YouSaid · the spoken record

Shirley Williams

lines on the record: 47
first: 2006-01-29
most recent: 2006-01-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I was going to say my luxury and my grandchildren, but you're not going to permit that, are you? So I think what I'd better say is I'll take with me my PC linked to the internet, and then I'll have things to think about for all the time I'm on the island.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very fond of poetry, partly because in politics that's what you've got time to read. You haven't got time to read an awful lot of books. So I take probably the collected W.H. Orden.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I would probably. I would probably take that one because I think the plaint would be too sad and some of the earlier music, though lots of fun, would be very much tied to a specific time in my life. So I think I would take this one.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On my mother's gravestone the proper phrase is blessed of the peacemakers, and this particular record sums that up for me.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But not that. I mean, there's no question in my mind but that she has achieved a certain kind of immortality. I mean, she is now part of the canon of literature of the First World War, and lots of people study her and so on. No, she went, she achieved more than I've achieved. But I think she would have died reasonably happy, put it that way.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll a that and B just love clothes. She just loved going out to buy clothes. I mean, this was just about things he really enjoyed in life, one of the things he really enjoyed in life, was helping to choose clothes for very pretty women. He then decided to take me in hand, and he used to go to shops and sort out what he thought would suit me. And he was always right. And I would then come along with only half an hour to spare and choose between the four things he'd sorted out. And he always got it right. The other thing he persuaded me to do was to be more punctual as well. No, he was a very good influence upon me in every possible way.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw a bit of dick as friend, widow, widower, friend. And very gradually we moved towards falling in love and getting married. He was a wonderful husband. He was sort of the ideal husband one would have wanted to choose because he was already very well established in his own career, very famous in America, very much admired. The most lovely man because he'd served and nurse his wife throughout her illness, and I lost him in two thousand three. He was of reasonable age, but he was so wonderful as a member of our family as the sort of pataphamilias to both me and my children and my grandchildren, that we all miss him very, very”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record number seven is really comes after quite a long period in my life which I will deal with very quickly. After 87 I decided that first of all I'd stop being the party president I could only be it for six years I'd been it for six years it was now 87 I was at the end of that period and I decided to go and spend some time back in the United States so in those I then spent the next eight years pretty well full time at Harvard I came back in sort of three or four months a year and there I picked up a very old friendship with Dick Neustadt who was one of the probably the most formidable authority on presidential power in the United States that there's been a towering academic figure. I'd known him very well when he was married to his wife who later died of multiple sclerosis. I was particularly a friend of his wife Bert rather than of him at that time I knew him, but she was the one that was my real friend and when I went back to Harvard”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Labour Party is not the party I would today wish to belong to. I'm very happy to belong to the party I belong to because in the end I think that first of all I passionately wish to see our civil liberties defended. I think on many areas like prison policy like education policy like what I see as a gradual dismantlement of the National Health Service labour isn't doing what I would be happy with and I don't want to go from one party I've finally became unhappy with to another one I would still be unhappy with.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was colossally exciting. And I remember we launched it in all 11 regional capitals from Glasgow down to Cardiff to Southampton, which also meant that everybody felt that the party had been launched in their backyard. It was a tremendously clever way of getting people to identify with the party everywhere. It meant a lot of travel. I think what really probably hurt it was that David was a brilliant leader, but he wasn't a team player. And so he, I think, as he became more and more the sole banner carrier in Parliament, so eventually he sort of became more the leader of one party and the rest of us were sort of somewhat abandoned.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And chariots of fire was the music I chose for my Crosby campaign, which was the first time anybody got elected as an STPMP in a very, very conservative seat. It was pouring with rain. It was November. It was cold. It was bitter. We had no money. We had an open truck. And I remember week after week, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rogers and me in this open trap with the rain often pouring down were cheered up entirely by playing chariot so far as we went round all the villages and towns of the Crosby constituency to the point where finally we had established the brand music and the brand name and people came out in their thousands to vote for the SDP.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the next record, of course, for me, it sums up the birth of the Social Democratic Party. After I left the Labour Party in 1981, primarily, as you said, for reasons connected with the attempt to make accountability to the party and not to the people, and secondly on very specific issues that the Labour Party at that point had decided to leave the European common market, which I'd always been strongly in favour of, to leave NATO, various other rather far-reaching decisions of this kind, I just felt I couldn't, I remember feeling very strongly, I cannot get up on an election platform and advocate these policies because they are 180 degrees the opposite of where I actually stand, and I can't do it. And so I felt the only way I could stay in politics and actually we could put forward this extra option, this new choice, was by creating a new party.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not impossible to change it because I think gradually, let me give an example, we have far more emphasis today on things like conflict prevention, conflict resolution, peacekeeping, the role of the United Nations in all this. International relations is gradually becoming feminized. And that's the way it's going to go.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not entirely. I mean, Harold Wilson was really the first Prime Minister who broke through the view that in the cabinet there was just one woman, the statutory woman. But even so one still did run into a certain feeling that women weren't really thoroughly serious practitioners. I mean, if you look at the history of women in politics, Barbara Castle, Claire Short, Mrs. T, etc., what you find over and over again is that they tend to be outsiders. They tend to be boat rockers or whistleblowers. And the other crucial fact is that they are not part of the culture of clubberry, which is a very important part of British politics and has been ever since the days of Antony Trollop.