Sir Fitzroy MacLean

Sir Fitzroy MacLean0:00

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

Sir Fitzroy MacLean0:05

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty one, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:27

Our castaway this week is an author, a traveller, an ex-soldier and an ex-politician, Sir Fitzroy MacLean.

Presenter0:34

Sir Fitzroy, you have been to many strange and romantic places. Have you ever visited a desert island?

Presenter0:40

I've uh visited one or two rather barren rocks off the west coast of Scotland, in fact one of which I am hereditary captain and keeper. Splendid. I've also visited a good n number of rocks off the Dalmatian coast.

Presenter0:56

And you have no ambition whatever to spend any considerable time on one? I wouldn't mind if I did.

Presenter1:03

Is music an interest of yours?

Presenter1:05

It's an interest, but I'm very untutored.

Presenter1:08

Do you possess a lot of records? Quite a lot. What was your plan in choosing your eight for the Desert Island? Nostalgia, Inspiration, Self Improvement, Music While You Work? W what was your Largely Nostalgia.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean1:20

Yeah.

Presenter1:22

Right. And also pleasure. But I think I mean the idea would be uh things that would remind one.

Presenter1:29

of happy moments in one's past or interesting moments in one's past. Uh I'm a great one for nostalgia. What's the first one you have on that little pile there? Uh the Baron Rocks of Aden, uh a p a pipe tune. I think the the greatest of all pipe tunes myself.

Presenter1:47

Partly because I heard it played literally in my cradle. My my father was was in the Cameron Islanders and um it was the first pipe tune that I ever knew and it came back into my life when when I became a private in the Cameron Islanders, whatever it was, twenty or thirty years later.

Presenter3:03

The Barren Rocks of Aden by the Regimental Band and Pipes and Drums of the Black Watch. Now, you are a Scot, though, according to the reference books, you were born in Egypt.

Presenter3:14

I was born in Egypt because my uh father's regiment happened to be there at the time. Do you come from a military family? Does the military strain go? I'm the first one not to be a soldier for four or five generations.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean3:23

I'm the

Presenter3:27

You were educated at Eton and Cambridge, where you took a first-class honours degree in what? In classics.

Presenter3:35

What was your ambition as a youngster? I think to be a diplomat. Was it the prospect of travel which attracted you most?

Presenter3:43

Not really, no. I thought it would be the the most interesting and exciting thing I could do. Well, in fact, you did, of course, join the diplomatic service when you came down. What was your first posting? Paris. A plumb job right away. Plumb job. Well, I was in the Foreign Office for a few months before that. They did something they'd never done apparently before, which was to send round uh a form to fill up saying, Where do you want to be sent? So I thought, Well, there's no harm in in aiming high and I said Paris and uh a month later they said, You're going to Paris. This was the mid-thirties, the days of the Popular Front. An awful lot going on. A lot going on. You were in Paris yourself. At about that time.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean4:18

No.

Presenter4:23

Were you long in Paris?

Presenter4:24

Three years. And then? They said, where do you want to go next? And I said, Moscow. Th they they said you must be out of your mind but I said no, I want to go there and uh they said well nobody else does so it's the easiest thing in the world. One of the drawbacks must have been that the Russians weren't permitted to meet foreign diplomats. It was very nearly im impossible. I went there with the firm determination to meet as many Russians as I could and in fact I did meet a few, mostly in trains and buses and places like that. The f the the further one got away from Moscow the easier the atmosphere was but it was very difficult indeed. They were terrified.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean5:05

Yeah.

Presenter5:06

Now in a minute we'll talk about your unauthorized and unorthodox travels in Russia, but let's have another record first. What's that?

Presenter5:14

One of the things that did lighten the darkness a bit in those days was being able to go to the Balshoy Ballet and um they didn't have a very big repertory but they had Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake and I had to choose. I wanted one waltz and I listened to to Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty and came down in favour of Swan Lake.

Presenter6:36

The Waltz from Swan Lake, the orchestra of the Swiss Roman conducted by Ernest Ansomet.

Presenter6:43

Now, Sir Fitzroy, by sheer persistence and a lot of cheek, you went to a lot of places in the Soviet Union where you weren't supposed to go. These were unofficial travels, just for curiosity. These were, as you say, unofficial travels just for my own personal curiosity. What I found when I got there was, of course, interesting, to say the least of it. But I was really on local leave. Yes. And you got to Turkestan and Afghanistan, sometimes by showing meaningless but impressive looking documents to people who couldn't read anyway. Interested. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. You got over the border into China once, didn't you?

