Sir Peter Parker

Speaker 10:00

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

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1980, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

This week, our castaway is the Chairman of British Rail, Sir Peter Parker.

Presenter0:35

Sir Peter, with what degree of dread would you envisage a sojourn on a desert island?

Presenter0:41

Quietness

Sir Peter Parker0:41

Remoteness. The whole scope for uh

Sir Peter Parker0:45

thinking things out. No, I think I'd look forward to this.

Presenter0:48

How important is music to you?

Sir Peter Parker0:50

It's become more and more important really to me in uh

Sir Peter Parker0:54

The last ten, twenty years I was never trained in music.

Sir Peter Parker0:57

And uh I was you know the choir boys of looking

Sir Peter Parker1:01

at the notes and hoping I'd get through, but I was never trained in an instrument.

Sir Peter Parker1:06

But gradually, as my life has gone on, I've realized how much I depend on it.

Presenter1:10

You are, I believe, a patron of music. One one of your four children runs a a group, which I believe you funded.

Sir Peter Parker1:17

Well, not much funding is going on. I mean, he's out there in in the wide world uh doing for himself. He's he's put a pop group together, yes. A lot of boys from Derby called The Heartbeats and uh they're great fun. They're doing all right. Well, they're they're living, they're uh doing gigs and they're, I hope, going to be surprising when they really get going.

Sir Peter Parker1:38

Are you a disc player?

Sir Peter Parker1:39

Yes, yes, a lot.

Sir Peter Parker1:42

At weekends only.

Sir Peter Parker1:43

uh and I can get into my little hut.

Sir Peter Parker1:46

in Minster Lovell and then I'm by myself and I find I sit there and uh it's my my desert island of the week as it were the weekend. Now what's the first record you've chosen?

Sir Peter Parker1:57

I've gone for La Massaise, arranged by Berlioz. I was a boy in France for about

Sir Peter Parker2:04

First seven years of my life. You were born there. Born there. And uh

Sir Peter Parker2:08

The

Sir Peter Parker2:09

The first schooling I got was, you know, in a little French apron going to College Jean-Barre and uh

Sir Peter Parker2:16

I've always remembered this song in my head. It is surely the most rousing song in the world, and morale would be very good on the Desert Island. I can't see it sagging if we could begin with Marseillaise.

Speaker 12:48

Labus a little bit.

Speaker 12:53

Oh no.

Speaker 22:55

So people gathered on the chairs together.

Presenter3:02

Oh, the Supreme God.

Presenter3:05

And what you call the Speaker

Presenter3:09

So sickly air forget.

Presenter3:29

The Berlioz's arrangement of the Marcia's

Presenter3:33

The Paris Orchestra conducted by Jean Pierre Jacquillard.

Presenter3:37

Now, as a child, did you have mechanical interest? Did you play with Meccano? No, never even played.

Sir Peter Parker3:42

ride trains. It's just not my thing at all. And I

Sir Peter Parker3:47

Would feel this a terrible disadvantage where you're putting me.

Sir Peter Parker3:50

Your father was an engineer.

Sir Peter Parker3:54

I had two brothers ahead of me, who were older than I was, and they were pretty practical chaps. I never did that sort of thing. I don't know what happened to me in my boyhood. I I seemed to have missed reading all the right books. And uh I was about thirty before I read Alice in Wonder.

Sir Peter Parker4:12

Now after your seven years in France you continued to live abroad. Yes. The thing that uh smashed uh our family fortunes in France was the slump in thirty, thirty one. And my father then, I think with enormous courage when I reflect on it, I was only seven, seven and a half.

Sir Peter Parker4:28

He decided to go to China, furthest away from uh the European slump, and he went there really with nothing. And we spent the next five years in China, and uh formative years for me.

Sir Peter Parker4:40

And those ended with a bang, literally, because the

Sir Peter Parker4:43

uh war which um was between

Sir Peter Parker4:46

China and Japan broke out in 1937. Europe, they rather coolly called it the Shanghai Incident. But that.

Sir Peter Parker4:53

cleaned out the family. We were again uh

Sir Peter Parker4:56

broken financially and we were put on destroyers and evacuated and we came home to England.

Presenter5:01

Now you did rather well in in your English school. You got an exhibition at Bedford.

