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0:01
BBC Sounds, music, radio,
0:03
podcasts. On
0:06
Last Word this week, the author Lynne
0:08
Reed Banks, the artist Joan Hills and
0:11
the luthier Amnon Weinstein. But
0:14
first, Sir Paul Fox was one of
0:16
the pioneers of British television and one
0:18
of its most respected senior executives. After
0:21
starting his career in BBC Sport,
0:23
where he invented the sports personality
0:25
of the year show, he became
0:27
editor of Panorama, head of current
0:30
affairs and controller of BBC One.
0:32
In the late 1960s and 70s, he oversaw the
0:35
launch of many hugely successful programmes,
0:38
including Dad's Army, The Generation Game
0:40
and The Parkinson Chat Show. Paul
0:48
Fox was born in 1925.
0:51
After military service during the Second
0:53
World War, he started his career
0:56
in local newspapers before moving into
0:58
film and then the fledgling BBC
1:00
Television Service. I had come
1:02
from the cinema newsreels, I came from pathway news
1:05
and I felt that the cinema newsreel days
1:07
were over, even in 1950 and
1:10
that television and the immortal
1:12
Wilford Pickles phrase was the
1:14
coming thing. When
1:20
Paul Fox was controller of BBC
1:22
One, his counterpart at BBC Two
1:24
was Sir David Attenborough, who has
1:27
fond memories of working alongside him.
1:29
He loved competition, he
1:31
loved winning and within
1:33
the meaning of what he
1:36
thought public service television should be doing,
1:38
he was intensely competitive. He wanted to
1:40
win, which explains why he spends
1:42
much of his career publicly
1:45
with sports television. Good
1:49
evening sports fans and welcome to another BBC
1:51
Sportsview programme. We have ten items again for
1:54
you this evening with a special treat I
1:56
think for boxing fans. He
1:58
invented Sportsview. he was
2:01
crucial in having his
2:03
ear to ground and knowing what was happening.
2:05
So that, for example, he had
2:07
cameras there ready for Roger Banister's
2:09
running a four-minute mile when nobody
2:11
else knew anything about it at
2:13
all. The
2:16
most sought-after target in athletics, the four-minute
2:18
mile, was achieved yesterday evening on the
2:20
Oxford University track at Ipley Row. And
2:22
those of us who didn't know much
2:24
about sport, nonetheless, became very
2:26
well aware that it was a big,
2:29
historic and newsworthy item and
2:31
the BBC television, directed by
2:33
Paul in that instance, was
2:35
there. The tape is
2:37
broken and so is the record athletes have
2:40
long been dreaming about. But at first, Banister
2:42
knows little about it. He stumbles into the
2:44
arms of his coach, completely exhausted by
2:46
his magnificent efforts. The Sports View was
2:48
a magazine, but basically it was a
2:51
news programme. I mean, it emphasised the
2:53
news regularly. It was innovative, it was
2:55
exciting, it was different. Again, those were
2:57
pioneering days. And the enormous advantage of
3:00
working in television in those days, in
3:02
the days of the Monopoly, were that
3:04
one could try things. And
3:07
everything you tried was new and
3:09
revolutionary. He had huge presence. I
3:12
mean, he was a big man and a
3:15
very knowledgeable man. I
3:17
mean, he exuded power in my eyes.
3:19
I mean, I was very, very impressed
3:22
by Paul. He had been
3:24
a paratrooper and that didn't come
3:26
as a surprise. He had been
3:28
wounded when he crossed the Rhine
3:30
in the arm. There
3:34
was no sign of that. But
3:36
he was not only a big
3:38
man, but he was a very competitive man. And
3:41
he had his ears to the ground and he
3:43
was more knowledgeable about what was
3:45
actually going on than anybody else I'd
3:47
ever met. I suppose there's a danger
3:49
that if you are a controller of
3:51
BBC One and you are working with
3:53
somebody who's a controller of BBC Two
3:55
that there might be competition for ideas
3:57
between the channels. Was there a relationship...
