Phil Drabble

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a download from the Desert Island Discs archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it's the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection. It was archived without the music, so although the Castaways choices are introduced, they're not part of this recording. Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Discs website.

Speaker 10:26

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 10:30

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:33

Our castaway this week is a countryman and a naturalist. It's Phil Drabble. Phil, you're a person I admire because you knew what you wanted in life and you worked towards it, and it took you about twenty five years to get there. It shows it can be done.

Phil Drabble0:48

As a tiny child I was always interested in any sort of wildlife, and I always wanted to be a naturalist, but uh it did take an awful lot of graft.

Presenter0:57

Well, we'll tell the story in more detail later.

Presenter1:01

Now, you've had eight discs to choose. How have you been getting on? You got the whole eight?

Phil Drabble1:05

Yes, uh I've got the whole eight. They're a fairly variegated eight because uh I'm not a very musical sort of chap. Do you play discs a lot, aren't you? I've got a grammophone at home. Well here's a geek for you.

Presenter1:16

Here's a treat for you. BBC standard issue. Solar batteries and everything.

Phil Drabble1:22

Uh what

Presenter1:22

Uh

Phil Drabble1:22

True.

Presenter1:22

Uh

Phil Drabble1:23

Uh

Presenter1:23

Best one eblogger.

Phil Drabble1:23

The first one I've got is a curlew, which I would love to have on a desert island, because I'd hate the solitude of foreign parts. You'd never get me on a desert island without hijacking me there. But if I could hear a curlew, it'd remind me of the wild hills of home, which I love.

Speaker 11:32

Yeah.

Presenter1:32

But

Presenter1:47

The cry of the

Phil Drabble1:48

Curl you

Phil Drabble1:49

Where do you come?

Presenter1:49

Come from Yeah.

Phil Drabble1:50

I come from fairly unlikely habitat, really, for a naturalist. I come from the Black Country of Staffordshire, where my old man was a doctor. He got a mining practice along the edge of the Black Country. He was a doctor in the days when doctors knew their own patients, and his mining practice embraced quite a lot of farms, and a lot of his patients were our friends. And because of that, I got the freedom to run on so many farms that I had more acres to run over than if he'd owned a stately home, really.

Presenter2:21

Did you never have any leanings towards medicine yourself?

Phil Drabble2:24

No, I didn't. I never wanted to be a doctor. I was expected to go into the family practice, but I never wanted to be one. You did start studying medicine, didn't you? Well, I went up to Oxford to read medicine and I found that I had a great liking for beer up there, but not much for medicine. And if I'd stayed there until now, I would never have been a doctor.

Presenter2:47

Well let's go let's go back to childhood. Um you began bringing pets into into the house.

Phil Drabble2:48

Yeah.

Phil Drabble2:52

Didn't you? I did, because our house was in the town itself and we couldn't sort of look out and see anything wild, so I used to bring wild things in and uh I had all sorts of mammals. I'd been particularly interested all my life in mammals, and I used to bring mice home and rats. I had a wonderful tame rat called Horhor, after the biggest rat of all, I think, but was a beautiful rat, a wild one that I'd tamed. A ratting was a hobby of yours, wasn't it?

Phil Drabble3:21

It's a tremendous challenge ratting is. I I love ratting now. I love to take dogs and ferrets out ratting now. And it is such a challenge because they think so fast. If I could think as quick as a rat in a tight corner I'd I'd be a tycoon because if there is one way of escape he will slip through it and uh if you're going to outwit a rat I think it is the sort of pinnacle of hunting, although socially not perhaps quite so acceptable.

Presenter3:45

There was a catechol you used to go ratting with. He used to put live rats

Phil Drabble3:49

Yeah, that was a great friend of mine, old Harry Kelly. He was a professional rat catcher and he was built like an orangutan. He was a short little man with arms that reached down to his knees. And he put a ferret in and he got paid twice for everything he did. He got paid once for catching the rats from the chap who'd got them. And then he used to scoop them with his arm. His reflexes had put a Test cricket wicket keeper to shame. And he'd shove them down his shirt as fast as they came out and get a whole collection down there. He'd got a belt, of course. I hope so. They didn't go down that far.

Speaker 34:23

I hope so.

Speaker 14:24

Yeah.

