Robin Hanbury-Tenison

Speaker 20:00

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

Speaker 20:05

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.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is the explorer Robin Hanbury Tennyson. Robin, how much does music mean to you?

Presenter0:37

Well, more and more as I get older, it didn't mean a lot when I was young. I used to listen to all the pop records and listen to music as a passing thing, but I've made a marvellous discovery as I've started taking myself more seriously as a writer.

Presenter0:49

And that's thanks to my daughter Lucy, who gave me a Walkman, which I now use with classical music as a way of removing the outside world and getting on with work.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison0:59

And

Presenter1:02

Well, at my longhand. I don't use a typewriter if I can help it, no. But with my headphones on and um

Robin Hanbury-Tenison1:04

I don't use a typewriter if I can help it. No.

Presenter1:09

As a byproduct of that, I've become a little more aware and knowledgeable about classical music, which was not something that played a great part in my life. On your expeditions off into the wilds, did you take discs, cassettes? Yes, took radios more when possible to take anything, in order to listen to the good old BBC on the World Service. Well, you certainly must know about loneliness and and isolation. Did you find it difficult to choose just eight that would last under those conditions? Not very, no. It came quite easily. I I sort of grabbed a mixed bag of what I felt would be fun, and they were not difficult to choose because I haven't got a huge repertoire, I suppose, and I just enjoyed ones that I'd sung at moments and that I'd listened to and that give me pleasure. What's the first one on top of the bag?

Presenter1:58

The first one's a rather naughty record by Louis Armstrong and Thelma Middleton singing Don't Fence Me In, one that I have sung at the top of my voice in places where nobody else could hear me. That ain't what you wanna see rise.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison2:18

Where the west commensurate I gaze at the moon till I lose my senses I can't look at harbors and I can't stand Francis God

Presenter2:34

Louis Armstrong and Velma Middleton Don't Fence Me In.

Presenter2:38

Now, a lot of your childhood was spent in Ireland. Were you born there? I wasn't actually born in Ireland. I was born in London, but I went there when I was very young, and I spent.

Presenter2:46

Most of the first twenty years of my life there, except when I was away at school. Do you come from a large family? Yes, there are five of us, all much older than me, the brothers and sisters. So you were living in Ireland on this big estate. You had to amuse yourself. Yes, I suppose so. I've made a big thing in my book about being lonely, and and my mother taxed me with this and felt that I was uh being unkind about being lonely, because in fact she and I were very close. But I think there is a a kind of solitariness that

Presenter3:18

Comes from being in a wild and remote place like that. It was a very beautiful place, the most perfect imaginable place to grow up. A lake to mess about on? Wonderful big lake, with an island on it, where I made a camp at an early age and used to sleep by myself. So you were learning to be self-sufficient? Yes, I was learning this strange business of being alone, which very few people ever experience. Where did you go to prep school? In Ireland? No, my mother and I chose the most likely-looking prep school to please us both during the war. And we chose one on Loch Rannoch, which sounded wonderful and was wonderful. But unfortunately, it was a prep school from Broadstairs in Kent that had been evacuated there during the war. So I had two glorious terms and then found myself back in Kent, which didn't suit me at all. And then Eton. What did you think you were destined for? With a good deal of gloom. The army was what I was told as a younger son I was likely to be. But Oxford first.

Presenter4:11

Well, no, that wasn't even on the cards. I was supposed to go straight from school into the army, and I rather prevaricated and got to Oxford, which of course doomed the chances of going into the army.

Presenter4:20

You did a sum at um at Innsbruck University. That enabled you to get about Europe quite a bit. Well, that was sheer escapism. I I left school a bit early and went to Innsbruck to hone up my German, supposedly, and spent the entire time hitchhiking around Europe in the days when you really could hitchhike. How far did you get?

Robin Hanbury-Tenison4:38

Bramford

Presenter4:39

Oh, from Innsbruck, which is a marvellous crossroads. I could get to Vienna and regularly and see opera. I could get down to Venice. I could get right up into Bavaria and across Switzerland into France. I could go anywhere in those days. It was a marvellous way of getting to know Europe.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison4:51

Mav

Presenter4:54

Record number two.

