Edward Lewis

Sir Edward Roberts Lewis (19 April 1900 – 29 January 1980) was an English businessman, best known for leading the Decca recording and technology group for five decades from 1929. He built the company up from nothing to one of the major record labels of the world.

A financier by profession, Lewis was professionally engaged by the fledgling Decca company. Having failed to persuade its directors to diversify from making record-players to making records, he raised the capital to take the company over, and ran it until his death. Among the ground-breaking achievements of Decca under Lewis were the Decca Navigator System (the leading maritime and aviation navigation system prior to GPS), the Decca "ffrr" recording technology, and the first release on record of Wagner's Ring cycle.

Biography Early years Lewis was born in Derby, the only son of four children of Sir Alfred Edward Lewis (1868–1940) and his wife, May née Roberts. Alfred Lewis was a senior official, and later head, of the National Provincial Bank. Lewis was educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge.

After leaving Cambridge, Lewis worked in the financial sector, joining the London Stock Exchange. In 1923, he married Margaret Mary ('Masie') Hutton. There were two sons of the marriage, one of whom died, while still a boy, in a drowning accident. The other son later became the senior partner in Lewis's stockbroking firm. The firm, E. R. Lewis & Co, was founded when Lewis was 28, and was still trading after his death.

World War II and post-war years Having narrowly survived the 1930s, Decca flourished during the war. Record sales went up, which Lewis attributed to the demand for entertainment at home rather than in theatres. The success of the record division of the group was mirrored by that of the technical division, which played a crucial and remunerative part in the development of radar and other navigational equipment. From this sprang Decca's revolutionary new recording technique known as "ffrr" (full frequency range recording), introduced in 1944, which put Decca far ahead of its rivals in the realism of sound on its discs.

Lewis was a shrewd picker of employees and associates. His choice of Culshaw, the pioneering engineer Arthur Haddy, and the international manager Maurice Rosengarten were crucial to Decca's success.

Later years In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Peter Martland writes of Lewis: "Like many who create, build, and retain close personal control over large enterprises, Lewis was unable to appoint a successor or relinquish control of the business. As a consequence, in 1980, days before his death, the business, then in the grip of a serious financial crisis, was sold." In his memoirs, John Culshaw recorded the missed opportunities of Lewis's later years, when his entrepreneurial flair and his instincts for the market had been overtaken by a cautious conservatism.

Lewis gave large sums of money to Rugby School and the Middlesex Hospital. He was uninterested in high living, despite his large personal fortune. He bought Bridge House Farm in Felsted as their weekend holiday home. His first wife died in 1968, and in 1973 he married Jeanie Margaret Smith. He died of cancer at his London house, in Chelsea, on 29 January 1980 at the age of 79.

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