Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
An outstanding reporter both in print and on the air.
Eight records
Japanese Language Course
I would be far better doing something constructive rather than playing away at gramophone records. Why don't I learn a totally foreign language? ... So I would take a linguistic course in some completely exotic and bizarre language, for example, Japanese.
Spanish Dance No. 5 (Andaluza)
I've told you that I know very little about music, but years and years ago I did study the guitar. ... I still think it is the only instrument I can vaguely understand. And uh I would like to hear John Williams playing Spanish music.
We've had John Williams playing Spanish music. Could I have the master, Spaniard, Segofia, playing Bach?
A man and an instrument seem to me to have elements of the primitive go very, very well with desert islands ... Jochi Zamfiel, and he plays a thing called the pan pipes, which are a very, very elementary form of wind instrument.
America, you know, is absolutely full of folk singers ... but chiefly about Chicago, which happens to be my favorite American town. ... I've got some good friends there, among whom is this man called Wynn Strakey, and he he he's got a song, and this was actually recorded in the house of a friend of mine called The Forty-third Ward.
Under Milk Wood (Opening)Favourite
I would like to recall, if I could, on my desert island. the the really brave and creative days of the B B C when work was being done that was exclusively radio work. ... And I would like to refresh my memory with the very beginning of Undermilkwood, an absolute milestone, I think, in radio history.
It became a sort of national anthem for the various forms of protest movements. ... I wrote the words, for the occasion of the first Oldermaston march, way back in the sixties. And this thing still brings tears to my eyes.
My last record is music again, but the sort of simple, naïve music that I understand, which is a military band playing a recognizable tune by a recognizable composer
The keepsakes
The book
Laurence Sterne
because I considered it to be my life's work to finish Tristram Sandy one day.
The luxury
it'd have to be the whisky because that would allow me to forget the cigars.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Were you born in Scotland?
No. It's a very well kept secret, but I have to be obliged to say that I was not. ... I'm obliged to confess that I was in fact born in London.
Presenter asks
How did your education in France happen?
There is a sort of tradition in Scottish families of of having their children sent to France. ... But chiefly it was because my father was a very impoverished writer and by a strange paradox ... my father thought his six pounds a week would go further if we went to live in France, and that's how it happened.
Presenter asks
What did you want to be [when you came back to the UK at fifteen]?
There was I, with no qualifications, no degrees, no university education. virtually illiterate in two languages at once ... Now what other trade could possibly accept such a person as I except journalism, which is used to illiterate?
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
James Cameron
Hello, I'm Kirsty 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.
Presenter
Our castaway this week is an outstanding reporter both in print and on the air. It's James Cameron.
Presenter
Are you a musical person, James? Do do you enjoy music? No. The one reason is you know I
Presenter
duck this program for so long is that I am musically totally uneducated. I have very, very unsophisticated tastes in music.
Presenter
And to be frank, I get very little pleasure from it. I mean, in its intellectual form. It it's in its naïve forms, as we'll hear, I I can take it, but I don't know much about it. So you don't play records very much, hardly ever.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Presenter
Well, you've got eight presented to you by the BBC, eight of your choice. What's the first one we're going to hear? Well
Presenter
It has occurred to me
Presenter
that if I am going to be marooned on this desert island,
Presenter
I would be far better doing something constructive rather than playing away at gramophone records. Why don't I learn a totally foreign language? After all, I've got plenty of time to learn it, plenty of opportunity, and plenty of leisure to do so. So I would take a linguistic course in some completely exotic and bizarre language, for example, Japanese. I don't particularly want to know Japanese. I was very improbable that I shall ever have to make use of it. But I would like to think that I was not altogether wasting my time on this desert.
Speaker 4
I cannot find my hotel address.
Speaker 2
Hotel no Jiyushoga meets Karima-sen.
Speaker 2
I lost my change purse.
Speaker 2
Gamangutio naksimasta.
Speaker 2
Wallet
Speaker 2
Scythe
Speaker 2
He forgot his money.
Presenter
Yeah.
Speaker 2
Okaneo wasre mashita.
Presenter
What am I to do?
