This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of desert island discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

How did you start in journalism, Christopher? You were up at Oxford. What did you read?

I read what's known as honor mods and grates, which is a very nice school to read but doesn't really equip you for anything practical.

And I must say, when I went down from university, I hadn't the slightest idea of what I wanted to do or be except I felt it should be something vaguely literary.

Did you go straight to the Yorkshire post? Not quite straight. No, I landed, of course, out of the university into the middle of the Great Depression.

When it was extremely hard to find jobs, I did try the BBC and was received by a rather stern gentleman who I think was a retired colonel who told me briskly to go back to my hometown leads

and buy a bicycle and see how many subscriptions to the radio times I could sell. Very helpful, which was helpful perhaps, but put me off the bus seat at that time.

Well, eventually knocking about in London and doing odd jobs like being secretaries of clubs and so on, I started to do book reviewing and through the good nature of friends in Fleet Street

and got to know the people in the London office of the Yorkshire Post and they introduced me to the then editor Arthur Mann, who very kindly took me on a minimal salary as a reporter in my hometown leads.

The power of the press was first revealed to me when I was sitting on top of a leads tram and two ladies sitting in front of me and one said,

maybe this has never been the same since young young chap from Yorkshire Post reviewed her art show.

And then the times, what jobs did you do on the times?

Well, I joined the times as a sub-editor and I was basically a sub-editor throughout my service with it, which lasted a good seven years, but there was lots of variety in it.

And then the war that took you into the Navy?

Yes, just about the time when the times was going to push me off as a foreign correspondent to New York, they found they couldn't reserve me any further and they were kind enough to ask me whether they could help me towards one of the palm services.

When did you start broadcasting?

I started broadcasting while I was actually working for the Navy because the times was one of the few newspapers in Fleet Street which did not make up the salaries of their former staff to the pre-war level.

I was living on naval pay and being taxed for the year before when I was getting Fleet Street pay or rather printing house square pay.

So I had to make up my salary somehow and some good ladies in BBC schools department, the great Frieda Lindstrom to name the principal one, helped me to become a compare for a program called Current Affairs for Schools.

And that got me acclimatized to the microphone.

It was the kind of program you know where you turned up and you said to the children, now children has been a great battle in the Philippines, get out your atlases and run your finger down longitude so and so until you come to a little group of islands.

You got it? Are you there? Well, that's the Philippines and here's the Reverend Langham Place who was a missionary there in 1911 to tell you all about it.

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