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, record number five was when I was still married to Bernard and very happily so, and we were we had he'd been invited to go to Ghana, which was just becoming freed from its colonial status, the first British colony in Africa to become independent, and it was a marvellous experience. You'd come into a village in the total black, no electricity, of course, and you'd hear monkeys shrieking and parrots gossiping in trees and so on. And then all of a sudden out of this total blackness, I can't describe how black the blackness was. It was like black velvet. There would be these little points of light, which would be hurricane lamps borne by the students who came to my classes. It was an extraordinarily enjoyable experience.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I didn't want to see my marriage break up. It was very tough for a couple of years. I did everything I could to save it, but it couldn't be saved in the end. It was a sort of coup de fudre, I think. They were both obsessed with one another. And I finally came to understand that and realized that it was no good to keep trying to hang on. And the best way to save some sort of friendly relationship, which we didn't manage to achieve, was by, in a way, in the end accepting that I had to get out of the way.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He fell in love with somebody else, and I think he probably needed that somebody else because she was somebody who was prepared to, as it were, make him... Not any first, but almost everything. And at the same time was intelligent and attractive.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite good about that. He sort of managed to laugh about it, but I think it did cut a wound, but until he went to Cambridge when we then lived in two separate places, I think our marriage was pretty happy one. That was really put the Kaibos on it, though. But generally speaking, I must say, I think it worked very well for quite a long time.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, he was better than was. He was eternal, do you think? Very, very good at sharing responsibility for helping to raise our daughter. And of course his own career was taking off completely at that time. He was one of the youngest professors in the country at Bedford College at that time, University of London, and then later at University College London.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think absolutely. I think it would have been lonely for my daughter. I think it would have been very hard on us. It was quite hard anyway, but it would have been much, much harder.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, people enter and out the whole time. Transit in the spare room. Absolutely right. But the great thing was that we could have dinner parties together so that we could share out friends and so on. A lot of our friends.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People passing through. We had another couple besides, Frank Windsor, famous from Zedcars and his wife, Mary, who lived on the top floor, and they became a bit later. But the great thing about this menage was first of all that between us all we could afford much more space than if we bought three small houses, because one huge Victorian house ideally fitted three families. So we each had a floor. I think Rubis had two floors, we each had one.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record number four, it flows from my experience of going after I left University of Oxford where I'd had a wonderful time, and I got a full right to Columbia in New York, and I spent the year 1952 there. And he didn't get much leave, but on one occasion he got some leave and wanted to come and see New York. And it was the beginning of guys and dolls. It was the earliest beginning of the run of guys and dolls, that great musical. But I still remember the extraordinary for both of us, the feeling of this incredibly lively, vivid city, and the record I'm now asking you to play sums up for me the spirit and nature of New York as at that early performance of guys and dolls.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was home secretary, and I just lit into him about capital punishment for one. I said it's disgusting, and almost everything I could think of. And he, instead of thinking, oh my godfather's this pert, wretched young woman, he actually thoroughly enjoyed that we had a great argument, and after that we had lunch every now and then. He was really very fond of me. I became a sort of mentor. Did you get away?”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we met Lear thirteen And so I was sitting next to him. It was a long air raid, about two and a half hours, and I was sitting next to him in the air raid shelter. He”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did. Herbert, for one thing he was so tremendously warm and funny individual, but he also wanted to have had a lot of children. He only had, I think, one daughter. And so he actually did thoroughly enjoy children. How old?”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very Yes, I mean my mother was always a beacon to me. My father, in a way, shared my ambitions, but my mother was my moral beacon, and she was a woman of the most profound integrity.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, we got various dubious things through the door, as you might imagine all that, and she had a terribly hard time, there's no doubt about it. It was very funny, luckily for her it actually ended sooner than it might have done, because in April nineteen forty five, the newspapers published on their front page the Gestapo Blacklist, and by sheer good luck my mother, Vera Britton, my father, George Catlin, were on the same page as Churchill, and so there was in a sense the absolute proof that the Nazis hated her more than they did.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. And I think she also stirred up some quite profound sense of guilt that some people felt in Britain because she wrote a pamphlet called Seed of Chaos, which specifically came out against Saturday.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In nineteen forty eight when I was seventeen I was sent to Germany by the British Control Commission, and I remember as we went through out of the holes in the ground, literally the holes in the ground of the cellars, there emerged these sort of ghost people who were wearing rags, desperately hungry, and they just sort of came out of the depths almost as if it was an inferno that was down there. And so this had a great impact on me, and it was the first time that I really began to think I put it very bluntly, that we the Allies were not quite as wonderful as we presented ourselves, that we were capable of shutting one's eyes to the sufferings that were going on as a consequence of the war, and this war requiem, in a way, summed that up for me.