Eric Newby

Eric Newby0:00

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

Eric Newby0:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music, the programme was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

This week, our castaway is the writer and traveller, Eric Newby.

Presenter0:36

Eric, I've been reading several of your books, which are mainly autobiographical. I don't remember coming across anything about your musical tastes. Is music important to you?

Presenter0:46

Yes, uh it is in a sense important to me, although for large portions of my life uh I've had to live without it and live more or less on the memory of it. Have you any musical skill yourself? Do you play an instrument or play the piano? Do you sing?

Presenter1:02

No, I'm certainly not allowed to sing. I was in any band of singers I'm immediately identified and rushed to the exit. In fact, I had a a musical teacher against my will when I was young, a French lady with a large moustache. I think it was a moustache that put me off. I never got very far with that. This was the piano. The piano. Did you have any kind of plan in choosing your eight discs? Yes, I did. I know that some of my choices will probably seem awfully corny, but they're probably corny in a sense because a lot of other people like them and one hears them an awful lot. I think that other choices, or most of the choices one would make,

Presenter1:39

Being alone on a desert island and and and away from all the people you knew and loved and everything, would be remembering happy times or otherwise, or evoked by the music you were listening to, or whatever you happened to be listening to if it wasn't music. Nostalgic choices. What's the first one?

Eric Newby1:54

What's the first one?

Presenter1:56

Well, my first choice is Beethoven's piano concerto number five in E flat major, the the Emperor Concerto. Why do you choose that? Well, partly because I think it's the most marvelous piece of music and

Eric Newby2:04

Why do you choose that?

Presenter2:10

Because it was the

Presenter2:12

First piece of classical music that I bought for myself with my own money, or whatever money I had, before the war. And it came in one of those lovely big brown HMV albums which you opened out, and every 78 record was in its own sleeve, and on the inside there was pasted a rather recondite, actually, a description of what the music was about.

Presenter2:37

I shall always remember uh this record because it was played by a most wonderful pianist, long dead, uh Arto Schnabel.

Presenter3:45

The Beethoven Emperor Concerto Arto Schnabel with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.

Presenter3:52

Eric, you're a Londoner, I believe. Yes, yes I am.

Presenter3:56

I grew up in in suburban London, Barnes SW thirteen. My father was a an inveterate rowing man, so he spent all his time spare time on the river. That's why we lived by Hammersmith Bridge. Were you educated in London? Yes, I I went to Collick Court, which was a prep school in uh it's called West Kensington, I think it's really Hammersmith and St Paul's School, which was then in the Hammersmith Road on the other side of the road, an enormous red brick building which

Presenter4:25

Passing foreigners used to think it was a loony bin. What were you good at at school?

Presenter4:30

I was good at history, I was good at uh English, and I was, although I may not look it, I was extraordinarily good at divinity, but unfortunately, having a rather dirty mind, I always used to laugh at th the slightly off coloured bits in the Old Testament, and I got a bad reputation as a result of that. What did you want to be?

Presenter4:49

Well, I didn't really want to be anything. I didn't want to leave school. I wanted to go to the university and read history. But my father, when he found out that I'd fail irretrievably, I would have thought, you know, algebra, and therefore failed my O-levels in mathematics, it was obligatory to pass. He said you must go and learn business, because he was of the Victorian generation. He was much older than my mother. And he thought, quite rightly, I slightly outmoded way, that you had to make your way in the world, as he had. And so he took me away from school at the age of sixteen and put me into an advertising firm in London, in Lower Regent Street. Which particular job did you do in the advertising firm? Well, I did sort of very menial jobs. I worked on filing copies of advertisements and looking through thousands and thousands of magazines to see whether our advertisements had appeared in them or were upside down or whatever. And so I gained an enormous knowledge of the world from looking at the sort of extraordinary magazines from New Zealand and missionary magazines from Central Africa, you know, with advertisements for Kellogg's conflicts in them and things like that. And most of the time being sort of

Eric Newby5:28

Well I

Presenter5:58

rather tormented by the marvellously sexy secretaries who used to come in to our department and ask for copies of these magazines, who are much older than I was, I may say. Well, obviously you weren't going to get very far in that advertising agency. So let's break off at this point for your second record.

