Alan Kelly

ALAN Kelly was a former head of physics and the department of professional studies at the City of Sheffield College of Education but he was also a passionate record collector and a doyen of discographers.

Born in Girvan, he took his MA at Glasgow in 1948 and it was on leaving the college when it was amalgamated with another to become Sheffield Polytechnic, now Sheffield Hallam University, that he was free to pursue other interests.

He had started to collect records in the 1940s and soon developed an interest in opera recordings. As he put it in the introduction to his Spanish catalogue: “since records were expensive, I also made lists of what was or had been available”. He was still at it more than 50 years later.

Few lists of HMV recordings have been published without his keen involvement and those that were were generally regarded with disfavour. Alan’s achievement is best described as a response to record collectors who wanted to know who had recorded what, where and when. They also wanted to know what unpublished recordings might still lurk in the archives for possible re-issue.

Alan became a regular visitor both at the British Institute of Recorded Sound and the EMI Archive at Hayes. Leaving his home at Sheffield he would drive down, spend the day going through the registers and drive home again late in the evening. Regularly. Year after year.

Essentially, he came to have four strings to his bow: the catalogues of all single-sided issue numbers from 1898 to 1929, the registers for 1929 to 1934, the matrix cards identifying who had made each recording and the coupling series cards which identified what single-sided or face-numbers had been coupled on each double-sided issue. His achievement was to put it all together in a logical, coherent and digestible form.

In 2007 his work was recognised first by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in the USA which conferred on him a lifetime achievement award, and, second, by the conferring of an honorary doctorate of music by Sheffield University, a first for a British discographer and, possibly, the first world-wide to be so honoured.

Alan had a great sense of fun and never took himself too seriously. He once said that a record collector had written to him after finding an error in one of his listings and told him that the name of Alan Kelly was frequently cited by serious record collectors. “It seems that the phrase, ‘Kelly says’ ... is tantamount to citing Aristotle in a medieval disputation - and I had no idea” he wrote.

The oration Alan was given at his honorary degree concluded by quoting a recent review: “All serious collectors will welcome Alan Kelly’s outstanding contribution to the professional documentation of a large segment of recorded history, and support this fine work.”

JOHN B MILMO

This article first appeared in The Record Collector