Presenter5:06

You were a good rugby player, you eventually played for the East Midlands.

Sir Peter Parker5:09

That's right. Yeah, well, yes, it's a marvellous game and uh yes I enjoyed that. How good I was, I don't know. I kept on the left wing.

Sir Peter Parker5:15

As a schoolboy, what did you want to be?

Sir Peter Parker5:19

As a schoolboy I think I was

Sir Peter Parker5:22

really without that kind of long term ambition because

Sir Peter Parker5:25

As one got just that bit older, one was in the war.

Sir Peter Parker5:29

And one was really looking straight into the war scene and not thinking much.

Sir Peter Parker5:35

Beyond that.

Sir Peter Parker5:36

You had had a go at language.

Presenter5:38

Jews had dropped.

Sir Peter Parker5:39

Yes, I I left school, and before I entered the army, I learnt Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I think the idea then was I think Anthony Eden brought it out.

Sir Peter Parker5:49

that as the war broke out with Japan they found they had almost nobody trained to speak languages, and the Asian scene had been very much taken for granted.

Sir Peter Parker5:58

And so the Foreign Office had an imaginative uh idea. They took a lot of boys and started training them in Oriental studies. And uh thirty of us were trained in uh Japanese before we entered the army, the idea being that survivors would enter the foreign office.

Presenter6:15

Yes. Yes, in fact you you were in the intelligence corps and you ended up in Japan?

Presenter6:21

I ended up

Sir Peter Parker6:21

In Japan and America. I was really in 1945, I went into Washington.

Sir Peter Parker6:28

I was flown out of uh Burma. I've never forgotten that as a piece of organizational experience because I

Sir Peter Parker6:34

We're sitting on a jungle river's edge.

Sir Peter Parker6:38

feeling very far from home uh and there was a

Sir Peter Parker6:42

Wonky pagoda inside and a dead elephant, and a message came to me from uh headquarters saying would I report back to Delhi at once for overseas service. I've never forgotten that as an example of how headquarters look about what's happening in the field. Overseas service turned out to be Washington, and suddenly one was in Washington for the last few months of the war and flew into Japan immediately after the surrender.

Presenter6:58

Yeah.

Presenter7:04

And then you went to up to Oxford to

Sir Peter Parker7:06

Read what? History.

Sir Peter Parker7:09

I came out of the war really politically very puzzled and bewildered.

Sir Peter Parker7:15

and feeling that uh so much was

Sir Peter Parker7:17

Array that I felt history would probably be the best sedative I could take.

Presenter7:23

Let's have your second record. What's that to be?

Sir Peter Parker7:25

Well that's to be the Mozart Oboe quartet with Gussens playing.

Sir Peter Parker7:30

I was introduced to this by my wife, who used to play the oboe and regards this as the actual peak of all oboe compositions, and she adored Gusens. And to me this is uh th the most sentimental record I could take with me in the in the proper sense.

Speaker 28:10

Mm-hmm.

Presenter8:46

The last movement of the Mozart Oboe Quartet in F major.

Presenter8:51

Leon Gussens with members of the Lena String Quartet.

Presenter8:55

Right now, your university career in Oxford, you were active politically.

Presenter8:59

Yes, indeed. I became uh chairman of the Labour Club. And you're also active theatrically. You played some very distinguished parts.

Presenter9:08

I became a a s

Sir Peter Parker9:09

Sort of uh seemingly a specialist in kind of quack uh Shakespeare. I mean, I did the first quarter Hamlet, which is the first published version of Hamlet. And you played the Moody Dane himself. Played the Moody Dane, yes. And uh actually he's not so moody in the first quarter, you know. No, it it's very exciting, it's in thunder. It's it's much more uh

Presenter9:26

Whatever we

Presenter9:28

The incident thunder.

Sir Peter Parker9:30

uh a robust and vigorous and uh sort of athletic part compared to what it became, I think, mostly during the nineteenth century, where they thinned him out into a dreamy and decisive figure. And you had some other names that we'd know in the cast.

Sir Peter Parker9:44

Yes, indeed. We had uh had a couple of uh ratios'cause we did it both out of town and in London.

Sir Peter Parker9:50

I remember Lindsay Anderson, now the film director, he

Sir Peter Parker9:54

played it out of town, and he would come up to me with a great German accent and say, For lo, the morning russet mantle clad you know, typical Lindsay doing a thing of his own then.

