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. Originally broadcast in 1988, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. Passed away this week is a teacher and a philosopher, a brilliant classicist. She became an Oxford Don, the mother of five children and then... Headmistress of a high-powered girl school. Her clarity of mind combined with her sense of humanity have made her a natural for many public committees and it's perhaps in this capacity that she's achieved most recognition in particular as chairman

Of the inquiry into the ethical questions surrounding test tube babies. She's the mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. She is Baroness Warnock of Week in the city of Winchester. It's a wonderful title, isn't it? I like it, yes. Would you, that all makes you sound very serious and academic, which of course you are, but would you describe yourself as a blue stocking? I certainly was a blue stocking if that means someone who was interested, very much interested in academic work when I was an undergraduate. But I suppose, no, not wholly. I mean, I spent an awful lot of my childhood listening to Radio Luxembourg and writing. Horses so I don't think that's blue stocking work really. But did you spend an awful lot of your time at university? discussing existentialism until three o'clock in the morning? Good gracious, no. I sat with my Head down, slogging through my work, not talking to anybody much. In you too isn't it? I mean you had a reputation in Oxford for being a bit of a dresser.

That's very nice, I hope that's true. But I certainly always loved clothes, yes, disastrously. I mean, I'm a great buyer of clothes, really. What sort of clothes? Well, I always have a fantasy about how I'm going to be asked out to wonderful lunch parties. I'd hardly ever go out to lunch, actually, but there's always this thought that in this dress I shall really look marvellous. But the big floppy hats also attract you, don't they? Well, I think even I have grown out of the fantasy that there would be a time when I shall wear these hats, but I do love hats. So what to wear on the desert island? There's a problem. Treysers and several big sweaters, preferably men's sweaters. And what about music on the island and records? Music is very important to you isn't it? Yes it is. I might have to have a piano accordion or something that I could actually teach myself to play a bigger repertoire. I'm not sure. That would be useful. I might not be good enough to do it. I'd love to have...

Instrument there of some kind. Is that going to be your luxury? You can tell us now. Well I'm not sure, I'll have to think about it. All right, well we'll think about it as we go on. Let's hear your first record. Well my first record... Is going to be Mozart's Selenade in C minor, played by the Albion quartet, with my son, my elder son, playing in it, which is why I chose... Disrecording and it is an enormous pleasure in my life to have a professional musician among my children.

Lady Warnock, as I mentioned, served on many public committees from education to pollution. In fact, two reports have Have borne your name haven't they? Yes that's so. Two Warnock reports. How did you become such a natural for these things? is a great help because you in a way don't have a subject of your own. You're always trying to find out about other people's subjects, science, literature, everything, and standing And commenting. And so in a way a philosophy chairman is quite useful. They start ignorant but they are quite quick to learn. And it means that you're not frightened to ask the naive question? Absolutely. That is quite right and you are quite accustomed to saying, I don't understand, you'd better go back and tell me.

Useful in a chairman. Well indeed because otherwise experts blind everyone with science and nobody's got the guts to put their hand up and say I don't understand. That's right. The other thing I think is that perhaps temperamentally I don't know. I'm capable of not getting too much involved in the actual things that make people upset on the report so other people get very frantic and I can put all away. You're not sentimental about test tube babies. I'm tremendously sentimental about some things but not about works that I'm doing. Maintain your academic distance. That's merely being professional really. That is being professional, yes, absolutely.

Once you get a reputation for being good at these things, it's a bit like being an actress, I presume. The invitations then flow in. Yes, they do, but it's quite easy to put one's foot wrong and get out of favour. Which I dare say is true of actresses as well. But politically out of favour, one may well get that and then the invitation stops flowing in. Happened to you? I suspect it may have, yes, but it may be that I'm just resting. Another record, please. Well, the next record is part of a recording of the that I absolutely love and I think this is where I would say I was sentimental. I need to have reminders of... Mortality around me and I have a particular passion for Brahms so this brings the two together. that.