4:00
of competition or cooperation between the
4:02
two of you? There
4:04
was cooperation with the capital C.
4:06
I mean, my predecessor Mike Peacock
4:08
had started BBC2 with almost nothing.
4:13
I mean, and life was
4:15
secretive then, I think, he
4:19
kept it quite quiet as to what his
4:21
plans were. But when I
4:23
was appointed and Paul was appointed to
4:25
those two jobs, we got
4:28
together and we said, look, we
4:30
have to plan our two networks
4:32
together, they're going out together, and
4:35
so we could have really no secrets from
4:37
one another as far as programming is concerned.
4:40
And we arranged that the carbon
4:42
copies of our correspondence, of
4:44
our various memos and so on, were actually
4:47
at the end of the day, carbon copies
4:49
went from his office to mine and my
4:51
office to his. I knew
4:53
exactly what decisions he was taking and what
4:56
memos he'd sent, and he knew mine. David
4:59
was the most generous of colleagues
5:01
and the most warm-hearted of colleagues and
5:03
the most loyal of colleagues. And
5:06
with Hugh Weldon running the television
5:08
series, I thought he was a very
5:11
good set-up and one that was certainly the
5:13
most enjoyable time I ever had in
5:15
the BBC and also the
5:17
time when I learnt more than anything and
5:19
any other time. He's
5:21
associated with commissioning the
5:24
two Ronnies, the Generation
5:26
Game, Dad's Army, Parkinson's. I
5:29
mean, these are era-defining programmes and he
5:31
must have had some sense of what
5:34
would be popular with the viewer. Was
5:36
he very much in touch with what the viewers were wanting? Yes,
5:40
he was. And he
5:42
had one blind spot, actually, and that was
5:45
Monty Python's drawing circus. When
5:49
the first ones of those went out on BBC Two,
5:53
he didn't think it was at all funny. I have
5:56
to say, he changed his mind very quickly and
5:58
they became a lot of great... I
6:06
look backward hat Hacker Anything I did
6:09
during my time or control. The
6:11
Bbc wants I'm sure to the
6:13
moon news moved from Eight Fifty
6:15
and Nine Sustain where did been
6:18
swimming him as I moved at
6:20
nine o'clock advise some devious means
6:22
we managed to install of Nine
6:25
O'clock was it read that was
6:27
once the second thing when also
6:29
showed the pronouns wintertime when there
6:31
wasn't a lack of discipline management
6:34
Bbc programs and one time and
6:36
they ran Longan on thirty minutes
6:38
longer than system over the are.
6:41
And ran just any old lady was
6:43
a was around to time I saw
6:45
no reason I kind of asuncion round
6:47
town said need it He said at
6:49
one time I think that there are
6:51
three great jobs to have in the
6:53
B B C and the Editor of
6:55
Panorama. The considers Bbc once and the
6:58
Director General and he held to of
7:00
those positions but not the third. Do
7:02
you think he would have been a
7:04
good Director General of the Bbc. Yes,
7:07
us and to and the fact
7:09
that he he was up for
7:11
the position when became say cent
7:13
of Director General but didn't add
7:15
city Guess it's him to leave.
7:17
Decide to decide that his suit
7:19
and the Bbc was was not
7:21
bright and he's asked for your
7:23
key television. Was that seen as
7:25
an act of betrayal by the
7:27
Bbc at the time knows the
7:29
Bbc Salt a mean the Bbc
7:31
Here it is they wanted to
7:33
keep initially given the job. One
7:35
of the things. That attracted me to
7:37
the German Yorkshire A was a change I
7:40
wanted to change on quests me I wanted
7:42
to and the Bbc were unable to provide
7:44
a chance for me and I thought of
7:46
i didn't move them at the age of
7:49
forty eight I would never move and wanna
7:51
rethink. Said certainly persuaded me was the fact
7:53
that somebody said to me and hi T
7:56
V will be much closer to Pro Guns
7:58
and cause he was hugely influential. in
8:00
commercial television and I think it's quite rare
8:02
for somebody to have played such significant
8:04
roles on both sides of that
8:07
divide. Yes, indeed. He wasn't doctrinaire
8:10
and he was able perfectly easily
8:12
without any betrayal of any principle
8:15
to work for commercial television as
8:17
he worked for the puppet television.
