Roy Hattersley

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Roy Hattersley0:30

A castaway today is someone who, for all his achievements in the world of politics, would much rather have played left half for Sheffield Wednesday or opened the innings for his beloved Yorkshire. In a perfect world, he'd have done both in the same week. As it is, he has to be content with the position of Shadow Chancellor and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. He is Roy Hattersley.

Roy Hattersley0:50

Roy, you were brought up in Sheffield, the old west riding of Yorkshire. There's a lot of music there, traditionally a.

Presenter0:55

A place of music. Was there much music in your youth?

Presenter0:59

Not until I went to grammar school, I think, there was a lot of broadcast music with a sick grandmother at home and me having some sickly years when I was a small boy. There was a lot of listening to the radio. There was that sort of music, but I wasn't sent to violin lessons. That wasn't the sort of thing that happened to the likes of me in Sheffield. But by the time I got to the City Grammar, there was a great encouragement to take music seriously. And there were cheap tickets provided by the Education Department for fifth formers and sixth formers who went to the Sheffield City Hall, who sat on the platform on the wrong side of the orchestra and actually watched the conductor playing and heard the music for a few coppers. That's when I first heard serious music. It was the Halley Orchestra, alternate Friday nights and alternate Saturday nights. And if you were lucky when you were in the sixth form, you and a sixth form girl went along together for about ninepence each. So this first choice of music then, is that a memory of those days? It's a memory of all sorts of things rolled into one, a sort of kaleidoscope. It's actually played by John Bob Raleigh, who was a very energetic conductor of the Halley in the days when I used to watch it. But it's a piece of music which is about England in general. It's a fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams. And it seems to me to encapsulate all the things that I think about England, particularly one bit of England, Elizabethan England, which fascinates me.

Presenter3:19

Roy, you once described yourself as belonging to the emergent working classes with respectability above their station. What exactly do you mean by that? Well, I was brought up in a Labour household, but despite our strong Labour beliefs, there was a absolute conviction that I had a duty to get on. Now, get on didn't mean earning a great deal of money, fortunately, otherwise I would have been a great disappointment to my family. But it meant doing a number of, I suppose, worthy things, getting an education, getting a job which had some security and stability. I've not done that either. But there was a feeling that it was my duty to improve myself and be a credit to my family and to the standards my family held. Because it was a very curious household as well, wasn't it, from the point of view that wouldn't be curious to you, but it seems looking inward at it, there was your parents, there were two of your father's brothers, and your granny and yourself living in the same house. It was more than curious. Looking back on it now, it was quite extraordinary. But as you say, it didn't seem anything other than quite normal then. The two brothers had left by the time I began to think about things. They went off to the war and one of them came back briefly, the other got married while I was a soldier. They were only with us till I was about eight or nine. But right until I was twelve, thirteen, going to grammar school, my grandmother was there, an absolute and total cripple who could not move at all. And I do mean could not move at all, had to be fed. And this lady living amongst us and living as part of us was, I suppose, a quite extraordinary thing to happen to a little boy. Though as you say, it didn't seem a bit abnormal at the time. Your father, too, was fascinating, because it wasn't until later in your life, when in fact you were forty, that you were told that he'd been a Roman Catholic priest who had left the church to marry your mother. It does seem even more extraordinary that I went through forty years without ever realising this. My father worked in the local government and worked for the Ministry of Social Security. And I knew, for instance, that he could speak Latin like a living language. I knew he could translate gravestones when we went to visit churches in the country.

Presenter5:23

I knew he had a great fund of information, very esoteric information. He knew that the last Catholic bishop from Scotland was Bonnie Prince Charlie's brother. It never struck me why he knew all these things until he died and a priest who'd been with him in the English college in Rome sent his condolences and then it suddenly all fell into place. I remember the editor of Punch one day saying, the reason I didn't know this is through all my adolescence they kept saying, I've got something to tell you. And I wouldn't listen. I wouldn't shut up. I said, don't worry about that. I've got something to tell you myself. I'm not sure whether they tried to tell. I think they didn't try to tell me. But it is quite extraordinary that I didn't know until I was 40. They must not have tried to tell you, Aubrey. It was a matter of what... Could it have been shame for them? I think it was one very specific thing. When I found out, I didn't talk to my mother about it for some months, because I thought if she wanted to keep the secret, why not? And one Christmas Eve, she and I had lunch together, just the two of us, rather boozy lunch, I fear. And at the end, I talked to her about it, and we had a very frank conversation. And she said, you know, in those days, leaving the church, as my father did very quickly, to marry a lady with very pronounced left-wing opinions, very active in the Labour Party and on the left fringe of the Labour Party, was a great scandal. And she said, not a word ever appeared in a newspaper.