Sir Peter Parker10:03

We had John Schlesinger as the next one. We had Robert Hardy playing the player king.

Sir Peter Parker10:08

A dinon

Sir Peter Parker10:10

doing the ghost.

Presenter10:11

Pass it.

Presenter10:12

No, that that production came to London, uh, as you said, and I I remember seeing it, and you were a very, very good Hamlet, and the audience went away saying, Now that's that's a marvellous new young actor coming into the business.

Presenter10:24

But you you went off and did something else. Well, incidentally you you played Leah, too.

Presenter10:28

I think it's a very good idea.

Sir Peter Parker10:29

Two versions of that. There's I did the one which was played at

Sir Peter Parker10:34

Really, from the time of the Restoration, about 1685, to about 1835, the Lear played by Garrick and all these people was not the Lear as we know it by Shakespeare. It was trimmed down by Naem Tate, the Shepherds in the Field abiding author. And he was a kind of Hollywood scriptwriter. He said, This play's too sad, so we'll just have Lear and Cordelia win that last battle so that it'll end up happy. And that was the Lear played until 1835, until McGready brought back the real Shakespeare. And Naam Tate was never done again, except by us.

Sir Peter Parker11:04

And then I followed that because it was so unsatisfactory to perform with having a go at the real Lear, which we took to America.

Presenter11:11

Boohoo.

Sir Peter Parker11:12

And uh that was great fun. And I had

Sir Peter Parker11:15

Interesting cast there when I think about it, because Shirley Williams is Cordelia.

Presenter11:18

Oh.

Sir Peter Parker11:18

It was it was really very interesting, and Barber Robertson, I remember, in that production.

Presenter11:19

Really

Presenter11:23

Now why didn't you become an actor?

Sir Peter Parker11:25

Not enough lives to go round, really, Roy. I mean, I love to do it. I I had a good time.

Sir Peter Parker11:31

Yeah.

Presenter11:31

And in fact you went

Sir Peter Parker11:32

United States on an educational thing.

Sir Peter Parker11:34

Yes, on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, and I

Sir Peter Parker11:37

I was going there to

Sir Peter Parker11:39

study industry and industrial organization and uh how management uh was to be educated, something that really hadn't started in this country in nineteen fifty.

Presenter11:49

Your third r

Sir Peter Parker11:49

Record

Sir Peter Parker11:50

Well, this is the

Sir Peter Parker11:53

Britain's Serenade, we were talking about the war.

Sir Peter Parker11:56

Roy, and just at the end of the war, I was able to hear in Washington

Sir Peter Parker12:01

The um Britain

Sir Peter Parker12:03

Serenade, and there was one bit of it particularly that mattered to me and has mattered ever since, which is the

Sir Peter Parker12:09

Tennyson song he has.

Sir Peter Parker12:11

But I've always thought

Sir Peter Parker12:12

I'd lost both my brothers in the REF and uh

Sir Peter Parker12:18

I have always felt the last two verses could almost be uh

Sir Peter Parker12:21

The song of some of those chaps.

Sir Peter Parker12:23

of those times.

Sir Peter Parker12:26

Yeah.

Sir Peter Parker12:28

Oh God, so here are things and do

Speaker 112:33

Year and fade a tear of all the morning.

Speaker 112:40

Oh, sweet and far from Cleveland Sky The homes of heaven.

Speaker 212:49

Oh my faith.

Speaker 112:50

Yeah.

Speaker 212:51

Yeah.

Speaker 112:55

Lord, let us feel.

Presenter12:59

Uh

Speaker 112:59

The whole glands reply.

Speaker 113:04

You're a lawyer.

Presenter13:07

Answer equals

Sir Peter Parker13:07

Uh

Speaker 113:07

What's a hiker?

Presenter13:09

Uh

Sir Peter Parker13:09

Yeah.

Presenter13:12

Go on, go on.

Presenter13:16

Lord

Presenter13:19

Uh

Presenter13:24

The nocturne from Britain's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Peter Pearce and Barry Tarquill.

Presenter13:31

Right, Peter, into industry, the grease paint put away. You had to go at politics first. Yeah.

