Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
An actor, producer, designer, film director, author, playwright, entertainer and singer who ran his own theatre.
Eight records
Well, one hymn I learned at school which I loved particularly and I'm glad I loved it. It was God Loves the Little Sparrows... And it was many years before I heard that tune played, and I learned that it was... Stolen from Schubert's De Forella, a song about a chap who goes out fishing. Here it is, here is being sung by Gerard Suze, I think the greatest of all lyric baritones of the last I don't know, fifty years, certainly.
Well, it's going to be um a record of Kjörsten Flagstad, a a great Norwegian singer, who helped me and Josephine, my wife, to build the Mermaid Theatre... I think all singers sing better in their own language. And she's going to sing a song with the words by Ibsen, her fellow Norwegian, and it's just Meden vanderlilly, and that's simply a song to a water lily.
And so we got to know Eva Turner very well. She came to collect the money from the gas meter once a month and we went down to her home and I would go and deliver the rent in the mornings and sit outside her music room hearing this huge and beautiful voice pouring through the door. And that's why I've chosen the next record which is Voie lo Sepete from Cavallaria Rusticana.
And here we have her singing one of the loveliest songs in a very early recording when the voice was fresh and un unprofessionalized, Sally.
And the one we're going to have is his greatest record and a great classic, West End Blues.
Oh good, and then we went up number six now aren't we? Yes. Oh that's me. I'm glad I put myself in. I had a big struggle because I'm by nature fairly modest... However, having had two great dramatic sopranos in, especially Kirchden Flagstad, I have a record, and it's um a take off, in a way, a little skit on Wagner and The Ride of the Valkyrie.
This is a jazz record, a great jazz record, by Art Tatum. He's a blind pianist, and it's a record which shows what the human hand can do with amazing agility. Apart from being a beautiful um record, it's um I'll See You Again Noelkaard's famous song played by a great virtuoso jazz pianist.
Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491Favourite
I'm fascinated by the idea of what human beings can do with their bodies... and this also shows the same thing in a great classical recording. because I'm a mixed up kiddie a bit. And it's Mozart, it's the pianoforte concerto in C minor, one of the supreme works of Mozart in this field. Kirkel four nine one, played by a great pianist, Gieseking.
The keepsakes
The book
Homer
I would take the Odyssey of Homer, translated by WHD Rouse, which I think is the loveliest translation made into English.
The luxury
A box full of notebooks, pencils, and a pencil sharpener
Because I've had very great fortune. God's been very kind to me in having a really, I think, superlative memory. And I would like to write down from memory all the poetry I've ever learned.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Did you sometimes make early morning trips to Covent Garden?
Well, I went with my father once or twice, yes. He would put me as the five-year-old I howl the place down to be taken... And the horse and cart, the van, went from Hillingdon from the nursery, Cowley, up to Coven Garden and started half past ten and got there about half past four in the morning or five in the morning. Yes, well it seems just a slow horse journey, sixteen miles, and then a stop on the way at the bottom of Nottinghill Gate to give the horse some food and take it out of the shafts and put another horse in and clean the lamps and give the driver and my father a piece of bread and cheese before we started off again. And I would lie amongst the flowers in the back of the van on his overcoat.
Presenter asks
Did you go to the theatre a lot as a child?
No, never. Oh yes, I was taken by a school teacher to see some Shakespeare at the Old Vic, and we sat in the in the g in the gallery and I forgot what sixpence I think it was and there I drank in a lot of my early Shakespeare and love of the theatre.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 3
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
Speaker 3
For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty two, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.
Presenter
This week our cast away as barren miles of Black Friars in the City of London.
Presenter
who is well known as an actor, producer, designer, film director.
Presenter
Author, playwright, entertainer
Presenter
Singer
Presenter
He runs his own theatre, and he is better known to us on the whole as Bernard Miles. Oh, good, yes. Better than Baron. Well, Lord, he's nicer than Barron. Oh Don't do have eight Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
I know that music means a great deal to you. Well, I was brought up on it. I mean, I'm a Sunday school boy. My mother and father were Methodists. My mother had a charming soprano voice. My father, I think, he made his fiddle himself, and they used to go around the circuit round in Hillingdon and district, she singing and he playing a violin obligato. And so I was soaked in hymn knowledge. I know more hymns than I challenge anybody. than anybody else in England.
