Hugh Johnson

Speaker 30:00

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.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway this week is a writer.

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He specializes in writing on wine and on gardens. It's Hugh Johnson. Hugh, could you endure loneliness? Yes, I think I could. This meagre allowance of just eight discs, would that help or would it be too frustrating to have so few?

Presenter0:48

It would help enormously, I think, because it would be company. How much does music mean to you? A great deal. Not that I have such a very wide Catholic taste. I suppose I don't have all that many records. But each one means a lot, because it's it's something very individual. Can you make music? Do you sing or play an instrument? I love singing, which I do horribly badly, but I d I have enjoyed singing in choirs tremendously.

Presenter1:12

And um I used to play the trumpet. What sort of trumpet? Jazz trumpet, classical trumpet? All sorts of trumpets. Well, it started as school trumpet, so you got into the orchestra and the jazz band. And then I played in jazz bands a bit. And I never continued orchestral playing.

Hugh Johnson1:17

So well started

Presenter1:26

And I in fact I'm sorry to say I gave up playing the trumpet entirely years ago. But I still love it. Did you have any kind of plan in choosing your aid?

Presenter1:35

Yes, I wanted to remember moments in life which could be summed up with a particular piece of music in the form of a of sometimes of a voice, and the voice could be a trumpet voice. I love trumpet music, because to me the sound of a trumpet player a really good one.

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is as individual as a singer. And that's where we start, isn't it? It is, yes. Would you like to tell us about that first record you have there? Well, when I was at school I I shared a study in my house at Rugby.

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with a boy who was not only keen on jazz, but really knew a great deal about it, and he introduced me to jazz.

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And

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The sounds of individual cornet players of the twenties became very familiar to me, and I knew them almost as friends.

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And I think of all of them Bix Beiderbeck was the one who excited me most. His voice was the most distinguishable. I was then playing the trumpet myself, and I knew the easy ways to get around the scales, and Bix always did it in an unexpected way.

Presenter2:37

He had that essential excitement, that driving force which a great cornet player has to have and the result I think is electrifying. And what's the number? It's Biggs by De Beck with Frankie Trumbaugh's orchestra, Frankie Trumbaugh, the great trombonist, and they're playing Sing in the Blues.

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Bix and Tram singing the blues.

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You were at rugby. What were you good at at school?

Presenter3:59

Getting out of work, I think, really, as much as anything else. I did a bit of running, I did a bit of shooting, I played the trumpet quite a bit. I wasn't very ambitious as a schoolboy. H had you already got anything in mind?

Hugh Johnson4:06

I was more ambitious.

Presenter4:10

I wanted to be a sailor, actually. Did you? In fact, took an exam to pass into Dartmouth before I ever went to rugby.

Hugh Johnson4:10

I wanted to be as

Presenter4:17

And failed it on account of my eyesight. Unfortunately, I couldn't distinguish tiny winking green lights from tiny winking white lights. Oh, that's a central. Oh, very important.

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So after Rugby to Cambridge, to King's College, what did you read? I read English.

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I don't think I had any aptitude for anything except my own language. But it wasn't just a soft option. I really loved reading and wanted to express myself as clearly as possible. I saw the future in that.

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Did you keep up your music? Yes, I did a bit. I played the classical trumpet a little bit, not always with happy results.

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But before I went to Cambridge, I spent the better part of a year in the United States. Doing what? Well, I took my horn with me, and I thought I might be able to earn a bit of money doing that. Did you? In fact, I couldn't legally earn any money. I didn't have a work permit, but I carried it around. And at one glorious time, I was playing on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Were you? With Shaki Bernano and his Kings of Dixieland. Really? I had no idea that I was with such a distinguished jazz man. It was a very short moment, but it was at the Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras is a ball in New Orleans.

