Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a trade union leader. He still lives in the area of East London where he was brought up the son of a market street trader.

The close supportive community of his childhood was an enormous influence on him,

but his conversion to socialism came when serving as a marine at the end of the war,

he witnessed the appalling poverty of Hong Kong.

He's not a man who embraces change easily.

He's frequently embarrassed the Labour Party with his attacks on its modern ways, and he

remains a believer in traditional union organization.

He is the leader of the country's biggest union, the transport and general workers, Ron Todd.

Ron, how close do you live these days to the street where you were actually born and bred?

Right up against it?

Well, I was born just off of the market in in Wolfersho High Street. I currently live

near the Ford plant that I worked in so I'm about a mile and a half from the market

two miles from the market. And you still walk down there every weekend,

you?

Nearly every Saturday that I'm home I go down the market

because many of the stallholders I went to school with,

and many of them are new at the time my father and grandfather

were in the market.

A lot of families in the East End who were born, you know, in the 20s when you were and in the 30s

eventually got moved out, didn't they?

...