Norman Parkinson

Norman Parkinson0:00

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

Norman Parkinson0:05

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 photographer Norman Parkinson. Now, Parks, you already live on an island, don't you?

Presenter0:39

A small island.

Norman Parkinson0:39

Yeah.

Presenter0:41

Perhaps it was because uh many years ago I hoped that eventually I would receive the final accolade and be invited on your programme, Roy.

Presenter0:50

That uh I moved to a desert island in order to be well rehearsed. Well not all that desert. It's Tobago, isn't it? Yeah. How long have you been living there? Well we've been living there since 1963. You have a little farm there as well as a nice house? Well I have a few acres but it's mostly on the side of a cliff so the few pigs and cattle we have are usually shorter with eggs on one side than the other because they have to get about on the hillside.

Presenter1:16

Do you run your little farm commercially?

Presenter1:19

Yes, well, some years ago I uh got rather smitten with the idea of a cooperative. So that the the people who work with me there, um I got them some little training. I brought one or two of them to England and sent them to Smithfield Market, where they learnt to do butchery and that sort of thing. And I also learnt

Presenter1:38

That pigs thrive in the Caribbean, you know, back to the days of the buccaneers. Yes. They used to leave pigs on most barren islands so that they could always come back. That's right. When they came in for water and to scrape the bottoms, whatever, they released some pigs so that they knew there would be food there when they came back. And having heard about this, I started to release a few pigs around my farm and I found they did thrive. And then, because if you live on even a moderately large island, you soon begin to realize that your food isn't quite.

Norman Parkinson1:48

That's right. When they came in

Presenter2:12

I mean your vegetables are good and you have plenty of citrus and that sort of thing, but you miss a good English banger.

Presenter2:18

So we started to make them.

Presenter2:20

On a non-commercial basis to begin with, you know, you can buy a machine, which is one of the most obscene-looking objects in the world, in which you force meat into a skin. And we did a few months of that, in which we used to have a few rums and do this in the kitchen and then fall about on the floor with laughter. And then I started this cooperative, and the the people who work around come and make uh the sausages and bacon and so forth. And we are now making about six hundred pounds of the famous Pawkinson. Pawkinson note is banger.

Speaker 32:52

Yeah.

Presenter2:53

A week. Yes, you're really in the banger business. Yeah. Well, leaving this glamorous island and going back to the old familiar desert island, how well could you survive on one, do you think? Obviously you would know, you'd have a pretty good idea how to put up a hut.

Presenter3:08

Oh yes, I can I'm I I'm I hope we don't start with the rainy season. And this uh desert island will obviously be divided, as Tobago is, part of the year rain and part of the year dry. And if I can just get started with uh maybe two or three months of dry, I can get myself organized because nothing's worse than being damp. And you know more or less which fruits you can eat and which ones to keep off. Yeah, well obviously one it'll be a process of uh elimination.

Presenter3:37

What about small boats? Are you good with small boats? Yeah, I um in my youth I rowed with Henley, so that uh I know a little bit about boats. With what you know about tropical islands, would you try to escape and tropical seas?

Presenter3:51

No, I don't think I'd try and escape at all. I'm uh perfectly happy where I am, and uh provided I could just get by on your island, I'd be perfectly happy there.

Presenter4:01

All right, now let's get on to music. What's your first record you've chosen? Well, because of my association with Carnival, I'm at Trinidad.

Presenter4:09

which is now my not only my second home, but my real home.

Presenter4:14

I would sit with my record player and I would think about the happy times I had playing carnival in Trinidad, in Port of Spain, where you have a license to be drunk, which is part of the joys of life. It gets rid of all your inhibitions. And this last year, one of the great calypso in Trinidad was called Norman, Is That You?

Norman Parkinson4:38

Walking and shaking his hips, wearing earrings and rouge on his lips What he did to himself I don't know But he rarely change up the food Wearing a tie-tie pants And a handbag in his hands And say no this ain't true And he wearing makeup too Axel Uh

Speaker 34:58

Uh

Norman Parkinson4:58

Uh

Speaker 34:58

Tell me nobody is that you I want to know nobody is that you

Presenter5:09

Norman is that you sung by Merchant.

Presenter5:12

Let's go back now to pre-Caribbean days. Where were you born?

Presenter5:16

I was born in Putney, Rehampton, right in there. Perhaps schooled in Eastbourne, then Westminster School, in the days of top hat and tail coat. Oh, indeed.

