Peter Layton, artist

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:43My castaway this week is the artist Peter Layton. Known as the Grand Master of Glass, he's a founding father of the British Studio Glass Movement, which has carved out, or should that be blown out, a niche in contemporary art that now belongs to this ancient material. His work has been exhibited and acquired by some of the world's finest museums and his collectors include Sir Elton John and the late Duchess of Kent. He was born in 1937 in Prague where his father worked in a glass factory but when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia his family fled to Britain settling in Bradford where he followed in the footsteps of his friend David Hopney at their local art college.

1:21He trained as a ceramicist before falling in love with glass making when he saw a demonstration at a summer workshop. He says, how lucky can you be to do something you really love, working in an extraordinary material with special properties and myriad possibilities, creating things that thankfully people sometimes decide they need to enhance their lives. Peter Layton, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be here. Well, we're delighted to have you. We've got to start with the appeal of glass, Peter. You've described it as an extraordinarily seductive material.

1:55What is it that you love so much about it? It is truly a magical material. It's a material which is fluid at one moment and solid at another. I'm talking about glassblowing in particular. There are lots of other techniques and other ways of working. Casting and slumping and bending and pulling out millions of miles of fibre and exploring possibilities with it. It just appears endless. We'll be talking about your studio in London, which you've run for many years now, and you still encourage the public to come and watch you working there. And at 88, you're still spending two or three days a week there working in the studio.

2:40What keeps you going back? Well, you know, I've got far too many ideas. I'm not going, you know, I'm running out of time. It's the truth of the matter. I've got lots and lots more to do. It's a labour of love because it's not a way to make a fortune. But we do have a really nice gallery and a very, very nice studio. And it is incredibly rewarding when people walk into our gallery and their jaws drop and they, my God, I had no idea you could do all this with glass. And of course, we're going to be hearing your discs today, Peter. You've chosen your music for us. Is that important to you? Is it something that influences how you work?

3:18Well, there's usually music on in the studio, I have to say that, sometimes to the point where we need to tone it down a bit. And thinking about this programme, I mean, I'm just so blown away by how creative people are. The glass world is relatively small, you know, that's our kind of bubble. But when you think about how many creatives there are operating in the world, you know, makes it a much better place. Well, I think we should get started on that note. Then tell us about your first choice today, Peter. Disc number one, what is it? Ah, yes, George Formby, When I'm Cleaning Windows. As a kid growing up in Bradford, I used to go to a Saturday morning film club.

4:01George, my brother, and I used to go. And one of our heroes was George Formby. He was just incredible. I remember being a jockey in one of his films, and he just raised our spirits. Two overcrowded flats I've been 16 in one bed I've seen With a lodger tucked up in between When I'm cleaning windows All soldiers ever die, they say Though I don't want to pass away I kick the bucket every day When I'm cleaning windows Through working at such dizzy heights I dream about my job at night I polish my wife's thingamitides and think I'm cleaning windows. George Formby and When I'm Cleaning Windows. I mean, a few of his tracks have got a good double entendre going.

4:52Were you aware of that, Peter? No, not then, but it's a bit naughty, I agree. And I do actually like that. I like that cheeky northern bit. So let's go back to the beginning, Peter. You weren't born in Bradford, as I mentioned. You were born in Prague, 1937, to Fritz and Edith. and you and your parents escaped actually on one of the last trains out of the city in 1939. You would have been tiny. Do you remember anything about the journey? I don't remember the journey. I do remember arriving in London. How old would you have been? I was two and a bit. We caught the last train out in August, arrived here at the end of August and war was declared a few days later.

5:31So it was a narrow escape. when I get together with my family or, you know, when I think about my family at all, you know, I just think, what a miracle. They were heroic. And what did your mum and dad tell you about them having to make the decision to leave? I mean, how did it all happen? So my parents were Australian. Dad was, my dad, we called him Freddy, actually, was working for a Czech glass company. He wasn't a glassmaker himself, although when I took up gloves many years later, he was very tickled. And the way it happened was that my grandfather was a TB specialist. He had a sanatorium in a place called Semmering, which is south of Vienna.

6:15He'd already been put in jail. What was he put in jail? For being Jewish, I suspect. But luckily for him, he was also a Freemason. and apparently, as I understand it, the warden of that particular place was also a Freemason. He managed to get out somehow and he managed to leave with his wife and come to Britain. He became the city pathologist in Bradford and he managed to send coded messages to my parents who were by that time in Prague. There is a tale that the family do know how they were queuing up to get their papers stamped with hundreds, maybe even thousands of others and an SS man approaches them and says, said to my dad, what are you doing here?