Sir Peter Parker13:36

Yes, immediately in'51 I stood for Labour at Bedford, my hometown.

Sir Peter Parker13:41

And I lost to Christopher Soames, as a matter of fact. And

Sir Peter Parker13:46

I then had to get on and make a living.

Sir Peter Parker13:49

And uh

Sir Peter Parker13:51

Really in a way

Sir Peter Parker13:53

My interest as a manager has always been to look for the

Sir Peter Parker13:56

common ground in industry.

Sir Peter Parker13:59

Problems of industry are not or should not be political.

Sir Peter Parker14:04

And for instance, in the railways, it's my total aim to get a kind of bipartisan policy around railways because the

Sir Peter Parker14:11

Things that are right and wrong about industry need a longer time table than politics. And so that's really

Sir Peter Parker14:17

has been my theme.

Presenter14:18

You had a lot of experience here. You had about a dozen major directorships and public appointments in the industrial scene. It was suggested in the middle sixties that you should become chairman of British Rail, but it didn't gel at that time.

Presenter14:32

That was uh

Sir Peter Parker14:32

Barbara Castle, and I wanted to do it. I think it was 67. I wanted to do it, but I felt I needed a free hand to recruit and pay proper rates. And I agreed to do it, but I couldn't get the free hand. And I felt before I entered the job, I should get an understanding of what it would be that I could pay management and get the right headroom. Many people in nationalized industry at the management level have never been rewarded as they have been in the private sector, yet those managers take risks and responsibilities that are comparable. It was that principle.

Presenter15:05

Well, in any case, quoting the president when you did take over the job, it meant taking a salary cut of about forty thousand a year, which

Sir Peter Parker15:12

Yeah.

Presenter15:12

Pretty uncomfortable.

Sir Peter Parker15:13

Uh but I'm I'm happily railroaded so I'd like to skirt over all that.

Presenter15:18

Right. Now before we talk about the railway scene, let's have another record. Number four.

Presenter15:23

This

Sir Peter Parker15:23

The record is Al Binone and the Adagio. Of all the records really that I've come to think about for this uh splendid marooning, this is the one that really is my most working record. I probably play this every weekend. I find it quietening and strengthening and when it's done I feel uh encouraged to pick up and open my briefcase.

Presenter16:30

The albinone Adagio in G minor for strings and organ, arranged by Giazzotto.

Presenter16:36

Now, British Rail.

Presenter16:39

When you became chairman, you were an anonymous passenger for a while, just to look around.

Sir Peter Parker16:44

Yes, indeed.

Presenter16:45

A British Rail, of course, covers much more than passenger transport.

Sir Peter Parker16:48

Yes, mm very strong in freight. I mean, it's basic really to the basic things happening in a country. It is a kind of conveyor belt for the country, you're right. And of course there's shipping.

Presenter16:59

Yeah. Hotels catering?

Sir Peter Parker17:01

That's right. We have the biggest short sea shipping group in the world in Sea Link and uh allied to many companies in Europe. Uh we have an engineering group of thirty five thousand people, we have a property group which is probably one of the biggest, half dozen in the country, same with the hotels, we've got half a craft.

Sir Peter Parker17:18

It's a Himalayan range, actually, of things to do.

Presenter17:20

A total staff of what?

Sir Peter Parker17:22

Yeah.

Presenter17:22

Two hundred and forty thousand.

Presenter17:24

Yeah. And a vast acreage to administer. I mean, uh property, land. Yes.

Sir Peter Parker17:30

And this all grows because uh railways are a creative activity. Things happen. If you've got the railways there, things happen. And uh that's why all these uh groups exist within the in the group.

Sir Peter Parker17:44

But you're right, I'm in coming new to it.

Sir Peter Parker17:46

The problem of how to make contact, how to connect, is the most important thing.

Sir Peter Parker17:52

I spend, I suppose, two days out of my office a week, going about and and listening and hearing and

Sir Peter Parker17:58

talking with people and really finding out what is going on from my colleagues.

Sir Peter Parker18:02

Otherwise I would just be sitting like a spider at the center, reading papers.

Presenter18:07

Passenger transport affects most of us most.

Presenter18:10

I suppose I do about 10,000 miles a year on the 20th. Glad to hear that, Ryan.

Sir Peter Parker18:13

Glad you hear that, Roy.

