Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
Zoologist and journalist who led a zoological expedition to Persia and wrote a book about it, later worked as a reporter and magazine editor.
Eight records
The eight records for this collection haven’t been catalogued yet.
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
What part of the country do you come from?
I was born in the Thames Valley near Cookham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire, and I now live in London and have done for the last fifteen years or so.
Presenter asks
What was your first scientific interest? What started you as a scientist? Was it in the family? Was it an early thing of bird watching?
Bird watching was a very strong thing in the family, but no, it wasn't a scientific family. I don't know, at school you had to sit on one side of the fence or the other, and I sat on the science side very willingly.
Presenter asks
You were in a [bailiel?] — what did you read? What was your study?
I read zoology.
Presenter asks
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Anthony Smith
This download is the only extract the B B C has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley. Anthony, what part of the country do you come from?
Anthony Smith
I was born in the Thames Valley near Cookham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire, and I now live in London and have done for the last fifteen years or so.
Presenter
What was your first scientific interest? What started you uh as as a scientist? W was it in the family? Was it an early thing of bird watching? Or how did this all come about? Ooh.
Anthony Smith
Bird watching was a very strong thing in the family, but no, it wasn't a scientific family. I don't know, at school you had to uh sit on one side of the fence or the other, and I sat on the science side very willingly.
Anthony Smith
So did science for the last two years at school and then had three or four years in the Air Force and during that time I decided that I would like to write but wanted to go on to the university and I'd put my name down when I was eighteen for taking a scientific career and the more I thought about it the more that seemed a sensible thing to do even though I wasn't going to take it up because it would be a kind of modern language. It would enable me to speak to a lot more people and understand what they were on about. Even though I wished to write afterwards.
Presenter
You were in a a bailiel. What what did you read? What was your study?
Anthony Smith
I read zoology.
Presenter
And as an undergraduate you led
Presenter
A zoological expedition for the university.
Anthony Smith
I went on an expedition because it's one of the nice things that you can do at a university, make use of those superb long holidays, three and a half months in the summer. Term itself is a bit of a holiday, but the holidays are even more so. And I and a group of friends we decided to go to Persia. Suddenly it seemed where else. And so we bought ourselves a second-hand army truck and we drove there and lived in a village down in the south of Persia and did our biological and geographical work and came back again.
Presenter
Beepard.
Anthony Smith
Uh
Presenter
Uh
Anthony Smith
Yeah.
Presenter
Do you oppose Uh
Anthony Smith
Yeah. You wrote a book about that. That's right, because after I'd uh taken my degree and so forth, then what on earth to do? And everybody else was going around getting jobs or becoming researchers or going on for PhDs or so on. And I settled down and wrote about that Persian expedition. It was the only big thing that I'd ever done. And so I wrote a book called Blind White Fish in Persia.
Anthony Smith
So you wrote your first book under pretty edit
Presenter
Public se
Anthony Smith
Yeah.
Presenter
circumstances. What did you do then?
Anthony Smith
Well, I thought it'd be rather nice to write another book under equally idyllic circumstances, and so having had the Persian one accepted, then full of high spirits, I moved over to Italy and wrote another, which um brought me
Anthony Smith
very savagely down to earth again by being not accepted. Oh dear. And by that time I'd run out of what I laughingly called my savings and felt I had to get a job. What was it? So I got a job as a being a general reporter on the Manchester Guardian. Very lucky to get in.
Presenter
Yeah.
Anthony Smith
Uh
Presenter
This was rather useful. It it got you out of the scientific.
Anthony Smith
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Anthony Smith
Yes, well, what suddenly learned a little bit about writing because sub-editors are
Anthony Smith
very cruel people in a sense when it comes to changing the beautiful words that you have written. Yes, I think I uh got educated on the Manchester Guardian. How long did you stay there? Well, it was a short education in many ways because I was only there for a year and then Wonderland struck me again.
Presenter
Yeah.
Anthony Smith
And a friend dangled a bait in front of me. He was
Anthony Smith
running a magazine called Drum, which he wished to be the life magazine of Africa, and at the that time it was only operating in South Africa and what were then the Rhodesias. And he said, Would I like to start it up in British West Africa? Or when it's a rainy day in Manchester, that comes along as a very tempting offer. So off to West Africa I went.
Presenter
Now this was a magazine for a Negro readership. This must have presented problems for a white man who didn't even know Africa.
Anthony Smith
Very much so, yes. Uh it was fun and also the problem. I mean of course it's got to be for a Negro readership in the sense that in Nigeria the whites even in their heyday were outnumbered 3,000 to 1. So if you're only selling to the one then it's not a very good magazine. No I was suitably humble in that I couldn't write the kind of things that they were going to be interested in. I didn't know the ins and outs of politics which were fascinating for them. I certainly didn't know what kind of short stories were good. I was there as the person trying to ease himself out of a job teaching people to become photographers and writers in a rather sub-editorial way and being amazed at their choice of stories and personalities to write about. For example the cover girl which we had to have on this glossier magazine, I knew perfectly well which of the ten photographs on my desk I preferred.
