Professor Alan Gemmell

Professor Alan Gemmell0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty 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 seven, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:32

This week our castaway is a botanist and a biologist and a gardening expert. He's one of the stalwarts of Gardeners' Question Time, Professor Alan Gammel of Keele University.

Presenter0:42

Professor Gamble, how well could you adapt yourself to solitude?

Presenter0:46

I think I could adapt myself pretty well. I'm.

Presenter0:51

In many senses a fairly self sufficient person. I can enjoy being alone.

Presenter0:56

Mind you wouldn't like it to last forever, but I can enjoy it. Of course you spend quite a lot of time on an island anyway, though it's not a deserted one. The island of Arden in the Firth of Clyde. Yes, that's a lovely island. Not a desert island, nor deserted. Beautiful. That's where you have your Scottish home. Yes. How much does music mean to you?

Presenter1:13

It means quite a lot, not in the sense of an intellectual exercise, because I'm not intellectually

Presenter1:21

UNTHANDING OF MUSIC.

Presenter1:24

I'm very much a sentimentalist, as can be fairly clearly seen by my choice of records, and it means a lot in that I can feel quite strongly music. Do you have any practical skill to play an instrument? No, I've practised many instruments, all with notorious lack of success. Do you play discs a lot? Play discs quite a bit, yes. What's the first one you've chosen? Well, the first one I've chosen is in fact one which harks back to my boyhood. I was brought up in Ayr, for example. I went to school in Ayr, and the Burns tradition is very strong in Ayr, and consequently he was one of the folk heroes of my youth. And I'd like to hear one of his poems in a very good setting, sung by Kellas McKellar.

Presenter2:06

And the song is My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose.

Speaker 42:12

Love is like a red, red rose that new is sprung in June all my life.

Speaker 42:25

Love is like a melody that sweet

Speaker 42:32

Neatly played into your

Presenter2:37

Kenneth McKellar.

Presenter2:39

Brought up in Ayrshire, in town or country.

Presenter2:42

In a small town in Trun.

Presenter2:44

As a boy, what were your main interests?

Presenter2:47

As a boy they were very, very clearly defined.

Presenter2:50

I loved golf. This was my primary interest. I rather enjoyed reading and ordinary, you know, things that I think, I hope, every boy enjoys. But golf and I played a lot of rugby. These were my great things at that time. Yes, golf, of course. Well, you were a scratch player, right now, I know, for years. I got to that stage in my prime. And you played in the Scottish Amateur Championship? Yes, I played in that, not terribly successfully, but I survived the first round. Well done.

Presenter3:21

And you went to the University of Glasgow, um, a first class honours degree in botany. Why botany? Who instilled was there any one person who instilled a a love of the countryside?

Presenter3:33

It all arises largely by chance. I think so many things about one's life arise by chance. I really went up to the University in Glasgow to be a chemist.

Presenter3:41

And at that time, it was nineteen thirty, it was during the Depression, jobs were very difficult to get. And on the other side of the road in which we lived,

Presenter3:51

There was a gentleman who was an agriculturalist.

Presenter3:55

And talking to my mother one day, he said If Alan can get a good degree in botany, I can get him a job.

Presenter4:01

So my mother said to me, You're no longer a chemist, you're a botanist.

Professor Alan Gemmell4:02

The mother said to me, You're no longer a kid

Presenter4:06

And so I was. Right. Well, having got you established in your profession, started in your profession, let's have your second record. What's that? My second record is in fact

Presenter4:16

One of these mood pieces which I love, and this is Sibelius Finlandia.

Presenter5:11

Finlandia, the Halley Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbie Raleigh. Your degree in botany was the first of several academic qualifications. You went on to an American university afterwards.

Professor Alan Gemmell5:19

Jimwood.

Presenter5:22

Yes. I went to the University of Minnesota. I got a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in thirty five and um elected to study plant pathology. Went to the University of Minnesota where I studied

Professor Alan Gemmell5:32

Yeah.

Presenter5:35

Really diseases of cereals. But golf carries on there because the first scientific paper I ever published was on a disease of golf course greens. And then back to Glasgow for your doctorate. In in fact, you stayed in Glasgow for several years. I stayed in Glasgow then for several years, yes. And what was your next post? My next post after that was to go down to Birmingham.

Presenter6:00

Where I was working for the Home Office solving crime with the aid of science. Sounds a big change from agriculture, but that was it.

Presenter6:09

Police work. It was really police work. What in fact happens, you see, is that when anyone commits a crime, they leave traces of themselves where they've committed the crime, and the place leaves traces on them.

Presenter6:22

And the role of the forensic scientist is to try to link these two the scene of the crime, the suspected person, together. Yes, the s the odd seed and the trouser turn up. A lot of the links are of this kind. Seeds, hairs, clothing fibres, bits of paper, shreds of tobacco, bloodstains. They're all biological materials. Fascinating, John. It is fascinating. On the other hand, it's terribly repetitive.

