This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Madeau Stewart
(Filed: 05/10/2006)

Madeau Stewart, who has died aged 84, was archive features producer for Radio 3, and was familiar to listeners for her Sunday evening programme An Evening in Archives.

A knowledgeable woman with a wide circle of friends, Madeau Stewart corresponded with leading musicians and writers, including Stevie Smith, Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Goudge; much of her correspondence is now held in Oxfordshire Records Office and the National Archives. As an interviewer she was known for her ability to draw out the particular personality of the artist, from the operatic diva to the shy young instrumentalist.

An only child, Madeau Stewart was born on May 10 1922 on the Isle of Wight. Her father, Oliver Stewart, a half-uncle of the Mitford sisters on their mother's side, was a much-decorated First World War flying ace and wrote a regular column, "Air Eddies", in the Tatler. Her mother was French and young Madeau grew up bilingual.

After leaving school, she won a scholarship to study piano and flute at the Royal School of Music, where she studied under Charles Soper and Robert Murchie and developed an interest in early musical instruments after Karl Geiringer visited the school to give a lecture about the Donaldson Collection.

Called up at the outbreak of war, she joined the WAAF as a designated clerk on special duties. "My parents hardly ever knew where I was and certainly not ever what I was doing," she recalled. After the D-Day landings, she served in France and Belgium, witnessing the liberation of Brussels, before being posted to Germany.

After the war she got a job as a selector for the BBC's Sound Archives, which at that time consisted mainly of spoken material. Finding that there was a growing demand from programme-makers for appropriate theme and incidental music for period dramas and travel series, she took on the task of augmenting the BBC's early music and non-British folk and indigenous music archives, a job which involved travelling around the world to collect recordings from far-flung parts and gathering in material from itinerant contributors.

In building up the BBC's early and Baroque music archives, she determined to try to record as much as possible on original instruments, and arranged a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection, a sadly neglected backwater of the museum's department of Woodwork and Furniture. She was dismayed to find that, while a few prize pieces were on public display, most of the collection was gathering dust in a corridor.

"It was the most saddening sight I've ever seen," Madeau Stewart recalled. "Simply ghastly. They were all piled up, higgledy piggledy, and all warping. I went in with one of the woodwork people and she absolutely played into my hands. 'Oops,' she said, 'I see that instrument's got another crack in it.' Obviously she didn't care and it was made quite clear to me that they didn't care."

Determined to get someone to save the collection before it was too late, she wrote to her cousin Nancy Mitford, then living in Paris, who put her on to Avilda Lees-Milne who, in turn, secured her an interview with the museum's director Sir Trenchard Cox.

"I was shaking with rage and he was terribly nice because we went for him like nothing on earth," she recalled. Her onslaught made an impression, for within a short time Margaret Hodsdon was giving concerts on the Elizabethan virginals; eventually the museum opened a separate music gallery.

In the mid-1950s Madeau Stewart was given the opportunity to make light programmes about the history of musical instruments, which helped to spark a revival of interest in the early music and Baroque repertoire.

Among other programmes, she recorded The World of Nancy Mitford and one of the first radio programmes about Chatsworth, called Open to the Public. After her retirement she moved to Burford, in Oxfordshire.

Although reticent, Madeau Stewart had a playful sense of humour. In the early 1960s she spent time on the island of Inch Kenneth, the home of her half-aunt, Lady Redesdale. There she enjoyed sitting on the rocks, playing her flute while seals flocked around her.

She was a regular contributor to the Folk Music Journal and other music magazines. Her publications included Instruments of the Orchestra (1980, with a foreword by Yehudi Menuhin) and The Enigma of the Green Man (1990).

Madeau Stewart died on August 30. She was unmarried.