Presenter7:26

I also got over the border into China. I wasn't so lucky there. They put me straight into jail and expelled me. But then the the Foreign Office had insisted on my warning the Russians what my intentions were, which rather uh enabled them to take steps in advance. As they control that bit of China they simply they said you won't enjoy yourself there. And when I came out twenty-four hours later they said we told you so.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean7:45

There's no

Presenter7:51

After a while, surely, they kept an eye on you. Oh, they kept an eye on me from the word go. I uh had uh by the end of my time there, I had uh four full-time followers who sat in a motor car outside my house and when I went for a walk after dinner they followed me. And they followed me to Central Asia and they followed me up in a lot of very, very uncomfortable mountains in their tight black shoes.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean8:10

Yeah.

Presenter8:18

You took the Golden Road, the Samarkand, and the Bokhara. How did you manage with languages? You spoke Russian, but not everybody else did.

Presenter8:26

I spoke Russian. Everybody or almost everybody spoke enough Russian to make themselves understood and I made myself understood. But uh when it comes to getting something to eat and you haven't had anything to eat for a long time, it's remarkable how easy it is to make yourself understood. You travelled for a while on an old medical certificate I I read.

Presenter8:49

I travelled at one time on an old bill from some shop in London that had by royal appointment and with a whole row. I mean, you know, they were by appointment of the Duke of Connog and Queen Mary, a lot of people like that. And all these impressive coats of arms, they took in everybody. It was a marvellous bill, that. I paid it in the end, too. Well, it had paid for itself, hadn't it? Paid for itself. And you got into Persia. Well, it was all a long time ago, but all one can say is, well done. Let's have another record. What shall we have now?

Presenter9:29

Neither you nor I are as young as we were the first time we met.

Presenter9:34

But the other day I was on a ra another radio programme

Presenter9:38

and my companion on this was a young gentleman of eight, mister Russell Scott.

Presenter9:45

and he had recently been taking some lessons in playing the organ, and I thought his performance was absolutely first class, and what I also liked about him was that he played some tunes which took me back to the thirties when I wasn't quite as young as he is now.

Presenter10:03

But I was younger. And so this combines nostalgia with the um next generation.

Presenter10:36

Russell Scott, aged eight, playing As Time Goes By.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean10:40

Yeah.

Presenter10:41

Now you had been in Russia about three years, I believe, and then the war started, and you suddenly decided to become a politician. Why?

Presenter10:50

Well, what I really decided to do was to get out of the Foreign Office and, um, uh into the army.

Presenter10:57

But I found this wasn't as easy as I'd thought. I was frozen in the Foreign Office by the defence regulations.

Presenter11:05

But after one or two unsuccessful attempts, I discovered that under one of the rules of the Foreign Office, anybody who stood for Parliament, who even thought of standing for Parliament, had to resign first. So I went along to the Permanent Under Secretary of State and announced to him that it was my intention to stand for Parliament. He was this was Sir Alexander Caduggan, the great diplomat. He had possibly an unreasoning dislike of politicians which come out in his diaries. He even went so far as to say when the bomb was dropped on the House of Commons, what a pity they weren't all in it at the time. And so you can imagine the reaction I got from him. A look of total disgust came over his face and he said, but do you realise, apart from everything else, that you will have to resign if you do this, commit this folly? So I said, as a matter of fact, I have worked that out, and here's my resignation, and thank you very much. Good afternoon, and got out of his office before anything more happened and round to King's Cross and into a train to Inverness. And I'd arranged with a friend that I should get straight into the Cameron Islanders as a private soldier. Winston Churchill once introduced me. He was amused by this stratagem. And he introduced me to Field Marshal Smuts as a young man who made a public convenience of the Mother of Parliament. By becoming an MP. By becoming a an MP in order to get out of the Foreign Office and into the Army. All I can say is that the Mother of Parliament has made a public convenience of me for the next thirty odd years. Right. From the Cameron Highlanders very quickly you were transferred to a specialized unit.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean12:22

We can

Presenter12:56

Well, I met a friend who had just raised David Sterling, who a few weeks before had raised the SAS, a special air service regiment. And from what he told me about it, it sounded the sort of thing I should enjoy. And so I got into that. What was your first enterprise with the SAS? My first enterprise was a raid on Benghazi, which was then about several hundred miles behind the enemy lines. Demolition and sabotage? Demolition and sabotage.