Lord Bernard Miles
Your own musical skill. You sing, I know. Do you play an instrument? I play the piano by ear.
Presenter
Peace.
Lord Bernard Miles
Uh just um picking it out one note at a time because um I was too lazy to learn properly. You know, my mother said you have to learn, but I said I can do it without any help from lessons and pick things out, bi bits of Mozart and hymns and bits of Schubert, you know. Do you collect rec
Presenter
What
Lord Bernard Miles
Yes, I have a fair collection.
Lord Bernard Miles
and many of those old discs which are unhappily not available now but contain have the most marvelous voices on.
Presenter
You have to hack that collection down to just eight r
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, one hymn I learned at school which I loved particularly and I'm glad I loved it. It was God Loves the Little Sparrows. And it went, God loves the little sparrows, He guides them as they fly, And feeds them in His kindness, Lest they should faint or die. He gave us eyes to see them, And lips that we might tell How great is God Almighty, Who hath made all things well. And it was many years before I heard that tune played, and I learned that it was
Presenter
I know you're I know
Presenter
What's the first one?
Lord Bernard Miles
Stolen from Schubert's De Forella, a song about a chap who goes out fishing. Here it is, here is being sung by Gerard Suze, I think the greatest of all lyric baritones of the last I don't know, fifty years, certainly.
Speaker 4
Iron Ichler Far, Forever, Ichtand and Him Gerstar, Utza Inzeusar, Bresmont and Fischlinsbar, Him Klaer and Mechlinsko.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Not unbearable.
Speaker 4
Press foot on fish lines bother him claw and back lines food.
Presenter
Yeah.
Speaker 4
Einfischer Mitter Roo
Speaker 4
For and a woo version, who t's a sweet cult and blue.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Gerard Suze singing Schubert's De Forel.
Presenter
Oh, Bernard, you were born, as you said, near Hillingdon. Your father ran a market garden.
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, he was part of a market garden set up. Three of them did it. They built the greenhouse and they gradually extended and got more greenhouses. And I was really born and worked amongst chrysanthemums and gladioli and roses and so-and-so pot plants. And I was one of the greatest disbudders of chrysanthemums in history. You had to go out, you know, and break off all the buds all the way down and leaving one bloom on the top. Did you sometimes make early morning trips to Cotton Gardens? Well, I went with my father once or twice, yes. He would put me as the five-year-old I howl the place down to be taken.
Presenter
Good morning.
Lord Bernard Miles
And the horse and cart, the van, went from Hillingdon from the nursery, Cowley, up to Coven Garden and started half past ten and got there about half past four in the morning or five in the morning. Yes, well it seems just a slow horse journey, sixteen miles, and then a stop on the way at the bottom of Nottinghill Gate to give the horse some food and take it out of the shafts and put another horse in and clean the lamps and give the driver and my father a piece of bread and cheese before we started off again. And I would lie amongst the flowers in the back of the van on his overcoat.
Presenter
Build.
Presenter
Five in the morning
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
And sound asleep of course, because I was far too late for a child to be up, really. But I howled the place down in order to go.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
If you go to the
Presenter
Did you go to the theatre a lot as a child?
Lord Bernard Miles
No, never. Oh yes, I was taken by a school teacher to see some Shakespeare at the Old Vic, and we sat in the in the g in the gallery and I forgot what sixpence I think it was and there I drank in a lot of my early Shakespeare and love of the theatre.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
Uh
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
You won a scholarship to Oxford. What did you choose to read? I read history.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
And you did some athletics in Oxford?
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, I was what was called a utility middle distance runner, yes. I ran a quarter mile once in just fifty one seconds, which in those days was quite good. It really was quite good. Were you mixed up in drama at the University? No, I didn't do any drama, no.
Lord Bernard Miles
Let's have your second record. What's that?
