The Seddon Tapes Marathon

A special extended Wavelength broadcast, originally aired in 2013. The Seddon Tapes Marathon presents the voice of the late Captain Maurice Seddon (Royal Signals, retired).

Among other inventions, Captain Seddon had devised a means of recording telephone conversations onto cassette tape using a unique footswitch system which only allowed one person to speak at a time. Whether this was a deliberate feature to prevent the other person interrupting, or a rudimentary workaround for the difficulties involved in getting audio directly from the British Telecom landlines is unclear. William English later obtained Seddon's blessing to air these recordings, which first began appearing on the weekly programme Wavelength.

William English first met Maurice Seddon around 1978 when they were both working as motorcycle despatch riders. William recalls, "at that first meeting I never imagined that around 30 years later I would be grubbing around on the floor of Seddon's home Datchet Cottage gathering hundreds of dusty audio cassettes. (...) The local council – who were responsible for clearing the house and garden – considered the vast quantity of cassettes to be of no value; they had been swept into a grimy pile in the middle of the floor.

These cassettes had already been retrieved from a local tip by Maurice, and many of them had labels describing the original contents such as Azerbaijani folk music. These were then recycled – recorded over – but sometimes not quite fully erased, so that a distant trace of the previous recording might be faintly heard in the background. Maurice habitually recorded most of his telephone conversations unbeknownst to the person at the other end". See also the book To Farse All Things (2025) by William English and Sandra Cross.

Choice selections appear on The Seddon Tapes Volume One published by Paradigm Discs.

With thanks to Ed Baxter, James Tregaskis, Dan Wilson, and Milo Thesiger-Meacham.