7:09My dad was fair, blonde almost and didn't look characteristically Jewish. You know, he assumed he wasn't Jewish so he said, why are you here? and my dad said, but I'm here with my wife and we're queuing for our papers and the officer said, show me, show me the papers you've got already and he noticed that something was missing so my mother, who's a really dynamic woman she was off like a shot, you know, she zoomed across town she left my dad in the queue and he moved up towards the front by the time she'd got back She charmed whoever she needed to charm to get the requisite stamp and got back as my dad arrived at the front and they got out of tour.

7:59It was a total miracle. How did life start to cohere when they arrived in Britain? They didn't immediately go to Bradford. I think they were in Surrey first, weren't they? They were. They were butler and maid to some really kind family who took them in, in Godalming. I do remember being treated very well by their kids who were older. And then Bradford was the next place to go, you know, because my grandfather was already there. And Dad was what they called an undesirable alien, and he was interned for a while. He joined the army. He was in the Pioneer Corps. Anyway, he survived. That was the amazing thing.

8:42And after the war, he came back to Bradford. but things were quite tough. They were obviously trying to adapt to a new environment and difficult to be Austrian in Britain during the war. They chose to anglicise your surname, didn't they? They did, they did. Our name was Lurvie. Anyway, they chose Leighton and I suspect it was a pin in the telephone book. I don't know, I never did actually know why. How do you feel about your surname, about being a Leighton? Oh, I like it a lot. We're all very happy to be Leightons. There's quite a clan of us now. We're well over 40. And George, my brother, went on to become quite a well-known actor.

9:22My sister Viv got an MBE for her work, setting up schemes, projects for people with learning difficulties, that sort of thing. And that's all because Edith and Freddie managed to get away. We, my wife Anne and I, were in Prague a few years back and we'd been to the Jewish cemetery and I'd been to the... There's an exhibition in a tower there. It was full of children's drawings that were done in Theresienstadt. And I remember being terribly, terribly, incredibly moved, thinking, you know, there but for the grace of God. Peter, let's have some music. It's time for your second choice. Well, on that note, I want to play Jacqueline Dupre, playing Colnidre.

10:09It's a composition by Max Bruch. My first wife, Tess, and I were at Windsor Castle showing a relative from Australia around and we heard this incredible music coming from St George's Chapel and we went and investigated and discovered that it was Jacqueline Dupre with Daniel Berenbaum and that there was a concert that evening and we were able to get tickets. This is a traditional Jewish prayer, this piece. What does it mean to you? It's a prayer that's sung on the eve of the Day of Atonement. which is the most holy day, if you like, of the Jewish calendar. It's the day when you repent, if you like, for your sins during the past year, your sins against God, that is.

10:56The translation of Kol Nidre is all vows, so you kind of abrogate all vows that you've made, and to my mind, it's a very beautiful song. So this is... Kol Nidre. Performed by Jacqueline Dupre. Yes.

12:07KOL NIDRE Performed by Jacqueline Dupre with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Quite powerful to hear that, I think. Yeah. Where did it take you? Well, it made me think about these millions of Jews that were killed, annihilated during that war. And, of course, it also made me think about what's going on at the moment, which is so tragic. you know, having lived through the Second World War. I never imagined we'd be back there on the brink again. You know, it's just, it leaves me speechless, really. So, Peter, tell me about life in Bradford. As you mentioned, you and your parents moved up, encouraged by your grandfather, Victor.

13:01Did the Jewish community in Bradford help your mum and dad find a sense of belonging there? Did they feel part of it? Yes, they did. and I'm really glad you asked that because we weren't particularly religious. My grandfather went to the Reform synagogue, we went to the Orthodox synagogue, but only largely because the kind of people that my dad worked with were there. I don't love religion, organised religion, at all. In fact, I'm pretty negative about it. What matters is the sense of community and I have to say the community then were good to us. They helped us where they could. I mean, my parents, my mother in particular, was quite a proud woman, so she didn't want to accept charity, as it were, and she worked incredibly hard.

13:55She was involved in fashion and she managed fashion shops. Entrepreneurial and creative, by the sounds of it. Yes, she was. She was very creative. One of her first ventures was to create a hand-knitting business, a hand-knitting service, and she designed as well. She was a designer. She designed for some of the local factories, like Lister's Mill, which was a huge mill that I passed on my way to school every day. It must have been very instructive for you watching her. I wonder what you learned from that, because there she is starting up on her own, doing creative work, a lot like you would in years to come.

14:33Yes, I think the truth is I took that a little bit for granted. She was just such an amazing personality. You know, you wouldn't expect anything less, is how I would view it. My dad was much quieter. He was quite a patient, quiet person. A rock, really. He allowed her to be who she wanted to be because he slogged away in the admin of a textile factory for years and years and years, probably all his life at a job he didn't really enjoy, but in order to let Edith, my mum, blossom, as it were. She sounds remarkable and obviously the source of your creative streak, but I know that was very much encouraged by your grandfather.

