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 1994 and the presenter was Sue Law. My castaway this week is a journalist and broadcaster. He was born 65 years ago in an East End foster home and brought up... He says, without the handicaps of family and religion. At the age of eight, he discovered Big sisters in the home was in fact his mother. His taste for reading and writing led him towards journalism. Beginning as a messenger at Reuters, he eventually became the editor of three Fleet Street newspapers, The Daily Express, The Daily Star, and The News of the World. Then, nearly a decade ago,

He joined BBC Radio where he's become a popular personality, first with a breakfast show and now with a late night programme. My life, he says, has been an attempt to prove that I'm entitled to a place in the human race. He is Derek Jamieson. It's a real rags to riches saga, Derek. Why are you going to tell me there are no riches? What I... It's absolutely true, I mean it's been a lifelong struggle when it goes on. Every single day people ask me how I'm doing as I walk along the street, you know, I'm now a sort of national institution. And they always say, How you doing, Del? And I always say, Struggling on in a cruel world. Struggling like that, they all laugh, they say this is cruel, driving a taxi or being up a ladder.

You've got a nice house on the south coast, you've got a flat in London, I mean you've done terribly well. Very, very well. At least a hundred times better than anyone could ever have imagined. But if you are born and grow up as poor as I was, then you carry those scars with you all your life. So that what hasn't altered then is your perception of yourself, is it? That you still feel you've got to struggle to prove that you're, what, not a nobody? Totally, yes. I am a poor working class lad from the slums of London, and every time I open my mouth, people discriminate.

They don't think I'm clever or I've done anything or I've succeeded. They think it's that Yobo Derek Jameson. You sure? Or is it that you think they do? Well, that's the question, isn't it? I mean, I'm only just coming face to face with the reality at the age of 65. Could it be me? You're telling me something now, Sue. I never thought of it that way. You think it might be all in my head. Now, of course, people discriminate against me. Because of the accent? Absolutely. It's never done me any good at all. My dear, if I'd spoken like Sue Lawley and... Of Derek Jamieson, I would have done ten times better. But you've smoothed it out, haven't you? You're a lot posher today than you were ten years ago. Well indeed, I'm not even a Cockney. I mean, I'm seen as the archetypal Cockney, and every time a newspaper mentions my name they say Cockney DJ, Cockney Dell. But of course I'm

Cockney's taught like that, don't he? Are you doing so alright, girl? You know, that's Cockney. Right, let's look at your music. Tell me about music. How important is it to you? Well, I think I've got this wonderful gift of universal taste, you know. I like all music, everything. And when Fate decided that I should be a DJ on BBC Radio, Music station, Radio 2. I was delighted because it gave me a chance to be surrounded, enveloped in lovely music, although most of the time they don't play my kind of music because I prefer opera and the classics to pop. But I still like pop music, I still have a great love for it. And your first record is one of the great classic pop numbers of all time, isn't it? That's why I chose it, because it represents the world of pop music. This, I think, is the greatest piece of music ever written in the pop world.

You. Can't forget this evening, All your faces you were leaving, But I guess that's just the way the story goes. *Music* Nilsen and without you. Describe then, if you will, Derek Jamieson, where it all began, the foster home in Hackney. Was it really squalid?

Indeed, well I was born in Hackney Hospital in 1929, just alongside the Hackney Marshes, and discovered as I got older, three, four, five, that I was one of a large group of children, waifs and strays, the rejects of life. An old girl called Mrs Agnes Wren, Mar Wren, brought us up, she ran this home. Purely privately, I mean everything. Was beg, borrow or steal, that was her philosophy. In that order? Well, it's yours, you're saying, not necessarily in that order. There was no welfare state, no social workers, you had to live on your wits, you know, and she sent us out to earn pennies from an early age. But did you steal? Oh yes, oh absolutely. What did you steal? Just things from shops, you know.

I mean fruit. I remember there was a greengrocer at the top of the road called Charlton's and every time I went into Charlton's I would pinch apples, pears, any fruit I could get my hands on because fruit is the stuff. Of life isn't it? But did you take stuff home to her? Is that what she kind of expected? Oh yes we did. I mean we went out to get money and the money bought food. The conditions in the home were, and you've written about them, pretty squalid, weren't they? I mean, you've written about five to a bed and someone peeing up your back. That's right, yes. Bed bugs marching across the ceiling. I mean, can you believe, Sue, to be so poor that you drink your tea out of an old jam jar because no one can afford a china cup?

