Jan Morris

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 30:11

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

This week our castaway is the author, journalist and traveller, Jan Morris.

Presenter0:36

Miss Morris, is music important to you?

Jan Morris0:39

No, I really don't think it is. I feared it ought to be. But it's a bit like alcohol, I find. I like it very much if I've got it. But if it isn't there, I don't seem to need it very much. Was it difficult to choose just eight discs to take to this island? Not awfully difficult, as I only possess about ten, so I've chosen the vast majority of them to have.

Presenter0:58

What's the first one?

Jan Morris1:00

The first one um is Bach.

Jan Morris1:03

And it's got two sort of associations for me. One is that I was brought up to believe that Bach was easily the greatest composer the world has ever known.

Jan Morris1:11

And do you know that when I was very small I thought this was a sort of scientific fact.

Jan Morris1:17

I used to scorn people who thought that Beethoven was greater. It was I thought it was simply a physical impossibility to have a greater composer than Bach. So I'd like to have him to start off with. And I'd like a piece played by my brother Gareth Morris, the flautist, The Bach B minor Sweet for flute and orchestra.

Presenter2:32

The last movement of the Bach suite in B minor for flute and orchestra, Gareth Morris with the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Klemperer.

Presenter2:42

Where were you born?

Jan Morris2:43

I was born in Somerset, on the coast of Somerset.

Presenter2:46

But fifty per cent Welsh in ancestry, I believe.

Jan Morris2:49

Father Welsh and mother English, and from where I was born I used to be able to look across to both my paternal and my maternal origins, because behind me were the Mendip Hills from which my mother's family came, and across the Bristol Channel were the Black Mountains of South Wales, from which my father's family came.

Presenter3:08

Uh

Jan Morris3:08

In recent years you've become particularly interested in your Welsh background.

Jan Morris3:13

I have. I've uh some uh twenty years ago I went to live in Wales in North Wales, as it happens, because I think I felt some old instinct was taking me back there. But I was very much concerned with other affairs anyway. I was travelling a lot and writing about other subjects, and I didn't take an awful lot of notice of Wales.

Jan Morris3:32

Until about ten years ago it gradually grew upon me how much the country meant to me.

Jan Morris3:38

and how deeply I felt about it, and what a pleasure I would have by uh immersing myself more thoroughly in it.

Presenter3:46

Right. Now, at the age of nine you were sent off to a boarding school at Oxford, in fact the choir school at Christchurch and I'll interject here that you were then known as James Morris. Yes. A choir school must be a very small enclosed community.

Jan Morris4:00

It certainly was then. I think they've changed rather now. But in those days there were only sixteen pupils being, in fact, the choir. Eight on one side of the cathedral stalls and eight on the other side of the cathedral stalls, made up the entire corpus of the school. So that we could, uh, for example, have a football or cricket team against another school, but we couldn't play a complete game against ourselves. There weren't enough of us. Were you a Sir Lewist? Yes, I was, but everybody was, I think, as I remember it.

Presenter4:27

Were you as happy there as you would have been at any other boys' preparatory school, do you think?

Jan Morris4:32

I think more so in many ways, partly because I love architecture and I liked it even then when I was very small.

Presenter4:39

That is

Jan Morris4:40

So that Oxford provided uh the most marvellous environment for a child who was interested in in the visual side of a city life. And then the daily cycle of the services in the cathedral I in those days thought were very beautiful. I was very moved by them. And the music was lovely, and the the words of the then unsullied Bible and prayer book were very beautiful, and the whole the tempo of the life of a of a child in such circumstances, I think, had a lasting effect upon me.

Presenter5:12

And then to your public school, to Lansing. You left, I believe, as early as you could, and and went into the army.

Jan Morris5:18

I did, yes, I didn't like school at all in the least, and so yes, as soon as I could I got away and and joined the army.

Presenter5:24

The war was on, of course, still. Were you commissioned quite soon? It didn't seem all that soon.

Jan Morris5:28

Yeah.

Presenter5:28

Uh

Jan Morris5:28

In the art of being messed around for a good long time, yes, I was. Yes, where did you serve?

Jan Morris5:35

First in Italy and then in Palestine and Egypt.

Presenter5:38

Were you making any plans about what was going to happen to you when the war was over? I mean, had you got ambitions nagging at you?

Jan Morris5:46

I don't think I ever had any doubt at all that the only thing I could do was to write, really. I had no other talents that have been noticeable then or since. It's about the only thing I could do, and it never I don't think ever occurred to me to think about doing anything else.

