Sir Ernest Hall

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 April 1998

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the businessman Sir Ernest Hall.

His life is like a fairytale. From a sickly boy, living in the one room he and his family shared, he became a successful businessman and millionaire - and all because of an inspirational piece of music. Today on the site of an old carpet factory in Halifax, he's brought together his two loves - business and the arts - to form an environment in which plastic-bag manufacturers and building societies draw inspiration from the painters and sculptors who work alongside. At the age of 68 he has also realised his ambition to be a professional pianist.

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

Favourite track: Piano Trio in B Major by Franz Schubert Book: The collected works by William Blake Luxury: Piano

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:09.1	The program was originally broadcast in 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a businessman born into a poor family in Bolton he
0:36.2	discovered a passionate love of music at the age of nine and trained as a pianist
0:40.6	and composer but it was industry not the arts in which he made his career and by
0:45.6	his late 30s he'd become a millionaire. Throughout his life he's tried to bring the
0:50.4	imagination of the artist to the world of commerce and the pragmatism of the
0:54.4	businessman to the world of the arts. Nowhere is this better represented than in the practical
0:59.8	utopia, his phrase, that he's created in Halifax.
1:03.6	Dean Clough, a highly successful mix of business, the arts and education,
1:08.5	is a monument to his vision.
1:10.6	We need to dream extravagantly, he says, and we need to believe in our dreams.
1:16.0	He is Sir Ernest Hall.
1:18.0	And if we believe in our dreams, that's the philosophy, isn't it?
1:22.0	We can attempt anything I think dreaming I'm sure we all
1:26.4	dream and we all have our dreams the problem is most of us abandon our dreams and I know from experience that dreams and dreaming and
1:36.6	believing in dreams is absolutely fundamental to our lives and how long ago did you
1:42.4	first dream of creating this this practical
1:45.4	utopia I've just described this Dean Clough which is we should say a vast
1:49.0	complex isn't it where polything bag manufacturers and building societies work alongside sculptors and painters.
1:55.5	It is.
1:57.9	It is a practical utopia.
	...

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