Presenter
That'd be
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, it's going to be um a record of Kjörsten Flagstad, a a great Norwegian singer, who helped me and Josephine, my wife, to build the Mermaid Theatre.
Lord Bernard Miles
She lived with us for a while. Her husband died at the end of 1948 and she returned from Norway to singing.
Lord Bernard Miles
just to earn a living and in order to go on living at all. And we met her with Karl Rankle, who was the conductor at Covent Garden, who lived in our street, and she came to live with us for a while, on numerous occasions indeed. And when we were living then in an old boys' school in Acacia Road, St John's Wood, which had a ruined schoolroom behind it, about thirty feet wide by seventy feet long. And when she saw this, she said, What are you going to do with it? And we said immediately, well, we're going to build a theatre in it one day. It was a kind of dream. She said, You could never build a theatre here, but if you do, I will come and sing for you in it. And I'll sing for nothing.
Lord Bernard Miles
And so she sang
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
I think it was thirty-six performances of
Lord Bernard Miles
Purcell's great opera, Dido and Aeneas.
Lord Bernard Miles
Twice nightly, the only twice nightly opera there's ever been as far as I know. It only lasts an hour and a half, you see.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
And in those days the musicians' union weren't so hot as they are now.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
And we had a lovely cook, Mrs. Hayes, who cooked them food in between the two performances and they loaded the kitchen and sat around her feet. She was like a goddess. She was plump and rosy and beautiful. And um that's how we started the Mermaid Theatre. How many people could you accommodate? Two hundred. Two hundred. And they did we did it by subscription. We just asked the local people if they would like to help us build a theater and if they would give us the money they could have two seats each. And so that's how it started and
Speaker 4
And so
Lord Bernard Miles
In the end the Lord Mayor, Sir Leslie Boyce, who was an Australian, came to see one of the shows and he said could you bring this to the city for the coronation?
Presenter
Which was the beginning of the City Mermaid Theatre. We'll talk about that story in a minute, but let's go back to Kirsten Flagstar. What's she going to sing?
Lord Bernard Miles
I don't know.
Lord Bernard Miles
That's it.
Lord Bernard Miles
I think all singers sing better in their own language.
Lord Bernard Miles
And she's going to sing a song with the words by Ibsen, her fellow Norwegian, and it's just Meden vanderlilly, and that's simply a song to a water lily.
Speaker 4
Walked they born for chance trembling.
Speaker 4
Four Life or Leader of Trends
Speaker 4
Broken love for someone seven.
Speaker 4
Here you make a robin over.
Speaker 4
Before the chemistry
Speaker 4
Holy falling over
Speaker 4
Oh, you'll live down over and over.
Speaker 4
When laughter sounds
Speaker 4
Boy.
Speaker 4
Orms then maybe beat a big
Speaker 4
For this they lost from the for
Presenter
Kirsten Flagstarred with Gerald Moore, with a water lily, with words by Henrik Ibsen.
Presenter
When you came down from Oxford you did some schoolmastering.
Lord Bernard Miles
That's right, yes I was schoolmaster in Filey at uh Southcliffe which is now a kind of uh holiday camp and I taught the boys and I learned to play golf because the thirteenth um tea was in our school playing field so we could get out of bed and go straight on to the thirteenth green and drive right round and come back and have breakfast.
Presenter
What made you decide to give up schoolmastering and and go into the
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, because a friend of mine, Bailey Holloway, a wonderful act, a great comedian and one of the pillars of the old Vic in those days, mounted Shakespeare's Richard III at the new theatre, and I was handy with a saw and chisel, etc. So he asked whether I would come and do the props, make the props and play seven small parts, which I duly did. And then I was out of work for a while until I got an introduction to Dame Sybil Thorndike and her husband Louis Casson, who were taking out a tour of St. John, eighteen weeks, my first experience touring. And returning, I got my first opportunity to appear in a West End Theatre because the production went first to the Haymarket and then to Her Majesty's, His Majesty's across the road. So I had the great glory of appearing in two of the
Lord Bernard Miles
greatest London theatres at a very early part of my little career.
Presenter
You had a good long spell in rep.