Hugh Johnson5:15

Will it

Hugh Johnson5:19

Everything

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When you do see the tailgating trombones on waggons going through the streets and um tremendous excitement in the air. That was that was a wonderful time. Now, one of your Cambridge activities was to join the Wine and Food Society.

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That's right. I um was sharing rooms in King's wonderful rooms overlooking the the backs and the river at King's with um somebody

Hugh Johnson5:46

Bing

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great friend, still a great friend, who was a committee member of the Wine and Food Society, and I'd never aspired to anything like that and had no great interest in wine, really.

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Then one night he came into our mutual room

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probably not entirely sober, and he had two glasses of wine in his hand.

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And I'd think I was asleep at the time. Anyway, he roughly awakened me and he said, Here will you taste these.

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And I did.

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And he said, What do you think? And I said, Well,

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That's marvellous and that's horrible. And he said

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I know, and they both come from the same vineyard, and that and they were made one year apart, or some very simple distinction.

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And he actually really proselytised me. He he converted me to the idea that wine is a fascinating subject because of all these funny

Presenter6:39

distinctions of quality that happen. That was the sort of Road to Damascus moment as far as I was concerned. Do you remember any particularly luxurious repast that the Wine and Food Society put on?

Hugh Johnson6:44

As far as I was concerned.

Presenter6:51

Oh, we used to dine splendidly in those days. The college cellars were full of wines I'd scarcely dare mention now at twenty five shillings a bottle. And um generous wine makers and wine merchants would bring superb wines for undergraduates to taste, hoping, of course, to trap us into their being their customers later on in life when we had some money. And we used to give them dinners afterwards. And one great man was a the owner of a splendid German estate on the Moselle, called Maximin Grunhaus. He was a Herr von Schubert.

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He'd given us some lovely Moselles before dinner, and we gave him the best dinner the college could make, which had a good deal of pheasant about it, and a creme brulee I'm quite sure to finish off with college tradition. And he was an enormous chap, full of good food and good wine.

Speaker 47:35

Yeah.

Hugh Johnson7:36

Yeah.

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and rather short on English, and he rose to his feet at the end of this dinner to thank us in due form for entertaining him.

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And he hadn't got a word out when he burst into tears.

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I thought it was the the best speech I ever didn't hear.

Hugh Johnson7:57

Yeah.

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Did you continue your your food and wine studies during vacations? Not really, I think, because they were all freebies at Cambridge, you see. They were these generous wine merchants and there wasn't much means to do it during vacations. Um no well I I d I did a bit. I worked in the cellars at the Army and Navy stores before Christmas and I another Christmas I worked at Fortnum and Mason's on a delivery van and there were occasional breakages, you know. Oh, there would be. What were you aiming for? You you were reading English to do what? To write, really. To write. I didn't really see that I had anything else much to offer the world. I just thought that I must try and write down anything that interested me and hope it interested somebody else. What's your second record?

Hugh Johnson8:03

Uh

Hugh Johnson8:29

To write, really.

Presenter8:41

Well, the excitement of music really comes across to me most in concert performances, and I've always loved the excitement of a particular concert that took place at the Carnegie Hall in New York, the year before I was born, in fact, in nineteen thirty eight.

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when Benny Goodman got together the best jazz men that he could find.

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And in an absolutely tumultuous concert there is one number called Sing, Sing, Sing.

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Sing, sing, sing, Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert in 1938. What was your first job when you came down?

Presenter10:15

I got a job of writing features for Vogue, and that meant I was a staff writer in the features department, and I was sent out to look at anything from an art gallery in Bond Street to a theatre, or even occasionally, a collection of clothes.

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and there were some very pretty and talented girls who'd won the Vogue Talent contest in the same room as I was. And I suppose in a way I felt a little bit overawed by all this pulcritude, because I f certainly felt I had to burst out on my own in some way.

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This is how I I first began to write about wine, in fact,'cause uh I saw an opening then. You were in contact with the late Andre Simon.

