Hello, I'm Christy 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 1978, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

On our Desert Island this week is the right Reverend and right Honourable Dr Gerald Ellison,

the Bishop of London. How do you do set about choosing your diss, to what extent does

Nostalgia come into it? I chose first records that I'm fond of, and that I think would meet my various

emotional needs on the island, but as well records that have got, for the most part, some particular

connection with happy memories and experiences that I'd be glad to recall on the island.

What's the first one? I'd like to hear Ellgars' first symphony. Why do you choose that?

I'm a great devotee of Ellgars. I love splendid music, and I think the first symphony,

especially the end of it, where the very solemn melody with which it opens comes back with the full

orchestration, is one of the most magnificent pieces of music that I know.

The closing passage of Ellgars' first symphony, so Adrian Bould conducting the London Philharmonic

Orchestra. Now, as a youngster, I know you were in the choir school at St George's Chapel

Windsor, so you had a musical upbringing. Music was very much a part of our home life.

My father was a rector in the City of London at St Michael's Corn Hill. He and my mother were

devoted members of the Bach choir, and my father with Harold Dark founded the St Michael's Singers,

which was a very important element in the musical life of the City between the Wars,

and then I and my two brothers were both in the choir at St George's Windsor. We were under

Sir Walter Parrott, who was contemporary of a Hubert Perry and Charles Villas-Stamford,

and so we were brought up in the great tradition of English church music.

As well as singing, do you play the piano or the organ? No, I wish I could. I can't, as it were,

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