Presenter5:59

Click.

Jan Morris5:59

What? Had you

Presenter5:59

Uh

Presenter6:00

Yeah.

Jan Morris6:00

I wrote poetry like everybody else, of course. I think I really wanted to write fiction and I

Presenter6:00

No, that's a different

Presenter6:06

Yeah.

Jan Morris6:09

Perhaps wrongly thought that the way into the writing profession was by way of journalism.

Presenter6:14

Back to Oxford for a while.

Jan Morris6:16

Yes, I went back as an undergraduate to Oxford.

Jan Morris6:18

But while I was there, during vacations, I managed to get a job on the Times. It wasn't bad, was it?

Presenter6:23

Well I was starting at the top.

Jan Morris6:27

way of earning a cheap back in the vacation. It didn't seem to be too bad. And this happened um in another curious way actually by the influence of Stanley Morrison. I don't know if you remember the great typographer who in fact designed Times Roman. And he was a sort of Emmanuel Greece on the Times at that time.

Presenter6:40

Bye as

Jan Morris6:45

And at Oxford I edited a magazine called Charwell, mhm, and I wanted to have one issue of the of this magazine, with a reproduction on the cover of a picture by Max Bierbaum.

Jan Morris6:57

And I noticed that the picture, the original of the picture, was in the possession of the Times.

Jan Morris7:03

So I took the ten ten train to London one day and filed up to Printing House Square and asked for the right man to talk to about this, and it turned out to be mister Stanley Morrison.

Jan Morris7:13

And he was interested that somebody should want to reproduce this picture out of the Times archives, and realized that I was interested in writing and in and the Times indeed. And so he then arranged, there and then, that when the vacation came I could come and work uh on the paper. What did they give you to do? Subbing, sub editing.

Presenter7:30

This was just for

Jan Morris7:30

For a couple of months. I did it, I think, two vacations. And then when I took my degree, I went back to them on the staff of the paper. It was an extraordinary stroke of fortune, wasn't it? Indeed.

Presenter7:40

Well, we've got you launched in the beginnings of your career. Let's stop for your second record. What's that?

Jan Morris7:45

How fast it went compared with the real thing, by the way.

Jan Morris7:49

Well, the second record is a a very different thing, really. I spent uh a lot of my life uh thinking about uh the British Empire.

Jan Morris7:57

And uh

Jan Morris7:58

In retrospect, what chiefly strikes me about that phenomenon is a sort of sadness and a wastefulness to it. I have become much more pacifist as I have grown older I am much less susceptible to militarist things, but I am still enormously moved.

Jan Morris8:14

by the sense of wasted glory that one gets from reading about this great adventure, and from writing about it too. And so I'd like to have uh part of the music that they play with beating retreat, the ceremony of beating retreat, played, if possible, by the Royal Marines, who do it better than anybody else, I think.

Presenter9:33

Part of the music for the ceremony of beating retreat, the band of Her Majesty's Royal Marines conducted by Lieutenant Colonel F. Vivian Dunne.

Presenter9:42

So you were working on the Times. In fact, you became quite soon a foreign correspondent.

Jan Morris9:48

Fairly soon, yes. I worked in the office for a time as assistant to the foreign news editor.

Jan Morris9:53

And then there were always little sort of bush riots happening that nobody particularly wanted to go and cover, so if there was a young hopeful around the office, I think they were all inclined to send them, and I was, yes, fairly soon sent on several such stories.

Presenter10:06

Now there was one particularly memorable assignment for the Times.

Presenter10:11

An overseas assignment in 1953. You'll know which one I'm referring to.

Jan Morris10:15

I simply can't remember what that was, unless you're mentioning Uh

Presenter10:18

Yeah.

Jan Morris10:18

Emma.

Presenter10:18

King of

Jan Morris10:20

Or or thinking of Mount Everest, which was indeed an assignment that changed my whole life, really.

Presenter10:24

You were in fact the only pressman with the expedition.

Jan Morris10:25

Uh

Jan Morris10:28

I was, but not through any merit of my own, simply because the Times had almost without exception had the rights to the newspaper reports of the Overest expeditions since soon after the First World War. And in the past the leader of the expedition had always acted as the Times correspondent as well.

