JOHN PEEL’S massive record collection could be saved for the nation with lottery funding.

The disc jockey, who died of a heart attack a year ago this month while on a working holiday in Peru, is believed to have had the biggest archive of recorded music in private hands in Britain.

The collection, which is housed in a purpose-built extension at Peel Acres, his farmhouse home in Suffolk, consists of 26,000 LPs, 40,000 singles and 40,000 CDs. It ranges from Beatles singles to records of Mongolian “throat singers”, African railway station bands and Bulgarian women’s choirs.

Many of his records are rare pre-release and promotional copies of discs sent to him by record companies during his 40-year career on radio.

An American radio station has reportedly bid more than £500,000 for the collection, although at auction it could go for double that figure.

If it is bought for the nation it is likely to be rehoused in a special room at the British Library’s sound archive in St Pancras, London, which already has 2.5m recordings, including tapes of vintage Peel sessions of rock groups on Radio 1.

Peel was a tireless champion of new performers and his enthusiasm helped emerging acts such as Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and the White Stripes to find an audience and become some of the world’s biggest bands. He had had discussions with the British Library about leaving his collection to the nation. Andy Linehan, the archive’s curator of pop music, visited the DJ at his home to examine the stacks of records.

There is no legal requirement to deposit copies of recordings with the British Library, unlike books, so the music collection relies on donations and acquisitions.

Such was the nature of many of the records sent to Peel that the archive would not normally be able to get hold of them.

Following Peel’s death at the age of 65, Candy Atherton, then Labour MP for Falmouth and Camborne, talked to the British Library. “They were very keen,” she said yesterday. “It was left that John’s wife was considering it but it was too early for her to decide.”

A lottery fund spokesman said money for the purchase could come from its arts or heritage funds.

Sheila Ravenscroft, Peel’s widow, who watched yesterday as a railway engine was named after him in Bury St Edmunds, said: “We have decided nothing yet. For the time being the record collection stays with us.”

Channel 4 has made a programme about Peel’s 140 favourite records, which he carried around with him in a box. A spokeswoman for the programme said: “It is the story of an obsessive DJ told through the treasured few records he carried with him everywhere.”

Peel’s collection was once rivalled by Sir Elton John’s 25,000 LPs and 23,000 singles but the singer sold them in 1993, raising £181,000 for the Terrence Higgins Trust.

John sings and plays piano on a new tribute single to Peel, a cover version of the Buzzcocks’ Ever Fallen in Love, which will be first played simultaneously across all BBC radio stations tomorrow.

To mark the first anniversary of Peel’s death, Thursday — October 13 — has been designated John Peel Day, with concerts being performed in his name around the world.

A charity compilation CD of his favourite acts, ranging from Lonnie Donegan to PJ Harvey, is also being released.

Margrave of the Marshes, the autobiography begun by Peel and completed by his widow, is due to be published on Monday, October 17.

In it he reveals that from an early age his mother would beat him with a belt if his nanny had considered him to have transgressed in some way. “She hadn’t wanted me to grow up to be a sissy, she explained years later,” he said.

Later, in the early 1960s when he was working in the Cotton Exchange in Dallas, Texas, he met the future president, John F Kennedy, while he was on an election visit to Dallas. As the motorcade passed the same spot where Kennedy would be shot several years later, Peel ran up to his car and shook his hand.

“‘Good luck, Mr Kennedy,’ I said. ‘Hey, you’re from England,’ he replied . . . I was amazed as we talked that a man running for president of the USA could be interested in what I had to tell him.”

Peel said Kennedy invited him to take several pictures of him and Lyndon B Johnson before he hurried back to work.

As revealed in The Sunday Times, Peel also recounts when he was raped by an older pupil while at Shrewsbury school where, he claims, new boys were regularly obliged to answer the sexual demands of the older “study monitors” during homework periods.

He does not name his abuser, and said the abuse was so common place he became accustomed to it, and when he was attacked by the boy in the public toilet in a cemetery on the outskirts of Shrewsbury he was not particularly traumatised.

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