Speaker 2
Do Shimashoka.
Presenter
My eyeglasses are broken.
Speaker 2
Menga nenga kwaremashita.
Presenter
Well, that was a an American teach yourself Japanese course. James, were you born in Scotland?
Presenter
No. It's a very well kept secret, but I have to be obliged to say that I was not. When my parents realized that I was on the way,
Presenter
They decided that obviously they'd never have another holiday after I was born. So they went away down to the south of France and returned to have me born where
Presenter
Every one of my family has always been born for generations back in Scotland. But unfortunately I hopped.
Presenter
untimely from the womb as we were passing through London. So I I'm obliged to confess that I was in fact born in London. A Londoner. And um I was then brought up in France until I was fifteen. Yes, how did that happen, your your education in France? Well, there is a sort of tradition in Scottish families of
Presenter
of having their children sent to France. It's a derivative from the old alliance. Mhm. But chiefly it was because my father was a very impoverished writer and by a strange paradox
Presenter
In those days the pound was worth actually infinitely more abroad than it was here.
Presenter
And home
Presenter
My father thought his six pounds a week would go further if we went uh to live in France, and that's how it happened. So you began in a French elementary school. Did you wear a black smock? Yes.
Presenter
Back outpack of sock and wooden shoes. How old were you when you came back to the United Kingdom?
Presenter
Just fifteen. What did you want to be?
Presenter
Well, how is I?
Presenter
in this extraordinary position of
Presenter
Having been to about um oh thirteen or fourteen elementary schools in France, which meant that I finished up at the age of fifteen having to get a job of some kind, because my family had sort of collapsed.
Presenter
And there was I, with no qualifications, no degrees, no university education.
Presenter
virtually illiterate in two languages at once, which is per
Presenter
Quite a thing.
Presenter
Now what other trade could possibly accept such a person as I except journalism, which is used to illiterate?
Presenter
Where did you start? Dundee. Working for whom?
Presenter
Gulpingly, I say D C Thompson and Company. If you work in Dundee, who else can you work for? The best form of grounding, because you had to do everything, Dundee. You had to do almost everything, which you could never
Presenter
possibly aspire to do in a in a union firm. I mean, I used to do everything, everything.
James Cameron
Yeah.
Presenter
From
Presenter
Setting myself stories, subbing the stories, writing the headlines, doing the drawings.
Presenter
Everything except going out and selling the papers on the street. Virtually that. And it was very useful because
Presenter
In later years
Presenter
when I moved into more civilized surroundings.
Presenter
No sub editor could blind me with science,'cause I'd been going for such a long time myself.
Presenter
Let's have your second record. What's that to me?
Presenter
The second record is guitar, if I could, because
Presenter
I've told you that I know very little about music, but
Presenter
Years and years ago I did study the guitar. In the days before it became debased and degraded as an instrument by pop groups who who know three chords and use it as an instrument of percussion. I really tried know how to play poppy.
Presenter
I gave it up, but I still think it is the only instrument I can vaguely understand.
Presenter
And uh I would like to hear John Williams playing Spanish music.
Presenter
John Williams playing The Fifth Spanish Dance by Granados.
Presenter
How long did you stay with the D C Thompson Group?
Presenter
About fifteen years between um Dundee and Glasgow. And eventually I got myself sent down to to London with the
Presenter
Daily Express. This was what, about the beginning of the war, was it? Hm. Just about uh nineteen thirty nine. Yes. Beginning of it. Yes, when when well, when the Daily Express was in the process of becoming a a four-page paper, as all newspapers were during the war. Oh, yes, indeed. It was very, very constrained indeed. And the staffing problems were ridiculous. Everybody who uh who was of any uh sort of
Presenter
Healthy significance was of course in the army. Mhm. But you worked on a on a very small staff and I suppose it was really back to doing several jobs.
Presenter
Yes, except that it uh
Presenter
You could hardly be expected to do as you had done in Glasgow, being told to carry the type around. And after the war you became an express foreign correspondent.
Presenter
A very unsettled life, surely. I mean, uh literally a question of being woken up at three o'clock in the morning and told to catch the five o'clock plane to Nicaragua.