Professor Alan Gemmell6:28

Yes, this

Professor Alan Gemmell6:30

A lot of the links

Presenter6:45

Because all the murder cases I was involved in were all very elementary, simple things of someone with an axe and drunk.

Presenter6:52

After that you moved on to the University of Manchester. Yes. I decided, after I'd been there not very long in Birmingham, that an academic career was really what I wanted.

Presenter7:02

And it was just the end of the war, then just after the end of the war, and um a job appeared and I applied for it, and by good luck I got it. And then on to Keel.

Presenter7:14

When it was founded? Yes, we were appointed in the I think it was the October forty nine and the University opened its gates in October 1950.

Presenter7:25

and that we were the first of the new universities.

Presenter7:28

Twelve professors, I think, were appointed. Sounds like the Apostles, that's might have been thirteen, which would sound even worse. But we were appointed really to found a university.

Speaker 27:32

Might have been thirteen, which is

Presenter7:39

And this was the first of the new ones. Nobody had any experience of this before. And it meant you just had to start saying, Do we need a hammer? Yes, we need a hammer. We'll order a hammer. And you started really with the nuts and bolts of the thing, as well as trying to devise courses. Yes, surely. And of course you've also been for many years a Justice of the Peace in that area. Yes, I was fortunate enough to be asked if I would act as Justice of the Peace. And this was very, very worthwhile because it.

Presenter8:08

took me out of the university community and put me right into the middle of what is really the Potteries community. I was in the hundred of Pyre Hill North, which is a magnificently archaic sounding area. And um this gave me lots of contacts outside the university.

Presenter8:24

Let's have another record. What next? Now my next record is really a relic of America. It's Ella Fitzgerald singing her song about Manhattan, which I think is lovely.

Speaker 48:35

Summer journeys to Niagara and to other places aggravate all our cares. We'll save our fares. I've a cozy little flat in what is known as Old Manhattan. We'll settle down right here in town.

Speaker 48:59

We'll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island too.

Presenter9:06

Ella Fitzgerald.

Presenter9:08

You've done a great deal of academic work abroad. You were a visiting professor in the Middle East. Yes, I was at Shiraz University in Persia, Iran.

Presenter9:16

And you've been a biological advisor to various African universities? Yes, I'm.

Presenter9:23

Fortunate in this respect. All these things are luck, really. But

Presenter9:27

A number of my former students from Manchester and from Kiel have got out to African universities and um they've asked me over. And then we were lucky in that Kiel was the first university in Britain to have a degree in biology. I was the first professor of biology. And so when these African universities started up and they thought in terms of a biology course

Presenter9:50

I was asked out to help them construct the course, and to advise them on lines of research that might be profitable to follow.

Presenter9:58

When did you make your very first broadcast? I made my very first broadcast actually from the Texas Centennial Fair in Houston in the summer of nineteen thirty six. What was that about?

Presenter10:11

This was just me as a foreign student. Somebody had picked up the fact that I wasn't a Texan. I don't know how they had.

Presenter10:21

And they asked me if I'd say something about the Texas Centennial Fair on a local radio station, and it came out sounding exactly like Harry Lauder.

Presenter10:30

Absolutely, I got the shock of my life.

Speaker 210:30

Slowly,

Professor Alan Gemmell10:30

Got the shock

Presenter10:33

And you did some wartime broadcasting. Mainly overseas.

Professor Alan Gemmell10:34

That I did some

Presenter10:40

And in nineteen forty nine, I think it was, you joined the panel of Gardner's Question Time. Yes, this was my lucky day. We'll talk about that in more detail presently. Let's have another record. Another of my American memories, and sadly one that won't be repeated, is Bing Crosbie singing June in January.

Speaker 410:58

A clouded moon

Speaker 411:01

Reached across a clouded sky

Speaker 411:04

Winds of January sigh and moan

Speaker 411:11

And yet it's you.

Speaker 411:14

I can see a sky of blue.

Speaker 411:19

Dear the miracle is due.

Speaker 411:23

Good

Presenter11:26

Bing Crosby.

Presenter11:27

Now, as I said, it was 1949. You joined Gardner's Question Time. You were a late comer, weren't you? Oh, yes, I was the boy.

Professor Alan Gemmell11:34

Oh yes.

Presenter11:36

The other two had been doing it for nearly two years before I joined them. The other two being Bill Sauberts and Fred Lodes.

Speaker 211:41

The other two

Presenter11:44

How many editions have you taken part in, then? I've taken part, I should think, in about twelve hundred and thirty around there. I've missed a number when I've been in Africa and this kind of thing. How many of the programmes come from the studio?