Phil Drabble4:27

And then he'd pull'em out and sell'em live for people to train their dogs on whose dog had killed ten the quickest in the local that night.

Presenter4:27

And then

Phil Drabble4:34

Yeah.

Presenter4:34

I I believe you knew every gamekeeper within miles, and rumour has it one or two poachers.

Presenter4:40

Yeah.

Phil Drabble4:40

I did. Poachers particularly are the superb chaps to learn your natural history of. You learn it really the hard way in the field, and you get about so quietly. And this is the secret of seeing any sort of wildlife not thump about looking for it, but to wait about and let it come towards you.

Presenter4:56

There's a scandalous story of you going poaching with a parson.

Phil Drabble5:01

No, no, no. He came poaching with me. Subtle difference. A great difference. And the joke was that he didn't know he was poaching. We used to go out a great deal with a friend of mine who's a farmer, a wild character, in a jeep just after the war, with a whippet. And we used to look for rabbits in the headlights and then slip the whippet. And this parson heard about this and he thought we were going on my friend's farm. So he said, Could he come? And there weren't any rabbits on my friend's farm that night, so we gradually got further and further afield until we'd no idea whose land we were on. And you know, there's nothing that makes you feel more naked than being in the middle of a hundred acre field belonging to somebody else with your headlights on. The parson never knew. He's still going strong. He's a bishop or a

Presenter5:04

Subtle difference.

Phil Drabble5:43

Something high up, man. Never got pinched.

Presenter5:46

Uh

Phil Drabble5:47

Right, record number two. Watch that.

Phil Drabble5:49

Well, for number two, I should like to have, I think, Pete Seeger singing Little Boxes.

Phil Drabble5:55

Why?

Phil Drabble5:56

Because I'd like something that makes me feel that it's not quite so bad as I thought at first to be on a desert island. And one of the things I resent about this country is that so many villages are being built up by a lot of little houses, that so many people are coming in with urban minds and running the country with urban mines, that that's one of the things I'd like to escape from.

Presenter6:27

Pete Seeger.

Presenter6:28

Now, medicine didn't take at Oxford, and afterwards you went up to the University of London. What did you read there?

Presenter6:35

I rent engine

Phil Drabble6:35

Engineering there for a stupid reason, about the silliest reason you could think of, because when I was in my teens I went through the whizkid stage of racing motorbikes and I've always had a sort of love-hate relationship with machines and I wanted to learn to tune a bike and for no better reason than that I thought that I'd go and read engineering.

Presenter6:55

Yeah, so you took a degree in engineering?

Phil Drabble6:58

I took a degree course in engineering, but I always found it impossible to do any serious work until I was paid for it, so I didn't pass a debt either.

Presenter7:06

All right. Well, we won't pursue your education any further. What did you do when you came down from London?

Phil Drabble7:12

When I came down I got a job in a factory at uh forty five bob a week in the tool room and I worked there for eighteen months.

Phil Drabble7:20

And then the chap who'd been passenger to me in my sidecar, he went abroad and I applied for his job, which was at another factory, Spring Works, and this was a really big step up in life. I got three pounds a week to go there, and this was soon stepped up to four, which is big time as far as I was concerned, unqualified, and I got married on that.

Presenter7:43

Now, at home, you had progressed from newts and white mice. In fact, you reared a badger cub and all sorts of intriguing animals. Tell me about the badger cub.

Phil Drabble7:53

Well, the Badger Cup was great fun, really, because I was still tied up in a town while I was an industry for the next twenty-three years, and so I used to bring all sorts of things home with me. And one thing that I did have, I had for ten years a tame badger. I'd never do it again, indeed, it'd be illegal now, but I learnt a great deal from him, and in fact he introduced me to television. He he did he and I did the very first television thing that I did, which was twenty-five years ago, and I shall never forget it, because I had to produce him out of a box so that he would walk round. And I I persuaded, I kidded the producer that he was so well trained he'd follow me. In fact, he was so short-sighted he was terrified of getting lost, so he stuck close to my heels. And after about three rehearsals, he didn't like this, and on the final rehearsal, he bit me, got me by the hand, and when the camera came up, all he could see was an enormous Drabelasian backside.

Presenter8:46

Oh dear. And you'll find time at nights to write about your pets and about wildlife in general.

