Quentin Crewe

Quentin Crewe0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty four, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

This week, our castaway is the writer, journalist, and traveller Quentin Crewe.

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Quentin, have your travels ever taken you to any deserted islands?

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They have taken me to lots of islands and lots of deserts, but never to a desert island.

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How much does music mean to you?

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I often wonder about this, because I've just done a trip uh across the Sahara for a year and a half, and I was rather surprised how little I missed it. Uh we did all take with us those uh things that you can plug into your ears, and they all got full of sand and didn't work after a few weeks. But they uh I was rather surprised that I didn't miss it very much. And on the other hand, I think music is very important subconsciously to to everybody.

Presenter1:16

One always remembers people by music, at least I think I do. Do you have a a biggish collection of records or tapes? No, rather they've got rather diminished now, because when one travels somebody always pinches them when one's away. But I have got a lot of old cracked seventy eights and things that Battery won't play. Well, what's the first one you've chosen for your island? I've chosen the first record that I re can remember owning, which was uh Fred Astaire's Night and Day, and I remember playing that when I was six.

Speaker 31:49

Night and day you are the ones

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Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.

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Whether near to me or far, it's no matter, darling, where you are, I think of you.

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Night and day

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Day and all

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Fred Astair singing Night and Day from The Gay Divorce. Are you a Londoner? Oh, no. Early I've lived an awful lot of my life in London, but I was brought up in I spent the first two months of my life in what's now called Libya.

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The next uh five years in Sicily?

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But then I suppose I went to school in England and I basically come from Cheshire. What was the reason for all these travels? Oh, my father worked uh he was originally in the Colonial Service and then later in the Consular Service, and so I went with them, my parents. You went to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge. What did you read? Law. Not with great success. Did you want to become a lawyer?

Quentin Crewe2:58

Not with

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No, I think I had that same sort of thing that people have. They can't be an actor, well then they'd like to be a barrister and stand up and do the Perry Mason thing. I think I was always full of ambitions of that sort. So what happened when you came down? Well, then I wandered around and and bummed around doing all sorts of jobs, working in a bookshop, in an organization which organized art exhibitions in a shipping line, selling tickets, all that sort of thing. And I did lots and lots of those things and ended up finally

Quentin Crewe3:28

Uh

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Because I was always unable to walk very well, though I wasn't in a wheelchair at the time. And then the doctor said, But I think you're getting rather strained walking all the way to work. And I said, Yes, absolutely right, because he said, I don't think you better work. I thought that was marvellous and went off to Italy, where I lived reading to an old blind man. And uh I used to read for about sometimes as much as ten or twelve hours a day out loud, which was quite a formidable task.

Quentin Crewe3:58

Yeah.

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When did journalism come into your life? Nineteen fifty three, when I was, I suppose, twenty seven or twenty six, I add hastily trying to reduce it. I came back to England from reading to my old blind gentleman, and I just by chance met somebody who had been appointed the deputy editor of the Evening Standard in London, and he thought that he wanted to find some new blood, I suppose. Anyhow, he asked me whether I would go and work for them.

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I told him that I was doing reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. He found this deeply impressive. And because I said no, I didn't want the job, because I thought I was going back to read to my friend in Italy, he then became more determined to employ me. And so he said, Come on, he kept on raising the ante to some dizzy sum, as it seemed to me then, of uh fifteen pounds a week. Good heavens. And so that was very exciting. And I couldn't resist. I rather forgot that bit about how the doctor said I shouldn't be working or shouldn't be straining myself, and then entered on the most strenuous part of my life. What sort of journalism were you doing? You were a film critic for a while. That was a bit later. I started off working on the Londoner's Diary in the in the Evening Standard, which was then a rather high-class gossip column. And then I did a column about London at night for the Evening Standard. And it was your proud boast that all the time you ran the column you never mentioned royalty or divorces.

Quentin Crewe5:17

I'm not sure.