Lord Bernard Miles
But I was a very good scene quite a decent scene painter. I could draw quite a bit, and I had learned, by the way, to paint scenery by the Russian method.
Lord Bernard Miles
and had painted Lecoq d'Or, a new production of that at Covent Garden, for the DeBasio Company, designed by Nathalie Goncharova and painted and supervised by Michel Larionoff, her husband. So I learned to paint by the Russian method and had had that and it was therefore natural I should drift to earn a living into scene painting.
Presenter
Oh, that's right, yes.
Lord Bernard Miles
Oh, that's right, yes, yes. She came drifting across the stage one day. I was just doing some painting and I thought, Well, you know, I can't do better than that. I've had a look around in the theatre, and I think I'll settle with this girl if she'll have me.
Lord Bernard Miles
And so, after a certain amount of persuasion, fairly long, she did. What other rep companies did you work with? Oh, well, I was at Birmingham. We were at Birmingham together, actually, with Eric Barker, a great radio comedian who is a very lifelong friend. And we went together on tour, and we went into the digs, some digs in Birmingham, and we got a double-bed sitting room, two beds and a sitting room for 35 shillings a week. And the landlady said she would cook all our food for us as well. So we settled for this and sent her out to buy the food. And as she turned in the doorway, she said, Oh, she said, and there's only one thing. She said, if you should have occasion to use the chamber pot, please do not put it back under the bed, as the steam rusts the springs.
Presenter
That was with Eric Balker, still around. He's one of my favourite landlady stories, it's a gorgeous one.
Lord Bernard Miles
That was a good horror.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
Your third record, please. Well, when we got to London and decided that we've no more touring, we've got to break into the great scene of London, a friend of ours said, I have a friend who could put you up if you're looking for a flat. She's a singer, this lady, and her name is Eva Turner, and she lives in Russell Road in Shepherd's Bush, and she's bought a house in Elsham Road. And I happen to know that the basement is free and that she would be willing to entertain a couple of respectable clients with a little baby. It has a little garden. The only thing is it is 25 shillings a week.
Lord Bernard Miles
And so we got to know Eva Turner very well. She came to collect the money from the gas meter once a month and we went down to her home and I would go and deliver the rent in the mornings and sit outside her music room hearing this huge and beautiful voice pouring through the door. And that's why I've chosen the next record which is Voie lo Sepete from Cavallaria Rusticana.
Presenter
Eva Turner singing Voilo Seppette from Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana.
Presenter
What was your first appearance in a film, Bernard?
Lord Bernard Miles
Oh, it was a film directed by Michael Powell out at um Wembley Studios, a little quickie called The Love Test. I did one or two films out there, one with James Mason called The Front Page. And you made a couple of Dickens films that were great successes. Well, Nicholas Nickleby, I did it Ealing, and then later one of the greatest of British films, I think, which is Great Expectations. I don't think David Lee never did anything better in a way. And I had a wonderful part in that. It was the old blacksmith, Joe Gargery. It was Alec Guinness's first film, and Valerie Hobson was in it, and Finlay Currie and Francis Sullivan, a marvelous cast of people. They were great days in the British film industry. And John Mills, of course.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
And John Mills, of course.
Lord Bernard Miles
In which we serve.
Presenter
Uh
Lord Bernard Miles
Yes, I rather came out of that. I had a wonderful part in that too. Noel Coward saw me in a tiny quickie, a little um propaganda film, and he brought uh Dickie Mountbatten down to see it, and we were told I'd got to go into a little projection room and wait there.
Lord Bernard Miles
And um
Lord Bernard Miles
In came this great sailor, and Noel Card, and Clements Dane, who is a dramatist and writer and a friend of Noel's, and we saw this little quickie through about the Home Guard. Just two minutes, there were two minutes, little tiny films of propaganda, and as they went out, Mountbatten turned and he said
Lord Bernard Miles
You'll do and Coward said Praise indeed So I got this lovely part in um in which we serve, once again with John Mills and Noah Coward and other lovely actors.
