THE GRAMOPHONE
Incorporating VOX, THE RADIO CRITIC and BROADCAST REVIEW
London Office : lOA. Soho Squa.re.
London, W.l.
EDITED BY
COMPTON MACKENZIE
TKLl1PHONI!: Gerrard 6098, 6O!l!).
TELEGIlAKS : Pa.rmaJ[to, Rath, London.
Vol. IX.
SEPTEMBER 1931
No. 100
EDITORIAL "10 so no il prologo. An a.pology is due to the public for inflicting upon i t a.nother r ev iew, hut I should not lJe doing so unless I were persuaded th.a.t many of the numerous possessors of gramophones will welcome an organ of candid opinion. T·he critical policy of THe GRAMOPHONE will be largely personal, and as such i t will ·be honest but not infalli;ble, while the errors we make will :b e mostly on the side of kindness. I f we endorse what a firm claims for i ts goods in our advertisement columns, we shall endo rse that cla.~m beca use we believe i t to be justified.
The instruments on which all records sent for us to revie w are tested are the Orchestraphone sold IlJy the Gramophone Excha.nge, a horizontal gra.nd of His Master's Voice, and an Adam model of the Vocalion Company. The soundboxes u.sed are the H.M.V. Exhibition No.2, a Vocalion, a Realistic, an Ultone, a Superphone, a Sonat , and a Three Muses. I f the ma·ker of any other soundbox likes to send us his product for tri al, we shaIl u se i t in competition with the others; but no opinion will be pa ssed on any soundbox sent to us before a three months' trial. We shall try each month to keep pace with the r e cords is sued; Ibut we hope that our rea.ders will accept these prehminary r eviews as provisional ; and every . three months we shall deal very critically with the output of the preceding quarter.
I have received many kind promises of support from dist inguished writers; and if I find that the sales wa rr a.nt me in supposing that gramophone enthusiasts want the kind of review THE GRAMOPHONE will se t out to he, I can promise them that I will do my best to ensure the ir ohtaining the finest opinions procura1hle.
of the Daily Telegraph, which put into my head the notion of bringing out a magazine entirely devoted to the gramophone, for I received so many more letters than I usually received about articles I had written in the Press that the latent enthusiasm or a possibly large public was revealed to me. Among other letters, I fancy I received one from our Mr. Crabtree saying that he was writing on behalf of Mr. Percy Scholes and urging me to write more about the gramophone. I found another enthusiast in Mr. Archibald Marshall the novelist, who about the same t ime was writing occasional articles in the Morning Post about the gramophone. Through Robin Legge I met Walter Yeomans who was then working in the Education Department of His Master's Voice. With him I paid a visit to Hayes where Mr. Alfred Clark, the Managing Director, encouraged me to persevere with the project to start a magazine. I was taken aback to find that there were already four monthly papers devoted to the gramophone, and I began to think that the interested public might be well provided for already. Yeomans, however, was firmly confident that there was room for another paper, and throughout the winter of 1922-23 he continued to send almost every week exhortations to be up and doing. So I wrote to my brother-in-law, Christopher Stone, suggesting that he should go into partnership with me in launching this new venture.
We shall have nothing to do with Wire>less in these column s. Our policy will be to encourage the recording companies to build up for generations to coone a g reat l ibrary of good music . I do not want to waste t ime in announcing what we a.re going to do in future numbers, because I do not kn<Y\v yet i f there is any real need for this review at all. We shall write as servants of the pub1ic, and ·i f we sometimes take upon ou rse lves a certain freedom of speech in dealing with our ma ste rs , su ch freedom of speech is the privilege of all good servants .
Andiam! Incominciate!n
I am thankful to say that many of those readers who bought the first number of THE GRAMOPHONE in April, 1928, will be buying the 100th number in September, 1931; but I hope they will not mind my reprinting the words with which I inaugurated a review that even in my most optimistic moments I never expected would prove to be of such stamina. It was an article I wrote on the gramophone for our old friend Mr. Robin Legge, then the musical editor
I regret that I cannot find the letter he wrote back, because I should have liked to print i t . The tenor of i t was that he suspected me of having gone off my head and that any chance that a paper devoted to the gramophone could ever have had must be spoilt by the rosy prospects of Wireless. In spite of his blindness, or shall I say deafness over the gramophone, I must admit in justice to him that he foresaw more clearly than myself the rapid development o~ Radio. So, crushed by the present London Editor, I turned to an old friend of mine, J. Hope-Johnstone, who was spending the winter with me on the island of Henn, and between us we managed to evolve what in spite of the opinion of some of our loyal first supporters I must now solemnly declare to be one of the worst
