Sir William Gladstone

Sir William Gladstone0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is the Chief Scout, Sir William Gladstone.

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Sir William, could you endure loneliness over a long period on this island? I don't really believe I could. On the other hand, I think I am quite good at being alone, provided I have something to occupy my mind, such as books or records. What would be the thing that you're happiest to have left behind?

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Noise, I think the noise and and rush of life.

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Is music a big thing in your life?

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Not a very big thing, but it becomes bigger, I think, if I get more agitated and need something to to calm me and exhilarate. What was your plan in choosing?

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I wanted to

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cover European society from the

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End of the seventeenth century through to

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The early twentieth century.

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because uh that, I think, provides me with all the company I want.

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The historian's approach. Yes, essentially. Where do we start? With Bach, in fact.

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He's a great religious composer, by which I mean that he really feels and thinks what he writes. But I've chosen a rather secular piece, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto.

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played by the Bath Festival Chamber Orchestra with Yhudi Menuin, who is a great hero of mine.

Speaker 42:32

Uh

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The opening of Bach's fifth Brandenburg Concerto, the Bach Festival Chamber Orchestra, with Yehudi Manwin.

Speaker 42:56

Yeah.

Sir William Gladstone2:56

Yeah.

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Let's go straight on to your next record. Well, my next record is Handel's March from Scipio. I wanted to have something from Handel because he typifies 18th-century English life at its best. And I think this is a very splendid recording by Charles Groves with the Royal Philharmonic, which.

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gives you the spirit of Handel, and is the sort of way he'd have liked to hear it played.

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Handel's march from Scipio or Scipione, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves.

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Sir William, you're a great grandson of the Victorian Prime Minister.

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That's right.

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Your seventh baronet. The title evaded the great WE CLADETON. Yes, the title was earned by his father, in fact, who made the family fortune, and was given a baronetcy by Sir Robert Peel. WE was the youngest of four sons. Where were you born?

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I was born at Eton, in Buckinghamshire, where my father was a master at the famous school. Yes, and of course you went there. I went there, yes. I in fact it was my home for my first seventeen or eighteen years of my life. Was it at Eton that you became a scout?

Sir William Gladstone5:02

And as there are

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Actually I I became a scout.

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before that at my previous school, but I went on at Eton and uh enjoyed it quite tremendously.

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What happened when you left Eden?

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I went into the navy. The war was on then. Where did you serve?

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Um I served in a couple of fleet destroyers. We went to the um the Far East, the Indian Nation. It wasn't a very exciting sphere of war, mercifully, but it certainly

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enabled me to see huge areas of the world I'd n never otherwise have seen. And then Oxford? Yes. I read history at Oxford. With a view to what? Did you want to teach at that age? It was when I was in the navy I decided I wanted to become a

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a schoolmaster. I I did think of staying in the Navy, but I thought there'd be a tremendous amount of competition at my age uh range and seniority.

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So I decided to teach. What was your first teaching post?

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It was at Shrewsbury School. I was very fortunate. I was uh appointed there by Jack Wolfenden, now Lord Wolfenden, a tremendously inspiring headmaster.

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And then you succeeded your father at Eton. Well, I didn't succeed my father. He'd he'd retired some years before, but I was fortunate enough to get offered a job there by another great headmaster, now Sir Robert Burleigh and although I wanted to stay at Shrewsbury, I felt perhaps this was an opportunity which I would greatly regret if I didn't accept it.

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While at Eton you wrote some text books.

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Well, yes, we did. Um I say we um myself and one or two colleagues uh simply found there were some gaps in syllabuses we wanted to teach. There weren't the right sort of books or there weren't modern books on a subject and we did write one or two, but they were fairly modest efforts. All on history. Yes, all on history.