Presenter13:33

One of your exploits in the desert was to kidnap a Persian general. Well, that wasn't in the desert. That was in in Persia. That was in in um in the town of Isfahan, where he was the army commander, General Zahide.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean13:38

That is in

Presenter13:47

and it had been discovered.

Presenter13:50

That he was in touch with the Germans. It was the time when the Germans looked as if they were going to break through the Caucasus into Persia. And my job was, if that happened, was going to be a stay-behind job behind the German lines in Persia. Meantime, the Powers of B thought it would be a good idea to remove General Zahidi, who commanded the local Persian Army Corps and who was the Germans were apparently going to do an airborne landing on our headquarters, and he was going to join in on their side and thought it would be a good idea to take him away. I was given the job of taking him away, which all went off with the help of a platoon of Seaforth Islanders, went off extremely smoothly, I'm glad to say. Could have gone wrong. After I'd taken him away, I found his chief of the general staff extremely easy to deal with. That gentleman, that general, afterwards became very important in Persia. He afterwards became Prime Minister and did a very good job indeed as Prime Minister. And I remember feeling at the time how lucky it was that I hadn't shot him.

Presenter15:04

Did you ever seek to visit his country during his term of office?

Presenter15:08

I did indeed, and I also became a great friend of his son, who was later a foreign minister and um ambassador here in London and in in in Washington. So you must have treated him right.

Presenter15:22

Well, I don't know about that, but anyhow he was one of the nicest people I ever kidnapped. Let's have your fourth record. What's that to be?

Presenter15:31

Well, this is a tune that, um

Presenter15:35

Anybody who was in the Eighth Army will remember well, it's a tune called Lillia Marlane, sung by uh a lady who I think was either a Swede or a German called Lulla Anderson, which we all used to listen to in the desert, in in the the war.

Presenter15:54

and which I in fact was able to follow up because she was situated when she sang this song in in Belgrade and I was later dropped into Yugoslavia by parachute. One of the first things we got on our radios was this same tune, only from very much closer, from a hundred miles away or so. And the fact that we listened to it, as practically everybody who'd been in the desert did listen to it, upset the Yugoslavs, partisans, very much indeed, because they were disgusted by the thought of this horrible woman as they saw her. In fact, she was very glamorous and attractive looking though, I never met her, sitting in their capital and singing songs to the German army of occupation. So the first time we switched it on, somebody said, Would you mind switching that at all?

Presenter17:14

Lala Anson singing Lilly Marlena, and nobody nowadays is going to tell you to switch that off. Now, this whole Yugoslav enterprise, I believe, was mister Churchill's scheme. He sent for you.

Presenter17:27

It was his personal idea, very much so indeed.

Presenter17:31

Tell me about it. What was it? Well, I had asked to be parachuted into Greece because I I knew classical Greek and and uh I could understand a little modern Greek. And by then the war in the desert was over and I wanted really to get not just make occasional darts behind the lines but to g get behind the lines and stay there and also to get back to Europe. It seemed enormously exciting and was. Therefore I put this idea forward and uh the answer came back we don't want Maclean for

Sir Fitzroy MacLean17:32

Click.

Presenter18:06

Greece, but we do want him for Yugoslavia.

Presenter18:09

And um I assumed that I was going to General Mihailovich and the Chetniks were the only people I'd heard of, but when I

Presenter18:17

saw the Prime Minister, he explained to me that he had begun to have

Presenter18:22

doubts about what was happening in Yugoslavia from intercepted enemy signals, intercepted of course by what is known as the ultra-secret, which has now been no longer a secret, he had come to the conclusion that that there was some other resistance movement infinitely more important than the Chetniks who really were fighting the Germans and he said to me, want you to go in and find out what is happening there. And that is what I did a few weeks later. Yes, you were parachuted into Yugoslavia and that was where you met Tito.

Presenter19:02

That was where I immediately met Tito. Tito was a shadowy figure in in those days. Really very little was known in the outside world about what was really happening in Yugoslavia. Of course the Germans and Italians knew much more about it than we did. Uh they'd found out the hard way. Well I immediately fi found Tito. I was naturally relieved to find a very

Presenter19:24

sensible, hard headed individual who rather to my surprise because of course he made no bones about being a Communist, but in spite of that he had a sense of humour, he was ready to uh discuss any question on its merits, he took his decisions there and then without referring them to higher authority. And I thought this is the sort of man um one can do business with. I also found that his

Presenter19:52

movement, his resistance movement, was infinitely more important than anybody outside had any idea. It was containing a score of enemy divisions which could otherwise have been used on other fronts. And um it was also of course politically much more significant. So what was really proposed was that you, a Tory MP, should promote a communist revolution?

