I liked this extract from Madeau Stewart's obituary in the Telegraph :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1530571/Madeau-Stewart.html

"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......"