Presenter18:15

So well, you see. Well, my observations are that intercity works well, high-speed trains are excellent, catering's getting steadily better.

Sir Peter Parker18:15

Well, and

Presenter18:23

But commuter trains, especially in the southeast, the commuter service is in a bit of a mess.

Sir Peter Parker18:29

Absolutely. I remember at a board meeting last year, one of my colleagues saying at one stage when we were talking about this tremendous problem, it's not just a problem this year, it's been a problem for a generation, of course.

Sir Peter Parker18:41

I'm saying well the

Sir Peter Parker18:42

Real difficulty we face is London and South East Asia and I said yes, that's about the scale of it. It is the most enormous problem for investment reasons and for a lot of other reasons. Delighted to hear you think we're uncurling the sandwiches, which indeed we are. Delighted to hear you feel that passenger traffic is moving up, which it is. We've got an expanding market. It really is a good scene in terms of marketing the railways.

Sir Peter Parker19:05

But the scene where the troubles lie is commuter land, which has been taken for granted for a bitterly long time, and we've got to get it right.

Presenter19:13

I mean, there are certain miraculous things, for example, to be able to go from London and be in Wales through the tunnel and up the other side in seventy five minutes.

Sir Peter Parker19:22

Yeah.

Presenter19:22

Yeah, yeah.

Sir Peter Parker19:23

And we've got the advanced passenger train, you know, trickling into service, which in railway terms is one of the wonders of the world. That's just.

Presenter19:23

Yeah.

Sir Peter Parker19:30

Coming into service in nineteen eighty, there are some amazing technical achievements in the railways. But of course that in a way is all the more exasperating to the commuter who is sometimes in a rotten old carriage forty years old and to be flaunting the technological successes which hold the rest of the world in some awe.

Sir Peter Parker19:51

to a commuter who just wants the damn thing to be on time, reliable, and warmer and cleaner. That is the greatest challenge.

Sir Peter Parker19:59

It's not an easy one. I wouldn't want to underestimate that, because

Sir Peter Parker20:03

We have ten thousand vacancies at the moment which we can't fill.

Sir Peter Parker20:07

So it's a very interesting problem. It's not only uh technical, it's getting the whole human arrangements right so that we can produce the kind of courteous popular service that people want.

Sir Peter Parker20:19

It has some more music.

Sir Peter Parker20:22

Well, I think there will be some bright and clear days, and on the bright clear days we'll need to have something that's fun. And I'd love to play Yvant Prantin and uh Sacha Guitri in uh an excerpt of Mariette, where uh uh Guitri is uh really Napoleon the Third, and he's making a pass at this spectacular singing star, but she doesn't really know who he is, and so

Sir Peter Parker20:48

He wants it to come.

Sir Peter Parker20:50

to supper and uh at the same time he has to disclose who he is and it's wonderful to hear Yvonne Pranter, one of the clearest bell-like ladies voices that I know uh react as she discovers that uh he is this great man and she ends up saying yes, which is an unforgettable note.

Presenter21:28

Hello, auvenis supervisor.

Presenter21:33

Rebouven.

Presenter21:36

Was that even the

Presenter21:38

He

Sir Peter Parker21:39

Yeah.

Presenter21:39

Yeah.

Sir Peter Parker21:41

Huh?

Sir Peter Parker21:43

Uh

Presenter21:43

He

Sir Peter Parker21:44

Yeah.

Presenter21:44

Yeah.

Presenter22:02

Sasha Gitri and The Divine.

Presenter22:06

Yvant Prenton in a scene from Mariette.

Presenter22:09

Now, Peter, fares have gone up by twenty per cent. Ordinary second-class returned fare from London to Birmingham.

Presenter22:17

Sixteen pounds sixty eight. That's a lot of money.

Presenter22:20

I mean, are the railways beginning to price themselves out after things are going up?

Sir Peter Parker22:24

Well, the fares go up because, sickeningly, inflation is kicking up again and uh no prices that I know are going down. We have got to keep pace with inflation. Just in this last year

Sir Peter Parker22:39

Uh the sort of inflationary changes you have to deal with, Roy, are for instance fuel, where the budget was changed in the course of the year by something like forty million pounds. Uh inflationary costs drive us to these increases, uh but the the facts of the matter are that the market is still expanding and we are doing better on passenger traffic as we were saying a moment ago.