Presenter11:57

One and four. Those are the answers to correspondence. Those are the answers to correspondence, yes. And the others, three out of four, all come from what? Meetings of gardening clubs and horticultural centres. Yes, every sort of thing invites us and does. Women's Institutes, Townswomen's Guilds, Gardening Societies, Allotment Societies, Chrysanthemum Societies. We've been to prisons, we've been to all sorts of places. They ask us, and if we can go, we go. Big halls and little halls?

Professor Alan Gemmell12:00

Those are the answers to

Presenter12:23

Yes, back rooms of pubs, Aberdeen Town Hall with overflow meetings. It's really the complete gamut, I should think, of experience in broadcasting. And I believe there's a very long waiting list of towns that are hoping you'll go and visit them. Yes, this can be a bit of an embarrassment. I think at the moment there's something like 1,400 invitations outstanding.

Speaker 212:48

Outstanding

Presenter12:49

And we do about forty-five a year, so we've got our you know thirty years going. Yes, you're all right. Do you record one every week or do you do several at a time? Every third weekend, and this allows me to have two weekends at home, on one of which I either garden or golf, and the other it rains.

Speaker 213:00

Yeah.

Presenter13:07

I'm pretty sure of that. So every three weeks there's a bit of a party. That's right, yes, we meet. And the B B C fixes your hotels. BBC fixes hotels, yes. I'm very grateful to them for doing it.

Professor Alan Gemmell13:08

Is he sure of that?

Presenter13:18

It's rather nice that, um

Presenter13:20

When the secretary writes to hotels and she says we want room for mister Sauerbutts, mister Lodes, and Professor Gemmel, the receptionist thinks Ah, Professor Gemmel, a venerable gentleman, we'll give him the best room with the bath attached and television and everything like that.

Professor Alan Gemmell13:29

Yeah.

Presenter13:36

And the other two are stuck in the garret. Very, very much appreciated by Mr. Lurds and Mr. Sarah. All these questions you asked.

Professor Alan Gemmell13:41

I'm sure.

Presenter13:44

Fifteen thousand, it says on a note I have here.

Presenter13:48

I suppose a lot of the same questions come up time after time. Yes, they're bound to come up time after time. The really surprising thing is that in almost every programme we do there's one we've never done before.

Speaker 213:59

Hmm.

Presenter14:00

And not only is the one we've never done before, that a adds, you know, novelty to it, but the answers change because science is a constantly advancing thing. Of course. Do you ever get questions that stump you? Oh, yes.

Presenter14:13

Not terribly frequently, because my two colleagues have vivid imaginations but we sometimes get questions that stump us simply because we're not getting all the information, or simply because the questioner is wrong. Lady, for example, who stood up and said, Why is it that when I

Presenter14:29

Planted an apple, pip, a pear tree came up.

Presenter14:33

And there just is no answer to this. You can't do anything. You can flannel as long as you like, but you can't answer it. It's a question of fact, isn't it?

Speaker 214:41

Yeah.

Presenter14:42

So 1230 programmes through fog, hail, flood and whatever. You've always got there. We've always got there. Occasionally we've been late.

Professor Alan Gemmell14:47

Who's got that?

Presenter14:52

But we've always got there, um and I hope it continues to be. Record number five. Now one of the things I love, as you've probably realized by now, is the spoken word, and I love plays.

Presenter15:04

And this record is Robert Donnet reading part of T. S. Eliot's murder in the cathedral. Now.

Presenter15:12

Think for a moment.

Presenter15:14

about the meaning of this word

Presenter15:17

Peace.

Presenter15:19

Does it seem strange to you that the angels should have announced peace?

Presenter15:26

When ceaselessly the world has been stricken with war

Presenter15:33

And the fear of war?

Presenter15:37

Does it seem to you that the angelic voices were mistaken?

Presenter15:42

An excerpt from the Archbishop's Sermon from T S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Presenter15:48

ROBERT DONAT IN THE OLVICK COMPANY PRODUCTION.

Presenter15:52

Your function on the team i is the technical man? Yes. I'm supposed to be able to contribute.

Presenter16:00

Two things a, the scientific knowledge which the practical gardeners can be expected to have and, b, the scientific approach to questions, which tries logically to reach an answer.

Speaker 216:12

Yes.

Presenter16:12

Now, you've told us you do a lot of gardening at the weekends when you're not doing gardeners' question time. So you are a practical gardener. You're not just the man who sits in the deck chair as the man of theory and rather than action. No, I'm afraid I'm not. I am a practical gardener, not in the sense that Bill and Fred are practical gardeners, because they do it every day of their lives. But I do enjoy it. I enjoy it very much. And.

