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 1983, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week, our castaways the soldier, traveller and writer, Captain Sir Ranal Fines.

Or travelling and adventure, Rana, are in your blood

because a late 17th century ancestor, Celia Fines,

wrote some excellent and still useful travel diaries.

Yes, that's Celia Fines,

who was the origin of the nursery rhyme,

which nowadays is there was a fine lady from Bambri Cross. It used to be

fines lady, but that got sort of changed. And of course, both your grandfather and father had

adventurous military careers. Yes, my grandfather was not in anybody's army. He was in the

Mounties in Canada. He was a trapper for furs in the

Northwest Territories. He joined Cecil Rhodes in Basuto land, where he got a whole regiment lost

in the too far east towards the African coast. And finally he ended up as governor of the Seychelles

and the Leeward Islands.

And he got a great number of military medals without ever joining an army.

My father was in the Royal Scots Grays.

He commanded them at the Battle of Alamane and was finally killed just by Monte Cassino in Italy.

Before you were born?

Three months before I was born, yes.

Changing the subject,

how much does music mean to you? Not very much, to be honest, right? Music is something which I hear a tune in the background, and whether it's jazz or classical or pop or whatever,

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