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The Gift of a Radio

My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

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The Gift of a Radio

By: Justin Webb
Narrated by: Justin Webb
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Justin Webb's childhood was far from ordinary.

Between his mother's un-diagnosed psychological problems, and his step-father's untreated ones, life at home was dysfunctional at best. But with gun-wielding school masters and sub-standard living conditions, Quaker boarding school wasn't much better.

And the backdrop to this coming of age story? Britain in the 1970s. Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and Free. Strikes, inflation and IRA bombings. A time in which attitudes towards mental illness, parenting and masculinity were worlds apart from the attitudes we have today. A society that believed itself to be close to the edge of breakdown.

Candid, unsparing and darkly funny, Justin Webb's memoir is a portrait of personal and national dysfunction. So was it the brutal experiences of his upbringing, or an innate ambition and drive that somehow survived them, that shaped the urbane and successful radio presenter we know and love now?

'Brilliantly illuminates the horrors and absurd snobberies of those times. A very fine memoir.' -Jonathan Dimbleby

'Moving and frank ... A story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s.' Misha Glenny

© Justin Webb 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

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Critic reviews

One of my books of the year: beautifully written. (Alan Johnson)
A gripping memoir ... fascinating and hugely entertaining. It's extremely thoughtful and shockingly honest. (Christina Patterson)
A crisp, unself-pitying memoir of a 'trainwreck' youth ... I've always likes Webb on the radio. But I like him much more after reading this book. He offers precisely the kind of brisk honesty and considered analysis he expects from his interviewees. Our politicians should all read it, and step up their game. (Helen Brown)
[Justin Webb's] affability and easy manner seems even more remarkable after reading [his] memoir, The Gift Of A Radio. The subtitle is My Childhood And Other Train Wrecks, which is apt: the experiences of his formative years would have driven most children completely off the rails
Moving, darkly hilarious ... In his mother, Gloria Crocombe, Webb records a great tragicomic character. (Melanie Reid)
This is not a misery memoir, but some painful introspection feeds [Justin Webb's] frank and lightly handled accounts of damage. It makes for engrossing reading. (Norma Clarke)
This is very, very good. It is not only a vivid portrait of Justin Webb's young life but, deftly, of those times as well. He has a light touch but writes with great sensitivity, insight, and wit. It is touchingly self-revelatory but never mawkish. The absurd snobberies of the class into which he was born and reared are brilliantly illuminated. The portrait of his mother is painful and touching, tender and anguished. He is never self-pitying or self-regarding but there is much raw pain as well as candour in what he writes. A very fine memoir indeed. (Jonathan Dimbleby)
On radio and television, Justin Webb comes across as one of this country's most relaxed and affable broadcasters. This moving and frank memoir tells a different story of a childhood defined by loneliness, the absence of a father and the grim experience of a Quaker boarding school. It is also one of the most perceptive accounts of Britain in the 1970s when the country was at its most stagnant and grey. But it is also a story of hope and how the gift of a radio changed the life of an unhappy little boy and put him on the road to becoming one of Britain's most trusted journalists. (Misha Glenny, author of McMafia)
Justin is a great broadcaster because he sounds like a real human being. This hugely entertaining book helps explain why. (John Humphrys)

I was gripped. This perfectly captures the unique in-betweenness of the 1970s. Justin Webb is both generous and critical, measured yet fierce in this account of an extraordinary childhood.

(Richard Beard, author of Sad Little Men and The Day That Went Missing)
All stars
Most relevant
A truly exceptional evocation of a bittersweet childhood, and of the 1970s - a restless era of casual violence and unease. Justin perfectly captures the boredom, the loneliness, the neglect - of children, of the mentally ill and their families, of the fabric of the nation and it’s institutions. The prose - and his voice - is to be savoured.

A story of survival in an age of ambivalence

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I found it truly fascinating to hear about Justin Webb's life. It also made me think back to the 1970s.

Loved this book

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Thank you Justin….
It was a wonderful and amusing read. I am a West Country girl and loved all the local references…

Nikki

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The sub-title of this memoir is 'My Childhood and Other Trainwrecks' which is a clear indication of the vein the author is mining.
Messed up parents, appalling public school, loneliness and isolation only redeemed by radio; then a lurch for freedom, surviving a road smash and joining the BBC. I enjoyed it and it is beautifully written and read but there's a lot of sadness amidst the love. I hope he's a happy family man now and life has been good to him as an adult. That would make a good book - but I doubt Larkin would enjoy it as much.

Fascinating - Larkin would love it.

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Justin Webb’s childhood was over-filled with suffocating love from and for his unhappy mother Gloria and both of them bound together lived in the shadow of his stepfather Charles who had been diagnosed as ‘mad’ just after he and Gloria had married when Justin was two. Charles had a serious mental illness which in the 1970s was not talked about or helped, so he went on casting a terrible pall over his wife and step son’s lives driving dangerously making outings in the Hillman Minx a nightmare, filling cupboards with padlocks and playing Brahms loud in the early hours to block the voices in his head. No wonder that when he swam out from the beach until he was just a speck, Justin – and he suspected his mother too – were disappointed when he returned to shore.

Gloria ‘s complicated life didn’t go right: a father who abandoned the family, failed and tragic relationships including an affair which at the age of 37 blighted her career and resulted in Justin, all of which produced a woman obsessed with class scorn – particularly of the lower middle class who, amongst an endless catalogues of sins, pronounced words wrong and went on coach trips wearing beige or were merely called Don. Even the television had to hide its shameful commonness in a cupboard brought out for special viewing.

Later Gloria sent Justin to Sidcot boarding school in the Mendips only 40 miles away from their home in Bath , a Quaker School which in that febrile 1970s when society as he says were all at sea, the school was viperous nest of cruelty, violence, rule breaking, filthy basement lavatories (Justin had learned never to say ‘toilet’) where all manner of offences were committed, ineffectual teachers, abuse of vulnerable pupils ,and drunkenness which hours of Quaker silence for self reflection did nothing to assuage. Discipline was haphazard at best with boys allowed to go off caving ill-equipped and unsupervised and serious offences and pupils’ needs, ignored. (But local Rugby games with grown men in Bath were lawless too according to his descriptions).

But he survived and made it to the LSE and a distinguished career as a BBC journalist. The details of his unusual childhood (but then what’s usual or normal when it comes to childhoods?) are riveting and startlingly vivid; the account of his near-tragic bus trip to Greece as a student is a cameo piece on its own. But what makes the whole even more satisfying are his intelligent musings based on his thoughts honed over the years (he’s 61 now) on the changing mores of the 1970s which now seem like another age, probably incomprehensible to those who have not lived through them.

I can’t recommend it more highly - and the author is also a first rate narrator.

Brilliant

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