Hello, I'm Christi 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 1983, Roy Plumlee. Foreign correspondent and ex-director-general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Green. Well, the BBC probably does more for music than any other organisation in the world. Are you? How important is it in your life? Music has never been very important in my life. I'm not exactly tone deaf. Certain songs and tunes stick in my mind, but musical I am unfortunately not.

How did you set about choosing this small list of eight discs to last possibly for the rest of your life? Well, I thought... That if I ever was wrecked, I might indeed settle down to writing a... Autobiography, and I wanted sounds which would be evocative of different stages in my life. Start at the beginning. That's right. We start with me in the nursery at home, dancing with my sister's governess, who was 28. I was 14 and I was very much in love with her. Strains of the Cabaret Girl. Oh, that was a musical comedy. A musical comedy of the town. Are we going to hear from the Cabaret Girl? Two songs, Dancing Time and Kalluwa. Sung by Dorothy Dixon, a great star of the 1920s, whom I met only a few years ago.

Years ago and she still seemed to me to be as beautiful as ever. When your feet have simply got to glide, you must lead me lightly, hold me tightly, take me where you hear all those saxophones mauling. Where can those ukuleles be? All the boys in London on telephoning, don't think time is any old time for me. When it's moonlight in Kalluwa, night like the sea is divine. It was moonlight in Kalluwa, when your kiss has met mine.

Two songs from The Cabaret Girl, sung by Dorothy Dixon. So Hugh, you come from a prosperous family of brewers and traders in Northamptonshire. But your father was a schoolmaster? Yes, he became headmaster of Berkhamsted School. Few months after I was born in 1910. So you lived at the school? Lived at the school. School, born in a schoolhouse before he moved to THE schoolhouse as Headmaster. And I had my first visit to a pub, in fact, at six weeks old, because... He stayed in a pub while he moved from one house to another. How many in the family? Six of us all together. Yes. Four sons, two daughters. Sons being of course the novelist Graham Greene. Were you the youngest? Except for one sister, yes. Did you

Who and your brothers attend Burkehamsted School? My eldest brother, poor chap, went to Marlborough, which did him no good at all. It was a very tough school, I believe, at that time. But Raymond, who became a doctor and mountaineer, and my brother Graham and I were all at Berkman school under my father. Grievances taken out on you by the boys? No, I wouldn't put it like that. One felt... At times a bit awkward. It was difficult to have this division in one's life between home on one side of what Graham has called the Green Bay's door. And when one went through that, one left privacy behind and was among crowds of other boys.

Hampstead, the next step was Oxford, but first it was decided to widen your horizons and you were sent to Germany. Why Germany? Well, the year was 1929. That was probably the best year of the Weimar Republic. Stresemann hadn't yet died. Germany at that time had a very great attraction, which even my parents must have felt. I can't think of any other reason why they chose Germany, but I'm very glad they did, because... Germany has meant ever since a great deal in my life. And at that time you experienced brief... The old Germany, a Germany that very speedily disappeared. The Germany of Weimar, with its enormous attractions, its leading place in the arts. The wonderful films of Weimar Germany, including one which I loved and saw about seven or eight times, Congress.

'Dances', a musical about the Congress of Vienna. - Lili? - Lillian Harvey. - Lillian Harvey, that's right. - She sang the, what I suppose is almost the theme song of Congress. About how the most beautiful things in life only happen once.

♪ Ring up your island line ♪

Lillian Harvey singing just once for all time from Congress dances that comparatively The brief visit was to mold much of your future life, but on you went to Oxford. I started off by reading for Honor Mods, that is classics, Latin and Greek. The normal thing after that would have been to go on to read Greats, which was ancient history, which I should have loved, and philosophy. And I knew myself well enough at that time to know that I didn't have the mind of a philosopher. And... Senior tutor at Merton, Geoffrey Muir, was a great authority on Hegel, and the idea of spending my time with Geoffrey... Discussing Hegel was really quite the only. What were your other activities? You're a tall man, did they put you in a boat? They tried to

and I rode I think for about ten days and then gave it up because I had a boil on my bottom. This happened, doesn't it, in Rome? I decided it was a sport only for gallist loads. And you were something of a university impresario. You were obsessed by the... Cinema, I believe you started a film society? Yes, I started the Oxford University Film Society, persuading the proctors that... It was a right and proper thing to do. I believe you used to go up and down Warder Street booking films. Yes. Doing the whole thing very professionally. Warder Street really was the street of adventure then, full of small... Rather crookie little firms which owned the great German classics, Russian classics, Swedish and so to go along with a big cigar and I was trying to look very much like a film in Presario. Did you think...