Jan Morris10:45

But by the time we got to nineteen fifty three, uh things were potting up a bit on the news front. There was much more interest in the story from other newspapers. And there was the complication of radio transmission coming in, and so they thought they ought to send um a professional along simply to deal with that.

Presenter11:01

Neers ha

Jan Morris11:01

Yeah. To be me.

Presenter11:02

That was how you were to get your despatches back by radio.

Jan Morris11:05

It wasn't at all because we weren't allowed to take radio to Everest, except for the market.

Presenter11:09

For security reasons, I suppose.

Jan Morris11:11

I think so, yes, and the Prole Government didn't uh approve the idea. We had uh walkie-talkies on the mountain itself, but nothing to get from the mountain back to Kathmandu, which was the nearest cable head.

Presenter11:22

A file.

Jan Morris11:22

How was that? It was sort of two hundred and fifty miles, I think. And also rather a lot of of altitude, you know, difference in altitude. Well, how did you get stuff there?

Jan Morris11:31

By classical means, by by runners, really. I I recruited a corps of of athletic porters and um they ran all the way over the mountains back to Kathmandu with my messages, and the faster they ran, the more money they got. It was said afterwards we'd have permanently upset the economy of Nepal.

Presenter11:39

Uh

Presenter11:50

Oh, this this was a terrific relay race. Now, once it got to the Post Office, Dukatmandu, of course, the material was was anybody's. It could be filed by any wandering journalist who happened to be about. How how did you manage to keep it under wraps for the Times?

Jan Morris12:05

Yes, it was vulnerable even before it got to Katmandu, and in fact several of the runners had their pouches that they carried my dispatches in. It's very like Evelyn War, isn't it? Tampered with by rival correspondents along the way. But um the reason that they didn't find out what they meant was that we'd devised a crude but effective system of codes to prevent them realizing what was happening. The problem was that the last message of all

Jan Morris12:33

I thought I could get sent back to Kathmandu by the Nepali army. The Nepalis had a radio station near the frontier with Tibet.

Jan Morris12:43

and a military post to watch traffic over the mountains into Tibetan Nepal. And they had a radio which was in contact with Kathmandu, and if I could use that radio just for the last message to say whether the expedition had failed or had succeeded, of course that would make a great deal of difference. But I knew that if I sent them that message in clear,

Jan Morris13:02

If the military sent it for me, it would be public property, would it not? Everybody would immediately get the news, and I would have lost the story. On the other hand, if I gave them a message which was so encoded that it didn't make sense, I knew the soldiers wouldn't send it for me.

Jan Morris13:17

So I had to devise a simple code just for this one last message, which appeared to make sense, but it would be the wrong sense, you see.

Presenter13:26

So

Jan Morris13:26

What was that message?

Jan Morris13:28

The message was the actual words were

Presenter13:30

Yeah.

Jan Morris13:32

Snow conditions bad.

Jan Morris13:34

Advance base abandoned.

Jan Morris13:37

All well.

Jan Morris13:39

And that meant that uh Hilary and Ten Singh had reached the summit of Everest on the day that they did reach the summit of Everest and that indeed we were all very well.

Presenter13:48

And with magnificent timing that that news that Edmund Hilary and Sherpa Tensing had got to the summit, reached London on Coronation Day. Was that planned?

Jan Morris13:58

Oh, well, it certainly wasn't except in the sense that I ran very fast down the mountain to try and get it back. But it hadn't been planned beforehand at all. It didn't occur to us that the news might coincide with the coronation. It was poorly fortuitous.

Presenter14:09

How far did you get yourself towards the summit?

Jan Morris14:12

Well, it's got higher every year since then. So I'm very near the summit myself now after thirty years. But in fact, I think it was about twenty-three thousand feet, something of that sort.

Presenter14:22

What's your third record?

Jan Morris14:24

My third record is Moocha.

Jan Morris14:27

Soon after the Everest expedition I went to live in Egypt.

Jan Morris14:32

and there my family and I lived on a houseboat.

Jan Morris14:36

And I only had uh about six records then, but I had reached the conclusion that music, if you played a lot of it, sunk into the walls of things and thereby gave them a sort of spiritual meaning. So I played my six records over and over and over again in the hope of impregnating the walls, the wooden walls of this old ship with the beauty of the classics. And the one I played most was this uh Mozart. And somebody wrote afterwards that my houseboat sank, it did sink, and they said it had sunk with the weight of the Mozart in its hull.

Jan Morris15:10

The the record was uh the dissonante quartet of Mozart.