Presenter
You worked a great deal on the other side of the camera. You wrote some scripts. The guinea pig, I remember, you worked on the scripts.
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, I wrote The Guinea Pig in collaboration with the author, that's um Warren Chettam Strode, and then a good film which I'm very proud of, which is Chance of a Lifetime, about a boss who gets absolutely sick to death of his workforce and says, Okay, you run it, go and take it over, pay me a hundred pounds a week and I'll get out and he leaves them to run it.
Presenter
On that film you did pretty well.
Lord Bernard Miles
Everything you operate. Today
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
Yeah. Well I had a wonderful cameraman, Eric Cross.
Presenter
Well um
Presenter
And a fine production crew. There's one aspect of your skill that we haven't talked about yet, and that's the entertainment side. You've turned up.
Lord Bernard Miles
Oh.
Presenter
A great deal on on the music hall through the years.
Lord Bernard Miles
When I was out of work in the thirties, Joseph and my wife said, Well, there's only one thing for you, he said, put together some of that stuff that our gardener says. There was a lovely old man named Jim Horne. He said one day, he said, I put some carrot seed in over there. He said, But that don't seem to retaliate. It's somehow, I don't know where that is. Anyway, he taught me how to speak, and I my grandfather had spoken a bit this way, so I picked up a lot of the Buckinghamshire speech and I wrote a couple of monologues, which Val Parnell, who was the great emperor of the Palladium in those days, heard me do it at the little players' theatre.
Presenter
I don't know how that is.
Lord Bernard Miles
It was then in King Street, Covent Garden. And he came round afterwards into my little dressing room, this great man, huge man he was, and very charming. He said, Would you like to come on the halls? And I said, Well, I would. He said, Well, you could start at the Alhambra Bradford and have four weeks getting into shape, and then you could come in with Lena Horne into the Palladium.
Presenter
You used to come and lean on a wheel, I remember.
Lord Bernard Miles
I used a cartwheel as my sort of emblems and yeah, I was dressed up as a sort of hick yoke and it's a good good act. Well let's have your fourth record. We had um Eva Turner Lancashire lass of course and that cutting, that marvellous cut on the teeth, very, very marvellous and this marvellous frontal voice is echoed by Gracie Fields who is an untrained singer but with a glorious voice and she is a Lancashire lass going right up on the halls I met her of course and it was she who told me to get nearer to the floats, nearer to the footlights, get right down she said so that theoretically you could lean over the orchestra and take a shilling out of an old lady's handbag.
Lord Bernard Miles
And she also told me that speak up does not mean speak louder, it means tilt your head up so that we up in the gallery can hear you speak up there and that's what speak up meant. And here we have her singing one of the loveliest songs in a very early recording when the voice was fresh and un unprofessionalized, Sally.
Speaker 4
Don't ever wander away from the Eddie and me
Speaker 4
Sally, Sally, Mary be Sally, And happy forever I'll be.
Presenter
Gracie Fields in an early recording of Sally. Let's go straight into your next recording.
Lord Bernard Miles
I was taught by a friend of my wife, Josephine Mary Lytton, who had been on the stage with Josephine.
Lord Bernard Miles
This Mary Lytton was well known as a writer in the melody maker, and that meant she was invited every now and again to go to America and meet some of these great, great players. I think she met people like oh, Pine Top Smith and Eddie Lang and strange names that are forgotten now, but she injected me with a love of jazz which has been pursued up and down ever since and reinforced by my friendship with Ken Moole, who's um been the conductor of the little band of all our three reviews, uh Cowdy Custard, Cole and uh Oh, Mr Porter. And um one of the greatest players of all of course is Louis Armstrong. And I met him um John Houston took me to the festival hall to a jazz concert of Louis Armstrong and his and his boys um a charity concert, Midnight Matinay in the nineteen well it was nineteen fifty four.
Lord Bernard Miles
And um he said all right, Bernard, he said we shall have to go round and see Satchmo now.
