Norris McWhirter

Speaker 10:00

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

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is a journalist and editor.

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One of the publications he controls is the celebrated Guinness Book of Records, its Norris MacWhirter.

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Norris, I know you're a student of islands, particularly those forming the British Isles.

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Yes, I am. Uh it all began actually when I had a phone call from a journalist in Brussels who said how many British Isles are there?

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And I was absolutely stumped. So I rang up the Ordnance Survey and various other learned bodies, and I was amazed to find that nobody knew the answer. So I thought that the only way to do it was to research it myself. And that was four years ago. And I've discovered there's a thousand and forty of them. That's round Great Britain, excluding the Irish ones. And there's no checklist, so I've had great fun in reconstructing it. There's a definition, they must be big enough to have the summer pasturage of at least one sheep, otherwise they don't qualify. And that was a definition made in 1861.

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Where would you like your desert island to be?

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Well, of all the islands I've visited, the ones I like best are the Hawaiian Islands, so I think I'd choose one of the obscurer ones of them.

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Now, Macwirta, a good Scottish name. Were you born in Scotland? No, I wasn't, because my father, like so many Scots in the interwar years, took a one way ticket to London. But my ancestry is a hundred per cent Scottish. Yes. Your father, of course, was a a newspaper editor and proprietor.

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You are one of a pair of identical twins, and sadly your twin brother Ross is no longer with us.

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Who was the elder?

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I was by twenty minutes, and I also was, I think, seven ounces heavier.

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How important is music in your life?

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Well, I can't say that I'm a musical person in so far as I was told, I think unwisely at an early age, that I was perhaps a bit tone deaf, and that has a rather depressing effect.

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But um I enjoy music, um and particularly I find that I enjoy things which are popular rather than things which are obscure. Did you find it hard to narrow your choice to eight for an island? I would have much preferred to have eighteen. What's the first one you've got there? Well, I think to remind me of my um Scots ancestry, I would like to have uh some bagpipes, and the reason being that my great-great-grandmother lived in a little place called Achfoopoel, just by Ben Nevis,

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and when she was uh very aged, over ninety, she'd never heard the pipes, and they bought the piper in from the local village, and the old girl lying in her box bunk

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whispered to the people after they'd played a dirge and a lamint and the shotish and everything, and she said, Thank God there's nay smell

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The Pipes, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, and Amazing Grace.

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Where did you spend your childhood?

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Uh in North London uh my father used to have to be in commuting distance of Fleet Street, where he was the first person to be editor of three different national newspapers. So really it was the edge of suburbia. Now there was a a prep school you both went to, you and Ross, where there was a Mr Busey and and he had quite an influence on you I believe.

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Very much so. He was one of these dedicated schoolmasters, and he was

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sufficiently old fashioned, in my view effective, to believe that the way to learn things was to learn them.

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And he used to have a card with all the dates of the kings and queens of England. The geography card had all the mountain ranges, all the countries, the capitals, the populations. And this was meat and drink to us. And I think I can rightly say that I can remember them all even to this day. And he was a great influence. And he's now retired, living near Edinburgh.

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He was the man who said that facts, McWhirter, is i are important. Yes, he sent me that.

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Then you both went to Marlborough. This was when the war was on, the last war. Yes. And there was the blackout and the rationing. And also, of course, most of the best masters left to fight in the war. And it was the sort of second eleven who returned in retirement. So it was a tough time. Yes, and you both went off to the Royal Navy. Your spell in the Royal Navy was virtually the only time you and Ross were ever separated. Yes, it was. It was the only time we were apart, and we were apart just over a year. He was in minesweepers, and I was in frigates chasing U-boats. And in fact, our reunion was almost forcible, because I was coming back from the Far East in HMS Scaravay, and by extraordinary coincidence, it had the adjacent pennant numbers as the minesweeper he was in, called HMS Schillet. And when we were coming through the Suez Canal, I got a signal to berth alongside HMS Chile on arrival at the Letta. And as we came in, our reversing gear broke and we had an agonising choice. Either we had to ram the Maharusa, which was King Farouk of Egypt's yacht, or we had to ram HMS Schillet.

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And the captain thought the paperwork would be a lot less if we had one of our own, and we did, so we had a forcible reunion. What happened when you left the navy?