Presenter5:26

That was certainly true. Well, with every column I've ever written. And then it's not true, as I say, I didn't mention royalty when I wrote a column for the Sunday Mirror, but it was when I was asked to do the

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Column on the Daily Mail

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which is now the equivalent of Nigel Dempster, I did say I wouldn't write about royalty or anybody's divorce or even the any midwifery, who was having babies or whatever. I would only write about people who were doing something worthwhile. And this lasted for about four months. And then they said, Oh, look, here's a picture of Princess Alexander. We're going to put it on your page. And I said, No, this is part of my agreement. And they said, What's the matter with Princess Alexander? I said, Nothing's the matter with Princess Alexander. It's charming, beautiful, all the rest of it. But this is what I've arranged. So you're fired, they said. And it w in those days

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You were out in five minutes. I mean that they had the paper to produce for the next day. I was fired at seven o'clock in the evening. I was rather impressed by their nerve, because they had nothing

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to put on to the top half of that page, of the whole page, and at seven o'clock, but still out. And the next morning there was a column all about royalty and divorce. Yes, large picture of Princess Alexandra.

Quentin Crewe6:27

Okay.

Quentin Crewe6:32

And the next

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All about

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Let's have your second record. What's that? The second record comes really more from a period when I was interested in jazz. In when I was at Cambridge I used to play a lot of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and I've chosen Louis Armstrong playing the St James' Infirmary Blues.

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Louis Armstrong, the Saint James's Infirmary Blues.

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You spent a year in Japan. What was that about?

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I'd become restless working in Fleet Street and I I'd always had an ambition, I always wanted to travel. And I'd just got married and my wife said, Why don't we go to Japan? She wanted to go. She was American, and was very interested in Japan and at that time it was nineteen fifty seven, it's really only twelve years after the war had ended, and really very few people knew much about Japan.

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Japan was extraordinarily different then. I mean, when you think now that they produce more motor cars than anybody else in the world, there were no Japanese motor cars in nineteen fifty seven. It was absolutely astonishing.

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And um

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I went there really to write a book about it, and then I was going to go on and write a book about Thailand, and then my wife became pregnant. We were all we'd had one child we took with us, and then she became pregnant and

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So we thought to move when she was six months pregnant to a totally new country was impossible. So I stayed a whole year in Japan. You called your book A Curse of Blossom, which is a curious, intriguing title.

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Well, it was really the contrast of the prettiness of Japan, which is ravishingly beautiful, and so many of the customs are beautiful, the manners of the people are exquisite, and at the same time I felt that they were so bound down by their traditions that it almost became a curse upon them, that they couldn't break free. I felt this

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And I still think to some extent it's true that, particularly with the men, the personality of Japanese men is very much hampered by tradition and by

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the system of obligation and uh

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You can't have a free exchange with somebody at all. If you give somebody a present, he finds it embarrassing. In fact, again in my wheelchair, I found, if my wife was pushing me, we came to a high step. Nobody would help.

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Because it would put me under an intolerable obligation to them.

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But that seemed to me too confused, and too convoluted a web.

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Yeah.

Quentin Crewe9:40

Looking at life

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You've been in your wheelchair for quite a few years now. You were stricken with muscular dystrophy. Yes, I mean, it's a progressive disease which you get as a child. I mean, I had it from childhood. But uh I took to a wheelchair in about uh well, s uh not all the time, but when I was about twenty nine, thirty.

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You resolved that it would change your way of life as little as possible. You continued journalism. You you worked on Queen for quite a long time. Yes, when I came back from Japan I was didn't have a job. It was just at a time when the Queen magazine was begetting rather lively and rather fun to work for, and they offered me a job and I took it.

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And you were spending always a lot of time across the Channel? Oh, yes. Well, as I say, I was brought up in Sicily, then in France, to some extent, and France was a place I always liked to go for my holidays.

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Your third record, and is perhaps based on that, is Chartrenet's Duce France.

Speaker 410:39

To safront, sir.

