Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Blind founder of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, awarded the Albert Schweitzer International Award for Medicine.
On the island
Eight records
The first one will be Basin Street Blues, preferably played by Duke Ellington. That has a story for me. When I went to Worcester College for the Blind, I was then about thirteen, and the place to be was in the band. Well, I spent the whole of one Christmas learning to play a tenor sax. It was about my I was about the size of a tennis axe in those days. And I learned to play this thing, and I went back to school. And I to my delight, I found the person who was playing the saxophone in the band had gone down with a very severe go of flu, and so I took his place just once. Well, I could only play one register on this darn thing, but fortunately Basin Street Blues starts with just one register on the sax. And so there I played it, and I played the thing sort of D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D and I managed it and it was a moment of glory.
Choir of St John's College, Cambridge
Not only because I I love it, but it reminds me of Oxford, and it reminds me of Jean and our wedding. Uh it was uh the sort of thing that was played almost every night in New College Chapel in Oxford, and I think it's a lovely thing.
Symphony No. 9 in C major, 'Great'
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Record number three is Schubert's C Major Symphony, and the reason why I've chosen that is, first of all, because it reminds me of London. I remember sitting in the Albert Hall when the thing was c was playing, and the bombs came, and the bombs were were were rhythmically annotating this symphony in a strange way. And later when I went a when I was in Africa, an extraordinary thing, uh the the the the strange haunting sound of the horns as as in the first bit of that symphony.
The drums of Burundi uh and it doesn't have to be Burundi, but the drums of Africa, because I will think of Africa as drums and the if you live in Zanzibar, the the thing they say in Swahili, that when the drum beats in Zanzibar, East Africa dances as far as the hills, and the wonderful rhythm of the drums, which not just a single drum, but the the symphony of drums playing together, the tremendous rhythm piled one on another.
Next piece of music is the Jatarang. Now this this is the water music of India … hear it over the water at night. or hear it in the courtyard of a Nepalese monastery, and it is magical.
London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra
Record record number six is a rather different sort of record. It is These Things Shall Be. It is the bit over the top in a way, because … I wanted to put it in, because, you know, the United Nations started with that sort of idealism. To my way of thinking, it is the only mechanism which can stumble forward towards some sort of solidarity.
The Last Train to San Fernando
Number seven is the the last train to San Fernando. It's a it's a it's a Calypso. And it would remind me so well of all the marvelous groups of disabled people I've worked with across the world, particularly the Calypso, because most of many of the Calypsonians, as they call them, in the West Indies, uh are themselves blind and they have helped us enormously.
Mass in B minorFavourite
BBC Chorus and New Philharmonia Orchestra
The last record would be the Bach B minor Mass, and I want that for sheer enjoyment. It doesn't remember anything. It is just, to my mind, one of the supreme bits of music of the world. And I want the Sanctus there in the middle, this great, swaying, surging, wonderful. claim of life. … And I'd rather like occasionally to play the B minor mess just to show them what humans could do when they really try.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:22How much of a surprise was it for you that you found yourself dedicating your life to other people?
I don't think this thing is ever predestined. You know, you you you do it, you do one thing after another. Uh, when I had my own accident which caused my blindness, I naturally began to get involved in the whole skills of blindness. And then from that naturally one goes to take an interest in the thing on a first of all nationally and then perhaps internationally. And it's been a fascinating business. I've loved every minute of it, and it's taken me to so many countries and millions of friends.
Presenter asks
5:04Tell me about the accident itself. How exactly did it happen?
It was in a chemistry laboratory at a school a school in Scarborough. One of the bottles had been mislabelled, and I d I don't remember what was in the darn thing, but it blew up quite spectacularly and blew most of the laboratory out of the window, and uh I th that was how I lost my sight, and they took me to a hospital, and very soon after that I went on to Worcester.
Presenter asks
5:53It was a terrible shock for you and to be immediately sent off to boarding school too – coping with huge changes in your life all in one go.
The keepsakes
The book
I always wanted to play chess better than I do play chess, and I'd like a book on that
The luxury
it'd be a wonderful way of getting round the island. Even more, I could use it to tell whether there were coconuts in the coconut tree.
Well, everybody says that, you know, but I don't remember it that way. And I've met so many people who've gone blind at my sort of years since, and they don't either. I mean, you accept it as a child. A child, I don't think, stops to think about catastrophe. It was a catastrophic on my parents, of course it was. They d me a lot of my time was taken trying to soothe down their anxieties, I remember.
Presenter asks
9:09You won a scholarship to Oxford – how on earth did you manage that when you were totally blind?
Oh, it's not so difficult, not so not so exceptional as all that. Do you know an interesting thing is that blind students at Oxford and Cambridge, over the past thirty years, I think it is, have got one uh two and a half times as many first class degrees, and one and a half times as many second class degrees, as the average of all students.
Presenter asks
15:35So Jean had become your eyes for you – has that always been the deal between you?
Well yes, you know, we're taught these days that to be independent to disabled people. I don't think that's right. I think it's interdependence. And Jean and I have always worked together. It was an absolute marvel to me when we got married and how how the whole thing changed. You were talking about how it changed when I lost my sight. The th real change was when we got married and were able to do things which I'd wanted to do and she'd wanted to do. I mean, t two together could do far more than we could do done separately.
Presenter asks
31:41On the island it would be a time for reassessment – what kind of conclusions would you come to about the cards life has dealt you?
I can't imagine. I I I am not very good at contemplation. I don't think I'd be very good at summarizing. or drawing conclusions from a career.
“Well not a bit. Yes, Mother Teresa uh I I've met her on a number of occasions in in in India. She she's anything but a saint like. She's a most amusing and charming woman.”
“This is the thing which the French call sans dobstak, the sense of the obstacle. And when you're walking along a street you you you begin to get used to the idea of the shadow sound of a tree or a lamp post, the difference between the different echo of when you're b between a a wall on your right and and a hedge. Of course you get used to all sorts of building these things into into panorama, into into views. Um this morning I was thinking about it as I was standing in our garden. Near at hand there's the the people talking. A little further away there's a tree, a sort of white column of sound in the wind. And beyond that, in our in our case, there was there's a sea, and uh at the road a a sort of hush of the of the car as it goes along the road, a sort of tangent across a circle. And then with luck, far out at sea, there there would be the the the toot of a of a of a of a of a boat, uh the sound of a boat, and that s that illuminates the whole scene.”
“Well yes, you know, we're taught these days that to be independent to disabled people. I don't think that's right. I think it's interdependence. And Jean and I have always worked together. It was an absolute marvel to me when we got married and how how the whole thing changed. You were talking about how it changed when I lost my sight. The th real change was when we got married and were able to do things which I'd wanted to do and she'd wanted to do. I mean, t two together could do far more than we could do done separately.”
“It was very much like a as a Biblical scene. Blind people saw again, deaf people talked. And children who had been crippled from birth walked again. There were some wonderful things. I mean, I remember the first on the first time the train about two years ago went to a remote part of India, there was a girl who was seventeen, and she was crawling about on all fours, having been a polio victim from birth, and being being mocked in the v in in in the village and by the in the market place, and she was really feeling she was at the bot bottom of everything. They were able to restore her to an upright movement again, and this last time we had a telephone call from the village saying uh that this girl was getting married. So could the train please come back and help to celebrate the wedding.”
“I can't imagine. I I I am not very good at contemplation. I don't think I'd be very good at summarizing. or drawing conclusions from a career.”
“And I'd rather like occasionally to play the B minor mess just to show them what humans could do when they really try.”