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. The programme was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an academic, never one to retreat into scholarly seclusion, she's also an active Labour politician and a leading public servant. She was educated At the London School of Economics where she went on to teach and then at the age of 35 joined the Downing Street think tank advising... Then Callaghan. Having twice failed to be selected as a Labour parliamentary candidate, she returned to the world of education. She became Deputy Education Officer at the Inner London Education Authority and more recently

Master of Birkbeck College in London. She was made a life peer in 1987 and became Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington but she prefers to be known simply as Tessa Blackstone. What does the handle Lady Blackstone do for you Tessa? Does it put your teeth on edge or does it just make you laugh? I really hate it. I much prefer just to be called Tessa. And I regret the fact that serving my party in the House of Lords means that I have to carry a title with me. I wish I didn't have to be called Baroness Blackstone or Lady Blackstone. On the other hand, you do in the end get used to these things. A lot of people still call me Dr. Blackstone or Professor Blackstone, and I prefer that. Many ways. And a lot of people call you master because you're master of Birkbeck, do they? Some of the staff at Birkbeck call me master. I think these rather archaic titles... Become gender neutral eventually just as a result of more and more women occupying the posts that go with the titles.

Having got over the problem of how to address you, there's then the problem of how to categorise you, because as I've said, you're an academic, but I could as well have said politician, and you were a civil servant, and you very much are a public servant. What do you think of yourself? I've often thought of myself as a rather marginal person who doesn't quite fit into anything. Is scholarly enough to be a proper academic, but too much of an academic to be a really effective politician, and maybe just a bit too political to be a good civil servant or So where does that leave you does it I mean that leaves you falling between all of the stores Is that a happy place to be used me for? between all of the stools, but somehow rather managing to sit with part of my bottom on all three bits of the stool. But it's comfortable. It sounds very uncomfortably. No, it's actually, actually I think I've come to terms with...

And I actually rather enjoy the variety. Let's have some music. What's your first desert island disc? I would like to have Shirley Verrett singing the song of the Vale from Verdis Don Carlos. I love the mezzo voice and she has the most beautiful voice and it was one of the... Greatest of productions, opera productions, at the Royal Opera House over the last 25 or 30 years, it's still going and I don't think it could be improved on.

Shirley Verrett singing the Song of the Vale from Act II of Verdi's Don Carlos with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. We were talking about titles and categories... But what about names? I suppose the phrase that was used of you that's proved difficult for you to shake off is dark-eyed evil genius. Now where did that one come from? that will be with me till I go to the grave. It was apparently. Invented by some wag in the Foreign Office when I was working in the Central Policy Review staff on a big piece of work which was known as the Review of Overseas Representations. And there was a bit of a campaign against some of our ideas from people from... Deep inside the Foreign Office. But your idea was to attack their lavish lifestyle, I guess. Well, it actually wasn't really about that.

- Did you say they should sell their palatial residence? - That was a very small part of a big piece of work, but it was this, the newspapers, particularly the popular press of course. But why did they pick on you? I mean dark-eyed evil genius is a sort of... I suppose it's sexism really, it was sexist stuff, wasn't it? Well, I worked in a team of five people, three of whom were men. There was one other woman, Kate Mortimer, and she and I were certainly, to some extent, picked on. I suspect, particularly at that time, we're now going back more than 15 years, some of the... It meant that we were asked to interview. We're not used to working with women and they found it more difficult. So I think perhaps there was an element of defensiveness on their part and. A little bit of sexism too. But you were though, I suppose you are, an... Natural feminist aren't you? From early on you seem to have been determined to establish

As a woman? Yes, there's no doubt that early in my career I was strongly motivated. By a wish to demonstrate that women could succeed in a wide variety of different jobs, different positions in public life, that women could be both mothers and successful career women. I suppose that I got into trying to be a young mother with a professional career. In the early days when it was much less accepted than it is now. This was early sixties because you were married and had a baby before you graduated. Absolutely right. And at that time, the view that predominated was that women with...