That some branch of the film industry might be your future career? Were you attracted? Sam Ekman, who was the MGM representative in London, and he gave me an introduction to Michael Balkan, the great impresario of the Ealing films. Who then had the studios in Shepherd's Bush, which are now BBC Lime Grove. I went to see Michael Balkan, he didn't offer me a job, but many years later when I was Director General of the BBC, I reminded him of that and of the fact that we now owned his studios. You began to edge towards journalism. I edged towards journalism. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but my father let me have 200 pounds to last

Me a year, which was not impossible in those days, and I went to Germany and I got some introductions before going and went to Munich to act... The Stringer paid on space rates for the New Statesman and the Daily Herald. In fact, a Fisher... I believe you were correspondent for the Detroit Daily News. Well, the Daily Herald correspondent in Berlin said, My boy, you will have a hell of a time in Munich. Working for two socialist newspapers, opened his desk, took out a card which said Correspondent of the Detroit Daily News. They took that. And that got you by. That got me by. What's your third record? Well, my third record takes us back to Oxford. I told you I wasn't a philosopher and I read English literature for finals, something I've never regretted. On the contrary, I think one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

I had the great luck to be one of the first pupils of Edmund Blunden, a very considerable poet to my mind. Yes, I did. Is Edmund Blunden reading what is in fact my favourite poem of his? Forefathers. Here they went with smock and crook toil in the sun Lowl in the shade. Here they mudded out the brook, and here their hatchet cleared the glade. Have a good day. Supper woke their wit, Huntsman's moon their wooings lit. From this church... They led their brides from this church themselves were led shoulder high. On these waysides sat to take their beer and bread. Names are gone. Edmund Blunden reading his own poem, Forefathers. So to Germany, this was 1933.

Dustin Power. Yes, it was December '33 when I went to Munich. For early achievements, you managed to visit Dachau, one of the first concentration camps of the Hitler era. Yes, I did that in my false capacity as correspondent of the Detroit Daily News. Getting in some way or other the permission of the SS. And I remember going along to, I suppose it was Gestapo headquarters, and they wanted To see my passport and I was sitting there waiting and I suddenly remembered that inside my passport I'd got some illegal communist pamphlets and... I thought, oh dear, now this may prove rather awkward, but they never saw.

That, although I learned to be more careful, I never respected the efficiency of the German secret police too much. In those early days, was Dacher bad? Dacher was Not as bad as it became it was a very unpleasant feeling the people Were standing around of course very depressed, very thin. The SS guards were the most brutal types. I wrote a letter to my mother about it at the time so I can still reread that letter and bring that information. Impression back into my mind. Inevitably you saw a lot of the Hitlerian top brass. What ones did you meet? I met Goering. I met Goebbels. I was very friendly with an adjutant of Hitler's called Captain Wiedemann. I have been as...

Close to Hitler as I am to you at this moment, but I never was, so to speak, introduced to him. I believe you used your height in your distinguished appearance to bluff your way into VIP enclosures quite frequently. Yeah, on one occasion I remember going up a steep lot of... Stairs outside a German railway station when Hitler and Goebbels were going off to Italy. And I wasn't supposed to be there, but I walked up the stairs immediately behind Goebbels, who's about a foot shorter than me, and the Hitler Youth lining the staircase burst into loud laughter, which didn't... Goebbels who wasn't used to that sort of behavior. Where were you when Britain declared war? At that time I had been expelled from Germany in May 1939. On what grounds? Well, obviously they didn't like me, but the actual ground was as a reprisal because a German journalist had been...

Expelled from London for Nazi Party activities. And I remember at a farewell lunch given for me by the Foreign Press Association, I said that I hadn't been leader. The Berlin section of the English Conservative Party. So when... - War broke out. - And so then I was sent to Warsaw. I was Warsaw correspondent. - Correspondent for whom? You were no longer... - Still a daily... Oh, I had long ago become, in fact, in February 1934, first assistant. Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then chief correspondent. And after I was kicked out... From Germany, I was sent to Warsaw because that seemed likely to be a rather hot spot. As it was. Right, we've got to record number four. Recalling my time in Germany, I would need...

A sound of that era and I choose that very good tune even though it was the devil's tune, the horse... Vessel so. . Horst Wessel song. So Hugh, you had done six years of good work as a foreign correspondent, an expert on German affairs. What wartime job was open to you when you got back to England? Well, uh...