Phil Drabble8:56

Yes, I did. I I did all my early writing when I came back from work. I used to get back about uh six or half past. And I found I couldn't start right away. I had to unwind a bit. And I did all my early writing between nine at night and one or two in the morning. I did four books and a lot of writing uh at that time.

Presenter9:16

And you began to broadcast. You told us about your first television appearance.

Presenter9:20

But of course it meant really getting time off for the factory. It wasn't good enough. Now you you had this this dream about getting away from it all.

Phil Drabble9:28

Yes, I did. I I wa naturally wanted to get away from it. I felt that it was a waste of life to work hard for five days a week to do what I wanted to do for the other two. And so eventually I engineered myself into a position where I could step off and work for myself.

Presenter9:48

Well, how you did it we'll talk about in a minute. Let's have another record first.

Phil Drabble9:54

Well, I think this time we'll have uh Flanders and Swan with the Bindweed and the Honeysuckle. Why did you choose that one? Partly because I I like their singing and uh even more I liked their sense of humour and it'd give me a wry smile, I think.

Presenter10:15

Flanders and Swan Miss Alliance.

Presenter10:18

Now you stepped out of the rap race.

Presenter10:21

Now, how did you set about it? You had a little cat. Battle obviously.

Phil Drabble10:26

Yes, for the last seven years I was on the board of quite a large company, and anybody in industry gets a

Phil Drabble10:32

as a freelance I think paid more than you're worth, so that I'd had simple taste and I'd been able to put a bit by, so that if I didn't get a commission for six weeks, well, it wasn't death and disaster. And by doing a few books, and I was broadcasting for about once every three weeks for the last thirteen years in industry, so I'd got quite a connection on the old boy basis, so that I was able to step off without

Presenter10:49

Yeah.

Phil Drabble10:56

Starting right at rock bottom.

Presenter10:58

And you took over a property that really became a kind of nature reservoir

Phil Drabble11:02

Zev

Presenter11:03

Yeah.

Phil Drabble11:04

I did. It was tremendously exciting. We were then able, you see, to live further away from industry than we could have done when I'd had to get there every day. And we bought a cottage that was a mile from a road one way and to an over two miles from a road the other, with ninety acres of woodland.

Presenter11:21

Ninety acres.

Phil Drabble11:22

Yes, it it wasn't uh valuable woodland and it wasn't particularly beautiful woodland, but it was lovely mixed woodland that had got tremendous potential. It had got such a variety of habitat that it was obvious that it was the sort of place that would harbour a very wide variety, a very wide spectrum of wildlife, so that it was a superb place to go and live as far as we were concerned.

Presenter11:43

But mind you, it must

Phil Drabble11:44

Yeah.

Presenter11:45

Need quite a lot of work. You've got to look after all this ninety acres. You can't just let it go wild.

Phil Drabble11:50

Well

Phil Drabble11:52

You can't be in industry as long as I was without something rubbing off, and I'd been trained as a time study engineer and chasing wasted work and so on, so that I was able to.

Phil Drabble12:01

To lay the place out, to be able to be managed with a minimum of effort, a minimum of man hours. And uh I've got an ancient nineteen fifty-seven tractor with a few ancient implements, and um I can do most of it myself, and we do have a chap to help us one day a week, but that's all the outside labour that we have. I manage the rest. Are you more or less self-supporting?

Phil Drabble12:24

Yes, we are really, because uh my wife's a very good gardener. I I told you that I don't much like hard work, so she does the garden and she grows all the vegetables and so on. And I do the easy stuff. I raise the stock, and we always have a dozen cockerels and uh a dozen ducks and a couple of geese, and we've killed a pig very often. We're not doing this time, and we usually get a bit of venison out of the wood and some pheasants, and she grows the vegetables so that and we've got bees, so that we do go quite a long way to being self-supporting as well as having a good uh nature reserve.

Speaker 112:47

Some fan

Presenter12:57

It sounds very pleasant indeed.

Phil Drabble12:59

Some more music, please. Let's have uh Estrinabiofrin singing Cinderella Rockefeller. Mm-hmm. Because uh I think it's one of the most lilting tunes that, although unmusical as I am, it really gets me swaying.