Presenter20:17

Well, Winston put it rather brutally. He said your job uh is uh to find out who's killing uh the most Germans and how we can help them to uh kill more and your mission is therefore m primarily military and only secondly

Presenter20:35

Tito was a rather independent kind of communist anyway, wasn't he? Well, that is what I noticed. On the on the military side, of course, there was no doubt at all that this was a very, very formidable movement indeed, as the Germans had known all too well for the last couple of years. Politically, I found him very unlike any Communist I'd met before, and I having spent three years in Stalin's Russia just before the war, I'd met a lot and in other places as well. But I thought, well, uh the Russians are going to have trouble with you after the war. As indeed they did. And I I mean I my first

Sir Fitzroy MacLean20:39

Well

Presenter21:15

major report to the Prime Minister. I said much will depend on Tito, whether he sees himself in his former role of a Moscow trained Communist agent of the Communist International or as the potential ruler of an independent Yugoslavia. That of course was the sixty-four thousand dollar question which uh came up in in in acute form once he was in power in Belgrade and very soon led to

Presenter21:46

the break with Moscow that we all know about.

Presenter21:48

I believe you still have a house in Yugoslavia. Uh, I have a little house there which uh I bought about ten or twelve years ago and where we spent many happy weeks every year. And you continued to see General Tito, with whom you had a very good relationship? I saw Tito right up to the time of his death, pretty well every time I went to Yugoslavia. And you were one of this country's representatives at his funeral? Yes, I was. Let's have your fifth record: Haydn Trumpet Concerto. Why'd you choose that? Because I like it.

Speaker 322:48

Yeah.

Presenter23:22

Part of the third movement of Haydn's trumpet concerto in E-flat, Maurice Andre with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter23:30

At the end of the forties you wrote the first of many books, the story of your wartime experiences, Eastern Approaches. How many copies of that book has been sold now worldwide?

Presenter23:40

Oh, I should have thought getting on for a million is just a new American edition has just come out. Yes. It wasn't only about my wartime experiences, it was also about my pre-war travels in the Soviet Union. And you've written a number of travel books since?

Sir Fitzroy MacLean23:46

It wasn't

Sir Fitzroy MacLean23:51

Yeah.

Speaker 323:51

I

Presenter23:57

Quite large.

Presenter23:59

You have written a very useful and excellently illustrated history of Scotland.

Presenter24:04

You're no mean photographer. You you provide most of your own illustrations in your travel books especially. All my own illustrations nowadays. Well, it's very kind of you to say so, but I enjoy taking photographs. I think it fixes places in one and people in one's memory. Anybody or any place I once photographed, uh I can always recognise immediately.

Presenter24:26

and most recently a pictorial biography of General Tito.

Presenter24:30

And um that's my last book, A Life of Tita. You are an incorrigible traveller, aren't you?

Presenter24:37

I yes, I I suppose I am. I I pretend I don't like it, but in fact when the opportunity offers itself, I'm away. What's your next record?

Sir Fitzroy MacLean24:43

Yeah.

Presenter24:47

My next record is Voices Appete. From the Matter to Figura. Indeed. Yes, why'd you choose that?

Presenter24:55

Because I think it's a beautiful song, beautifully sung, and a magnificent bit of music.

Speaker 325:19

Holy curse of earth, faithful.

Speaker 325:36

Oh baby sail o'er.

Speaker 325:44

Which of the world

Presenter26:00

Voices from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, sung by Fiorenzo Cosoto. Your first parliamentary seat was Lancaster. You held that seat for a long, long time. I held it, I think, for about seventeen or eighteen years. Then you decided to move. My wife and I are both Highlanders, and the children were by then seven and ten, my two sons. We thought that it was time we went back to the Highlands and that they grew up in Scotland. So you took a Scottish seat? So I was lucky enough to be adopted for a Scottish seat just on the borders of Argyle where we were going to live, and it all fitted in remarkably luckily. You held that seat for about, what, fifteen years?

Sir Fitzroy MacLean26:31

Uh

Presenter26:47

I think sixteen, it was just about half and half because of course I I missed the first four or five years of my parliamentary career by being out of the country. You had a spell as Under Secretary of State for War in the Churchill and the Eden Government. In the Churchill and Eden Government, which I enjoyed enormously, I must say. It was very, very interesting and exciting.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean27:02

In that church.

