This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

Tom Crowe
3:00PM GMT 03 Jan 2011

Tom Crowe, who died on December 6 aged 88, was in his day one of the most distinctive and best-loved voices on Radio 3; he made his mark in the 1970s, in particular as the announcer, three times a month, on the early Monday morning slot, where his air of carefully controlled muddle and civilised puzzlement endeared him to listeners.

He was born on July 5 1922, the only child of a Protestant “Ascendancy” family in Co Clare, Ireland. His mother died young, and his father, a farmer, was remote and sometimes fearsome, once snatching a book from his son’s hands and hurling it in the fire. His closest friends, he would say, were his father’s coachman and the butler, Doyle, and he would spend hours wandering over the family’s 2,000-acre estate.

His solitary childhood — much of it reflected in his short stories for The Dublin Magazine as well as two plays for Irish radio — would prove ideal training for a broadcaster keeping the imaginary company of a radio audience.

After Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied French and German Literature, he joined the Irish Guards and saw service in occupied Germany before joining the Third Programme as an announcer in 1952. On his very first morning at work, he overslept and was late for the studio, but thereafter, for eight years, was a well-behaved, conventional BBC voice. In 1960 he left the BBC to work on a memoir of the Anglo-Irish Arabist, Owen Tweedy, who had died that year, and whom, in his last years, Crowe had known. The book, Gathering Moss, was published in 1967.

By then the BBC had developed, as Crowe called it, “a more human face”, and as he returned to the announcer’s chair he too began to show a more human side, and to develop an accident-prone but haughtily unflappable persona. Essentially private and even secretive by nature, he was not at heart a corporation man, preferring what he once called “the underworld of the individual” to “the havoc of organisation”. Shambolic aplomb would be his broadcasting hallmark.

While never openly rebellious, he managed to suggest a quiet, disingenuous dissidence, mildly sending up the Radio 3 “grand manner” and himself with it. “I have the reputation of making a lot of mistakes,” he said once, “but I have learnt that it is best not to cower in a corner but to turn them into artistic triumphs.” Traditionally, the BBC continuity announcer was a smooth presence between records: Tom Crowe, by contrast, specialised in discontinuity.

Among his broadcasting gems of these years was his genuine bewilderment at an underrun of Elgar’s Chanson de Matin, which, unknown to him, he had played at 45rpm instead of 33. The BBC postbag was full of letters.

On another occasion he got his timings wrong, and Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words overran into the Greenwich time signal. Unruffled, he told listeners that he hoped Mendelssohn’s music hadn’t spoilt their “enjoyment of the pips”.

With a barely detectable Irish twinkle to his voice he would announce that “This week’s composers are Schutz, Scheidt, and Schein”, or “You have been listening to Bach’s Partita in G, and I have been eating a scrambled egg.” Not even the news was sacrosanct. In the middle of one item — about a dead whale, swollen with stomach-gas, which had exploded on a beach — listeners were astonished to hear his muttered aside: “How repulsive!” With time to fill, he would tell funny, perfectly turned stories about the donkey, the dog, and other animals at his rambling family home, Ripple Farm in Kent.

Many listeners will especially remember his comically heroic early morning struggles to tell the right time from the studio clock, with the remark, after one doomed attempt, that he was “à la recherche du Tom perdu”.

Tom Crowe retired from the BBC in 1982, and was briefly an announcer with the SABC in South Africa before returning to England and moving with his second wife, Liz, to her mother’s home at Pickering, Yorkshire. A previous marriage, to Yolande Amic, an art historian, was dissolved.

Tom Crowe is survived by his wife and children.