the story, but this goes on with every book.

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I think probably

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I didn't know. The doomed oasis.

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Uh there was a problem there in trying to get across these.

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very strange desert shakedoms at a time before they had been

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completely changed from

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gr uh grown up in the matter of moments from the camel to the Cadillac. Uh this was before that period, these tiny Trushaloman shaktoms along the Persian Gulf. And to get this across, it's always a question of trying to get it across to people who have never seen that sort of thing. This is trouble with Australia. It's so unique geologically in the fauna, the flora, everything about it, that if you haven't seen Australia

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Uh it's very difficult to.

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Get somebody mentally into the country so that they can feel that they've been there.

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Ah, yes.

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Now a number of your novels have been filmed. Do you work on the film versions on the script?

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Uh

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Never, never if I can help it. Um

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But once, once particularly I remember,

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when a well known writer had made a nonsense of it,

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The conversion into film.

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and then another writer, staff writer,

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had made it even worse. They said to me, four days before they were shooting with the whole cast in an expensive location,

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They said, Look, we know it's wrong. I'd sent them a terrific

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thing about how bad it was. We know it's wrong. Can you please do something about it?

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And so I rewrote

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One third of the whole thing, I think.

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in four days flat.

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For nothing.

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And um the only thing I got out of it

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My wife Dorothy and I got uh a week

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In Switzerland on it.

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Do you take any letters of reviewers?

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Uh

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I'd like to say no.

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I do take a lot of notice of the amount of space I'm given in reviews, that's very important.

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Reviews

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Uh I don't think any writer can say that he doesn't take

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If some reviewer slams you, you can't.

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help that your hackles rise or whatever it is.

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But I don't think it makes much difference to one's position. If you get

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Two half columns slamming you.

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You've still got two half columns of free advertising on your name. I mean, it boils down to that, frankly. As long as they spell the name right. As long as they spell the name right, that's all you need.

Presenter9:57

As long as I