Children should stay at home and I certainly knew that that wasn't for me and I think it really wouldn't have been for my children either because I would have been a pretty frustrated and not very effective mother if I had not been able to fine looking after my children but doing other things. And have you had any regrets since, looking back, it was as you say a long time ago now, 30 years or more, any regrets that you put that work before full-time motherhood? No, I don't regret that at all. I regret lots of things about what I did as a mother. I regret the fact that I was often terribly impatient. And you know I sometimes wish that I had spent more time doing certain sorts of things with my children when they were small. I will say that I do now have a wonderful relationship with my children and see a great deal of them. They matter hugely to me and I like to think and hope that I matter to them. And now you're a grandmother.

And now I'm a grandmother and my 18th month old granddaughter is the apple of my eye. I'm quite besotted with her. Record number two. I would like Jean Sablain singing Le Fiac and I'd like it because it reminds me of my... Father. He used to sing it round the lunch table on Sundays when he had a glass of beer or two when we were children. And then again he sang it to my own children when they were young and we always loved it. Jean Sablon singing Le Fiac.

You're a feminist then, a left of centre political thinker. What are the roots of those persuasions, Tessa? Were your parents radicals? Not particularly. My father used to describe himself as the last liberal in the home counties in the 1950s when there weren't very many of them around. Certainly was interested in politics. He sometimes got into discussions with us about political issues, but not very often. I wouldn't say we were a highly politicised family.

And he refused because he didn't think it was proper. No, he would talk about politics, but what he wouldn't do was to tell us how he had voted, in spite of this throwaway line about being the last liberal. And he used to say this because he was a local authority chief officer, and local government officers, he used to say in a slightly jokey way, are not meant to reveal what their political persuasions are because they should be able to work for either side. My mother, again, has always been interested in... Public issues of one sort or another but not in a party sense at all. Did she work? Did she have a job? She didn't for many years and she was a deeply frustrated housewife and mother who really would love to have had a job and a career. She started life as an actress and as a...

In Paris and then actually met my father in the war when he was in London working for the fire service and she was a driver enrolling like so many other middle-class girls at the time to do War work and she, when I was close to leaving school in the sixth form I think, went and got herself a qualification in shorthand and typing and became a medical secretary. But I think I was very influenced by being aware of her frustration and she was a tremendous... Sometimes it's encouraged her, of my sister and me. She wanted us to do well. That you didn't need any assertiveness training. Is this because you had to fight your corner in the family? Yes, I come from a large family with two brothers and a sister and we used to compete tremendously.

In every respect. - But what you're admitting to in saying that, that you don't need assertiveness training, is that you're bossy, which is one of those words that are... Of women who know their own mind or what they think should happen next. Have you, does that worry you being bossy or have you accepted that that's the way you are? I think I've accepted that. I am an organising kind of person. I like running things, I like things to go smoothly, I like people to be using their energies in a way that seems to me to be constructive. What I don't like about myself is that I'm sometimes terribly impatient. I get cross with people if they're doing things too slowly or if they haven't worked out clearly what is a sensible way of tackling a particular problem and I do wish I were more patient. Record number three. I would like to have Lotta Lenya singing Sura.

By Johnny Recht Weill's song. This goes back to my late adolescence when I did German at school and German at A-level and spent quite a lot of time doing exchanges. Staying with German families and although I don't think I actually heard Sirabaya Jhoni played in these families, it's a lovely piece of 20th century semi-familiar. Popular music. Bye, Johnny.

So, home life in the home counties and at where grammar school wasn't particularly politically inspiring, when and where then did you come across politics? London School of Economics as an undergraduate. I went there totally unprepared in many ways for what I was going to get. It was... An enormously challenging experience to me having been at a small, not particularly academic, girls grammar school. Where I'd been very happy but certainly I don't think tremendously stretched in any way. and I... I suddenly found myself thrown into a very cosmopolitan group of students with a tremendously talented group of academics who taught me and it broadened my understanding of life and the world hugely. But what were the political ideas, what were the issues that set you alight at that point?

