My Father - Anthony Chevallier Griffith

Classical Record Producer, Sound Recording and Transfer Engineer

Portrait and interview - 1994  (Additional technical input from Mark Ainley, a specialist in several fields including the curating and research of historical piano recordings.  See author of article in link below).  

In many respects, my father Anthony was one of those very fortunate people whose work was also his passion. He had a long and distinguished career in classical music and was a pioneer of early sound recording, having put much of his early work directly onto wax.

Born in 1915, he was three years old when his family left London and moved to Torquay in Devon. He would recall that his earliest memory of those days in London was seeing a Zeppelin overhead.  Anthony went to boarding school at Beaudesert Park in Gloucestershire and Wellington College in Berkshire. After school and before WWII, Anthony worked as a sound recordist with Alexander Korda's company, London Film Productions, at Ealing Studios where he first worked with Sir Thomas Beecham on Whom the Gods Love – the Life of Mozart.

In 1937 he was the sound engineer for Knight without Armour with Marlene Dietrich and before moving on to Denham Studios he worked on such films as Robert Donat’s The Citadel and Goodbye Mr Chips.

At the onset of WWII, Anthony joined the RAF and became a navigator and night fighter radar operator, rising to become a Squadron Leader, being mentioned in Despatches. After the war, on 20th November 1948, he married local Torquay girl Evelyn June Gully and they made their first home together at 120 Lauderdale Mansions in London, before moving on to Orpington (22nd May 1950) and in Haslemere, Surrey in December 1955.

Anthony had a long relationship with the EMI Group and became one of the most respected and knowledgeable engineers and producers in the industry. He was head of EMI’s Classical Music Division in Vienna between 1949 and 1951 and was responsible for all recordings made during that period of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He was very proud of the fact that on one occasion, on his way back from Vienna, he made the last recording of Dinu Lipatti, the Romanian, whom he believed to have been the greatest pianist who ever lived. Lipatti died shortly afterwards. Anthony's earliest recordings for EMI were made in 1934 and he rejoined HMV and Columbia after the war, working alongside Walter Legge and the leading artists of the day on recordings made throughout Europe.

In the 1950s, he became famous for his expertise in transferring 78rpm records to the then-new microgroove long-playing medium; hundreds of LPs were issued bearing his imprimatur and achieved world-wide acclaim. In the 1960s he became recording manager of the World Record Club, a subsidiary of EMI, and produced and engineered many new recordings with Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Arthur Bliss and other great musicians. Although Anthony retired in 1979 and returned to live in Devon with June, he continued to act as a consultant to EMI for many years.

This photograph is a based on a childhood memory of the many occasions I would stand outside the sitting room window with my nose up against the glass watching my father conduct as he listened to music and also tested pressings.  He was always oblivious to my presence.  For this image, I was using a long cable-release to fire the shutter.

My father lived in Bridgetown, Totnes for a number of years.

For further reading, visit this link: -  https://www.thepianofiles.com/behind-the-microphone-anthony-griffith/

Update: Anthony died in Torbay Hospital in 2005 at the age of ninety.