Desert Island Discs Radio 4
When it comes to Desert Island Discs, I’m an addict, but this particular interview with Professor Louise Richardson was especially compelling.
Perhaps it was her Irish background – there was an instant connection.
She is one of seven children and grew up in the late 1950s in Waterford at a time when the assumption was that, as a girl, she’d get married.
Birth order is very significant, she said, with seven kids, everything has to be negotiated and it is a good life skill. She said that boys seemed to have all the fun and get the respect – there was the assumption they would do interesting things. That whole notion was “preposterous”.
She told a story about how she was envious of her brother and when he got a communion suit, she felt it was “a profound injustice”. So much so, that she went into her parents’ wardrobe, put it on and walked into town in it. She was just four years of age.
It led to an alarmed phone call to her parents and advice that she should be taken to a doctor.
You could imagine her striding forth like Pippy Longstocking, intent on adventure and righting wrongs.
At 14, after Bloody Sunday in Derry, she declared her intention to go north and join a peace march – for the only time in her life, her mother forbade her.
She went to Trinity College in the early 1970s shortly after the ban on Catholics attending had been lifted and she went on, groundbreaking, striding forth in a career as a political scientist whose specialism is terrorism – in America, Scotland and England, that led her to the post of vice chancellor of Oxford University.
Richardson was sharp, engaging and funny on all levels and her music choices were close to home – from Brian Boru’s march to Carolan’s Concerto.
Her book of choice for her island was Seamus Heaney’s collected poems and her luxury – why that would be a champagne fountain.