Presenter6:40

And they were enormously proud of that, and I understand why in 1930, and I think because of that they just blocked it out of their minds.

Presenter6:47

Let's move on now to a second choice of of record. What will that be? It's a piece by Stephen Sondheim called Anyone Can Whistle from a show, same title, which ran I think a few days in New York.

Presenter6:58

It's sung here by Lee Remick, and it represents a side of my character which I perhaps would only confess to on a desert island, namely an enjoyment for certain sort of cheap, sentimental, romantic music. But this is a very high quality cheap sentimental romantic music. Smashing lyrics, lovely tune, nice ladies singing it, and really rather more to it than some of the snobs I bump into from time to time realise there is to this sort of song.

Speaker 37:24

Anyone can whistle any old day easy

Speaker 37:34

It's all so simple.

Speaker 37:38

Relax, let go, let fly So someone tell me why can't I

Presenter7:53

Roy, you mentioned in your lead up to that uh last record, Lee Ramick Singing Any One Can Whistle, you mentioned the word snobs and you mentioned them in relation to your interest in what you call cheap and popular music. I think that's rather wonderful music actually, brilliant lyric, that we should ever write a lyric like that. We'd die happy. But I mean, what about the other thing that interests you at sport, particularly soccer? Do you get the same kind of snob reaction from some of your friends about your interest in that? Well, not from my friends, because they wouldn't be my friends if they were rude about football and cricket, but from some of the people I have to do business with. I do have some colleagues who say they've never been to a football match in their lives and don't know uh how I can waste a Saturday afternoon.

Presenter8:31

Going to football, watching football, coming away from it. And this seems to me tragedy for the people who've not understood the great pleasure that that brings. And it started in your youth, didn't it? I mean, a love affair with Sheffield Wednesday and a love affair with the Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Yes, I was encouraged to like cricket far more than I was encouraged to like football. My mother and father were both cricket devotees. And I was taken when I was 11 to the old Brammel Lane Ground, which had cricket then and should have cricket now, to see one of those victory tests, Australian Combined Services versus an England 11. And I can remember one of the few rows I had with my father. He was 40 and I was 11. And I was saying, I'm going to the Test match. And he's saying, it's not a real Test match. And I was saying, yes, it is a Test match. And I've been infatuated by cricket ever since that day. What about Yorkshire cricket? Do you feel that's different from other cricket? Well, for the last two or three seasons, it's been worse than other cricket. But I'd like to see it different in some other ways. It's special in that it is Yorkshire. The great thing about Yorkshire is that we only play Yorkshiremen, as you know very well. And I voted solidly in the members' ballot to keep the team exclusively Yorkshire. And it does mean that I can identify with it. It means I have a tribal relationship with Yorkshire cricket. I think I have a tribal relationship with a lot of things. I have a tribal relationship with Labour Party, a tribal relationship with Sheffield Wednesday, tribal relationship with Yorkshire cricket. It means I'm enormously partisan. And I don't think I would feel quite so partisan if we had Australians or New Zealanders or West Indians playing for. What about your next choice of record? Well, my next choice at summer time on Breedon.

Presenter10:00

And again, it's rather like the Sun Time we had a minute ago. It's a combination of an absolutely stupendous tune with a piece of poetry.

Speaker 310:08

Summer time on Britain, The bells they sound so clear, Round both the shires they ring them in steeples far and near, A happy noise to hear.

Speaker 310:30

Here of a son name of me.

Roy Hattersley10:32

Yeah.

Presenter10:37

Yeah.

Roy Hattersley10:37

Roy Reading About your youth in a lovely book you wrote a couple of years ago called Yorkshire Boyhood. It makes me wonder that you ever actually made it into adulthood. But you're a sickly child. It seems to you.

Presenter10:47

lived on Obridge's lung tonic and Scott's emulsion.