Presenter16:15

The opening of Mozart's quartet in C major, Kirkel four six five, played by the Amadeus Quartet. So you were living on this houseboat in Egypt. By this time you were married and had a family.

Jan Morris16:30

Yes, the title.

Presenter16:31

What were you doing? Were you writing still?

Jan Morris16:33

I was the Times' Middle East correspondent. Very grand, wasn't it?

Presenter16:37

So you had to cover a lot of territory.

Jan Morris16:39

Yes, the whole of the Arab world really, and forays into Israel as well.

Jan Morris16:44

I'd been there before. I'd uh

Jan Morris16:47

served in Egypt in the army and also I had worked very briefly for a news agency in Cairo before, so I knew it well and love it still.

Presenter16:52

Die

Presenter16:54

Any particular events you remember from that period?

Jan Morris16:58

Well, I suppose the event that ended it all really, which was the Suez adventure of nineteen fifty six. Oh, of course you were.

Presenter17:03

Well, right on the spot.

Jan Morris17:04

Well, by that time, in fact, I'd left the Times and joined The Guardian.

Jan Morris17:09

Oh, there was one thing on the Times I ought to tell you about really, because it was fun, that's all. And that is that just before ni it was early in nineteen fifty six, the Sultan of Oman I don't know if you know about him No He was then the autocratic leader of the very remote and isolated country called Oman decided to make a show of force in the interior of his country, which in fact he'd never visited.

Jan Morris17:32

And two of us from the Times arranged to accompany his expedition, one to go with him himself and the other with his army, which was approaching the interior from the other side of the country.

Presenter17:44

Yes. How big was the army? Was it of serious size?

Jan Morris17:48

No, not very serious.

Jan Morris17:50

It was very small and had some British officers. And the other Times correspondent, incidentally, was Peter Fleming. Oh, yes.

Jan Morris17:57

But I was deputed to join his Highness.

Jan Morris18:01

So I joined him and his slaves he had a lot of slaves and his goats, which we were going to eat.

Jan Morris18:06

at his palace in Salalah on the southern coast of Arabia. And uh the whole lot of us the Sultan, the slaves, the goats and I uh trugged across the interior of Oman in a series of American trucks. It was the first uh crossing, motor crossing of Oman at all, and as it happened it made me, though a purely passive traveller, I just sat in the back of the truck, it made me the first European to cross Oman from one side to the other.

Presenter18:31

How far is it across?

Jan Morris18:33

I think four or five hundred miles, I think, something of that sort. I've really rather forgotten.

Presenter18:36

The whole thing was fairly peaceful.

Jan Morris18:37

Yeah. Yes, the the enemy who lived in the interior I was very vague about who they were the whole meaning of the crossing was very vague to me. But such as they were, they lay down their arms and swore fealty to His Highness. But it didn't actually last long. Very soon afterwards there was a rebellion against him.

Presenter18:55

You didn't have to go out and cover that.

Jan Morris18:57

I didn't. I finished my Omani period by then.

Presenter19:00

Now you held a love affair which still goes on with Venice. Did that start about then?

Jan Morris19:06

No, it had started before then. It had started in the army when the British Army took me to Venice first. And I uh certainly fell in love then with its melancholy emptiness because it was the war just that minute ended and it was entirely empty of tourists and even of Venetians. And when you say I've had love affairs continued ever since, like many love affairs, it certainly had its ups and downs and there have been periods when I've disliked the place very much, but it's true that I do come back to it, yes.

Presenter19:31

And in fact you've written a book about Venice.

Jan Morris19:33

I've written three books about Venice and I've just written the last one, I think.

Presenter19:37

I've got some catching up to do. I don't know what.

Jan Morris19:41

Yes. Well, there's one big one and two other ones. But I hope that I've got it in a literary sense out of my system now.

Presenter19:47

Right. Your next record, number four.

Jan Morris19:49

Well, the fourth one is directly connected with Venice, really, because the best book I've written about Venice, which is simply called Venice.

Jan Morris19:57

I like very much. I'm fond of it as a as a child of mine. And I like to think that it aspires in a way

Jan Morris20:04

to the condition of Mendelssohnian music.

Jan Morris20:08

It isn't as good as Mendelssohn, there's no doubt about that. But um when I read the words to myself I hear behind them strains of Mendelssohn.

