78rpm gramophone record, "The Hums of Pooh, parts 3 & 4"; shellac; H.M.V., about 1931

Ten-inch gramophone record, shellac, with a printed paper label on either side in the centre. The record is in a plain brown paper sleeve. The track listing is as follows:

Side 3
(a) They all went off to discover the Pole
(b) Three cheers for Pooh

Side 4
(a) The more it snows
(b) The butterflies are flying

Given by Susan Brandon

Given to the MoC by Susan Brandon in 2015 [2016/384].

The donor (b. October 1944) recalled in June 2016: "This really was one of my favourites and it had been bought especially for me. I even remember the day I was given it. I suppose I was about six years old. I was used to reading the A.A. Milne books myself but loved even more having them read to me. My father was a librarian and my mother had been the first children’s librarian in St. Pancras until she married and had to give it up. I had picked up reading easily, mainly I suppose by being read to and being introduced to a wide range of books. I don’t ever remember being taught to read. When I started school and it was realised that I was already able to read, my teacher, Miss Thomas, used to take a group of children around her for group reading and give me another group to do the same. It never occurred to me then that this was unusual.

Anyway, I had been home for lunch and was on my way back to school for the afternoon session. I always went with a friend who was a year older than me and she had to go to her aunt’s house every day whilst her mother worked. Her aunt lived opposite me in Laurier Road. We had quite a long walk down the Dartmouth Park Hill to get back to Burghley Road Infant School. About half way down the hill we stopped at a road crossing but my foot slipped straight out in front of me just as a car came to a halt at the junction. It stopped with the tyre over the lower part of my leg just above my ankle and the poor horrified driver rushed out to make sure I was OK. She was even more horrified to see that the car was still on top of my leg and had to get back in to move it away. Meanwhile a group of anxious passers-by had gathered and somebody spotted my father coming up the hill on the other side and rushed to tell him. Normally he never came home at lunchtime, so this was very unusual but also fortunate as he had the rest of the day off. He told me he had a special surprise for me and, having realised that I had no broken bones, he gave me a piggy-back all the way home.

My surprise was this record and we played and played it over the next few days whilst I recovered from a badly sprained ankle. I think I can probably sing all the songs on it even now, though it is a great many years since it was last played."

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, his early recordings were made onto wax-impregnated paper, then onto tin foil. Better quality and more sturdy wax cylinder records followed around a decade later. Laterally-cut discs were invented by Emile Berliner, who named his playback system the ‘gramophone’ to distinguish it in the market from Edison’s cylinder-playing phonograph. Cylinders and discs coexisted until after the First World War, when the disc system became the most popular. The market opened up after the Berliner’s patents expired in 1919, this initially resulted in manufacturers creating machines and records which played at wildly varying speeds, although standardisation at 78rpm was achieved by 1925. Shellac compounds began to be used for records in the late-19th century, replacing hard (vulcanised) rubber as the most popular material. The ten inch format was standard after 1910, which typically allowed about three minutes of material to be recorded on each side.

“The Hums of Pooh” is a selection of poems ‘composed’ by the fictional teddy bear Winnie the Pooh, created by A.A. Milne. The recording is based on a collection of poems of the same name. This record is the second part (parts 3 and 4) of the recordings. By 1930, Milne had begun to grow tired of the character and had sold part of his rights (including for sound recordings) to American producer Stephen Slesinger, who turned Pooh merchandise into a $50 million a year business. This recording, published by The Gramophone Company on their His Master's Voice label, was set to music by the popular composer Harold Fraser-Simson, and sung by popular baritone George Baker.

B.96-2015