( Then Alice Fleisch is ist Riegras from the Brahms Requiem with the chorus of the Vienna Staatsoper and the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Bernard Heiting. Do you come Lady Warnock of a highly academic family then? No, not really at all. My father was a schoolmaster who died before I was born. My mother was really not highly educated at all but extremely clever. Came from a large, complicated Jewish family. But no, we weren't particularly academic, but I'd say we were very cultivated. I mean, there was lots and lots of music and lots of books. You had, or you have, a sister to whom you were very close. Yes, she and I were very much the end of the family and we were very close. Caught up really very much as if we were just the only two in the family. We did everything together and I still see a great deal of it.

And you had your own language, I gather? Well, we had us, we used to tell each other a story where the characters were horses and it was called talk-talking and every time we went... For a walk we went on with this long continuing saga and we went on doing that I have shame to say until we were undergraduates but we'd forgotten by then that the characters were horses we were always casting operas and talking about Was rarely in disguise of this. You were obviously therefore very happy at home and it was a very happy childhood. Did that make you therefore when you went to school a rather private person because you already had a whole and rounded life?

Absolutely right. I greatly enjoyed school, greatly enjoyed it. I loved all the dramas that seemed to be forever going on at school. But I always felt, well, not exactly superior but different from most other people and reverted to a completely separate life in the holidays. Different in that you were cleverer than most of them? No, I don't think that, because I had some very, very clever friends at school who were cleverer than I was. We, I and these clever friends, formed a rather disagreeable little clique, I think, probably. I didn't feel that set me apart, but I did feel separate as far as music went, not because I was a great performer, but because I knew a lot of music, I think, and always felt secretly that it was more important to me than it was to other people.

Do you still feel that when you meet people or go about your business, do you feel... are you aware of your cleverness is really what I'm trying to say I think? Certainly not. I mean, in school I think I was always aware that there were few of us who were going on to university, few of us who were really interested in the classics or whatever it was, and that did. Especially in the war, I think that set one apart rather. I used to be very frightened of meeting people, because they'd think I was a blue stocking or didn't understand the things they were interested in. But that's not true anymore. I mean, partly I've met so many people, including my husband, who are far cleverer than I. Shall we have your third record now? I need to explain my third record, it's a very different thing from the last. It's the Everly Brothers and the first of their...

Songs that I ever heard which is Bye Bye Love. Always I've had a great taste for pop music. In the fifties and sixties when my children were at school at home we used to buy an awful lot of singles and there was something about both the lyrics and the wit of the Everly Brothers. So it really got to me, I loved it. Bye bye love, bye bye happiness Hello loneliness, I think I'm gonna cry Bye bye love, bye bye sweet caress Hello emptiness, I feel like I could die Bye bye love, goodbye There goes my baby with the someone new Brothers and bye bye love. You went off to Oxford to Lady Margaret Hall to read classics. You had up until this time...

As I understand it, led a manless life. How did you meet your husband? As an undergraduate, but not the first time I went to Oxford. I split my career there, went off for two years in the middle because it was the war, and taught at Sherbourne Girls' School and then came back and did... Two more years. It was then that I met my husband. I was by then doing philosophy and became secretary of an undergraduate philosophical society, a rather smart one that you had to be...

Invited to belong to, and the tradition was that the secretary became president and chose her secretary. So somebody told me I ought to choose this brilliant undergraduate, Warnock, and I'd never met him, though I'd seen him. And so I spent ages wondering how to address him. We were very formal in those days. So I wrote a letter that said, Dear Mr Warnock, may I call you Geoffrey? and then asked him be secretary and subsequently president and he wrote back saying dare mary may i call you miss wilson so that was one of the worst snubs i've ever had and that was my first encounter with him However, you did marry him despite the snub. Well, yes, because it was after that we had great fun running this. Society and I suddenly realised that men could be funny and that it was actually just as much fun gossiping with him.