First, there seemed to be no very obvious job, but my time for call-up was due anyway. And I managed to get into Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Any very great difficulty. I remember being interviewed by an RAF officer with one of those very big moustaches. Who said to me, Palais vos Francais. And I said, Oui. And he said Specken Sie Deutsch! and I said Jawohl! and he said Duddy good linguist, I see you are, oh boy! we need for RAF intelligence. And I found myself in the branch of RAF intelligence called AI1K, which dealt with the Of German Luftwaffe prisoners and I was doing that job during most of the Battle of Britain. And then the...

How did that contact first start? Well, that was really rather odd. The BBC made an approach through Duff Cooper to, um, algebra and statistics. Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, to release Pilot Officer Green to be head the BBC German service and pilot officer Green was seconded by the RAF to the BBC, rather a curious way in which to join the place where I spent a lot of the rest of my life. House. Exciting work, deceiving the enemy, taunting the enemy. Taunting, but most of all, and most important of all, Giving the enemy hard news, hard news even of our defeats.

That when, as one hoped, the time would come for victories, they would believe what we said about the victories, and I think I can say we did. But there was some taunting too. We broadcast a number of songs, often parodies of... German songs. The first one of all, which was a song about the German army being moved up and down, hither and thither, with no end to the war, was a great... Compliment to us adopted as the official song with slightly different words of the German anti-action song. Craft gunners. That shows they were listening. It shows that even then, early on they were listening. But later on these songs got tougher and Lucy Munheim, a German actress in England,

Parody of Lala Anderson's Lily Marlene which ends with the order to hang Hitler on a lamppost. Record you've chosen to bring back those years. That is my next record. I look to Mannheim in a rather special version of Lily Marlene.

In the later days of the war you visited the liberated areas, you paid another visit to Dachau when it was a different proposition altogether. That was really horrible. Dachau had not been an extermination camp, it had no gas. Chamber, but there was an incinerator, a big hall, piled with corpses. Around an enormous stove and the notice was up in this big hall saying Reinlich keit ist herpricht, bitte Henderwaschen, klenen Is a duty here, please wash your hands. But the living, the skeleton... In their striped pajamas were in some ways more difficult to bear than the dead, to have Kissing one's hands and embracing one. - And you saw devastated Berlin, all the places that you'd never... So well. Yes, everywhere I'd lived was destroyed. Now, you decided not to go back to being

A foreign correspondent now that the war was over. Yes, I had every chance, but I got interested... In administration as well as in reporting, in running things. Above everything I think was what kept me in the BBC and of course I'm glad it did. Though I left the BBC for a time, not long after the war, to take charge of broadcasting in the British zone of Germany, building up a new German broadcasting system. Of the BBC? Roughly, but with adaptations to... Were German custom and German history. And then back to Bush House as head of BBC European Services. Which is did that cover? East European services in fact which cover Russian, Yugoslav and Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish.

But mainly, of course, it was Russian that mattered, and I think it was because of... To take a tougher line in our broadcast to Russia that Ian Jacob wanted me for the job. This was the Cold War period. Yes. Now, you were accepted as an expert in psychological warfare, and if there has to be warfare, that's... The best kind. There must have been a fair amount of infighting to sort out in so many so many causes, a job demanding an immense amount of tact. And teched also in dealing with the Foreign Office, who would sometimes... Think that one was being too tough. But I didn't have that job for very long. He went off in your travels again. I was sent to... ...off to Malaya on another psychological warfare job, which had nothing or hardly anything to do with broadcasting, which was conducting psychological...

Warfare against the Chinese insurgents, the Malayan peoples, the Army as they called themselves in the jungle of Malaya, which meant the use of leaflets, of rumour and rather different methods for me. And then back to the BBC, an important administrative... Job. Did you not hesitate, having been a man of action, you could have been crushed in BBC's great administrative machine unless you were careful. Well I was absolutely terrified of that job, becoming Director of Administration. The only job which has ever frightened me. It didn't frighten me later on to go on to a higher job. I came to enjoy it very much. It was again that strain in me which I had become conscious of at the end of the war that I was beginning to enjoy running things. And I learnt how...

