Earl Of Snowdon

Speaker 20:00

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

Speaker 20:05

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

Presenter0:29

This week, our castaway is a celebrated photographer, the Earl of Snowdon, who began life as Tony Armstrong-Jones.

Presenter0:37

Lord Snowden, with what degree of dread would you view a spell on a desert island?

Presenter0:42

Miss Mum, do call me Tony. Please take you away with it.

Presenter0:46

I would have enormous pleasure.

Presenter0:49

I'd love every second of it. Even for quite a long time. Oh, yes, I would adore not having the telephone. Is music a big thing in your life? No.

Presenter0:57

Music means mostly nostalgia to me.

Speaker 41:01

Uh

Presenter1:01

It reminds me of what I did at a certain moment.

Presenter1:05

It reminds me of when I made something or when I photographed something.

Speaker 41:08

Yeah.

Presenter1:08

It's secondary, I I mean, really and entirely visual.

Presenter1:12

It's not

Presenter1:13

That I'm tone deaf, but if I'm at the ballet, I'm watching rather than listening, and listening is just there as a secondary. What's the first record you've got there on your list?

Presenter1:22

Well I've got written down a record called The Green Cocker Too.

Presenter1:26

And it was the only record I had when I was at school.

Presenter1:30

We were not allowed grammar phones, as I like to call them. But on the other hand, uh a master said

Presenter1:36

One was allowed anything that one made oneself.

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So I made a radiogram, which took quite a long time.

Presenter1:43

And I just had this one record, the green cockatoo. On the flip side, as they call it nowadays, was a thing called Chiquita Banana. I remember it vividly and it almost wore through from one side to the other.

Presenter1:54

But the making of the gramophone was much more important than listening to the music. Well, we've traced the actual record that you had, and it's by Roberto Inglis.

Presenter2:33

The Green Cockatoo, Roberto Inglis, and his orchestra.

Presenter2:37

Let's go right back to the beginning. You were born in London, yes? I was born in London, yes, in Eton Terrace. And Jones, obviously of Welsh stock. Yes.

Presenter2:47

Your father was a barrister. It's well your mother's side provided the artistic talent.

Presenter2:52

Yes, entirely, because my father was a a much loved, not only by me, barrister, um and my grandfather on his side was a doctor.

Presenter3:00

But on my mother's side,

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There was my mother's brother.

Presenter3:04

Oliver Muscle.

Presenter3:06

Who probably influenced me more than anybody in the world. Yes. Great stage designer, probably the greatest in this century, I think.

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Created all the

Presenter3:15

Theatrical designs in the thirties like the white-on-white Elaine.

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And

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Just after the war

Presenter3:23

I think he was responsible for making Covent Garden really glamorous again.

Presenter3:29

And

Presenter3:30

With no great accessories, the head dresses were made of very simple things like

Presenter3:35

Uh pipe cleaners and and paper clips, but look stunning on stage. And he liked to do all that himself, didn't he? He loved to make things. He made everything himself.

Earl Of Snowdon3:41

Oh yeah.

Presenter3:44

Now, the school at which you were so fond of playing the Green Cockatoo was Eaton. What were your interests there?

Presenter3:51

It was varied, a bit of photography.

Presenter3:53

No games. Quite a bit of science.

Presenter3:56

There's a story that you fitted up your study not only with uh a hand built radiogram, but I mean you made it more or less like the cabinet of doctor Caligari. You had a burglar alarm and automatic curtains and

Presenter4:11

You put a radio set in your top hat. Yes, yeah, that was it was filled with gadgets, my room. So that when it was during the war, of course.

Presenter4:18

And um when you opened the door, it drew the black eyed curtains. And everything was automatic, but it was quite uselessly so.

Earl Of Snowdon4:23

And

Presenter4:28

I used to make crystal sets in match boxes.

Presenter4:31

I then did have yes, I did have a wireless in my top head.

Presenter4:34

and a walking stick,'cause I wasn't very well at the time.

Presenter4:36

And that worked as the um the earth. And the Ariel came down, you see, in the with a headphone out of the top hat. Yes. Not awfully good reception. On what occasions did you listen through your top hat?

