Edward Lewis (Decca)

Sir Edward Roberts Lewis (19 April 1900 – 29 January 1980) was a British businessman, best known for leading the Decca recording and technology group for five decades from 1929. He built the company up from nothing to one of the major record labels of the world.

A financier by profession, Lewis was professionally engaged by the fledgling Decca company. Having failed to persuade its directors to diversify from making record-players to making records, he raised the capital to take the company over, and ran it until his death. Among the ground-breaking achievements of Decca under Lewis were the "Decca Navigation System" (the leading maritime and aviation navigation system prior to GPS), the Decca "ffrr" recording technology, and the first release on record of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Lewis was born in Derby, the only boy of four children of Sir Alfred Edward Lewis (1868–1940) and his wife, May née Roberts. Alfred Lewis was a senior official, and later head, of the National Provincial Bank. Lewis was educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge.

After leaving Cambridge, Lewis worked in the financial sector, joining the . In 1923 he married Margaret Mary (‘Masie’) Hutton. There were two sons of the marriage, one of whom died, while still a boy, in a drowning accident. The other son later became the senior partner in Lewis's stockbroking firm. The firm, E. R. Lewis & Co, was founded when Lewis was 28, and was still trading after his death.

Lewis's firm acted as brokers for a company that had recently changed its name to The Decca Gramophone Company. It manufactured recording and play-back equipment and had developed the world's first portable gramophone. With Lewis's help, Decca was successfully floated as a public company. The share issue was oversubscribed by twenty times.

Despite the success of the public offering, Lewis had reservations about Decca's future. He remarked that "a company manufacturing gramophones but not records is rather like one making razors but not consumable blades". He proposed that Decca, which already had a global reputation and distribution network, should use them to expand into making and selling records, potentially a much more profitable activity than merely making equipment.

The Duophone Record Company, with its record factory in the London suburb of New Malden, was in difficulties, and Lewis tried to persuade the directors of Decca to buy it. They did not wish to do so, and so Lewis formed a syndicate and proceeded with the purchase, not only of Duophone, but of Decca itself. The new Decca Record Company came under the management of Lewis's reconstituted Decca Gramophone Company in 1929. That year, however, was the year of the Wall Street crash and the collapse of financial markets. The record industry suffered along with most others. Within a year, Decca's bankers were threatening to withdraw credit, and Lewis insisted on bold moves to keep the new company competitive with its huge, established rival, EMI, formed by the merger of HMV and Columbia. He cut the retail price of Decca records to less than half that of EMI's and secured the resignation of Decca's managing director, S. C. Newton, whose role Lewis effectively took over, though he was never officially more than a member of the board of directors until 1957, when he took the title of chairman.

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