Presenter23:02

Now you've done a very good job with with student cards, senior citizen cards, and you're you've expanded that scheme. Wouldn't cutting fares all round for everybody do a similar job, just in the same way that you're getting more students and senior citizens travelling? Wouldn't you get more bottoms on more seats?

Presenter23:20

Yeah.

Presenter23:21

Other trends

Sir Peter Parker23:23

You have to begin from the premise that we are expected to be a commercial concern. That is our remit from government. And I say I don't have a subsidy from government. I have a contract from government. They give the subsidy to the passenger. We get a contract

Sir Peter Parker23:38

run a certain size network, which is what the government wants, we then have to generate what money we can from our markets.

Sir Peter Parker23:46

And we do this, I think, with some marketing zest i in the discount market that you're talking of. But if you did the simple thing of, for instance, halving fares

Sir Peter Parker23:57

You would then have to increase your passenger traffic by 100% to bring in the same amount of revenue that you're bringing in now.

Sir Peter Parker24:05

Now bringing in the hundred percent extra, if you cut down to fifty percent, would load an already strained system, would be a very chancy thing because you're unlikely to be able to pull it off and I think it'd be very bad judgment. What you can do is fight the discount market and something like almost a half now of our revenue is in the discounted area that uh

Sir Peter Parker24:28

uh you described. I mean, it's the sort of Laker land, the discount area. But we were doing it long before Freddie, and I think he would say so. There were fly trains before sky trains.

Presenter24:38

Another record.

Sir Peter Parker24:40

Well, this is really quite different. It's Al Jarrow, who is a black singer, and I've chosen a bit of him from an open uh concert in Europe.

Sir Peter Parker24:51

Uh there'll be moments, I think, when one'll be wandering round the beaches of this desert island making one's own kind of noises, you know. And at the strange way that Jarrow sings he moves from the normal pop version into a kind of jazz approach, which I find is highly spirited and most energetic. And my children introduced him to me so that I feel uh

Sir Peter Parker25:13

I'd be in touch with them as I hopped about the beach trying to make his sort of noises.

Presenter25:18

Who, girl, when they get to beat in this fight? They call you big and beaten gang. Can't make me wonder, just up and dancing, jumpin' sound, to dump and dance and jump and sound Confederate dark. I want to dance and dump and dance. Gotta get down, it's too different.

Speaker 125:42

Badness game is saying don't get it to take it to take it

Speaker 125:57

Tatu, tagged at, tatted to tack and take it at tacking, tacking duty, tacking duty, tacking to tackle.

Presenter26:08

Algero

Presenter26:10

Better than anything.

Presenter26:12

You say you're winning, Peter. Is beeching

Presenter26:16

a great obstacle in your path. I mean, by axing the branch lines, did he get people out of being railway minded? Did he get many people out of the habit of taking trains, of thinking about trains?

Presenter26:28

Yeah.

Sir Peter Parker26:28

I think the first thing is to say that much more good came from Beeching than is given credit. I mean, we can all look back and say he could have done it differently. And certainly, cutting off a lot of uh the rural lines, uh rather like tributaries to the river, the main river dries up. And psychologically, I think railways took a terrific knock.

Sir Peter Parker26:49

But in many ways when I meet my opposite partner, say, in Germany, where they haven't yet brought their system to an economic proportion, I think they rather envy the fact that I've inherited a system from the sixties which is lean and could be economic.

Sir Peter Parker27:04

I think the problem with the Deeching time is that everything happened very quickly, and no one was going to foresee the new priorities, and it left a feeling that perhaps railways were in retreat. Actually railways are in advance. This is the age of the train coming.

Sir Peter Parker27:20

Another record, number seven, isn't it? Seven, yes. And this is an extract from a record by Ralph Richardson on the poetry of Blake. Blake.

Sir Peter Parker27:30

means more to me than any other writer or artist.

Sir Peter Parker27:35

And I regard him as the greatest Englishman really, or among the greatest. And uh Richardson does him beautifully, a great sort of bold, compelling style.

Sir Peter Parker27:44

And uh I'd like an extract of that. It'd be good just to hear a voice by itself. And and uh I think I'd like to have Richardson reading The Crystal Cabinet.