15:21He loved the fact that you were interested in art. I know you've got an artwork of him. You've actually immortalised him. Tell me about it. Art at school was really not very stimulating. It was really dull and stultifying almost. Grandad was a great scholar of Goethe and Schiller and he had a fantastic library. You could barely move in his study and he went to any concert he could. He was a great supporter of Valais, and he used to take me along. Eventually I ended up at art school, and I asked him to sit for me, and actually that was a really, really nice experience. He was a Victorian gentleman.

16:11He was very reserved or perhaps even strict in a certain kind of way, but working with him over a period of time modelling his head was a really nice way of getting to know him better. And what did you make out? What did you cast it in? I modelled it in clay and eventually I did have it cast in bronze and I'm so glad I did. And even the bronze head lay around for a long, long time and I only got it mounted, had it mounted a year or so ago and it sits in our house and I pat Victor on the head from time to time. I'm really, really glad to have it. And actually, it's pretty good likeness. It's not bad.

16:59All right, Peter, it's time to make some room for the music. It's your third choice today. What are we going to hear next? I had to do national service. I thought I might get away with not doing it. It was scraping towards the end, but that wasn't to me. and literally just before Christmas in 1956 I was called up. So I went into the RAF and eventually after the horrors of basic training I ended up in what was called a movements unit in Southampton in the docks. I'd grown up in Bradford which is what in those days was such a dirty place. The buildings were black from the smoke of the factories.

17:45We experienced the worst smogs you can imagine. I mean, pea supers. You really couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It was that bad. Getting Southampton was different. It was clean. It was white. It was a revelation that I didn't even notice cities like that existed. So I went to a Dave Brubeck concert in the City Hall, a new building, brand new building, and actually the track I've chosen, I would have liked to have chosen God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. He played it, but apparently he never recorded it because he was playing that during the concert and there was a pause. During the pause, the bell tower chimed and it was just that perfect moment for them to chime and the whole audience erupted.

18:39It was just a wonderful, wonderful moment. That Dave Brubeck moment has stuck with me. So it's Dave Brubeck playing Take Five.

19:04Thank you.

19:49Dave Brubeck and Take 5. So Peter Layton, tell us a bit about your life at school. You passed the 11 plus and you went to Bellevue Grammar School in Bradford. What kind of pupil were you? B-stream. I went to Bellevue because I wanted to play football at the grammar school, the Bradford Grammar School, which was the school to go to. They didn't play football. They only played rugby. Of course, I hadn't been at Bellevue very long before I fell in love with rugby, so I somewhat regretted it. I mean, it was a stupid decision, wasn't it? So you turned down the grammar school just for the love of football?

20:27Yes, I chose my school because I might not have got in at the other school. That was where Hockney was. And we became friends through my best friend at the school, David Johnson. He knew David. Yeah, you've often said about David Hockney that you've often followed in his footsteps in one way or another. I have. He was probably my first contact with an artist or seeing somebody working as an artist. I mean, he would draw wherever he was, and we had this trip to Scotland, foursome, hitchhiking and sleeping where we could. He was drawing all the time. Even then, you didn't have any aspiration to be an artist, and you ended up working a steady job in the woolen trade in Bradford.

21:16Tell me about that. My father was approached by a distant relative with this wonderful opportunity to maybe become the guy who would take over his business eventually. And this was what we euphemistically called the heavy woolen industry, but it was actually the rag trade. We would get bales of rags from Eastern Europe or from wherever, and they had to be sorted. So there were ladies sitting in rows, cutting, chopping away bits of cotton, and I was a so-called managerial trainee. And this is when you were 16? I was 16 or 17 at that point. Now, initially, I was very excited about it. You know, it sounded rather good.

22:04That was what kids did in Bradford. You know, they went into textiles. But it was, I mean, it was crazy. The dust was mad. The way we packed the rags was we would get into bales, climb into bales. which were hanging from the ceiling, empty bales, and somebody would shovel the rags in and you would stamp them with your feet into the corners. No mask, no nothing. The dust was... I would have been dead decades ago if I'd stayed there. And thank God I got out. You did, and you left and spent a year in Israel with a youth movement called Habanim. I did. I think that was quite a pivotal time for you.

22:45Tell me about it. Yes, it was. It was. As I said, we weren't a religious family in any sense. But, you know, the thought that these people whom I was a part, not by choice, actually, were being annihilated, left, right and centre during the war and had nowhere to go and had no home. So I ended up joining a Zionist youth movement called Habonim, the Builders. I went to Israel for a year to learn how to become a youth leader. I must say that that was a time of great idealism and sacrifice to build something. I feel for my friends and possibly I may even have family there who regard this current awful situation as existential.

