Sound archive

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.”
The Library of Congress is perhaps the best known early collector of what the BBC calls “vernacular culture.” In the mid-1920s, it began recording American music and folklore, and no doubt many people know the story of Leadbelly, who was first recorded by the Library’s researchers when he was in jail. Today the Library of Congress Recorded Sound Reference Center holds examples of the entire history of sound technology, beginning with wax cylinders, on which is preserved a range of musical and verbal expression.
And where, one might ask, is Guyana’s Marie Slocombe? The sad truth is we don’t have one. We have certainly had our great folklorists, in particular Wordsworth McAndrew, who recorded so many of our folk songs, folk tales and reminiscences for radio several decades ago. But in an act of unbelievable vandalism, many of his tapes were wiped for economic reasons during the Burnham era, because the radio station was very short of money and wanted to re-use the tapes. Exactly what has survived of his work, if anything, is unclear.
Both the PNC and PPP/C governments have been guilty of neglect and unconcern where recordings of significance are concerned, failing to recognize their duty both to the present generation and to posterity. The whole issue of the preservation of the nation’s sound heritage came to the fore in recent times as a consequence of a fire at the former High Street studios in July 2006. Messrs Denis Chabrol and Gordon Burnett in letters to this newspaper drew attention to the inadequate storage of audio recordings, some of which (reel-to-reel tapes and records) were to be found on the floor of the abandoned High Street building, as well as in the bicycle shed in the yard. Mr Chabrol claimed that those which had been moved to NCN Homestretch Avenue were being kept in conditions that were not conducive to preservation either, being “stacked on one another, lying on stairs and in other places.”
In a report carried in this newspaper, Managing Director of NCN Mohamed Sattaur denied these claims, saying that everything that was necessary had been moved, and that six months prior to the removal the staff at Homestretch had been “instructed to start transferring some of the media to mini disc.” The process of transferring, he said, had been undertaken by technical staff, and it was simply the old original tapes which were left in High Street for eventual disposal. Inevitably, the question was asked as to why, even if the contents of the tapes had been transferred, the originals were not being kept.
The issue reared its head once more following a second fire at High Street in September of that year, when this time NCN’s Programme Manager Martin Goolsarran made a comment – again to this newspaper – about the relocation of materials from High Street to Homestretch Avenue. In his response, Mr Chabrol supplied photographs taken that same week of tapes being stored under a stairway at NCN, and challenged him to deny whether some were being kept in unsatisfactory conditions at the Transmitting Station, Sparendaam.
Exactly what the situation is now, no one except the staff at NCN knows. What can be said, however, is that a sound archive is more than an amorphous collection of records and recordings, however well preserved these might be. They have also to be retrievable, which means they have to be organized and catalogued. One doubts that NCN has either the space, the expertise or sufficient personnel at its disposal to devote to a professional archive, and the time is past due for premises to be set aside for such a purpose, and a preservation project drawn up.
Recordings, particularly tapes, are very fragile and present some unique challenges in terms of preservation. It is a field, however, where almost certainly international assistance would be forthcoming if sought, but first the country would have to demonstrate the commitment to preserving its recorded history. Furthermore,
whoever heads such an archive would need to be able to rise above petty party perceptions to identify what is historically important, as opposed to what some politician thinks is important or unimportant.
One wonders how much has been lost, even of that which dates back only to 1992. One thing is certain, if moves are not made in the direction of a sound archive, we might at some future point only have recourse to the BBC to hear the voices of both Mr Burnham and Dr Jagan in their heyday, in addition to all our current leaders. Those with the commitment and sense of history of a Marie Slocombe, it seems, are in short supply in this country.