Beschreibung:

Papers of Rex Palmer, principally relating to his career with the Royal Flying Corps, as an original member of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and as recording supervisor with His Master's Voice; the collection including autograph letters etc by Edward Elgar (see below), Lowell Thomas (see below), Edmund Blunden (calligraphic autograph manuscript of his epithalamium 'The Victor' and a later autograph letter reminiscing about Great War contemporaries, including Sassoon who has had "a cheerful 80th birthday & remains as much as ever", but wishing "they'd stop these miscellaneous wars, especially with even more dreadful weapons"), Kirsten Flagstad (two fine photographs, signed and inscribed in July 1936, one "in remembrance of a very pleasant recording in Copenhagen"), Pablo Casals, Sir Thomas Beecham (fine photograph signed), Yehudi Menhuin (1933 and 1956, the first a postcard written on holiday soon after his famous recording with Elgar), Fritz Kreisler (large signed photograph), Luisa Tetrazzini, Leonard Cheshire, Gracie Fields (signed photograph with group of snapshots), Basil Cameron, and others; the collection also comprising: several autograph albums kept by his wife Bee Darling (with a photograph of Charles Laughton signing one of them); a Festival of Britain album; a collection of inscribed books by, among others, Edmund Blunden (Undertones of War), Lord Reith (Wearing Spurs with slip inscribed to Palmer as "one of the most esteemed and most popular of the early pioneers of broadcasting"), his HMV colleague Fred Gaisberg, Felix Weingartner, Sybil Thorndike and others; papers of his wife Bee Darling's family (including early 19th century letters by members of the Rawson family), etc., some dust-staining and minor wear, including to the books, which are sold not subject to return, the Kreisler photograph fraying, that of Lowell Thomas trimmed