Presenter4:56

One of my great favourites, which is the Villa Lobos Bacchianas Brasileiras. This to me is the most evocative Indian music that I know.

Presenter6:07

Bacchianus Brasileieris, number five. Not of course Indian Indian, these were Brazilian Indians. And of course Villa Lobos is a Brazilian composer, you're quite right. Of course, and it was played by Castellanet.

Presenter6:19

Oxford, what did you read? I read philosophy most. I chopped and changed quite a bit. And uh I didn't actually, if the truth be told, read a great deal. I enjoyed myself at Oxford and met interesting people.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison6:29

Met interesting people

Presenter6:32

Well, I acted for a bit and then found I was very bad at it. But a great friend of mine I played in Measure for Measure. I played Froth on one occasion, a foolish gentleman. I was very well cast for that at that era.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison6:36

So great for you.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison6:42

I

Presenter6:46

And when you came down? Immediately, without any hesitation, I set off in an easterly direction with an old Irish friend in a beaten-up old Jeep which we bought for a hundred pounds and we attempted to drive to Ceylon. Just because it's there? Because nobody else had done it. And uh at that stage in the fifties it was still an exciting thing to do.

Presenter7:08

And because it was there, as you say. Overland to Ceylon. You you finished up on your own? Yes, the friend I was with went back from India just before the end.

Presenter7:17

But we had a wonderful time exploring Persia and Afghanistan and going way off the beaten track because we were in no hurry.

Presenter7:25

Time is the greatest luxury of all, and and that was one moment when we had time. And then you went on on your own? Then I wandered through the Far East, working on ships and taking buses. You you crossed the Pacific uh as a seaman? Yes, before the mast. I managed to get a workaway passage. Very difficult things to get. I was uh

Robin Hanbury-Tenison7:38

Yeah.

Presenter7:45

Thrown off many ships in Yokohama harbour before I found a friendly captain who would let me go on. And it was very good for teaching one the rougher side of life, being the only Englishman on a Norwegian ship. Did he work you hard? Oh, very, yes. It meant going up the top and all things like that. Well, there is an enormous temptation to tease a fresh-faced young English recent undergraduate and make him do the nastiest jobs on board a ship like that. So whenever the aerial iced up, it would be me who had to go up, and I suffered dreadfully from vertigo.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison8:01

Well

Presenter8:16

What followed? Well then I came back to England very briefly after travelling down through America and wandering about Mexico.

Presenter8:24

Became engaged to Marika and disappeared three weeks later with my great friend Richard Mason on what we had plotted at Oxford to be the last great expedition ever. I hope undergraduates will always go on plotting to undertake the last great expedition ever. And this was to cross South America at its widest point. In what? Again in a jeep, this time a new one that we conned the Brazilian manufacturers into giving us. And we set out from Recife, the easternmost point on the Atlantic, and heading due west.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison8:34

Where I

Robin Hanbury-Tenison8:39

Okay.

Presenter8:56

cut our way for six thousand miles until we came out of the Pacific. Had this been done before? No, no, nothing anywhere l near that. This was really done before. Yes, the nearest crossing that had been done was two or three or four thousand miles to the south.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison9:03

That was really dumb for me.

Presenter9:09

Four thousand miles of it was on country that no vehicle had ever been on before, and everybody said it was impossible. Did you have any official backing? None. We had official discouragement all round. Everybody said that we were quite mad, that the interior of Brazil was a horrific place that one should never go. Actually it was quite delightful and really not that difficult because we just took it yard by yard, one of us going in front cutting down trees and the other

Presenter9:32

driving the Jeep, and when we came to rivers, making rafts and taking the Jeep across. Your companion was afterwards murdered in the same area, was he not? Yes, he went back to the same region with um our other great friend John Hemming, and they formed a very serious expedition.

Presenter9:47

and were assured by the authorities that there were no Indians in that area.

Presenter9:52

and in fact he was ambushed by a group of uncontacted Indians a long way from their traditional land, who um clubbed him to death. And that caused a great sensation at the time. The group were not in fact contacted for another fourteen years.

