John Arlott

Speaker 10:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plomley. I hope you enjoy listening.

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This week, our castaway is the writer and cricket commentator, John Arlot.

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John, how would you feel about being on a desert island for a while?

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I think I wouldn't mind a desert island for a while. I couldn't endure it forever, but uh

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Yes, I think time to contemplate one's toenails without interruption.

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What would you be happiest to have got away from on this island? Noise.

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Any particular noise that sets your teeth on it.

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traffic noise, the noise above all of the juggernauts which really fill me with

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An illogical and for me fairly unusual hate. I just abominate the things that I've been doing.

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Is music important in my life?

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Yes, it is.

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I'm not a serious musician. I don't know very much about it. Associative music, certainly.

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But

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The voice to me

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was so long a professional matter when I was a

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producer and I was an instructor in the B V C training school, I was so concerned with the voice and what could be done with it that I think that almost replaced

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Instrumental music for me. Yes. So that obviously that is a a key to your desert island choice.

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It is, yes. What do we start with?

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Well, start with not the voice at all. Rubenstein's melody and F. Yes. Which does really in fact speak to me because my father, who was

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And the Dickensian phrase, very good to me, was a very

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good, versatile musician who could play wind instruments and string instruments. And very late in life he taught himself to play the piano.

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And it was Rubenstein's melody in F that he used to play and in a way it speaks to me about that very kind man.

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Rubenstein's Melody and F played by Philippe Entremont.

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What's your second choice?

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I think I'd like to Edric Connor, Negro Spiritual.

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A very fine actor and one of the most moving singers I've ever known in my life. And I thought he did something with the Negro spiritual, which I don't believe anybody else ever did better.

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I'd like to pray his mercy pouring down.

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What a mercy pouring down!

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What a mercy for and love What a mercy for and dove my Lord in the heart when I sin a man dies

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Television perandum.

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Salavis foreign Salavis

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My Lord in the heart when I see the man die.

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Etric Connor singing Mercy Pouring Down

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John, you're known as a Hampshire man. Were you born on Hampshire soil? Yes, I was. I was.

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Born in Basingstoke, which can hardly be called, well, I suppose you could call it Hampshire, but hardly call it soil now. Changed a lot since I was there, anyway. As a youngster, what did you want to be? I think I would rather have liked to be a farmer, because if you grew up in the days of the slump, you had the impression that farmers would never be out of work, and everybody else was likely to be. Now, I have it on good authority that you failed your school certificate. What was your first job?

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My first job was in a town planning office, an office boy in a town planning office, one of the early ones in fact.

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And that.

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And then I'm a dun too.

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stores clerk in a mental hospital.

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And then to the police force. Yes, you became a plainclothes man in Southampton. The job of a detective in a seaport sounds exciting.

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You never think of it as exciting if you're doing it, of course, and one did

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Initial

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years on the bait, which probably were more hazardous, if anything was hazardous, than fine clothes duty ever was.

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But in fact Southampton had the reputation, which I think it still enjoys, of being about the cleanest port on the seven seas. And there wasn't an awful lot of violence. There were places where occasionally

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You like to go with another policeman, but on the whole it wasn't a bad place. It wasn't a very dangerous life at all. Except of course during the air raids it really was bad. Yes, indeed. How was your cricket at that time?

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Oh, passionate but indifferent. You did in fact play twelve man for the county. I fielded twelve man for Hampshire on two or three occasions, but I think that was really a an indulgence to my enthusiasm rather than any indication that I was

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Anywhere near county standard as a player. When did you start to write?

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Started right during the war, about 1941 to 42. Never dreaming that anybody would ever publish anything I wrote. What was your first published piece? First published piece of poem called Cricket at Worcester.

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Which was sent by a friend of mine, Sir George Hamilton, in fact, was sent by him to Cyril Connolly, who was then editor of Horizon, is, I suppose, the

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outstanding intellectual publication of the day and

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To my utter amazement, Cyril Connolly published it.

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That was a very promising start.

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Very willing moment.

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Let's have your third record. What's that, John?

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Kind of the Russian Don Cossack choirs. I think this is a quite outstanding example of

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Discipline.

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Balance, poise, timing, singing, culling cat.

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Somebody come on.

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Come on, come on.

John Arlott7:40

Oh yeah.

