Marie Slocombe

Marie Tapscott Slocombe (1912–1995) founded the BBC Sound Archive in 1936. Her keen interest in audio recordings and folk music have made her legacy important in the history of recorded sound.

Early life and career Born in 1912, Slocombe studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she gained a First in French. As a secretary in the Foreign Office she undertook temporary work at the BBC in 1936, and as part of this work was tasked to sort out and dispose of "a pile of dusty broadcast discs." On discovering that these included speeches and readings by contemporary figures such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Winston Churchill and others, instead of disposing of them, she realised their historical significance and resolved to preserve them.

In these early days, the BBC had only one sound recording machine, a Blattnerphone tape recorder, and transcribing recordings to disc for retention was expensive; this led to "indifference, even opposition" from BBC management. She began a collaboration with the Leeds University Dialect Survey which provided a large collection of British dialects.

Her work was commemorated by a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Saving the Sounds of History, broadcast on 1 September 2007.

Publications