Ernest Pike
After studying at the Guildhall School of Music in London, he worked as a bank clerk and sang as a church tenor before making his first recording "Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes" for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company in 1904.
He became the house tenor for HMV and made several hundred records in a career that spanned over twenty years.
Pike has been called "England's most recorded tenor", and his "silver voice" became a favourite in thousands of homes – remaining so until well into the 1920s.
[5] After completing his studies in the early 1890s, Pike worked as a clerk for a bank in Victoria, London; he became a shorthand writing expert and taught his skill to other employees.
[5] Sometime during the 1890s he was appointed principal tenor at Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, London – a post that he still held in 1903.
[5] With a now busy concert schedule and the start of his recording career in 1904,[8] he was able to resign his post at Holy Trinity Sloane Square (in c.
[14] Assuming an average of three takes per song, this would equate to approximately 400 double-sided 78rpm gramophone records for HMV alone.
[14] Pike sang in the earliest and often incomplete recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan (G&S) and other light operas of the era.
[20] He sang both Colonel Fairfax and Leonard Meryll in The Yeomen of the Guard (1907 for G&T) and Ralph Rackstraw in the 1908 (Gramophone Company) recording of H.M.S.
[15] In 1917 after lengthy negotiations with Rupert D'Oyly Carte, HMV was granted permission to do a series of complete recordings of G&S operas.
[21] Pike shared the singing of both Nanki-Poo and Pish Tush in The Mikado (1917); sang Luiz, Francesco and parts of Marco in The Gondoliers (1919), and Leonard Meryll and the First Yeoman in The Yeomen of the Guard (1920).
[23] By 1922 Carte was insisting that his company's own singers be allowed to perform in the recordings, a move that prevented Pike and several others from singing further solo parts.
He became well known for his recordings of First World War songs, for example the American song "There's a Long Long Trail" in 1916 and "Take me Back to Dear Old Blighty" (as Eric Courtland) in a duet with George Baker (as Walter Jeffries) in 1917; he also made one of the earliest recordings of the famous ballad "Roses of Picardy" in 1918 shortly after it had been written.
[5] In his memoirs the producer and recording engineer Fred Gaisberg remembered Pike as a "silver-voiced tenor".
[18] The singer George Baker said of Pike: "He had a smooth tenor voice that was easy to record because of its even quality".
