Barbara Holdridge

The audiobook pioneer whose early recordings of Dylan Thomas kickstarted a global phenomenon

- Patrick Kidd

If Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney had written to Dylan Thomas under their full names, rather than using their initials in the belief he'd pay more attention to men, the Welsh poet might have been less elusive.

Especially if they had revealed that they were two single, 22-year-old women desperate to make him a proposition.

Their note, sent backstage at a cultural centre in Manhattan where Thomas was giving a reading in 1952, was seen by his agent, who told them to call the poet at the Chelsea hotel. Having tried and failed for a week to reach him, Cohen rang his room at 4.30am, reasoning he would surely be there at that time. She was right - just - and caught Thomas as he came in from a night of carousing.

Thomas invited them to lunch at the Little Shrimp, his favourite restaurant, accompanied by his suspicious wife, Caitlin, but Cohen and Roney's motives were pure. They simply wanted to record him reading his poetry. The women, who had studied ancient Greek together at the city's Hunter College, were bored by their jobs in book and music publishing and had hit on an idea to bring the beatnik oral culture of Greenwich Village into middle-class living rooms. These days it would be called a tech startup.