Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Zoologist and journalist who led a zoological expedition to Persia and wrote a book about it, later worked as a reporter and magazine editor.
On the island
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:00What part of the country do you come from?
I was born in the Thames Valley near Cookham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire, and I now live in London and have done for the last fifteen years or so.
Presenter asks
0:18What was your first scientific interest? What started you as a scientist? Was it in the family? Was it an early thing of bird watching?
Bird watching was a very strong thing in the family, but no, it wasn't a scientific family. I don't know, at school you had to sit on one side of the fence or the other, and I sat on the science side very willingly.
Presenter asks
1:07You were in a [bailiel?] — what did you read? What was your study?
I read zoology.
Presenter asks
2:11What did you do then [after writing your first book]?
Well, I thought it'd be rather nice to write another book under equally idyllic circumstances, and so having had the Persian one accepted, then full of high spirits, I moved over to Italy and wrote another, which brought me very savagely down to earth again by being not accepted. Oh dear. And by that time I'd run out of what I laughingly called my savings and felt I had to get a job. So I got a job as a general reporter on the Manchester Guardian. Very lucky to get in.
Presenter asks
3:25This [magazine] was a magazine for a Negro readership. This must have presented problems for a white man who didn't even know Africa.
Very much so, yes. It was fun and also the problem. I mean of course it's got to be for a Negro readership in the sense that in Nigeria the whites even in their heyday were outnumbered 3,000 to 1. So if you're only selling to the one then it's not a very good magazine. No I was suitably humble in that I couldn't write the kind of things that they were going to be interested in. I didn't know the ins and outs of politics which were fascinating for them. I certainly didn't know what kind of short stories were good. I was there as the person trying to ease himself out of a job teaching people to become photographers and writers in a rather sub-editorial way and being amazed at their choice of stories and personalities to write about. For example the cover girl which we had to have on this glossier magazine, I knew perfectly well which of the ten photographs on my desk I preferred and had a batting order for them. And everybody else in the office disagreed with me, so I thought they were wrong. But we took the pictures out into the street and every passerby agreed with them, never with me. So I became more humble.
Presenter asks
5:24Could that [motorcycle] trip be done now?
Alas, alas it couldn't. I was in at the final stages of the empire, so to speak, and very grateful that one could just waltz through. But these days, of course, the South Africa has very much cut itself off from the rest of the world, always being cut off by the rest of the world. Rhodesia, as we know, is a different kettle of fish from Zambia, which is just north of it. Tanzania is having a bit of a problem in Kenya and Uganda now. No, I think it would be very, very difficult.
“Bird watching was a very strong thing in the family, but no, it wasn't a scientific family. I don't know, at school you had to sit on one side of the fence or the other, and I sat on the science side very willingly.”
“I wrote a book called Blind White Fish in Persia.”
“I was suitably humble in that I couldn't write the kind of things that they were going to be interested in. I didn't know the ins and outs of politics which were fascinating for them.”
“I was in at the final stages of the empire, so to speak, and very grateful that one could just waltz through.”
“I thought how nice it would be to go right round Britain and became more fascinating on thinking that it was six thousand miles long.”