Kind of cup. But where did the money come from? Well some of the women who had illegitimate babies would give Ma five bob a week, send the postal order now and again. She would go round the churches, you know, scavenging in churches, seeing what she could get. One week we'd all be supporting the Salvation Army and then a couple of weeks later we'd all be Catholic and then we'd be congregation. She didn't tell them that none of us were baptized at all. And in fact then you discovered, as I said at the introduction, at the age of 8, that one of the girls... Yeah, I was 7 or 8. You see, Elsie Wren was one of the big girls. My name was Jamieson, wasn't I?

Ma Wren ran the home, she was in charge and it never occurred to me until I began to realize how much Elsie seemed to depend upon me and turned to me and leaned on me when she wanted support and help. And it occurred to me around the age of seven or eight that Elsie was in fact my mother. I didn't call her mother until I was well into my thirties. How old was she then? Well, she was twenty-seven. When she had me, so growing up in the 30s she'd be in her mid-20s, 24, 25. And then she had another child who you realised was your sister? Yes, I had a sister, Jean, who's in America, Ohio, and she was born in 1936. And I think by the same time...

Father. - Was there quite a fine line then, dividing this idea that this home was an orphanage or was it a brothel? - Well, no, it was an orphanage. I mean, some of the girls, the way in which they got their money, yes. Not all the girls, but some of the girls didn't bear examination, but it certainly wasn't a brothel, but you could say that the girls made the supreme sacrifice when necessary to get a bag of groceries. - Let's have record number two. - As you know, I'm a great opera lover. I discovered it. In wartime days, I had this wonderful program called Two Way Forces Favorites, and there, amid what Vera, Lynn, the Ink Spots, and Shelton, suddenly I heard this incredible voice, and it was Gigli singing. And I fell in love with opera that day, that Sunday lunchtime at the age of 14 and I've been totally enchanted ever since. And I think it's not only one of the world's greatest singers, but one of the greatest arias of them all.

Dame Joan Suddlun singing I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.

Joan Sutherland singing 'I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls' from Michael Bouse, The Bohemian Girl. You'd have been about what, twelve or thirteen? Derek when you were evacuated to Bishop Stortford. How did Derek Jamieson, cheeky, rough, illegitimate? Which was quite a stigma in those days, wasn't it? How did you go down in Bishop's Dormant? Well, it wasn't easy because people used to whisper things like, I know all about you, you little tyke, and all that. And I had this wonderful story, Sue. My father was an air hero. He was killed in the First World War, you know, the old air flying corps. He was a battle over the trenches in Flanders, shot down in flames, a great war hero. Sadly, at the age of 9, 10, 11, I didn't realize that if my father died in World War I, which ended in 1918, what was I doing being born 10 or 11 years now?

And that, of course, was my ruin. Yes, everybody knew I was a liar. But there was a man called Ernie Hare, wasn't there, who gave you a good hiding and then became a rather, well, a kind of father figure. Yes, teachers were in short supply because of the war. I think we had three or four teachers for a big East End school from London. And one of the teachers was Ernest Hare. He took an interest in me, he saw something,

After I had destroyed someone's potato, seed potatoes, I'd cut them up with a pen knife and he knocked me across the road, you know, bash, 'cause I lied and tried to blame someone else and he bashed me across the road, which had a tremendous salutary effect upon me. I formed a great attachment to him. I remember being very, very emotionally tied up with Ernie Hare and his family and everything. And he encouraged me to the point of paying for library tickets. He got season tickets for me. I could get as many books as I wanted on his tickets. So you were a natural reader, you liked it? Yeah, I used to devour books four or five times. Six books a week, mainly modern American literature. But at some point you were sent away to a borstal nevertheless? Well no, it was the wartime equivalent of approved score, one step down the ladder soon, not borstal. Borstal's a prison for young offenders. Approved score is a cut about...

But I was found to be beyond care and control by a juvenile court. I'd got into some mischief and rolled some millstones from a flour mill into a river, which wasn't the thing to do in wartime Britain. Sent me to this hostel where's beyond care. - So this was despite all the fact that your education was kind of moving on, you'd taken a liking to improving yourself. - Indeed, and of course I was very, very good at English writing, I mean I was gifted a gift with words that's been with me all my life. But was it the influence of Ernie Hare that pulled you back from criminality? Yes.