Wheels went round in the BBC in that way. Well, you ran them very well to such an extent that you were invited to be Director General, and we'll talk about that. Distinguished office in a minute. Let's have another record. Well, my next record is a Beatles record, which seems to me It would be really rather beautiful poetry. The Beatles, after all, were one of the trademarks of the '60s. As it happened, I regret... I was asked about this record and decided that it shouldn't be broadcast because it seemed then... To be encouraging drug taking. How that can ever have seemed like, yet I've now rather at a loss to say. Now, this is a section of the Sgt Pepper record, isn't it?

voices of the sixties, the Beatles. So, Director General Sir Hugh, Supreme... A very large organisation indeed, an organisation that impinges on every one of us. You started with shock tactics, you did something... Dreadful you move the nine o'clock news. Yes, the trouble was that the audience for the nine o'clock news had by that time inspired...

Of its sacred reputation got rather small and the director of radio and myself decided that it'd be much better to have the main news at 10, when it could have half an hour or two, and that would provide Program planning earlier in the evening. But there certainly was a considerable outcry. What were you going to do next? What you did do, very effectively, was to attack the anti-image of the corporation and make for more exciting broadcasting. Well, I tried to. I thought that in some ways the BBC had got a bit stuffy, was not a bit appealing to the nation as a whole, but more to the respectable middle class. And I thought the BBC should be everybody's BBC. And therefore it meant...

To some extent doing away with the BBC voice, having different accents on the air, Adventurous programming meant laughing at politicians. A liberalisation. Yes. The programs that you remember as being particularly indicative of the times and what you were Aiming at. Well, one which is generally picked out is a program called 'That Was The Week That Was', which started... In the autumn of 1962, which we thought of as a late night program on Saturdays for a couple of million people. And got up to an audience of about 12 million, heard with equal enthusiasm all over the country. - And an excerpt from that is your next record. - That is so.

Starting with Millicent Martin. ♪ That was the week that was ♪ ♪ It's over, let it go ♪ ♪ 52 times a year ♪ ♪ The week is done and over with before you know ♪ The new force in politics is of course the army. The candidates but what they haven't had yet is a party political broadcast. You've got one ready. It's by 326098 Lance Corporal Wallace AJ. Royal Signals. - Good evening to you.

I am speaking to you tonight from the Gascape store at Kitchen Alliance number 14 supply depot, Utoxeter. An excerpt from 'That was the week that was' with Alison Martin singing the theme song, the voice of David Frost and then Roy Cunearis, Lance Corporal Wallace... AJ Royal Signals. How long did you stay as Director-General? Until, appropriately... April the first, 1969. And when you left, among the other things you've done, is write some books which had probably been in your mind for a long time. You wanted to settle down and do some writing. So in some ways what I've produced, apart from a little book called The Third Floor Front about my... Life, particularly in BBC, I became an anthologist and produced several collections of...

Early Victorian detective stories. I wrote introductions of... And now you're in publishing with the Bodley Head Company. And in the Bodley Head catalogue at the moment there's a book called 'A Variety of Lives, Of Sir Hugh Green. Now why a biography and not an autobiography? Why didn't you write the story yourself? I started to. I think I had written about 12,000 words about my early life. And then I realized that the time was coming when I'd have to spend months in the BBC archives. Turning over dusty and boring papers. And I just couldn't bear the idea of spending my life in that way. And... I just put it aside and about a year later this young man Michael Tracy turned up and wanted to write my biography so I thought, ah, this is my release. A very entertaining book, but then you had a very entertaining life. Let's have your last record.

The last record is my brother Graham reading an extract from his book In Search of a I chose that because I thought in one shape or another I should like to have his company on the desert island. January. On September 31st, 1959. All I know about the story I'm planning is that a man turns up. For that reason alone I find myself on a plane between Brussels and Leopoldville. Character cannot end there. X must have known Leopoldville come that way, but the play... This where he emerges into my consciousness is a leper station many hundred miles up the Congo. The heps yonder, the hepa... It's one of the smaller stations four days away. The voice of Graham Greene. Now you fended for yourself in quite a few countries, Sir Hugh. Could you survive, could you look after yourself on a desert island? I think that if there was...

A well of sweet water and lots of bananas, then I could get by. Would you try to escape? Do you know about sailing? No. I'd be completely helpless. Now you've got your eight records. If you only had one, which would it be? I'm inclined to think that I would rather like to have Edmund London. And one luxury. Oh, that's easy. I would like to have a portable typewriter. And, if you will allow it, lots of paper. Yes, of course. You're going to do that autobiography after all. Then I'll do that autobiography. Good. Thanks. And you have the works of Shakespeare and you have a Bible. You may have one other book. Um... I think I would like the Penguin complete Sherlock Holmes. And thank you, Sahil Green, for letting us hear your desert island discs.

You guys for making me think of them. Goodbye everyone. Listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit--

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