Sir Arthur Bryant

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.

Presenter0:31

This week, our castaway is the historian, Sir Arthur Bryant. Sir Arthur, I'm told that you like to work to a musical background.

Sir Arthur Bryant0:38

Yes, I I always have done so. It it probably is a very

Sir Arthur Bryant0:42

Bad way of listening to music, and I can't say perhaps that I do listen to it, but it does help me a great deal to have a background of classical music. Have you any? Okay, musical ski.

Presenter0:51

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant0:51

Uh

Presenter0:51

Yourself.

Sir Arthur Bryant0:52

Yeah.

Presenter0:52

Yeah. Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant0:52

None whatever.

Presenter0:54

You don't sing or play an instrument?

Sir Arthur Bryant0:56

Well, I sing, but one would hardly call it musical skill.

Presenter1:00

Now what's the first record you've chosen?

Sir Arthur Bryant1:04

Well, I I would like, because they've meant a great deal to me in my life, to have one of the songs of my old school Harrow, which has no wonderful buildings like Eton or Winchester, but none the less has this great tradition of school songs, about sixty or seventy of them altogether.

Presenter1:22

And you used to sing well.

Sir Arthur Bryant1:23

And I used to sing those and still do. Like Winston, I go down to Harrow whenever I can to hear the songs sung and sing them.

Presenter1:31

Which one are you going to take to your island?

Sir Arthur Bryant1:33

Well, there's one called if time is up.

Sir Arthur Bryant1:36

and the words of which have always meant a great deal to me.

Speaker 21:40

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant1:40

They glide the months of worry and work, and desk and toil and task, And as you fear them fright the soul, And as you trust them pass And some will bring me good days, And some will bring me dull, And some will bring me trouble enough till all the days are done But good come, bad come, they came the same before, And hey ho, follow the game, And show the way to more.

Presenter2:32

If time is up.

Presenter2:34

A Harrow song recorded in the school on Speech Day, nineteen twenty eight.

Presenter2:39

Now, Sir Arthur, you were born on the royal estate of of Sandringham. Yes. Your father was an official in the royal household.

Sir Arthur Bryant2:45

He was an official now. He was with he was with King Edward VII, who was then Prince of Wales when I was born, from I think about eighteen eighty until his death in nineteen ten, and then he stayed on with George V, and he only retired three years before George V died. He was with the he was with the royal household for fifty one years. What was his office? Well, his office he was head of the secretariat uh at the palace, which was rather like being head of a uh a civil service department, while the private secretary was corresponding to a cabinet minister.

Presenter3:19

So, Harrow, and then, because the First World War was on, the Royal Flying Corps.

Sir Arthur Bryant3:25

and of which I was probably the worst pilot that ever existed.

Presenter3:28

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant3:28

Yeah.

Presenter3:28

Have you a a good mechanical sensor?

Presenter3:31

You served in France, of course, and

Sir Arthur Bryant3:33

Yeah.

Presenter3:33

After the war to Oxford, what did you read?

Sir Arthur Bryant3:35

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant3:36

Well, I I theoretically read history, but in fact I think the only thing I read when I was at Oxford was poetry.

Presenter3:44

Uh

Presenter3:45

When you graduated you were offered all sorts of jobs the Foreign Office, the Diplomatic Service, the Chair of the Editor of Burke's Peerage.

Presenter3:53

What, in fact, did you do?

Sir Arthur Bryant3:55

Well, I I believed that the world could be made a better place and I could help to make it a better place and I went and taught uh in a London slum school. Um I was quite wrong. Did you find that work rewarding? Loved the teaching. I loved the teaching, but then they made me a headmaster. I was I think the youngest headmaster in England because I was actually appointed when I was twenty three. I took up my duties when I was twenty-four. I was principal of what was then called the Cambridge School of Arts, Crafts and Technology and is now the Technical College for East Anglia. Did you enjoy that? I enjoyed the building the school up. I mean I only had two years, but I built it up from I think two hundred to about two thousand students. But I didn't like administration.

Presenter4:39

Well, in that short time you seem to have done very well at it.

Sir Arthur Bryant4:42

I worked there hard.

Presenter4:43

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant4:43

It's

Presenter4:43

Tell your second record. What shall that be?