Presenter10:06

Great efforts were made to pacify them, and when they were contacted through bad management and the wrong people being allowed to look after them, out of the 800 or so who were found to be living perfectly peaceful, happy, healthy lives, within 18 months there were only 85 left from disease. They were neglected, diseases were introduced, they were not given proper treatment.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison10:24

One does.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison10:25

They wanna

Presenter10:29

They were prostituted and abused in all sorts of ways. This was simply through their contact with white people. Absolutely. Before that they were fine. And it was an example of the kind of treatment that Indians get. And it was something which enforced our belief that somebody had to do something about it. And I'm sure Richard would have agreed with it. He was very much interested in Indians himself. And then you came home to get married?

Presenter10:54

Then I came home just in time, a fortnight before the wedding date had been fixed, nothing having been heard for six months, and got married and eventually went and uh settled and farmed in Cornwall. Record number three.

Presenter11:05

Going back to the the new era of learning to appreciate a bit of classical music, I'm still in the what Godfrey Smith so properly calls the tingle quotient phase of finding the tune, I suppose, in classical music and beginning to appreciate the rest through that. And one of my great favourites is Mozart's Twenty-First Piano Concerto.

Presenter12:26

Part of the first movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Uri Segal.

Presenter12:34

Your first expedition, I see, Robin, was twenty five years ago, and you have been at it ever since.

Presenter12:40

Now we can't take em one by one because there are too many. Let's take uh an area. Let's start with with South America that we've been talking about. Having gone right across the thickest bit,

Presenter12:52

You've now decided to come right down the length from north to south.

Presenter12:56

Yes, I started off with Sebastian Snow, whose idea it was to make that journey, but he By water. We were going to prove that it was possible to go from the Caribbean to the South Atlantic by river through the middle of South America, which had been done.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison13:00

By what

Robin Hanbury-Tenison13:08

Okay.

Presenter13:09

More or less. There were a couple of portages, but very short periods out of ten thousand kilometres. I think we probably went about or I went about three or four hundred altogether over land.

Presenter13:23

And uh Sebastian became ill right at the beginning, and had to come back. So I continued by myself.

Presenter13:29

And what I learnt on that, I was three months largely alone in a small boat in very remote rivers, was the ability to be totally alone, which I honestly don't think most people have any idea what it's like to be more than 100 miles, two or three hundred miles from the nearest other human being, totally alone in the tropical rainforest, looking after yourself.

Presenter13:54

And very afraid.

Presenter13:57

It engenders a kind of exquisite fear, which I don't particularly want to enjoy again, but I did enjoy greatly at the time, because you will become very, very aware of your surroundings when it is just you and the elements.

Presenter14:09

And uh

Presenter14:10

I think I probably went a bit mad coming down those rivers, singing my way mile after mile. I had outboard motors. It was quite noisy. It was very hard work. It was like driving a one man band in a little inflatable rubber dinghy with two outboards.

Presenter14:24

and lots of petrol and pumping things out.

Presenter14:27

It was a kind of mad exploit, but it was very nice to get to the other end. I'm sure. How long did it take you? Three months. And then you went down the same route with a big expedition afterwards. Well, I went back a few years later with a great hovercraft expedition, the same hovercraft that I think still does the Isle of Wight run to cows. And it was shipped over by the Geographical Magazine, and we retraced part of my route over the Rio Negro and the Orinoco.

Presenter14:58

My first time that I was with a whole lot of other people, and I I found that a ghastly experience. They were all perfectly delightful individuals, but en group.

Presenter15:07

I found that um twenty-two or three British people cooped up in a noisy machine was

Presenter15:14

That being alone is infinitely preferable. On your own, what are the hazards? Accident, of course, disease, hostile Indians? What have you got to keep looking out for most of the time?

Presenter15:25

I think your own personal determination to keep going is the most important thing.

Presenter15:31

And that covers all the other problems really. Disease being largely psychosomatic, you don't get ill if you can't. I believe this quite firmly. I don't get ill when I'm on expeditions, and if there aren't doctors around.

Presenter15:44

Also, if you break down, and there's a garage anywhere within reach, you have to get repairs and work from the garage. I wouldn't dream of attempting to repair my vehicle or my craft if I could get somebody else to do it. But if I can't, then I find resources within myself that I never suspected were there. I'm not a very competent mechanic,

Presenter16:05

Anything can be done if you have to do it.