One it would have been, right? Yes, South Africa. I arrived at LSE not very long after Sharpeville. Um... I think poverty in the third world generally. I met a lot of third world students for them. First time in my life. I think inequality within Britain, I learnt through my lectures on the social structure of modern Britain the extent and degree of poverty, which I was unaware of within my own country. All these things radicalized me, there's no doubt about that. And you also fell in love. I did. In love with a man who articulated all of these things very well. Was that part of the attraction? He came from a South Wales mining background and was president of the Students' Union at LSE. With piercing blue eyes and auburn hair. And he had a sort of charisma.

And he was tremendously involved in politics himself. He'd been a member of a Labour Party from quite a young age and again was a great debater and took part in National Union of Student Competitions and that sort of thing. So getting involved with Tom also got me more deeply into politics. And perhaps I would otherwise have done. So you married him, Tom Evans, and you had a child, and then later another one, both now grown up, of course. But he, Tom, your husband, sympathised with your feminist aspirations, didn't he? I mean, he didn't blame you for not wanting to stay at home and look after the children. Yes, he passionately believed that women should have the same... Opportunities to contribute to the wider world beyond the home as men. Although coming... From a background where, on the whole, women looked after the men in their homes.

He had certainly not been brought up to do very much around the house. He accepted that this was something that he really should do. But he was never terribly good at it, much as he tried and wanted to. He was very impractical. But he was very committed to taking his turn, coming back and putting the children to bed on those occasions when I could. Get back that kind of thing. But in the end I think what after about nine or ten years the marriage came unstuck. It did. But you came together again as a family. In really very sad circumstances much later on in the mid 80s didn't you when when Tom found he had cancer. That's right. Tom and I remained enormously close friends even after our marriage broke down and we constantly talked to each other about politics, our careers, life and the children of course. Who remained at the centre of both of our lives, but he very sadly got stomach-wracking.

Cancer in his early 40s and eventually died. And it was a very difficult period of course for my children. As well as for me, but I did look after him in those final weeks of his life and I'm very glad I did so. Next record. I would like Ella Fitzgerald singing Every Time We Say Goodbye kit because it was something that Tom used to sing when we first lived together. We had one of those enormous great big tapes that we had in the early 60s of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter and this is the one I... Would choose from that tape.

♪ I die a little ♪ ♪ Every time we say goodbye ♪ ♪ Say goodbye ♪ Ella Fitzgerald, and every time we say goodbye. You twice tried to become a Labour candidate. Of Blackstone in Stoke Newington and then later in Stevenage. Why were you rejected you think? What didn't the local parties like about you? Well, you don't have to ask them. Difficult to answer that question. That I wasn't quite what they wanted at that time. I don't now particularly regret having failed. I think I was always a little ambivalent about it anyway. It happened that there was a vacancy in my own local constituency.

And therefore it seemed sensible to have a crack at it, even though I realised at the time that my chances of being selected were not very high, but I always felt that perhaps I wasn't going to make a very good Member of Parliament, that there was things about the life which I would find irritating and I was also always, to be honest, a little bit worried about whether I was going to be able to cope as a single mother. I was by then with looking after my children and doing all that you have to do as a full-time politician. But you're in politics proper now. You're opposition spokesman now in the Lords on foreign affairs and you've done... In science, you've done treasury, you've done trade and industry as well haven't you? I'm now a spokesman on trade and industry. Right. And how much larger a role would you like to play? What's your political ambition really, ideally? - Well, my political ambition is to get rid of...