Presenter4:49

Oh, well I was watching games, because I didn't play games very much.

Presenter4:52

So there they were, the BBC, talking through your head.

Presenter4:57

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

Presenter5:00

I think, again, something that

Presenter5:03

reminds me of

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Both somebody I admired enormously, and

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The wartime period, which is London Pride by Earl Coward.

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He was, I like to think, a great friend of mine and again my uncle's.

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A marvellous man.

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A great performer.

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A real maestro, I think. London Pride has been handed down to us. London Pride is a flower that's free. London Pride means our own dear town to us, And our Pride it forever will be.

Presenter5:34

Whoa, Liza, see the custer barrows, The vegetable marrows and the fruit pile pie Oh Liza, little London sparrows, Carven garden market where the custers cry.

Presenter5:48

Yeah.

Earl Of Snowdon5:48

Mark me feet, mark the beat.

Presenter5:50

No card.

Earl Of Snowdon5:51

Yeah.

Presenter5:52

Now, you moved on to Cambridge, Jesus College. What did you read? Well, I was going to MIT to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then changed to.

Presenter6:01

Go to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences. Mhm. Didn't enjoy that. Read it for ten days, which is quite a short term really. Yes. And then changed to architecture, which I didn't even know existed when I went there.

Presenter6:13

But in those days, uh once you'd got in you could change, which I think is kind of good idea.

Earl Of Snowdon6:17

What is

Presenter6:20

Oh, nothing to do with the college itself. No, it was a very tough college called Jesus, which we're in Instagram rank.

Earl Of Snowdon6:20

Is it the

Presenter6:26

It was, I s'pose, subconsciously and consciously, the influence of my uncle of a mesel again.

Speaker 46:32

Mm-hmm.

Presenter6:33

It is a tremendously nice thing to read because so long as you've got your mass and building construction.

Presenter6:40

It will serve you in very good stead for the rest of your life, especially on a desert island.

Presenter6:45

Did you do a lot of architectural photography? I didn't do enough architecture. I never finished my.

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Um

Presenter6:51

I was awfully bad at drawing drains.

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I I used to enjoy the theory of design and sketch designs.

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But somebody else used to do some of my working drawings, who is now a very successful vicar.

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Yeah.

Speaker 47:05

Every everyone.

Presenter7:07

Yeah. Except one person, I think. You achieved fame as as Cox of the Cambridge Boat and the University Boat Race.

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Which station did you draw? Middlesex.

Presenter7:16

And you won. We won by three lengths, but we also had a slightly nasty moment just after Hammersmith Bridge.

Presenter7:23

When the oars did touch. It's a thankless task, coxing. If you steer a good course, nobody says anything. If you steer a bad one, they throw you in the drink. Yes, and you're a figure of fun. But actually, it's very exciting.

Presenter7:34

The uh tideway is so huge, you're extremely lost out there and lonely.

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And it's very difficult to know whether you're crabbing. What I mean by that is going sideways. And you tend to steer.

Presenter7:47

onto objects like you get

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uh a certain bridge in line with something else.

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Um

Presenter7:55

It may be thankless, but it's great, great fun. You do have a sense of power, although you're not in power, the stroke is in power. You're yes, you're blamed for everything if you don't win, and bla and thanked for nothing if you do win. But you enjoyed your rowing? Loved it. And then I was asked to go down by my tutor at Jesus because I hadn't um

Presenter8:11

contributed to college rowing and had concentrated too much on university rowing. Such was the

Presenter8:16

autonomy of colleges in those days.

Presenter8:18

Now what about your exams? I failed them.

Presenter8:21

Had you decided then that you were going to Dutch architecture and be a photographer? Oh, no, not at all. I had no idea. My father was marvellous. He said do what you want, but do it well. And so I did the rounds of going down to messels in the city to look for a job there.

Presenter8:35

Think of all kinds of things. My first job in fact was getting two pounds a week on a motorcycle. That included the petrol.

Presenter8:45

that I had to pay for and I had to I buy the motorbike.

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working for two young Australians,

Presenter8:52

who were finding flats for people. It was an agency, you see.