Speaker 35:26

Oh, indeed.

Norman Parkinson5:26

Yeah.

Presenter5:27

Uh living later in a semi-detached house in Landford Road, Putney, one had to run the gamut of a mile or so to uh Putney Bridge station, and in those days the top hat was a marvellous thing to throw tomatoes at.

Presenter5:41

And um you know it does um improve the character or otherwise.

Presenter5:48

Well, there was a wonderfully antique photographer called Richard Spate.

Presenter5:53

who claimed to fame was that he uh took a picture of King Albert of the Belgians in the trenches in 1917 by using a sheet. Well, a you know, a bed sheet. To reflect light. That's right. And um I d can't imagine what the exposure was like. It was probably a fortnight, 5.6.

Norman Parkinson6:02

Basically

Presenter6:12

But he d he was a marvellous photographer who recently has been greatly revered. Not that he had anything to do with me, because I drove him mad.

Presenter6:20

But I uh my father fixed up for me to to be apprenticed to him. Did you know anything about photography? Not a thing. Were you interested in photography? No, it seemed y you know, one was dragging one's feet into anything and uh it seemed to be a good way of getting by. How did you start sticking pictures onto mounts and that sort of thing? Well no, I became his assistant in the studio. You know, he had these big carbon arc umbrellas and uh I just attended the lights and worked the cameras and uh i i i in the end after two years, you know, uh drove him completely mad. What sort of photography was it, mainly? Well it was a debutante, you know. Uh he was called a court photographer. Yes. Uh and uh after two years I felt I was the one who'd been caught.

Presenter7:03

I think it's time we had another record. What next?

Presenter7:06

Well, obviously, out of respect to Richard Spate, FRPS, I can't get started with him, or couldn't get started with him, Punny Berrigan.

Speaker 37:18

On the Gold Course, I'm underpar

Speaker 37:25

My drug or win have asked me to start.

Speaker 37:31

I've got a house, a show place.

Speaker 37:36

Still I can't get no place with you.

Presenter7:42

I Can't Get Started by Nebergan.

Presenter7:46

So you got the sack from your first job. You decided to stay with photography after that full start.

Presenter7:52

Yeah, well it seemed that uh one had uh acquired a trade. I mean, whatever one learnt from spate one learnt how to take snaps and how to print them.

Presenter8:01

And uh I started by renting a a room and uh a few backrooms, number one, Dover Street, Piccadilly. My f my father, who was never a very ambitious man, said that I had taken leave of my senses because he said if you want to be a photographer, you have to start

Presenter8:19

Say in High Street Putney.

Presenter8:21

And then work up. But you don't start at at the top. What sort of photography were you you're going to stay with the Debs, were you? Well, there seemed uh in those days, you see, there wasn't no fashion photography because most of it was done by artists. There were great photographers like uh Baron de Meyer and Honnigan Hune and Andre Durst and those sort of people.

Presenter8:43

But there was practically no fashion talk. It was all artists and and I could only see that that one would photograph Debs and hope that they'd buy the pictures. But they never did. They just wanted more eyelashes and less waist and never paid their bills. So you were going down a bit? I was going down very fast. What was the break? What saved you? Well, there was a lovely lady who was the editor of English Harper's called P. Joyce Reynolds.

Presenter9:07

And she was visiting a photographer on the fifth floor of Number 1 Delvey Street.

Presenter9:11

And uh the lift fortunately that day had broken and she'd noticed some snaps of mine that I had taken outside. And when she got back to the office she got the art director Alan McPeak to uh telephone me and asked me if I'd like to take some photographs for them outside. In those days, of course, there were no models, they were just ladies in quotes who were prepared to be photographed for the smarter magazines. And I just went off and bought a little camera and took some ladies in smart hats against uh some statues, you know, which I thought was uh

Presenter9:43

a progressive way of doing it. And of course unfortunately when the when I pulled the films out of the soup there was nothing on them. So I had to, with my last twenty pounds, buy a Graphlex.

Norman Parkinson9:49

So

Presenter9:53

What's that? Well Graphlex is a four by five camera of some antiquity, but the pictures came out and I think that was the beginning. In fact, in my book Sisters Under the Skin there is a photograph of an old lady that I took in Bath in about 1937. Oh yes. Which was in fact taken on that very Graphlex which I still have.