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Challenges de monophon.

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Berla celebrates the soul.

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I'm not sure if I can do it.

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Monvillager.

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Aucla cheer maisons sagé.

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Charles Renet singing Douce France.

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Quentin, one thing you could still do well in a wheelchair was eat. You've always been interested in cooking in restaurants, haven't you? Yes, I was very lucky, I think, as a child that my mother was very greedy, and so she always insisted on very, very good food. And then when I was working for Queen Magazine, we one day needed an emergency column about restaurants, and I went out to a restaurant and wrote about it in a I hope not immodestly, it was a different way for than the way people had done it before, because I looked at a restaurant not just to write about the food, because I think it's rather disgusting writing about one's veal chop and what it looked like and how it was, I thought in a restaurant it's just as important what the atmosphere of the place is, what the service is like, who are the other customers, and this kind of thing.

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makes it much more interesting. So I reviewed the thing.

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almost more like a

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Theatre Cricket do. They'd also always been very complimentary about restaurants before, and I thought it was no reason not to say which was a bad restaurant to avoid. You were commissioned to write a book after visiting each of the twelve French provincial restaurants that had been given three stars in the Guide Michelin. Now this is a a magnificent assignment. It was beautiful, absolutely lovely, because it meant I went round France eating myself silly, getting enormously fat, eating the very best food in the world. And of course it didn't mean a quick visit to each restaurant. You had to really go right through them in. You'll try all the

Quentin Crewe12:40

Closing

Presenter12:46

Well, I had to try an awful lot of it. I used to stay about three days. They used to think I could eat two meals a day of their food, which was quite impossible. So I took an extremely greedy young man with me who helped me, pushed me round in my chair, and uh he could eat four meals a day, so I couldn't eat it. Rather than offend the chef, I used to give it over to him. What did you call it? The great chefs of France. The great chefs of France. There was also a bit of history, I mean, the history of how French food came about and why the tradition was so strong.

Quentin Crewe12:46

Yeah.

Speaker 412:46

Yeah.

Quentin Crewe13:07

What did you call it? The great chefs of France. The great chefs of France.

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And there was a useful little guide called the International Pocket Food Guide. Yes, that's for people who are going abroad and can't because if you go to a restaurant in in Portugal, say, and you can't understand a word the waiter says, you can at least read what's written on the menu. So this is a sort of dictionary, so that if you're in Portugal, you look up the Portuguese section and see what ferjão is,'cause then you know he's it's a kind of bean dish. Very good, too.

Quentin Crewe13:39

Trunandee.

Quentin Crewe13:45

What is

Quentin Crewe13:49

Yeah.

Presenter13:49

Because it's it's no good asking a waiter, say what's that? because he's going to explain in Portuguese. So this can't least explain it in uh in English. And it's people have found it rather helpful, actually. I'm sure. Well, after all that experience, it was only right that you opened your own restaurant in London. Is it still going?

Presenter14:06

Yes, absolutely. I've been very well indeed. Thank you. Record number four. Record number four is Mozart's horn concerto, the number four, appropriately enough. Dennis Brain performing, who was the greatest, absolutely greatest horn player I've ever heard. And I became very attached to this. My first wife was very musical indeed, and this was one of the records she used to play a lot, and I've always been fond of it.

Speaker 414:50

Okay.

Speaker 415:04

Yeah.

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Part of the third movement of Mozart's fourth concerto for horn in E flat major, Dennis Brain with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

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Now, your travels, you've been right across the United States in a wheelchair. The United States, yes, and a great many other places too. The United States wasn't any problem at all. Uh actually travelling in a wheelchair is not really as difficult as it sounds.'Cause provided you can get in and out of the car, it's no harder to sit in a car than it is for anybody else. Yes. And uh so that isn't difficult. Aeroplanes are now very well organised and uh

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London Airport, which everybody has always complained about for years, has suddenly, in the last two or three years, become absolutely excellent for helping people who are disabled.