Presenter16:07

Your fourth record, what's that Robin?

Presenter16:09

Well, this is, I believe, the sexiest record ever made. And uh that's Edith Piaf singing Milor.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison16:20

Ta-da-da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison16:27

But I may dance it home.

Presenter16:47

Is it piaf?

Presenter16:48

Milo.

Presenter16:49

Another area in which you spent a lot of time Indonesia. Where have you travelled there?

Presenter16:56

Yes, Indonesia, which is very similar to Brazil in size and population, I found after doing a lot of work in Brazil with the Indians, has an even bigger indigenous population of people in in need of the sort of help which we're trying to bring to such people. A pretty dispersed population. Very dispersed on the islands, but with instead of having large tracts of land in between, they have large tracts of water. But many similarities. And extraordinarily little known in Europe, very few books about Indonesia. So we travelled over a great part of Indonesia and wrote books about that and visited many of the remote areas.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison17:08

Uh

Presenter17:36

One of the nice things about this phase in my life was that Marika and I travelled together and she being an exceedingly prolific writer kept me up to the mark in writing the serious authorized version while she wrote much more readable books about our adventures and experiences. Yes, and Marika of course was a a great writer about food. That was what she was much best known for as a cookery writer, yes.

Speaker 317:41

Mm-hmm.

Presenter17:59

Let's get on to your fifth record. Well, another of my tingle quotient records, which is Bruh's violin concerto. Who shall play it? Kung Wai Chung.

Presenter18:55

An excerpt from the first Broek Violin Concerto played by Kyung Hua Chung with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Rudolf Kempe.

Presenter19:04

Robin, your third.

Presenter19:06

Main area of exploration, of course, Africa. You covered a lot of Africa.

Presenter19:12

Yes, only desert areas really. I don't know the African forests well. I went through a phase in the mid sixties of wanting to get away from it all in deserts. Yeah. It's very different from jungles, but

Presenter19:25

have their own particular charm, and I spent quite a lot of time on three expeditions riding by camel across various tracts of southern Sahara. Are the nomads leaving the desert?

Presenter19:37

Yes, partly through the impact of oil and other exploitation in different ways, partly because the trucks are replacing the camel caravans, and partly because of the dreadful Sahel drought which has made it just untenable to live there. Is that a fairly permanent phenomenon?

Presenter19:55

I don't think so. I think people will drift back in to occupy the desert in time. I don't know. I was lucky enough to travel before the great Sahel drought began, and to travel with Tuareg across areas and between oases which were still working and I must say I did love the peace and solitude of the desert.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison20:09

Hmm.

Presenter20:14

And what other areas of Africa have you explored? The only other main area has been the Kalahari Desert, which I made a brief trip when I walked across with a Bushman four years ago. And we had the interesting experience of surviving for a day on an ostrich egg of water each for day after day.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison20:32

On

Presenter20:34

Which is plenty. Don't want to believe your desert manuals. An ostrich egg, which holds about a litre and a quarter, is ample water supply and it keeps relatively cool in it. Your first expeditions really were for fun. I mean, they were just one chap or two chaps. I mean, they are now scientific expeditions. I believe the Royal Geographical Society is one of your sponsors. That's right. I underwent a sea change and stopped doing it for myself and getting more passionately involved in the purpose of what we were doing. And I was eventually, after associating with the Royal Geographical Society for many years, given the great honour of being asked to lead what turned out to be their biggest expedition ever, which was to the Borneo rainforests of Sarawak, which was a marvellous experience. And we had a hundred and forty scientists in the field for fifteen months. Was this an expedition that stayed more or less in one place, or were you moving a great deal? We were examining a quite a large area which had been declared a national park and was very little known, which was enormously varied. It had huge mountains and variety of different forests. And we stayed at a base camp. I I organized it rather on the basis of the English weekend as being the best thing that the British have offered to universal culture. So that everybody came home and enjoyed themselves and recreated themselves at weekends every two or three. But they did the work out in little sub camps where life was exceedingly Spartan.

