National Gramophonic Society

The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in England in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to produce recordings of music which was ignored by commercial record companies. The Society was proposed shortly after Mackenzie had launched his monthly The Gramophone (still in publication today as Gramophone), and its activities were announced and its releases promoted in the magazine's pages.

The NGS was established for the publication by subscription of classical music, recorded complete and uncut. The Society's Advisory Committee, responsible for devising the recording programme and passing test pressings, consisted of Walter Willson Cobbett, Edwin Spencer Dyke (leader of a string quartet), Gramophone contributors W. R. Anderson, Alec Robertson and Peter Latham, and the magazine's Editors Compton Mackenzie and Christopher Stone, who was also NGS Secretary.

Cobbett (b 1847), a lover and amateur performer of chamber music, had founded the Cobbett Competition in 1905 for a short form of String Quartet composition or 'Phantasy', and for other short chamber works, prizes won variously by William Yeates Hurlstone (1876-1906, pianist) (1905), Frank Bridge (1908), John Ireland (1909), J. Cliffe Forrester (1916), H. Waldo Warner (viola of the London Quartet) (1916), York Bowen (1918) and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs (1919). In 1921 he was offering further awards to Royal Academy and Royal College of Music graduates, and commissioned many new chamber works from English composers. Cobbett led his own string quartet in two productions for the NGS, which he paid for himself, but beyond this his involvement in its activities was minimal.

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