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based in Shepherd's Market, and my job was to go round to all those tobacconists that had postcards in the window.

Presenter9:02

Write them all down. It said, Bed sit, thirty Bob. And then I'd come back and they'd put it in their files and it would it was thirty five pop when it went out to the client, so that's how they made that commission.

Presenter9:11

Well, let's make off at this point for your third record. Watch that.

Presenter9:15

I think

Presenter9:17

If I could have night and day

Presenter9:19

By Carol Gibbons, who used to play at Savoy. Why?

Presenter9:23

It was something that was played early on at that time in the fifties.

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Um

Presenter9:29

I got an old ironmonger's shop in

Presenter9:31

Um the Pimlico Road.

Presenter9:33

which was not fashionable like it is now, filled with antique shops. It was a marvellous street.

Presenter9:39

I was next door to the sunlight laundry.

Presenter9:42

And the rent was two pounds a week.

Presenter9:46

And

Presenter9:47

I think it was one of the other few records that I had and liked.

Presenter9:50

That was your first studio.

Presenter9:52

That was my first two dead that lasted for quite a long time. Right. Night and day.

Speaker 49:56

Night and day

Speaker 410:01

You are the one.

Earl Of Snowdon10:03

Yeah.

Speaker 410:05

Only you, beneath the moon, and under the sun.

Earl Of Snowdon10:13

Well and near to me or far.

Earl Of Snowdon10:17

It's no matter

Presenter10:18

The darling, where you are, I think of you.

Presenter10:25

Uh

Speaker 410:27

Uh

Presenter10:27

Night and day, Carol Gibbons and his Savoy Orpheans accompanying and playing with Al Boley.

Presenter10:34

Right. Now, you were a photographer. When did you make the decision? You you were busy working for the two Australians.

Presenter10:41

I didn't really decide. I just drifted into it.

Presenter10:45

I started by doing a few photographs of friends. I lived in a box room.

Presenter10:51

In Albany, opposite.

Earl Of Snowdon10:52

Obviously,

Presenter10:53

A good address small box room.

Presenter10:56

and uh it had the window on the floor because it was above the porter's lodge.

Presenter11:00

And so everyone was underlit, you know, lit from underneath for those year or so.

Presenter11:06

And then I went to a society photographer called Baron, who was marvellous, very kind.

Presenter11:15

And

Presenter11:16

As his hobby he took marvellous ballet photographs, but as his everyday life he took

Presenter11:21

Photographs of other grand ladies against a tapestry background.

Presenter11:25

It was something of a mass production studio, wasn't it?

Earl Of Snowdon11:25

It was something

Presenter11:28

With a lot of skill. Yes. There were five sittings done a day, and all with with lamps. Mhm. With a slight formula of one key light to light the nose, and then if they moved, you'd give them the

Presenter11:41

what he called the Rembrandt lighting, and that meant the shadow would go across the cheek. Yes. And then there was a l little thing called an inky dinky which filled the light in the eyes, and two backlights light the hair and the hands.

Presenter11:52

Um no, he also had great skill because I tried to copy him for quite a long time afterwards when I was in a basement in Shaftesbury Avenue working with David Symm.

Speaker 412:01

Oh yes.

Presenter12:01

And what's we

Speaker 412:02

In relatively,

Presenter12:04

Quite right.

Speaker 412:05

Hmm. Yeah.

Presenter12:05

Yes.

Presenter12:07

And in those days, I mean, I was only charging six pounds, which wasn't a lot, really.

Presenter12:11

But I was doing awfully bad copies of what Baron was doing very well. That was mostly wanted.

Speaker 412:15

That is my optimal one.

Presenter12:16

Casting pictures for actors, was it? Yes, I was working for Spotlight, doing glossé ten by eights. Yes.

Presenter12:24

And that went on for about another six months.

Presenter12:27

A great part of the photographic scene, of course, is weddings. When did you do your first?

Presenter12:31

Oh, then, about that time.

