Nearly three decades of recorded interviews with musicians and movie stars have been donated to a university’s journalism department.

Victor Davis, the distinguished entertainment journalist with national titles such as the Daily Express and Mail on Sunday, has given cassettes spanning 1967 to 1994 to Cardiff University.

His notebook catalogues an alphabetical listing of interviews with dates and places.

Under ‘B’, for example, are such luminaries as David Bowie, Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Charles Bronson and Drew Barrymore.

Professor Bob Franklin said: “This is an invaluable as well as fascinating record of Victor’s distinguished career in journalism and we are delighted that he has entrusted the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural with its safe keeping.

“It will join our existing collections of personal papers, letters and documents of significant journalists such as Hugh Cudlipp, Tom Hopkinson and Richard Stott.

“Collectively they will be a key resource in the research and pedagogic agenda of a new Centre for Popular Journalism here at Cardiff, as well as providing an important research archive for scholars of journalism studies and popular culture around the globe”.

Victor with Sean Connery in St Moritz, 1981
Pic: Victor Davis Journalism Archive, Cardiff University

Professor Franklin says the first job will be to transfer the many cassettes into more durable and accessible digital formats so students and other users will be able to consult the collection of interviews which document a senior journalist’s working life.

Victor started as a copy boy with the Daily Express in 1945 before taking a reporter’s job with the weekly Streatham News, in London, in 1950.

From there he went to the Daily Sketch before becoming the Express’ foreign correspondent covering events in the Congo between 1960 and 1962.

Stints as night news editor and in the paper’s New York Bureau were a pre-cursor for his lengthy spell interviewing the world’s glitterati.

From 1967 Victor was appointed Express’ show business editor and moved to the Mail on Sunday in 1984 as well as writing under pen names for various magazines.