Presenter
Yes, and that went on for twenty five years or more. It was a deeply and profoundly unsettling life and uh ruinous to a domestic life. I mean, it dest destroyed many people's marriages, of course, as it necessarily would do, but at the same time
Presenter
It's very difficult to say that one would have chained had it otherwise because it gave me opportunities of
Presenter
seeing the world that no could never possibly have had otherwise. And indeed it's all over now. I mean, I was the last of the dinosaurs, really, because there aren't any of us left long, and no newspaper can afford that sort of You became, in fact, the Express's first roving reporter. You could go more or less where you liked. More or less where I liked, yes.
Presenter
I wasn't by any means the first. I mean, there were Dwyads like Sefton Delmer and so on who were much superior to me, but I was among the first, yes.
Presenter
Your third record, what next? Well, could I have another guitar? Only, paradoxically. We've had
Presenter
John Williams playing Spanish music. Could I have the master, Spaniard, Segofia, playing Bach?
Presenter
Segovia playing Abach Gabot.
Presenter
Why did you leave the express?
Presenter
Because I fell out with them on a matter of policy and it's too complicated a story to go on to now, but um I thought they behaved extraordinarily dishonestly over a certain political issue and I
Presenter
I just felt I couldn't carry on any longer, that was all. So where did you move to?
Presenter
It took me some time to move anywhere, since Beaverbook was a very powerful man in the newspaper proprietors' association. I became.
Presenter
Pretty nearly unemployable for a while, but ultimately I fa finished up in Picture Post with Tom Hopkinson, my very good friend. Which sank with all hands unfortunately towards the end of the fifties, didn't it? Yes, as a result entirely of of of of my misdoings, because I wrote a piece from Korea which was disapproved of.
Presenter
which was the
Presenter
suggesting that uh the South Koreans were behaving in every way as atrociously as the North Koreans and that it was a great shame to see concentration camps with the United Nations flag flying on top of it. But um the proprietor thought that that was an injudicious thing to say and uh the editor refused to take it out. Yes. So the editor and I were summarily fired.
Presenter
What happened to you after picture post?
Presenter
Well, where was Tower after two scandals?
Presenter
In two years I really was in a total mess. Then I found my home finally, my
Presenter
true home in the News Chronicle which was then going and which was the the one place where I really felt
Presenter
happy and comradely relationships with everybody, and for whom I travelled the entire world in perfect amity and peace. It was an excellent paper. It was a good paper. Now what happened at the end of your stint on News Chronicle?
Presenter
One died.
Presenter
It died on you.
Presenter
It it very nearly did.
Presenter
It's often been said that it was the first example of the ship that left the sinking rats. But uh I did in fact leave it just one week before it it passed away because I saw the writing on the wall and uh there it was. I was very, very depressed about it and I said that that is the way
Presenter
The newspaper industry is going to be run. I don't want any more of it and I won't go back to F Fleet Street and eighteen years ago I've never been back since it's a funny thing to say, but um
Presenter
in in in spite of everything I say about the trade of journalism.
Presenter
Some way.
Presenter
Best friends to journalists, I'm obliged to say.
Presenter
Well, we'll spare your blushes and your shame, and we'll get on to record number four.
Presenter
Well, here's a
Presenter
A man and an instrument seem to me to have
Presenter
Elements of the primitive go very, very well with desert islands, a sort of.
Presenter
Totally unsophisticated thing. It's a fellow, a Roumanian chap, called Jochi Zamfiel, and he plays a thing called the pan pipes, which are a very, very elementary form of wind instrument.
Presenter
elementary enough even for me to understand.
Presenter
Zohi Zamphir playing a Romanian tune of which I won't attempt to give the title.
Presenter
When did you move into the broadcasting medium, Daves? Well
Presenter
More or less after the the News Chronicle. Now here is a bit of showing off, but
Presenter
I thought, well, what about this business of television? It seems to be here to stay, and I can't nothing I can do to stop it. So I went to David Attenbourne, who was then running the new found V D C two, and being very impertinent, I said, What
Presenter
BBC television needs is the equivalent of, as it were, the signed article in a magazine for which the
Presenter
The writer takes responsibility and the paper doesn't. And so why don't we do
Presenter
A series of programs which would be completely idiosyncratic.
