Professor A H Halsey

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the sociologist and Oxford Emeritus Professor A H Halsey. Prof Halsey played a key part in the switch to comprehensives as an adviser to Labour Education Secretary Anthony Crossland in the 1960s. Born in 1923 to working class parents he grew up convinced that intelligence wasn't dependent on class. Chelly, as Halsey was universally known, won a scholarship to grammar school but started his career inauspiciously as a sanitary inspector's apprentice, where he became intimately acquainted with such delights as the putrid lungs of diseased cattle. During the war he trained as a fighter pilot and perfected the 'aerial handbrake turn' that would keep him out of the way of the Japanese Kamikaze pilots. It was practising this manoevre that very nearly cost him his life as his plane took a nose dive, recovering only yards from the ground.

After the war he went to the LSE and on to make a name for himself in the rapidly expanding discipline of sociology, and for some 40 years has held a professorship at Nuffield College, Oxford. Along the way he's taken on the grammar school system, the class system, the establishment and feminism. As he turns eighty, he talks to Sue Lawley about his life and times.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a sociologist. He was a railway child born into a poor happy family that earned its living on the trains.
0:31.0	He was clever and won a scholarship to the local grammar, sometimes
0:34.4	hiding his newfound learning from the family for fear of swanking. He went to the
0:39.0	LSE, lectured in America, and in the 60s became an education advisor to the government and a champion of
0:45.0	comprehensive education.
0:47.0	Since then as an Oxford professor and a former wreath lecturer,
0:51.0	by the way, he's turned to other themes, in particular the breakdown of family life.
0:55.6	A Christian and a socialist, he says, that the family with all its miseries is the best thing we've
1:01.0	ever devised.
1:02.4	Its collapse, he believes, is going to ruin the future.
1:05.5	He is Professor A.H. Hallsy. Albert Henry Hallsy, but always known to your family as
1:11.0	Chelly, or for some reason why Chelly no idea it came
1:15.6	very early before my memory began but it stuck for 80 years it stuck in the way that
1:21.1	often in those days things did stick and people did acquire
1:26.5	nicknames which they carry forever. But this sense of family and the nature of
1:32.1	education they've been strong themes in your life
1:34.4	haven't there and I'd quite like to talk to you about yours first of all because
1:37.7	yours was a very large family wasn't it? Yes it was a large family there eight of us, children that is, but the important thing to notice
1:47.6	about that is that if you were stuck in the semi-school laboring population. It wasn't all that extraordinary,
1:53.8	and certainly wasn't extraordinary
	...

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