Hello I'm Krusty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. Our castaway this week is a great figure in the world of cricket. He was one of the best fast bowlers of all time, a Yorkshireman, Fred Truman.

Fred, where about in Yorkshire do you come from?

Well, I was born in a little village called Stainton

down near the bottom end of South Yorkshire just the other side of Maltley towards Bortry.

So you're a country boy? Oh yes very much so and of course now I live in the Yorkshire

dales which is also very country there. Do you play records a lot? No not a lot because I

don't get chance I'm not very often in so spend a lot of my time listening to

records and things on the car when I'm traveling. What's the first record you've chosen out of

your aid? Well I thought I'm supposed to be a fiery character. This is

supposed to be my image which of course is completely wrong but so let's stick to

the image shall we and I think we'd start with Tarkovsky's 1812 overture the closing passages. Oh, Oh, And the Oh, The closing passage of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture, played by the London Symphony Orchestra and the Bound

of the Grenadier Guards conducted by Kenneth Allwyn. Now, Fred, your father was a miner

but you don't really come from a mining family, do? Well, no, my father comes more from the racing background. Horses? The horses, yes.

And of course in the late 20s when things were bad and especially with the advent of the motor car and the horse traffic starting to die away

He's a buyer and a seller and things like that he moved into the Yorkshire coalfields and so that's where I was born in the Colfields

How many were you in the family? Oh wait a minute, seven or eight of us.

So times were a bit tough? Oh yeah they were tough but they were very

happy times. They were. That's the main thing you know you always had a good meal and

you were always well clothed. Dad was a very conscientious person when it came to the family. They came

first, very much so. And you used to help out by doing odd jobs. Oh yes, I used to go in the winter

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