Presenter10:51

Well then a great transformation came in our lives, like the passing of the third floor back. This figure arrived. We changed doctors. I think we actually changed doctors because we found the doctor who was looking after us was an Irishman and we knew that doctors ought to be Scottish. So we found a Scottish doctor, who was a man called Andrew Stephen, who wasn't too keen on being the sort of doctor then that we were looking for. He was most keen on being the doctor to the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. He actually became Sir Andrew Stephen, chairman of the FA. But when he saw me wheezing with asthma and all the other things, he said the object of my life ought not to be staying inside on cold and rainy days, but going on to Wadsley Common and kicking a football. So off I went and it changed everything. I mean I recovered instantly. It was a great psychological remedy before people heard of psychology, or nearly before they heard of psychology. And Andrew Stephen remained my family's family doctor all their lives. Indeed, when he was chairman of the FA, I remember being at a great do with him.

Presenter11:47

And somebody introduced us when I was in the cabinet saying, Sir Andrew, do you know the Secretary of State? And Sir Andrew replied, Know him, I delivered him. Which wasn't quite true, but it put the rather pomper civil servant right in his place. Well, here's this boy then, once sickly, now playing football vigorously and enjoying it. Obviously wanting to play, as I said earlier, left half of Sheffield Wednesday. Where did the politics come into? When was the political ideal shaped? Well, they were never really out because right at the end of the war, the 45 election, my parents and the one uncle who had just briefly come back from the Middle East at the end of the war, were involved in the 45 campaign. And they'd always been Labour. One of the standing jokes in the family was that my father once voted Conservative, but we're not sure whether that's true or whether that was a slur cast upon him by his offensive younger brothers. But they're up to their necks in politics from 45 onwards. And I found politics exciting. And I also found it a tribal thing. As I say, I didn't begin to develop an ideology of socialism until I was 18 and I worked university. A theory of socialism came to me in my late adolescence and early manhood. But in my 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th year, I knew I was Labour. And I found it very enjoyable, very exciting to be going through the business of politics.

Roy Hattersley13:02

But of course you grew up in a albatross or

Presenter13:04

Working class background. It was a very comfortable one, wasn't it? There wasn't any poverty there. I mean, did you actually experience poverty at all as a young person? Do you see it? Oh, I experienced it in a sense. I mean, my father in those days was a council clerk, and council clerks were earning a good deal less than people in the steelworks, or after forty-eight people down the pits. I can remember when we'd scrape to buy a semi-detached house, there being no furniture in the front room, and me being under penalty of death not to allow my friends to open the front room door and discover there was no furniture. But uh the ward which I used to canvass in, campaign in.

Presenter13:41

Shalesmoor became part of Crooksmoor Ward where I was a counsellor fifteen years later. That was real grinding poverty. That was back-to-back houses. That was uh houses without lavatories inside. That was uh people living in uh the worst sort of post-war, interwar deprivation. So I saw it in one sense, and we've experienced it in another.

Presenter14:02

Let's now have another choice of music. Well, the next one is about my youth, or about somebody's youth. It's a very old lady called Mabel Mercer singing Blame It On My Youth.

Presenter14:11

It's another one of the silly songs, I think, and this, unlike Sun Time, is genuinely silly. But it's a mock of hope. I'm into my fifties, which I don't enjoy. Half the things I write are complaints about not being twenty five. And it seems to me that if we can have an eighty year old lady singing Blame It on My Youth, there may be some life left for those of us who are into fifty.

Speaker 314:31

If I expected love when first we kissed

Speaker 314:37

Blame it on my youth.

Speaker 314:42

If only just for you I did exist.

Speaker 314:47

Blame it on my you

Speaker 314:51

Yeah.

Speaker 314:52

I believed in everything.

Speaker 314:58

Like a child of three

Presenter15:01

Roy, when you were at uh university, were you very active there in in politics? Yes, I was. I promised my father I wouldn't be. I promised him that after the Labour League of Youth and all that in Sheffield I'd have three years off. But I didn't. I turned up the Freshist Conference and what was called the Socialist Society within recruiting and I joined immediately. And uh I was very, very active and became chairman of the Labour Party Student Thing Nationally in my last year.

Presenter15:25

I played much more part in politics, I suspect, than I should have done, but politics was by then obsessing me, and there was no way of stopping the obsession.

Roy Hattersley15:33

After university, it seems to me that you you took on jobs that that were sort of uh inconsequential in the sense that you could be

Presenter15:38

Said to be treading water, I suppose. Would that be right? Were you waiting to get it? Actually during finals, people would approach me to see if I'd be the candidate for Sutton Cofield, absolutely hopeless seat.

Speaker 315:44

Yeah.