Presenter21:54

and as a result a great deal got done. We also found amazing things there which we had not set out to find like the greatest cave in the world.

Presenter22:03

and then subsequently when we went back finding one four times bigger.

Presenter22:07

So it is far and away the greatest caving area in the world. But all those sort of adventures and excitements were spin-off of the main scientific work, which is what really mattered. There's an organization that crops up a lot in your writings, Survival International. Now what is that organization? Well, we started Survival International 15 years ago when there was a world outcry about the treatment of Brazilian Indians.

Presenter22:32

And we felt that there was a need for such people as those we've been talking about already.

Presenter22:37

to be represented internationally until such time as they were able to represent themselves.

Presenter22:43

And we have

Presenter22:45

grown and succeeded in having some notable successes in preventing governments, multinational companies, missionaries, and other people who wish to change people's lives for dogmatic rather than

Presenter22:59

reasoned purposes.

Presenter23:01

to prevent them being uh wiped out. And uh we are still the leading organization that represents such people.

Presenter23:08

It's a very uphill struggle. It is not a popular one to get people to fund, so we're a very poor organisation.

Presenter23:14

But we are listened to and we are sometimes able to change governments and other people's minds.

Presenter23:19

Apart from other explorers, I I suppose the people you're liable to come across most in the remote areas are missionaries who are working on some of the same problems. Is there much community of interest? How do you get on with them? Oh, very well, sometimes. Some are doing excellent work and leading devoted, selfless lives, helping with medical aid for people who have no resistance to outside diseases and

Presenter23:42

Defending them against the incursions of people from outside. Regrettably, rather an increasing proportion of missionary work in remoter areas of the world is motivated by a desire to change people at all costs from their traditional ways and turn them into poor replicas of ourselves as being a method of saving their souls. And I simply do not subscribe to that. And there is a lot of missionary fanaticism now, which is not often heard about, and is exceedingly dangerous, and just as

Presenter24:14

as much genocide, in my opinion, when it's at its worst extremes, as the deliberate extermination of people who are in the way by

Presenter24:25

Settlers who find them a nuisance. That's a frightening theory. It is, and it's not said often enough or loud enough, but the destruction of other cultures is, I believe, as criminal an act as the destructions of species uh which make up the ecosystem of the world. We are dangerously monocultural now. We are dangerously believing that we can solve all our problems by simply inventing more resources. And I don't think we can. I think we need to take a good look at the way in which we live on this planet.

Presenter24:56

Which brings us to record number six. Yes, I was getting a little serious there, I think, so perhaps we'd better have Noel Card singing Uncle Harry. Oh, this is a missionary song, is it?

Presenter25:06

Well, it's not exactly pro-missionary.

Speaker 325:08

The natives greeted them kindly.

Presenter25:09

English

Speaker 325:10

And invited them to dine On yams and crams and human hams And vintage cocoanut wine The taste of which was filthy But the after effects divine Poor Uncle Harry got a bit gay And longed to tarry This Aunt Mary couldn't quite allow

Robin Hanbury-Tenison25:21

And blah blah blah.

Speaker 325:25

She lectured him severely on a number of church affairs But when she'd gone to bed he made her get away down the stairs For he longed to find the answer to a few of the maidens' prayers Uncle Harry's not a missionary

Robin Hanbury-Tenison25:32

Pretty long

Presenter25:39

Noel Coward. In your books, Robin, and there have been a number of them now, there's little about animals, it's about people, isn't it? Yes, much more. I'm not a naturalist, I don't pretend to be. Your new book, An Autobiography, Worlds Apart, which incorporates, of course, a lot of your Expeditions of the Past.

Presenter25:57

How much of the year did you travel? Much less than people thought. You get a reputation as an explorer of being away all the time, forever. It was less than an average of three months a year, I suppose, over those twenty-five years. The longest was the Mulu expedition for fifteen months. But apart from that, I was almost never away for more than three or four months. And now you feel you're settling down a bit. I would like to, yes. I have no great desire to travel for its own sake, but there are all sorts of good reasons for being abroad. It's also so easy now, because you can get there so quickly by plane. That's one of the reasons why we modern explorers find it much easier to lead a happy home life than the Victorians did.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison26:26

Uh

Presenter26:36

Well, you have a stock firm in Cornwall that you run.