Jan Morris20:17

And the Mendelssohn in particular, I hear, is his Italian symphony, which was written after his first visit to Venice. And he said somewhere that when he first went into Venice and went up the Grand Canal, he felt like a prince entering into his domain.

Jan Morris20:32

And he puts that in the music. And I know that feeling, you know, I truly do. Especially then when I was writing the first book about Venice, when I went out in the glitter of Venice and the Grand Canal, I felt I owned the place. And when I want to revive that feeling now, this is the record I play. Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony.

Presenter21:49

The opening of Mendelssohn's fourth symphony, The Italian,

Presenter21:53

Riccardo Mutti conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra.

Presenter21:56

Now you mentioned Suez rather intriguingly before you started talking about Oman.

Jan Morris22:02

Oh yes, that's right. The um the Suez intervention, yeah, nineteen fifty six. Because you asked me uh what stories I'd covered in the course of the Middle East there, and this was the culmination of them in a way.

Presenter22:05

Yeah.

Jan Morris22:13

By then Acta had moved from The Times to The Guardian, and The Guardian sent me to cover Suez first of all from the Israeli side with the Israeli army, which was interesting going into Sinai, and then back to Cyprus and back into Egypt to see it from the British point of view too. So it was a very revealing and interesting look at two sides of a conflict.

Presenter22:33

Was it easy to get from one side to the other? I mean, surely there was a certain amount of distrust of anyone who was

Presenter22:39

operating across the border as it were.

Jan Morris22:41

Cyprus in those days was a kind of no man's land, you know. It was very common for correspondents to get out of Israel into the Arab countries via Cyprus with two passports for each country, so that was quite a well uh frequented route. But in fact it did give me the only actual scoop of my entire newspaper career, I think, unless you count Everest

Presenter23:01

Ghosts

Jan Morris23:01

I see, yes, sorry. But this one was a more orthodox scoop, you know. And it concerned the question of collusion. I don't know you're probably too young to remember, but at the time of Suez, one of the great accusations that was brought against the British and French governments was they had colluded with the Israelis.

Presenter23:01

I see, I space.

Presenter23:17

You're very kind, Anne, yes.

Jan Morris23:18

Yes, sir.

Jan Morris23:20

They had colluded with the Israelis in order to attack uh the Egyptians. And uh in Cyprus, as it happened, I stumbled purely by chance upon some French uh bombers which had been dropping napalm bombs in Sinai against the Egyptians, thereby conclusively proving that the French at least had colluded with the Israelis in their attack upon Egypt.

Presenter23:47

Yes.

Presenter23:48

Since the age of about four you had had the idea that you were encased in the wrong kind of body.

Jan Morris23:54

It was more than an idea, really it was a kind of mystic conviction.

Presenter23:58

Yeah.

Jan Morris23:58

I never had any doubt about it at all there had been some sort of a mistake.

Presenter24:02

And you consulted various medical specialists and psychiatrists and so on about this.

Jan Morris24:06

Yes, I did. I think I should rarely have consulted uh a mythologist or a legendary.

Presenter24:14

Of course, before you could do anything practical about this, you had to wait until your children were old enough to understand.

Presenter24:21

and, of course, reach an understanding with your wife.

Jan Morris24:24

Yes, though she had known about it always in fact, I had never hidden anything from her. Um but yes, otherwise, of course, there was nothing I could do about it at all until I was really very mature, and I was in my forties.

Presenter24:37

So you began taking hormone treatment.

Jan Morris24:39

Yes, I I took millions of of pills of hormone treatments prescribed for me in the end in New York.

Presenter24:45

At that stage you started to live as a woman.

Jan Morris24:48

I went through you mustn't think, by the way, that I'm always talking or thinking about this subject, you know I truly don't think about it from one year to the next, and I but what happened was that I very gradually crossed this line

Presenter24:53

I I truly don't think about it.

Jan Morris25:00

whose existence I don't entirely believe in, incidentally. The line from male to female, from one gender to the other, because the

Jan Morris25:09

effect of the hormones was a very gradual one and it it changed me physically and I suppose it changed me psychologically and and mentally to some degree too. So that over the years I gradually slithered

Presenter25:18

So you live.

Jan Morris25:21

or swam from one side of the barrier to the other.

Presenter25:25

Your real friends, of course, understood and were helpful. Some of it, although occasionally embarrassing, must have been irresistibly comic.

Jan Morris25:33

Yeah.