8:19
Sir David Attenborough on Sir Paul
8:21
Fox is died aged 98. Now,
8:23
Lynne Reed Banks was the author
8:26
best known for her novel The
8:28
L-Shaped Room and her children's story
8:30
The Indian in the Cupboard. In all,
8:32
she published 40 works in different
8:34
genres, including a biography of the
8:36
Bronte family called The Dark Quartet.
8:39
Lynne was born in Barnes in West
8:41
London. Her father was a doctor and
8:43
her mother an actress. At
8:45
first, Lynne followed in her mother's footsteps,
8:47
but a stint in weekly rep convinced
8:50
her to abandon the stage. She
8:52
landed a job at the newly launched
8:54
ITN News Service, one of only two
8:57
women news reporters on British television at
8:59
that time. Lynne is
9:01
credited with pioneering the technique of Vox
9:03
Popping or conducting interviews in the street
9:05
with members of the public. Her
9:08
son, Gilon Stevenson, told me she
9:10
also reported on show business. She
9:13
interviewed incredibly famous people. She
9:15
interviewed Charlie Chaplin. She interviewed
9:17
Audrey Hepburn and she interviewed
9:20
Rita Hayworth. Miss Hayworth, this
9:22
is the first time you've been with your children
9:24
for quite a few weeks, isn't it? You're very
9:26
excited to see them again. Of course I am.
9:28
They arrived yesterday morning and this morning they
9:31
have never been in England. Then at
9:33
one point she asked a question that
9:35
she wasn't supposed to ask somebody and
9:38
then after that they said, right, Miss Banks,
9:41
you are banished to write scripts now.
9:43
But that obviously was good news for
9:45
her future career as a writer because
9:48
I believe it was while she was
9:50
doing that that she began to write
9:52
her book. It was. She
9:55
sat there and while the boys were going off
9:57
to lunch saying, what's the matter with you Banks?
10:00
Why are you sitting here, you little swat?
10:03
And she would sit there, and she
10:05
would work, and she just started writing
10:07
this book, and it became
10:09
the L-shaped room. My room was five
10:11
flights up in one of those gone-to-seed
10:13
houses in Fulham, all dark
10:15
brown wallpaper inside, and
10:17
peeling paint outside, on
10:20
every second landing was a chipped sink
10:22
with one tap and an
10:24
old ink-written notice which said, don't
10:26
leave tap dripping. The story of
10:28
the book is about a girl who has
10:30
had a shorter fare with an
10:33
actor, and is now pregnant,
10:35
and is ashamed of it and afraid.
10:38
She has a middle-class father like my
10:40
mother did, and she's afraid to
10:42
tell him, and she goes and finds
10:44
herself a squalid room,
10:47
and my mother always said that that was,
10:50
you know, the room itself is a kind
10:52
of a manifestation of squalidness within,
10:54
a sort of a kind of a
10:56
place for atonement, you know, somewhere that
10:58
was awful. And she meets
11:00
a group of very interesting eclectic
11:03
characters that live in this five-story
11:05
house, and gets
11:08
to know all of them. There's a writer
11:10
called Toby. Make
11:15
up for this. If
11:19
anything for you when you wake up, it
11:22
will be me telling you I love you. The
11:25
L-shaped room, the
11:27
setting for a love story such as
11:29
you have never seen before. Was she
11:32
happy with the film adaptation? Oh,
11:34
she hated the film adaptation. She
11:36
didn't like the way that he ended it.