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After being in the Navy, we went back to Oxford because we were there six months during the war. And we went back, Ross studied law, and I studied economics under Tony Crossland, who was later the Foreign Secretary. Yes, you didn't always agree with him, I gather. No, we used to have arguments. Our tutorials were spirited. He was a wonderful tutor, a very charming man, but we didn't exactly agree eye to eye, though I rather think we would agree more eye to eye nowadays. Yes. And you and Ross both achieved distinction in university athletics. You got your blue, didn't you? Yes, I ran in the 100 yards, which I think must be the greatest economy of effort in getting a blue, because it only lasts just over 10 seconds. And it was a very wintry day, because in those days they used to run it in March, and it was perishingly cold at the White City. And when you came down? When I came down, I continued with sport, and we ran quite a lot in various international matches and things all over, running in Norway and in Greece and various other places. But then we set up a business, and that was a fact and figure business in Hoban, in a little garret, and it was to supply facts and figures to newspapers, yearbooks, encyclopedias, advertisers, anyone who wanted them. And it was like building up a practice.

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Well let's pause here for your second record. What have we got?

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Well, um

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We're talking about the Navy and one of my most vivid memories was the last day we came in from patrol from the Atlantic in the second escort group which was the one which had sunk most U-boats in the days when it was either they got you or you got them and the second escort group in fact was quite famous and it had six ships and they steamed back from the bar outside Liverpool into Liverpool and all the lights were ablaze and that of course after years of blackout was a great sight and the senior officer's ship commanded by Commander Weems, the HMS Wild Goose

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put on her loud haler, and played full blast with all the flags flying, Land of Hope and Glory.

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Land of Hope and Glory, and played very appropriately because of the story you told us by the band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines.

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Now you started this agency for providing facts and figures, and your interest in sport continued. In fact, you worked for the BBC as a commentator. Yes, in those days it was radio because the nineteen fifty two Olympic Games, which were held in Helsinki,

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were too far away to be televised back to this country. They were very much dominated by the great Czech runner Emil Zatopek. He won the 5,000 meters against Chris Chataway, I remember who came fourth, the 10,000 metres, and his wife Dana, who was a javelin thrower and won another gold medal herself, explained that she didn't want her husband to run the marathon because he'd never run one, that's 26 miles, because he really wasn't strong enough. And all the other marathon runners only wished that the advice had prevailed. But Zatopec did run in it, and needless to say, he won it by a street. You were present as a commentator at a very historic sporting occasion.

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Yes, that was um the four minute mile. And I knew Roger Bannister very well'cause he after all was in the same team uh against Cambridge and in the same club, the Achilles Club.

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And I knew that he was training very hard to be the first person to break four minutes. And for eight years, the record has stuck rigidly at four minutes, 1.3 seconds, tantalizingly close. And I was appointed to be the announcer at the meeting. So the evening before, that was May the 5th, 1954, I thought to myself, well, if I have to announce the first four minute mile, how will I do it? So I practiced it in the bath. And sure enough, it happened. Three minutes, 59.4 seconds. There were 1,500 people there, and I've met all 10,000 of them since.

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It really wasn't expected in in athletics.

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I would say there was an American called Wes Santee who could have done it. John Landy of Australia could have done it. There were three men in the world who could have done it. But it certainly wasn't expected that night because it was a 15 mile an hour wind blowing and it was cold and blustery and very, very far from ideal conditions. I know that you've kept the actual stopwatch that clocked in that. It's a historic item. Surely.

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Write your third record, please.

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I think that I'd like to recall the nineteen fifty two Olympic Games at Helsinki. They had a wonderful spirit about them, and they were so dominated by Zatopek and his wife that one continuously seen to be standing up for the Czech national anthem.

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The Czechoslovak National Anthem.

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Now, Norris, one of your athletic friends put you on to rather a good publishing job.

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Oh, yes, that was a phone call, and it came from Chris Chataway, who was second in the first four-minute mile, and he had newly taken up an appointment from Oxford with Guinness Brewery at Park Ryle on the western edge of London, and he rang up our office in Hoban and said that they would like us to go over there and discuss a new project which they had in mind.

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So Ross and I got in the car, and we went over and we met.

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Sir Hugh Beaver, who was the chief executive of Guinness, and he unfolded to us his plan for producing a book for settling

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Arguments in the eighty two thousand pubs in Britain

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And we had lunch.

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And I remember that perhaps the thing which clinched it in his mind was that we had all sorts of information out of the top of our heads. They asked us about the pole squatting record or the widest river in the world that froze. You were already writing something of the sort on breakfast food packets, weren't you? Yes, we were. That's not widely known. It's perfectly true. We were. We were doing it for breakfast packets, and so we had a head start on anyone on the subject. So you've got the job. What were your terms of reference to start with? The terms of reference were really quite generous. No interference at all. Just go away, get on with it, and let us know when you've finished.