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Kalinka by the Don Casseck Choir. It was your first writing that brought you into broadcasting, wasn't it? Yes, because I joined the staff as a poetry producer, which I remained for.

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Five years until I went and became general instructor in the training school. I was never a staff commentator, never in outside broadcasts.

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Uh

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You were at the microphone yourself quite a lot, though. I remember you were compere of Country Magazine for Francis Dylan. Yes, I did that. I even did.

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20 questions when Governor Harding took one of his little holidays.

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When when did you start commentating on cricket?

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Quite by accident, and it was sheer accident, I was in the Eastern service broadcasting, that is, to India, Malaya, Southeast Asia, the Eastern Service to the PBC.

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And they decided to let India know that they realized an Indian cricket team had come here.

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They sent me off to do ten minutes a day on each of the first two matches, intending not to do any more. They sent me solely for the reason that

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Since I worked in that section, I was presumed to know how to pronounce the Indian names. That's the only reason I was set. That was the beginning of a very distinguished commentating career. When did you decide to join the ranks of the merry insecure freelancers?

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It must have been about 1952 or three, and I didn't decide it. The BBC decided it by informing me that my outside activities were an embarrassment to the administrators. Would I therefore please either give up writing for the papers or leave?

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Right, another record.

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Yes, this could be a Dylan Thomas, a Dylan Thomas reading.

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Fernhill. Yes. You worked with him a lot in your producing days. I did. According to an RN Taufin Davis, three-quarters of the broadcasting he ever did, he did for me. He had, of course, this unique and this wonderful voice. It was the voice of a man who wrote his poetry, almost engraved it, so that.

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Every word had to have its true value. It used to seem almost to sting it out, spit it out, its utter clarity of isolation of each word as well as each idea. Or let's listen to him reading the opening of his poem, Thern Hill.

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Now as I was young and easy Under the apple boughs about the lilting house And happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes And honoured among wagons I was Prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.

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Uh

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The voice of Dylan Thomas.

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Your cricket commentating must be almost a full-time job in the summer. A great deal of travelling, of course.

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Yes, it's a seven-day-a-week job and everyone forgets the travelling, but the travelling is at times extremely heavy. It's very hard on the players themselves, of course. There must be a great deal of background reading for you, too, to to keep up with it all.

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That's quite painless, of course. One doesn't notice it. I did that from childhood without any thoughts of being a commentator. If I'm interested in anything, I read it automatically. Yes.

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Are there sometimes days when you pray for rain?

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No, rain at a cricket match is a contradiction in terms and a cricket ground in the rain to my mind is the most depressing place on earth. Yes.

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You work mostly on commentate mostly on sound radio. You don't do so much on television. There is, of course, a great difference in approach.

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An immense difference, and such talent as I have.

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It's probably more suited to sound radio as a descriptive ability than to anything else.

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But one makes this conscious change. As soon as you go to television, you try, try to add to the picture, not to describe the picture.

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Through the years, what are the events that have ruffled your famous calm?

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Once I was doing Commentary at Southampton and there was a vertical ladder that went up, I suppose, about 35, 40 feet.

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I was sitting in the committee room, drinking pot.

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And I suddenly realized I was due on the air for the first broadcast after lunch, so I set out.

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I ran down and as I went round the back of the pavilion, the O B engineers were as usual uncomfortably housed in the coal hole. And as I went by I said, All right, I shall be there. Fade the mic up.

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I ran.

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Right.

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Uh

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I shot up the ladder and I'd got almost to the top when I saw my then four-year-old son struggling up the vertical ladder behind me with my very heavy dispatch case in his hand. And I looked out and saw an old policeman friend of mine down on the seats and said, please look after that little boy and got in, put the earphones on and I just missed the announcement. And I heard the girl at Bristol say, all right, we'll go back to John Holliday in a minute. I think that's the only time I'll ever...

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Hail to be on the air. That was a frightening moment.

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There is, of course, a good deal of corrugated iron roof work in commentating cricket, isn't there? There is. It's not as bad as it used to be. There used to be a a green tarpaulin igloo at Leicester, which really was, might have been made to create drafts. It was colder and draftier in there than it was if one had had nothing.

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Let's have record number five. Well, that for me would be a Thomas Hardy poem to Lisby Brown, set to music by Finzi and sung by John Carroll Case. An important poem because it's supposed to indicate a lost love in Hardy's life. One of the things that he tried to conceal and he subsequently bart his correspondence.