Sir Arthur Bryant4:46

Well, I was going to suggest something from the Beggars' Opera because uh when I came out of the army in nineteen nineteen, this marvellous uh production of of colour and music, the Lovett Fraser sets of the Beggars' Opera and these enchanting old English airs, which I had also known as a child in a thing called the Babers' Opera, because the Beggars' Opera songs were all taken from old traditional songs, and I would very much like something from the Beggars' Opera.

Speaker 25:21

Where I laid on Greenland's coast, And in my arms embraced my last, Warm amid eternal frost.

Speaker 15:22

Where I leave

Speaker 15:27

Form a mid eternal throne.

Speaker 25:31

Too soon the half-year's light would pass. Where I sold a hind desire, soon as the burning day was closed, I could not pass a dream toil when I my daughter's blessed repose. I would love you all the day, every night you would kiss and play, If with me you fondless ray.

Speaker 15:38

It was cold.

Speaker 15:43

The first class we follow is

Speaker 25:57

Over the hills and far away, where I lay the field in school, And leave my arms and kiss my last, Over the main return prosperous and tight people

Speaker 16:00

Where I say I've been in school, and the fire of tempest lay

Speaker 26:10

I would

Speaker 26:11

Every night.

Presenter6:16

A song from The Beggars' Opera conducted by Richard Austin. He was the musical director of the original Love.

Sir Arthur Bryant6:22

Oh, the original loved phase of the production, yes, yes.

Presenter6:27

So get getting back to your career, Sir Arthur, you were the youngest headmaster in England. You then went off in another direction. You decided to read for the Bar. Why was that?

Sir Arthur Bryant6:35

Because I wanted to go into politics.

Sir Arthur Bryant6:38

I even hoped that I might become Prime Minister, although I must say, looking at what Prime Ministers have to suffer today, I think I was well out of it.

Presenter6:48

He would never practised law.

Sir Arthur Bryant6:49

No, hardly. I was put into very, very good chambers. Very good in

Sir Arthur Bryant6:55

Sherwin's chambers, but they were enormously long and involved briefs and I never had in those chambers, though I would have done very well if I'd stayed there, no doubt. I never had any of the ordinary court practice, which is what one really wants as a young bar student.

Presenter7:14

I think it was at about this time in your career that an event happened which had a very great influence on you. You were invited to look through some family papers in an old house, and you volunteered to catalogue them. What was in that collection?

Sir Arthur Bryant7:27

Well, it it wasn't quite that. It was my my first wife's home at Somerford in Cheshire, the Shackley Papers, and they had in the library there a kind of dummy door with old imaginary names of books on the outside. You open this door and one found oneself in what to a historian was a kind of paradise, uh a a great muniment room filled with, well, deeds going back to the twelfth and thirteenth century, and what was to me the most wonderful treasure and educational experience, family letters of the sixteenth, seventeenth, mostly seventeenth and eighteenth and early nineteenth century. And for years I used to spend my evenings transcribing twenty or thirty of these letters and they taught me.

Presenter8:19

Yeah.

Speaker 18:20

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant8:21

How to.

Sir Arthur Bryant8:23

Study history and how to be meticulous, how to be a scholar. And as a result?

Sir Arthur Bryant8:29

And as a result, a man who was at school with me, now last dead, called Godfrey Phillips, who was a reader to Longmans, used to come and stay with me and saw my enthusiasm for these letters. And he Longmans were wondering whether to reprint A Life of Charles the Second, Osmond Airy's Life of Charles the Second, which had been written thirty or forty years before, or to ask somebody else to write a new book on Charles the Second. And so I said, well,

Speaker 18:59

And

Sir Arthur Bryant9:04

Shall I write shall I try my hand at writing a thing about Charles the Second's Escape from Worcester? which is of course a a very thrilling, dramatic story, and I did, and Longmans liked it, and then commissioned me to write A New Life of Charles the Second, which is what I spent the next two years doing.

Presenter9:22

Published nearly fifty years ago, still in print, and still selling very nicely.

Presenter9:27

Yeah. Uh

Sir Arthur Bryant9:28

Yeah.

Presenter9:28

Uh your third record, I think now, please.

Sir Arthur Bryant9:31

When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I saw my first Gilburn Sullivan.

Sir Arthur Bryant9:37

And

Sir Arthur Bryant9:39

I've always loved those operas, and I would like to have one record played, I think the the most exquisite piece of pastiche and good music that Sullivan ever wrote, the madrigal from the end of the first act of Ruddygore.

