Apropos Barbar and diaries

I have just read a brief history of EMI Records, entitled 'A Voice to Remember'. This booklet was supplied as part of a record set that I bought years ago. I picked it out recently as a result of needing to dry a lot of my LP covers which had got wet in the barn during recent storms. On the inside cover the narrative starts 'The first gramophone arrived in London under the arm of an American lawyer called William Barry Owen. Sent by the machine's sponsors to seek capital for launching the gramophone in Europe, Owen encountered difficulty and reluctace before he met Trevor Williams, a Lincoln's Inn solicitor aged thirty-eight'....Williams was unmistakenly interested....Trevor Williams - against the advice of colleagues in the City - put together a small syndicate among his family and friends. And so in April 1898 The Gramophone Company was formed. A year later an artist called Francis Barraud came to the new offices with his painting of a little dog peering into a gramophone and this image was adopted as the company's logo.

In 1931 The Gramophone Company merged with Columbia records to form a new grouping called Electric & Musical Industries Ltd or EMI. At this time the company invested in new recording studios at premises they had recently bought in Abbey Road, St.John's Wood. In the booklet there are some letters written by TW and photos of him with his colleagues. One shows them all standing in their suits, coats and top hats, with TW wrapped up in a bearskin coat, driving hat and goggles 'as betokened his mode of transport that morning' and his motoring enthusiasm.

For any of the younger readers of this fine blog, Trevor Williams was Barbar's Dad.