Roy Whittaker (on the left) and David Henderson
Fortunately two listeners - Roy Whittaker, from Cornwall, and David Henderson, from Warwickshire, heard the programme and contacted Broadcasting House. They both loved listening to Alistair Cooke and recorded Letter from America every Friday night for years.
But unlike other people who got it touch, they had also labelled the tapes with dates, and stored them safely in boxes - one in his attic, the other in his cellar.
Mr Whittaker and Mr Henderson entrusted their collections to the 主播大秀 and as a result helped complete the between the years 1974 to 2004. The recently finished digitising over 600 of their recordings.
To celebrate, we invited them for a special lunch and a tour of Broadcasting House with presenter to say thank you. Paddy sneakily managed to type a brief thank you note to them on , displayed on the first floor of .
Digitising the collections wasn鈥檛 straightforward - some were recorded on long obsolete . Restoring the machine on which they鈥檇 been recorded by David Henderson, back in 1974, proved the only solution. The majority were on cassette tapes 鈥� but the levels varied considerable according to the brand of tape, so it was painstaking work.
And there鈥檚 plenty of more work to do 鈥� the audio needs restoring, descriptions need writing, but one day we hope to find a way to make them available to the public, along with the .
And if you know anyone who recorded Letter from America before 1974, please get in touch.
Zillah Watson, Producer and Curator of the Letter from America Archive
- Visit the on the Radio 4 website
- See
- Gallery: