Classic Desert Island Discs - Baroness Hale
38:15 Share

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening. MUSIC PLAYS

My castaway this week is Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond. She's a great actress.

She recently retired after three decades as a judge, leaving behind a legal career distinguished by a long list of firsts. She was the first woman and the youngest person to be appointed to the Law Commission and in 2004 became the UK's first woman law lord. She also made history as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, later becoming its deputy president and then, in 2017, its president.

Despite leaving a skyscraper's worth of glass ceilings in her wake, it was in September 2019 that she was thrust into the spotlight when she announced the Supreme Court's judgement that the prorogation of Parliament had been unlawful. It was a landmark moment and a cultural flashpoint.

That announcement and her chosen accessory that day, a twinkling spider brooch, captured the public imagination. She was called the Beyoncé of the legal world and had a double-page spread in vogue, a far cry from the Yorkshire village where she grew up. Another famous spider person observed, Her own motto below her coat of arms is,

As for how she got there, she says, I just set out to be the best I could be at whatever I was doing at the time. And remember, I've been around a long time.

Lady Hale, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you so much for having me. So you're very keen for others to follow in your footsteps then. If you had to pitch the idea of pursuing a life in law to a young person listening to this, I wonder what your opening arguments would be. They would be that the law affects us all in everything that we do. It's got everything in terms of stories, arguments, justice, injustice, violence.

what's not to like? You once said, Lady Hill, I don't set out to stir anything up, but you do have a reputation for speaking up about the issues that matter to you. How did you weigh up what was worth sticking your neck out for during your career? Well, most of the things that I have stuck my neck out for are issues to do with the less advantaged people in society. And for a lot of my lifetime, that has included women and children,

And people with disabilities, people with mental health problems, and of course people without enough to live on.

So in various ways, I have felt it necessary to speak up for them. Music and singing, I know, are particularly important to you. You were a member of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society when you were a student, and I believe On Il Climor Batat is one of your party pieces. Well, when I am called upon to sing a party piece at various social gatherings, often connected with students and Grey's Inn, yes, indeed, my party piece is On Il Climor Batat.

Because it's a great thing to get other people to join in with. On Il Climor Bar Tat. On Il Climor Bar Tat. On Il Climor Bar Tat. On Il Climor Bar Tat. Oh, perfect. I feel like I could join in at this moment, but we do have to move on. Tell us about your first disc today. It's a recording by Kathleen Ferrier.

who was one of my parents' favourite performers, with a beautiful, beautiful contralto voice. And she came from the north of England, which of course we did too, so they had a lot of her recordings. And I've chosen O Thou That Tell Us Good Tidings to Zion from Handel's Messiah. O Thou That Tell Us Good Tidings to Zion O Thou That Tell Us Good Tidings to Zion

Get the ark into the high mountain. All that tell us good tidings to sun. Get the ark into the high mountain. Get the ark into the high mountain.

O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, from Handel's Messiah, performed by Kathleen Ferrier with the London Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Adrian Bolt. Lady Hale, in 2019, when you announced the Supreme Court's judgment that the Prime Minister's prorogation of Parliament was unlawful, void and of no effect...

It was, of course, a seismic moment in British constitutional history, but I know that you've described it as a source of satisfaction rather than pride. Tell me a little bit about that distinction. Well, the satisfaction is that we managed to reach a reasoned conclusion with which all the justices agreed. It doesn't give us any satisfaction at all to tell the Prime Minister or a public authority that,

that what they have done is unlawful. But it is satisfying to reach a judgment. And Lady Hale, in the years following the referendum, some commentators portrayed you and your fellow judges as unelected officials trying to derail a democratic process. Can you understand why some voters might feel that way too? It's difficult for me to understand that because we were not debating whether or not Brexit should happen.

That had been decided in the referendum, and we are a democracy. What we were deciding was what the government could and could not lawfully do against the context of the Brexit process. As judges, of course, we do not want to do things that are out of step with public opinion and

But we are not governed by public opinion. We are governed by the law. And that's what we have to stick to. Of course, Lady Hill, I have to ask you about the spider brooch that you wore that day. It caused such a stir. It was a vicious camel spider, I believe. And there were so many conspiracies associated with your decision to wear it at that moment that I feel duty bound to invite you to set the record straight. How did you choose it that day?

I have a large collection of brooches. It was begun by my husband when I was in the family division of the High Court and had to wear dark suits. He thought they needed a little bit of livening up. And the dress which I chose to wear that day has always had a spider on it. In fact, when I got the dress out of the wardrobe, the spider which usually sits on it was nowhere to be seen.

So I went quickly to my jewellery drawer and took out another spider. It never crossed my mind that anybody would draw any conclusions from the fact that I was wearing a spider rather than a dragonfly or a frog or anything else that I might have been wearing. I was rather thrilled to hear that it had been a bit of a bargain, that particular spider. That particular spider, my husband told me, had cost £12.00.

I mean, who would have thought that a spider that would go down in history would have such humble origins? It's an inspiring story. I think it's an inspiring story too, but there were no hidden messages in it, whatever. Well, it's good to lay that one to rest. Time for your second piece of music today. What's it going to be and why have you chosen it? After school, of course, I went to Cambridge and this was in 1963. The Beatles had just brought out their first album,

And the first tracks I listened to with school friends and, of course, spent most of my Cambridge career dancing to the Beatles and sometimes the Rolling Stones. So it's Love Me Do. Love Me Do. Love Me Do. Love Me Do. Love Me Do.

The Beatles and Love Me Do. Lady Hill, you were born the second of three daughters in Leeds in 1945 and your parents, Cecil and Marjorie, were both teachers. How would you describe their approach to life together? Oh, well, they were very, very deeply in love, which is one of the things that we were always clear about as children. We were loved, but theirs was the greatest love affair of all time.

What about their partnership, the dynamic between them? When they got married in 1936, of course, my mother had to give up her job as a teacher because there was then a marriage bar in the teaching profession. But my father insisted that she had some money of her own to spend, not just the housekeeping.

They were very much a partnership of equals. When you were three, your father became the headmaster at a boarding school for boys in the village of Scorton near Richmond in North Yorkshire. As newcomers to village life, did you feel a little bit different from the locals? I think we especially felt different when we went to the local village school because in those days everything depended upon school.

passing the 11 plus and most of the pupils in the school were not expected to pass the 11 plus but we were yeah you took it a year early as well to boot to boot i did hear that um you know when you'd set your mind on something you were very hard to dissuade from the notion of acquiring it there was a particular childhood story about a lemon that i know that your sister your sister told once

Do you know what I'm talking about? Well, it was apparently when I was about 15, 18 months old and at the table there were some slices of lemon there and Brenda decided that she wanted a slice of lemon. And she was told very firmly, no, you wouldn't like that, it's bitter, it's sour, you wouldn't like it at all. But I insisted and I screwed up my little face because it was so sour and awful.

But I insisted, Brenda likes lemon. It's time for your third disc. What have you chosen and why are you taking it with you today? I was lucky enough to go to two live performances which stuck particularly in my mind. One of which was Jacqueline Dupre playing Elgar's Cello Concerto.

but the other was one of the first three performances of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. I already liked Benjamin Britten's music because we had sung it and studied it at school, but the War Requiem blew my mind away. Was it for this, for this, the clay-brewed toad made fatuous?

Part of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, performed by Peter Pears and Galina Vishnevskaya, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer.

Lady Hale, as we've heard, you passed the 11 plus and then you went to the high school where you were pretty much top of the class in everything. If we'd met you back then, what would we have seen? Well, you would have seen a short girl with hair in pigtails, with round National Health Service spectacles to begin with. I was definitely a SWAT officer.

Rather overweight to begin with, but I did lose a bit of that as time went on. A dumpy little thing. Tragically, you lost your father when you were just 13. He had a heart attack and he was only 49 at the time. Must have been so shocking and difficult to lose him. My younger sister and I were devastated at the loss, but also it was the loss of our sense of security and we did wonder what was going to become of us.

Yeah, I know that your mother had to work very hard to make sure that you got that stability back. Well, she did because she picked herself up remarkably quickly, dusted off her teaching qualifications and became the head teacher of the local village primary school. I know that years later you found something after your mother's death, something that she'd written not long after your father died. What was it and what did it say?

Well, I did. I found a piece which she had written in an exercise book which was labelled Commonplace Book. And it purported to be a story, a story about a woman who was dozing in the afternoon and thinking about her life and the fact that she had to put on a show for the children.

but the emptiness of having lost the one person in her life that she wanted to be with, the other half of her who was no longer there. It's a very moving piece. And what about yourself? I wonder how losing your father at such a young age has shaped your own outlook on life. In hindsight, I do wonder whether that was one of the reasons why...

I have always been determined to go to university, determined to have a career of my own, because if our mother had not had a career of her own and the ability to become independent once more, our lives would have been very different. Time for your fourth disc today. Tell us about the music that we're going to hear next. Why have you chosen it? Well, this is getting on to my adult life in college.

where my first husband introduced me to Bach's Mass in B minor.

The piece that I particularly love from it is the Gloria because it is such an uplifting piece of music. I can imagine marching round the desert island, conducting the choir and the orchestra as they bring out these magnificent sounds. MUSIC PLAYS

is

Gloria in excelsis Deo from Bach's Mass in B minor, performed by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque soloists, conducted by Sir John Elliot Gardner.

Lady Hale, as you mentioned, you studied at Cambridge. You'd won a scholarship to go to Girton College and began your course in 1963. You'd originally planned to study history, but then decided to read law. Why did you change your mind? My headmistress had read history at Oxford and she didn't think I was a natural historian.

Her idea was economics, but my thoughts about economics were that I had had to study some economic theory for my A-level history paper, and I hadn't liked it one little bit. But I had also had to study the constitutional history of the 17th century, and I thought that was fascinating.

So I said brightly, well, what about law? Rather to my surprise, she did not say nonsense. Girls don't do law. She encouraged me. At Cambridge, you were one of only six women studying law in a year group of more than 100 students. And you said that you experienced imposter syndrome there. We hear that phrase a lot today, but it wasn't used back then.

How would you describe what you were feeling at that time? I remember feeling as I walked along King's Parade in Cambridge, surrounded by the beautiful buildings that are there. And here I am in Cambridge. It was a dream. It was a wonderful thing. But am I up to it? Can I do it? Can I succeed?

Well, you graduated top of your class with a starred first, so it worked out quite well. And you started work as an assistant law lecturer at the University of Manchester. Why did you opt to go for an academic post instead of going straight to the bar? Well, in those days, we were told how very difficult it was to make a career at the bar, especially if you had no connections and no money and were a woman. Then the idea of becoming a university lecturer changed.

was suggested to me and Manchester said, we would like you to qualify as a barrister and do some part-time practice as well as doing your teaching. And so that was a huge attraction. You started your pupillage in Manchester. What was your relationship with your pupil master like? Oh, it was very good.

But I had been told that he didn't approve of women at the bar. Why is that, I said. Your wife's a doctor. And he said, ah, medicine is a caring profession and women can and should care. But the bar is a fighting profession and women can't and shouldn't fight. Well, I took the view that he was right about the bar. It is a fighting profession. But he was, of course, wrong about women.

Did you voice that opinion at the time? I can't remember. I think what I did was to try and prove him wrong. And to his credit, he was sufficiently complimentary about my performance when I appeared in front of him after he'd become a judge for me to think that possibly I had just about dented the view. It's time for some more music, Lady Hill. Your fifth choice today. What is it and why? The duet from The Marriage of Figaro.

between Susanna and the Countess when they are plotting against the Count. It's a very feminist opera, which must be one of the reasons why I like it so much. CHOIR SINGS

♪ ♪

Solaria che suave zeffiretto from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, performed by sopranos Charlotte Margiono and Barbara Bonny, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Lady Hale, in 1984, you were appointed to the Law Commission, the first woman to be appointed and the youngest commissioner at 39. You were responsible for family law at the commission and you led the work on what became the 1989 Children Act. How do you look back on that piece of legislation today? Well, it's appropriate to be proud of it because the law before was in a complete mess.

There were many different routes by which children could be removed from their families and they all had different processes, different criteria, different outcomes. And what we managed to do was to boil things down to their essentials, one route, one set of criteria and all the courts having the same powers to decide the future of children, which had not been the case before.

People have remarked on your empathy as a judge, Lady Hill, and credited that to your background in family law. But I know that you've also talked about the necessity of hardening your heart on occasion. How and when did you learn to do that? When I was a family judge, I had from time to time to take children away from their families. And that is a really difficult thing to do.

But nevertheless, you have to do your best. You have to try and protect them from significant harm. There was one case where the question was who was responsible for the injuries suffered, the several injuries suffered by a young child. And I decided that it was the mother's boyfriend who was responsible for

The decision was taken to let the child go back to the couple and the child was injured again, which was a pretty clear indication that I had been right. The mother was obviously devoted to her children, but the only solution had to be to take them away from her and that was very distressing, of course for her, but also for the other people involved. And for you?

Well, I was one of the other people involved, wasn't I? Yes. It's time for some more music. Your sixth choice today. What is it and why have you chosen it? Well, this is to remind me of my daughter. My daughter is gay and she is in a civil partnership with the mother of her children. And her partner is a member of Dublin's Lesbian and Gay Choir.

They had a lovely ceremony in Cambridge to celebrate their relationship. And at that ceremony, there were, of course, quite a lot of their friends, quite a lot of whom were members of gay choirs from many different places. And at the reception, they decided they would sing a song called Hand in Hand. It's very uplifting and it will remind me of my daughter and her family.

♪ With shoulder press to shoulder ♪ ♪ We will build on what make us whole ♪ ♪ And we will learn to lift our voices in a song ♪ ♪ We'll see it's our differences ♪ ♪ We make us strong ♪ ♪ And be the strongest we can stand by ♪

Hand in Hand, performed by Gloria, Dublin's lesbian and gay choir. Throughout your career, Lady Hale, you've been very upfront about your feminism, but that hasn't always made you popular. Did it ever get you into trouble? I expect so. No, I have made no secret of my belief that women are the equals of men in dignity and in rights.

and that their experience of life is just as valid and important in shaping the law as is the experience of men. I do not think that was always popular amongst certain sections of the media, and possibly not always popular amongst some of my colleagues. I think it was nicknamed the Brenda Agenda by some of them. Well, one of my colleagues I subsequently learnt, because he published diaries...

that I was seen as having an agenda. Well, I probably do have an agenda, which is an agenda to promote equality and diversity. It's an agenda which lots of people have, but it is sometimes stigmatised as being an agenda, whereas the agenda which other people have, which is to preserve the status quo, is never seen as an agenda, although, of course, it equally is.