Presenter
Make no attempt whatever for this famous balance that you have to have. You'll achieve it over a year, but you'll never achieve it within one programme. And be as bloody minded as you'd like within this one programme.
Presenter
Of course he said no.
Presenter
And then in the usual unpredictable B V C way
Presenter
They changed their mind a month or two later, and they said, Yes, we'll do it.
Presenter
And they gave us a budget and they gave me a crew and they sent me out to Ava and they gave us a transmission date and everything. The only thing they forgot to do was get anybody to write the shows. And I found myself stuck with doing the first three, which of course was completely negated.
James Cameron
Another thing.
Presenter
My
Presenter
Original proposition, which was that somebody completely hostile or different should do each programme. So, as it were, you were achieving a considerable sense of imbalance because it was always me. And I was
Presenter
very unbalanced anyhow. And anyhow after three times I came back from China or India or somewhere like that. And um
Presenter
I said, you know, this is making an awful mockery of my idea, because it was a show called One Pair of Eyes. I said, it's just my pair of eyes the whole time, and it's getting boring. I I uh request you respectfully to fire me. And they duly fired me, because they had to. And the compensation prize they gave me was another little show for Cameron Country, which is much the same sort of thing. I took you all over the world again. Indeed, again. So I I really was slung into television at the
James Cameron
Mm.
Presenter
And the deep end rather. And I had to learn as I went along,'cause I knew very, very little about it. In fact, nothing at all about it. You've done some very distinguished radio, too. In fact, a script of yours won the Italia Prize. It was a a radio play about open heart surgery which you underwent yourself. Hmm. It was indeed. It was called The Pump.
Presenter
You've got your first television play coming up quite soon, The Sound of the Guns. Yes, that's about the Suez thing in 1956. It's all set in Cyprus. I thought it would commend itself to the television company because it had six characters and one set, which I thought was pretty damn cheap. For a ninety-minute play, it's wonderful. Yeah, well as it turned out, it's now got eleven sets and eighty-eight characters.
Presenter
Is that your doing all that? No, nothing to do with me.
Speaker 4
No!
James Cameron
Oh. Yeah.
Presenter
Not my money.
Presenter
Record number five.
Presenter
America, you know, is absolutely full of folk singers, but mostly southern
Presenter
rustic folk singers. But I know a man
Presenter
who is a an urban folk singer who sings folk songs about
Presenter
towns, um but chiefly about Chicago, which happens to be my favorite American town. To everybody's astonishment, I like Chicago. I got and I can't imagine why I do, since I've got some good friends there, among whom is this man called Wynn Strakey, and he he he's got a song, and this was actually recorded in the house of a friend of mine called The Forty-third Ward.
Speaker 4
First you head north till you get to the park.
Speaker 4
Then you go a few blocks west of Clark when you start feeling better you
Presenter
And thank the Lord that you're back home in the 43rd Ward, in the 43rd Ward, 43rd Ward, in the 43rd Ward.
Speaker 4
I'm feeling Great and I thank the Lord that I'm back home in the 43rd board.
Presenter
Forty third Ward
Presenter
A Chicago folk song by Wynne Strakey.
Presenter
James, are there any places you haven't been? Yeah.
Presenter
I've never been to New Zealand in my life.
Presenter
A very good reason for that is that it's not on the way to anywhere else unless you're going to the South Pole.
Presenter
And secondly, even better reason, nothing's ever happened there, as far as I know.
Presenter
You've even been to Albania. Now that's a collector's piece. It can't be easy to get in. Very, very difficult to get in indeed. Indeed, I I barely did it. But I went in with an East German tourist group, pretending to be an East German tourist group, if you can imagine. And uh I had arrived in Tirana.
Presenter
About three minutes when they rumbled me. And they said, This is disgraceful, you're not supposed to be here, you can't come here.
