This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Disks, the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Where were you born, Mr. Emmock?

I was born in London, and curiously enough, on the very day and month and year that Cezanne died.

Now I think there ought to be something here by rights. It should have made a difference or had some effect, but quite honestly it didn't take.

Which came first in your life, drawing or mechanical things always?

I believe you had already patented some inventions while you were still at school.

Well, they were patented for me by my father. Yes, I was 12 or 13 at the time, improvements to the ordinary acoustic gramophone.

Yes, indeed. What was your first job when you were at school?

My father thought that I should have some befitment towards the business world which he was engaged in.

He thought that was the thing. I should have something solid. So I was doing two finger typing in his office for him until I made so many mistakes that I had to really think of doing something else.

No, I went actually. I went into an advertising studio. I think that is quite an early age.

And in an advertising studio, one has to do everything, drawing pictures of the product.

Absolutely everything. It had to be everybody and do everything.

And it was so destroying in lots of ways, but I wouldn't have had it otherwise.

The experience gained and the way it made you think quickly and produce ideas absolutely on the spot.

It's a thing that stood me in very great state ever since.

Were you selling humorous drawings as a freelance?

Never done a humorous drawing in my life before that.

How did that start?

Well, it started with punch straight away and really it started through spite.

How was that?

We had a friend, a copywriter at the studio, and one morning he came in very full of himself and threw down a manuscript.

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