Presenter6:13

Well, my second record deals with my private life at this time, because I was, like most people, rather interested in girls, and it brings to mind a a very attractive schoolgirl, whom I knew in those far off days in nineteen thirty seven. We weren't really allowed to talk to them on the bus, but I used to.

Presenter6:33

And the record is Thanks for the Memory, sung by Shirley Ross and Bob Hope.

Eric Newby6:39

Strictly entreneur?

Eric Newby6:42

Darling, how are you?

Presenter6:45

And how are all those little dreams that never did come true?

Speaker 46:52

Off we glad I'm the moon.

Speaker 46:55

Cheerio.

Speaker 47:02

Thank you so much.

Presenter7:11

Shirley Ross and Bob Hope. Well, the day came when you had to go from that advertising agency and all those glamorous secretaries. What did you do?

Presenter7:20

Well, I was always very interested in sailing ships and that summer I went on holidays to Sorcombe in Devonshire and when I was out in Stairhole Bay which is in the estuary of Sorcombe I dived down and saw the remains of the four-masted Finnish bark Herzegovin Cecily which had been wrecked off the Devon coast some time previously and she was lying there in about six fathoms of water and I read all about her and I became terribly excited at the prospect of going to sea and I asked my father to apprentice me as an apprentice in one of Gustav Eriksson of Maryham's fleet of four-masted barks. He had eleven four-masted barks, all of them without sail and engaged in the Australian grain trade and he paid fifty pounds for me to be apprenticed and I went to sea. That autumn, the autumn of the Munich crisis, I joined the ship in Belfast. Apprentice, did that mean you had to sign up for a long time? At that time you signed up as an apprentice for one year or a round voyage. After that you could continue to sail and you could be an ordinary seaman and you could eventually become an able seaman and so forth. How big were these grouped? Well the ship I was in was the biggest sailing ship in the world. She was over three thousand tons. She had something like nine or ten miles of running rigging. Her masts were as high as Nelson's column. I believe you had a very frightening experience within an hour or two of going aboard for the first time.

Presenter8:49

Yes, I I shall never forget that, because I got on board and I was wearing my ordinary clothes and slippery shoes, and I met the second mate, and uh without any further ado, he said, Up the rigging.

Presenter9:02

And he made me climb up the rigging in these slippery shoes. And I got halfway up and I had the shoes on, so I took them off and stuck them in the rigging, because I couldn't they were so slippery. And he shrieked at them not to drop them on the deck, because it would kill him or something. And I went up to the top, to the royal yard, which I thought was far enough, which is the topmost yard of the ship. And he told me to shin up six feet of bare pole and go to the top. Which was how high? Well, it's about a hundred and a hundred and eighty something feet. Wow. And all Belfast spread out below one. Then he told me to actually sit on the cap. Well, I never saw anybody else do that, and I just pretended I didn't hear him and went down. But it was a good idea, because I soon got over my fears of going aloft in a sailing ship. I bet I'd be scared stiff I did it again now. How many were in the crew? There were about thirty. And you, as an apprentice, was the lowest form of life. Yes, there were several apprentices on board, and we were all the lowest form of life.

Presenter10:02

So where did you go? Where did you sail to? Well, we sailed from Belfast in Ballast and we arrived in South Australia, in the wheat belt of South Australia, near Adelaide, at a place called Spencer Gulf, eighty-two days from England, without having seen any land except Tristan d'Acuna. And we had made not the fastest passage out, but quite a good one.

Eric Newby10:19

And

Presenter10:24

And then you load it with grain and sail back. Now the grain race, why was it so important to get back first before the other ships? It wasn't really terribly important. But the race was something which all members of the Ericsson fleet and all other square rig sailing ships in the world who were engaged in this trade were mad about, naturally, because who could make the fastest passage to England?

Eric Newby10:31

Yeah.

Presenter10:45

How did you do? Well, we won. It wasn't an official race, you alice. No prize, but everybody fought like hell to see who would get there first, obviously.

Eric Newby10:49

New part.

Presenter10:55

Well done. Let's have your third record.