Presenter12:33

It's in the latest book that I've done. I mean there there were some early photographs of

Presenter12:37

A WEDDING IN IRLAND

Presenter12:39

It must take a lot of nerve. You have to stand up in front of a hundred people, sort of ordering them about. And you've really got to get an awful lot of work done in just a few minutes. Yes, I mean this is why I broke away from doing group pictures, which I didn't like to do, and treating a wedding as if it was an ordinary documentary exercise for a magazine. Nothing new. It had been done by other people for picture posts in Life magazine.

Presenter13:03

But still the majority of photographers were using

Presenter13:06

large cameras and I was tending to use a thirty-five millimeter camera which

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The newspapers didn't like in those days and said they were too grainy. And it was at the same time as that that I was starting to work in the theatre, again thanks to my uncle.

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And

Presenter13:22

In those days, again, people were using large cameras, had one day to photograph the play.

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And I slightly wanted to

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It was really a matter of time, and lack of time rather.

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was to take photographs during the production.

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In the mood of the production,

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Blow the photographs up enormously outside the theatre to make a very good display. Not to impress other photographers, but to get people.

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Off the buses and go and see the show. That was my job as I saw it.

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You had to learn a fair amount about stage lighting, I presume to No, because I was anti lighting.

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Things were much too lit, I thought.

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And on the whole, I wanted my photographs to look either unlit or taken in daylight. So I used to make

Presenter14:07

a very large tin box which was filled with bulbs with tissue paper over the front, or using bounced light as it's known, which is putting a light reflect against a white board, which is now used a lot. This was during a public performance you could take your mind. No, no, no. Usually during a dress rehearsal, it seemingly was always in Bournemouth.

Presenter14:28

I went down to Bournemouth every week, and it's an extremely long way.

Earl Of Snowdon14:32

Let's have a look.

Presenter14:34

Well, in about nineteen fifty six,

Presenter14:37

Marlin Dietrich appeared at the Capitapari.

Presenter14:41

and was introduced by Neil Coward and I used to go along and photograph her from the gallery every night.

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and she was a great professional, absolutely marvellous, and she used to look at every single contact print.

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and choose the ones herself, not from blow-ups.

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And one night I remember going there,

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And

Presenter15:00

She said, Darling, I like this one.

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But I like the smoke from that one.

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And Said's been Miss Deepcrick, that's very difficult, you know. And she said, No, it isn't.

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What you do is you get the negative of that one and you put it in the enlargement, print it, all right, and you take it out and you put the paper in the drawer.

Presenter15:19

and you take the other one out,

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And then you put that in the arch and you print that on top, all right?

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And I had to get it to a press by nine o'clock the next morning. It was already 3.30 in the morning.

Presenter15:28

She was technically absolutely right. She used it on her gramophone sleeve, so I think she was quite happy. And the conversation. And she was professional. Absolutely professional and marvellously kind to me. It was very exciting. So I'd love to hear.

Earl Of Snowdon15:34

And she's

Presenter15:42

Her singing The Boys in the Background.

Earl Of Snowdon15:45

See what the boys in the back room will have, and tell them I'm having the same.

Earl Of Snowdon15:53

Go see what the boys in the back room will have and give them the poison they name and when I die

Earl Of Snowdon16:03

Don't spend my money!

Earl Of Snowdon16:06

And I was in my picture in a frame.

Earl Of Snowdon16:10

Just see what the boys in the back room will have.

Presenter16:15

Marlena Dietrich and the boys in the back room. And of course it isn't just a matter of taking photographs, it's a matter of getting them printed. You had to go round to art editors with your portfolio, I presume. Yes, and and making contacts, really.

Presenter16:29

I remember actually I had a wonderful scoop once. I went to Vienna and photographed Senna Jorinach at the opening of the Staatsoper, and that was in 1954.

Presenter16:38

and got in, because I dressed up as an electrician, and I stayed in the theatre for about fifteen hours in the wings up a ladder.

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and got photographs of her singing in Rosen Cavalier.

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Came back very pleased with myself.

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And um

Presenter16:52

Nobody wanted.

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I don't know.

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But, um, she was very kind. I met her later at Glanbourne. Yeah.

Presenter16:58

No, it it it's a very close relationship that one has to have with an art director.