Of government and elect a Labour one and if that were to happen, and I hope and expect it will at the next general election. Then I would very much like to play some part in working for or in a Labour government. What would you ideally like? Ah, that's a very difficult question to ask. So there are lots of different things that I would be happy to do. I don't have one clear idea of what I want to do and I think it would be very dangerous to have such a thing. Certainly, I mean you'd narrow your options for a start but surely it would be in the area of education which has been your life study really. I wanted actually to change from education in the Lords during last session because I got just a little bit stale and a little bit bored. I may well want to come back to it at some point but I wouldn't say that that's necessarily the department that I would want to end up in.

We had a lower government. More music. I would like to have part of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. I would like the Adoration de la Terre. I've chosen this because one of the great loves of my life is ballet, classical ballet and Stravinsky was the great 20th century composer of ballet music. Very hard to select a piece from all the wonderful works that he wrote for me. Ballet. This piece however I think is enormously exciting and I've chosen it partly because of course when it was first played it was a great scondale in Paris, it was booed and I think it's a demonstration of how audiences can get things wrong at first.

Part of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Adoration de la Terre, played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Carian. You became master of Birkbeck in 1987 and you've been there ever since. It seems that you feel there like a round peg in a round hole. Why do you say that? What makes you feel that? I identify so strongly with what it does. I really believe in providing higher education of high quality for people who want to study part time in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s. In other words, when they're older, not just at the conventional age of 18 to 22. But the thing I also love about Birkbeck is its students.

They're so motivated and so enthusiastic about what they're doing. They're committed perhaps in a way that ordinary undergraduates are. Absolutely. Do they come in the evenings or during the day when they fit it in? No, they come in the evenings after work. Most of our students have jobs in the day and anybody who can manage to do a three-year undergraduate course in four years combined with a job has an option. Awful lot of energy and drive and commitment. The College also happens to be in a rather attractive part of London in Bloomsbury, home to the British Museum and a higher than average number of blue plaques signifying ancient distinguished residents. Yes, I'm extremely lucky in that I live in a University of London house with a blue plaque. Which in my wildest dreams I wouldn't have ever imagined would be outside my front door. Says Milstint Garrett Fawcett lived here. - So this is your tied cottage. - This is my tied cottage.

To live in a house which was lived in for 40 years by the great suffragist and fighter for women's rights. Wonderful. So it would be quite a large decision to move on. I'm sure the next job, your next job, would have to be very attractive to persuade you to leave a post in which you felt happy. And a home that you loved? Absolutely. You haven't got one in mind? Not at all. Record number six. I would like the trio from Mozart's Cosi Fantutti at the end of act one its most beautiful. Piece of music. Also I think it would be rather appropriate on this desert island in that what they're singing, the two women and Donna Alfonso, is made... Wind be gentle and the waves be calm as they're waving goodbye to lovers as they go off in a boat. And I would be thinking, may the wind... Be gentle in the waves, be calm. Somebody come and get me.

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry singing part of the trio Suave Silvento from the first act of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tute with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Karl Böhm. You're on the main board at the Royal Opera House, Tessa. You're chairman of the ballet. You've been on committees at the Arts Council, you've been chairman of the BBC's General Advisory Council, you're a trustee of the Natural History Museum. The word 'governor' was... Or trustee or patron turns up numerous times in your CV. Is this pure altruism at work or is there something in it for you too? - Oh, there's a huge amount in it for me.

First of all, I love being involved in a wide range of different institutions in this country. being Chairman of the Royal Royal. The BBC's General Advisory Council, for example, was enormously instructive for me. I learnt a lot about broadcasting and how a great public organisation like the BBC was. Like the BBC works. Similarly, being involved with the Opera House, it's a wonderful privilege, it's not just altruism. But those are the fun ones, those are the big ones, those are the influential ones. What about the numerous, and I cannot overstate this really, numerous other roles that you play on various committees for various reasons. I mean, can you simply, when they ring up, not say no? Oh, I do. I, I. I mean I often say no and in fact I've taken a New Year's resolution this year not to take on anything else unless I get off something because there is a danger that you just go away.