Presenter25:33

Well, especially looking

Jan Morris25:34

back on it, you know, it is funny in a way, isn't it? Yes. I remember

Jan Morris25:38

For example, I was a member of two clubs in London then.

Jan Morris25:42

One very grand club too, in which I was a member as as a male, and another one not very far away in which I was a member as a female.

Jan Morris25:49

And I could pass really fairly successfully in both roles, and I used to switch from one to the other. I walked down the street and crossed the gender barrier as I walked.

Presenter25:58

Well, the ultimate stage, of course, surgery. For that, you went off to Casablanca. Now that wasn't a case of just being furtive.

Jan Morris26:06

No, no, not at all. No, it it was possible even then to have this surgery in England and and quite a lot of people had had to.

Jan Morris26:14

But there were various legal complications that I

Jan Morris26:17

didn't want to burden myself with, partly on the advice of a very remarkable man, incidentally. I better not tell you his name, but he was a very celebrated Catholic priest and scholar.

Jan Morris26:28

whom I knew as a friend, not I'm not a Catholic.

Jan Morris26:31

and I consulted him about this whole thing, and he said

Jan Morris26:34

That if the law was a barrier, the law was wrong. It wasn't a moral law. It wasn't even a sensible law. And therefore I should ignore this law.

Jan Morris26:43

and uh I should circumvent it and do whatever I could do. And I took this advice.

Jan Morris26:48

And instead of um laboring through all sorts of barriers concerning divorce, for example, I popped off on an airplane to Casablanca and did it anyway.

Presenter26:58

You wrote a very honest and and and sensitive book about it, all a book called Conundrum, and the one frightening passage was the

Presenter27:06

horror of of that Arab clinic you went to, when after major surgery you were left in the dark and nobody came near you. That must have been an awful moment.

Presenter27:15

Yes, it was rather frightening.

Jan Morris27:16

Thing? But, on the other hand, it was something that I wanted so badly, you know.

Jan Morris27:21

that I was perfectly content. I found that the surgery had been completed and even if I was tied to a bed in in a clinic in Casablanca, I was perfectly happy with it. And I must say that the memories of the clinic in general are not unhappy ones for me. There was

Jan Morris27:38

Outside the walls of this building, every morning, an itinerant flute player used to come by. He was a beggar, and he played an Arab flute most entrancingly, every morning, and I heard this sound coming closer to my window and then disappearing down the alleyways. I remember it I shall remember it for all my life, I'm quite sure.

Jan Morris27:55

With nostalgia in a way.

Presenter27:57

And you have no regrets you feel that

Presenter28:00

You're a happy woman instead of being an unhappy man.

Jan Morris28:03

Oh, certainly yes.

Jan Morris28:06

Record number five.

Jan Morris28:08

This concerns America.

Jan Morris28:10

I've loved America since I went there first in nineteen fifty.

Jan Morris28:15

Three on a Commonwealth Fellowship.

Jan Morris28:18

And so I'd like uh something to remind me of America, and in particular to remind me of New York, which is my favorite city in the whole world.

Jan Morris28:25

And when I think of music in New York, I think of piano players, because as you know, the place crawls with piano players. When I think of piano players, I have come to think first of Thelonius Monk, and I like mister Monk playing T for Two.

Presenter29:39

Thelonious Monk, T for Two. Now among your books, which are are mainly travel books, there is one major work, a walloping great work, that must have taken at least a decade to write, the Pax Britannica trilogy. What was in your mind?

Jan Morris29:53

Yeah.

Jan Morris29:54

As a matter of fact, it came out of that Oman adventure that uh we were talking about before. I wrote a little book about that journey called Sultan and Oman.

Jan Morris30:02

and a critic in reviewing the book

Jan Morris30:05

Said about it. I can't remember if he liked the book or not, he probably thought it was rotten.

Jan Morris30:09

But he did say that it seemed to represent in its attitude this kind of late Imperial adventure.

Jan Morris30:16

The responses of a generation to the idea of the empire.

Jan Morris30:20

And out of that

Jan Morris30:21

The thought that I could represent a generation in its responses, I thought I'd do something bigger about the Empire as a whole, not just a tiny little late episode of Empire, but the idea of the adventure.

Jan Morris30:32

And so I first did a book called

Jan Morris30:34

about the empire at its climax, which I took to be the end of the Victorian century.

Presenter30:38

This in fact turned out to be the middle volume of the Trinity.

