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

The program was originally broadcast in 1981 and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. On a desert island this week is the celebrated photographer Patrick Litchfield. Now that's the name you work under

professionally. In private life you are the fifth Earl of Litchfield.

That's right. I chose not to use the title initially because I thought it would have

been something of a disadvantage

although most people won't believe that. I think in the 60s it might have been because nobody is about

to give a job to somebody who would appear to be well healed when there were others perhaps more hungry than myself wanting to work.

Now I don't mind what I'm called because people tend to know, but there wasn't a rather boring occasion when a newspaper that I was

working for asked me to go and photograph Lord Litchfield.

So that was an easy one. You have a very large estate and Staffordshire. That's off your hands now.

No, it's not. I mean, it's very much in my hands because although the house itself in which I live is National Trust and administered by the Stafford County Council.

The estate proper is still administered by us,

and there's considerable farming interests there,

and it's very important to me.

Did you grow up, though?

Yes, in part.

I was also brought up partly in Paris and partly in Tripoli.

It was sort of wartime in post-war and I whizzed about and never really had a proper home as such but saw quite a lot of the world

in the process of growing up. Now you have this fascination by things pictorial

was there a collection of paintings in the house that you grew up with?

No, they were sold before I grew up. There's a less than marvelous collection at the moment,

but I don't know quite what it was that made me want particularly to take photographs

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