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. It's difficult to imagine a more intriguing or controversial figure than our castaway.

His time spent as chairman of British Steel and then at the COBOLBOLBOLBOLBOLD divided the nation into those who regarded him

as an ogre and those who saw him as a savior. One critic described him as the industrial butcher for Thatcherism.

On the other hand, the economist thought him to be the man who gave Britain the chance of remaining a relatively rich country in the 21st century.

He is Sir Ian McGregor.

Sir Ian McGregor, let's go back to the very beginning.

You were born in Scotland.

What sort of a community was it?

I was born in a place called Kinloch-Levin, which was a little enclave at the head of a

fiard, if you will, rather like the Norwegian Fayette's, in which there was a factory for the production of aluminium.

We built there in the early part of the century, 96 to 98,

and the community was more or less totally isolated,

like a mining camp in the backwoods.

What about your father?

Was he employed by the Animiname Company?

Yes, he joined the company when it was originally founded in 1895 in

in Vineshire, Foyers on Loch Ness, where the first aluminium factory in the United Kingdom was built in 1895,

harnessed the water power from the river that flowed through that community.

That was a very tiny little factory and the company finally got on its feet

and prospered enough to try to expand and they had to move to another area to find

...