Thanks one and all for the helpful info. It gives me confidence that the reel is worth offering. The tape box says that the tape is an interview with Jennie Lee in 1967. I will contact the Open University first, as they have a Jennie Lee archive. The interviewer was a journalist and periodical editor, apparently of leftwing sympathies, later wrote poetry, and died in the last couple of years aged c88. She was also interested in local and family history, and had been a councillor. She had lived in the same house since childhood, it seems. By the condition of the books, magazines and ephemera, I’d assume that the house is likely to have not been damp, anyway.She probably wasn’t likely have had speakers, I think, so that there is small likelihood of damage from magnetism. More likely is print-through, as this interview was, I think, done in order to write an article. Since then, it probably has not been played.Apparently one firm still makes the tape recorders, and there are quite a few secondhand recorders on Ebay. There is also quite a lot of blank, but apparently vintage, tape for sale.Sadly, the house-clearance bloke selling the material was lacking the space to store the ephemera, and so after a time-limited and rudimentary scrabble through part of it by several of us, it was heading off to a council tip of some sort (not Wandsworth, I think). The books were due to get another chance.
David Ainsworth ● 2519d