Presenter10:53

Yes, that was the happiest and luckiest thing that happened to me when I started work. I wanted to write about wine, but knew so little about it that the only way I could set about it really was to go and ask people who knew, so I interviewed and reported.

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And the most obvious person in London to interview was Andre Simon, and I went to him with all innocence to ask him one day what he was going to drink with his turkey at Christmas.

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And that was the first time I ever met him. I met him in his office and was absolutely enchanted by this wonderful old Frenchman with that great halo of white hair and marvellous manners. And we just became very good friends. I then went on and worked actually for him for two or three years after that. You became an editor very soon? Of Wine and Food, which was the magazine of the Wine and Food Society, which is a quarterly magazine.

Presenter11:49

And uh old Andre had really got tired of editing it himself, and Condonast, the publishers of Vogue and House and Garden, had bought it from him and I suppose partly at his suggestion they made me the editor, which I well, I suppose I was twenty-three or so at the time. I was jolly lucky. This is marvellous. I loved doing it. And you were also wine correspondent of the Sunday Times, which must have been another very rewarding occupation. Yes, that was working for Ernestine Carter, who was a fantastic editor. Sharp she was, but um she knew nothing about wine, of course. I could get away with anything. But you also travel correspondent. Was that at the same time, or did you move on to that? That came later. I I was never on the staff at the Sunday Times until I'd written my first book about wine. And then when Harry Evans was editor, he asked me if I would take over as travel editor from Elizabeth Nicholas, who had been travel editor for twenty-five years, I think, and who was the great pin-up.

Presenter12:53

Of all the regular Sunday Times readers. She was of almost the Cyril Connolly class and generation and was one of the immortals. And it was a daunting task trying to take over travel writing from her. But marvellous swan around and really exploit some of our energy. There wasn't much swanning involved. It was really, really hard graft. But Elizabeth Nicholas had been travelling for so long that she could make three stories out of some somewhere she'd been to a couple of years ago. I'd hardly travelled at all, of course, so I had to really go, have a look, come back, write my story and go somewhere else.

Hugh Johnson13:06

Side drive

Speaker 413:10

What is it?

Hugh Johnson13:10

Uh

Hugh Johnson13:20

I'd hardly travel there.

Presenter13:26

I was rather relieved that I wasn't at that longer than about a year. And then you went to Edit Queen.

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That arose out of a travel story in a curious way, yes.

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because Jocelyn Stevens was the editor and owner of Queen, and running a a marvellous piratical magazine that sort of had Fleet Street by the heels in a way and he sold it at that moment and was asked by the man who bought it to appoint a new editor.

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So, quite understandably wanting to kill his old magazine, he appointed me editor, I think.

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Well, never mind, you got the job. Let's have your third record. Well, my third record really harks back to King's College, Cambridge. I started going and listening to music there when I was a very small boy because it was my father's college and

Presenter14:19

As children we used to go on Christmas Eve to the Carol service, every Christmas, and it was a little family ritual really, before it was being regularly broadcast, before there were great queues outside the chapel, we would just slip in and it was beginning Christmas in the college chapel. And the sound of those voices in that particular box of stone that makes them so resonant is something absolutely like mother's milk to me.

Presenter14:48

But the piece I have chosen is not typical kings. It would have been lovely to choose a carol.

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But it's Allegri's Miseri, which I think shows the beauty of boys' voices.

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in the most astonishing way.

Hugh Johnson15:10

And in sin hath my mother conceived me.

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Part of Allegri's Miserare, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, directed by David Wilcox, and let's mention the name of that boy treble, Roy Goodman.

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Hugh, you mentioned having written your first book. What was it? It was just called Wine. Rather grand than and simple and explanatory. Yes. I was a young man who'd just really been bowled over by discovering what lovely stuff wine was, and I

Hugh Johnson16:26

It's simple and expanded.

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Wanted to make it sound simple. It sold rather well, didn't it? I'm glad to say it still does. Yes, it's still in print fifteen or sixteen years later.