Presenter15:51

When I was selected, it had a majority of, I think, 17,000, Conservative majority, and I nursed it carefully for four years. Managed to push the Conservative majority up to 27,000. But before I actually took my exams, I knew that I was going to be hoping I was going to be a candidate and wanted to get a safe seat thereafter, or a safe-ish seat, a winnable seat. So when I came back to Sheffield and worked in the steel industry for a year, which I didn't enjoy, and then went to the WEA, which I did enjoy, it was all being done in preparation, I hoped, for getting into Parliament. And within six months of being back in Sheffield, I was on the council. I stood for the Crooksmore Ward, which was a very safe seat, and was a councillor when I was 23. So it was really politics and having to earn my living as well. You want to be an MP in Yorkshire, though, did you? I wanted to be an MP in Yorkshire desperately. And I...

Presenter16:38

I offered myself to almost every seat in Yorkshire. I think perhaps literally every seat in Yorkshire was going. I have been turned down by more Yorkshire seats than uh it's possible to imagine. I wanted each of the three whole seats and was refused each one of them. Um I was turned down in two Bradfords, one York, one Doncaster, one Rotherham, two Leeds. There's hardly a constituency in Yorkshire that I didn't want and didn't want me. Why didn't they want you?

Roy Hattersley17:04

Why didn't they work?

Presenter17:06

I suppose they wanted other people more. Other people had more trade union backing, other people performed better on the day of the selection conference, other people occupied the political position that they wanted. It was enormously good luck for me that I ended up in Spotbrook. My little Birmingham seat, or my small piece of Birmingham, is exactly right for me, and I hope I'm right for them. But they all know, my friends in that constituency know now, that whilst I wouldn't change them for anything, I came to them having been rejected by the County of Yorkshire. Next record. Well, my next record is another American show song. It's from Rogerson Hart, and I think Hart is the greatest of all the popular lyricists. It's a marvellous combination of rhymes and sentences. It's called It Never Entered My Mind.

Speaker 317:53

I didn't guess it.

Speaker 317:55

That I would sit and mope again

Speaker 318:00

And all the while I'd hope forget

Roy Hattersley18:02

Alright

Speaker 318:05

To see my darling, dope again

Speaker 318:10

Hmm it never ended my mind

Roy Hattersley18:25

Roy, in the twenty odd years that you've been in the House, you've held a high post in

Presenter18:29

Most departments. Which has been the most satisfying for you? I think the three and a half years in the cabinet, being in the cabinet is different from any other job. For some years I was the senior minister outside the cabinet. But being the senior minister outside the cabinet just doesn't compare with being in the cabinet, even though you're grubbing around at the bottom of the division. I think I was number 21 out of 27 cabinet members in seniority. That is the important thing in politics. That's where the decisions are collectively taken. That's where the real business is done. And even though I was in the cabinet during difficult years, 76 to 79, I enjoyed those three difficult years enormously. I think there have been three periods that I've been particularly happy. One was my last two years in Sheffield when I was chairman of the housing committee. And had a great joy of actually seeing the plans from last year actually turn into houses that people moved in the year after, which you never see in national politics. Then the three years in the cabinet. And now being shadow chancellor and deputy leader. I'm enjoying what I'm doing this minute. But having said all that, I have to confess that I just enjoy everything. I have an absurd capacity for happiness. It makes people very angry sometimes to discover that I persist in enjoying myself no matter what's happening. I just am a happy person. And it's great for me, but I think it's probably pretty painful for some people I have to do business with. My staff, when we've had a bad day, and I know we've had a bad day, the newspapers say Gott Hatterley was terrible yesterday. And they all come in feeling unhappy, ashamed, guilty that they somehow didn't brief me properly. And they discover I'm happy. It's lovely for me, but it sometimes causes them a bit of pain. Does nothing depress you at all? Briefly. I'm depressed from 20 to 5 till quarter past on a Saturday afternoon when Wednesday lost. I was deeply depressed after we lost the 79 election. But that was 24 hours. I mean, after we'd lost, there was the business of trying to win in 83. And after we'd lost in 83, there was the business of trying to win in 1987. I don't stay depressed for long. I do believe that things are going to improve. I think that's very much related to socialism. Energy and optimism are the two great ingredients of socialism.

Presenter20:35

Let's have a another choice of record. Well, it's another feature of the England obsession. This piece of music I actually first heard after I'd bought a old seventy eight thick bakelite record.

