Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1993, and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this week is a politician. Brought up in poverty in the northwest of England, he left school at 14 to work in local factories where he became an active trade unionist.

He went via Ruskin College, Oxford, to Cambridge where he became the first working class president of the union,

Pipping Jeffrey Howe to the Post. In the 1966 election, he won Stoke on Trent for the Labour Party, and a high flying career seemed a certainty.

But then, a minor operation on his ear went badly wrong, and he lost his hearing completely.

He nevertheless stayed in Parliament, and became one of the country's best known and best loved campaigning MPs,

fighting not only for the death, but for the lidamide victims, battered wives, and many other causes too.

Recently, an operation has partially restored his hearing, and for the first time in 26 years, he's been able to hear the voices of his family again.

He is Jack, now, Lord Ashley. The magic moment apparently, Jack, was when you heard your four-year-old grandson speak. What did he say?

What he said was a very simple sentence. We were at a pond together, and he said, look at the flies, how do you?

And magically, I heard him say, they're not flies, granddad. There was some other kind of insect, and I was bored over it.

It really was an absolutely magical moment, and it proved to me that this operation had, in fact, been a great success in restoring part of my hearing.

So what exactly do you hear? What kind of sound?

I can't hear perfect speech, because voices are very distorted. Yet I can hear speech. I need to couple it with lip reading.

And yet, sometimes, I turn away, and I can understand people, especially my wife, Pauline.

So that means I am, in fact, hearing speech, and I'm certainly hearing you far more clearly now, or understanding you far more clearly now within the olden days of nation-wide,

when you were about it very kindly mouthed. But at that stage, your wife, Pauline, used to sit behind us.

I remember, and, in fact, you appeared to be looking at me, but, in fact, you were looking at her over my shoulder, weren't you?

Yes, well, Pauline was always there, as a safeguard, and what always managed to interpret and explain, in cases of difficulty, but mildly.

So you were lip reading her over our shoulders?

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