As with all my women friends. How did you then sort out having a professional academic life with being married and subsequently producing children because it was not particularly encouraged at the time that you should do both, was it? I certainly wasn't encouraged, but I never really seriously thought of giving up. Though occasionally when things got a bit rough and the children would all seem too much and we couldn't keep a nanny and what not, I said I'd give up. But how did, you were both fellows. Of Oxford colleges. That's right, yes. But then you had to find time in some way to have babies. All by good luck and judgment, I think all of my children except one were born on the long vacation, which worked out terribly well because I could take that four months then, when one could have the baby and start it off and all is well. One of them was born on the first day of the Hillary term and I took...

Four weeks off then, but that was all. I didn't have to have any more time. Was all of that, all of these marital goings on, frowned on by your fellow academics a bit? It was thought on you... There were some married fellows but they were conveniently divorced or widowed and I think I was the only one with a sort of ongoing marriage. And then of course children were thought to be pretty difficult to manage. But again, looking back on it, by luck, the fellows of my college were very much accustomed to having pets and they kept tortoises and cats and dogs and used to ask after one another's pets. And my first child was called Kitty. The second child was called Felix and somehow it worked very easily. They slipped into saying Hi, it's Kitty and Hi, it's Felix and they took their place among the pets. How they passed unnoticed. Another record. Well the next record is one of Handel's 'Concetti Grossi' number two.

And this I love, have always loved Handel, and it's played in this recording by a group... Called The English Concert, whom I admire enormously, and especially the harpsichord playing of Travel Pinock.

Handel's Concerto Grosso No. 2 in B-flat major played by the English concert conducted from the harpsichord by Trevor Pinock. So the rigors of the Working Mother were visited by the on the Warnock household some 20 years really before the problem became fashionable. Did you experience all that guilt? All that heartache of not being there for the first step? Yes, very much so. I particularly felt guilty about that. Children being left in the hands of seeding the inadequate nannies. I mean by about 1954 we had a serious succession of lovely nannies, but No, I think that I did feel appalling guilt about not being there, particularly when they got ill or anything went wrong with them. It always seemed that it must be my fault. And I felt they suffered the most awful things, going to school and they should have been kept at home and that kind of thing.

So there is no end to the guilt, I think. So you suffered a great deal, did they? I think so. I'm sure they did. I'm sure that these awful nannies really were. Harmful to them. But I daresay they would have suffered if I'd been at home as well. I don't know. Well, what did they say now? Now they're grown up. I mean, do they have awful memories of times when they wanted you and you weren't there? I don't think that because... I don't think they'd ever admit that they'd ever wanted me. But I think they have fairly awful memories of some of their nannies. Yes, I mean I think they now probably realise our childhood was by... A means ideal. But I think they are forgiving about it. I mentioned that you became headmistress of a very high-powered girls' school, that was Oxford High School. How did that come about? I was really getting a bit sick of teaching philosophy. I'd done it a 15-year stint.

Thought a change would be nice and I'd been very much involved in secondary education on the Oxfordshire County Education. Committee running the music subcommittee of that, which I greatly enjoyed. You have of course written a lot about education and lectured about it. I think you have little time for the government's buzz phrases of the moment, 'parent power' and 'opting out'. I must say I do distrust that very much. Parent power I don't really believe in because I truly think that a government must have an education policy which has got to take into account what all children need, including handicapped children and very bright children. And parents, understandably enough and properly, are interested in that.

Our own children and they cannot be expected to form policy. You also believe fundamentally don't you in the comprehensive system? I do and I don't honestly think the comprehensive system had long enough to... Adapt to what was really a very new idea, which is that everybody requires education and not some people getting good education, some people getting bad. It comes strangely from you though having been headmistress of a highly selective girl. Indeed it does and I do think... See that that's an inconsistency. But even while I was there, that system was collapsing. And if I had my time again and was allowed in my time again to be a headmistress, I would like to be a headmistress for comprehensive school. These views are why you've fallen out of favour, as you put it.

