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Tannoy

company

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ742568 ↗
Source-derived summary

Tannoy is a British manufacturer of loudspeakers and public address systems founded in 1926. Today the company is part of the Music Tribe group of brands.

History

The company was founded by the Yorkshire-born engineer Guy Fountain (1898-1977) at a garage in Tulsemere Road, Dulwich in London as the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company. It originally made battery chargers for wireless radio sets. The company name was changed to Tannoy in 1928 and a small factory was opened in Dalton Road, West Norwood, later moving to Canterbury Grove. Tannoy Square SE27 commemorates the site today.

During World War II Tannoy public address systems were supplied to the armed forces, and a Tannoy PA system was used at Buckingham Palace in 1945 to announce the end of hostilities. Tannoy speakers were also supplied to factories around Britain to relay the BBC's motivational radio series Music While You Work, and to Butlins and Pontins holiday camps following the war - where they were famously used to waken guests with the words "Good morning, campers!". The Tannoy factory moved from Canterbury Grove to Coatbridge, Scotland in the 1970s.

In 2002, Tannoy was acquired by TC Group, and TC Group was subsequently acquired by Music Group in 2015.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Tannoy” is company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tannoy and company, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA strong contextual entry point for chronology, institutions and public events when official records are distinguished from later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1926, 1898, 1977, 1928—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1926-01-01. For this dossier, Tannoy and company is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q742568. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 1898, 1977 and 1928.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Tannoy”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Tannoy primary sources, Tannoy archive and Tannoy research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Tannoy”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Tannoy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.