Presenter26:40

Alas, Marika died. Yes, she died two years ago of cancer. But you've married again? Very happily, yes. And you have a family? Yes, I have two small stepsons and a son of fourteen and a daughter of twenty-four. Now, there's a lot we've been reading about lately, about you and two white horses. Tell me the story. You bought a couple of horses on the Carmarg. That's right. We needed two new horses on the farm because I spend a good deal of time riding round the moors looking for lost sheep and strayed cattle and the two horses we've got getting a bit old. So I looked around the world and the Carmarg horses seemed like a good idea. I went out and talked about it there and everybody agreed that they would be perfect for my purposes. We also found that there'd never been any Carmarg horses in England and so I bought a couple of them and obviously instead of shipping them back in a truck or anything silly like that we rode them back. Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. Well about 1,200 miles. It was about 1,200 miles and it was absolutely... it's opened my eyes to how you should see the world in future.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison27:36

Which is English.

Presenter27:46

France from a horse is infinitely preferable to France from a car, which is nice enough. You and Luella, what could you do? About thirty miles a day? Yes. Luella and I were in very comfortable saddles. We were able to ride up to about thirty miles a day. We were well supported by a ground crew who arranged a field for the horses every night. It made no pretence of being an expedition. It was a purely syboritic exercise to enjoy France at its best. Record number seven.

Presenter28:12

This is The Police, singing Every Breath You Take, which was produced by my son in law, Hugh Padgeam, who married my daughter this June. So you're getting interested now in the music of the younger generation? It's classical music that I'm getting interested in, but I've always loved pop records and this was a particular favorite last year.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison28:46

Every breath you take

Robin Hanbury-Tenison28:50

Every move you made.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison28:54

Every bond you breathe.

Speaker 328:55

Every step you take, I'll be watching

Presenter28:59

With every breath you take, buy the police.

Presenter29:03

Robin, we won't insult you by asking if you could look after yourself, because you've done it all over the place, and under some very difficult conditions.

Presenter29:11

We'll ask you instead to choose an island. Where would you like your island to be? I don't mind really, as long as it's hot. I suppose the South Seas. I don't know the South Seas, so it would be

Presenter29:21

More exciting and more remote. Would you try to escape? No.

Presenter29:26

I wouldn't. I'm not a good sailor. I wouldn't try and make a boat or get away'cause I'd only sink. Write your last record.

Presenter29:33

My last record is uh some Indian flute music, which is very evocative music from the Andes.

Presenter29:41

El Condo Pasa.

Presenter29:43

It's played by Los Kalchakis on this very lovely breathless flute.

Presenter29:50

And I find it exciting because I think it's an old Inca melody.

Presenter29:55

and therefore gives us a link with music from a different era, different culture altogether. And the fact that it's been so very popular with us, and with um Simon Garfunkel making a pop record out of it as well,

Presenter30:07

It is significant, I think.

Presenter30:57

Elcondor Pasa played by Los Calchakis, with Guillermo de la Roca as soloist.

Presenter31:04

If you could take only one disc of your eight, which would it be? It would be the Villa Lobos one. The Villa Lobos. That would.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison31:09

Cause

Presenter31:11

Give me a link with the South American Indians. Right. And one luxury to take, one object of no practical use at all that you'd like to have about the place.

Presenter31:20

Well, I was hoping you would allow me to have a large cask of claret washed up on the shore. That, of course, what if Excellent idea simple idea. Yes. I mean, if you could arrange that it was La Fitte, nineteen seventy, that would be even better. Always acceptable whatever you can manage. A bottle of that a day once it had settled down in a cave.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison31:32

One guess.

Presenter31:37

Or

Presenter31:38

Keep me going.

Presenter31:41

One book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already provided by the management.

Presenter31:46

It's very difficult to choose, and I finally decided that I was much less well-read than I'd like to be. And could I have the great big massive Oxford Companion to English Literature? The Oxford Companion to English Literature. And thank you, Robin Hanbury Tennyson, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 232:13

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