Presenter
Begum, get out.
Presenter
That
Presenter
The difficulty was that
Presenter
There's nowhere to get out to, because they had destroyed all the roads. And Fyugosavo, there's no longer any railway.
James Cameron
There's no way.
Presenter
And the aeroplane only ran once every two weeks and it had just gone. So there was no no way I could be expelled. So they kept me there and they sent me down to a a great big empty Russian hotel, a place called Dulles on the on the Adriatic coast. It's a really louv rather loud place. And they had a little stretch of beach which they wired off which I was allowed to gamble about on. I could not go anywhere else. It was really very very dull indeed. I didn't see very much of a
Presenter
Well, the Russians are gone. Had the Chinese connection started? Very much so. The Chinese connection was very, very visible, very, very evident indeed. A lot of your dispatches you you've used as bases for for for books. How how many books have you done? Well, I have had published ten books.
Presenter
Of which
Presenter
The Greater Path.
Presenter
Seventy percent were pretty hack commission jobs, history books, about periods of the wars and that sort of thing. Not not I'm not very proud of most of'em, but
Presenter
I wrote this autobiography called Point of Departure, which I'm not altogether disappointed. I wrote this book called The Indian Summer, which I consider the only one that I would like to be remembered by. Well, Point of Departure was reissued last year after ten years, which is a nice thing to happen to animals. Indeed. I've never heard of it happening. I was immensely complimented. Immensely.
Presenter
And your other book, An Indian Summer, which is indeed fascinating.
Presenter
Affection for India has has been increased by your having married an Indian lady.
James Cameron
Yeah.
Presenter
But it had existed for many, many years before that, because after all I've only been married to this Indian lady for seven or eight years, and I have known India for now thirty two years.
Presenter
Your latest book has been an editing chore for the BBC, a book of excerpts from the script of Yesterday's Witness, which is a programme you've worked on a lot. I've worked on it quite a lot because they produced rather Stephen Peet is a good friend of mine and it's been a pretty absorbing programme because it is exactly what its title implies. It's Yesterday's Witness. It's not h history, except insofar that there are living people able to tell the story. But this book, of course.
James Cameron
Hit
Presenter
Owing to the consummate swiftness and energy.
Presenter
BBC Publications has only taken three years to emerge. By the time I finished it, well done. Let us uh cover
James Cameron
Tot much.
Speaker 2
Well done.
Presenter
cover that up and and get on to another record. What shall we have? Number six we got to. Well, could we get away from music at the moment? And I would like to recall, if I could, on my desert island.
Presenter
the the really brave and creative days of the B B C when work was being done that was exclusively radio work.
Presenter
like the works of Dylan Thomas and Louis McNeese, which couldn't have existed without radio. And I would like to refresh my memory with the very beginning of Undermilkwood, an absolute milestone, I think, in radio history.
Presenter
To begin at the beginning.
Presenter
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, quarters and rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the slow black.
Presenter
Slow.
Presenter
Black
Presenter
Crow black fishing boat bobbing sea
Presenter
The houses are blind as moles, though moles see fine tonight in the snouting velvet.
Presenter
RICHARD BURTON speaking the opening narration to Under Milk Wood.
Presenter
What are your present activities, James? Y you're doing a weekly piece for The Guardian nowadays? I do a weekly column for The Guardian. That is the only permanent commitment I have at the moment. I
Presenter
I'm
Presenter
Trying now that I
Presenter
sort of busted my
Presenter
Princess knows on television drama. I'm trying to do another one or two of those. And I do a certain amount of work for
Presenter
Magazines and that sort of thing.
Presenter
I always have no right whenever I've got
Presenter
In his spare time I try and dig into a a bit of a book which would be a continuation of
Presenter
point of departure, so I want to call time of arrival. Oh, yes. But um it takes a terribly long time because uh one's got to earn one's living and and never can do that out of books.
James Cameron
Uh
Speaker 4
Uh
Presenter
Record number seven.
Presenter
Here again, this is a real
Presenter
Sentimental journey.
Presenter
It became a sort of national anthem for the various forms of protest movements. It was called We Shall Overcome.