Speaker 210:05

A birds are blossoming smiling welcome to the spring.

Speaker 210:12

Farmers truth are blending day. Life is love in marriage.

Speaker 110:16

I'm just lost.

Speaker 210:20

Point is love, hide is love.

Speaker 210:24

Oh merry missing is pretty summer's

Speaker 210:49

No, no, no, no, paint us dave is far away.

Presenter10:56

The Madriggle from Radikor, a performance conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.

Presenter11:02

Now you spent two years writing that biography of Charles the Second. Yes. The first, of course, of many books of history narrative history, social history, biographies.

Presenter11:12

Which you've been writing for fifty years. In fact, um I think I may mention that you're celebrating your eightieth birthday just about the time this

Presenter11:20

programme is going out and you're still hard at it.

Presenter11:23

Now after Charles the Second, you decided to stay in the seventeenth century. You wrote three volumes about Pepys.

Sir Arthur Bryant11:29

Yes, of which the fourth volume uh I'd done about a third when the war broke out, but then because of the Pepys Library I'd got about a year's work to do in the Pepys Library, which was Pepys's great interest of his last years of retirement, and as I couldn't go on doing that, I wrote English saga and then the three volumes on the Napoleonic Wars.

Presenter11:51

There was much to be revealed about Pepys, of course, because the diaries cover only a very short span of his

Sir Arthur Bryant11:55

Yes, I mean nine years of his early manhood.

Presenter11:59

I have a a note here, another note about the thirties, another job which came up during that period when John Wreath suggested you should become his principal assistant and possibly succeed him as director general of this establishment.

Presenter12:14

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant12:14

Yeah.

Presenter12:14

What's that chap?

Sir Arthur Bryant12:14

That is true. That is true.

Sir Arthur Bryant12:18

Well, I was very tempted by it, but by that time I got used to writing, and though I also wanted to go into politics, more and more I realised what a jealous mistress certainly writing history is, and I couldn't combine it with anything else. I mean, if I'd taken this job, I was also once asked to produce at the Old Vic, and again, I was terribly tempted because I used to produce pageants and I loved the theatre. But I was rarely, by fate, I suppose, designed to be.

Speaker 112:45

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant12:54

You remember what George the Third said to Gibbon when Gibbon was presented to him? Well, I suppose it's scribble, scribble, scribble, mister Gibbon, and that has been my lot in life.

Presenter13:06

Right, let's have another record. What should we have now?

Sir Arthur Bryant13:08

Well, I I think the first great musician whom I learned to appreciate when I was about nineteen or twenty was Mozart. And uh as I've only got a minute or two, I think I will choose something from the greatest opera ever written, The Magic Flute, and I would like the beginning of the introduction to the second part of the magic flute.

Presenter14:34

The opening of the prelude to the second act of the Magic Flute

Presenter14:38

George Scheltick conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter14:42

Now, the Second World War and as an analogy of that war in which we were up against it, you wrote those three volumes about the Napoleonic period.

Sir Arthur Bryant14:52

I then went on to do that, yes, and during the war I was doing that, and at the same time I was going round lecturing to all three services, and these two wars were, as it were, going on parallel in my own mind and experience.

Presenter15:09

After the war you came very nearly up to date by editing the Allenbrook Diaries.

Sir Arthur Bryant15:15

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant15:16

A very great man whom I came into contact with in a very humble capacity at the end of the First World War. It's the quickest mind I've ever come across, enchanting man, very humble, and I was asked by the Royal Regiment to write his biography and I said, Well, I can't do it during his lifetime, but if I survive him, if I'm still compos mentis, I'll do it. But it it so happened that when he knew I was going to write his biography, he copied out all his war diaries, meaning to copy only the bits that he thought would be all right for me to use, but in fact he was so fascinated he copied the whole thing and then put in these memories, these wonderful pictures of Winston. And when I was shown these, I felt that before a false legend grew which left out the contribution of our greatest soldier it was my duty as well as my

Speaker 215:56

Uh

Sir Arthur Bryant16:17

pleasure and privilege to write this book, The Turn of the Tide, and its sequel, Triumph in the West, though it played havoc with my work as a historian.

Presenter16:26

Of your other published books, apart from the ones we've mentioned, which are particularly important to you?