And the books, the reading. What happened to Ernie Hare? Ernie went on to become a local headmaster. He had children of his own who have written to me since my autobiography came out. And I told the story of Ernie Hare. His children have written to me. Did you keep in touch with him? No, I wrote him a long letter declaring my undying love for him and my thanks and gratitude for everything he'd done for me. And he didn't answer it. It was a bit too painful and embarrassing. How old were you when you wrote that? Fourteen. Were you hurt? My whole childhood was just a bed of pain and that was one of the most... Came from episode. Next piece of music. At the age of 15, 16, I decided I was a communist and became very, very strong in the faith, I remember. This stemmed more or less from the love of the Red Army, what Joe Stalin was doing in World War II.

And the Red Army used to come over to Britain once a year and give concerts and we all used to go being young communists and I remember sitting in the Royal Albert Hall and there was the Soviet Army chorus and band the Red Army and suddenly they broke into this piece of music you've never heard anything like it in all your life listen to this ♪ His eyes rolling forward ♪

Soviet Army. Chorus and band and it's a long way to Tipperary. - Amazing. - You were a communist in your teens, you say, and you've certainly been a Labour voter. I've always been on the left, I'm not the doctrinaire political person, I really take issues on merit, you know. But how did you square the kind of politics you had during those heady days of... I mean you were editing two of the nation's most right-wing newspapers, you know, The Daily Express and the News of the World.

Was that not difficult, compromising sometimes? You have to go for the professional thing. I couldn't turn down being a newspaper editor in Fleet Street after all the years I'd spent there because of political considers. I hate politicians anyway. I regard them as appalling people. But we missed, you know, there's a gap in the story. How did the outdoor messenger from Reuters even begin to get a toehold in the street of Shey? In 1949 I was conscripted into the army to serve my two years, best two years of my life. Marvellous, really enjoyed it and finished up as an instructor in Austria. And when I came out of the army Reuters wouldn't reinstate me. They said no, no, he's a political activist. So I went to the labour exchange in Hackney, sorted out the manager and told him to phone Reuters and say, You've got to take this man back, it's the law, he has done.

Right of reinstatement for six months. So they took me back for six months very reluctantly, told me to look for another job. And I knew I had six months to save myself. Well, I worked, I be with the way, I did everything to the very best of my ability. And I made such an impression that within, what, three or four months nobody ever again mentioned the thought of my leaving. And of course became a very senior executive at Reuters. I was one of the duty editors by the time I... Left in 1961. Record number four. Well I was saying I was in the army, what a marvellous time I had in Austria and every gas house everywhere we went we could hear this incredible music of an instrument we never heard of called

The zither. And then Carol Reed brought out his film The Third Man with Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Joseph Cotton and of course the theme was Harry Lyon, the character played by Orson Welles, the music of Anton Karas. - Give her a dab hand, Derek Jamieson, at the Black Art of Circulation Building. You quadruple the.

The speculation of the Sunday Mirror in Ireland at one point. Now, how did you do it? In Ireland? How did I do that? Well, that was simple. It was 1965. I went to Manchester to launch the first colour in national newspapers in Ireland. And we went to town and began enlisting writers. The first person I signed up was a young girl from Northern Ireland called Bernadette Devlin, who became the youngest MP in the House of Commons. And the day her first column appeared in the Sunday Mirror, the circulation in Derry, Londonderry, quadrupled, as you say. Of course, in the Republic, my greatest support was the Kennedy family. Every week there used to be some different aspect of the kiddies. I was going to say, there were more obvious ploys like the case, or the pill or the Pope, any story to do with any of those things. My greatest front page, the lead said, The Pope and the Pill. He didn't say anything about the pill.

We just had a go at birth control, but it was near enough. So, the Pope and the Pill, the inside story of the Kennedy family, and a picture of a girl in a white, sharkskin bikini in colour, and across the bottom in red, white letters on red, Manchester United in colour. And that paper, Sue, sold out in about two and a half minutes. It's not a very subtle art, is it? The art of circulation, of a tabloid. Well, I mean, you have to sell newspapers. You are there as an editor to sell newspapers, you know, and it's an art that us popular journalists... Possess and the posh ones don't. I was editor of the Daily Express, I put on 25% in 15 months. What was the trick there? How do you make the Express more popular? Peter Townsend, Group Captain Peter Townsend. He was the first boyfriend of

Princess Margaret, right? So I bought his story. When I arrived at the Express I said to the executives, What have we got? Meaning what properties, what features. Nothing. They said nothing. Look blank. And one of them said, Oh, we have an option on a book by Peter Townsend, but it's not finished yet. Buy it! But he hasn't finished it! Buy it! I said, Buy it! Don't care what it costs, buy it! And we bought it for 70,000. Unseen and I serialized it in the Daily Express as The Royal Romance of the Century, which was rubbish of course. The Royal Romance of the Century was the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson. But of course, the public doesn't remember that. No chance. And it put on 165,000 copies and more importantly, we held them.