Presenter13:21

Music to Sway To Cinderella Rockefeller by Esther and Abby O'Varim.

Presenter13:27

How many books have you written?

Phil Drabble13:29

Uh I've written

Phil Drabble13:31

Eight since I've been there. All about animals? Yes, all about animals of one sort or another, one about dogs and one about pets and the rest about um wildlife generally.

Phil Drabble13:42

And um I've got one in the pipeline. What's that about? This is about um a mixture of dogs and television. It's really about my experiences with uh filming animals on television.

Presenter13:54

Mm-hmm.

Phil Drabble13:55

And uh it's going to be called One Man and His Dog because uh Oh, from the television series, of course. That's right, from the Sheep Dog series, yeah. And you do a lot of lecturing all over the country?

Presenter13:59

Oh, he's from

Phil Drabble14:06

Yes, I do. I do quite a lot of lecturing and I enjoy this very much because uh as a broadcaster you can do a piece and you and your producer decide what you want to do and you have a postmortem on whether it worked or not.

Phil Drabble14:19

But you don't know what the customer thought. But when you're talking to a lot of ladies after lunch who've paid to come in, you know whether you're hitting target or not. And if you get on target, it's a very good yardstick because they're precisely the sort of people that'd listen to one on radio.

Presenter14:27

And if you get

Presenter14:35

Or many radio series you've done, in particular wildlife, of course.

Presenter14:39

And what was the other one called A Living World?

Phil Drabble14:41

Yeah, well, yes, L Living World and Wildlife. I I love those in particular. I think there are no programmes that I would rather do than those because I meet so many of the sort of top naturalists that I couldn't meet any other way in those. And they hark back. It's one of the reasons that I chose the Curlew, not only because it reminded me of Lovely Solitudes, but it reminded me of the predecessor of these two programmes, which was the Old Naturalist Programme, which used to have, I think, a curlew signature to it.

Phil Drabble15:10

Another record.

Phil Drabble15:12

This time I think I'd like the Seekers singing What Have They Done to the Rain? Why?

Phil Drabble15:18

Because I think that one of the nicest things in England everybody goes on about the sun and getting away to the sun, but I love the winter and the autumn and I love nice soft

Phil Drabble15:27

lovely English rain. And uh I don't know what sort of desert island you're going to banish me to banish me to. It's not bad. But I don't think it'll have anything as nice as soft English rain.

Presenter15:45

The Seekers with Judith Durham. Now we mentioned television briefly, doesn't it? We talked about one man and his dog. You're coming up to the third series of that programme, aren't we? We are.

Phil Drabble15:55

Uh

Presenter15:55

Now how does this operate? You go pretty well all over the country.

Presenter16:00

Yeah.

Phil Drabble16:00

We go to the

Presenter16:01

Yeah.

Phil Drabble16:01

Farm of each of the competitors, and we do a bit of film at the farm of each of the competitors, so that when we have the sheepdog trials, the competitive trials on television, we can hark back to the sort of land and the sort of place where each competitor lives. So that you can decide for yourself, for instance, that here's a dog that's used to wild Lakeland country running against a dog that comes from the lush midlands or whatever. And I think that it gives it more personality and people can get involved with the competitors who are an absolutely delightful bunch of chaps.

Speaker 316:33

The viewers try to spot the winners.

Presenter16:39

And of course, last May your your Badger watch caused quite a sensation. You you bugged a Badger set.

Phil Drabble16:46

Yes, the Natural History Unit at Bristol, they did a marvellous job really because they had found a set with eight holes in it and they put a microphone down each hole and they wired all these up to a caravan a long way away. And then they got some cameras that were sensitive to infrared light and they lit the set by infrared and they could control the cameras like Big Brother from about a quarter of a mile away. They'd zoom right or left or up or down or zoom in by a little lever in our van. And the sound man used to shout, he's coming out a hole four or whatever it was, because he could hear which microphone was kicking. And the camera would veer over like Big Brother and wait for him to come out and sure enough on queue, he came right out full into vision. Well this was quite unique.

Presenter17:32

Audience participation in in animal watching

Phil Drabble17:34

It was a very exciting programme to be invited to do, yeah.

Presenter17:39

And the country game, of course, that that Bristol programme you've been on many times.

