Leonard Stanton Jefferies

Leonard Stanton Jefferies LRAM (4 September 1896 – 22 October 1961) was a British musician, composer, and conductor. He was the first director of music at the British Broadcasting Company, and pioneered techniques for broadcasting live music.

Early life Jefferies was born at Weston-super-Mare on 4 September 1896, and studied organ and piano at the Royal College of Music. when he served as a naval telegraphist. From 1919 to 1921, he was organist and music director at the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, in the City of London.

Career Around June 1922 he became the only musician employed by Marconi's experimental broadcasting station 2LO, the British Broadcasting Company's forerunner. He was to be responsible for concerts broadcast from Marconi House, under the management of Arthur Burrows. With help from his RCM friend, the clarinettist Frederick Thurston, he gathered together a group of musicians to perform the first radio broadcasts of music from Marconi House. By the end of that year, 2LO had been absorbed into the nascent British Broadcasting Company, operating from Savoy Hill. He was its first director of music in 1927.

While at the BBC, Jefferies made broadcasts in which he gave organ recitals and conducted orchestral performances. He composed music for Children's Hour programmes, on which he played the character of Uncle Jeff, and undertook the role of what would now be called a continuity announcer. Another of his duties was to build a collection of music recordings, which became the BBC Music Library.

Famously, the director of the BBC, John Reith, was once entertaining the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Randall Davidson, who expressed a love of piano music. Reith telephoned the BBC's headquarters, and within minutes, Jefferies was playing Schubert's Marche Militaire, live on air.

In 1924, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts at the Central Hall, Westminster. ), he returned to the BBC as a producer, He retired formally from the BBC that year, though he continued to undertake some work for them until the next year.

Legacy

Jefferies developed new techniques for positioning microphones and controlling sound levels for broadcasting an orchestra, a subject he named "balance and control"; he wrote about this, and more, in The Radio Times, and it was extensively covered in a 1984 PhD thesis presented to the University of Leicester. and Don't Look Back (1974).

Personal life

Jefferies died on 22 October 1961, In the 1930s, they had a cottage at Lyme Regis.