Jan Morris30:41

Yes, exactly, yes. And then, like um a Renaissance work of art, I decided to add two side pieces to the centrepiece and make a triptych of it.

Presenter30:50

The mind boggles it.

Jan Morris30:51

The amount of reading you had to do for that.

Presenter30:54

Yeah.

Jan Morris30:54

Well my mind boggles too now that it's all over. Yes, I can't imagine what I thought I was doing when I started on the thing. I just can't imagine.

Presenter31:02

Because they are long books. I mean, the wordage is is

Jan Morris31:04

They are enormous books, it's quite true. But of course, you know, I'm a very superficial kind of researcher, and the research chiefly consisted of travel. I've fortunately been

Presenter31:05

Alright.

Jan Morris31:13

allowed to travel all my life all over the world, and so for those ten years it did, by the way, take a decade to do I concentrated my travel entirely on the places that had been part of the British Empire, so the research was chiefly going to look at the places and meet people who remembered what it was like.

Presenter31:28

And on the whole rather pleasurable. Entirely pleasurable, yes. Now, what conclusions did you draw about the British Empire achievement or experiment? Where did it go wrong?

Jan Morris31:39

I don't think it could be said to have gone wrong. I think, on the whole, it improved, as a matter of fact. But time and the world overtook it, did they not? At the at the time of the climax of the empire, I think

Jan Morris31:52

It could be said to be mostly an honourable enterprise. Most people thought that they were doing good. I know that the.

Jan Morris31:59

The prime moves of the empire were not very disinterested men. They were businessmen and uh strategists and people who were doing it for ulterior motives really. But the most of the people who ran the empire and made the empire thought they were doing a good thing, and indeed most of the subject peoples too. It this was in the eighteen nineties. But morality changes, does it not? By the twenties and the thirties the men themselves who ran the empire were beginning no longer to believe in its morality and to think that it was wrong for one small power to impose its will upon another one.

Presenter32:32

Recently you you've published uh a picture books.

Jan Morris32:34

summing it all up.

Jan Morris32:36

I had always intended to accompany the trilogy with a book of pictures.

Jan Morris32:41

And to begin with, I just thought of that as a sort of reference work. But later, the more I thought about the Empire, the more I was struck with the degree to which

Jan Morris32:49

An instrument of its dominion was actually its style. The effect of the empire was the empire, the way it bore itself.

Jan Morris32:57

The um

Jan Morris32:59

projection of its personality.

Jan Morris33:01

was what made the empire so powerful. And so I thought I would try and capture that in a series of pictures which we've called the spectacle of empire.

Jan Morris33:09

Your next record, please, John.

Jan Morris33:11

We now return to Wales.

Jan Morris33:14

And this is the first of two records I'd like, if I may, to have, which are Welsh records.

Jan Morris33:19

My feelings about Wales are are profound and deep and and sentimental. And um one half of them

Jan Morris33:25

are particularly moved by the melancholy and wistful side of Welsh life, the feeling of might have been, the constant yearning for something which I think comes out of the particular nature of Welsh history.

Jan Morris33:37

And so I like a song which expresses some of that wistfulness, and which also has a particular meaning for me, because it's sung by a lady, misses Lloyd Roberts, who taught one of my children at Cricket School years ago. A song is a love song.

Jan Morris33:51

called Dachoving Harriad Ilauer in a Berchlan, which means there's my lover down in the orchard.

Speaker 434:11

Are we under here?

Speaker 434:14

Warn'ty rum de rat a little.

Speaker 434:19

Akurtzi ada kurski bar da kulro sabaidi nakur.

Speaker 434:30

Faldiradalital, Turum Diroram Diradalital.

Speaker 434:42

Aku there wenwir ganheno, turm dirm dirabelitl.

Presenter34:57

A Welsh love song sung by Bivic Lloyd Roberts.

Presenter35:01

What are you working on at the moment?

Jan Morris35:03

I'm working on a very large book about Wales. I've done several books about Wales. One of them has just come out called Wales the First Place with uh a photographer, Paul Wakefield, a very brilliant photographer indeed, which is a shortish evocation of the feel of Wales. But the one I'm working on now, which is called The Matter of Wales and is for Oxford University Press, is a much, much bigger thing in which I hope to cradle within two covers the whole of the little country, its past, its present, its meaning, its history and its feel. It's a very ambitious project which may flop hopelessly, I think.

Jan Morris35:38

And I

Presenter35:39

Another big research project.

