Lord Elwyn-Jones

Lord Elwyn-Jones0:00

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

Lord Elwyn-Jones0:05

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.

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Our castaway this week is a writer, a politician, and a very distinguished lawyer. In fact, he became Lord Chancellor. It's Lord Elwyn Jones.

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You're a man of many interests. Is music one of them? Yes, indeed, especially in the context of Wales and Chapels and Handel and Mendelssohn. Do you sing? Yes, I sing. I I sang a great deal as a small boy.

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I used to be called upon to sing from the pulpit in the tabernacle chapel sad songs, with my mother and sister in tears in the second row I turned to look at them.

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Could you face?

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Involuntary exile on a desert island. I think I could face up to it, yes, I think so. I've

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Got reasonable reserves, I think, to fall back on. You have just eight disks to to bear you up. Did you have any plan in choosing them?

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I had a plan based on on preference, of course, and on experience and association.

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With the records that I've chosen, and perhaps when we come to them, I I can indicate that. Well, let's come to the first one. What's that? The first one is Myra Hess playing Bach's beautiful song, Jesus Joy of Man's Desiring.

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It reflects very much the mood of contact with Bach, who is much loved, of course, and played and sung in Wales.

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And there's a special poignancy, I think, in Myra Hearse's version of it, which I'd very much like to play time and time again in a lonely exile.

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Myra has Jesu Joy of Man's Desire.

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Now we've established the fact that you're a Welshman. From where? From Tlenety, small town in South Wales, right at the fringe of the industrial area and the beginning of the beautiful rural Wales of Carmarthenshire. Steel and rugby football. Tinplate, steel and and rugby football, yes. Your father worked. My father was a tinplate rollerman.

Lord Elwyn-Jones3:29

My father was a telephone.

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And what is that? Well, the work's job was to thin out the steel bars brought from the steel works into a thinness suitable to make tins. And that is why Schneider. Sausspenwach, little saucepan, the great theme song of the teams and of Wales, more now a a legend and a hymn than a mere folk song. Were you one of a large family? Well, my mother and father had seven children.

Speaker 43:43

That is why Siness

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But such was the fate of children born in working class homes in those days that the first three died.

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before they reached the age of twelve. And then there were four survivors, my two brothers and sister and I. All of whom won scholarships at university. We were good at exams, yes, that's so. What place had you among the four? You were the eldest, the youngest? I was the youngest, yes. I I was very lucky in that respect.

Lord Elwyn-Jones4:20

I was the

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Because they rather looked after young Ilwyn right at the end. And one of your brothers had a very distinguished rugby career. Yes, indeed. I think that I I'm more well known in Wales, if I may say so, as the brother of Idris than anything else. He was captain of the Wales. He was captain of Wales and a Cambridge Blue and achieved all the great heights. He was also a very good scientist, incidentally. But that meant, I presume, family excursions to Cardiff Arms Park. And especially to Clanesi. Not family excursions. My mother didn't really approve very much of rugby football. She thought it was not entirely suitable activity. She didn't like the rough house.

Lord Elwyn-Jones5:03

She didn't

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Episodes. And I remember when Idris invited us to see the varsity match at Twickenham, and mother came. I had a miserable time trying to explain to her what was happening. Idris was a hooker, right in the middle of the pack, and she kept on saying, Where is Idris Pach? Is he all right? He was all right. He certainly was. He was doing very well. At school, what was your main interest, your favourite subject? My favourite subject was history, which I went to read at Cambridge afterwards. Right, well, we'll follow the steps of your career in a moment. Let us break for another record. What's your second? I would like, especially in the context of what we've been talking about, rugby, Cumranatha, the great hymn which has, when sung at Cardiff Arms Park, led many a Welsh rugby team to victory. And the sound of the singing there, it's a great folk occasion. It's more a folk celebration than a hymn when it's sung there. This isn't a Cardiff Arms Park recording, is it? No, it's one of the great choirs, the Morriston male voice choir, I do believe, and it's eminently something to be sung by a male voice choir, one of the greatest of all musical instruments, in my view.

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What is I'm there?

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Let's see.

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Holy God!

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He was on me.

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Kumramba

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Or guide me, O thou great Redeemer, by the modest and Orpheus choir.