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Where else have you travelled? Long hauls. Well, I've been around India quite a lot. The most difficult one, or the most perilous one, if you like, was my first desert journey, which was across the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia. And I think I was the fourth European to go right across it. Before that there'd been Philby, the father of the traitor, a man called Edwin Thomas, and Wilfrid Thesecher, who is probably the greatest living explorer now. It was his book that inspired me to go, and it was a very, very remarkable journey. And I

Presenter17:02

saw people who now don't exist. His book prompted me to go and see the tribes who lived round the Empty Quarter and who grazed their camels to some extent in the Empty Quarter itself. The Empty Quarter is a sort of menace place in uh the the Koran, they say they use it as a kind of threat, you know, the the Ru Baqali, the most dangerous place in the world. In fact, I find it very difficult to find anybody to go across it with me, except for the members of the tribes who knew it well.

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And so frightening is it, even to Saudi Arabians, that the interpreter who came with me actually went mad during the thing. He was a city Arab. He went completely mad.

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Yeah.

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And eventually it was deeply horribly unpleasant. The others, I'm afraid, were rather inclined to tease him, because he I he was getting more and more on edge as the deeper we got into the desert, and finally, when we were five hundred miles from the nearest place at all, nearest oasis or anything, he went completely off his head and ran across the sand with a knife, cutting his own throat. And uh this was one of the most awful experiences of my life, because the other members wanted they said, Oh, let him go, let him kill himself, it doesn't matter.

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And I said, but we can't do that. And then and then had the younger ones. I had eight.

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Bedouins with me, got him back, and then they all debated as to how to kill him,'cause he was still alive, and you could see his windpipe, and it was very disagreeable indeed. But they said, How should we bump him off? and one offered to shoot him, another strangle in another. And I said, No, no, we can't do that. My Arabic wasn't at all good either. And I said, He's a present from the king.

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And I must take him back to the king.

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And they said the king's only going to cut his head off. So I thought, well, you know, maybe I shall look, but I'll show you something.

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and I had taken with me a lot of morphia, which you could get in the early sixties if you were travelling abroad. You can't get it now. And I injected him with I don't know how much morphia, and he relaxed and became calm.

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And we stitched his throat up, pouring in heaven knows how much sulphonamide powder, and stitched him up, and I'm glad to say we got him back alive to the capital. And the king didn't cut his head off, but was extremely sympathetic and sent him off to Switzerland. That's a gruesome story. Well, then you planned a long trip to the Sahara Desert, not just across it, but round it, up and down it, sideways across it. Yes. The interest of a desert is not just the emptiness of it or the although that's got something to do with it. And it isn't just rolling sands and nothing else. I mean the Sahara has wonderful, beautiful mountains in it. It has fascinating uh prehistoric cave paintings. Because it used to be a perfectly verdant, grassy area with uh

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rhinoceros and elephants. You see those in the um cave paintings. But what is interesting about these places is is the people who live there and what they do, what they believe in, how their lives are conducted. And I thought that this would be disappearing, as it has in Saudi Arabia, because they've become so rich from the oil.

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And now all the people I knew who had they all went by camel and they had never seen a town, they'd never seen anything. Now they've all got range rovers and fizz about and uh do look after their camels, which they still own, but they don't ride them, and they don't go in for at all a hard life.

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But the hard life still exists in the Sahara, and as far as I can see, will go on doing so. One thing that amazed me is that it's three and a half million square miles. It is a vast area. It's huge, it is. It's certainly as big as the United States, but it stretches, after all, from the Atlantic.

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and Mauritania.

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Right across to Egypt.

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And and to the Nile, to the sea. Oh, before we

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Talk in any more detail about that expedition. Let's have your fifth record.

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My fifth record is Sandy Shaw singing Always Something There to Remind Me, which is great.