How did you deal with those kinds of comments, that sort of vitriol and the negative press? Well, the negative press, you just have to say, oh, dear, they've got it wrong. But not to let it bother you too much. And of course, with most things in the media, the circus moves on. Obviously, if there is justified criticism, one wants to know about it.

But if it's unjustified, I think you have to carry on regardless. You had initially gone for the job of President of the Supreme Court in 2012. And at the time, you were one of the two longest serving law lords and seemed like the obvious choice, but you didn't get it. Some people said that your feminism had counted against you. Were they right, do you think? Oh, they may have been. Or just the fact that I was a woman or the fact that I was me, obviously.

I'm sure there will be things about me that not everybody likes. Like what? Possibly my propensity for speaking my mind when I want to. Sometimes my tactlessness. I'm sure I am tactless from time to time. Did you have to be slightly more tactful when you were a taster on MasterChef? They didn't broadcast a lot of my comments. And I think that was probably because I wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic about the food. LAUGHTER

Honest to the last. I'm afraid so. Oh, well, they knew what they signed up for. It's time for your penultimate disc, Lady Hill. Number seven, what's it going to be? This is the magnificent anthem, I Was Glad. I chose this because it was played at the memorial service in Westminster Abbey for Lord Bingham, Tom Bingham, who, to my mind, was the greatest judge of the 21st century, at least so far.

I was glad. Composed by Sir Hubert Parry, performed by the Choir of Westminster Abbey with the organist Simon Preston, conducted by William McKinney. Lady Hale, you married your second husband, Julian, in 1992. How did the two of you meet? Well, we first met in 1968. We were colleagues in Manchester for 16 years. We met in the year of the Great War.

I think we got on pretty well, but we certainly were not in the slightest bit romantically entangled. And then we were both appointed to the Law Commission at the same time. And I suppose after seven years together at the Law Commission, we did fall in love at first sight. You called him your frog prince. Why was that? Partly because he had started to give me frogs.

Originally, because his driving style was not unlike that of Toad of Toad Hall. And the first frog he gave me, which was a plant holder, he thought was a toad, but it wasn't. It was a frog. We eventually decided that it had taken us so long to recognise our feelings for one another that clearly he had to be my frog prince too.

Last year, you stepped down as president of the Supreme Court because you'd reached the compulsory age of retirement at 75. And the lockdown put paid to the plans that you and Julian had made for the next phase of your lives. What did you decide to do instead? We retreated to our home in Richmond, where we had a very happy few months. And we were actually enjoying, relaxing more than we had expected to do. And then very suddenly, he died.

of a pulmonary embolism, leaving a huge hole, not only in my life, but in the life of all the other members of the family to whom he was so dear. We will never forget him. There will always be that huge hole in our lives, but he would not have wanted us to be miserable. So we do our best to live without him, but with his memory and with some fun as well. I'm about to cast you away. Are you looking forward to living on the island?

I think there are a huge number of practical challenges about being cast away on a desert island. And I'm not sure that I'd be particularly good at rising to them. But of course, I would have to do my best. All right. Well, we'll let you choose one more disc before we send you to your desert island. What's it going to be and why? This is the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem because we played it at Julian's funeral.

It is the day of wrath, of course, the day of God's wrath, but it also represented for us the very real anger that we felt at having him taken from us so suddenly.

So Lady Hale, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'm giving you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You can also take one other book with you. What will that be? The best possible practical handbook on how to survive on a desert island. It's yours. You can also have a luxury item. What would you like?

A solar-powered computer programmed with an inexhaustible supply of Sudoku puzzles for me to do. Yes. And also can provide me with a programme which will enable me to write. And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves if you needed to? I would have to have, I think, the Gloria from Bach's Mass in B minor.

because that always makes my spirits lift and I can walk round the island conducting to it and even singing to it. Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much indeed for having me. It's been a lifelong ambition realised at last. MUSIC PLAYS

♪

Hello, this is Marian Keyes. And this is Tara Flynn. We host a podcast you might like for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking. Each week we take real listeners' questions about life, love, lingerie, cats, dogs, dentists, pockets, or the lack of, anything really, and apply our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help, but also hopefully entertain. Join us, why don't you? Search up Now You're Asking on BBC Sounds. Thanking you.