One of the best known sound archives in the world is that belonging to the BBC. However, according to a BBC feature, it almost got dumped in the 1930s, and was only saved because of the sagacity and persistence of a temporary secretary. In 1937, Marie Slocombe was employed as a summer relief secretary at the BBC, and was told to “sort out and dispose of” a pile of discs. The report went on to say: “She noticed that among them were recordings of GB Shaw, HG Wells, Winston Churchill, Herbert Asquith and GK Chesterton. So she hesitated.” That hesitation eventually led to the establishment of one of the world’s great sound archives, which were built up initially, at any rate, in the face of at least the indifference and sometimes the opposition of the mandarins.
Slocombe collected society’s worthies, of course, but she also collected Britain’s enemies like Hitler and Goebbels, and most of all, the voices of ordinary people. She evinced a great interest in preserving both folk music and local dialects, and according to the BBC after World War II she sent out recordists to collect songs and interviews throughout Britain. She also apparently made recordings herself, as a consequence of which, said the article, the BBC had a collection of “Australian Aboriginal music, the sound of the kind of harp King David played, recorded in Ethiopia, and… some Vietnamese spoon music.”