I think it may be so, yes. I don't think that what I say about education is very popular. The fifth record, please. The fifth record is... Part of an anthem my beloved spake by Purcell sung by the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral isn't this rarely because until now I've always lived in a cathedral town, either Winchester or Oxford. And I think the one thing I really miss about leaving Oxford is leaving the Cathedral, which I love. ♪ To be my beloved spirit ♪

Her cells, My Beloved Spake, sung by the choir of Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford, with the English concert and organist Simon Preston. You will of course have a voice on the Education Bill and a vote indeed as you now sit in the House of Lords. Do you go there very much? Do you exercise that power? To go there during term because it's very unpredictable when things are going to come up. Of course in recognition of the public services that we've talked about and not least for the Warnock report on human fertilization. You concluded in that report that... Human embryos should not be experimented on after 14 days, but that still hasn't become law, has it? No, no it hasn't, though a law of some kind I think is promised.

For the next general election. Does it mean in the meantime that that kind of research can go on? Yes, at the moment it is going on, but subject to voluntary guidelines that the British Medical Association and Medical Search Council have put together. It's always of course the fear of creating the master race or as we've recently been seeing on television the hybrid, the gorilla come human. I mean do you think that could happen? I don't think that hybrids for example could at the moment generate happen and I think It would be very reassuring if there were a law in place that criminalised certain activities like cloning, like cross-fertilisation and so on, which people rarely do fear very much. I'm rarely quite anxious now.

That what we as a committee recommended most strongly, which was that there should be a central ethical committee, to look at all these questions, including gene therapy and all the things that have grown up since 1984, when we published our report. I think that central committee ought now to be established, whatever other legislation there is. Shall we pause for another record? Well, the next record is a record by Schubert, thinking of the desert island. I think I would almost have to have some Schubert there. And this is a particularly lovely work called Aufderungs. Well, I think the combination of tenor and horn is absolutely amazing. I appreciate it.

Auf dem Stroom, sung by Robert Tier with Neil Sanders horn and Lamar Kraussen piano. It was in 1984, I think, Lady Warnock, that you and your husband achieved a unique academic double. You both became heads of Oxbridge colleges. Already he was there yes he was in Oxford you became mistress of Gertin so you you After Cambridge and left him in Oxford? That's right, yes, yes. It was a cause for some speculation, I think. But... We worked out, it was a good time, I mean the children were all away and it looked like partly an exciting new thing that would be a good experiment. How did he cope without you or how does he cope without you and how do you cope without him? Well he was well looked after as long as he was at Harford. He could always eat in college and there were people...

Looking after, partly looking after our rather large house there. So that was really no problem. Now that he's retired he's become extremely domesticated. So there's no problem really. He now lives in your house in Wiltshire? He does and looks after it and keeps it clean and healthy. And I live in a very nice flat in Gertin for the middle of the week and keep it untidy. And you go home to a lovely warmed house in a beautiful suburb. On a Friday night. Wonderful. I mean I now know what it's like for men to be married. It is absolutely blissful to come in and the house is gleaming.

Clean and warm and everything is in working order and you don't feel the ceiling will have fallen down and the frost. It's absolutely marvellous. So you have two homes now, Cambridge and Wiltshire. There was a time when you had three, Oxford, Wiltshire and Cambridge. How did you cope with that? I mean wasn't everything always in the wrong place? Always. I never had the right clothes, especially not the right shoes or bag. It was really very difficult. The other point of course is that, as we've been discussing... Practically the whole of your life you'd been, your grown-up life, you'd been an Oxford woman and then suddenly four years ago you became a Cambridge woman? Yes, that's taken a bit of getting used to, certainly. And I think probably I'm looked at still as a somewhat dangerous age.

In Cambridge, but I do love it, I mean I love the feeling that I am part of Cambridge University, I like that very much indeed, and I very much, very much love my college, Gertin, it's a very nice place. You are, if I may say so, in your early sixties, is retirement on the horizon? Yes, I think so, I think I will have done a decent stint when I've done seven years, which is two and a half years from now, so I shall retire then. And go and mess up the house in Wiltshire? Absolutely, just what I shall do. Right, I think we've got to your seventh record. Well the seventh record, again I couldn't have a list of it.

Records that didn't have Bach and it would have been very easy to have eight records by Bach, who in a way I think was my first love as a composer. So this is a part of the first cantata with Dietrich Fischler-Diskauer, whom again I admire to distraction.

