I have sometimes suggested that recording directors and engineers might regularly be given credit on labels. Their work is every bit as skilled as any of the names we read in the cinema, wbich extend almost to the tea-maker. Our engineers would probably resent any such idea. As a race they are reserved and exceptionally modest about their revolutionary contribution to our technological society. What is so extraordinary about these men who somehow combine the disciplines of art and science, and who are therefore extremely rare, is that their beginnings were so often so far removed from the studio.

When he was 14, Kenneth Wilkinson who was born in 1912 and is Decca's Chief Recording Engineer, was working for Cassell's the publishers. By chance one of the firm's accountants left to join the World Echo Record Company, and Mr Wilkinson went with him watching the company's first electrical recording at the old Clerkenwell Sessions House off Farringdon Street in London. Fascinated by the mystery he became the 'studio boy', placing the microphones and generally making himself useful. This was the life, and in 1927 young Wilkinson took a course at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Shortly after this, the Dominion Company, whose Musical Director was Jay Wilbur, began to use the World Echo studios and the next thing that happened was that World Echo collapsed and Mr Wilkinson was out of a job. The Dominion label is still remembered, and so far as I know was responsible for the initial recording of Gramophone's founder and first editor. I still have Sir Compton's reading from Rogues and Vagabonds, as well as Ian Hay in a hilarious extract from that old favourite The Lighter Side of School Life. 

Mr Wilkinson went to Brighton Ice Rink, looking after the recorded music for the skaters, but was soon back in the industry with the Goodman Record Company, which also went broke. By 1931 Jay Wilbur had become Musical Director of Crystallate, which had bought up Vocalion and was issuing records under the Imperial and Rex labels from the present Decca studio in West Hampstead. Mr Wilkinson joined him at Crystallate and thus came under the wing of the great Arthur Haddy, now a Director of The Decca Record Co and a name to conjure with in the record business the world over. It was in 1937 that Decca bought the record side of Crystallate because, presumably, they realized the recording genius at work there, for the Haddy-Wilkinson team was retained and has been there ever since. In Imperial days, when they put Jack Payne's face on the labels of his records, Mr Wilkinson remembers making Vera Lynn's first records and working with many of the popular stars of the day. 

Mr Wilkinson has come a long way from recording Elsie Carlisle to the War Requiem and Billy Budd. He is particularly proud of these two works by Benjamin Britten, the former with its three-dimensional demands, and the latter, to be issued soon, with its effect on the listener of being part of a ship's company and thus personally involved. Of course, there is argument about Decca's realistic approach to operatic recording, but if you accept the aesthetic then surely it could not be better done. As for the War Requiem, it won a host of awards from all over the world, and even if such rewards are artistically negligible, they are none the less tributes to a standard of technical excellence that began 40 years ago on the studio floor. Moreover you cannot get results like this without a true understanding of what music itself is about. 

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