You know, you can put on 160,000 and lose them two days later. But you don't, by the sound of it, have to have a lot of respect for your reader, then? You're just shoving a headline because it sounds good. I have more respect for the readers of newspapers, for my own people, than anything else on God's earth. I don't know why you're saying that. Because you just said you'd sock them a headline that wasn't necessarily accurate, but it didn't matter they'd swallow it Oh, do you mean it wasn't the royal romance of the century? Yes, but I don't feel that my readers are suffering too much because of that. I don't think they go home at night and say, Oh my god, that Jameson cheated us! He said that was the right thing! Romance of the century and it wasn't. Is it true that when you launched the Daily Star for Victor Matthews in 1978 you said it was going to be tits, bums, QPR and roll your own? Indeed not, because the Sunday Observer had to publish a retraction. There's nowhere in a million years, Sue, think about it.

Let's launch a newspaper in Manchester and talk about QPR. Is it a phrase if you... Throw in some good human interest stories as well that might just have about summed up your approach. Manchester United, good human interest stories and roll your own. I think it's a bit, it rather patronises the readers isn't it? I don't regard the working class like that. Remember the working class. So what more than... Middle class people think of the working class like that. I don't. But what more than that... No way would I take the view that my readers are into tits and bums and roll your own. I regard that as offensive to me and offensive to them. It's a typical middle class statement. What's your definition?

Of what makes a good tabloid newspaper then beyond those things we just talked about. Interesting. Apparently you bring out a newspaper that interests the readers. Why is it that there are people who take the view that if a newspaper sells four or five billion copies, there must be something wrong with it? What kind of elitist statement is that? Record number five. Ah, back to opera. Well, of course, I'm an incurable romantic. I still cry when I hear opera. Every time I play... Placido Domingo, I say, the world's greatest singer, just to upset the Pavarotti fans. And if any of them doubt it, just listen to this. *singing*

Placido de mente singing the aria a Lucivan less deli from Puccini's Tosca with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli. It was in March 1980 that the week ending... On Radio 4 said you were an East End boy made bad and you thought erudite was a kind of glue and various other not desperately as it turned out damaging

Jokes at your expense, but you blew, you sued. Why did you react so strongly? All I'd done to come from that total utter poverty, hardship, deprivation, no family, no money, no food, and to have clawed my way up from that to become the editor of several newspapers and all the rest of it, and all they could say in summing up my career, an East End boy-made band. What a bunch of toffee-nosed twits. So I thought we'd go for an apology, and of course the management of the Express newspapers wanted to support their editor.

The lawyers got hold of it in 1980. I parted company with the Express in '81, I think it was, or around that time. I was on my own. - But what I don't understand is, I mean, Private Eye had been calling you Sid Yobo for some time. That's, and again, the implication there, although it's said since that it was quite a fond nickname, I don't know it was particularly fond, but the implication is that you were illiterate, that you were a bit rough, and it was an image you'd cultivated. Did you balk at this one? Which was pretty feeble, start of thing. Well, of course indeed. Their attack on me was not... That wasn't literature, that wasn't satire, there was nothing clever about it. But I didn't want it to go to court. I knew I couldn't win this. I had a feeling very strongly and the jury said yes, defamatory. And I thought, oh thank God I've won.

I'm alright. Did found it and then they added but not malicious and that meant it was free speech, fair comment. And I was left with a bill for £75,000 and of course it was every penny I had and more, and what saved me was the BBC didn't press for their money. They never ever collected their money from me, and what's more they picked me up, dusted me down, and made me a star. How about that? You're called Number Six. The Beatles. Well, the Beatles in the 60s, early 60s, changed everything. Life was never the same again. It's too boring to explain because the Beatles, the music does it. Especially this one. Because it applies to me. I've been saying this all my life. Help! Help! Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody. Help! You know I need someone. Help!

The Beatles and Help! So now Derek Jamieson, you're a broadcaster, you patently enjoy it. Are there similarities with newspaper editing? Do you feel you know who those people are? Oh yes, I've always had this thing for the public, you know. You see...

Right at the beginning I wanted to communicate, I wanted to reach out and touch people. I felt abandoned, rejected, an outsider, a maverick, someone different from the rest. I even wondered how I survived at all, what am I doing on us, what am I here for? And the only thing that I could reach out and sort of get strength from was the feeling that I must make people like me or even love me, shall I say. I needed the love of people, I needed support. That's what drove me as a newspaper editor and I suppose that's what drives me as a broadcaster. But it also explains why you had such a thin skin.