11:39
That was, I think, a big problem, because
11:41
it was very important to my mum, the ending, and
11:43
he changed it. He sort of
11:45
taken away some of the gold power, the
11:48
independence, the life that was going
11:50
to be lived on Jane's terms.
11:53
Nothing's ever the same after your first book's
11:55
published, and if you have the good fortune
11:58
to have it be a success... You
12:01
think about yourself quite differently. It's
12:03
not a question of getting a big head.
12:06
It's like coming home. It's
12:08
like a ratification of
12:10
what you are, which
12:12
I had somehow never had. I'd
12:14
never really been secure in anything else
12:16
that I'd ever done. I'd always had
12:19
a bit of an inferiority feeling. Three
12:21
weeks after the premiere of the L-shaped
12:23
room film, Lynne left Britain to
12:25
live on a kibbutz in Israel. On
12:28
her return to London, she met and fell
12:30
in love with a sculptor called Heim Stevenson.
12:33
The couple married and went back to the kibbutz,
12:36
where Lynne taught English and worked on the farm. She
12:39
continued to write and in 1980 came
12:41
up with her best-loved children's book, The
12:44
Indian in the Cupboard. It
12:46
was a story that she developed for my brother,
12:48
Omri, my younger brother, developed in
12:50
the sense that she would make up stories for
12:52
us when we were kids, you know. She
12:55
started telling Omri a story. Of course,
12:57
she was using props as a good
12:59
actress does. The cupboard was a present
13:01
from his brother, Gilon. It
13:03
was actually a bathroom medicine cabinet that someone
13:06
had thrown away. But Omri
13:08
liked it. All it needed was
13:10
a key so that he could lock it, and
13:13
then it would be his secret cupboard. It's
13:15
a story about a boy who is given
13:17
a cupboard by his brother for his tenth
13:19
birthday, and is given a key by his
13:21
mother that belongs to his granny, and
13:24
he likes putting things away, and he takes
13:26
his Native American toy and puts it in
13:28
the cupboard and locks the
13:30
cupboard door and goes to bed. And
13:32
that is the key to the magic,
13:35
because when you lock the cupboard, whatever you've got
13:37
inside comes to life. Try
13:40
it. Me? I'm
13:43
awake. Believe
13:45
your eyes. I have a
13:48
magic cupboard that has a magic key. I
13:50
put a plastic in the cupboard and it
13:52
came alive. You are so
13:54
real. I
13:56
think that my mother at that point had
13:59
realised that... was a very
14:01
big difference between films and books and
14:03
had kind of accepted it. So when
14:05
the film came out she was a
14:07
little bit more ambivalent. Were there times
14:09
when she was criticized later on as
14:12
attitudes changed? Was her work criticized by
14:14
some who said it was very much
14:17
of its time? Yeah definitely. I mean
14:19
I think somebody whose career expands over
14:22
70 years is just going to get that.
14:24
My mum wasn't writing about necessarily,
14:26
I mean writing about her own opinion.
14:28
She was writing about the opinions and
14:30
thoughts of her characters. But certainly
14:32
there were things that were just okay to
14:34
say in the past and are no longer
14:36
okay to say now. And I think my
14:38
mother was a progressive person in the sense
14:40
that she didn't stay in her lane, she
14:42
was very open to change, she
14:45
was open to new mores, new
14:47
ways of thinking. If I
14:49
couldn't be a writer, well
14:52
I would have said once if I couldn't be
14:54
a writer like I'd be dead because my work
14:56
has been terribly important to me all my life.
14:59
But now I'm getting on in
15:01
years, I feel that it
15:03
wouldn't be so terrible if I couldn't write.
15:05
She wanted the world to be a better
15:07
place, she never wanted to
15:09
show off, she always wanted to give. And
15:12
she was a wonderful, loving,
15:15
loyal mother. I
15:17
loved her with all my heart. Gilon Stevenson
15:19
on Lynne Reed Banks who's died aged 94.