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I was really excited with what I was doing. I've just got married. I'd just retired from paid employment.

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And I set off round the wine-growing areas of Europe with my bride, Judy, in a tiny red mini, and we visited as many vintages as possible, in other words, as many places where grapes were being picked. I'd got it all worked out that if one started in Portugal, went on to Spain, and then took a nip across the Mediterranean on a ship from Gibraltar to Naples. We could see the vintage practically everywhere in Europe, and I was photographing, taking notes, writing as I went along. And in a great sort of spate of enthusiasm and absolute joy in the subject, I wrote a book which I think feels exciting. That's why it's readable. And you topped that with a book that needed very much more travelling, a wine atlas and a massive tome covering just about everywhere.

Presenter17:44

Well, that was the biggest opportunity, the biggest break really, that I could possibly have had in my life. I was editing Queen, and my old editor from my first publisher, Nelson James Mitchell, had just set up his own publishing firm, Mitchell Beasley. And he said, Hugh, I think you'll have to give up your editorship, but I think there really is something big in an atlas of wine. And when I'd given it ten minutes' thought, I realized that as all wine is sold by geographical reference, in other words, where it comes from, that's what's on the label.

Presenter18:20

To actually map those places and to make sense of labels in terms of maps is unnatural. How many countries are covered in that book? Any idea? Never counted everywhere where wine is grown in the world, which must be forty or fifty countries.

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Record number four. What's that to be?

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This is a piece of really bouncy dance music because I spent quite a lot of time in the sixties

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in and around New York. My brother lived there in those days, and uh I remember endless parties in Connecticut on warm weekends in the summer when the music we danced to was Herb Alpert and his Tijuana bras. And of of all the foot-tapping tunes that I can think of, in case I ever get depressed on this island of mine, is I'm Getting Sentimental Over You.

Speaker 419:09

Da-da-da-da-da!

Speaker 419:13

Boom, but I'm not sure.

Presenter19:32

Getting Sentimental Over You by Herb Alpert and The Tawana Bras.

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Now back to your writing, the other side of your writing, the other great interest. Some years ago you became a country dweller. Yes, that's right. I bought a house in the country thirteen years ago. With a fair amount of ground. With a lovely old garden and some absolutely spectacular old trees in it. And I'd just finished writing my World Atlas of Wine.

Hugh Johnson19:48

Uh

Presenter19:58

And I suppose I had rather felt I'd shot my bolt on wine at that time. I'd been really sweating at it for two years.

Presenter20:04

And I was looking round for another subject, and at the same time I was overawed by these beautiful trees, and I wanted to find out something about them. And I went to look for the book that would tell me, and to my absolute delight, I didn't find it.

Presenter20:18

And I thought, this is something I can do. I can write the book for people like me about trees. Well, now going back to your house, it had these lovely trees in it. You also had a fair amount of ground. Was it laid out to your satisfaction, or did you want to start from scratch and pull it down and start again? It had been a lovely garden, but the old lady who owned it had, alas, lost her sight about five years before, and nothing had happened in the garden. She had planted wonderful things fifteen years before that.

Presenter20:46

And most of it was just a poplar plantation, which gave me an opportunity of of cutting down the poplars and opening up about um eight acres to plant trees for my own joy, I mean, as as a collection, and a little arboretum, if you want to use the grand word for it. Did you already know a lot about gardening? I mean, had you always been equipped with a a a trowel and a spade and spent your weekends doing that? No, although I was brought up in Kent as a boy and loved the garden and the country round it, in the North Downs.

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I didn't know one plant from t'other.

Presenter21:21

I really had to start at the beginning and learn. But that made it all the more exciting, really. And rather cannily, you brought everybody else in with what you were learning because quite soon you were writing the principles of gardening. That was quite a bit later. I'd been gardening for um six or seven years by then. But I was thinking in in an author's terms, if you like, while I was learning about gardening. I was I was asking the questions that that a researcher would ask.