Presenter14:51

We did it very rapidly because we got the commission in september nineteen fifty four and we had it finished by the end of august nineteen fifty five, mainly because of ninety hour weeks.

Norris McWhirter15:01

Yeah.

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Uh

Presenter15:03

And I well remember the caretaker in our office in Fleet Street thought we were demented when we used to go home at two o'clock in the morning. And now there's been a new edition every year since then. Sometimes more than one a year. We've had twenty-five in fact in twenty-four years. And it there is uh it's regularly updated and about twenty per cent of it changes from one edition to another so it's hard work. In how many languages?

Presenter15:26

It's now in nineteen languages and this year we will get it into Chinese officially for the first time, also Turkish and Indonesian, and we've also had nibbles from Arabic publisher, the Soviet Union and Hindi.

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What are the total sales to date in twenty what's it, twenty four years? Yes, twenty four years. Well, it's difficult to keep track because they aren't synchronized, but I would say the best estimate is about thirty seven and a half million. Yes, right.

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Record number four.

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Well, I'd like to be reminded of the times when we were working all hours that God gave, uh, ninety hour weeks, and the pop song of that time, the hit, was Singing the Blues by Tommy Steele.

Norris McWhirter16:37

Uh

Norris McWhirter16:39

Watch two minutes away

Norris McWhirter16:43

Bill

Norris McWhirter16:44

I'm all like

Presenter16:46

Tommy Steele Singing the Blues. Now, of course, new records are being broken every day. You've got to keep up to date with a whole lot of them. And when somebody writes in and says I've just broken the record for such and such, then it's all got to be checked.

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And what do you insist on in the way of um

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Corroboration.

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Well our corroboration is very much the same as that that would be required by a court of law. It must be independent. And we find that by the mechanism of the press as a lead, the radio, television, log books, notarised statements or affidavits, that one can establish the truth. And in this one also finds rather interestingly that very few record breakers get any satisfaction out of trying to fudge a record. They are often very devoted, dedicated people and they like to do it genuinely. Though we have had a few people who've tried to pull a fast one, but they're very much in a minority. How do you know where to stop? Because there are all sorts of just plain silly records that you must get written to about. I mean like how many peanuts you can balance on a playing card or something. I mean d does the whole lot go in? Oh certainly not. No, we're highly selective. We spend more effort in rejecting things than in accepting them.

Speaker 117:53

Yeah.

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And as a general rule, we include only absolute records as opposed to ones that are qualified. And we also do not include records which are gratuitously dangerous. In eating and drinking, we exclude all spirits. We don't have things like ramp jumping on cycles because children would come to grief. Cycles aren't built to stand the impact. So we exercise a lot of responsibility and we are unashamed censors.

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Of course, apart from the Book of Records, there are other publications that you've branched into.

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Yes, um our publishing company, which is a subsidiary of Guinness, uh has branched into a whole series of facts and feats books, which are much more specialized, and we also do a guide series, and it's great fun meeting these expert authors because they're such wonderful enthusiasts.

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Record number five, Norris.

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Well, I'd like to think about uh when I was originally compiling the book, it was before Ross and I were married, and we used to live at home, and we had tremendous parental support.

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and I always think of my father's favourite.

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a song, because he always used to think of my mother in the terms that Harry Lauder used to think of the Bonny Lassie.

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I love a lassie, a bunny healing lassie. Could you see her, you would fancy her as well. I met her in September, pop a question in November.

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Here ought to myself.

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Our faith or hands can see

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Feeling quite contented, a pin and shield the bargain where I guess.

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I sit in weary, weary when I think

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I love a lassie, said Harry Lauder.

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Now, three or four years ago Ross was assassinated by a terrorist. Almost immediately we sat down to write his biography. This was obviously a form of catharsis.

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Now to have spent fifty years of your life with an identical twin together from birth must have produced a tremendously close

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Unique kind of relationship. Yes, I think that

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Identical twins are as close as people can get because after all genetically they're the same person. They can even give each other skin grafts. And we found that we were so much on the same wavelength that by being twins one could perhaps get the work of three people done because you were always had a deputy, you always had a stand-in and it was possible to accept uh engagements to do things in the certain knowledge that if you were double booked then your other half could stand in for you. As children it was virtually impossible to tell you apart I believe.

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Yes, it certainly was. Uh and the um photographs we've got when we were one or two, I can't tell now. I'm quite sure which one was which. So in the book I actually said Ross brackets believed to be on the right.