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So your decision, Lord Elwyn Jones, to get to university in in fact, you went to the University of Wales and Ab aristwith, but you thought you should aim even higher.

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Well, I went to Aberastwis and my brothers who had been to Abba first and then took PhDs at Cambridge, they rather wanted me to graduate in the first instance in Cambridge, so I went up to Cambridge on their uh advice. And you read history under the great GM Trevelyan. Had you the intention of becoming a professional historian? I had at the beginning that ambition to become a fellow of my college, and I suppose some would say I did well enough in my first two years to make that a possibility. But in my last year this is purely finding an excuse, I didn't achieve the the level of firsts needed to achieve that ambition. And by then, in any event, my

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Interest raised to some extent by the Cambridge Union debates, by my beginning to get involved in politics, and my then gradual interest in the law that moved me away from Cambridge into a different field. You spent a long vacation in Germany. You were attracted by German culture. Yes, I was. In those days in 1928 at Cambridge, to be nice about the Germans was what every respectable radical was expected to be with a slightly bad conscience about Versailles.

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And uh I was secretary, I think.

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of the Anglo-German Association.

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and we entertained the then German ambassador.

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The committee in my rooms, Baron von Neurath, the next time I saw him was when he was in the dock at Nuremberg.

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He was one of the accused at the Nuremberg trial, and sent me a message to say how nice it was to see the young man who had entertained men here as before. I had to say that I could not communicate with occupants of the dock.

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So, Dan from Cambridge, I I suppose you had a bit of filling in to do before you started your legal studies? Yes, I don't know whether filling in is the right phrase. I did many things. My first job when I left Cambridge, having to earn something to keep me going while I was reading for the bar, came through the Cambridge Appointments Board, and it was to tutor the brother of a gentleman described to me as Mr Hale Munro. And in due course I turned up.

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at Hampton station to be met by a young man with a smart car. I hadn't the faintest idea who he was. He took me to his home, explaining that it was his wife's brother I was to tutor. I then met in the house a most beautiful young woman.

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who said that they would be returning to London in the late afternoons, but that might fit in at the times they wanted me. They left the room, and when they were out, I looked at press cuttings. They were Jesse Matthews and Sonny Hale, and that started a most delightful friendship which lasted until poor Jesse died. And you've chosen a record that Sonny and Jesse made together. Yes, I heard them sing it more than once.

Speaker 410:43

Hold my hand, No matter what or the weather, Just you hold my hand.

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We'll walk through life together For you'll find in me that kind of a friend

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Who will see?

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The title song from Hold My Hand at the Gairty Theatre, Sonny Hale and Jesse Matthews.

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In due course you were called to the bar you were a member of Gray's Inn

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Now, were you principally occupied in criminal law or civil law? And which did you prefer? Well, I did some of both, including, of course, family law as well. I suppose I probably did more criminal cases in those days.

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and I appeared in some of the famous cases on the Wales and Chester Circuit. A great responsibility in those days, criminal law, because those were still the days of capital punishment, weren't they? Indeed they were. And uh I found participation

Lord Elwyn-Jones11:43

A great

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In murder trials with the death penalty at the end of the day, very painful, it created a new atmosphere of melodrama, of emotion, crowds of people trying to get into the court, and then if there was a conviction, the hideous

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Delivering of the death sentence the black.

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And all that. It made me think then, as I think now, that it was something of a blasphemy. Were you able to choose to defend or to prosecute? Oh, no, you would act on the cab rank principle at the bar. What case comes along you are expected to take.

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Now you talked about your your trips across the Channel. A lot of that was to do what you could to help political prisoners. Yes, I got involved uh with various civil liberty organizations which invited me and asked me to go to trials in different parts of Europe at the time.

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when the oppression of Nazi and Fascist dictatorship was making its terrible impact on the administration of justice, and sometimes the presence of a British lawyer was, so I was told at any rate, helpful in limiting some of the ferocity

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and abominations of the trials in the so called People's Courts. Never have courts been more wrongly described.

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One of the London newspapers offered you a job as foreign correspondent. Were you not tempted? I was indeed at the time. It was Walter Leighton and the News Chronicle, and it was a very prestigious thing, of course.

