Delia Derbyshire

Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 – 3 July 2001) was an English musician and composer of electronic music.

During the Second World War, immediately after the Coventry Blitz in 1940, she was moved to Preston, Lancashire for safety.

Her parents were from the town and most of her surviving relatives still live in the area.

She was very bright and, by the age of four, was teaching others in her class to read and write in primary school, but said "The radio was my education".

Her parents bought her a piano when she was eight years old.

Educated at Barr's Hill Grammar School from 1948 to 1956, she was accepted at both Oxford and Cambridge, "quite something for a working class girl in the 'fifties, where only one in 10 [students] were female", winning a scholarship to study mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge but, apart from some success in the mathematical theory of electricity, she claims she did badly.

She was not credited on-screen for her work until Doctor Who 's 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.

After one year at Cambridge she switched to music, graduating in 1959 with a BA in mathematics and music, having specialised in medieval and modern music history.

Her other principal qualification was LRAM in pianoforte.

She approached the careers office at the university and told them she was interested in "sound, music and acoustics, to which they recommended a career in either deaf aids or depth sounding".

Then she applied for a position at Decca Records, only to be told that the company did not employ women in their recording studios.

Instead, she took positions at the United Nations in Geneva, from June to September, teaching piano to the children of the British Consul-General and mathematics to the children of Canadian and South American diplomats.

Then from September to December, she worked as an assistant to Gerald G. Gross, Head of Plenipotentiary and General Administrative Radio Conferences at the International Telecommunication Union.

She carried out notable work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who.

She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music", having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.

Derbyshire was born in Coventry, daughter of Emma ( Dawson) and Edward Derbyshire.

of Cedars Avenue, Coundon, Coventry.

Her father was a sheet-metal worker.

She had one sibling, a sister, who died young.

She returned to Coventry and from January to April 1960 taught general subjects in a primary school there.

Then she went to London, where from May to October she was an assistant in the promotion department of music publishers Boosey & Hawkes.

In November 1960, she joined the BBC as a trainee assistant studio manager and worked on Record Review, a magazine programme where critics reviewed classical music recordings.

She said: "Some people thought I had a kind of second sight. One of the music critics would say, 'I don't know where it is, but it's where the trombones come in', and I'd hold it up to the light and see the trombones and put the needle down exactly where it was. And they thought it was magic."

She then heard about the Radiophonic Workshop and decided that was where she wanted to work.

This news was received with some puzzlement by the heads in Central Programme Operation because people were usually "assigned" to the Radiophonic Workshop.

But in April 1962, she was assigned there in Maida Vale, where for eleven years she would create music and sound for almost 200 radio and television programmes.

In August 1962, she assisted composer Luciano Berio at a two-week summer school at Dartington Hall, for which she borrowed several dozen items of BBC equipment.

One of her first works, and most widely known, was her 1963 electronic realisation of a score by Ron Grainer for the theme of the Doctor Who series, one of the first television themes to be created and produced entirely with electronics.

When Grainer heard it, he was so amazed by her arrangement of his theme that he asked: "Did I really write this?", to which Derbyshire replied: "Most of it".

Grainer attempted to credit her as co-composer, but was prevented by the BBC bureaucracy because they preferred that members of the workshop remain anonymous.

Derbyshire's original arrangement served as the Doctor Who main theme for its first seventeen series, from 1963 to 1980.

The theme was reworked over the years, to her horror, because the only version that had her approval was the original.

Delia also composed music for other BBC programmes, including Blue Veils and Golden Sands and The Delian Mode.

The Doctor Who story Inferno reused some of Derbyshire's music originally composed for other productions.

In 1964–65, she collaborated with the British artist and playwright Barry Bermange for the BBC's Third Programme to produce four Inventions for Radio, a series of collages of people describing their thoughts on dreams, belief in God, the possibility of life after death, and the experience of old age, voiced over an electronic soundscape.

Her father died in 1965 and her mother in 1994.

In 1966, working with composer George Newson, she collaborated on the BBC experimental radio drama, The Man Who Collected Sounds with producer Douglas Cleverdon.

In 1966 while working at the BBC, Derbyshire, fellow Radiophonic Workshop member Brian Hodgson and EMS founder Peter Zinovieff set up Unit Delta Plus, an organisation which they intended to use to create and promote electronic music.

Based in a studio in Zinovieff's townhouse in Putney, they exhibited their music at experimental and electronic music festivals, including the 1966 The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, at which The Beatles' "Carnival of Light" had its only public performance.

In 1966, she recorded a demo with Anthony Newley entitled "Moogies Bloogies", but Newley moved to the United States and the song was left unreleased until 2014.