Lord Bernard Miles
I said, well, I wouldn't know what to say to him, John. I've never seen the first, nearly the first jazz I've ever heard. He said, Oh, just you be natural. He said, Satchmore, he said, Here, just be very grateful. He said, You just say what comes straight into your mind. So round we went, and in the end, he pushed me forward, he said, and here's Bernard Miles. And I said, That's great, great evening, Mr Armstrong. I said, You'd have had Mozart in the aisles. And he said, Gee, what a yeah, what a guy. Hey, boy, he said, You hear what the guy says here? He said, We'd have this Mozart He said, Hey, guy, he said, Yeah, he knowed how to put notes together. Come on, lads, come in to meet this fellow, Miles. And in the end, the whole of his dressing room was full of this band clapping me on the back because I had said that their performance would have Mozart jumping in the aisles.
Presenter
Come in to meet this fellow.
Lord Bernard Miles
And the one we're going to have is his greatest record and a great classic, West End Blues.
Presenter
Louis Armstrong, West End Blues, recorded in 1928. Now, you told us how you started this little theatre in your garden in Acacia Road. Oh, yeah. And then the Lord Mayor of London invited you to go into the city to the Royal Exchange. You did very good business, though, didn't you? I packed it, yes. I packed the place for, I think, about 14 weeks. And then.
Lord Bernard Miles
As a
Lord Bernard Miles
You afterwards found the site at Puddle Dock? Oh, well, then, then we're still not to be deterred. We thought, well, here's the home. This is the place for us. And, um.
Lord Bernard Miles
We um went to see the city architect who showed us the plans around the walls and he showed the various bits of the city which was bombed, of course had been badly bombed and he said that piece there, marked blue, there for development in two years' time, other pieces there for four years' time, those pieces red for ten years' time. What would you like to choose to put a theatre up in? But we knew where we wanted to go. We wanted to be on the river, that's the obvious place to put a theatre on the river, and we wanted to be in Shakespeare land. Shakespeare had had a theatre, but a theatre had been put inside the ruined priory at Blackfriars. And so to be there, to be sort of walking where Shakespeare trod, it was really holy ground. And the city were very happy that we should go and they gave us a lease of ten years for peppercorn rent. And there we turned an old warehouse into a theatre. How many
Presenter
Nipper
Lord Bernard Miles
Uh
Presenter
Production situation
Lord Bernard Miles
But Uh
Presenter
Really?
Lord Bernard Miles
From fifty-two.
Presenter
Shakespeare, musicals, modern comedies, and children's theatricals.
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, my wife had that idea. She had the idea we must have a children's theatre.
Lord Bernard Miles
And we began to build up this theater, which is up till now entertained.
Lord Bernard Miles
There are over two million children.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
So you did about a hundred and fifty productions at The Mermaid, and then you decided that um
Presenter
Redevelopment had to take place. You hadn't much security, had you?
Lord Bernard Miles
Uh
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
Our lease ran out after seven years.
Presenter
Uh Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
And seven and a half years, so we no lease and no planning permission. So really we were squatters. And nobody but the City of London would allow squatters I mean but they said well they're doing no harm, they're proving what we want proved, that if we go ahead with our great plan to build a major arts centre, then people will come. And this is a very good little try out down there, a very good little test. And so we went ahead and we did prove that um people would come down. I think there were about five or six million people came to this tiny theatre in twenty years.
Presenter
So the idea of you redeveloping the mermaid really was to put an office block on top of you and give you security. That way.
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, it wasn't really quite as simple as that. We got by the generosity of the Department of the Environment what's called an office development permit to build forty thousand square feet of office space and hopefully to live off the rent, cream off some of the gravy. But of course we had this very valuable permit but no money. Therefore we had to make an arrangement with somebody who had some money and was wanting to build some offices. And this turned out to be a firm of trust fund managers. And to express it in a vulgarism, we traded in our office development permit for one and a half million pounds of redevelopment. And that's why the new theatre came into being. Well it's not a new, it's the same theatre just redeveloped. We'd better have another record. Oh good, and then we went up number six now aren't we? Yes. Oh that's me. I'm glad I put myself in. I had a big struggle because I'm by nature fairly modest.