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But uh I think wisely I chose to go on with the Bar, while continuing, as much as time permitted and opportunity, my political writing.

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And indeed you you joined the territorial army. You were by now married. You had married artist and television scriptwriter. I married Pearl Binder in thirty seven, and I've been married to her ever since.

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Yes, in 2010.

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Then war broke out, a couple of years general service, then appointed to the Department of the Army and Legal Services, and that took you all over the place. Yes. At the end of the war I was uh a judge advocate in North Africa and Italy. I had been with the Akak gunners before that and had some great adventures in the Battle of Britain in that field.

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And the experiences there in the trials.

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in Italy and and North Africa, including the beginning of inquiries into Nazi atrocities committed against the Italian people.

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That led me, perhaps inevitably, to being one of the prosecuting counsel at Nuremberg, which Hartley Shawcross invited me to be when I was elected to Parliament in nineteen forty-five and became one of his colleagues in the House. We'll talk about the Nuremberg trials in a minute. Let's have your fourth record. It's Mozart's Fortieth Symphony.

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Which is

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Inspiring is a joy to hear whenever I hear it, and I long to hear it played and played again.

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The opening of Mozart's Symphony No. forty, The English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britton.

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So to the Nuremberg trials, of which you were one of the prosecutors.

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Twenty-four men on trial for the murder of twelve million people. Yes, it was

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described by Lord Burkett as the greatest trial in history.

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There was no equivalent to it, because there was hardly any crime equivalent.

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To what we were trying to deal with. Millions deliberately put to death.

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As a matter of state policy.

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It was a terrible experience. How long did the trials take?

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The sittings, I think, spread over ten months and of course covered great events which uh had uh torn the world apart and uh there were complexities of law. On fact the evidence was largely, almost entirely, from the documents of the Nazis themselves and the problems of proof, therefore.

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were not really very difficult because the documents were unchallengeable and pointed to the guilt very clearly. Did anyone show signs of regret? Oh yes, oh yes, several did.

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The butcher of Poland said a thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased.

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von Schirach, who was in charge of Hitler Youth.

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condemned himself, as he said, for bringing up and training German youth to become slaves of a mass murderer, referring to Hitler. Although there were several who indicated that. Even in the grimmest circumstances there's usually a lighter side. There was the French indignation about champagne stores. Yes, well, we had to settle the indictment i in London.

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In August 1945, we were, after all, dealing with millions of murders. When it came to the indictment about Nazi pillage of France, they insisted on a quantity of champagne bottles stolen down to the last unit, something like twenty two million five hundred and forty six thousand three hundred and forty two. And we said, Well, why not make it a round figure? Parsion bouté. Not a bottle must be missed out. So this was really listed on to the list of major war crimes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Every bottle counted to the French. Your fifth record, please. My fifth record is the Beethoven Emperor Concerto.

Lord Elwyn-Jones18:17

Oh, yeah.

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Written, if if my memory serves me right, while

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Napoleon's guns were hammering at the gates of Vienna.

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You'll have been aware that Vienna played a rather significant

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part in my thinking and experience and uh

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It's a tremendous piece.

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The beginning of the second movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, Daniel Barrenboim and soloist, and Otto Klemper conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Now, Elwyn, you were an MP for an East London constituency, and you had your law practice, you had plenty to do. You were appointed Attorney General. Now, what what's his job? The Attorney General is the principal legal advisor of the Crown, of the government. He conducts cases in court, in important cases, both civil and criminal.

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and he uh represents the government of the day in the commons on legislation, especially that emerging by way of law reform from the Lord Chancellor, and there was a good deal of that in my time with

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Lord Gardiner is the Lord Chancellor, one of the great reforming Lord Chancellors of our time, of course.

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So those were the two main activities representing.

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The Crown in the Courts, and, of course, being the Government's legal adviser.

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In your new autobiography, In My Time, you describe some alarming incidents in your experience in court. For example, the suspected murderer who pleaded innocence and then tried to strangle somebody actually in the courtroom. Yes, that happened i in a small courthouse i in mid Wales, and uh it took the guards who were supposed to be guarding him in the dark a tremendous struggle to get his hands upon the poor little

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innocent girl who came out of curiosity to attend the trial. It was pretty w it that doesn't happen very often, I'm happy to say. The control of the court proceedings is pretty strict, but it was a very horrific experience at the time. And you prosecuted in that really dreadful trial that became known as the Moores case.

