George Baker (record singer)

George Baker (10 February 1885 – 8 January 1976) was an English singer. He is remembered for singing on thousands of gramophone records in a career that spanned 53 years, beginning in 1909. He is especially associated with the comic baritone roles in recordings of the Gilbert & Sullivan operas.

George Baker, also known as George Portland (and other recording pseudonyms), was born in Birkenhead, the son of Walter Baker and his wife, Elizabeth, née Sanders. He studied violin, flute and piano as a child. At the age of 16, he served as organist and choirmaster at the Woodford Parish Church in Cheshire. He did the same at two churches in Birkenhead between 1903 and 1906. Baker studied singing with John Acton and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. There he studied with Gustave Garcia and was awarded a Patron Funds Grant to continue his vocal studies in Milan in 1914. He was married three times: first to pianist/conductor Grace Lilian Bryant (1871–1955), from 1911 until their divorce in 1922, then to singer Kathlyn Hilliard, who died in 1933, and then to Olive Groves, another singer and teacher, who died in 1974.

Baker first recorded for Pathé Records in 1909, while still a student; the piano accompanist and conductor (on his orchestrally-accompanied Pathé discs) was his future wife Lilian Bryant, musical director for Pathé's London studios. Pathé had just changed its emphasis from cylinders to vertically-cut disc records. After his Pathé debut, in the early 1910s Baker began making lateral-cut records for the Gramophone Company and other labels. In 1934 he recalled the experience as follows:

Baker recorded roles in the first British recordings of Parsifal by Richard Wagner, Hiawatha by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Salome by Richard Strauss and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. He recorded in a wide range of repertory, including as "Uncle George" in a popular early series of children's recordings, in dance band records, hymns, and in the once popular recording of The Departure of a Troopship.

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