15:22
Now Joan Hills was a leading artist
15:25
who worked with her husband Mark Boyle
15:27
and children Georgia and Sebastian to form
15:29
the Boyle Family Collective. They're
15:32
best known for creating extraordinary random
15:34
facsimiles of the earth's surface. Their
15:37
work has been shown at the Venice
15:39
Biennale, the Hayward Gallery in London and
15:41
the National Galleries of Scotland. Joan
15:44
was born in Edinburgh. Although
15:46
she wanted to study art, her father
15:48
persuaded her to study structural mechanics instead.
15:51
In the 1950s she married a grain merchant
15:53
and had a child but the marriage did
15:55
not last and Joan took her baby to
15:58
live in a flat over a cafe. in
16:00
Harrogate, where she earned money by running
16:02
a beauty salon. It was
16:04
here that she met Mark Boyle, as their
16:07
daughter Georgia told me. One day
16:09
she went down to complain about the noise of the coffee
16:11
machine and the guy who ran
16:13
the cafe said, let me introduce you to
16:15
the man who's ordering all the coffees. This
16:17
is Mark. So he moved in
16:19
with her very quickly, which was at that
16:21
time a very brave thing to do for
16:23
her to have him move in. But
16:26
it seemed like the kind of obvious thing that
16:28
they were going to be working together for a
16:30
very long time. Joan
16:35
and Mark moved to London and became
16:38
key figures in the underground art movement
16:40
of the 1960s, meeting Yoko Ono and
16:42
the Beatles and other influential people from
16:44
the counterculture. Part of their
16:47
practice was also that they were doing
16:49
light shows, which are now known as
16:51
the kind of psychedelic light shows. But
16:53
they would show down at this club
16:55
called Yufo, which was a famous club
16:58
where the underground was. Where Pink
17:00
Floyd played in Soft Machine. They
17:03
basically did the lights for Soft Machine. One
17:05
day when they were down there doing the
17:07
lights and the guy jumped up on the
17:10
stage, that's Jimi Hendrix. When Hendrix then went
17:12
off to tour the States, he
17:14
was supported by Soft Machine and Mark and Joan
17:16
went along as well. The
17:22
art world then was much smaller than it
17:24
is now. If one person was
17:26
having an opening or doing something, then they
17:29
would all go to that. One of the
17:31
events that Mark and Joan did was the
17:33
thing called Big. We sent out
17:35
a printed invitation to friends, which said
17:37
at the top, the annual big of
17:39
the Institute of Contemporary Archaeology. People turned
17:41
up in all their glad rags thinking
17:43
they were going to some kind of
17:45
opening and then they were put on a bus
17:48
and taken down to Shepherd's Bush. We told
17:50
these people they were indeed to
17:52
dig and they really couldn't believe it.
17:54
But they did go ahead and start
17:56
to dig and they were moving this
17:59
rubble and concrete And
18:01
then, out came a fashion
18:03
of hate, or the
18:05
foot of a broken statue.
18:07
And indeed, the whole place
18:10
was a demolished golden statue
18:12
factory. Whatever they found was going
18:14
to be the exhibition. The
18:16
idea was to treat those pieces
18:18
as though they were archaeological finds,
18:20
very important. One day we did
18:22
find a smashed television set, and
18:26
beside it was lying the
18:28
grey rectangle that is
18:30
the kind of anchor piece for the
18:32
glass between the glitters from the cabinet.
18:35
And inside that grey
18:37
rectangle looked absolutely remarkable
18:39
and beautiful. And
18:41
we realised that this was a way of isolating
18:44
this enormous sight
18:48
and really focusing on something without
18:50
touching it. They realised
18:52
that what was lay within that was actually
18:55
far more interesting because it was random, and
18:57
that was something that was really important to
18:59
them. They started off at
19:01
first by doing transition pieces where
19:03
they would start moving the pieces
19:06
from where it was onto a grid and
19:08
a board, but they realised that they
19:11
were missing all the small particles
19:13
of dust. They then decided that
19:15
they would work on techniques where
19:17
they could both freeze
19:19
the surface and then translate
19:21
it into something that hung on a wall.
