Tannoy
company

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 It originally made battery chargers for wireless radio sets.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.
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.
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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.
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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.