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So you were writing about subjects that you enjoyed most, wine and gardens? That, to me, is the only way I can write anything that anyone wants to read. We've got to record number five.

Presenter21:58

Mozart is just a composer who I couldn't leave off the desert island because in his music one finds everything. And I think that in his third violin concerto there is an absolute consummation of everything which is reasonable, which is measured, which is elegant, which speaks of the eighteenth century. I can picture the furniture, the the architecture and everything else about the period when it was written just in this piece of music.

Presenter23:28

Part of the second movement of Mozart's third violin concerto, the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Baremboim and the soloist Pinchas Zuckermann.

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Your wife is a a graphic artist.

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Yes, she's a a typographer and a printer. She has a a little business at home which keeps her very happy, and keeps us both very happy. Good. Well, I know that she shares your interest in wine because she goes with you. Your interest in gardens, too, obviously? Oh, very much so, yes. Have you thought of putting aside an acre as a vineyard?

Presenter24:00

I've thought about it, but I think um I think it was Sam Johnson who said that a man may criticise a table though he couldn't make a table himself. He'd know whether it was a good table or not. My business is looking at uh what other people do in the way of wine. If I were doing it myself, I should be too concerned with my own results. I I want to stay aside from wine making and taste other people's wine and be the critic. We read a great deal nowadays about English vineyards. How many acres of um England are under wine cultivation?

Hugh Johnson24:20

And

Presenter24:32

I don't accurately know. It grows every year. I think it's about five hundred or acres or more. I believe two million bottles were made last year. The biggest vintage there's ever been in England. That's a lot of wine.

Hugh Johnson24:33

Oh.

Hugh Johnson24:39

Oh yeah.

Hugh Johnson24:42

That's a lot of

Presenter24:43

Do you think there's a commercial future for English wine?

Presenter24:46

Yes, I'm sure there is, because they are always good talking points, and they're suited to English summer weather. Not that there's such a lot of that, but I should think the supply will last out the sunny days we have. Record number six.

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The Mass in in B minor, Bach's Mass in B minor, because I think the final chorus, the dona nobis parchem, give us peace, uh the most topical and apt thing to play today.

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It sounds to me like the whole human race singing at once. There is this astonishing body of sound where the overlapping of the different voices is like every race in the world joining in this great cry. And then

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As they come to a a a climax of pleading, give us peace.

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Over the top of the whole thing the trumpets come like the voices of the angels joining in.

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The closing chorus of the Bach Maus in B minor

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The new Philharmonia Orchestra, the B B C Chorus, conducted by Otto Klempere.

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You once took part in a performance of that, didn't you, Hugh, as a trumpeter? Yes, I did, in in King's College Chapel, as a matter of fact, with the Cambridge University Music Society. And um David Wilcox, who was then the director of music, now Sir David, was conducting it. There was a disastrous moment not, thank goodness, in the performance, but uh in the dress rehearsal.

Speaker 427:11

Uh

Hugh Johnson27:11

Yeah.

Presenter27:13

It was a really crucial moment for the very high Bach trumpets, which I wasn't used to playing anyway.

Presenter27:20

And I came in a bar early in the middle of a great silence.

Presenter27:23

And

Presenter27:24

David Wilcox stopped everything, turned on his roster and glowered at me. Dead silence, and I blurted out, I couldn't wait.

Presenter27:37

Right, now let's bring your wine books up to date. You do a pocket wine book, which is rather handy. That's an annual, isn't it? Yes, since uh 1977, so we're now on the eighth edition, the year 1984 edition. And that's rather like a glorified, very glorified vintage chart in a way. It goes into great detail about each particular wine that you're likely to meet, and it's in pocketable form, which seems very popular. And in contrast to that, you've got a walloping great book called The Wine Companion.