Sir Arthur Bryant16:32

Well, I would have said my two books on the Middle Ages, Makers of the Realm and the Age of Chivalry. I mean, how they came about was that when I'd spent ten years on the Napoleonic Wars and the Regency period from nineteen forty to nineteen fifty, and I'd published The Age of Elegance, I thought before I went back to the nineteenth century and carried the story on from the beginning of English saga, I would take a busman's holiday and rather as actors all want to act Hamlet, all historians, would like to write a a history of England. I wanted to write a boys' history of England in one volume. And when I started, I suddenly realized that

Sir Arthur Bryant17:13

Apart from what I'd learnt about the seventeenth century and the ten years I worked on that before the war, and what I'd learnt about the Napoleonic Wars and the Regency and the ten years I'd worked on since then, I didn't know anything about the history of England beyond what I'd learnt at school and and university, which was nothing. And trying to answer all the questions I couldn't answer,

Sir Arthur Bryant17:36

I found myself writing not a boy's history of England in one volume, but an old boy's history of England in almost any given number of volumes, of which I have only done two, and a third almost done.

Presenter17:47

What

Sir Arthur Bryant17:47

It worked Being on the

Presenter17:48

Member.

Sir Arthur Bryant17:48

Well, at the moment I am gone back to attempt to write a boy's history of England in one volume, which is well, nor not only a boy's history of England, but a general history of England in one volume.

Sir Arthur Bryant17:58

admittedly of an unusual kind, but I'm in the middle of that at the moment.

Presenter18:02

Record number five. What shall we have now?

Sir Arthur Bryant18:05

I think I would like

Sir Arthur Bryant18:08

something of Bach's which conveys that marvellous sense of rhythm, the greatest master of rhythm that ever lived, and could I have, shall we say, the beginning of the first Brandenburg.

Presenter19:20

The beginning of the first Brandenburg Concerto, Karl Munschinger conducting the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.

Presenter19:27

So rather, will you tell us about your method of of writing? Now obviously a long period of research. Do you then make a long chronology and fit things in, or do you use card indexes? Or how do you set about it?

Sir Arthur Bryant19:39

Well, I I find that the method one uses in every book.

Sir Arthur Bryant19:44

Uh varies. But roughly speaking, a historian's task is threefold. First of all, you have to collect your material, and that is fascinating. There is no end to it. The difficulty is that at some point or other you have to stop. There's been many a great historian who has never written what he should have written, because he's gone on with his research up to the time of his death.

Speaker 120:07

This

Sir Arthur Bryant20:08

Then there comes the second problem, which is that of arranging the material, and that is very difficult indeed. I always say that the most important thing is not to try and prove a thesis, not to start with any preconceived ideas in your head at all, to let your material soak into your mind so that you begin to see the past as it actually was, as it was lived through. That is where things like original letters and diaries are so important. And however you arrange your material, if you have carbons for different subjects, you should have one set of carbons which you arrange in strict chronological order. And as you subsequently go through these carbons after all your years of research in strict chronological order, the story begins to form in your mind. Then finally you get to the writing stage. That's the most difficult of all, because writing detailed and authentic history is very different to writing. I mean, I've had for forty-four years now to write a weekly page, now monthly, for the Illustrated London News. Well, I do that out of my head, and if I didn't do it out of my head, I could never get it done. But you can't write history in that way. Probably for every paragraph, you probably got a hundred or two hundred closely typed sheets of paper taken from different sources. And however you mark those in coloured pencils and whatever design you draw up for doing it in the right order, I find I write everything in pencil, then it's typed out and perhaps twenty or thirty times it has to be typed out till I've got rid of every unnecessary word, I've made every sentence lead to the next sentence, because the whole art of writing is to persuade your reader.

Sir Arthur Bryant21:58

To read the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next chapter. Once you fail to do that, you've lost your reader.

Presenter22:07

You talked about working from the original letters and diaries, some of which of course obviously haven't been looked at for hundreds of years. Have you ever made any find which was very exciting to you? Not necessarily a great historical truth, but something that justified a belief?

Sir Arthur Bryant22:25

Well, of course I did in the second volume of my Pepys, published in nineteen thirty five, I found a whole mass of new material about the Popish plot and Pepys's part in it, which was really very thrilling. It was almost like a a thriller.

Presenter22:40

We've got your sixth record. What shall that be?