Presenter20:46

In a grammar school jumble sale for some worthy course 40 years ago. And then I'd hardly heard of Elga and I'd certainly not heard of his sea pictures. And when I played it, as I'm sure I did, on a wind-up old-fashioned grammar phone, there was this thing called Where Corals Lie. And it struck me then, as it strikes me now. Absolutely bogus title. Nothing to do with South Sea at alls. Nothing to do with the Pacific. It's English music. It's about the West Country. It sounds like England. And this is Janet Baker sounding exactly like England now.

Speaker 321:25

The deeps have music soft and low.

Speaker 321:32

Winds awake, the air is proud.

Speaker 321:44

Yeah.

Speaker 321:45

Beyond to go and see the land where corners are

Roy Hattersley22:16

Roy, when you look back at your career in politics, who have been the people that you've worked with, that you've observed, who've represented

Roy Hattersley22:24

The reason why

Presenter22:24

Why you came into politics. In other words, the giants.

Presenter22:28

Well, I've been deputy to nearly all the big figures in the Labour Party over the last ten years, Callahan, Crossland, Healy, Castle. I think the man who I admired most and certainly liked most, I mean in a sense loved, was Tony Crossland. Why? Well, he stood for the sort of socialism in which I believe. He believed in equality, and he believed in promoting equality, and he believed in making the sacrifices on his own behalf and the people like him, which brought socialism about. He was also an enormously endearing character. The politician who I enormously admire in my party today is Dennis Healy. Dennis Healey seems to me to be the last of the giants. And I suppose I like Healy and like Crossland, because both of them have got that iconoclastic streak. I mean, they do say enormously clever things and at the end of it make a joke about themselves, or Tony did and Dennis does. And that seems to me a most endearing quality, if you can take yourself with something less than total seriousness. Not always a feature of politicians. But Healy and Crossland have that capacity, Tony had and Healy has, to laugh at themselves in an absolutely admirable way.

Roy Hattersley23:35

Now, you yourself have got a kind of split career. I mean, you're involved very heavily in politics, of course, and also in in in writing. I mean, your output's quite considerable for a very busy politician. Regular columns in Punch and Guardian seem to write whenever you can. Are you ever tempted to perhaps think of giving up politics and concentrating on writing full time?

Presenter23:52

No, never.

Presenter23:53

When I retire, which is I suppose 30 or 40 years from now, I'm going to write full-time then. I mean I'm going to write seven days a week then. When you're 19. When I'm 19. That's right. My grandfather didn't die until he was into well into his 90s and he was still on the Mansfield Council. So nobody who's looking for a seat better look for sport books until well into the 21st century. When that happens, I shall want to write every day and most of the day. But at the moment, I think of writing as an enormously important part of my life. But the secondary part of my life is politics first.

Roy Hattersley24:02

I go live.

Roy Hattersley24:24

What about the position though that you're in where

Presenter24:25

Yeah.

Roy Hattersley24:26

You move freely between Fleet Street and the house and you're in a pos

Presenter24:28

Politician being written about by those people that you associate with. Do you have a despair of your colleagues in journalism? Yes, I find political journalism in England at this minute to be in a deplorable state in that there are two or three newspapers which I know I can write off before I say anything or do anything, that they're never going to say what I say is right or what my party does is right, I think we're more polarised and more prejudiced than at any time in our history. And I know my colleagues, so to speak, political journalists who say, well, we tried to get it in the paper, but you know, they're not going to publish the sort of stuff that you're saying at the moment. I think political journalism is now in a very dangerous position in Britain because newspapers are in so few hands and those few people who own them have got a very strong political position, which doesn't happen to be mine.

Roy Hattersley25:18

Let's now go to another choice of record.

Presenter25:20

Well, we're going to hear a piece of poetry. We've sneaked a few bits of poetry into this programme and onto this island, uh disguised as songs, uh Sondheim and uh Hausmann in Summertime and Britain, but this is a piece of poetry actually read by the poet. It's

Presenter25:35

Auden's in praise of limestone. It was actually, I think, written about limestone country in Italy, but I'm cheating. This is to remind me of limestone country in Yorkshire, not the bit of industrial Yorkshire where I was brought up, but the um north west of Yorkshire, Ingleton, Wernside, Pennygent, Malum Tarn, Malum Tarn, a lake on top of a mountain, which seems to me to be like heaven. And uh Auden here is describing limestone country as exactly that.

Presenter26:04

Yeah.

