'Apart from his family and a few surviving acquaintances, very few people seem to know about Bill Stapleton's Irish Recording Company from the late 1940s.
Few know of his five-star quality recordings of top musicians, a missing page in the recording of traditional music from 70-plus years ago. Few knew of its existence." That's what Harry Bradshaw, a leading figure in sound engineering and broadcasting at home and abroad, told me recently.
He did good work, though, in prompting RTÉ broadcaster John Bowman to mark the birth of Stapleton who was born 100 years ago this month.
As a sort of teaser, Bowman ended his Sunday morning archives programme on February 28th with one of the earliest Stapleton recordings, that of renowned uilleann piper Séamus Ennis singing The Bonny Boy Is Young, to a piano accompaniment. There would be more the following week and the week after as Bowman played Stapleton's recordings from the late 1940s, restored and remastered by Bradshaw.
“The Séamus we hear singing The Bonny Boy,” said Bradshaw, “is almost a baritone of the type you might hear at an Edwardian soirée or whatever.”
He told Bowman about what might well be the first recording of a young Val Doonican and what might be the very first recording of piper Willie Clancy. And there were many other Stapleton recordings of traditional musicians that stayed hidden for almost 70 years.
Bradshaw has been researching Stapleton's life and career: "He was born in Kilkenny and the family moved to Dublin when he was very young and he was raised in Inchicore. He didn't excel at school and in his own written accounts said he scraped through his Inter Cert and knew he wasn't going to be as lucky with his Leaving Cert. So he left to study radio at Kevin Street Technical School and excelled at electronics, found his niche and walked through his various City and Guilds examinations."
He came out with his qualifications at the wrong time because the war had just started. There were no job prospects and so he joined the army and was seconded to the Air Corps where he was made captain.
But he had this idea that he'd become involved in the recording business; a business that didn't exist in Ireland at that time. There was the State broadcaster Radio Éireann and any recordings made in the country were by EMI/HMV of Hayes in Middlesex in the UK. So he was going into an area that was far from certain, starting a business from scratch.
Moore Street
After the war, Stapleton set up the Irish Recording Company, acquired premises in Moore Street to be close to Radio Éireann in the GPO and was in business by the summer of 1947. He bought a portable disc cutter over from the United States: "He got the most incredible sound quality with gear that was pretty basic by today's standards," said Bradshaw. He was getting some business for Radio Éireann doing some commercial recordings, but was also going around the country making recordings.
During this time he invited an accordion player from Cavan called Terry Lane to come in and make a record. Lane had already recorded several 78s for HMV and was regularly heard on Radio Éireann. Lane insisted that his daughter Eileen accompany him on the piano. Stapleton agreed and they recorded four or five sides, the first of several recordings where Eileen played the piano. In time, she became the recording label accompanist, and in 1950 they were married.
In 1997, the celebrated fiddle player, Seán McGuire, spoke with Irish Music Magazine: "In 1948 when I was playing with the Malachy Sweeney band I was introduced to Captain Bill Stapleton who wanted to start the first Irish traditional label, the Irish Recording Company. I recorded a number of pieces for him in Dublin with his wife, Eileen Lane, on piano. He never released them but they turned up, unbeknownst to me, in the US."
Bradshaw said that Stapleton had sent some of his recordings to the United States to find a distributor, but unbeknownst to him or to the artists, these recordings were published on American labels.
Bootlegged
"Stapleton reckoned that his record label idea was finished after his recordings were bootlegged," said Bradshaw. "He felt that his reputation as an officer and a gentleman was in ruins because people would jump to the wrong conclusion. When the record label he had set up to record traditional music crashed, Stapleton continued running his studio businesses. In the late 1950s he moved to London where the coming thing was television. He later established Silverpine Studios in Bray."
Before he left, he packaged up most of the stuff he had collected, and for safekeeping gave the material to collector and author Breandán Breathnach, one of the most noted activists in Irish traditional music in the 20th century.
In the mid-1980s, Breathnach presented Bradshaw with two boxes of acetate master discs that had been given to him over 30 years earlier. He said he was passing the lot over to the sound engineer to do with them what he thought fit.
The end result is that Bradshaw has remastered Stapleton’s fiddle and uilleann pipes recordings from the later 1940s and they will be issued on CD later in 2021 by Cairdeas na bhFidléirí (fiddles) and Na Píobairí Uilleann (pipes).
Among those who will be heard are fiddlers Aggie White, Denis Murphy and John Kelly, and uilleann pipers Leo Rowsome, Felix Doran and Willie Clancy (uilleann pipes). These CDs will be a fitting tribute to the remarkable Bill Stapleton, and Irish recording pioneer.