Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

A castaway was once described by an observer as a good man in a blizzard

attribute to his unflappable nature. Another described him as one of the most decent and well-liked

men in British politics. He is a foreign secretary, Sir Jeffrey Howe.

Sir Jeffrey, a good man in a blizzard. Does not mean you make a good man on a desert island,

do you think? I'm not sure. I think the techniques are all different,

and in the blizzard I was with a lot of other people, so I had company to keep me going.

I didn't think I'd be too bad on a desert island. What about the background of yours,

did music play a big part in your life, for instance? It always has, yes, but as a listener

rather than a performer. I have painfully performed my way through school. I've always enjoyed singing,

and we have a daughter who's a singing teacher. But really, music is an inescapable part of the

background of a Welshman. My father and my aunt were both regular chapel girls. My mother went to

a different chapel in church, and my grandfather founded one or even two well-sweeting chapels,

so that Welsh hymns were very much part of the background. Your grandfather, he founded a union

too, didn't he? He was a founder member of the Timbators Union, yes. What about your father,

what did he do? He was a solicitor, went into his uncle's family firm, started in the last

century, and he became the local coroner, and talked to the justices. I used to go around

the south well as well as the west to walk in with him as a boy, going to many of those tragic

inquests that he had to reside over, and he was a very typical Welshman for the generation, not

allowed to be involved in politics because of his job. He knew Lloyd George, Lloyd George knew my

...