23:36They are fighting for their own survival. and yet I'm not altogether happy with the proportionality of the responses and in fact I'm very unhappy and having been a refugee, I feel for refugees, whoever they are. I worry about Ukraine all the time and I am absolutely gobsmacked, if I can use that expression, that we find ourselves back here again. It changed your life, the year that you were there. It did in many ways, yes. While I was in Israel, I took classes. I went to the local art school, Bethalel, in Jerusalem, and I was taken under the wing by a painter called Yonah. He was very encouraging, and I just enjoyed being with him and around him.

24:33After our stint in Jerusalem had ended, we went to work on kibbutz and I got myself some paints and some boards and went out painting Mount Hermon in Syria. And then I came across a novel called Lust for Life by Irving Stone about Van Gogh. And I found it very inspirational and I thought, yeah, why don't I do this? Why don't I go to our college? Well, I think that's a great moment to go to the music before we find out what happens next. Disc number four, what's it going to be? Disc number four is Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind. I did a couple of years at Bradford Art College, following on from David Hockney, and then I went to London to the Central School of Art and Design, which had a really excellent ceramics department.

25:25there was a guy and he had a little ukulele or a miniature guitar or something or other. He would sit cross-legged on the wedging bench where we needed the clay. Day after day, hour after hour, he would play, he would sing blowing in the wind. I could have chosen any one of a number of Bob Dylan songs, but this takes me back to days at the Central School, which were important. How many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they're forever banned? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind.

26:23Bob Dylan and blowing in the wind. So, Peter Layton, you were sharing digs with your younger brother, George. So you were at the Central School of Art and Design and he was at RADA. He became, as you mentioned, a very good actor. So your parents, they'd wanted nice, secure jobs for the two of you. They had an actor and an artist on their hands. Were they supportive? Oh, they were supportive. I mean, Dad always wanted money in the bank, having lost everything. Of course, yeah. Security was incredibly important. Edith had no such thoughts. So while you were studying, you also ran a stall on Portobello Road to supplement your grant, a ceramics stall.

27:07Was that where you learned the sales pitch that you need to have as an artist? I guess it must have worked because as part of the course at the Central, We went and spent a month in Stoke-on-Trent, you know, learning industrial techniques. And while I was there, I discovered a man who had a house full of antiques. He wanted to sell them. So I bought a little bit at a time. And I did manage to get a stall down Portobello Road. On one occasion, this woman, she and a friend came by one Saturday morning. and they needed a present for someone. Tessa, who became my wife eventually, persuaded her friend, who's called Liz Taylor, to buy something from me.

27:56Subsequently, a month or so later, they were having a party and they'd arranged for all these guys to come down in a minibus or a car from Birmingham to their party, but it started snowing and suddenly the people from Birmingham weren't coming and they, last minute, very short of men for this party. So Liz said to Tess, well, how about that guy we met down Portobello Road? Can't you track him down? She remembered I was a student at the Central. She rang the office and they said, oh no, we don't give messages to students. You could try the student telephone. And I happened to be passing in the basement of a building, in Central, our ceramics was in one building, and the rest of the art college was in another building.

28:45And I was on my way to sculpture or something, which was in the basement, and the phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, I'd like to get a message to a student. I said, oh, what department is he in? And she said, sculpture. And I said, oh, I'm not in that department. I don't think I can help, really. She said, no, no, ceramics. I said, oh, ceramics, OK, I'm in ceramics. I could pass on a message. Who is it you want to speak to? She said, well, Peter Layton. So I said, speaking. And that was the beginning of our romance. And that was that for the two of you. So you graduated in 1965. You went to the States to teach ceramics.

29:29I did. Firstly in Iowa and then in San Francisco. How did those new campuses compare to London? Was it a different attitude, different mood? Oh, very, very much so. The Central School, it was run by the caretaker, you know, and when he came around at 5pm, jangling his keys, you knew you had to get out. Whereas when I went to Iowa, it was open 24 hours and the caretaker would come in and have a cup of tea at three in the morning and pass the time of day with whoever was there. The students were so motivated. And obviously, you know, I mean, some incredible cultural changes happening in America at that time.

30:09You were in California during the height of the counterculture. What did you and Tessa make of that? I mean, what do you remember about San Francisco? Oh, it was a marvellous time to be there. It was buzzing. I mean, certainly, well, on the music scene, I would say. We did go to the Fillmore. I was literally right beside Jim Morrison of The Doors. So I would have liked to have had them, but another group that I particularly liked were Jefferson Airplane, and so I've chosen White Rabbit, Grace Slick singing White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you're going to fall Tell them I hookah, smoking caterpillar Has given you the call Call Alice When she was just small