Speaker 421:08

I walk along the city streets who used to walk along with me And every step I take recalls How much in love we used to be Oh how can I

Speaker 421:22

Forget you when there is always something there to remind me Always something there to remind me I was born to love you

Quentin Crewe21:25

Always something there to remind me

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Uh

Quentin Crewe21:32

Uh

Presenter21:32

Mm-hmm.

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I was born

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Sandy shore, always something there to remind me. Now this trip to the Sahara to take how long? In all a year and a half. How big a team?

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Uh it varied, but there was a sort of core of the there was a photographer.

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uh called Tim Beddo, who came with me, and a a mechanic.

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and a young man who pushed me around. Sometimes we had others, sometimes visitors came.

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But they were basically the the main team. How are you travelling?

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Well, I started off with two unimogs, the Mercedes truck things, small army things. I actually bought them second hand. They had been NATO vehicles. And I was then somewhat alarmed because there are great many wars going on in the Sahara, that somebody would mistake us for some invading force. And so I painted them somewhat like ice cream vans, all blue and pale fall. And we didn't have any difficulty of that sort, because I mean they're really very jumpy. One of the group was one day

Quentin Crewe22:33

Blue the

Presenter22:44

Wearing some he'd been a Marine and he'd got some kit bag.

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And they pounced on him in Mali. He said, What's that? Why, you're a soldier. I mean, they're really very nervous of people coming in.

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And so I was very glad I'd painted them these things. And then latterly, uh because we had various disasters with those two, I u bought some Land Rovers and used those. Where did you start?

Presenter23:08

Started in Tunisia, in Tunis, and went down to the south of Tunis. Got the first of my border troubles, but I was always having trouble at the border. You must have had a fantastic amount of paperwork before you started with the permits and visas and heaven knows what from all these countries. I should have been I'm much too improvident. I started off with full of optimism and thinking that I and we did get visas, of course, but of course the visa doesn't necessarily interest the guy at the border, who's never heard of a visa, where he knows he's not allowed to let people in and uh that's his prime objective. But given uh that you can talk him round or bribe him or something of this sort, visas aren't in a sense very really very important. So down to Algeria.

Presenter23:54

Uh your route, I suppose, to some extent determined by water sources. Yeah, one always has to go to d to an oasis. But still, in within Algeria, there isn't much problem, really, unless you set off uh on a rather pointless journey across the pure sand dunes where there's nobody and it isn't on the way to anywhere. Sandstorms?

Quentin Crewe24:14

Sound store

Presenter24:15

Oh, yes. Terrible. I think sandstone's one of the most uncomfortable things you can have. It sort of invades you. All gets into your eyes and your ears everywhere. And it's it's really horrible.

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Record number six. Record number six is very appropriate for the desert. It was also a great favorite of mine, although quite an old one, is a singer called Nelly Lutcher.

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Singing cool water.

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All dear feast, the barren waste.

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Without the taste of water

Speaker 424:48

Cool water.

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Old Jan and I, with roads burnt dry.

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And souls that drive forward

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Nelly Lacha singing Cool Water

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Now your trip across.

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And ran the Sahara. It was in Niger that you were arrested for the first time, wasn't it? Yes, I think it was the first time I was arrested. Others had been arrested before. We seem to get arrested in almost every country with

Speaker 425:22

Mm-hmm.

Quentin Crewe25:22

Uh

Presenter25:25

One of us got arrested in Taman Rasset in Algeria, at least. He disappeared. W in every town you go to, you have to report to the

Presenter25:32

police and then to the customs, and Ernie had gone down to report to the customs. You know, suddenly Rosie hadn't come back for two hours. So I went down

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to the customers, and said, Have you seen my friend mister Cook?

Presenter25:44

Oh, yes, they said, He's in prison. Oh, I said, I said, Well, why is he why is he in prison? And they said, uh, he sang in the customs.

Speaker 425:54

Yeah.

Presenter25:57

Really? How perfect you are doing it gets terrible. In England we shoot them for that. And uh he did laugh and left the bug.

Presenter26:06

Where was it that you were blown up?