19:23
And they were throwing darts at a map
19:25
of the world as I understand it. As
19:28
people came into the exhibition, we would
19:30
blindfold them. That was my brother and
19:32
myself, and we would give them an
19:34
air rifle, and we'd
19:36
explain that they had an area that they
19:39
could fire at. And wherever those darts landed,
19:41
we would go and make a piece. And
19:44
I understand that the random
19:46
idea, the idea of chance
19:48
entering into the artworks, also
19:52
influenced the way that your parents lived their lives.
19:55
Yes, someone had written to Mark
19:57
from an architectural magazine and asked him
19:59
what was his... favorite part of Britain.
20:02
And Mark said, well, actually, we don't have favorite
20:04
parts like that. And what I suggest you do
20:06
is get a map and you put a dart
20:08
in it and where if that lands, go and
20:10
look at it. And the guy sent
20:12
back this thing saying, well, random selection
20:14
was Colville. And years later,
20:17
they decided that they could go and
20:19
get married in Colville with this random selection
20:21
that had been done. And my mother had
20:23
run up a charity shop and asked them
20:25
if they gave a donation, could they provide
20:27
them with witnesses? And they turned up in
20:30
Colville and there was these two witnesses and
20:32
they just went to the registry office and
20:34
did it. I'm just interested in your mother's
20:36
character in particular, since we're talking about her.
20:39
So what was she like and what was
20:41
her role in the family dynamic? I
20:43
suppose she was in some ways a foil for my
20:45
father, who was much more loud and a big
20:48
rack on term. My mother was quite,
20:50
very quiet, very gentle, but was always
20:52
there, was always quietly doing the
20:54
things. She
20:56
was modest and very brave. The
20:59
joy of this work is that you
21:02
find beauty in the
21:05
most random and neglected places.
21:08
It's not the we necessarily find beauty
21:10
or because that's for each individual to
21:12
work out for themselves. What
21:15
it is, is it's something that's very familiar
21:17
that is suddenly hanging in front of you.
21:19
You're used to having your head down looking
21:21
at things and then suddenly it's hanging in
21:23
front of you and you're able to
21:25
really look at it and really examine it and really
21:27
think actually the world
21:29
is pretty amazing. Georgia Boyle on her mother
21:32
Joan Hills, who's died aged 92. This
21:35
week, last words also go to the cricketer
21:37
Derek Underwood, MBE. He
21:39
was one of Kent and England's greatest ever
21:42
bowlers, taking 297 wickets in 86 tests, the
21:47
most by any England spinner. And
21:50
we remember Angela Redgrave, MBE, the
21:52
dance teacher who was principal of
21:54
the Bristol School of Dancing for
21:57
over 50 years and inspired thousands
21:59
of students. But now
22:01
for the Jewish Luthier, Amnon Weinstein,
22:03
musical instruments were his whole life.
22:06
He'd learned how to make and repair
22:08
violins from the great Luthiers of Cremona
22:11
in Italy, and taken those skills back
22:13
to the dusty workshop in Tel Aviv
22:15
which he'd inherited from his father. A
22:18
chance encounter there was to inspire Amnon
22:20
to create a collection of violins which
22:22
had been played in the most terrible
22:24
of circumstances, in the Nazi
22:26
concentration camps of the Second World War.
22:30
Amnon's Violins of Hope project is
22:32
now being carried on by his
22:34
son, Afshalon, who told me the
22:36
family suffered terribly in the Holocaust.
22:38
My grandfather was one of eleven brothers
22:40
and sisters, and only one of
22:43
his brothers survived. My grandmother had
22:45
seven or eight brothers and sisters, and
22:47
none of her family survived. Every
22:54
single camp had an orchestra.
