Dallas Bower, who died in October aged 92, was one of Britain’s movie sound pioneers. He recorded Britain’s first ‘all talking’ feature Under The Greenwood Tree, trade shown in September 1929. An interest in radio while still at school led him to construct his own amateur radio station at his home. When it became time to look for work he wrote to the Marconi Company seeking employment. He was successful, being given a job in their test department at thirty shillings (£1.50) a week. Several years later while working for British Thompson Huston (BTH) he met Harold Sunday. an American RCA engineer who was installing sound equipment at British International Pictures’ (BIP) Studios in Elstree. Sunday asked him if he would like to be a recordist saying “No one knows how to do it. Would you like to chance your arm?”. Bower, being a keen cinema goer jumped at the offer, starting at a salary of £15 per week - not bad for 1929. One of his first jobs was recording a wild track of an actress repeating the word ‘knife’. This was for the imaginative use of sound in Hitchcock’s 1929 film Blackmail. Besides a number of other features he was greatly involved in recording musical scores for BIP Productions that had been made as silent films prior to the advent of talkies. In an interview recorded for the BECTU Oral History Project, he related the following story concerned with the capture of sound for a very wide, three camera set up on a Monty Banks comedy. “Standing in front of a small alter on the set was a very beautiful young woman extra named Estelle Thompson, so I said to my assistant I wonder if it’s possible to put a mic under Miss Thompson’s gown. She was approached and asked if she would mind and she said she didn’t mind at all. So that’s where the microphone was put and in due course as you know Miss Thompson became Merle Oberon, no less. His career as a film sound man ended in 1936 when he joined the new BBC Television service becoming one of its two senior producers. During the war he was Film Supervisor at the Ministry of Information (MOI) and he played an important part in setting up the filming of Henry V with Laurence Olivier. It was Bower’s idea to shoot the battle scenes in Ireland to avoid the exterior location difficulties of filming in war torn England. After the war his career continued as an independent film/TV producer/director. | Production sound mixers will, I’m sure, be saddened by the death during the summer of Nevil Druce, designer in the 1970s of the original Micron radio microphones. He was born in Ealing, west London, in 1929. He joined the BBC Research Department in the early 1950s and during his employment there worked on many pioneering techniques ahead of their time. In 1962 he formed Better Sound Ltd, a camera and sound equipment rental company, followed in 1965 by Audio Engineering Ltd, to develop and manufacture the equipment he designed. Besides radio microphone development, he was responsible for the Crystomatic and Microlock film and sound synchronisation systems for single and multiple camera setups. Before Nagra days, another activity was modifying EMI L2 portable recorders for synch use with Arri 16mm cameras for which he also designed and produced Fibreglass blimps. A brilliant engineer and a most likable fellow. BOB ALLEN 
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