Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A conservationist and birdwatcher, Director General of Nature Conservancy and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund.
On the island
Eight records
George Barclay with Charlie Kunz and the Casani Club Orchestra
I'm playing Red Sails in the Sunset because I'm a very bad sailor, but in the course of my life about the environment, I've had to go a long way about the world and I've had to cross many seas and so on. And this, I think, gets the feeling that we in this little island are really only a very small part of the natural world and that we've got to think of ourselves as wanderers, as enjoying the resources of a planet which is pretty small by any by most standards, but which is big enough for us if we use it properly.
The Concert Band and Chorus of the RAAF
I came to live in Portsmouth at the beginning of World War I and I had the si the scene then of the expeditionary force, the old contemporaries, marching through the streets of Portsmouth. So many of them never came back.
I like that particularly because I was 40 meters up, 130 feet up in the top of the canopy in Demerara and nobody had ever done an all-night session at the top of the canopy. I saw the monkeys coming through just by me and so it's a special song for me.
Ewald Böhmer with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Clemens Schmalstich
I would like on my desert island to remember Ludwig and all the lovely times we had together, and this was his favorite music
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
we were having a very difficult meeting of about 20 people which was deadlocked on some shipping problem and suddenly there was a slight pause in the meeting and Hercombe, who was in the chair and I both got up, left the meeting hurriedly, went over to the window and listened to one of the first black red starts to sing in. It wasn't a nightingale, it was a black red start, but we listened to it, just made sure of it, and we came back to the table and everybody was dumbfounded and this difficult argument immediately come to an end. Everybody agreed within two minutes, so never underestimate the power of a bird.
a great deal of our work was in Scotland, and one of the first reserves we got was in what was now called the Road to the Isles. So I have chosen for my next record The Road to the Isles.
I'm not a musical person, but this was the waltz from Othenbach Helen. And Helen of Troy, of course, was a great person who started quite a lot of things. And I somehow got very attached to this melody, and I would like to hear it now.
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 'Pastoral'Favourite
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer
My last record, of course that very great composer Beethoven was obviously a bird lover and the last record that I want is the Pastoral Symphony and I want the part of it where he actually as a composer of music he goes to learn from the quail and the cuckoo and so on and you hear the birds in the Beethoven music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:13What are the horrible things in the world that come to your mind?
There are so many, it's hard to know where to start. But I think what I would call malign technology technology has been used in a malign way. It's been used to destroy a lot of the environment. It has been used to destroy a lot of people's lives.
Presenter asks
5:04Is there a moment when you recall [the bird watching bug] happening?
Yes, I recall it very vividly. It was a wet day and my parents were passing the Natural History Museum and I said, let's take him in there. And we went into the bird gallery. In the bird gallery, there were wonderful habitat groups of eagles on their rock ledges and so on. And there and then I said, this is what I want to do. I want to watch these birds and I want to learn more about them.
Presenter asks
9:46What was your reaction [to the outbreak of World War I] as a young boy?
Oh, they did and of course for two years the war was run entirely by volunteers. It was only in the middle of the war that conscription was brought in. But um nobody had any idea what carnage there would be. I can't I can't speak without emotion of the incompetence of the generals we had in the First World War, in sharp contrast to the ones in the second.
The keepsakes
The book
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
This was perhaps the most important book written this century and far more people ought to read it because we don't know who we are as a human animal unless we understand evolution...
Presenter asks
25:10Why did you leave [your exciting life in government] and become Director General of Nature Conservancy?
Well, I was a charter member. I was a council member and we appointed another man as the first director general, but he couldn't cope with it and he left very early. And then the chairman came to me and said, well, the vice-chairman came to me, said, well, we've got a very simple decision to make. Either we pack the thing up or you come in and run it. Which shall it be?
Presenter asks
26:34Why were [the civil servants] so relieved [when you left]?
Well, because I was a permanent civil servant aged in my middle 40s, I had a long way to go. They couldn't get rid of me from the civil service. There was no way they could get rid of me. And they were terrified. They knew what an activist I was. And all the civil servants took a very contrary view to me. And they were wondering how on earth they could possibly get me out of the civil servant. And suddenly, overnight, this mad fellow got out himself too. They were so grateful.
“We have broken away from the principles of nature and we've got to get back to them very soon if we don't want to become an endangered species out of it.”
“It didn't seem lonely to me because I was with the birds.”
“I think having been born under the sugarloaf, the air I absorbed as a baby was the air which makes one again the government. And I've always been again the government, even when I've been in it.”