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That must have meant listening to those horrific tapes.

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Looking at dreadful photographic evidence. That was the most unpleasant emotional experience I had in court, was to read that out.

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One had to suppress one's emotions, otherwise if I had not done so, the whole of the court would have been

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in a tumult of of emotion and distress it was awful.

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Let's have record number six. Record number six.

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Changes the mood a good deal. It's the Blue Danube.

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Vienna again. Vienna again, and my particular memory of it is vivid because we had a conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Vienna in 1949. No dancing had been allowed in the great palace where the Austrian authorities gave a reception for the delegates from all parts of the world. And sounds rather like 1815, isn't it? Well, it indeed it was. There was a r Russian occupation at the time.

Lord Elwyn-Jones22:30

Yeah.

Lord Elwyn-Jones22:32

Yeah.

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And uh suddenly the band struck up the blue Danube, and suddenly everybody started dancing.

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And I'm afraid it was the British delegation that led the dancing.

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So I've always had a feeling about the Blue Danube.

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As a waltz ever since. It's a bit old fashioned now, I'm afraid.

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The Blue Danube by the Johann Strauss Orchestra of Vienna, conducted by Vily Boskovsky.

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In 1974, you were appointed Lord High Chancellor. That's as high as you can get. Well, it's the head of the legal profession.

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And it's a strange office owing everything to history and nothing to legal principle, in the sense that the Lord Chancellor is a member of the Cabinet,

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He's the Speaker of the House of Lords, and he's the head of the Judiciary. He looks after the Great Seal. How far back does that go? The Great Seal goes certainly to Anglo Saxon and then pre Norman times. It's when people couldn't sign their names, and they used a stamp and a seal instead, and that was taken up.

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By royalty itself, too.

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authenticate great documents. And uh it's kept in the Lord Chancellor's office and I had one charming experience about that when I swore in one of the judges who brought his small son and I was explaining about the seal that I had given his father as part of the documentation of his appointment.

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And I pointed to the river of Thames, and said we could catch fish there now. And when he went home, his mother asked him,'What do you remember about your father being made a judge'?'Oh,' he said,'the Lord Chancellor spends all his time catching fish in the Thames to feed his great seal with which is a sweet thought.

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Of course the Lord Chancellor lives in the Palace of Westminster, in the House of Lords. Yes, yes, there is the Lord Chancellor's residence there. And he takes precedence, I believe, over the Prime Minister. I mean, the Prime Minister is is a is a new office. Yes. The Lord Chancellor was established, as I say.

Lord Elwyn-Jones25:29

Yes.

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In the Middle Ages it reached its ascendancy in the Tudor time with Wolsey, but after that money and property told more, and raising funds told more, the Treasury became more and more significant, and the first Lord of the Treasury, who was now of course the Prime Minister, began in fact to take precedence in importance, in political importance, but in terms purely of the order of precedence, the Lord Chancellor still comes before the Prime Minister and is the ham in the sandwich between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York.

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And Speaker in the House of Lords. Now Speaker in the House of Lords is not analogous to the Speaker's role in the House of Commons. No, the Speaker in in the Commons is very much master of the proceedings. He decides who to call, he rules on points of order, he keeps the discipline of the place, and he is he is, of course, totally non-political, he is neutral. Whereas the Lord Chancellor, as Speaker of the House of Lords, has only largely formal duties to perform as Speaker, putting formal motions.

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But his real role there is as minister.

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playing his part in putting through government legislation and sometimes justifying government policy.

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So it's a curious mix of the two things, but it's

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survived all these centuries, and I venture to think it may survive a little longer yet.

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We've got your seventh record. What should that be?

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Well, that certainly goes from the the grave to the cheerful aspect of the Lord Chancellor's activities, namely, Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, with one of the songs of the Lord Chancellor there.

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and I I recollect having to sing it at a concert in the Middle Temple Hall with John Reed.

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Of the Doily Cart Company.

Lord Elwyn-Jones27:45

Oh, the door.