Presenter28:08

Yes, that seemed to be a logical development. Having collected a a huge amount of information about individual wine growers all over the world, I thought it would be worth putting on record exactly who made what sort of wine. In fact, uh it came out last year, and it is a uh one might say a report of the whole state of the wine-growing world, as far as I could grasp it, at that time.

Hugh Johnson28:33

Yeah.

Presenter28:35

Right, record number seven.

Presenter28:36

Handel, I think, is my probably my single favourite composer, and I really only first heard this little Handel opera, or operetta, which is called Asis and Galatea.

Presenter28:46

I heard it when our local choral society at Felstead in Essex, in which Judy, my wife, sings, they did it last year, and I absolutely fell in love with it, and I went and bought the record, and I've played it every time I get in the car since, almost, on my tape. And I particularly fell in love with Norma Burroughs, the soprano, who when she sings this song, As When the Dove, puts a fabulous amount of life and feeling into her singing, I think.

Speaker 429:12

As when the benton of the narratives play, when he returns, no more she moans, no more she moans, no

Speaker 429:41

She returns no more, she was above.

Presenter29:48

Uh

Hugh Johnson29:48

Uh

Presenter29:55

As When the Dove from Handel's Aces and Galatea, with Norma Burroughs as soloist and John Elliott Gardner conducting.

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Now, we put you on this desert island, Hugh. Have you any useful knowledge that you've picked up in your travels that's going to be useful to help you to live? Well, as far as gardening goes, yes, I suppose I could plant seeds.

Presenter30:15

See if they came up with my favourite food, perhaps I don't have the patience to hook it out, but there'd be plenty of time.

Presenter30:24

Would you try to escape? Would you try to rig up some kind of raft, or primitive craft, that you'd get away on?

Presenter30:30

I think I'd sit tight. I think actually that um my uh very well organized family would probably come and find me. But it rather depends whether the island is the comic strip kind with one palm tree or a fully blown treasure island.

Presenter30:44

How big a family do you have? Do how many children? I have three children, two daughters and a and a son. And they'd come and look for you, you think? Well, certainly my wife would.

Hugh Johnson30:50

Well

Presenter30:52

While you're waiting, what would you be drinking? What could you manufacture out of the local resources?

Presenter30:57

I don't mind the coconut milk, actually. It's rather a good drink.

Presenter31:01

If I could find some way of opening the coconuts, I'd I'd start with that. Can't bear the coconut flesh, the stringy white stuff, but the milk's good. All right.

Presenter31:10

Your last record.

Presenter31:11

Well, this is a a haunting tune called

Presenter31:15

The theme from Harry's game, which I heard only the other day for the first time, when it was used as the theme music for a play in which my daughter Lucy, who's sixteen, was a very sinister figure. The play was The Crucible, which is about the witch hunt in Salem in the days of the Puritans. And this strange tune, with sort of ghost words which I take to be Gaelic, I'm not quite sure, stuck in my mind and reminds me of that marvellous evening in the theatre.

Speaker 331:55

And I need you in your

Presenter32:18

The theme from Harry's Game by Clanard. If you could take only one disc of that aid, which would it be? It would be the Bach de la Nobi's Parchem. And one luxury to take with you. Well, it's lots of paper and and a pen. Can I have both? Yes, of course, yes. Writing materials. Need some way of delivering them to the publisher, though, which I'd need lots of bottles to send. And the m bottles might as well be full, I suppose. No, you're overdoing it. Just writing materials. The publisher will have to come and fetch it. And one book. You already have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Hugh Johnson32:34

Are they adding

Speaker 432:43

Yeah.

Hugh Johnson32:43

No, you're over to it.

Speaker 432:45

Yeah.

Presenter32:55

I think I'd like as much of PG Woodhouse as you can get between two covers, really. All right, we'll bind some paperbacks together. And thank you, Hugh Johnson, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you, Roy.

Presenter33:08

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 333:15

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