Dr Catherine Gavin

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

This week our castaway is the novelist and historian Catherine Gavin.

Presenter0:36

doctor Gavin, you're a Scot, aren't you?

Dr Catherine Gavin0:38

Yes, I was born in Aberdeen.

Presenter0:39

And you were educated there?

Dr Catherine Gavin0:41

At Aberdeen University.

Presenter0:42

Mhm. And apart from your family and friends, what would you miss most in a prolonged isolation?

Dr Catherine Gavin0:49

Well, and miss television very much, I think.

Dr Catherine Gavin0:52

I like to watch television. Yes. I'd miss that. I'd miss going to libraries, reading and studying. And of course I'd miss the kind of life I lead in this world, which is moving very fast from one place to another place, one city to another city. Is music an interest of yours?

Dr Catherine Gavin1:08

Yes, but I couldn't say it's a predominant interest. When I was a little girl in Aberdeen we all took piano lessons. I'm just a typical example of a girl who went so far with her piano lessons and then that was that.

Presenter1:18

You still play?

Dr Catherine Gavin1:20

I play to amuse myself. I can hardly say to amuse others.

Presenter1:23

What was your plan in choosing your music? Are you looking back, or are there great performances? Or wh what was your overall plan?

Dr Catherine Gavin1:32

My overall plan was to look back and think of pieces of music that meant something to me at different times of my life, perhaps illustrated some of the things I've been writing about.

Presenter1:40

Where do we start?

Dr Catherine Gavin1:42

Well, if I'm cast up on this desert island, I think the first thing I should want to do is hear a Christian song of praise for deliverance from the deep.

Dr Catherine Gavin1:50

So may my first record please be the Trumpet Voluntary.

Presenter2:55

The Trumpet Voluntary, John Wilbraham playing the trumpet, and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Field conducted by Neville Mariner.

Presenter3:04

No, you took a a degree at Aberdeen University. What did you read?

Dr Catherine Gavin3:08

I read history and English literature.

Dr Catherine Gavin3:10

And then I got a scholarship and went to the Sorbonne, Paris.

Dr Catherine Gavin3:14

And after that I studied for my doctorate.

Presenter3:16

Yes. What was your thesis?

Dr Catherine Gavin3:18

It is entitled Louis-Philippe King of the French.

Presenter3:21

And that was to be your great interest, French history.

Dr Catherine Gavin3:24

That has always been my very great interest.

Presenter3:26

What was your idea at that time, to become an academic?

Dr Catherine Gavin3:31

Yes, I think when you're only twenty one you don't just make tremendous lot of plans for the future. I just went ahead and did the things that seemed most natural to me at that time. And I did become an academic, if being a university lecturer is an academic. I was that, both at Aberdeen University and at Glasgow University.

Dr Catherine Gavin3:47

But I also began to write newspaper articles, travel pieces, an apprenticeship.

Presenter3:53

And you began to write some novels, I believe, which we don't hear about now your lost novels.

Dr Catherine Gavin3:55

Which we don't

Dr Catherine Gavin3:57

My Lost Novels. Well, they were very

Dr Catherine Gavin4:00

Very immature efforts. I just wrote about the things I knew, which is still not a bad plan.

Presenter4:06

What what about in particular?

Dr Catherine Gavin4:08

about life in Scotland, uh life in uh the countryside, life in the fishing villages, and so on.

Dr Catherine Gavin4:13

But all that was before the war, before that that great experience we all had of going to war.

Presenter4:18

Let's break at this point your second record. What shall we have now?

Dr Catherine Gavin4:22

Now when I was a child in Aberdeen I used to be very thrilled when the Gordon Highlanders came marching up Union Street, their kilts swinging and their pipes and drums playing.

Dr Catherine Gavin4:30

And so, in honor of the Gordons, I would like to hear their regimental march, the Cock of the North.

Presenter5:16

Cocker the North by the military band drums and pipes of the Gordon Highlanders.

Presenter5:21

So while lecturing you were also writing. Now we know from one of your recent books, Traitor's Gate, which we'll return to later, that you were a voluntary worker in Glasgow among the French troops who were returning from the disastrous campaign in Norway. That was nineteen forty one.

Dr Catherine Gavin5:36

Yes, they are they arrived in the beginning of May.

Presenter5:40

Now we n we know that you were doing that job because you wrote yourself in as a minor character in the book.

Presenter5:46

which was about those times.

Dr Catherine Gavin5:47

I wrote myself into the first chapter for a few pages, and I did it because I wanted the readers of the book to understand that this was a true story.

Dr Catherine Gavin5:54

That I was there, I met those men, I saw the origins of the Free French movement right from the start.

Presenter5:59

Well, we'll talk about those books later. We'll keep the chronology going. Now, in 1943, you changed from the academic life.

Dr Catherine Gavin6:02

Later.

Dr Catherine Gavin6:04

Going

Presenter6:08

to the journalistic life.

Dr Catherine Gavin6:10

Yes, I was offered a job in London as a leader-writer for what is now Thompson newspapers, it was then Kemsley newspapers.

Presenter6:16

That was for the Glasgow Daily Record, wasn't it?

Dr Catherine Gavin6:18

The Daily Record, yes.

Presenter6:20

And I believe that has or had a unique requirement for the leader writer. The leaders had to be of an exact length.

Dr Catherine Gavin6:28

Yes, all the newspapers required to be of an exact length. My allocation was six hundred and thirteen words.

Presenter6:34

And it couldn't be over

Dr Catherine Gavin6:36

Not six twelve, not six fourteen. Six hundred and thirteen words.

Presenter6:39

That is very good training, of course.

Dr Catherine Gavin6:40

It's wonderful training.

Presenter6:42

How long did you stay there?

Dr Catherine Gavin6:44

Well, I I had that job until I was sent to France as a war correspondent. That was just a year later.

Presenter6:50

That was also at Kemp the newspaper.

Presenter6:52

What's your third record?

Dr Catherine Gavin6:54

My third record is Quay Faro, sung by Kathleen Ferrier from Orpheus and Eurydice.

Presenter7:00

Why do you choose that?

Dr Catherine Gavin7:01

Because I think I'd be wandering in the halls of memory myself, like Orfeil, and I'd like to have this beautiful area sung to remind me of my own loved ones.

Speaker 37:18

So we are the Lord's and so you are saved.

Speaker 37:56

Come on, come in.

Speaker 38:00

Five deep.

Speaker 38:03

Please me again.

Presenter8:08

Kathleen Ferrier singing K Faro from Glux, Orfeo and Eurydice.

Presenter8:14

Now, you became a war correspondent accredited to Supreme Allied Headquarters. There were very few women war correspondents. How did you manage it?

Dr Catherine Gavin8:22

Well, I was the lucky one, I think, really. We after Paris was liberated, a group of eight women reporters

Dr Catherine Gavin8:29

left from London to go to Paris.

Dr Catherine Gavin8:32

and it was understood that one would receive what they called a permanent accreditation, because that depended on your employers rather than on the War Office.

Dr Catherine Gavin8:40

But after our time of trial, I suppose you could call it, our experiment,

Dr Catherine Gavin8:44

I was the fortunate one who stayed behind.

Presenter8:47

And you covered the Nijmegen crossing to relieve the Allied forces trapped in Arnhem. That was a rough assignment.

Dr Catherine Gavin8:53

That was a very rough assignment. The whole assignment was pretty rough, because I was also covering political events in Paris at the same time. Sometimes when I wanted to be up front with the troops, I was hauled back to hear some great pronouncement.

Dr Catherine Gavin9:05

in Paris, and one had to follow all the developments of the provisional government once it was recognized by mister Roosevelt, who was reluctant to the last moment.

Dr Catherine Gavin9:14

Of course it was a very interesting time, as General de Gaulle succeeded in his bid for power and managed to make himself President of the Provisional Government.

Dr Catherine Gavin9:22

But the biggest occasion that I ever covered in Paris

Dr Catherine Gavin9:26

was the a visit of Mr. Churchill on the 11th of November, the old Armistice Day, the 11th of November 1944.

Dr Catherine Gavin9:34

One knew how much it meant to him.

Dr Catherine Gavin9:36

I remember one of the men correspondents standing beside me in the press box said to me, Now watch him cry.

Dr Catherine Gavin9:43

I had never seen mister Churchill cry before, but, as you know, the tears did flow rather readily, and there was every excuse for them that day, and I really think that the moment when the grenadier guards went down the Champs Elysees and saluted him,

Dr Catherine Gavin9:56

and were in liberated Paris after five years of misery. I really think that was the most glorious moment of my life.

Presenter10:03

And then you went to the south of France to cover the last pockets of resistance down there.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:08

Yes.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:10

It was uh south of France in December 1944, just before the Battle of the Bulge was an extraordinary place.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:16

Very deserted, very much battered about, for the fighting had been fiercest but the place I was assigned to was just beyond Manton.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:24

in a little town called Sauspelle, where the enemy resisted very strongly right through to the following spring. I don't know any part of France that was more severely tried than the high country beyond Malton. I'd like to write about it some day. Perhaps I will.

Presenter10:37

You went with the American troops because you had better facilities to get in.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:42

Well, they were more flexible about having women war correspondents along with them.

Presenter10:47

You could get up more or less into the firing line, which the British wouldn't wear.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:49

Yes.

Dr Catherine Gavin10:51

The British are always rather nervous about our safety.

Presenter10:54

And the Americans not?

Dr Catherine Gavin10:55

Couldn't care less.

Presenter10:56

Yeah.

Presenter10:57

Then where did you go?

Dr Catherine Gavin10:59

Well, then there was the Battle of the Bulge. I was up at Brussels at that time.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:03

And so the winter went on, with more and more politics.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:08

And finally, I had the great satisfaction of being present at Rass on the night when the Germans signed the document of unconditional surrender.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:16

Then after that the Daily Express.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:18

made me a very fine offer, so I changed my employers and went off to the Middle East for the Daily Express.

Presenter11:24

Yeah.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:24

That's another very fascinating assignment, still in uniform because that was the law.

Presenter11:28

Mm-hmm. What was going on there at that time?

Dr Catherine Gavin11:30

Oh, practically everything practically every country. We really were extended there. The Daily Express had only two correspondents in that enormous field.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:38

I managed to get up into the Russian occupied zone of Persia, where I was promptly arrested on general grounds of espionage.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:46

but released immediately by the good officers of the British Vice Consul.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:50

Never a dull moment in the Middle East.

Presenter11:52

I'm sure of it.

Presenter11:53

And then where to across the Atlantic.

Dr Catherine Gavin11:56

Well, I was based on Cairo for the Middle East assignment. One was always coming back to Cairo and there was always a riot going on in Cairo.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:03

Then I went back to Paris from the Middle East. My last po posting in the Middle East was to Addis Ababa.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:08

in the Ethiopian sector, the front.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:12

And then I came back to where I'd always wanted to be as correspondent in the press gallery of the National Assembly of France.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:20

And then I was in America for a bit.

Presenter12:22

Yeah.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:22

And then I got married and lived happily ever after.

Presenter12:25

Yes, you married a man on the New York Herald Tribune. Yes.

Presenter12:29

Record number 4.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:32

Now there wouldn't be just an awful lot to look at on this desert island, except the sea and the sky.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:37

And I think I would like to hear one of my favourite singers singing one of my favorite songs. I would like to hear Bing Crosby singing How Deep is the Ocean.

Dr Catherine Gavin12:45

How high is the sky?

Speaker 312:47

How far would I travel?

Speaker 312:51

Ruby, where you are.

Speaker 312:56

How far is the journey?

Speaker 312:59

From here to a star

Speaker 313:04

And if I ever lost you

Speaker 313:09

How much would I fry?

Speaker 313:13

How deep is the ocean?

Presenter13:16

Bing Crosby, how deep is the ocean? How long did you spend in the United States?

Dr Catherine Gavin13:21

Oh, I've spent a lot of my life in the United States. That particular year, before I was married, before indeed I met my husband, I spent the better part of a year in the United States and Canada.

Presenter13:31

Going all over the continent.

Dr Catherine Gavin13:32

Yes, the whole way around. And then jumping a little bit to the time when my husband and I went to live there, which was in 1950.

Dr Catherine Gavin13:40

Then I was taken on by a big lecture agency.

Dr Catherine Gavin13:44

To be a professional lecturer on the very tough American circuits. And for nearly ten years, I went on two lecture tours every winter.

Dr Catherine Gavin13:52

and I got to speak in forty of the then forty eight States.

Dr Catherine Gavin13:56

which was the most wonderful way of knowing the country and its people that could possibly be imagined.

Presenter14:00

Was it at that time that you acquired the excellent habit you have of writing a few hundred words of description about the place you are in every day?

Dr Catherine Gavin14:08

Well, that has been that I I did on my lecture tours, but my husband and I have travelled together a very great deal because he's in international advertising and his work takes him.

Dr Catherine Gavin14:17

to many, many different lands.

Dr Catherine Gavin14:20

And indeed we went right round the world once, and twice all round South America and it was more in those days, after I was trying to be a serious novelist, that I got into this disciplined habit of writing one thousand words of description every morning.

Dr Catherine Gavin14:33

You never know when it's going to come in handy, and it very often did.

Presenter14:37

It was nineteen fifty eight that you wrote your first historical novel, Madeline.

Presenter14:42

What was that about?

Dr Catherine Gavin14:44

Well, as I'm a very literal person, and need a good deal of backing, you know, from real facts, I wrote it from an old family story of ours. I had a great uncle called James Bruce.

Dr Catherine Gavin14:55

who was a chief engineer in the P and O.

Dr Catherine Gavin14:57

And

Dr Catherine Gavin14:59

He flung up everything a very brilliant career.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:02

to go and fight for France in the war of eighteen seventy.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:05

And after that he was a completely broken man and and and died.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:10

Few years later.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:11

And I've always thought there was a some sort of background to that that we didn't know about, so I invented the story of Madeleine. Madeleine is pure fiction, but James Bruce was very real.

Presenter15:20

and it was the first of a sequence of about that period.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:24

Yes, but going back to the old academic days when French nineteenth century history was the subject,

Dr Catherine Gavin15:29

I wrote four novels on the Second Empire. They're not sequels, they're not linked together, except that the Emperor Louis Napoleon and his Empress Eugenie are are, as you might say, the

Dr Catherine Gavin15:39

The linking figures in in each one.

Presenter15:42

Record number five.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:44

Well

Dr Catherine Gavin15:46

I would hope that my husband would come out to look for me just as fast as he could. In fact, I'd be very annoyed if he didn't.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:52

to get a research party organized and get started.

Dr Catherine Gavin15:55

And I think I'd be a bit like that Japanese girl who was looking for her American to turn up. I'd always be hoping that one fine day I'd see a ship a sailing. So may I hear one fine day from Madama Butterfly.

Presenter16:08

Who would you like to sing it?

Dr Catherine Gavin16:09

Joan Hammond.

Speaker 316:28

Baby, why have you mine?

Presenter17:11

Joan Hammond singing One Fine Day

Presenter17:15

Now after your novels about the Second Empire, you wrote a quartet of novels about the First World War.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:21

Yes, I began coming closer to our own time in that one, that series.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:27

The last one I'll talk about presently, if I may the last one to be written, not the last one chronologically.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:33

It was about the Russian the fall of the Romanoffs.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:36

And that's a very difficult subject to write about, because so much has already been written.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:40

But I had the idea of writing about the Tsar's daughters.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:43

And that seemed to work very well too. People liked that book.

Presenter17:47

And now you've started a series of novels about the last war, one we've already mentioned, Traitor's Gate.

Presenter17:54

Now that was the one that starts with you in Glasgow in 1940.

Dr Catherine Gavin17:58

Yes, and that's perhaps a different kind of writing. I would say the eight historical novels that that preceded it.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:04

were were written in a

Dr Catherine Gavin18:07

I hope not to say a mandarin style, but certainly in a d discursive style. I think now I've changed. I I hope that my writing is developing.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:16

And I think these two books about the Second World War are much more what we would call action writing.

Presenter18:21

Yes.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:21

Of course to me they're not historical, because I remember it all.

Presenter18:24

The first one you told us was based on fact. Traitor's gifts.

Presenter18:28

And now you've written the sequel to it none dare call it treason about the French resistance, and it has such a wealth of detail it makes it difficult to believe that you weren't in France at that time.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:39

Well, I encountered the French resistors at that time I was telling you about when I was in the south of France in 1944.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:46

Of course, we were surrounded by resistors in Paris. The entire population of Paris had been in the resistance, so they say.

Speaker 318:52

That's it.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:53

We had a name for them. It was the Resistance of September.

Dr Catherine Gavin18:56

But those people down in Montan were the real thing. They had had all the humiliation and and pain of being occupied and yet

Dr Catherine Gavin19:04

They were sticking fast to their belief in France.

Dr Catherine Gavin19:07

And there not then, of course, but two years later

Dr Catherine Gavin19:10

I met some of the men whom we'd tried to help in Glasgow, some of the Chasseurs Alpins, because that's where that great regiment comes from.

Speaker 319:17

Hmm.

Dr Catherine Gavin19:17

And I've talked to them so much, and gone over the ground with them so often, that, well, I do rather feel as if I'd been there for part of it.

Presenter19:24

And in both those novels a a really extreme anti-Gaullist feeling on your part.

Dr Catherine Gavin19:29

Yes, I was anti Golist from the moment the the man first spoke over the B B C, on the eighteenth of june, nineteen forty.

Dr Catherine Gavin19:36

I saw we were in for trouble with him. I saw that he was going to use Britain as the springboard for his own ambition.

Dr Catherine Gavin19:42

And at this he did.

Presenter19:44

Now you like to hang on to your characters. Just uh you brought yourself into Trader's Gate, and someone who was in Russia during the First World War turns up in France during the second. Someone from the last quartet of books turns up in your second volume of the present series.

Dr Catherine Gavin19:59

From the Snow Mountain? Yes, I thought he was a very important character in the Snow Mountain, and he fills a very useful role, and none dare call it treason.

