Gilbert Briggs

Gilbert Briggs founded Wharfedale Wireless Works in Yorkshire, England in 1932, and was a leading figure in the early development of High fidelity loudspeakers introducing such basics as the two-way loudspeaker and the ceramic magnet, as well as writing some famous books on audio and loudspeakers. Britain was at the forefront of developments in Radio, Audio, and Television, and Wharfedale is a name known to this day as a leading manufacturer of high quality loudspeakers, and although the company was sold in 1958, to The Rank Group, and then again in the early 1980s to Verity Group PLC, loudspeakers continue to be sold under the Wharfedale name to this day.

Briggs was a proud Yorkshireman whose passion for audio came out of a love of music, and who built a business out of a hobby, working long hours and always promoting what he truly believed in

In the 1950s - Gilbert embarked on an ambitious collaboration with a close friend and colleague, Peter Walker, founder of Quad Electroacoustics. With Quad supplying the amplifiers and Wharfedale building the loudspeaker systems, they embarked on what was to become an industry-defining series of concerts wherein audiences were invited to experience live versus recorded music first hand. Touring UK and the US and playing at venues as auspicious as the Royal Festival Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Gilbert was the son of Phineas Briggs, a mill worker who was descended from a line of Yorkshire weavers and textile mill workers. Phineas died of pleuro-pneumonia, aged 36, leaving Gilbert, aged nine, and three young siblings, to be brought up by their mother, Mary Anne Emsley, who abandoned their back-to-back house to move the family in with her mother. Despite these desperate circumstances, Gilbert later wrote that they were happy, and he was very soon to move to Kings Lynn to attend technical school. Later he attended Crossley and Porter Orphan School in Halifax, where he acquired a love of classical music. He was then to spend 27 years in the textile industry, often travelling as a merchant. In 1914 he was rejected for army service following a medical screening in which he was considered to have a heart condition, though this was never to affect him in any way. This rather spurious and hurried diagnosis saved him from fighting in the First World War, in which one in seven of men under 25 were to die, and he continued in textiles at Holdworth Lund and Co.

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