22:57
Those had to play in the morning and in the
22:59
evening when the inmates would go out and come back
23:02
for work. The
23:07
Canadian composer Jap Nico Hamburger is
23:09
the child of two Holocaust survivors.
23:12
He's dedicated his music to remembering those
23:14
who were lost. Some of
23:16
the musicians who were at gunpoint
23:18
ordered to play music at the
23:21
entrance of gas chambers. That's
23:23
an unimaginable, cruel
23:26
and cynical situation to be
23:28
in. Amnon
23:34
himself was intensely moved by these
23:36
stories. It was forbidden to
23:38
the Jewish to pray, and
23:40
the violin was praying for them.
23:43
And to be out of this horrible
23:46
place for five minutes, and all
23:48
the value of that, for five
23:50
minutes in the free world, that's
23:52
the power of music. After
24:05
the war, my grandfather bought
24:07
many German and Austrian made
24:09
instruments, because after the war with Israel,
24:12
nobody wanted to touch anything
24:14
German, including musical
24:16
instruments. They came to
24:18
my father and said to him, if you
24:20
are not buying this violin, I'm breaking it
24:22
or burn it. And for
24:24
my father, this was sacrilege, and
24:27
he bought every instrument that people bring
24:29
it to him. In
24:44
1979, a guy came to
24:46
the workshop with the violin that he got from
24:48
his ex-employee. His
24:51
employee was playing all the
24:53
way to the God's chambers in Auschwitz. I
24:56
opened the violin. I remember
24:58
it was inside black
25:00
powder because it was played. He
25:03
had the camo to you, and he had
25:05
all these horrible places. And
25:07
I asked him questions, and he told me
25:09
about what happened there. So what
25:11
was the impact on your father of that
25:14
violin and the ashes that he found inside
25:16
it? Honestly, I can't really
25:18
tell you. He didn't, I mean, he repaired the
25:20
violin, he gave it back to the owner, and
25:23
in a way that was the end
25:25
of it for him. But soon, families
25:27
from all over the world began coming
25:29
to Amnon's workshop with violins that had
25:31
been stored away in attics and cellars,
25:33
each with its own haunting story. As
25:36
the collection grew, it came to the
25:38
attention of Jap Hamburger, who was determined
25:40
to write a piece to allow the
25:42
violins to be heard again in the
25:44
concert hall. I'm a composer. The
25:46
topic of the symphony was children
25:48
at war, and
25:51
some of those instruments were actually
25:53
present in
25:56
the concentration camps where my parents were
25:58
prisoners and survivors of the Auschwitz.
26:01
And just as Anand Weinstein
26:03
had thought and
26:05
realized was to save some
26:07
of those instruments that actually
26:10
had been there and
26:12
bring them back to life
26:15
in the sense that they're not just
26:17
artifacts in a collection or artifacts
26:19
in a museum, but actually instruments that
26:21
do what they were supposed to do
26:24
to perform music. What
26:33
was your father's reaction when he went
26:35
to one of these concerts and he
26:38
saw the fruits of what he had
26:40
done by collecting the instruments?
26:44
Listen, it's a big crowd. And
26:47
you hear the crowd, you hear
26:49
the reaction after the
26:51
concert when people come to congratulate you
26:53
and when they speak
26:55
and they talk about their experience. It's
26:58
amazing. The
27:02
Holocaust is a story of death,
27:05
but the Holocaust is also a story of
27:07
hope, because many people survived
27:10
and the music was
27:13
a part of it. When you know
27:15
all the stories of the violin, you
27:17
find that many violins brought
27:20
hope with them. Anand
27:32
Weinstein has died aged 84. This
27:36
week you also heard last words on
27:38
the artist Joan Hills, the author Lynne
27:40
Reed Banks and the TV executive Sir
27:42
Paul Fox. Don't forget there
27:44
are hundreds of other fascinating life stories
27:46
in the Last Word Archive on BBC
27:48
Sounds.
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