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And from Eton you were appointed Headmaster of Lansing. Yes, that was a fantastic stroke of of luck. I got it, my first Headmastership I'd applied for. You were there for eight years. Why did you resign, Sir William? You were still in your early forties when you resigned. Yes, well, I'm very fortunate. I've got a family property, and it was agreed between my father and myself, he was getting on in years then, that that would be about the right time for me to take it over. And I think if one is fortunate enough to be able to alter one's job after about a decade, this is a very good thing to do. Let's have your third record. What's that? Well, um this is Mozart, and I've chosen a very gay movement from one of the horn concertos played by Dennis Braine.

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The latter part of the third movement of Mozart's Horn Concerto, No. three, Dennis Brein, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carijan.

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So you went off to manage the family estates, one in Scotland, a lot of farmland.

Sir William Gladstone9:07

Yeah.

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Yes, yes, farmland and forestry.

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You discovered some remarkably fine and rare wines in the cellars of that house, I believe. That's quite true. It's an enormous house, far, far too large to contemplate living in. And in fact, nobody has lived in it since 1926, when an aged bachelor, predecessor of mine, died. My immediate predecessor, in the meanwhile, was also a bachelor. So there's a house where absolutely nothing had been touched or thrown away for fifty years. Including some pre-phyloxeric clarets in 18th century fortified wine. Yes, we uh there was a great deal of of very ancient wine, connoisseur's wine.

Sir William Gladstone9:42

Yes

Sir William Gladstone9:43

Yes.

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And um we had tremendous fun. We drank everything that was worth drinking in that over the course of ten years and then flogged the rest to connoisseurs who wanted it for its rarity value. Yes. And you also have a castle to run in Wales on Deesside. Well a bogus castle. We've got two castles actually. One's a ruin and has been for about three hundred years. It guarded the great main road from Chester into Wales. But the the one we live in is really a Georgian house clothed to make it look like a castle. And that was the residence of the Prime Minister? Yes, he married a Miss Glynn whose family lived there and he lived there for many years himself, though he didn't own it. It belonged to his brother-in-law, the Glyn, head of the family, and then the Prime Minister's son and grandson inherited it.

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You have his archive there, I believe, a a massive collection of Gladstoniana. Well, we we have, yes. Actually, all his um political papers are in the British Museum, and his diaries were given by his sons to um Lambeth Palace Library, to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Why to Lambeth Palace?

Presenter10:56

They're really a religious document. He was a very religious man, and every night for seventy years he used to record his innermost thoughts and make his confessions, in a sense, in this diary, as well as recording all his daily doings and the immense number of people he met and all the books he read and so on. He's not a literary diarist like Pepys at all, but he's provided historians of the nineteenth century with a tremendous mine of information, literally a mine. I mean, it's not in any order except chronological. And they're being edited now. And my great-uncles, his sons, decided that they should be offered to Lambeth Palace Library because they thought that fitted their character. He was, in fact, a member of the House of Parliament for fifty years, wasn't he? Oh, he was a Privy Councillor for over fifty years. Yes, yes.

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He was Prime Minister on four completely separate occasions. The opposition having been in power between them, he won four elections. And he'd been Chancellor of the Exchequer for eight years before that. Let us have record number four. What's that? Well, record number four I think is the most obscure of my choice. It's for the classical guitar, and it's by the composer Sor, who really wrote for the guitar. Uh it's his sonata, Oppus fifteen.

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Fernando Sor's Guitar Sonata Op. fifteen, played by Ray de Latori.

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When did you become Chief Scout and how did that come about? I became Chief Scout in nineteen seventy two. I'd left schoolmastering by then and I was to a fair extent master of my own time.

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And um Lord MacLean had to give up when he became Lord Chamberlain, and they searched about for someone who knew something about young people and who had time he was prepared to give up, and they they hit on me. Had you kept up your scouting links since Eaton? No, I hadn't really. I had um kept in touch with scouting. I knew what went on, but I'd done very little that was um active. In fact, I think I became known to the person who suggested me originally as a possible candidate for Chief Scout by making a speech in Brighton in which I firmly told a large number of scouters that they must get up to date. The image must be brought up to date. It wasn't due to me that it was brought up to date, but the fact that it had is of immense importance. It has indeed changed vastly from the early days of Baden-Pohl when he adopted a lot of scout training from poor war scouting tactics. Oh, yes, that's true. There are all sophisticated activities. But nevertheless, what one has, I think, to bear in mind is that that Baden-Powell devised this

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in a way long before the Boer War, when he was training soldiers, and what he wanted to do was to bring out the best in them, rather than just drumming things into them, and create resourceful men who were motivated by self discipline and this kind of thing.