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And one needs somebody quite desperately to criticise, to

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Say what they think about pictures.

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take awa away your favorite one if if necessary and um

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Somebody to argue with, but somebody who you have respect for.

Presenter17:19

But you began to make great progress. You you you went to America and photographed there. You were given the accolade of being invited to photograph the royal family.

Presenter17:30

Then you decided to join the Sunday Times. You're you're still working for the Sunday Times, aren't you? Yes. After a quite a long time. After eighteen years, yes. And love it. But I work for um British Vogue as well. Yes. Because they give me a kind of freedom

Presenter17:45

Escapism. The Sunday Times give me

Presenter17:48

the opportunity to do and have done in the past.

Presenter17:51

under various editorships to do the photographs of

Presenter17:55

Various social problems that I think had been swept under the mat too much before, not looked at, not wanted to be seen. And I think we had suddenly a magazine

Presenter18:05

That didn't have to sell on the newsstand, so we could really, in quite depth.

Presenter18:10

Show the problems, both the physical and the architectural problems.

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Of the suffering or the lack of caring of mental health, old age, cruelty to children.

Speaker 418:24

Ooh.

Presenter18:24

It's a difficult

Presenter18:27

Life to photograph these kind of problems without being a voyeur's.

Presenter18:32

My job is to.

Presenter18:33

Get people not to be impressed by the photographs at all. They want to be very simple photographs to get people to read the article, and that's all.

Presenter18:42

Record number five, please.

Presenter18:45

Not for any particular reason, but West Side Story I'd love because I think it was the freshness of it, the newness of it, the whole

Presenter18:54

New look at musicals. The first musicals I ever went to were things like Oklahoma and Get Your Gar, and then suddenly there was Westside Story, and that.

Presenter19:02

Music by Leonard Bernstein was absolutely marvellous, I thought.

Speaker 419:35

Ha!

Presenter19:37

Leonard Bernstein's Music The Prologue to West Side Story.

Presenter19:42

Now, a lot of travels for the Sunday Times doing your reportage. One of the hazards of the traveling photographer, it seems, is that he's liable to be arrested.

Presenter19:51

That's an occupational house, I guess.

Presenter19:54

In fact, in India

Presenter19:56

We were flying from Co Chin to Bombay.

Presenter20:00

on an ordinary flight and I had my cameras on my lap and I was

Presenter20:04

Photographing out of the window.

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And um the Indian steward came up and said the captain would like to see me.

Presenter20:12

So I thought how charming You know, better view from the cockpit. So I collected all my bets together and went up the cockpit, whereupon he confiscated the whole lot. When I got to Bombay, I was arrested. What had you done wrong? Well, I was accused of photographing the fleet in Co Chin. I was actually photographing a sunset over a paddy field.

Presenter20:27

We were kept there for a bit, and it was all right. I took the film out and showed it to the sergeant in the end.

Presenter20:35

And he just looked at it and shook his head when I took the film out.

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And he exposed the whole thing, holding one hand up above the other.

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And he said, Oh my god, they're not very good, are they?

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And then the next day

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I had to report back to the police station, but instead of that, at five o'clock in the morning a frightfully grand Indian policeman arrived with Pips all the way down his thing.

Presenter21:00

And he um said, I'm terribly sorry about our boys being rather overenthusiastic last night. By the way, I think I was at Trinity when you were Jesus.

Presenter21:10

So I said, yes, sir, I think you might have been. But then he insisted on having.

Earl Of Snowdon21:11

So I

Presenter21:15

a police car behind me, you see, for the next day.

Presenter21:18

And every time he got to a village, they got out and I was about to take a photograph and he told them all to smile, so that wasted a whole two days of no.

Presenter21:27

Action whatsoever.

Presenter21:29

In recent years you you've been making films for television. Yes. How did that start and what was the first?

Presenter21:35

I'd finished designing a

Presenter21:37

a birdcage for the zoo. Yes. And it's the first time I'd met Derek Hart.

Presenter21:43

And then I was asked by CBS to do a third of a film on loneliness.