Presenter
If you're only selling to
Anthony Smith
and had a batting order for them. And everybody else in the office disagreed with me, so I thought they were they were wrong. But we took the pictures out into the street and every passerby agreed with them, never with me. So I became more humble.
Presenter
Type.
Presenter
Then after you had stayed with Drum for a year or two, you undertook a very long motor bicycle ride indeed.
Anthony Smith
Yes, well, drum was an exhausting job. It really was seven days a week, and I slept in the office, and after sleeping in the office for two years, you feel you want a break.
Anthony Smith
And I was paid off, given my money, and a Union Castle ticket back to this country. That seemed rather a dull way of coming back to England and to no job. So I cashed the ticket and bought a small, unpowerful motorcycle, because the map as seen from South Africa from Cape Town, where I rarely was,
Anthony Smith
Looks so enchanting, and what a wonderful way to go back up the great imperialist route of the Great North Road, up Eastern Africa, and that's what I proceeded to do. How long did it take you?
Anthony Smith
Well, I was rather idle and I was just eking my money out by staying with friends and by saying that Joe down the road said that you could put me up and that kind of thing. So it took me a very comfortable five months.
Presenter
Could that trip be done now? I I suppose one it'd be a job to get the necessary visas going through all the
Anthony Smith
Alas, alas it couldn't. I was in at the final stages of the empire, so to speak, and very grateful that one could just waltz through. But these days, of course, the South Africa has very much cut itself off from the rest of the world, always being cut off by the rest of the world. Rhodesia, as we know, is a different kettle of fish from Zambia, which is just north of it. Tanzania is having a bit of a problem in Kenya and Uganda now. No, I think it would be very, very difficult.
Presenter
That's a shame.
Anthony Smith
Yeah.
Anthony Smith
Uh
Presenter
So you came back from that long ride. Did you come back to another regular job?
Anthony Smith
Yes, uh alas I was short of money again. I got married and uh yes, I had another short go on the Manchester Guardian, then a shorter go as the literary editor for a magazine called Truth, which then died under me rather quickly, bad luck and then leapt ashore onto the Daily Telegraph, where I was science correspond.
Presenter
Abundant. Yes.
Presenter
You developed an enthusiasm for a virtually extinct form of transport.
Anthony Smith
Yes. I don't know whether this was the effect of working on the sixth floor of the telegraph for so long and looking out over London and thinking it'd be rather nice just to drift away and drift over it all.
Anthony Smith
I don't know what started off my interest in ballooning. Maybe it had been that motorbicycle trip, because that was exceedingly rough, and I felt there maybe was a better way of seeing the planet than just going by a motorcycle over it and meeting every bump. And I felt it would be nice to go up in a balloon, and somehow I was stirred into this even more by discovering that there was no balloon maker in England, no ordinary balloon, and no pilot who could teach me how to fly one. So by that time, I decided to be one. Well, how did you set about it?
Anthony Smith
I wrote letters to lots of people and then it all ended up with a Dutch couple who are balloonists, they call the Boosmans, they went on their honeymoon by balloons, so they're real addicts. They couldn't make me one, but they found a Belgian who had a suitably large attic who could make me my balloon. So equipped with that, I then went to Africa, where else. To do what? Well, to fly this thing. I felt that it would be such magic in a country that is wild and open and no electricity wires and masses of big animals galloping along, just to sail along over the top of all this. Anyway, that was my dream. Yes. And observe. Just observe, observe, to be up there in a rather godlike or womb-like manner, looking down on it all from a height of a couple of hundred feet, not jerking around in some Land Rover, or jerking around even more on a motorbike, or walking, for heaven's sake, just drifting. What's the longest trip you did? The longest five hours was as much as we could coerce the balloon to be stably up there. In fact, the earlier on the day we set off, the better it was, because then it was calmest. Yes.
Presenter
You are, I believe,
Anthony Smith
President of the British Balloon Club. Well, I used to be, I've now been ousted out by the new generation. I went to the.
Presenter
But there are other members.
Anthony Smith
Uh Oh, very much so, yes, because although my balloon was the first in this country for a long time.
Presenter
Very much so.
Anthony Smith
There are now, I believe, about sixty pilots and about fifty balloons, and it's uh incredibly the fastest growing form of aviation, if you can twist the statistics, so that um you know there are many more this year than there were last year, and it is accelerating phenomenally.
Presenter
Bravo. All due to you on the sixth floor of the Daily Telegraph Building.
Anthony Smith
I think all due to the fact that we all of us just have a
Anthony Smith
A longing just to be up there and let the ground pass underneath us without even having to walk. Uh
Presenter
Good. Uh
Presenter
What other major projects, Antony? A number of trips to Brazil, I know about.
