Steam recordings survive

I WRITE in answer to Paul Brown’s letter in the November issue about steam recordings. The simple answer is no, they have not been lost. Peter Handford produced excellent recordings in the 1960s on the Argo Transcord label and I still have three of the original LPs. I missed the end of mainline steam as far as recording was concerned, buying my first cine camera in 1973, but at the time dubbing sound onto silent film was the method that amateurs like myself used to make sound films as, to my knowledge, no Super 8 cameras recorded

audio during filming until the mid1980s. Even then, the film cassette was incompatible with the silent version and was very short-lived, no doubt due to the emergence of the video camera.

Therefore, for those of us on limited budgets, the method was to splice the film, send it away for a thin strip of magnetic tape to be added, then dub the audio from the aforementioned records or the trusty Philips cassette recorder. Synchronising the exhaust beats was a little hit and miss, but the general effect was worth the effort.

Today my films have been converted to video, and audio tracks plus sound recordings to MP3 files, so hopefully there are many recordings tucked away on hard drives both in this country and around the world.

John Randall Milton Keynes