Norman Parkinson10:07

So yeah

Presenter10:12

Well, there you are started on your own and you've had your first break and you're coming up to your third record for The Desert Island. What's that? Well, um the next the next record that I've chosen reminds me of my early days in New York when I went uh after the war.

Presenter10:30

A Sleeping Bee by Diane Caroll when she was about eighteen from the House of Flowers.

Norman Parkinson10:35

Must be done to me I walked with my feet off the ground

Norman Parkinson10:48

When m

Presenter11:01

Deanne Carroll singing A Sleeping Bee from House of Flowers, which remind you of your early days in New York, that was when you transferred your allegiance to Vogue, wasn't it? And you were working for Vogue internationally. That's right. I'd been invited to America to start working and I used to be there for six months or three months of each year. Now you were an innovator as far as fashion photography is concerned, weren't you? Well, the kind people say so. I remember that these photographers I was talking about earlier took very scent-laden studio or apartment pictures of girls, rather like Steichen with heavy furniture and

Presenter11:43

And uh as soon as I got hold of girls, uh I thought that they didn't really need their knees bolted together. I think that they were people who should be taken outside and should run and jump and behave like I always saw them the way they did behave.

Presenter11:57

Well now, of course, hardly anything of that sort is done in the studio. You you see every girl in a bull ring or up the Eiffel Tower or sitting on top of a pyramid or something. Oh yes, there's a g there's a great deal of that. And uh I think perhaps I started the um

Presenter12:13

You know, the trips into impossible places. Just because you liked trips to impossible places. Yeah, and look where I am now.

Presenter12:22

Another record. What next? Oh.

Presenter12:25

Well, I have to hark back too to the nst nostalgic uh period in America when there was uh football games and raccoon coats and large two gallon shakers full of martinez and West Point and Ives.

Presenter12:42

Charles Ives. The composer. Yeah. Symphony number two.

Presenter13:47

The closing passage of the Second Symphony by Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Now, you work globally, working for

Presenter13:57

Virtually every periodical there is all over the world are the demands and styles required.

Presenter14:03

Very different.

Presenter14:05

No, um why I have got a tab because uh so much of my photography appears in fashion magazines of being a fashion photographer. I l like to think of myself more as a photographer and drop the fashion bit because

Presenter14:19

You know, there's something ephemeral about fashion, but it but it does mean that one's asked to

Presenter14:24

to uh use the camera more and more because fashion is so quickly changing.

Presenter14:30

And you've done a fair amount of advertising work, too. That must be very profitable. I suppose it really it's in advertising that one gets the most nonsensical stories.

Presenter14:39

Yes, there there has recently been this uh Irish gentleman who decided to send me to India. He said the place of your choice, you know, and India seemed good as anywhere, but he sent me with a ton of carpet. A ton of carpet. Which I had to hang round. Yeah. I had to sort of cut it round the various uh Indian monuments and I was cunning enough not to try and carpet the Taj Mahal or Fatapasikri, but

Speaker 314:52

Which I have to hand out.

Presenter15:06

You you would never credit the the uh absurdly delightful things one has to do. There's also a story that you lost some motor cars that somebody gave you to photograph, wasn't there? This is your life.

Norman Parkinson15:16

Yeah.

Presenter15:19

I remember, yes, many years ago I had a new Land Rover that I was just bought to take out to Tobago and we borrowed a couple of Jaguar XK120s and I had to take a photograph of a girl riding a horse in the surf and a car driving alongside it. You know, I suppose the advertiser thought there was a presupposed great speed and... Yes, and a girl in every picture. A girl in every picture. It got to be there. And the fellow who was driving the Jaguar wasn't quite as smart as he should have been.

Presenter15:54

and uh he got it b bogged, stuck in the sand, uh and we didn't really realize that the tide was in fact making and not going out. But anyhow I hitched my

Presenter16:05

Land Rover to it eventually and of course if you know underneath an XK120 there doesn't seem to be an axle. And while we pulled away the Land Rover just dug itself into the sand and we just walked away and l with our cameras and left the two vehicles to disappear under the sea. It was an expensive day. Yes, you got the cameras out, didn't you? The cars were five. What's that to be?

Norman Parkinson16:23

Everything's

Norman Parkinson16:29

With love.

Presenter16:34

Well, that's to remind myself of the happy days that uh I now spend in Italy.

Presenter16:40

Uh because I go there two or three times a year to work for Italian Vogue who um I don't know, all the magazines down in Milan now are so fat you can hardly lift them.

Presenter16:48

And uh they're practically all colour pictures they ask you to do.

Presenter16:52

And uh you work very, very hard and then you end up uh eating glorious bowls of pasta.

Presenter16:59

And of course you're always within spitting distance of Saint Peter's Rome.

Presenter17:05

And uh since we're very much in the news now.

Presenter17:09

We have uh

Presenter17:10

My friend Tom Leira

Presenter17:12

Doing what I go was called genuflect, and I'm afraid it's not in Polish. Ah, this is the Vatican Rag. That's the one.

Speaker 217:20

4, 6, 8, time to transubstantiate. So get down upon your knees, fiddle with your rosaries, bow your head with great respect and jingu flag, jennifer flag, jennifer. Make a cross on your abdomen. When in Rome, do like a Roman. Abe, Maria, gee, it's good to see you. Getting ecstatic and sort of dramatic and doing the battle.

Speaker 317:50

Tom Leira

Presenter17:51

The Vatican Rag. Now, of course, portraits is is is a big thing in any photographer's life.

Presenter17:58

Which raises really a a question of conscience. How much can one retouch?

Presenter18:03

Ah, well once upon a time, I think this is where photography has grown up, there was a lot of retouching went on.

Presenter18:10

But uh the portraits I do of people today, mostly ladies, I mean a m man who wants to be photographed has obviously got a screw loose somewhere. But uh one does photograph a lot of ladies, uh not fashionable ladies, you know ladies that live in large buildings at the end of the mall. Well, you do your retouching before.

Presenter18:32

You take your photograph now. How do you mean? Well, I have a good friend in Paris.

Presenter18:37

Olivier Echoud Maison. Isn't that a marvelous name for Mr. Hothouse. And he is a bit of a hothouse too. But he's a a genius with makeup. And there are others in England too, Anthony Clavey and others, who are brilliant with make up. And they

Norman Parkinson18:40

Yeah.

Presenter18:54

Put the retouching right there and then. Recently, you've been honoured by being appointed a royal photographer. I never know what that adjective means. I've been dubbed with it, and I'm very pleased to wear it, but I think the media gave it to me, and there are many, many other photographers who are also considered royal photographers. But I think I'd like to say that I have photographed every member of of the royal families of Europe, and I have a shooting stick, which was recently lost by British Airways, upon which every royal posterior had sat. You have a sort of superstition about a a hat that you always wear in the studio.

Norman Parkinson19:12

But

Presenter19:31

Well, there's a series, a whole family of hats. I'm glad you asked me because I brought them with me. Oh, it's beautiful. Once upon a time, I went to Kashmir. And these hats... I'm bringing out red and brown and so forth.

Norman Parkinson19:42

B

Norman Parkinson19:44

Scope

Presenter19:45

Yeah, they're they're Mohammedan bridal hats, I think. You've disappeared under the table to get some more. You'll be up again.

Norman Parkinson19:49

Utica.

Norman Parkinson19:52

Forget about it.

Presenter19:53

Oh, a set of three. Well, th this this is the following family. I now wear the great-great-grandson of the original hat.

Norman Parkinson19:55

Quality.

Presenter20:02

But I wear another one over the top of it, because it's rather like training sheepdogs. I know that the original old dirty hat is a good one, and then you have to keep training them. These always come with me, you see, so that they get the fluence through them. And as long as you're wearing a hat, it's all right. Well, people I mean a lot of girls that particularly on fashion sittings, they just won't even start to work.

Norman Parkinson20:14

Through the

Presenter20:22

Until they see I put my hat on. Record number six.

Presenter20:26

Mm.

Presenter20:27

Grace Jones, that lovely Jamaica girl, reminiscent of one's wild life in um discos, La Vien Rose,

Presenter21:05

Grace Jones, La Vian Rose.

Presenter21:07

Your work is in pretty well every magazine in the civilized world, or has been at some time or another. And uncivilized, too. But only now have you published your first book. Ah, yes.

Presenter21:18

Well, I always had a a bit of a worry about producing a book because uh so many of my uh colleagues run off to books, you know, like measles and uh before you can say knife there they are in the remainder shops at 30 Bob so that I was postponing it and thought maybe somebody would do it like my son Simon when I was dead and buried. But uh I had this nice publisher, Kushan up an Arab gentleman, who said, Parkinson, it's high time you did a book.

Presenter21:49

And I kept on postponing it, and then I hit upon this idea of sisters under the skin.

Presenter21:53

And I started to look through my files, going back, as I said, to an old lady in Bath in nineteen thirty seven, and I found that I did have quite a collection of photographs of important ladies, a handful of which are now dead.

Presenter22:06

And the

Presenter22:07

Then I happened to meet

Presenter22:09

Or pick up what a fearful word pick up a couple of

Presenter22:13

Identical twins.

Presenter22:15

the McCandless twins um outside the V and A.

Presenter22:19

and they looked pitiful and were about to sell their clothes'cause they hadn't got any money. And uh w we kept them off the starvation line for a short while and uh we took quite a lot of photographs of them and they appeared in vogue and Sunday Telegraph and the Mail and so forth. And uh I took a picture which seemed so suitable for the cover.

Presenter22:40

of the book and um

Presenter22:43

That's how it all started.

Presenter22:46

Well now I have to hark back a little bit to um

Presenter22:50

My days at school that run a full circle. I remember at Westminster, I was never a queen scholar and I was just one of those ignoramous boys at the back, but very impressed by the scene of Westminster Abbey. And I remember on two or three occasions that the monarch visited the Abbey and was greeted by the wonderful fanfares of the trumpeters in Mellow Hall. And as I sit there miserably dreaming of a rum punch and drinking coconut milk, I want to play this one.

Presenter24:04

A fanfare played by the trumpeters of the Royal Military School of Music, Della Hall.

Presenter24:09

Which brings us now to your last record.

Presenter24:12

Well

Presenter24:14

Uh John Gilgood, Sir John Gilgood, has been a very, very old friend of mine. In fact, my wife was his first fan, and I think she, at the age of about nine, wrote to him and asked him to marry her about the time of Richard of Bordeaux.

Speaker 324:32

And

Norman Parkinson24:32

Uh

Presenter24:33

Since here we are on this desert island, and since I have recently got permission from the Government of Trinidad and Tobago, they have my private burial ground, because at the age of sixty-five you have to think about these things. And I never wanted to be buried with people that I hadn't been introduced to. I think that fate worse than death is to end up in Putney Vale. So the Government has given us a small patch of ground below the house, and there I shall be interred. There I hope will be the the best wake that Tobago's ever known with steel bands and everything e else that haircutting and I hope I'll lie in a tin bath with ice all round me and this is the way we get our cool drinks when we go to a funeral in Tobago. You wear your best suit, boots and all and you're covered in ice and when you want your rum and soda or rum and water you just scoop the ice off the tin tub.

Presenter25:26

And here we go, John Gilgood, Fear No More. From Cymbaline. Exactly.

Speaker 325:32

Fear no more the heat of the sun.

Speaker 325:35

Nor the furious winter's rages

Speaker 325:38

Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and tain thy wages.

Speaker 325:45

Golden lads and girls all must

Speaker 325:48

As chimney sweepers come to dust

Speaker 325:52

Fear no more the frown of the great

Speaker 325:55

thou art past the tyrant's stroke

Speaker 325:57

Care no more to clothe and eat

Speaker 326:00

To thee the reed is as the oak.

Presenter26:02

Sir John Gielgud, The Dirge from Cymbeline. Now, if you could take just one disc.

Presenter26:08

Out of the eight, which would it be?

Presenter26:10

Well, I think I'd take the fanfare.

Presenter26:13

And one luxury to take with you to the island? Nothing of any practical use. Can I take a statue? Yes. Which one? Well, the statue which I saw recently, which haunts me, by a Venezuelan sculptor who does life size statues of

Presenter26:31

sort of Amerindian looking women.

Presenter26:33

But they're very, very sexy and the the one I'm thinking of is life-size, bronze.

Presenter26:40

And she's leaning against a hammock. Do you uh remember the name of the sculptor? Cornelis Zittmann.

Presenter26:46

And you're allowed one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we don't allow big multi-volume encyclopedia. No, no, here's the book. It was given to me by my wife when I first met her. It is The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly. Right. The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly. And thank you, Norman Parkinson, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Well, thank you for having me. Goodbye, everyone.

Norman Parkinson27:21

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