Presenter26:08

Ah, that was in Mauritania. We'd been to look at a very, very beautiful beach and we

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decided to go on our way, having s seen this beach down to the left, and we were going to a town called Nuadibu, and hoping to go further on north, because Nuadibu is at the very north of Mauritania, just before the Western Sahara, which is the part that's in dispute with the Polisario and

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Morocco and so on, and so every so often there's quite a flare up.

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But there was absolutely nothing to show that there was any danger there, and we drove, and there was a little bank we drove up it, and didn't quite get over the bank, and the car rolled backwards, and we were on a very large landmine, and whomf I was completely expelled from the vehicle on the other side, and did a little flying through the air, and uh landed on the sand. And luckily, absolutely unbelievably, nobody was seriously hurt at all. But it was the end of the vehicle, I mean there it is still sitting there now, no doubt.

Quentin Crewe27:06

The

Presenter27:11

Well, now the story of that splendid expedition you've written about in your book called What Is It's called In Search of the Sahara. In Search of the Sahara. And uh it's uh

Presenter27:23

A happy book, I think, in some ways. It's a mixture of history and my adventures. What's record number seven?

Presenter27:30

Record number seven is another French one. I've always been fond of French songs and I've chosen a rather unusual one which is uh Henri Salvador singing Malady d'Amour and he came from the West Indian Islands, the French West Indies, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and he sings a bit in Patua, but I think it's a very interesting song.

Speaker 427:51

Malandi damou, malandi des a move, ja sha si wême wen, woa mashila ye wa.

Speaker 428:00

My la demour, my la died de la jeunais, che che si wé mi moi, mui ma che de ye moi, pi tui mi pi t.

Speaker 428:10

I pititu pit, s'est pangage, mais en mi, mais fili.

Speaker 428:16

On title, when you got the long leaf, I put

Presenter28:21

Malady de Mour by Henri Salvador.

Presenter28:24

If we send someone over from a neighbouring island every morning just to tidy up and cut the firewood.

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You'd be all right on a desert island, wouldn't you? I mean, you could do the fishing. Oh, yes. I'd be all right. And certainly the cooking.

Presenter28:38

Yes, I could survive. Could you stand the loneliness?

Presenter28:43

I think so. I I must say, I mean, I know this is a a thought that you often put. I'd much rather not. But uh in some ways I like being alone some of the time. Record number eight. Your last one. The last record is Max Brooks Concerto, Violin Concerto, No. One. I've latterly come to like classical music more than I want to listen to classical music more than I used to, and I love this piece, and I it's got a a marvellous, triumphant, optimistic ending, which is the bit that I think we should play.

Presenter30:21

The optimistic ending to Brooks' first violin concerto in G minor, Gehudi Menuin with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Suskind.

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If you could take only one disc of the HU Platus, which would it be?

Presenter30:34

Oh, I think probably the last one,'cause it's got more variety in it than any of the others. The brook. The brook. And you're allowed one luxury to take to the island, one object of no practical use whatever.

Quentin Crewe30:40

I broke.

Quentin Crewe30:46

What happened?

Presenter30:47

Well, I've thought about this because I know you always ask this question, but I I mean I don't know whether you regard it as a luxury to take a potter's wheel.

Presenter30:54

Not because I want to make cups and saucers, so to speak, but because I want to make something. I think it'd be the one thing about being on a desert island would be to change the

Presenter31:04

The atmosphere by making something new all the time. So the Potter's Wheel is what I've got. I think that's perfectly permissible. And one book. You have the Bible and Shakespeare as a basic ration.

Quentin Crewe31:08

I think that's perfect.

Presenter31:15

I would take a dictionary of one sort or another, I think, but certainly, narrowing it down, I think Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, full of anecdote, full of imagination, things to set one thinking on different planes. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Phrase and Fable. And thank you, Quentin Crewe, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you very much. Goodbye, everyone.

Quentin Crewe31:47

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