Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Former Royal Navy commander, author, MP, and broadcaster; creator of a newsletter and founder of the Hansard Society.
On the island
Eight records
Western Civilization and the Far East
This disc is not explicitly named in the transcript; the castaway mentions his book but no music disc is introduced. Based on the transcript, no music discs are discussed. Returning empty.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Not recorded.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:53Did this start your ambition as a writer, or was it already there?
No, I've always been inclined to sort of pick up a pen and cover a piece of paper with writing. It's when one of my sort of habit, so to speak.
Presenter asks
1:46What made you decide to resign your commission in the Royal Navy?
Well, I think there were two reasons. One is that for various reasons due to the congestion in the navy there wasn't very much prospect in front of me and secondly, I had always felt that much as I admired the navy, I'm sure it did me a tremendous amount of good… I had an urge all my life to go into what I suppose one would call public life, which in those days I thought meant being a member of parliament.
Presenter asks
2:19How did you set about [educating yourself in civil life]?
Well, I said about that by I got a job with the Royal Institute of International Affairs and then, as a economist once sarcastically remarked, King Hall educates himself in public and gets 2,000 a year for doing it because I discovered that the things I wanted to know and was finding out all the time from the experts was exactly what the ordinary man in the street wanted to know and I knew what he wanted to know.
Presenter asks
4:56Was the theatre a very early interest of yours?
Not really. No, the playwright, you mustn't call it well it may be successful financially, but I'm not really a man of the theatre. I wrote these plays as a joke.
Presenter asks
5:45What have you on the stocks at the moment? What are you working on?
Um well, I'm not working anything in the theatre line. I'm really trying to make a study of a very dull sort of subject it may sound, and that is what is the nature of power in power politics in the nuclear age. That ought to put the listeners off, but still it's very relevant, I assure you, to your present day lives.
Presenter asks
6:04Have you still one outstanding ambition unfulfilled?
Uh no, I've not in a general way. I've had my ambitions. Sometimes they've been fulfilled, sometimes not. But I think at my time of life what I should like to feel is that in the course of one's life one has put more into society than one has taken out of it, and that, of course, only posterity will be able to judge whether one's done it or not.
“I was very careful not to let it be known I was a naval officer and I'm happy to say that the Times Literary Supplement hailed me as a new and hitherto unknown expert on the Far Eastern situation.”
“I had an urge all my life to go into what I suppose one would call public life, which in those days I thought meant being a member of parliament.”
“It started with six hundred subscribers and built up very rapidly a large circulation.”
“It's an unofficial and strictly private and international society which simply exists to promote, in any proper manner, interest in and knowledge about all forms of parliamentary democracy.”
“What I should like to feel is that in the course of one's life one has put more into society than one has taken out of it, and that, of course, only posterity will be able to judge whether one's done it or not.”