Sir Arthur Bryant22:44

Well, I would like something of the most English of all composers. I would like something from Elgar, and I think I would like that wonderful end to his first symphony, which brings back so nostalgically to me the majesty and the idealism of that, as we would perhaps think now, rather pompous England, the England of of King Edward the Seventh.

Presenter24:09

The closing passage of the first Elgar Symphony

Presenter24:12

The Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbie Raleigh. You mentioned just now, very briefly, this rather staggering record of yours for writing for the Illustrated London News every week for how many years? Forty

Sir Arthur Bryant24:25

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant24:25

Well, if they haven't sacked me by then, it will be.

Sir Arthur Bryant24:31

Forty three years this summer. And that was weekly until quite Until three or four years ago it was weekly. Now it's monthly. You succeeded GK Chesterton. That's right, who'd done it for thirty one years, and it never occurred to me for a moment that I could possibly beat his time record. In fact, I have.

Presenter24:35

I still

Sir Arthur Bryant24:48

Yes, you not only have to write the thing, but you have to think of the idea.

Presenter24:51

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant24:51

Yes, and that I find one can only do at the last possible moment. So I've many a times I've sat down on my bit of paper and I've written our note book by Arthur Brandt without knowing how it was going to go on.

Presenter25:04

Now you also hold office in many learned societies, and some fairly frivolous dining clubs.

Presenter25:10

Yes, I am very fond of dining clubs.

Presenter25:13

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant25:13

I belong to two or three.

Sir Arthur Bryant25:15

Record

Presenter25:15

Numbers

Sir Arthur Bryant25:15

Uh

Sir Arthur Bryant25:17

Well, every year my great treat is to sit down quietly after all the rush of pre Christmas and listen to that marvellous service from King's College Chapel of Carol's, and I would like one on my desert island I would like one of the Carols to remind me of that.

Speaker 225:45

Oh you told me.

Speaker 225:52

How's the

Speaker 226:07

Cause I could say

Presenter26:35

The choir of King's College, Cambridge, the Carol, O little Town of Bethlehem, it's the Walford Davis setting.

Presenter26:43

You used to be a farmer, did you not, Siraja?

Presenter26:46

Uh I I did and uh a very ex

Sir Arthur Bryant26:50

Yeah.

Presenter26:50

Expensive.

Sir Arthur Bryant26:50

Some

Presenter26:50

Well the purpose of that question is uh talking about this island and how you're going to manage, you could at any rate cultivate your food to some extent.

Presenter27:00

Yes, a little, a little. If some kind of craft came along, or some seaworthy raft, would you try to escape?

Sir Arthur Bryant27:06

Fatal.

Presenter27:07

Yeah.

Sir Arthur Bryant27:07

No good? No good in my hands, no, no.

Presenter27:10

Right.

Sir Arthur Bryant27:10

External.

Presenter27:10

Stay where you are. I would have. Yes. Your last record.

Sir Arthur Bryant27:17

I think the perhaps on the whole

Sir Arthur Bryant27:20

because I should be thinking a great deal about

Sir Arthur Bryant27:24

My native country, I think I would like to end with that wonderful piece of music, Holt's Jupiter, from which those very moving words of poor Cecil Spring Rice's, I vow to thee, my country, all other things above, entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love, uh, was uh set to music, but I would like it from th the original Jupiter.

Presenter28:53

Jupiter from Holst's Planets Suite, the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrei Prebin. If you could take just one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be? I think the magic flute. And one luxury to take to the island.

Sir Arthur Bryant29:08

Well, I would love to have.

Sir Arthur Bryant29:11

A very great picture.

Sir Arthur Bryant29:13

Can I take the picture out of a public gallery?

Presenter29:16

We'll get at you somehow.

Sir Arthur Bryant29:17

All right, well then I I would like the picture of the little princess by Velasquez in the parlour. Mm-hmm. The greatest picture I've ever seen.

Presenter29:23

Great.

Presenter29:25

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

Sir Arthur Bryant29:34

Well, I suppose because I shall miss my clubs, my dining clubs, very much in the island, I would like to take the next best thing, which would be Boswell's Life of Johnson.

Presenter29:47

And thank you, Sir Arthur Bryant, for letting us hear your desert island discs. And from all of us, happy birthday.

Sir Arthur Bryant29:53

Then thank you very much for the pleasure of doing them for a second time in my life with you.

Speaker 130:05

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