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And one of his methods, of course, I suppose, his main method, was ingenuity, making something out of nothing and it's still really the simplest.

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of scouting which is the best. Uh it's what's often known nowadays as survival techniques. How many scouts are there in the world?

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In the world, there are about fifteen million. Quite a considerable number. Indeed, and in this country? Over half a million. And still expanding. Curiously enough, people say you don't see much of scouts nowadays, but there are more than ever. Well, that is because one doesn't see the old scout hat and the ribbons on the tunic anymore. Yes, that's true. There's no doubt we lost something of BP's original style when we abolished the old uniform. But I think it was absolutely essential that we shouldn't get stuck with that old Edwardian image, you know, the sort of music hall boy scout and the sort of knobbly knead scoutmaster. We had to get rid of that. As Chief Scout, have you any major ambition or big innovation that you want to get through during your years of office?

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I've got a lot of ambitions, but my one big ambition is to try to bring more Scouting to the areas where it's very thin or not known. There are a lot of difficult areas in our towns and scattered rural areas where there's very little for the kids, and I think Scouting's what they need. I think it would be of immense value to them if we could expand into those areas.

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Your fifth record, William? Um well, I must have some Beethoven, and I've chosen the Eighth Symphony, and perhaps we could have the the second movement.

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Part of the second movement of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, Karigan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Well, number six. Let's go straight into that. Well, number six is Brahms. Like Beethoven, we must have some Brahms, and I've chosen one of his symphonies, one of these great, tremendous works, conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt with the London Philharmonic. He's he's to me is a great man.

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Part of the first movement of the Brahms' first symphony, Sir Adrian Bolt conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Now, Sir William, your your capabilities, your practical capabilities as a castaway, because if anyone can light a fire by rubbing two sticks together, it should be you. Yes, that's a fair point. I think I'm quite good at making things out of the minimum resources. And cultivation, of course, is your job. Yes, quite true. Yes, I'm I'm um I'm very much involved in farming and uh even more personally involved in horticulture.

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Would you try to escape?

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Oh yes, I'd try to escape.

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not only because I wanted to, but because this would be one of the main exercises for my ingenuity.

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Record number seven.

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This is from Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. I wanted to take with me to this desert island some of the great English music of Elgar, and

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One can get a bonus here because it's the great mind of Cardinal Newman behind it who wrote the The Dream.

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Hurry!

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I believe I truly God is three and God is one.

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And I next knowledge truly one who came

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Richard Lewis as soloist in an excerpt from Elgar's The Dream of Garantius.

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Which brings us now to your last record. Well, my last record is Benjamin Britton. I suppose it's my only modern piece of music, or fairly modern, from Neuer's Flood, Nor's Flood, which I heard performed more than once in Lansing Chapel, where it's immensely impressive. And Britton, as well as being a tremendously lively composer, is a brilliant composer for young people and children.

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An excerpt from Benjamin Britton's Noah's Flood.

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If you could take just one disc of the eight you played at, which would it be? I think it would be the Brahms.

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And one luxury to take to the island with you?

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Obviously, it's a very difficult one, but I would take a watercolour. I've got a watercolour at home by a man called J.B. Pine. Underneath it, it's got the caption, a Swiss scene, but it isn't, in fact. It's a scene from the home counties. It's the Chinese temple, now destroyed, at Virginia Water, near Windsor. And it's got a tremendous calm and depth in it, which I love to gaze at when I want inspiration. Right. And one book, apart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias. Undoubtedly, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Largely because it's about Gibbon rather than the Roman Empire. And it would last a good long time. It certainly would. Thank you, Sir William Gladstone, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it enormously. Goodbye, everyone.

Sir William Gladstone24:08

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.