Presenter16:36

I get a sore back and callus in my hands, but

Presenter16:40

I love it. Now, apart from your technical publications, you've written a number of books about gardening, Science and the Garden, The Sunday Gardener, Basic Gardener, and you've edited

Presenter16:49

A monster encyclopedia. There's lots of lovely colour pictures. Yes. This is largely the child of Gardner's Question Time, surprisingly enough. It is a big book.

Presenter17:00

It's

Presenter17:01

divided really into two sections. The first one I wrote with a specific purpose, and that's an introduction. And this is really the basic biology of a garden, talking about plants and how you look at plants and what you should expect to see and how plants behave, etcetera. etcetera. And then the second section, which is by far the greatest section of the book,

Presenter17:21

Comes from a list of topics which I wrote down as the most common questions that were asked in Gardner's question time.

Presenter17:29

And I got about thirty common topics. And I thought about who could write these thirty topics best, and I asked people to do it. And so there is a section, you know, how to build a wall in a garden or how to make a garden pool, as well as how to grow roses, or how to grow vegetables. I've tried to cover the whole spectrum in this book.

Presenter17:51

Now you've retired from your university post. I suppose now you're really going to get busy?

Presenter17:57

Well, I'm hoping not to, but i it's not working out that way at all. You've got a lot of projects. I've a lot of projects in hand. I've a lot of writing to do and I've got a lot of lecturing that I want to do.

Presenter18:08

And I'd like to be able to well, I'm going to go overseas much more than I have been in the past because I've been limited by university terms. And um

Presenter18:19

The only thing I can say about it is that I don't want to work as hard as I did work when I was employed by the University, but I'm perfectly willing to work quite hard. Fair enough. Um we've got to record number six. What's that? It's Mendelsohn.

Presenter18:34

The Hebrides Overture.

Presenter19:35

Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, or Fingel's Cave, played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Carrion.

Presenter19:43

Now, you have certain advantages as a castaway, Professor Gammel. I mean, you're not going to eat the wrong kind of berries for a start. I hope not.

Presenter19:52

And of course if you stay there long enough you'll be able to cultivate and grow a lot of your food.

Presenter19:57

Apart from that, are you good at knocking things up with your hands, things like shelters? I wasn't.

Presenter20:05

When I was young, it seems very long ago, my father always used to say if you wanted something done, you got somebody to do it who was a professional at the job.

Presenter20:14

And I believed in this implicitly until I started having to pay professionals for doing the job.

Speaker 220:19

Dang.

Presenter20:20

And I started learning to do things myself.

Speaker 220:21

Are they?

Presenter20:23

And although I wouldn't say I'm a very good do it yourself man, I'm becoming a much better do it yourself man. And what is much more important, I've now got

Presenter20:34

The confidence to start the job. And I think this is the great thing, because once I get started, I'll finish it. Would you try it whiskey?

Presenter20:41

I think eventually yes, because I'm essentially a person who likes people.

Presenter20:47

But I like them when I want them, and I'd like to be able to stay in the desert island long enough to be absolutely tired of solitude, and I think that would take quite a long time.

Presenter20:58

Record number seven.

Presenter21:00

Two of my favourite people actually, Yehudi Menuen and Stephan Grappelli, two of the best violinists in the world playing together and playing that old favourite Lady Be Good.

Speaker 221:44

Uh

Presenter22:04

Yehudi Menouin and Stefan Grappelli. And now we come to your last discourse there.

Presenter22:10

My last disc is, in fact, simply a Christmas disc. I love.

Presenter22:15

Volume in music, it affects me terrifically. And I thought, how can I get?

Presenter22:20

A good volume that I would love to hear.

Presenter22:23

And so I've chosen the Huddersfield Choir, with the Black Dyke Mills band, singing and playing O Come All Ye Faithful.

Presenter23:17

Oh, come all ye faithful by the Huddersfield Choral Society and the Black Dyke Mills Band. If you could take just one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be? It would certainly be the Mendelsohn. This is so evocative of the moods and changing feelings I always get in the islands that it would have to be that one.

Presenter23:36

The Hebrides overture Fingles Cave. Yes. And one luxury to take with you, nothing of any practical use.

Presenter23:43

I don't know if you'd call this practical use, but I would really love to take a pencil a lot of pencils and lots of paper with me. And I could write write other books, for example.

Presenter23:56

And you're allowed to take one printed book with you apart from um the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

Presenter24:04

It may sound a strange and rather silly thing, but what I would like to do, because I would have the peace to do it, is to take a book.

Presenter24:11

On elementary calculus, which is a mathematical way of handling problems. Because I know a little bit about it, but not enough. And if this elementary book had problems and answers, I could maybe find the right answers to the problems. This would open a whole world of biology to me again. It would indeed. And thank you, Professor Alan Gemmel, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Professor Alan Gemmell24:54

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