Presenter21:50

And most of the films have come out of the features that I've done for the Sunday Times. I then asked Derek if he would work on it with me, and it ended up as.

Presenter21:58

A film about uh different aspects and problems of old age, and it took a long time in the making, almost a year, and they put up with a lot because

Presenter22:08

I was ex totally inexperienced, and if you'd been brought up as long as I had been then to work alone and be alone,

Presenter22:15

It's very difficult to work with a crew of maybe five or six people. It's much more cumbersome. And thanks to Derek's expertise and and help

Presenter22:24

It seemed to work out alright. How many have we done?

Presenter22:28

We did that one, which was called Don't Count the Candles. Then there was one called We Will Always Remember You Lumpy, which was about the odd relationship of the English toward pets, either shooting them or loving them.

Presenter22:41

Then there was one the year before last called Peter Tina and Steve, which was about.

Presenter22:46

some teenagers.

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in Kent, who had been brought back into society and looked after by a professional fostering scheme under Nick Stacey, which I'm all in favour of.

Presenter23:00

rather than having the short, sharp shock in detention centers. And then I did a film about um Burke and Wills, who were the first to be able to walk across Australia from south to north in. and a film about Mary Kingsley in West Africa.

Presenter23:15

Record number six.

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Could I have

Presenter23:19

a bit of swan lake because

Presenter23:22

It reminds me really of when I went to

Presenter23:26

Vienna, with Dame Margot Fontein, and

Presenter23:29

Rudolph Nereev, to do his one leg, to do stills of that.

Presenter23:33

To photograph it must be very challenging but rewarding. To photograph during a performance is dependent on a quick reaction, and a reaction of your finger on the

Presenter23:43

Button. I think not on a motor.

Presenter23:46

I like much more to photograph during rehearsal when it's being tried out for the first time, when you see the choreographer working on it.

Presenter23:54

Rather than the repetition of a performance that's gone on many times before.

Presenter23:58

Because you're not putting anything more into it.

Presenter24:01

What are we going to hear from Swan Lake? Let let's have the wolves from Act One.

Presenter24:04

I like it'cause it's got a good tune.

Presenter25:01

The Walls from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake from Act One.

Presenter25:07

Now you you mentioned that uh your most recent book of photographs, that's personal view, a very handsome volume, selected from all your pictures.

Presenter25:16

If

Presenter25:17

You are going to take one picture on a desert island. Which which picture are you happiest and proudest of?

Presenter25:23

out of the thousands you've taken.

Presenter25:26

I think I'd probably take one of Cartier Breast Sons.

Presenter25:29

And not one of your own? No, I wouldn't I didn't want to take one of mine.

Presenter25:33

I once had taken, they appear in a magazine, I can't bear them. Mm-hmm.

Presenter25:37

I didn't think I'd actually take a photograph. I'd rather take a painting.

Speaker 425:37

I didn't think I'd act

Presenter25:40

Yes. I don't really like photographs being framed and treated with reverence. I'm very much against.

Presenter25:46

this whole new movement of photographs being valuable. I don't think they are at all. They're worth the paper they're printed on. I think you should be commissioned to do a book or whatever. That's nice to be paid for that.

Presenter25:58

During the years that you were married to Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, you had exceptional opportunities to photograph the royal family.

Presenter26:05

You've presented the reproduction fees for those photographs to a trust.

Presenter26:10

I didn't do very many photographs during those years. Um

Presenter26:13

But I formed a trust, yes, in nineteen sixty.

Presenter26:16

And one would have hoped or thought it would have

Presenter26:19

become an enormous sum of money. It hasn't it's got up to about ten thousand pounds.

Presenter26:23

And what I'm going to do, hopefully, is form an award scheme for next year, which is the year for disabled people or disabled persons it's called.

Presenter26:33

And this will be an award scheme for disabled students between the age of 18 and 24.

Presenter26:39

Ten thousand pounds isn't enough capital for the necessary bursary, so I'll need to top it up to get a worthwhile amount.

Presenter26:46

So you're going to launch an appeal? So I put m all my money into it and hope that other people will join in with it.

Presenter26:53

And um

Presenter26:54

See where it goes from there. Well, that's a very worthy charity.