Indeed, oh absolutely. I'm much too emotional and vulnerable, always have been. But as far as the listeners are concerned, I mean, does it go further than that then? Are you also seeing yourself as some kind of proof to them that disadvantaged people can make it? I'd like to feel that someone looks at me and says, My God, he did all right for himself from a very... Poor start, then that's a good thing, isn't it? But you must get some negative letters as well because you're the kind of presenter, I mean you're not exactly anodyne, you know, you're the kind of presenter people either love or hate. Well oddly enough, very little. The vast majority of letters I get from the public, and I suppose I get more than most broadcasters, are totally supportive.

Of course, they have a programme on Radio 4 called Feedback. When they took me off the breakfast show, Radio 2, to make way for Mr. Wogan's return, I got something like 10,000 letters protesting. Feedback on Radio 4 used one letter saying, Thank God that man is going. Good riddance. That's what you have to put up with if you come from the working class. - But why do you think that's got anything at all to do with class? - Of course it has. You don't think they'd have done that to Sue Lawley, do you? You must be joking. But it's only Sid Yobbo. It's only old Derek Jamison. Doesn't matter about him. What a dreadful person. Have you heard the way he speaks? And these days, we're going to be doing a little bit of a general overview of the different types of plants that we're going to be using.

As you take the wife to work with you, Ellen, who presents your late night show on Radio Two with you, by the sound of it you'd rather be back on breakfast? I don't know. I don't know that I would now. You know, it's a bit late in the day for me, isn't it? But you obviously resent being moved over so that Terry Wogan could come back. Oh, absolutely, yes. Number seven. Back to opera. My favourite is La Boheme because it's a wonderful story of love and beauty. And of course there's this girl in the garret in Paris dying of consumption and Rodolfo, the artist, a revolutionary artist falls in love with her. She tells him I'm just a simple ordinary girl. Loves the country, the flowers, the birds and so on. My name is Mimi, she says, and here's Renata Tabaldi with that message.

Renata Tabaldi singing the aria Mi chiamano mimi from the first act of Puccini's Labuem with the orchestra of the Academy of Saint Cecilia Rome conducted by Alberto Erede. Four decades in Fleet Street, Derek, one in broadcasting practically. You've edited, as I said at the beginning, three national newspapers. You've become a radio personality and yet you still have this inferiority complex, this chip on your shoulder, this kind of view that the world is trying to do you down. No, it's not inferiority.

The priority complex, God forbid, I don't consider myself inferior because I happen to come from the working class. What I would say to you, Sue, is that I have this feeling that the class system in this country matters a great deal. And if you happen to be born at the bottom of the heap, then of course you do feel that the working class, the poor, get a rough deal in this country. But aren't you living proof that that doesn't have to be the case? Price you have to pay. Look at the struggle, look at the effort. What price have you paid? Well, I mean, I've been working flat out since I was 14 years of age, nothing ever came easy. A newspaper editor because I had done every single job on a newspaper from making the tea to laying out the front page. There aren't many editors who can say I can do every single job in the newspaper. Other factors have applied. I had to get there by sheer hard work.

Talent, ability, drive, whatever. All those things that emerge from, I suppose, my poverty-stricken background. Let's have your last record. Would you believe, despite all my reservations about society in Britain and the class system and so on, I happen to be a very, very fervent lover of this country. I think it's the greatest country in the world. I think we're all exceedingly fortunate to be born British. And as much as I hate jingoism and flag-waving. Chance by the last night of the proms and it makes you proud, doesn't it, as they stare near me. Most of them are foreign music students anyway, I reckon, but anyway, I must have this on my island to remind me of home. It's a snatch of land of hope and glory from the last night of the proms.

Land of Hope and Glory recorded live at the last night.

Of the Proms in 1969 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davies. If you could only take one of those eight records Derek. Oh, it would have to be Placido Domingo singing from Tosca because that's an opera that says it all and certainly my favourite out of this choice of records. What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare? Well, I think I said that I'd educated myself on modern American literature and the writer who had the most effect upon me was John Steinbeck, so I would take his greatest work, The Grapes of Wrath, about the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and that will keep me going. What about your luxury? Well, a word processor, would that count as luxury? I'd like a word processor to play with. I can make my own newspaper, write novels, send off imaginary letters to people I want to complain about. Yes, a word processor. Derek Jamieson, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Great pleasure.

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