Speaker 227:54

Oh, what a smile

Speaker 227:57

A threefold smile filled me, that like a flame I burned. I bent to kiss the lovely maid, And found a threefold kiss returned. I strove to seize the inmost form With ardour fierce and hands aflame, But burst the crystal cabinet.

Speaker 228:19

And like a weeping babe became.

Speaker 228:22

A weeping babe upon the wild

Speaker 228:26

And weeping woman pale recline.

Speaker 228:29

And in the outward air again I filled with woes the passing wind.

Presenter28:36

Sir Ray Fritchardson reading William Blake's The Crystal Cabinet.

Presenter28:41

Do you think this Japanese training of yours enables you to eat raw fish, which would be a great economy and a a splendid thing for a castway to be able to indulge in?

Sir Peter Parker28:51

I love it. Uh the trouble is I'm not very

Presenter28:52

The land.

Sir Peter Parker28:54

Good at fishing.

Presenter28:56

That was the next thing I was getting.

Sir Peter Parker28:57

Lust

Sir Peter Parker28:58

Well I'd have to invent one of those cunning Oriental baskets and hope that lobsters wandered in, that sort of thing. But I'm not good at the at the line fishing.

Presenter29:09

Could you rig up a shelter?

Sir Peter Parker29:11

Yes, but I'm not very practical, but I could

Sir Peter Parker29:14

probably be more practical in those primitive circumstances. And I think I could do a shelter.

Sir Peter Parker29:19

And small craft do know anything about sailing.

Presenter29:21

Uh

Sir Peter Parker29:21

Not very much.

Presenter29:23

Yeah.

Sir Peter Parker29:24

Not very much, but enormous confidence the sea will take me in the right direction. I'd be putting a raft down in not not in a hurry, but in due course I'd be building a raft and feeling in sort of higher dull spirit, but currents would take me

Presenter29:39

Oh, we hope not just in a circle and back again.

Presenter29:44

Not the inner circle, yeah.

Sir Peter Parker29:45

Uh

Presenter29:46

Plan

Sir Peter Parker29:46

Your last record. I think we've got to have Beethoven, and I love Beethoven's seventh as much as we can. Uh

Presenter29:54

And

Sir Peter Parker29:54

Adrian Bolt is deep in my

Sir Peter Parker29:57

Memory. As a boy we used to go and listen at Bedford to the evacuated orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it used to play in the school hall at Bedford, and I used to see Bolt do his stuff there. That heroic figure uh doing this would be vastly encouraging as I spent my time there on this island.

Presenter31:12

The last movement of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony, conducted by Sir Adrian Belt, conducting not the B B C Symphony Orchestra, but the Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra of London.

Presenter31:22

If you could take only one disc out of the eight you have played us, which would it be? The Mozart The Mozart Oboe Quartet.

Sir Peter Parker31:29

Yeah.

Presenter31:30

Your luxury?

Presenter31:31

Uh

Sir Peter Parker31:31

That's very difficult, I

Sir Peter Parker31:34

I've been through a range of things, right? W a hot bath, for instance, not enough. That's possible. That's possible. Not really enough.

Sir Peter Parker31:41

I think I end up being pretty sure that I want to hang on to my gold pass, which gives me the freedom of the railways. Not that it'll be much use on the island, but it would give me the feeling some day I'll be back on the rails. That would be nice. Could I have a late Christmas present?

Sir Peter Parker31:55

I just like a little footprint on the sand. I find that very cheering.

Presenter31:59

Oh, that can be organized. Yes, that that would indeed give hope.

Presenter32:03

And one book.

Sir Peter Parker32:05

There's no doubt in my mind there. I take Blake's collected works, which must mean Ameladi's pictures,'cause the two things are together, aren't they?

Presenter32:11

Yeah, it's pros.

Sir Peter Parker32:12

Yeah.

Presenter32:12

Pictures

Sir Peter Parker32:12

Uh

Presenter32:12

Uh

Sir Peter Parker32:12

Uh

Presenter32:13

Right. The collected works of William Blake

Sir Peter Parker32:13

Right.

Presenter32:15

And thank you, Sir Peter Parker, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Sir Peter Parker32:19

It's been a delight, and the idea of the peace and the scope of that island, and for not too long, it's a great pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 132:33

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