Doris Grace Arnold (4 November 1904 – 5 October 1969) was a

BBC Radio BBC Radio is an operational business division and service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a royal charter since 1927. The service provides national radio stations cove ...

presenter and producer, and a pianist. Born in

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, in 1904, Arnold joined the

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in 1929, as a typist. She first appeared on air as a stand-in for a pianist who was unwell. She married fellow pianist, BBC producer and songwriter Harry S. Pepper, and the two would perform piano duets together on air. As presenter of the programme '' These You Have Loved'', in which she played and talked about light classical recordings, she was one of the BBC's (and thus the United Kingdom's) first female

disc jockey A disc jockey, more commonly abbreviated as DJ, is a person who plays recorded music for an audience. Types of DJs include Radio personality, radio DJs (who host programs on music radio stations), club DJs (who work at nightclubs or music fes ...

s. She also arranged music for

male voice choir A men's chorus or male voice choir (MVC) (German: ''Männerchor''), is a choir consisting of men who sing with either a tenor or bass voice, and whose music is typically arranged into high and low tenors (1st and 2nd tenor), and high and low bas ...

s. In 1934, she featured on a

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, in the Wills series ''Radio Celebrities''. She also appeared as a castaway on the

programme ''

Desert Island Discs ''Desert Island Discs'' is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942. Each week a guest, called a " castaway" during the programme, is asked to choose eight audio recordin ...

'' on 25 September 1967. Arnold died in 1969 at

Denham, Buckinghamshire Denham is a village and civil parish in the unitary authority of Buckinghamshire, England, approximately 17 mi from central London, 2 mi northwest of Uxbridge and just north of junction 1 of the M40 motorway. The name is derived from the Old En ...

References

1904 births 1969 deaths 20th-century British musicians 20th-century British pianists BBC radio presenters British DJs British music arrangers People from Denham, Buckinghamshire 20th-century British women pianists {{UK-radio-bio-stub