Sir David Attenborough has spent more than seven decades bringing the natural world into people’s living rooms. As the face and voice of landmark BBC series like Life on Earth, The Blue Planet, and Planet Earth, he’s inspired generations to care about animals, conservation and the climate.
Knighted in 1985 and later appointed a Companion of Honour, he’s also won multiple BAFTAs—including for programmes shot in black and white, colour, HD, 3D and 4K.
But when he’s not charting the lives of whales or trekking through the jungle, Attenborough is a voracious reader with a fondness for practical knowledge.
In 2012, while talking to host Kirsty Young on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs – where guests are asked to list songs, a book and an essential item they would bring if they were left stranded on a desert island – he picked a title from the 1800s as the book of his life.
Attenborough’s chosen book is Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, a DIY book for the nineteenth-century explorer and adventurer written by W. B. Lord and T. Baines.
Attenborough justified his choice: “It’s about four inches thick, and every conceivable disaster that you can think of that might happen to a traveller is there, together with a solution”.
“I mean, and good advice. It says things like, an unmanly fear of fever is inclined to bring on the symptoms. Good stuff, you see. But it also tells you how to use its own, to use the phrase, how to baffle an alligator”.
The book’s description page sets its context: “Baines and Lord had between them adventured in Africa, Australia, the Crimea and India and offer this book to others who might follow and benefit from the advice of ‘two roving Englishmen who have roughed it.’”
Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life was first published in 1868 in serial form, and provides guides to travelling featuring useful hints & detailed instructions on “wagons and boats, horses and oxen, tents and firearms, hunting and fishing, observing and collecting, carpentry and metal-working, camping requisites, bush cuisine, medical improvisation, the best ways to cross rivers, to move heavy objects and to build huts” – perhaps a useful read if you’re trapped on a desert island.
Along with the guides, Attenborough chose the eight songs he’d need while stranded – all classical pieces: Francisco Yglesia’s Pajaro Campana or The Bell Bird, Franz Schubert’s Impromptu No.1 in F minor, George Frideric Handel’s And the Glory of the Lord, Lyre Bird’s from the Life of Birds, The Gamelan Orchestra’s Legong, Carl Michael Ziehrer’s Wiener Burger Waltz, Mozart’s Soave sia il vento – Gentle be the breeze, and his ultimate favourite, Bach’s 3rd of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.