Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1980, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week are cast away as the chairman of British rail Sir Peter Parker.

Sir Peter with what degree of dread would you envisage a sojourn on a desert island?

Quietness, remoteness, the whole scope for thinking things out.

No, I think I'd look forward to this.

How important is music to you?

It's become more and more important, really, to me in the last 10, 20 years. I was never trained in music and I was, you know, choir boys of looking at the notes and hoping I'd get through but I was never trained in an

instrument but gradually as my life has gone on I've realized how much I depend on it.

You are I believe a patron of music. One of your four children runs a group which I believe you funded.

Well, not much funding is going on. I mean, he's out there in the wide world doing for himself. He's put a pop group together, yes. A lot of the boys from

Derby called the Heartbeats and they're great fun. They're doing all right. Well they're living,

they're doing gigs and they're living, they're doing gigs, and they're, I hope, going to be surprising when they really get going.

Are you a disc player?

Yes, yes, a lot.

At weekends only, and I can get into my little hut in Minster Lovell and then I'm by myself and I find I sit there and it's my desert island of the week as it were the weekend.

Now what's the first record you've chosen?

I've gone for La Marseille's, arranged by Berlio's.

I was a boy in France for about seven years of my life.

You were born there.

Born there.

And the first schooling I got was in a little French apron going to Kolee Jean-Bade and I've always

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