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Here is people.

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Where are you now in sun, in rain?

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What is your brow past joy past fade?

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Sweet Lisby Brown, how you could smile, how you could sing.

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How you could smile, how you

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John Carroll Case singing part of To Lisby Brown, the Thomas Hardy poem set by Gerald Finzi.

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Now your other occupations, John, you are of course

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a wine and cricket correspondent for a newspaper.

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And you've written a lot of books.

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What have you written recently?

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Well three, one is a huge book, the heaviest book.

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I've ever written, ever shall write. Uh, in terms of physical weight, in fact, it's this big Oxford companion to sports and games.

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which is supposed to describe and give the history and the outstanding biographies of performers.

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In all the competitive sports of the world. That's a big one. How long's that taken? It was a very big one. Long enough, five years. Mm-hmm.

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And the others?

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Two books about wine, one about burgundy and the other one about champagne, yes.

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Still, uh Hampshire, of course, you've written for the Hampshire magazine for many years, essays. I've done the lead there for twelve years now, and in a way my

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My duty though. I always feel that one. Yes. And it must have been a great joy, John, when all those years after failing your school cert, you were given an honorary MA at Southampton University.

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That was very exciting, very embarrassing, but very exciting. We've got to record number six.

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Well, I think if I'm on a desert island I want a laugh. I'm sure the Yetis would infallibly give me one. And although I believe that the name in the first stanza should be Fairham, which is in Hampshire, and not Wareham, which is in Dorset, where they come from, I'll settle for their version of Buttercup Joe.

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Now I be a truebred country chap. Me father comes from where'em. Me mother she's got some more like I, and well knows how to rear'em. Some folks calls I bacon face and others termit head. But I can prove I ain't no fool, though I be country bred, for I can plow and milk again.

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The Yetis. How resourceful would you be on this island? You could lock up some sort of shelter. I'm not very good at this. And when my

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Middle son Timothy left his junior school and had his valedictory report. Under handicrafts, the master wrote, cheerfully hopeless. And I'm afraid this does rather run in the family. Yes, it's a nice thing to have said about you, though. It's friendly.

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Um, would the frugal living worry you? You wouldn't have much luxury in the way of food or drink. Yes, it would. It would distress me very much indeed. I don't like food in large quantities, but having been spoilt by being the son of and the husband of good cooks, I like good food, not too much of it. Would you try to get away?

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No, I'd be content to wait until I was rescued, I didn't, as long as I didn't have to eat. Right. Record number seven.

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Well, since I'm hoping to be rescued, we might as well have a sea shanty, I suppose, and again, ain't there some splendid

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Discipline, he a voice discipline. This very macabre one called Go Down You Red Red Roses sung by Burl Ives.

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In eighteen hundred and fifty seven Come down, you bunch of roses, come down.

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Come down

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Uh

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We say

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Build up to the gates of heaven. Oh, you pinks and posies, come down, you red, red roses, come down. Saint Peter would not let us in. Come down, you bunch of roses, come down.

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Come down.

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He sent us back to earth again.

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Burr Lives and a Sea Shanty, which brings us to your last disc.

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My last disc I think would be the boar's head carol sung by the Elizabethan singers.

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Some of these don't

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A ball's hand is out.

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With paying some money for each

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Let's go!

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Who's he deserved?

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Just beat you all.

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Which one?

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The Bawshead Carol by the Elizabethan singers. If you could take just one disc out of eight, which would it be?

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I'd take the Dylan Thomas reading of Fernhill.

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It moves me very deeply indeed.

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And one luxury to take with you.

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Perpetually renewed case of champagne. It was Alec Waugh, wasn't it? He said one of the compensations of cryole is that you're learning to appreciate champagne. This will be arranged and your very, very favorite vintage and brand.

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and one book apart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias.

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Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Stones, Tristram Shandy.

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Handsomely bound. Handsomely bound. And the first edition. And a first edition, of which, of course, volumes 5, 7, and 9 were all signed by Stern himself. Yes, he didn't trust his publisher. So announced, they came at in twos, you see. They announced that the only genuine copies had been signed by him. A cautious author. Thank you, John Arland, for letting us hear your desert island discs.

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Very nice to have been with you. Thank you, Ryan. Goodbye, everyone.