Speaker 226:04

In so far as we have to look forward to death as a fact, no doubt we are right.

Speaker 226:10

But if sins can be forgiven, If bodies rise from the dead,

Speaker 226:15

These modifications of matter into innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains, made solely for pleasure, make a further point.

Speaker 226:25

The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, having nothing to hide.

Speaker 226:31

Dear, I know nothing of either.

Speaker 226:34

But when I try to imagine a faith a faultless love or the life to come,

Speaker 226:40

What I hear is the murmur of underground streams.

Speaker 226:44

What I see is a limestone landscape.

Presenter26:48

Now your choice of music has reflected a very, very deep love of Britain and also to some of the records of England. Of England, I'm sorry, sir. Don't confuse me with Scotland or Wales. And also your love of words as well, and some of the popular music that you've chosen. What does this last piece that you've chosen represent? Well, everything. It's Blake Jerusalem and the famous Paris setting. And.

Roy Hattersley26:55

Of England, of England, I'm sorry.

Roy Hattersley26:58

Leading away.

Presenter27:12

It by family and the Labour Party, I can remember my father telling me that George V had said to Hubert Perry, If you don't play Jerusalem, I'm going to whistle it. I can remember hearing it played and singing it at a thousand Labour Party gatherings. I mean, my father, who was the councillor, council when he died, and his funeral, which was very much a council funeral, it was the moment of maximum difficulty to keep our poise in balance when they sang Jerusalem at the end and it

Presenter27:38

Adds up to me for all the family associations of my mother and father and of the Labour Party. It is also the most uplifting piece of music it's possible to listen to. If you hear the thing, you've got to be uplifted at the end. You can't avoid it.

Presenter28:52

Ron Hattersley, do you think you might want to escape from your desert island? Yes. I think at first I'll quite enjoy it, depending on the luxury objects you let me take. But I don't think I will enjoy it for very long. I think I'm basically a gregarious person, and being away from talking to people and listening to people I think I would find very painful after a day or two. What about the book that you take there? Well I want to take S.E. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy because I know you let me have the Bible and Shakespeare free gratis and for nothing. And it seemed to me the best way of spending my time and actually maximising the amount of reading you let me have is to be able to go through those tragedies with Bradley, writing in the margins all the things I don't know about Macbeth and Lear and Othello. I did that in the sixth form with Hamlet and it was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done in my life and I'd like to do it again with the other tragedies and this is the only chance I'm going to get. What about the luxury, the inanimate objects? Well it's a sort of combination. It's what's known at home as my boy writer's set and the boy writer's set is a lot of lined paper, a lot of pens and a lot of that white material with which you paint out words. And I hoped I could have all those combined in a little canvas bag and an indefinite supply of all three and I could write and write and write. That's granted. And what about the one record? You have to choose one record from the eight that you've selected. Oh that's Jerusalem because whenever I'm feeling pretty fed up if I am, if the coconuts are running out or I'm getting horrified by just the flat landscape which is one of my visions of hell because there are no ups and downs, no hills on this island, whenever I'm beginning to feel unhappy, which won't be often, but when it happens, I shall play Jerusalem and I'll feel uplifted again.

Roy Hattersley29:59

And I hope tracker

Roy Hattersley30:33

Right, Hattersley, thank you very much indeed.

Roy Hattersley30:43

Desert Island Discs, which was created by Roy Plumley, was introduced by Michael Parkinson.

Roy Hattersley30:48

The producer was Derek Drescher.

Roy Hattersley30:52

Roy Hatters's selection of records began with an excerpt from the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Talis, played by the Sinfonia of London, conducted by Sir John Barbie Raleigh.

Roy Hattersley31:02

That was followed by Lee Remick singing Anyone Can Whistle from the musical of the same name.

Roy Hattersley31:09

In Summertime on Breeden was sung by Frederic Harvey with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by George Weldon.

Roy Hattersley31:16

The fourth choice was Mabel Mercer's recording of Blame It On My Youth.

Roy Hattersley31:20

Shirley Ross sang Rogers and Hart's It Never Entered My Mind.

Roy Hattersley31:24

And Dame Janet Baker, Where Corals Lie, one of Elgar's five sea pictures.

Roy Hattersley31:29

WH Auden read the excerpt from his own poem In Praise of Limestone.

Roy Hattersley31:34

The final record was Paris' setting of Jerusalem, recorded at the last night of the 1982 proms, when the conductor was James Lochran.

Speaker 331:50

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.