Phil Drabble17:42

Yes, that's a very pleasant thing to do too, for the same reason one meets so many interesting people, I think, yeah.

Phil Drabble17:49

Another record. Let's have Noel Coward in Let's Do It.

Presenter18:03

Noel Carda, Las Vegas.

Presenter18:05

I'm not sure I have to ask you those familiar questions about how you'd manage on the island. If there was uh any wildlife there, I'm sure you'd trap it.

Phil Drabble18:14

I don't think I'd have any difficulty uh feeding myself. My main difficulty, I think, would be afar. I hear that s couts can rub a bit or two bits of wood together and it burns up or something. I would try and try until I got one going.

Phil Drabble18:27

And once I got a fire going that'UD never go out. We burn logs at home, and we just chuck another log on the embers next morning.

Presenter18:34

And you built enough hides and sheds and things you'd rig up some kind of shelter.

Phil Drabble18:38

Not if I could help it. I don't like unnecessary work. I don't think that I'd build myself a shelter if there's anywhere I could creep under.

Phil Drabble18:45

Got any fishing?

Phil Drabble18:47

Well, I can tickle trout so that I know the trout don't like it much.

Phil Drabble18:55

Do you know anything about small boats? Would you try to escape?

Phil Drabble18:59

I would never stop trying to escape. I I wouldn't be on your island for very long. I would get off it by hook or by crook, and no holes barred. Uh I would try and lash things together to make rafts. I would keep silkworms and grow silk to make inflatable silk dinghies. I would do anything I could to get away.

Presenter19:17

This may take time, but good luck.

Phil Drabble19:17

Yeah.

Phil Drabble19:20

Back to records.

Phil Drabble19:22

Let's have the King singers in Wish You Were Here, because I should by now be feeling very nostalgic, and I know you don't let me take any animate objects there, but uh there's no harm in wishing my wife was there, is there?

Presenter19:41

Wish you were here the King's Singers. Which brings us now to your last one. What have you saved till the end?

Phil Drabble19:47

Well, I would want something that was really English, and I can think of no nice English sound nicer than a blackbird, and I should like a really good blackbird, because it'd remind me of my black country boyhood they sung well there, and it'll remind me of my present time living in wild woodlands.

Presenter20:10

The Song of an English Blackbird. If you could take just one disc out of your eight, which would it be? I'd have an Encore of the Blackbird.

Speaker 120:12

But

Presenter20:17

Right.

Presenter20:18

And one book to take with you apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already there, and big encyclopedias, which we don't allow.

Phil Drabble20:26

Well one of the things I resented about school is that they wasted so much of my time doing integral calculus and stuff I've never used since instead of something useful. And I would like to have learnt shorthand and I would like the very best shorthand primer or instruction book or whatever you can get me. And I'd like plenty of paper to practise on because when I'd learnt it well enough I'd uh make enough notes to uh do a book when I got home and earn myself a pint of beer.

Presenter20:53

Fair enough. And one luxury to take with you, as you pointed out, inanimate.

Phil Drabble20:58

Although I'm a naturalist, I've never done any bird-ringing, partly because I don't agree with it unless there's a specific purpose. But I would like to take a complete set of bird-ringing tools, that's to say, numbered rings to put on their legs and pliers to put them on with. That's what I'd really like.

Speaker 321:18

Good to ring our seagulls.

Phil Drabble21:19

I'd ring the seagulls and I would particularly try to ring any migratory birds because when they flew on, any that got recovered, either dead or caught by other bird ringers, the numbers of the rings would be taken and sent to the British Museum. And as I would have to be a licensed ringer to have done it, they would know who'd put them on and they would send to my address so that my wife would know that at least I was alive and well on the desert island from the fact that I was ringing birds. And when she once knew that, there would be absolutely no stopping her. She's a very, very resourceful woman. And she would find out what species I'd ringed and therefore what rough part of the world they'd come from. And I'm quite certain that she would then organise an expedition to rescue me. I wouldn't be marooned too long.

Presenter22:07

Phil, this is a very crafty choice of a luxury, isn't it? And thank you, Phil Drabble, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc.

Phil Drabble22:09

It's a very

Phil Drabble22:16

Well, thank you for having me, and I hope the stay is short.

Presenter22:19

Bye, everyone.