This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Disks. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Eric, what part of the country do you come from?

I'm a thoroughbred cop now, I was born with the sound of the bells and I'm very proud of it.

Good. Which came first? Photography or natural history?

Well, I suppose natural history came first because my mother says that when I was only two years of age,

I used to escape out of the garden and spend all my time collecting beetles and snails.

And then, when I was only six, I took my first bird photograph. I bought the camera.

I paid 35 Bob for it and I was saved out of papers and pennies and farthings.

I took it straight up to our local playing fields, found the songstrikes nest, rested the lens on the front of the nest,

and just took the photograph. I didn't realise it was anything so complicated as focusing on it and like that.

I took it back home, got my oldest brother to develop it. Well, if you imagine what it was like, it was just a horrible blur,

but it did make me realise there was much more infotography than I'd first sought.

Was it your first ambition to be a natural history photographer?

It always has been, yes.

Was it your first job when you left here?

No. When I left school in 1926, I drifted into the motor car industry and stayed there until the firm that I was working for went broke in 1929.

I was on the unemployment market and I tried to find a job that was just unavailable in those days.

And so I spent the time going up to the zoo, taking photographs of various different new arrivals,

as well as babies that were born. I used to rush the negatives back home, develop them and print from the wet negative

and rush them around Fleet Street and more often than not just, it didn't set everything at all.

It was very tough.

Yes. You also did a lot of children's photography?

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