Records

Coliseum

The factors were Cooper Brothers Ltd, of 45 & 63 City Road & 17, Clerkenwell Road, London EC 1, with branches in Manchester & Cardiff. Initially, all the records were manufactured in Prussia by Lindström, using a mixture of their local masters and those they recorded at their Beka studios in London. From late 1912, some Coliseum records are believed to have been manufactured at Lindström's new British factory in Hertford, and certainly that is the case following the outbreak of WWI in August 1914. In 1916, the Lindström company in the UK was closed (due to being an enemy company) but the factory continued making records under a British management (and then known as "The Hertford Record Company"), until early 1920, by which time the factory was owned by Columbia. The prices of cheap records rose during WWI, as a consequence of material costs (shellac in particular became scarce and very expensive) and the disappearance of the cheap German imports. By the end of WWI, Coliseum records were 2/6 for 10" and 3/6 for 12".

Catalogue numbers started at 100 in 1912 and reached 1156 by early 1920. At this point the company was matched up with Scala and started using the same numbering, starting at 1200. This coincided with the label's ownership moving from Lindstrom to Crystalate. Masters were now mainly from Invicta/Guardsman in the U.K. and Gennett in the U.S., the pressings done by Crystalate in Kent. Just to confuse matters, there had already been a short-lived series of George Formby issues in 1914, using Jumbo masters, which ran from 1201 to 1218.

In 1922, the relatively new Universal Music Company in Hayes (forerunner to "Vocalion") took over production. Masters now came from Vocalion, both UK and US, plus the occasional ones from Emerson. This continued until 1927 and catalogue number 2059, at which point Vocalion dropped all their production of client labels. Latterly, US masters had been sourced from Gennett.

The catalogue numbers referred to are for 10" records, but 12" records were produced as well, during much of the same time period, and the label designs matched those of the 10" issues.
The first series of 12" started at 1 and ran to 99 (1912 - 1914). Then they started again at 5000, running for about 60 issues (1914 - 1916). In the 1920s, there were two concurrent series, the 4000 celebrity and 4500 standard, both running for about 60 issues, though information on the 12" records is, as usual, scarce because, as discographer Arthur Badrock always said to me (and I paraphrase) "being jazz and dance band collectors, we never used to bother with 12" records".

Coliseum control (or stock) master numbers were introduced with the new 1200 series in 1920. These had a '0' prefix and started at 01, running into the 01000s by 1922. With the change of manufacturer to Universal, these became prefixed with CH- and dropping the leading zero. "CH" undoubdedly stands for Cooper & Howells, the two companies who owned the label. As a point of note, any record which shows the CH- number in the wax in handwritten form is an original recording, made specificaly for Scala and Coliseum, but a CH- number in typeface is a control number covering an existing Vocalion-owned recording, either British or American. From mid-1923, the CH- prefixes were dropped and the stock (control) numbers used matched those used for other Vocalion client labels such as Guardsman, with a G- prefix. The, in 1926, control numbers were dropped altogether and the Coliseum records sown only the tru master number on the labels and in the wax.

In 1927, Cooper Bros was wound up and new issues of Coliseum records ceased immediately; all stocks being auctioned off. From January 1928, The Regent Fittings Company of London advertised that it had 10,000 Coliseum discs for sale at 12/- per dozen (1/- each), so they had obviously bought the bankrupt stock.

  Early label designs

Special colour for Billy Williams

Coliseum Grand Opera
(courtesy of Dr Anton Bieber)

War-time issue

Crystalate pressings
c. 1920-21 

  
10" ealy 1920s

12" early 1920s
(courtesy of Graham Gough)

10" mid-1920s

  1920s Vocalion pressings