Presenter20:06

How do you prepare a book? Do you prepare the details of your plot?

Presenter20:11

In advance

Dr Catherine Gavin20:12

Yes, pretty well. And then I go on location, as the movie people say. I always like to go over the scenes of a book. I remember once a reporter was very angry with me for writing about what I'd seen in Lima de Peru. He said it was impossible for anybody to have been in in Peru.

Dr Catherine Gavin20:26

But in fact I'd been there twice, writing my thousand words of description every morning.

Presenter20:31

That must be very useful to have all that stuff. And now, when you start a book, when you've got your your treatment, as it were, you know exactly what you're going to write.

Presenter20:40

How do you write? Do you write in bursts, or do you write so many hours a day, or how does it work out?

Dr Catherine Gavin20:46

Oh, once I've started the actual writing I I write straight on. I work on it every day and usually in in the early morning.

Presenter20:53

Record number six we've got to.

Dr Catherine Gavin20:56

Now this is a rather special record. It's the song the Foreign Legion sang during the Algerian War.

Dr Catherine Gavin21:02

when General de Gaulle tried to humiliate them by disbanding them.

Dr Catherine Gavin21:06

And when the boys were loaded into the trucks and taken off back to the barracks,

Dr Catherine Gavin21:10

They began to sing this song which Edit Piaff had just made famous, called Non je ne regrette de rien. They meant they didn't regret a single thing of what they'd done in opposition to Charles de Gaulle.

Speaker 321:21

Doria.

Speaker 321:26

No run a regular

Speaker 321:31

Nigga bear coma beginning.

Presenter21:52

The voice of Edith Piaf.

Presenter21:54

Well, now, having gone through some very rough experiences as a woman w war correspondent, I don't think there's much doubt as to your capabilities as a castaway. You could look after yourself on this island.

Dr Catherine Gavin22:05

I could forage for food, and know how to prepare it, I think.

Presenter22:08

Yes. And build some kind of shelter?

Dr Catherine Gavin22:11

I could build a shelter. The one thing I couldn't do is build a raft.

Presenter22:14

Would you try to escape if the materials turned up?

Dr Catherine Gavin22:19

Not even, because I don't know a thing about navigation. I might just finish up on another desert island.

Presenter22:24

Would you bother on your own to keep up appearances? Would you try to keep your hair in order and mend your clothes and whatever?

Dr Catherine Gavin22:33

Well, that would almost depend on the kind of clothes I was cast away in and what don't they always finish up wearing skirts made out of leaves and branches and bananas and that sort of thing? I suppose it's possible.

Presenter22:42

I suppose it's possible. Would you try?

Dr Catherine Gavin22:44

I would try.

Presenter22:45

What's your seventh record?

Dr Catherine Gavin22:49

I was talking about this book of Snow Mountain that I wrote about the Romanoffs, while I visited Russia three times.

Dr Catherine Gavin22:55

when I was working on that book and I became very interested, apart from the predominant interest which is French literature and life.

Dr Catherine Gavin23:02

I became very interested in the arts in Imperial Russia, and indeed in the political thinking of post-imperial Russia.

Dr Catherine Gavin23:10

And so I should like my seventh record to be uh the great Matsurka

Dr Catherine Gavin23:14

From Grinka's opera A Life for the Tar.

Presenter24:19

The Mazurka from Glinker's A Life for the Czar

Presenter24:23

The Monte Carlo National Opera Orchestra, conducted by Louis Fremont.

Presenter24:28

And what's your last record to be?

Dr Catherine Gavin24:30

My last record is to be the greatest national anthem in the world, the embodiment of the spirit of the land which has meant so much to me.

Dr Catherine Gavin24:38

A Macaz.

Presenter26:04

La Marciaz.

Presenter26:05

Played by the Paris Police Band.

Presenter26:08

And if you could take just one disk, which would you choose?

Dr Catherine Gavin26:11

The Marseillais to cheer me every day of my life.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:14

And one luxury to take to the island? I'd like a painting. It's hanging at present in the Chicago Art Institute.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:21

It's of course a French scene. It's an impressionist painting by Pizarro.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:26

And it's called On the Banks of the Marne.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:28

Winter

Presenter26:30

Or somehow we'll get it for you.

Presenter26:32

And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we don't allow big encyclopedias.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:39

Then I like the work that really turned my mind to the study of history when I was very young.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:45

It's endlessly fascinating. The Letters of Queen Victoria.

Presenter26:49

Right.

Presenter26:50

And thank you, Dr. Catherine Gavin, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Dr Catherine Gavin26:54

Thank you for inviting me.

Presenter26:56

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 127:06

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