Presenter10:58

My third record is Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. Six.

Presenter11:03

It makes me feel uh camoso, as the Italians say, in the same way as it did when I first heard it, which is many, many years ago.

Presenter12:10

Part of the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony of the Pater Tik, Furtwengler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Presenter12:18

So you won the last grain race from Australia.

Presenter12:22

And then, almost immediately, I believe the war came along, you joined the London Scottish, then transferred to a very select and specialized unit.

Presenter12:32

Well, I was in the London Scottish and then I was commissioned eventually in the Black Watch. And at the end of 1941, I went to a rather sort of crazy organisation called the Special Boat Section. What was the usual function of that unit? Well, the Special Boat Section performed somewhat similar functions to the Special Boat Section which the Marines have been using, or one assumes have been using in the Falkland Islands. That is to say, their predominant job was to land on hostile shores, usually from submarines, and either do beach reconnaissances or sabotage, and principally in the time when I was in it, attacking Axis airfields, landing from submarines by fallboat, by canoe, and then attacking German airfields in Crete or in the western desert. A group of you went ashore to sabotage a German airfield in Sicily and something went wrong.

Presenter13:28

Yes, well, unfortunately, a lot of this had been going on and there were something like a thousand men on the airfield, either Germans or Italians, guarding the planes. I mean you have to put the bombs in the engines of the planes on JU eighty eight in order to get rid of them. And um it was a bad scene there. They they they flooded the place with uh searchlights and uh we succeeded in blowing up a number of spare airplanes and engines and things like that and we managed to put the lights out by blowing up the pylons but too late to do anything and we got back, had to cut our way through the wire again, got back to the foal boats which we buried in the sand, having encountered a party of Italians who were too frightened to attack us, I'm glad to say and put to sea again. A big storm came up, the boat sank and we spent eight hours in the water. We never found the submarine because we hadn't got infrared apparatus, it was dark as hell. And we were picked up at eight o'clock the following morning by Italian fishermen who took us into Catania in Sicily. That was the end for us.

Eric Newby14:25

Yeah.

Presenter14:27

So you were a prisoner of war in in various places in Axis territory. Where were you sent? Well, I was sent to a a camp called Chieti, near Pescara on the Adriatic, and uh arrived there to find the Eighth Army in a terrible state the remnants, the ones who had been kept in a bad state, you know, no clothes, all dressed in blankets and things like that. And we were in fairly good nick actually when we arrived there. We stayed there for a bit in this camp, and various escape attempts were made. Then I was sent to another rather luxurious camp which was full of members of Weitzclub and things like that and all rather grand chaps. And when the Italian armistice came in nineteen forty-three, we broke out of the camp to save ourselves being captured by the Germans and taken to Germany. And I had a broken ankle and left on a mule instead of walking.

Presenter15:11

There was a Yugoslav lady living locally with whom you became friendly. Yes, she was a young girl. She was the daughter of the local schoolmaster. And this girl I got out of the camp, as I said, and I had a broken ankle and I was in rather a bad way with it. And she got me hidden in a maternity ward of a local hospital. And well, I can go on telling all that. But at any rate, she came every day to teach me Italian, because she said, If you can't speak Italian, no good. You'll never get escape. And then the Germans found out I was there and came to get me, so I escaped through a window, fell into a river, got my put in plaster repairs all soft, and a doctor very bravely took me to the mountains in a car, driving down the main German lines of communication, past all the German panzer bargain and tanks going down to the front. He would have been shot if he'd been caught. And took us to the mountains and we lived in caves and various places and various hideouts in the mountains for the next three or four months. And you'd covered an awful lot of territory on those near Munich and in Czechoslovakia, which was as far east as we got.

Eric Newby16:11

Uh Yeah.

Presenter16:16

All of us. I'm talking about not only about me, I'm talking about thousands of other chaps, you see. And we ended up.

Eric Newby16:18

Me and

Presenter16:23

At this very, very heavily bombed

Presenter16:26

prison camp at Brunswick. How long were you in the bag altogether? Well, I was captured in august nineteen forty two and we were finally let out, uh or rather the Americans liberated us on a very memorable day, april nineteen forty five. Let's have another record, Eric.

Presenter16:43

Well, my next record is A Takartin Fugue in D minor by Bach.

Presenter16:49

Played on the organ by Helmut Walker. And this record it was only really when I was in a prison camp and used to go there were a few records and used to go to musical society evenings or days, it didn't matter whether it was day or evening that I really began to I can't say understand fugal music, but to appreciate it, its infinite soaring capacity, or if anything, can take you out beyond the barboire of a prison camp. Something like this to Carter and Fugue can do it.

Presenter18:22

The Dakata from Bach's Dakata and Fugue in D minor, played by Helmut Wager.

Presenter18:27

So the war was over, you were repatriated. You went immediately back to Italy to find that young Yugoslav lady you'd been rather fond of.

Presenter18:37

Vander who is now misses Newbyn? Yes.

Presenter18:40

What had you decided you wanted to do? What was your post-war career going to be? You didn't want to go back to sea again? When I first of all got back to England, before I went back to m find Banda and marry her, I was still in the army. And my mother and father were in the wholesale dress and what was then called the mantle manufacturing and costumia, making suits and coats and dresses. And my mother I wasn't in no one was in terribly good shape after being in this place. And I was lying around feeling rather demoralised. And my mother said this was whilst I was still on leave, said it's no good lying there being demoralised. We'll send you up to the north of England to Leeds with the dress collection.

Presenter19:22

So I became a commercial traveller just for a few days. In the rag trade, yes. You worked for a while with one of the top Couture houses, didn't you? Yes, I did.

Presenter19:33

Yes. Well, I've spent ten years in my parents' business, tottering up the backstairs of stores with armfuls of stock, and trying to see buyers who didn't want to see me, or were dead, or mad, or gone on holiday, or you know, all the things that you tell commercial travellers. And then my parents, my father was getting very old, and the business was going downhill. And I felt that the best thing was to get out of it, because then they could wind it up and go and earn money from some other source rather than my parents'. So I went and worked for a very splendid firm in Grosvenor Street called Worth, which was associated with Pacan in Paris. And they made very beautiful clothes, very expensive. I mean, they they would still seem expensive now. And I loved working there. I really en enjoyed working with clothes. I mean, I I'm interested in fashion. They still buy vogue. How did you get out of that particular trade?

Speaker 420:20

Yes

Eric Newby20:20

Till

Presenter20:25

Well, and I got out of most things by uh getting sacked.

Presenter20:29

And what happened then, this was in 1956. I had written a book called The Last Grain Race about my life as a sailor, which I was able to do because I had all the log books which I'd kept. And this book showed signs, to everybody's surprise, including my own, of being a success before it was published. And this gave me the confidence to ask a friend of mine who was in the diplomatic service and had always been trying to get me to go there to

Presenter20:59

go to a very unknown part, a completely unknown part of Afghanistan at that time called Nuristan, which he had been on the borders of when he had worked in the British Embassy in Kabul. And so we went to Nuristan. All expenses paid by the publisher? No, not at all. I was given an advance on royalties for the book, really very small, I may say, and it was extremely difficult to make ends meet. We had two children at school. We were very badly off. And Vanda wanted to come with us, but she couldn't come to Nuristan. She came as far as Persia, which at that time was a very adventurous journey, I may say. We drove all the way in Landrove and all the way to Afghanistan through rivers. We had to use schnorkels.

Presenter21:39

It wasn't a bit like it is now. It was a a wild journey.

Presenter21:44

And we went into Nuristan and in order to go there we had to pretend we were on a climbing expedition, otherwise the Afghans wouldn't have let us go. And we nearly got to the top of this, just the two of us, of this 20,000-foot mountain in the Hindu Kush. And from there, with our Tajik drivers and our horses, we went down into Nuristan, which was we were the first English people to go there since 1886. And the result was a very successful book called A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Yes. Let's have another record. What have we got to? Number five, I think. My next record.

Presenter22:21

I not only like it, but it's part of history in a way.

Presenter22:25

It's Beatles.

Presenter22:27

It isn't.

