Bill Cullen

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2003

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Sue Lawley's castaway is the Irish businessman and writer Bill Cullen. He was one of 14 children born to William Cullen and Mary Darcy. His childhood, in the tenement slums of inner-city Dublin was one of extreme poverty. Born during the war, the family lived in a one-room dilapidated tenement. Learning the secrets of street trading from his mother and grandmother, Bill started selling from market stalls from the age of five. He sold everything from fruit to evening papers home-fashioned Judy Garland dolls to paper flowers.

He eventually started working in a car dealership and went on to own Renault Ireland. He is now a millionaire many times over. He puts his success down to sheer hard work and the support and determination of a close knit family. He has written about his life and says his autobiography, It's A Long Way From Penny Apples, is a tribute to the strong women of Ireland - like his own mother - who held families together through thick and thin. Royalties from the book have been given to the charity of which he is a director, The Irish Youth Foundation. In the past 17 years he has raised £20 million through his charitable work. He is now working on his second book Streetwise, which will impart the business knowledge he has gained over the years.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: New York, New York by Frank Sinatra Book: Glimpses by Brendan Kennelly Luxury: An accordion

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an entrepreneur. He's risen from the tenement slums of Dublin
0:36.2	to become one of the richest men in Ireland. The stars of his extraordinary story,
0:40.7	apart from himself, of course, are his mother and his grandmother.
0:43.8	The first, a dynamo, the other, a philosopher who taught him to be positive.
0:48.1	So it was that the boy who started work at the age of six selling apples from his mother's market stall was only 16 years later
0:55.1	in charge of Ireland's biggest Ford dealership and he went on from that to own one of the country's
0:59.8	most profitable car distribution companies. His grandmother told him to say I am
1:04.8	terrific every morning before he left for school and those words still ring in his
1:08.7	ears these days as he rub shoulders with presidents and prime ministers.
1:13.0	Getting to the top may not have been easy, but it wasn't wholly unenjoyable either.
1:17.0	I'm lucky, he says, but luck is opportunity meeting preparation.
1:21.8	He is Bill Cullen and your preparation was
1:24.2	certainly tough Bill and what you seem to have had all the way through is this kind of
1:28.0	positive approach which is really your form of luck isn't it it's in the
1:31.9	genes that kind of positivism. Well I't it it's in the genes that kind of positivism well I say
1:34.2	it's probably in the genes so but it's it's also part and parcel of the habits you
1:38.6	develop from an early age and that's what I got in my mother's house. We had tough times, but she raised us all to be very positive.
1:48.0	Yes, look in the mirror every morning, a big smile and say, I am terrific and never leave this house without a smile on your face
1:54.8	and your head high.
1:56.6	But she you've said was a true entrepreneur.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.