Bach can talk Number one Christlager in Tordesbanden sung by Dietrich Fischer Dieskau with the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter Can I ask you, Lady Warnock, I know it's something you've made a bit of a study of. Why do men outperform women at university? I think they're bolder, I think they're less concerned about whether they get things right, they're more anxious to chance their arm. Of course, I mean, there are very brilliant women at university, but they tend to be a little bit more cautious, I think, and end up in the 2-1 class rather than the first,

Men might be a little less cautious and tip themselves over to the first class. What do you think women are cautious about? I mean, are they frightened of being seen to be clever, do you suggest? I suspect they've got over that by the time they get to university, though it may still be weird. Them, I think they are trained up more to try to get things right and to fair making fools of themselves and that probably does remain with them and maybe slightly. Inhibiting sometimes and really that's why I'm very much in favor of single sex education because I think girls between the age of about 12 and 17 are particularly prone. To holding back and letting boys go ahead of them. Could you have that in your comprehensive system? I could.

I could also have selective teaching of girls in subjects like physics and engineering where they wouldn't be made to look fools by the boys. You've said before now that we've talked all about your life and your life in public service. You've also said that you wouldn't have minded really for going all of that and gone and going into advertising or commerce. Can that be true? Yes I think that is true. I think I'd have loved it. That in the days when I was on the Independent Broadcasting Authority and I really realized how seriously I took the whole question of advertising, communicating. Not ever having an idea that wasn't capable of being passed on to somebody else. And I love the wit and lightness of advertising. So I think I would have been very happy in that sort of world. I wonder if you might have gone into politics, you were a contemporary of the Prime Minister.

Oxford, you have an ability to dominate, to be a bit bossy. I do know that I have, I hope I'm not too bossy, I suppose I'm fairly bossy, but no, I could never have gone into politics, I simply couldn't, because I dislike the compulsory deceit, the lack of candour that goes with politics. I mean, I know it goes with advertising too, but advertisers carry around with them the fact that they're... Not telling the whole truth. Politicians, on the other hand, pretend to be making promises they can keep, the whole truth when they're not and I really would find that very very disagreeable and I wouldn't like I'm very bad at people publicly criticizing And rubbishing what I say, so I'd have nothing going for me as a politician at all. Let's have your eighth record. The eighth record is in a way a rather silly record. I heard it one day when I was driving up, I think to a meeting of the IBA, and it practically

The road. I'd never heard a sound quite so dramatically lovely as this and it's part of a trio sonata by a Czech composer called Zil.

Movement of Zelenka's trio sonata number three in B flat major with oboists Heinz and Maurice Bourg, Sashko Gavrilov on the violin and Klaus Tuhnemann on the bassoon. So some choices. First of all, which of the eight records would you like to take more than any of the others? That is the most awful and difficult question you can imagine. Because how can I live without Schubert? On the other hand, I think that I will choose the Purcell, the record that contains my beloved Spake, because I shall be deeply homesick on this island, and what I shall miss, among other things, The Church of England and the Seychelles Choir and so on. I think I'll have to have that. The book you have... I'm sure you know this, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. I'm thankful about that because I think they will do me very well, both of them. But again I think I shall be thinking about England rather obsessively. So I've got to have a book to tell you about that.

About England and I've got to have a novel because I do love novel reading so I think I'll have a novel by Trollope and probably the best of all his novels is The Last Chronicle of Bassett which will Keep me now, Harold. And your luxury, you were muttering earlier perhaps about a musical instrument to teach yourself. I was, but I think rarely what I'll have to have if I'm allowed it is a barrow and a lot of paper, because I have always kept a diary. I think on the desert island this diary will become very important even if nobody ever sees it but I'd hoped to be rescued and then I could publish it. That's definitely allowed. In fact, lots of biores in case they run out. Lots of biores in case one runs out and lots of paper. Thank you. Baroness Warnock, thank you very much indeed for playing to us your desert island discs. You've been listening to a podcast.

From the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio.

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