Presenter
Oh good, just
Lord Bernard Miles
I trouble my mother taught me this. Don't push yourself forward. However, having had two great dramatic sopranos in, especially Kirchden Flagstad, I have a record, and it's um a take off, in a way, a little skit on Wagner and The Ride of the Valkyrie.
Lord Bernard Miles
Which opens thee?
Lord Bernard Miles
Siegfried, does it, or?
Presenter
Anyway, it comes in.
Lord Bernard Miles
These large ladies are nine of them. They're illegitimate. They're by Erda out of Votun and out of wedlock. But no disgrace in that, Wagner says. And they're mounted on these vast Suffolk Punch stallions and they're making a real race of it. No, these are no ordinary women. They all conform more or less to the standards set by the biggest of all lady singers. The record-breaking mezzo-soprano Marietta Alboni, chest 59, waist 67, hips 76, who set the classic proportions once and for all. Very few tenors ever managed to get round her. In fact, she rolled on three of them. She flattened them out. You never heard flatter tenors than they were after she'd finished with them.
Lord Bernard Miles
Now for those who aren't familiar with the handicapping system up here at Valhalla, each horse has a dead warrior tied across his cropper, so it's bound to be a pretty stiff race.
Presenter
The race for the Rheingold Stakes
Presenter
Now we talked about the redevelopment of the mermaid, which you had to shut for what, three years, while all three and a half years.
Lord Bernard Miles
Two enough buildings.
Presenter
And you opened up again last summer. Things haven't been terribly easy so far. Well
Lord Bernard Miles
And I think I've done l less wrong guessing than many people. But still, I think we should have opened the restaurant and got the whole catering going first, and then injected the theatre.
Presenter
No
Lord Bernard Miles
But to do the two things together was a mistake I overspent, which I never regret, really.
Presenter
Well, you had one cracking success, Children of a Lesser God,
Lord Bernard Miles
Oh yes, and now another one we have now, which is one of the great hits of the London season, which is the portage in which Alec McCarn is giving this amazing performance as Hitler. And we had
Presenter
So, yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
So that's two and treasure.
Presenter
Brian and Pact. But I can't believe you.
Lord Bernard Miles
But however you want to Yes, and she's had seven Long John Silvers on whose shoulders she sat. She's done over a thousand performances. She's played in Canada, down in America, and she sat behind the pilot in the plane going to America in her cage because she couldn't go into the compartment in with the with the um passengers. And as the plane lifted off, she raised her wings and she went
Lord Bernard Miles
all the way over the Atlantic and the Canadian pilot said, Gee, mister, he says she thinks she's flying this aircraft.
Speaker 4
Uh Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
Record number seven.
Lord Bernard Miles
This is a jazz record, a great jazz record, by Art Tatum. He's a blind pianist, and it's a record which shows what the human hand can do with amazing agility.
Lord Bernard Miles
Apart from being a beautiful um record, it's um I'll See You Again Noelkaard's famous song played by a great virtuoso jazz pianist.
Presenter
Art Tatum, I'll see you again.
Presenter
Now, we know about your skill at carpentry. Do you have any other skills that would be useful on a desert island? In a practical sense, look after yourself.
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, I think I could make um a shelter. Yes, I could uh I think I could look after myself fairly well.
Lord Bernard Miles
I would hate to kill birds, only.
Lord Bernard Miles
I think I'd starve.
Presenter
I'm a vegetarian. I mean we know about cultivation
Lord Bernard Miles
Well I would think I would go under because the poisonous I think I I suspect I would grow thinner and thinner and and go under.
Presenter
And well, you're you're a well qualified carpenter, you should be able to build some kind of raft.
Lord Bernard Miles
Well, I would try a route I don't know. Do you know anything about navigation? No, not only the star, I know the north star, and I know one or two other constellations, but
Presenter
Do you know anything about
Lord Bernard Miles
When you get when you get onto a desert island without bearings, where is the desert island? You've never told anybody. You've never said it's in the South Seas, Caribbean, or where? Which way would you want? Well, I like the Caribbean. Then I would know that the Gulf Stream would drive me. Okay, if I could get down into the Gulf good.