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my father came down to Bristol, which is where the plane landed, took me back in the train to London. My mother was in a meeting in Birmingham and had no idea, and so he hid me behind a curtain, and when my mother came back from her meeting in Birmingham about eleven o'clock that night, you pull back the curtain, there was her daughter. On her side very emotional, on my side not, because I learnt independence and I couldn't take the leap of the three years when she hadn't been there, so it took little time. And my mother, who was a subtle woman, I mean she was very sensitive, realised that the best way was not to sort of hug me over and over, though she certainly started that way, but to leave me time and space to adapt myself to the idea of once again being the daughter in a household rather than a free spirit.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collected rags, I was blonde because I was blue-eyed because I was English, enough to be going on. And of course, in the end, we went to the final gallop, and Elizabeth Taylor got her nose ahead, and she therefore became the lead part in national velvet. And I'm always grateful I wasn't.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Famous in my way, which of course is what led to the famous Elizabeth Taylor's story. Which was when the Middle West film correspondents suggested my name as the lead part in National Velvet.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in Minnesota, I moved quite rapidly from being suspect because Britain was seen as an old European power trying to trap fresh young Americans into wars that they had nothing to do with. And then by the time the Pearl Harbour occurred in 1941, I suddenly became the town's heroine because I was the representative, our gallant little ally, quoted the.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, record number two is the famous Vorjac, New World Symphony. My parents both being high minded people wanted their children to actually live in part of the war, so they sent us to America, but the minute the minute that it was clear there wasn't going to be invasion, they tried to get us back because quite rightly they thought if we were going to be part of the post-war world, we had to had experience of the war, but not the one that might have been an absolute disaster in the sense that we might have been left orphaned and abandoned.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People coming through Well known people, activists, in fact fans of my mother, all sorts of people. It was a constant flow in and out, but not until tea time. All the earlier hours were dedicated to work.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not isn't he, actually I remember he came quite often to the house my father was secretary of the Free India Committee, and Nero as a young man who just got out of prison, came to our house and spent several hours talking to other fabians and people on his side.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too small, but by the time I was about six, I became conscious that my mother was somewhat unusual. Early what I was conscious of was that there was this very strict discipline in my house, under which you did not interrupt, either mother or father unless something disastrous had happened because they had to be working and you had to learn that.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, very much so. Particularly by my father. He had absolutely no sense that there is a different set of potentials for boys than for girls. And I always remember he used to encourage me climbing his bookshelves right up the ceiling when I was about three and my mother was terrified I would fall off. And he encouraged me always to go to the very top shelf and I felt he was entirely behind me and it was a wonderful feeling.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. I mean, my parents, I didn't see my parents all day long. My mother, for one thing, was locked in her study for the whole of the morning and part of the afternoon, but by the time we all got together, usually at tea, the conversation was almost invariably about the major issues at the time from the Spanish Civil War to the rise of Hitler, and I remember listening to my parents vigorously discussing with one another and finding out that the only way I could get into the conversation, my brother would be there too, would be by saying something like Will is Hitler going to bring the whole world to an end then. And then my parents would stop, look at me, listen, and I felt that that was how to get into the conversation.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my first record really reflects my great fondness for one of the people who made a lot of my work in education possible, and that was my friend John Little. He was a remarkable, had remarkable political insight, great devotion and commitment, and in a fairly hard life because he was not a man who enjoyed good health, and he died young. I remember this always being associated with him. It was somehow it captured the nature of the man.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we'll make it, but no, you're right, it will be a pull, and we'll have to overcome the setback that is undoubtedly there.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I don't feel so much resentful as rather simply sad. I have seen this happen with party after party. It's not anything very new, but I agree with you it's very sad and I think one of the harsh things, just life is not altogether fair, is that by and large the Liberal Democrats were held and to some extent held themselves to a higher standard and that's where part of the pain comes.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's quite true. I think the problem with Charles was that he promised more than once to give it up and then made real efforts for a while and then after a while under pressure lapsed. And I think the problem is that many people with the issue of alcoholism as a sort of disease do tend to believe that they can break the habit and it's much, much harder than”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be correct, yes. I did know a bit about Charles' problem, and one has to say that alcoholism or heavy drinking is an occupational hazard of politicians. I think it would be fair to say that someone like Winston Churchill more or less marinated in alcohol, but it didn't seem to affect his performance. Somebody on the other hand like George Brown, who I knew well, was driven to extremes by just a couple of sherries. Nowadays, because we have this society which is a curious mixture of Puritanism and permissiveness and hasn't quite decided which it is, I don't think either George Brown or Churchill would have got away without massive criticism from some newspapers. For this particular thing”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watch this woman. Right. I think I never took it as seriously as some parts of the media did. For one thing, I realised that in myself there were some drawbacks, for example, I've never been a terribly highly organized person. And I've got away with it because I'm hugely energetic. But you do have to be pretty well organized, I think, to be a Prime Minister, and I'm not sure I was sufficiently well organised.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something Probably. I think I started out by thinking I might want to be a journalist when I was very young. I might want to be a farmer, but in a way politics was insistent, and for me it was an endless sitting in the circle of the theatre of the world. And I found that extremely fascinating. So I got involved in politics as a very young person indeed.”
2006-01-29 · Desert Island Discs · Rt Hon Shirley Williams · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source