Presenter26:59

Let's get on to music watch number seven.

Presenter27:02

What I'd like is a bit of Beethoven's Ninth, because we had it in that film Don't Count the Candles.

Presenter27:11

It reminds me of making that, which was a year of my life,

Presenter27:16

Again, thanks to Derek. He chose it.

Presenter27:19

I just like to hear it.

Presenter28:20

Part of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Leopold Stachowski conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter28:27

Now you've always liked working with your hands. You like to make your own equipment. And of course you designed and made uh a a wheelchair.

Presenter28:36

What did you call it? That was a champion. We made about.

Earl Of Snowdon28:39

Yeah, so

Presenter28:40

5,000 of them.

Presenter28:42

And because of the amount of publicity it got, it stimulated interest in wheelchair design as a whole in arts schools. So maybe it helped a bit to upgrade it, but you can't.

Presenter28:51

I was trying to get the cheapest possible.

Presenter28:53

Means of transport. And it can't do everything for everyone. But it has moved the design on a bit.

Presenter29:00

I hope so, but I think there are now better ones than that, and I'm working on a new one.

Presenter29:04

Right. Working on a wheelchair. Could you work on a larger scale?

Presenter29:12

No, I I don't think I'd need many tools. I mean, one one could do with stones, pebbles. You c you can start from the Stone Age and work up. Hopefully there might be some bits of metal you can make into chisels.

Presenter29:21

Anything useful like fishing or cultivating are going to be all right for food.

Presenter29:26

I don't care much for food.

Presenter29:28

We want to eat something.

Presenter29:29

Yes, I get by on sort of um

Presenter29:32

you know, veg and fish and stuff.

Presenter29:35

Would you try to escape?

Presenter29:37

No, I don't think so, but it would be fairly pointless, I think.

Presenter29:40

You've never studied navigation, you're not very good with small boats.

Presenter29:44

No, no. You'll stay where you were. I'd I'd stay where I was,'cause I think that always, whether whether you're skiing or Or whatever, it's much better to stay where you are, and someone will find you.

Presenter29:53

And in the meantime, while you are there,

Presenter29:56

Make it as good looking and actually create something worthwhile out of the island, which wasn't presumably very nice when you got there. Right.

Presenter30:04

We've got your last record. What's that to be? I think if I could have um Land of Our Fathers, preferably in Welsh, if you've got it. Yes, indeed.

Speaker 430:12

Yeah.

Presenter30:13

which reminds me of the pleasure I had in designing the investor at Carnarvon.

Presenter30:18

And also me being Welsh.

Speaker 430:46

A slowing both the sun.

Speaker 430:50

Yeah.

Presenter30:54

Land of My Father's by The Triochie Male Choir. If you could take only one disc of the eight you play this, which would it be?

Presenter31:02

I think

Presenter31:03

Probably the most peaceful, so it would be a Swan Lake.

Presenter31:08

All right. That first act waltz from Swan Lake. One luxury to take with you nothing of any practical use. Can it be something like oil paints and brushes and a canvas? Oh, yes, yes.

Presenter31:19

Well, then I think I would take.

Presenter31:21

paints and oils, because I paint so little, I paint extremely badly.

Presenter31:26

And I'd have enough time to get better. All right. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and We Frown on Big Encyclopedias.

Presenter31:34

What I would like to take is a book which is called A History of Architecture.

Presenter31:40

On the Comparative Method by Sir Bannister Fletcher.

Presenter31:43

Because it's a marvellous record.

Presenter31:45

It would help me tremendously when I was building. I could build an crib

Presenter31:50

in almost every

Presenter31:51

Date, mood, and method. I think we'll have something gothic this week. So exactly. So when you come to see me.

Earl Of Snowdon31:55

So

Presenter31:57

You will have a choice of where you would like to stay, on which part of the island. All right, give us the title once more, will you? It is called A History of Architecture.

Presenter32:05

on the comparative method.

Presenter32:07

By Sir Bamister Fletcher. Right.

Presenter32:10

And thank you, Lord Snowden, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. And thank you, Rye, very much for having me. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 232:24

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