Presenter
Now we have a
Presenter
You check
Lord Bernard Miles
A good point. I could get down into the Gulf Stream, which would carry me within a couple of weeks right up to Ireland, or round the north of Ireland, or round the north of Scotland, but within sight of these wonderful islands. Well, there you are. And if not, land in Norway. You've got the whole thing sewn up. Nothing to worry about.
Presenter
And if not
Presenter
Nothing to worry about.
Lord Bernard Miles
I'm fascinated by the idea of what human beings can do with their bodies. I'm working on the halls watching great jugglers, tumblers. The human being is a phenomenal animal, and of course Art Tatum shows that in that jazz recording, and this also shows the same thing in a great classical recording.
Lord Bernard Miles
because I'm a mixed up kiddie a bit. And it's Mozart, it's the pianoforte concerto in C minor, one of the supreme works of Mozart in this field.
Lord Bernard Miles
Kirkel four nine one, played by a great pianist, Gieseking.
Presenter
Part of the third movement on Mozart's Piano Concerto No. twenty four in C minor, Walter Giesicking with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrier.
Presenter
If you could take only one disk out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?
Lord Bernard Miles
Oh, undoubtedly the Mozart concerto which we've just heard, that never grows stale.
Presenter
Yeah.
Lord Bernard Miles
And one luck
Presenter
Luxury to take with you. Uh Any one object which would give you pleasure to have? A box full of note books.
Presenter
Yes.
Lord Bernard Miles
And pencils and a pencil sharpener.
Presenter
That can be provided to right what in particular
Lord Bernard Miles
Because I've had very great fortune. God's been very kind to me in having a really, I think, superlative memory. And I would like to write down from memory all the poetry I've ever learned. Paradise Lost, the lyric poetry, the Gerald Manley Hopkins, Hardy, and all this, much of which I know by heart and would like to record.
Lord Bernard Miles
And you're allowed to take one book, one printed book.
Lord Bernard Miles
I would take the Odyssey of Homer, translated by WHD Rouse, which I think is the loveliest translation made into English. And if there was any room or any if you could give any easement over this matter, I would like to take the Iliad as well, which leads into the Odyssey. It's really one book with
Presenter
We'll bind them together.
Lord Bernard Miles
Yeah.
Presenter
And thank you, Bernard Miles, Lord Miles, for letting us hear your Desert Island.
Lord Bernard Miles
Musier.
Lord Bernard Miles
It's really been a real pleasure to do this with such a charming
Lord Bernard Miles
group of people that you should know, ladies and gentlemen, what it's like up here.
Presenter
Uh
Lord Bernard Miles
Yeah.
Presenter
Thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone.
Speaker 3
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio four.
Presenter asks
What made you decide to give up schoolmastering and go into the [theatre]?
Well, because a friend of mine, Bailey Holloway, a wonderful act, a great comedian and one of the pillars of the old Vic in those days, mounted Shakespeare's Richard III at the new theatre, and I was handy with a saw and chisel, etc. So he asked whether I would come and do the props, make the props and play seven small parts, which I duly did. And then I was out of work for a while until I got an introduction to Dame Sybil Thorndike and her husband Louis Casson, who were taking out a tour of St. John, eighteen weeks, my first experience touring. And returning, I got my first opportunity to appear in a West End Theatre because the production went first to the Haymarket and then to Her Majesty's, His Majesty's across the road.
Presenter asks
What was your first appearance in a film, Bernard?
Oh, it was a film directed by Michael Powell out at um Wembley Studios, a little quickie called The Love Test. I did one or two films out there, one with James Mason called The Front Page.
Presenter asks
Do you have any other skills that would be useful on a desert island?
Well, I think I could make um a shelter. Yes, I could uh I think I could look after myself fairly well. I would hate to kill birds, only. I think I'd starve. I'm a vegetarian.
“I know more hymns than I challenge anybody. than anybody else in England.”
“I think all singers sing better in their own language.”
“I'm fascinated by the idea of what human beings can do with their bodies. I'm working on the halls watching great jugglers, tumblers. The human being is a phenomenal animal”