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I was then Lord Chancellor, and towards the end of the concert there was a call for me to take part, which I very willingly did because I enjoyed the song anyway, and I did a duet with John Reed. In your robes? Oh, no, civilian clothes, with the Queen Mother sitting in the front row. But it was all great fun, and I acquired an undeserved reputation for public singing as a result of that.

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What was the number that you sang? It was uh when I went to the bar.

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As a very young man, I said to myself, said I, you know that great tune.

Lord Elwyn-Jones28:20

Uh

Speaker 428:20

That's a really young man.

Lord Elwyn-Jones28:21

Yeah.

Speaker 328:30

When I went to the bar as a very young man, Said I to myself, said I, I'll work on a new and original plan, Said I to myself, said I, I'll never assume that a rogue or a thief Is a gentleman worthy implicit belief, Because his attorney has sent me a brief, Said I to myself, said I

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When I went to the bar as a very young man from Ireland, they sung by John Reed with the new symphony orchestra conducted by Isidore Godfrey.

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Have your travels included in a desert islands?

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Yes, I don't know whether desert islands is quite the word, but the most remarkable

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island that I visited was Ocean Island on the equator, when I was appearing for the Ocean Islanders in the action they brought against the Phosphate Commission and the British Government.

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Following the removal

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Of and the mining of the phosphate from their land, which was made of phosphate, which turned it into a desert.

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And that was a a very dramatic visit. But so was the visit to the island of Fiji where the Ocean Islanders were moved to after the war. Assuming you are on an island that has no people, you're all on your own, could you build a shelter? Could you look after yourself? I'd make an awful botched job of it, but I've done a little bit of building in my time. I suppose there wouldn't be any bricks or mortar there for bricklaying, so I'd have to use a won't.

Lord Elwyn-Jones30:03

That's what

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I think I'll have a shot at it, yes. I'm not wholly useless with my hands, I think. Are you a good fisherman?

Lord Elwyn-Jones30:05

Guide himself.

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I am a fisherman, but not a good one. I have caught fish in my time. Are you a good cook? Yes, I can claim that. I don't know whether anyone in the family would admit it. Could you make a raft?

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I suppose pressed to it. Yes, I think I might. Could you navigate it? Could you point it in the right direction? Well, I'm not sure about that. I I think I know a little bit about the sun, the stars, and the moon.

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But whether that would get me anywhere, I don't know. You are very promising castaway material.

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Let's have your last record.

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My last record is is a very moving one.

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It's

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From the Messiah, I know that my Redeemer liveth. It was my mother's favourite part of the Messiah, which we used to.

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perform in the Tabernacle Chapel with the choir in those days.

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Or my father and

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The rest of us sang.

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And I heard it most movingly sung in Westminster Abbey at the service in memory of Norman Kirk.

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But it's always made a great impact on me, i i if only because, as I say, my

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Mother liked it more than any other hymn.

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Uh

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Feels dark with far stars.

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We are named

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And that he has done.

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I know that my Redeemer liveth from Handel's Messiah and the soloist Heather Harper.

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If you could take only one disc out of the H you played us, which would it be? I think I'd take the Mozart, No. forty symphony. And one luxury to take to the island with you, one object of no practical use whatever.

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Well, an object which has given me great joy for many years was a collage that my wife has made.

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In a sense, it's a fun satire of a city dinner.

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There they sit, the alderman and the Lord Mayor, but they have the heads of animals, cats, dogs, an elephant is in the middle, and the table is strewn with things pasted on in collage, of course, of choice dishes. And this has been shown in many parts of the world. It's always a great delight for me to see it, and I'd love to have it. Your wife, of course, is Pearlbinder. How many children do you have? I have three children. Two.

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Daughters and a son, and no less a treasure than nine grandchildren, I should think so. That's been a great joy in my life.

Lord Elwyn-Jones33:23

Razor Grace.

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You have one book to choose to take to the island with you. We provide you with the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

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Well, I think partly out of respect for George Trevelyan, my teacher at Cambridge, and the interest of the subject, I'd like his Social History of England. It stands reading many times. Right. And thank you, Lord Elwyn-Jones, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. It's been a great privilege to be here. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Lord Elwyn-Jones34:04

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