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You had your own language as children? Yes, I think this is something that's quite common among identical twins for a very short time. When they're about coming up for one or one and a half, they converse with each other in a language which is not explicable or understandable by other people. And I think that this is something which alas only lasts a short time and in our case was never recorded because it was in the era before tape recorders.

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Record number six.

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Well, I would like to recall a very moving occasion, and that was Ross's memorial service. And we had such a tremendous response from so many people that it was decided that we couldn't hold it in a local church. And various friends of ours made arrangements, and it was held at St. Paul's. And I was astounded when I got there with the police escort, finding that the place was really packed.

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It was a very moving service in which Lord de Lisle, who won a Victoria Cross in the last war, read the address.

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and the service which was taken by the Bishop of London ended with a piece from the awesomely beautiful and slow orthodox Russian Requiem.

Norris McWhirter22:24

Mostly chills for King Crow.

Norris McWhirter22:45

Beneath this leave by the way.

Norris McWhirter23:04

Peace all in mercy.

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An excerpt from the Russian Orthodox Requiem

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The Russian Cathedral Choir of Paris.

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Have your travels taken you much to the tropics?

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Yes, I was in the tropics a lot in the Navy, crossed the equator several times, and most recently in Singapore. Yeah, see, so you've got some ideas on putting up a shelter and you could forage for food. Fishing all right? I've done a little bit of fishing, but not a great deal. I wouldn't describe myself as a skilled angler. Right, getting back to facts and figures in the book, what's the biggest fish ever caught on a line? On a line. Ah, that is a man.

Speaker 123:52

On a line.

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called Alf Dean, an Australian, who caught a white shark, a man-eating shark, that weighed uh about two tons. I should avoid that. Would you try to escape?

Presenter24:08

Um I think I would, yes, because I think that when one's been used to several decades of activity in so-called civilized world, one would be suffering quite a lot of deprivation, as it were, and lack of stimulation. Right, back to the book again. What's the longest drift on record?

Presenter24:28

Oh, well that was a man called Poon Lim and he was a Chinaman who was a crew of a British merchant ship in 1942, which I think was the year this programme started. 1942. And he was in the southern Atlantic and he was on a raft alone for 134 days and I was very privileged to meet him recently. He's now a resident of New York City.

Speaker 124:38

Yeah.

Norris McWhirter24:49

Really

Presenter24:52

Well, we hope you won't be away from your family all that time. Um you have a son and a daughter, I believe. Yes, I have, and in this more enlightened and civilized age they're able to be at school together, and Marlborough, where I was, and where Ross was.

Presenter25:07

And that's been a very happy arrangement. And I know that brings you into your next record, because you have a record there by the Marlborough School Choir.

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Yes, both of them have sung in the choir, and they have the most moving services, none more moving than the Christmas service of Carols, in which Roy Wilkinson, the musical director, and the organist Christopher Rathbone, really give it their all, and my favourite is Hark the Herald Angel Sing.

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The Organ and Choir of Marlborough College. What's your last disc?

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Well, this I'd like to have Richard Tauba singing You Are My Heart's Delight.

Norris McWhirter26:49

To what my heart is and where to wind on

Norris McWhirter27:01

You make my darkness bright when like a star you shine on me Change and my heart never your life

Norris McWhirter27:20

The streets of mine may fair and true.

Speaker 127:29

Fine mess

Norris McWhirter27:34

And I now hear you will.

Presenter27:46

Richard Talber singing Lehars, You Are My Heart's Delight. If you could take just one disc out of the eight, which would it be in ours?

Presenter27:54

Well, it's a hard choice, but I feel that I am an unashamed patriot, and the one that would stir me most, particularly at the moment of rescue, would be Land of Hope and Glory.

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And one luxury to take to the island with you. I've given a lot of thought to luxuries, and I've thought

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that is either between a calculating machine

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one of those pocket ones that are the wizardry of the modern age, or else a nice roll of cloth of chatouche, which is even better than Vicuna, but unfortunately it costs about a thousand dollars a yard. Oh, we can manage that. What do you want to do? Wrap yourself in it or? Yes, I think that some desert islands get very, very chilly late at night, and it would be a great comfort to have at least some good warmth. Right. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we don't permit big encyclopedias. Right. Well, I would have the National Dictionary of Biography, and I'd spend my time indexing it, because it isn't indexed. I'd do it both by place and by people, and I think it'd be a very useful contribution to the reference books of the world. It would indeed.

Presenter29:04

And thank you, Norris McWhirter, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Well, I've enjoyed it very much being on What is a Superlative programme. Bless you. Thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 129:22

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