Man who hid among choirboys rescues lost recording of Queen’s Silver Jubilee service
A COVERT recording of a service celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, made at the request st of the Queen Mother as a surprise, is to be heard for the first time after the man who embedded with a church urch choir to make it salvaged his “lost” tapes.
David Hutchinson was working at a shop near to o Windsor Castle when he received eived a mystery phone call from the Queen Mother’s r ’s office, tasking him with th making the recording. g.
On instructions to o keep it a surprise for r the Queen, the e 29-year-old hid in the e church vestry with the he choir, using a wireless ess tape recorder to capture ture the sounds.
The service, which celebrated the 25th anniverversary of the Queen’s een’s accession to the throne, rone, was held on February ry 6
1977 at the Royal Chapel apel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park. The Queen Mother presented the recording as a gift for the Royal family, their friends and close staff in the congregation, but the master tapes were thought too damaged by water to survive. Thanks to recent technological developments and with permission from the palace, Mr Hutchinson has now been able to produce the first publicly available recording of the service in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
A copy has been donated to the the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, which has never held it, with all artist royalties from the public sale to be donated to the Royal Collection Trust. Mr Hutchinson, who is now 73, said that he had received a telephone call out of the blue in January 1977 from the Queen Mother’s lady-in-waiting, while he was working at Taylor Hutchinson on Eton High Street.
The company provided recording equipment to the music industry.
“It was a spur-of-the-moment idea,” Mr Hutchinson said. “The Queen Mother wanted it to be a surprise, so it had to be done discreetly.”
Describing how he had hidden himself away in the vestry with the “rather naughty” choirboys, he used a fourtrack tape machine with wireless microphone technology so as not to arouse suspicion.
Some 120 copies were delivered free of charge to the Queen Mother to distribute, but were never made public and not sent to the Royal Archives.
By the year of the Golden Jubilee, the original recording had been damaged by water and it was not thought possible to salvage it.
But, Mr Hutchinson said, the advances in technology had made it possible to improve the quality of the recording and it would now be released to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee next year.