Jan Morris35:40

Yes, but a very enjoyable one.

Presenter35:42

Your travels have been going on all your life. Do you find travelling more difficult as a woman?

Jan Morris35:47

No, on the contrary, I think I find it easier. People are very much kinder, you know.

Jan Morris35:52

To women rarely still, on the whole, than they are to men, and also

Jan Morris35:56

They expect no harm of you. There's more of an innocence to you. I think purely from a professional point of view there are one or two disadvantages.

Jan Morris36:04

There are certain places it's still hard for a woman to go. Bars in certain parts of the world you're not welcome, and that sort of thing. It's just a slight disadvantage. But that's the only really the only one I can think of, and I think it's vastly outweighed by the advantages.

Presenter36:11

Damn.

Jan Morris36:18

Uh Yeah.

Presenter36:19

Record number seven.

Jan Morris36:21

This is another Welsh one, and this expresses the other side of my view about Wales. I'm a a patriot and a nationalist, and I believe that only by active means can Wales retain its Welshness and its language and its separateness and the possibility, the potential which I believe in.

Jan Morris36:41

of its becoming an ideal country. I think it can be a country that can show the world how a country could be if its qualities, its private personal qualities, could be converted into political qualities.

Jan Morris36:53

So while I'm away on this island I want to be reminded that at home the fight is going on.

Jan Morris36:58

And so I'd like a record by a great contemporary hero of Wales, David Ewan.

Jan Morris37:07

I come

Jan Morris37:22

I'm not involved.

Presenter37:33

A Welsh nationalist song by Dafyth Ewan.

Presenter37:37

To anyone who's been up Everest, even with a well-equipped expedition, a spell on a desert island must look like a piece of cake. Could you cope?

Jan Morris37:44

I really could not. I'm dreading it. I get lonely, you know, after a week end at home, writing a book. I I would be perfectly hopeless at it.

Presenter37:52

You could not um do the usual things like building shelter and uh

Presenter37:57

Catching it.

Jan Morris37:57

I try, but I'd try above all to get off the blessed thing at once. I would start building a boat.

Presenter38:02

Right. Do you know anything

Jan Morris38:03

Anything about navigation? Nothing. No. Watch it. Anything to get away.

Presenter38:06

Watch it. Anything to get away. Your last record.

Jan Morris38:12

Well, I've thought of these records being played in the order on the island day after day after day, and the order that you've kindly played of them for me now, you know. So I would like to end the programme, as I propose to end my day on the island, with something really serene and calm and grand and great, and something that I'd never ever get tired of.

Jan Morris38:32

So I get back to old Bach again, and I would like to have what still seems to me the greatest of all melodies and chorales, G Z You Joy of Man's Desiring. But since he was a German, I would like it sung in German.

Presenter39:45

Geez your joy of man's deserting.

Presenter39:48

by the Munich Bach Quire and Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter.

Presenter39:52

If you could take only one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

Jan Morris39:57

I toyed between Thelonious Monk and Jesus Joy of Man's Desaring, but I think I must have the Bach.

Presenter40:05

Uh Right.

Presenter40:06

And one luxury to have with you, one object of no practical use.

Jan Morris40:11

Well, I tell you, all my life I have toyed with the practice of astronomy.

Jan Morris40:16

So I would like, if I may, to have an astronomical telescope, and with it, if it wouldn't be greedy, I would like to have Messier's catalogue of objects, astronomical objects, which is the catalogue of nebulae, you know.

Presenter40:29

Yes.

Jan Morris40:29

And I think I would very happily, night after night, try and tick off all these objects and see them for myself. It would be very soothing and uplifting, wouldn't it, and contemplative?

Presenter40:38

That will arrange and give you a pencil as well.

Jan Morris40:41

Okay.

Presenter40:41

Yes. If you could take just one book, you already have the

Jan Morris40:42

Got it.

Presenter40:45

Complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible.

Jan Morris40:48

Well, this is rather awful, and I hope you won't be shocked. My family say it's very, very conceited of me.

Jan Morris40:54

But I would actually rather like to take my own book on Venice not because I think it's a great book or anything, but because it's a very happy book, and it would remind me always of lovely times that I've had in the past and the ones that I propose to have again in the future when I get off this awful place.

Presenter41:08

Right, and thank you, Jan Morris, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Thank you.

Jan Morris41:12

You I enjoyed every minute of it.

Presenter41:14

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 341:40

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