Lady Margaret Tebbit

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 1995

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is Margaret Tebbit. She'll be talking to Sue Lawley about the night 11 years ago when the IRA detonated a huge bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where she was staying with her husband for the Tory Party Conference. Since that dreadful night, she has been severely paralysed, and she'll be describing the effect on her life: the dreams she has in which she no longer has to use a wheelchair, the new friends she's made and the old ones who turned out not to be such good friends in adversity and how her previous experience of mental illness - in the form of severe depression - compares with her current physical incapacity.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a politician's wife. She married nearly 40 years ago when she was a nurse and he an airline pilot.
0:35.6	A devoted couple they had three children. Her husband entered politics where he became
0:40.5	enormously successful.
0:42.7	In 1984, they went together to the Tory Party conference in Brighton.
0:46.8	They stayed at the Grand Hotel where in the early hours of October the 12th, the IRA detonated
0:52.4	a huge bomb. She and her husband were trapped for
0:55.4	hours under tons of rubble. They survived, but she's been severely paralyzed ever
1:00.6	since. Today she surveys life from a wheelchair but shows no trace of bitterness
1:06.2	simply an acute eye for the needs of those who like her have become the victims of
1:11.3	sudden terrible injuries.
1:13.2	Although she can recall every moment of that awful night,
1:16.2	I think it much better, she says, to look forward than to look back.
1:19.9	She is Margaret Tebit.
1:21.8	It's an impressively positive attitude Lady Tebit, but let me ask you what is nevertheless a central question.
1:29.0	Do you blame anybody for the position in which you find yourself?
1:33.0	No, I don't think I blame people.
1:36.0	I don't completely forget or forgive,
1:41.0	but one has to completely look forward.
1:44.0	And was that your attitude from the beginning or have you had to work towards that attitude?
1:49.0	No, I think
	...

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