Presenter
Uh
Anthony Smith
Yes, I was very fortunate to be able to be attached as correspondent or scribe to a British scientific expedition, forty-five scientists in all, that went to the Mato Grosso, that is the area that we've all heard about in that Colonel Fawcett went there and died there. It's a part of Brazil not very far away from the coast, about 700 miles directly inland, but very wild, and there have been Indians living there until very recently. Alas, roads are now being carved through all that part. Alas the Indians are having a very rough time. But science, fortunately, was able to leap in into this virgin territory and take note of all the stuff that was there. And I went three times to Brazil and hung around behind the scientists, find out what they were up to, went and visited Indians, found out how they were faring, and generally saw how the world's largest tropical rainforest was faring. Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
You wrote a a long and successful book called The Body, um a biological depiction of humanity. Probably the first book on biology of which the feature film rights have been sold. Yes, well that was very odd.
Anthony Smith
Odd.
Presenter
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Smith
Yeah.
Presenter
What's the
Anthony Smith
Fortunate. I I knew the director of that film, a great friend of mine called Roy Battersby, and he was wanting to make a film and hit upon the same subject as I had hit upon for wanting to make this major book. So I wrote The Body and he made a film, The Body.
Presenter
An interesting project nearer home than most of your projects, Operation Seashore.
Anthony Smith
Yes, well, we all go down to the seaside. We're all addicts for the seashore in this country. We love it even though
Anthony Smith
The wind whips the sand around our ankles on most days, and we all walk up and down the beach, and I thought how nice it would be to go right round Britain and became more fascinating on thinking that it was six thousand miles long. Is it really? That's a major gender. It's here to Vladivostok.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
For example, yes.
Presenter
And you must have found some rather horrible things.
Presenter
Uh
Anthony Smith
Well, yes, alas, alas, um, you know, the sewage from six million of us goes untreated straight into the sea, that anybody afloat on any kind of a boat throws all his rubbish overboard and that ends up at the high tide mark. Uh yes, it is much too precious a place, this coastal heritage of ours, to be treated in this cavalier fashion, and so we tried to publicise and make noise about that fact. I should think so.
Presenter
You've done a great deal of radio and television through the years.
Presenter
Done a
Anthony Smith
Bet yes. Uh great.
Anthony Smith
Uh That was a nice television series. I mean a nice and it was fun to do.
What did you do then [after writing your first book]?
Well, I thought it'd be rather nice to write another book under equally idyllic circumstances, and so having had the Persian one accepted, then full of high spirits, I moved over to Italy and wrote another, which brought me very savagely down to earth again by being not accepted. Oh dear. And by that time I'd run out of what I laughingly called my savings and felt I had to get a job. So I got a job as a general reporter on the Manchester Guardian. Very lucky to get in.
Presenter asks
This [magazine] was a magazine for a Negro readership. This must have presented problems for a white man who didn't even know Africa.
Very much so, yes. It was fun and also the problem. I mean of course it's got to be for a Negro readership in the sense that in Nigeria the whites even in their heyday were outnumbered 3,000 to 1. So if you're only selling to the one then it's not a very good magazine. No I was suitably humble in that I couldn't write the kind of things that they were going to be interested in. I didn't know the ins and outs of politics which were fascinating for them. I certainly didn't know what kind of short stories were good. I was there as the person trying to ease himself out of a job teaching people to become photographers and writers in a rather sub-editorial way and being amazed at their choice of stories and personalities to write about. For example the cover girl which we had to have on this glossier magazine, I knew perfectly well which of the ten photographs on my desk I preferred and had a batting order for them. And everybody else in the office disagreed with me, so I thought they were wrong. But we took the pictures out into the street and every passerby agreed with them, never with me. So I became more humble.
Presenter asks
Could that [motorcycle] trip be done now?
Alas, alas it couldn't. I was in at the final stages of the empire, so to speak, and very grateful that one could just waltz through. But these days, of course, the South Africa has very much cut itself off from the rest of the world, always being cut off by the rest of the world. Rhodesia, as we know, is a different kettle of fish from Zambia, which is just north of it. Tanzania is having a bit of a problem in Kenya and Uganda now. No, I think it would be very, very difficult.
“Bird watching was a very strong thing in the family, but no, it wasn't a scientific family. I don't know, at school you had to sit on one side of the fence or the other, and I sat on the science side very willingly.”
“I wrote a book called Blind White Fish in Persia.”
“I was suitably humble in that I couldn't write the kind of things that they were going to be interested in. I didn't know the ins and outs of politics which were fascinating for them.”
“I was in at the final stages of the empire, so to speak, and very grateful that one could just waltz through.”
“I thought how nice it would be to go right round Britain and became more fascinating on thinking that it was six thousand miles long.”