Presenter
And for many, many years.
Presenter
At least fifteen years.
Presenter
I have been under the impression that I wrote it.
Presenter
In fact, I know I did.
Presenter
This has been disputed because they I didn't re write the tune, because as I told you, I know nothing about music, but I wrote the words, for the occasion of the first Oldermaston march, way back in the sixties. And
Presenter
This thing still brings tears to my eyes. I don't think I'd play it on my desert isle because it would make me too nostalgic.
Speaker 4
We shall
Speaker 4
Um
Speaker 4
We shall overcome.
Speaker 4
We shall overcome
Speaker 4
Someday.
Presenter
Pete Seeger.
Presenter
James, you've spent many miserable nights and days in desolate places. Have you ever had occasion to forage for yourself? How well could you manage, for example, on a desert island? I think I could manage you mean for physical sustenance? Putting up a shelter, finding food, foraging. I don't think I would have much trouble about that, provided there was some fruit or something available.
Speaker 4
I don't
James Cameron
Two.
Presenter
I I'm a very, very small eater. A very, very tidy eater indeed. I don't know that I'd be much good putting up shelters and that sort of thing. Would you try to escape?
Speaker 4
What?
James Cameron
Uh
Presenter
No, I don't think so. I'm a terribly bad seaman. I mean, well, even on a raft or something. I I swim the last five minutes. No.
James Cameron
Uh
Presenter
No, I would wait to be rescued. I write. Your last record.
Presenter
My last record is music again, but the sort of
Presenter
simple, naïve music that I understand, which is a military band playing a recognizable tune by a recognizable composer, and this is the United States Navy playing Washington Post by Souzan.
Presenter
Sousa's Washington Post played by the United States Navy Band. If you could take only one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?
Presenter
It would be the the milk wood, I think, because I I get much more
Presenter
understandable pleasure out of words than I do from music. And you're allowed to have one luxury with you on the island.
Presenter
I my luxury would be
Presenter
A case of malt whisky.
Presenter
Alternatively.
Presenter
A box of cigars, since I'm addicted to both of those things. I don't suppose I'd be allowed both, wouldn't it? Yeah, a snap decision which well, it'd have to be the whisky because that would allow me to forget the cigars. Yes, just to make you feel better, it'll be more than one case. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias. Well
James Cameron
Yeah
James Cameron
This
Presenter
For twenty years I carried around the world a copy of a book.
Presenter
that I thought had all the prerexes has to be inordinately long. It has to be s pretty boring.
Presenter
And it has to be worthy and considered to be worthy. And I carried around Lawrence Stearne's Tristram Shandy for years and years and years, and I never got around to reading it, or more than the first two or three pages. That is the book I would have, because I considered it to be my life's work to finish Tristram Sandy one day.
Presenter
Right, Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Stern. And thank you, James Cameron, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. And thank you very much indeed, Vice, for asking me. It's very good fun. Goodbye, everyone.
James Cameron
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
Why did you leave the Daily Express?
Because I fell out with them on a matter of policy ... I thought they behaved extraordinarily dishonestly over a certain political issue and I I just felt I couldn't carry on any longer, that was all.
Presenter asks
What happened to you after Picture Post?
In two years I really was in a total mess. Then I found my home finally, my true home in the News Chronicle which was then going and which was the the one place where I really felt happy and comradely relationships with everybody
Presenter asks
How well could you manage on a desert island?
I don't think I would have much trouble about that, provided there was some fruit or something available. ... I'm a very, very small eater. A very, very tidy eater indeed. I don't know that I'd be much good putting up shelters and that sort of thing.
“I am musically totally uneducated. I have very, very unsophisticated tastes in music. And to be frank, I get very little pleasure from it.”
“It was a deeply and profoundly unsettling life and uh ruinous to a domestic life. I mean, it dest destroyed many people's marriages, of course, as it necessarily would do, but at the same time It's very difficult to say that one would have chained had it otherwise because it gave me opportunities of seeing the world that no could never possibly have had otherwise.”
“I get much more understandable pleasure out of words than I do from music.”