Presenter22:28

Early Beatles is record, but it's mature Beatles from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, which is very appropriate to me at the moment, as I was born in nineteen nineteen.

Presenter22:39

Called When I'm Sixty-Four.

Speaker 322:41

When I get older losing my head Many years from now

Speaker 322:48

Will you still be sending me Valentine, Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? It might be out till quarter to three.

Speaker 322:58

Would you lock the door?

Speaker 323:02

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?

Presenter23:11

When I'm Sixty-Four by The Beatles. Now we can't cover all your travels, but another book I know took you slowly down the Ganges, didn't it?

Presenter23:21

And you had a spell as travel editor on a Sunday newspaper. Was that rewarding, or was it mainly a matter of packing groups of readers onto charter flights? When I came back from going down the Ganges, my problem has always been how you survive whilst you're writing a book about what happened. And I was terribly lucky. I was asked if I would like to become travel editor of The Observer, which by any standard is probably one of the nicest, best jobs in in Fleet Street. And that was in 1963. And I had after that probably about ten of the happiest years of my life because I was able to travel very extensively and lead my readers a merry dance through bog and fell and swamps and things like that. I was also able to take my wife with me most of the time, which meant that we were always very close together. Otherwise, living that kind of life, your marriage might very well sort of collapse, you know.

Eric Newby24:08

Uh

Presenter24:15

It isn't only the far-flung travels that have interested you. You've peddled through Britain and some of Europe on a bicycle.

Presenter24:23

Oh yes, I've I've done a lot of cy. I've cycled to Italy and I I've cycled um mind you I I did this really to inspire my readers, but I of course I enjoyed doing it myself. I also one occasion cycled all the way from the Wash to the Seven and back to Wimbledon without going on any classified road whatsoever. You were on towpaths and... Yes, towpaths and footpaths and things like that. And once I had to hire a man to take me across this small river on a boat because I couldn't get out of the impasse I got myself into.

Eric Newby24:43

And that got to hold.

Presenter24:52

And you've explored some of London's forgotten rivers, which have now been adapted to sewers.

Presenter24:58

Well, the ones I went down, I went down when I was actually a a fashion bar for the John Lewis Partnership. I used to go down at night and then come back in the morning to Wimbledon and clean myself up, have a bath and then go and off and buy clothes, or, you know, do whatever I had to do as a bar. And I had great difficulty in getting permission to go down the Suez, and I eventually went down various Suez with working gangs working all they worked all night, you know, it's jolly hard work. But they like it down Suez. They don't think it's bad, they think it's very healthy. They can be quite dangerous, can't they? Yes, it's very dangerous. If it starts to rain, you've got to get out jolly quickly. It was enormous.

Eric Newby25:26

Maybe

Presenter25:34

Cataclysmal floods of water come roaring down the city in a matter of minutes and sweep you away. In the Fleet River they have gates, each of which weigh tons, and when the water comes zooming down the fleet, it just opens these things as if they were paper. Are there a lot of rats? Yeah, a lot of rats in some places, and uh especially a lot in the entrance to the Tibon. And also you've got to be careful about um gas. I mean uh otherwise even though if you start lighting matches you might rise through a manhole like Polaris. On the whole the Ganges sounds better. Let's have another record. Well the next record is an extraordinarily frivolous one and I include it because on my island I can't only be intellectually feasted by music but I've also got to remember a lot of

Eric Newby26:07

Uh

Speaker 426:07

Uh

Presenter26:21

happy times had especially with, you know, my children and other people's children and my children's children and so forth had been phonitum. And one of the records which I loved when it came out and which all children

Presenter26:37

not very young children, but all children love, is an extraordinary thing done by Jack Hulbert, which is called The Flies Crawl Up the Window.

Speaker 426:45

You must jump out of

Presenter26:47

Problem, it really is sublime. It's where do all the flies go when it is winter time? You ought to know the answer, but I'll tell you once more. Mr. Gladstone told the Queen in 1864. Flies crawled up the window, it's all they have to do. They went up by the thousand and came down two by two. The flies crawled up the window, they said we'd love to roam. So once more up the window, and then we'll all go home. The Flies Crawled Up the Window by Jack Hulbert from his film Jack's the Boy.