Presenter27:09

Do you spend most of your time in Scotland, no?

Presenter27:12

Um when I'm not travelling I I love being there and I spend as much time as I can, but uh I'm occasionally lured away by the need to make my living or to go travelling or do something in other parts of the world. As as well as your farm, you also have a hotel to run.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean27:24

Yeah.

Presenter27:27

I do indeed, yes. The the the Craigens Inn, which uh originally started as a sort of um idea it might be rather fun, now takes up really a great deal of our time and attention. Now, your wife writes cookery books. She writes cookery books, and we try to put her good principles into practice at the at the pub. Record number seven, what's that? And record number seven is, uh, very appropriately the road to the isles, because that is exactly where we're situated in our garden.

Presenter28:06

Well God who went in the northern home and years we gathered from the world the watchdog fear This hard foolian some crooked arm of here It's gonna come off muck a muck to his fear

Presenter28:23

Oh the trunk favour and the moon young and gay and the morrow come of the humour Master Ban Hooker Just the right of the game But dinny hoose and dear in hand and fear Oh holy and some hooked ham of beer to me gabel from my

Presenter28:50

The Road to the Isle sung by Archie McTaggart and Cameron McKick.

Presenter28:55

Now in your military career have you had occasion to live off the land occasionally? Constantly, yes, uh for a large part of it, uh both in the the desert where there was nothing except y what you took with you, and in uh Yugoslavia where one literally lived off the land, food and everything else was fairly scarce.

Presenter29:16

And you are a farmer, so on your desert island you should be able to look after yourself pretty well.

Presenter29:22

You could rig up a shelter of some sort, obviously. I could certainly rig up a shelter, no problem at all. And uh I'm quite a good cook. Fishing I make the most of what I've caught. I can fish enough to catch uh uh fish. Would you try to escape?

Sir Fitzroy MacLean29:29

Yeah.

Presenter29:37

I don't I'm not certain that I should escape. Uh on the other hand, I I think that if there was

Presenter29:44

Timber abud.

Presenter29:46

I would inevitably have a shot sooner or later after a nice long rest. How's your navigation? Shaky, but I might get there in the end. We navigated our our way round the western desert.

Presenter30:01

Number eight is um the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven. Why do you choose that? Because I I think, without really knowing very much about it, that uh Beethoven was incomparably the greatest composer and I like to end up with something by him.

Presenter31:18

part of the first movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto,

Presenter31:22

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir George Schulte.

Presenter31:26

On that section you chose we didn't hear the piano at all. If we had, it would have been by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter31:33

If you could take only one disc out of that eight you've chosen, which would it be? I think I would take the last, the the Beethoven. The Emperor. I have a feeling that uh one might get tired of some of the others quicker. And one luxury to take to the island with you? Well, this is something I've debated a lot. I've thought of asking for the apparatus to distill alcohol. Reasonable. I also thought of asking for a television set with the type of aerial, saucer aerial, which will uh get programmes from satellites.

Presenter32:10

Yes. You're providing me with electricity, I hope.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean32:12

Yeah.

Presenter32:15

But I'm afraid that neither of those really arises, because what I would have to have, and I understand you're mean enough not to provide this automatically, is an unlimited supply of pencil and ballpoint pens and paper. That will be provided. That's your luxury. Is that all I can have? I can't have the television set. No, alas. I should have thought paper of some kind would have been a great help for all kinds of purposes.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean32:30

Mm.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean32:33

Is that a

Speaker 332:36

Yeah.

Presenter32:42

One book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already there.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean32:46

Where did the

Presenter32:47

Well, there again, I've thought a lot. I'm very glad indeed. It's very civil of you to to let me have the Bible and Shakespeare. I should make very, very good use of both of those. I've thought a lot about what I should have as another book.

Presenter33:03

And I think

Presenter33:05

Probably I would settle for a book I've never read.

Presenter33:09

which is is war and peace in Russian.

Presenter33:12

Right. I think that would take me a very long time, and I think that by the time I got to the end of it, or uh possibly before, I should be ready to try and escape.

Presenter33:23

Good. And just to be on the safe side, we'll let you have it in English as a crib, if you get sent. No, I don't want that. Part of the point is to have it in Russian to keep my what I still please call my mind fully occupied.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean33:28

No, I

Presenter33:36

Your wishes will be taken care of. And thank you, Sir Fitzroy MacLean, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you, Roy. I've enjoyed it enormously. Goodbye, everyone.

Sir Fitzroy MacLean33:53

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