On adding more and more things. And I have a job to do, and I have a political role to play, and I want to do those properly. Presumably based on what we were saying earlier about your being naturally assertive, committees are all the better if you're the chairman. I mean otherwise jolly frustrating business if you think, oh come on, this person could move this along, you know, you would be able Yes, but... You nodded. Well, you can... No, I think you can play a perfectly effective role and try to make things happen as a member of a committee rather than try to chair them all, and I'm certainly not chairman of everything that I'm involved with and wouldn't want to be. Next record. I would like to have part of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral. This, again, is like my previous choice, a just wonderful piece of music. I don't think I could go to a desert island without some Beethoven. What... What this music would do, I think, is make me think about the English countryside. Walking in the Star Valley, I have a little cottage which I...

Share with several friends on the Suffolk Essex border and I love going there at all times of the year but I think in particular I would think about walking there in autumn.

Part of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major, the Pastoral, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. I think we've established that you're not particularly domesticated. Tessa, but you're ordered and you're organized and you're efficient, so your island will work for you, will it? I mean, you'll get it all sorted out. You won't just sit there. Miserably hoping someone would turn up. Oh, I'll certainly sit there miserably hoping somebody will turn up. I will be terrible on this desert island. One I'm not terribly good spending... Long periods of time on my own. I don't like my own company for more than a few hours and secondly I'm terribly impractical. I wouldn't really know how to chop down trees and make a fire. I wouldn't find it very easy to go out and catch fish and even if I caught one I'd hate killing it. So I'll probably starve quite soon. This is very pathetic stuff.

I can organise other people to do things for me, you see, that's the problem rather than doing things for myself of this sort. What will you miss most? I'll miss my granddaughter. I'll be sitting there longing to go back and have her on my knee looking at a book. She's just starting to talk and saying dog and cat and what does the dog say? Woof woof. And if... If you didn't pull through, I'm sorry to put this to you, but it's quite an interesting question. If the rescue came too late and there you were, a dusty heap on the beach, Think that we'd be saying about you back here, what would you like to be, I suppose, remembered for or as? I suppose I would like people to remember me as a woman in the second part of the 20th century. Century who fought to improve opportunities for children from every kind of social background, particularly in relation to

to education. And I suppose I would like people to remember me as somebody who... Had a wide range of concerns as far as public policy is concerned. And someone who perhaps was... Do you like to think of yourself as a role model for younger women? Well, it sounds a little bit pompous. Some sort of pretentious, I don't know that I am a perfect role model, in fact I know I'm not. I suppose I would like to be thought of as somebody who had encouraged younger women in a variety of different contexts but I find this question very embarrassing. Then we shall stop forcing you to answer it and ask you for your last record. I would like to take Janet Baker.

Singing 'Ponderschönheit' from Mahler's 'Song of the Earth'. The reason I've chosen this is that it's a beautiful piece of music but it's also a piece of music that was used by Kenneth Macmillan in his great masterwork, the ballet 'The Song of the Earth'. When I first saw it in the 1960s it had a huge impact on me and I think as well as listening to the music I would think about the dancing.

Janet Baker singing 'Fondes Schoenheit' from Mahler's 'Song of the Earth' with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Bernard Huytink. Well now, which one of the eight, Tessa, do you think you'd have to have above all others? I think I'd want to take the Mozart. And what about your book? I would like George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'. I'm a great admirer of George Eliot, one of the great women writers and I think that is her best work. And your luxury?

Well, I'm, as I've already mentioned, very impractical, and I have to own up that I can't even type. So I wondered whether I should take a laptop word processor, but it would have to have an incredibly simple manual that had been specially written for very stupid people like me so that I didn't get stuck at lesson two. The alternative is to take one of those Is walls that you get at smart tennis clubs with a nice piece of concrete in front of it and plenty of balls and a good tennis racket so that I could bang away when I got fed up with swimming,

Not just playing tennis. On the basis that there's no such thing as an easy manual to teach you how to use a computer, I think you'd better have the tennis wall. Okay, I'll accept that. Tessa Blackstone, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/diss.