Presenter27:22

You've just put together a sort of resume of most of your travels and a sort of autobiography called A Traveller's Life. That must have been rather fun, going back on the whole thing. Yes, it was, actually. The trouble is that I had so many travels that the book came out originally at 250,000 words, and we had to reduce it to something like 85 to 90,000, which wasn't very easy, which means leaving out all sorts of lovely travels, which I wanted to, but you can't help that. Well, you've got another couple of volumes when you feel like it. I don't think the customers would stand that. What's your next project? Where are you going and what for? Well, immediately I'm engaged in writing a book about the Mediterranean, which means visiting all the countries on the periphery of the Mediterranean, not the islands. There are many compensations in your job, aren't there, Eric Newby? Well, as long as you don't sort of slip on a banana skin and break your leg or something like that, it's all right, providing you're Phillip Kit. It's all right. Record number seven.

Presenter28:13

Record number seven is a record which doesn't have any extraneous memories for me, it's just

Presenter28:19

Really?

Presenter28:21

Marvellous piece of music.

Presenter28:24

It's called Poji Hamor.

Presenter28:27

And it comes from Margaret Figura, Act Two.

Speaker 428:35

Don't you know?

Presenter29:21

Portiamour from The Marriage of Figaro sung by Victoria at Los Angeles.

Presenter29:26

You visited a lot of islands. Do you know anything about desert islands?

Presenter29:31

Well, not really desert islands. I mean, I suppose the nearest thing to really desert island was when I was a sailor and we were rowing.

Presenter29:38

Eight miles from the shore, coming back after being allowed ashore for the first time, we got caught in a storm and we had to run onto what was really a desert island, just uh a bit of scrub and a lot of white rabbits. When was this? That was when I was a a sailor in a sailing ship before the war. I mean, that was the most. I mean, I've been in islands in Fiji, you know, which were six feet deep in human bones from cannibal feasts and things like that. But they were being lived in, uh, these islands. They weren't desert in the sense which you mean by desert. So you know what you're up against. Could you look after yourself? Oh, sure, yeah. I think so. No worries. I mean, to use modern jargon, I think I'm a survivor. Yeah. I have been up to now. Well, those years as a prisoner of war and.

Eric Newby29:49

When was the

Eric Newby29:52

I

Eric Newby30:17

Yeah.

Speaker 430:17

Yeah.

Presenter30:20

All the other places you've been, as well as being a a sailor before the mast, I think we needn't worry about you. Let's get straight on to record number eight.

Presenter30:28

Well, my last record is by a man called Scott Joplin, who was a rag pianist, and his works

Presenter30:38

I would gladly have all of them on my desert island, because I never get tired of them.

Presenter31:43

Scott Joplin's Soles A Mexican Serenade played by Joshua Rifkin.

Presenter31:49

Well, thank you for letting us hear your eight records. Eric, if you could only take one of them, which would it be?

Presenter31:55

I take the rifkin. Right. And one luxury to take with you. Any one thing of no practical use.

Presenter32:03

I think, considering I'm by myself and I would want to have some slight celebration from time to time, even at Christmas, I think I'd take a couple of cases of Glenmorringy or some malt whisky like that and and use it uh particularly c look forward to it, you know. Yes, yes. Well, in case you're there for a long time, we'd better say six cases.

Presenter32:24

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

Presenter32:28

It's very big. It's enormous. It's about thirty volumes. But I would take the whole of the Dictionary of National Biography, which deals with all British men of more or less genius or interest since the beginning of recorded history until the present day. I uh it is I mean until not the present day in fact, because it's always about ten years behind.

Presenter32:52

And I would hope that I would get off my island before I would have to get the next volume.

Presenter32:57

So, the Dictionary of National Biography, and thank you, Eric Newby, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Well, thank you, Roy. I've enjoyed it, really. I was scared stiff. Yes, well, it's a bit of an ordeal, you know, but I didn't find it an ordeal at all. I'm delighted to hear that. Goodbye, everybody.

Eric Newby33:08

Well it's a bit of a

Eric Newby33:22

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