On Guy Fawkes’ Day, 1907, four partners decided to turn their enterprise, which had been trading for a few months, into a limited company and Stainer & Bell Ltd was formed the following month, publishing from a room in Berners Street off Oxford Street in London’s West End.

Initially the shares were divided between Sydney Bransgrove, a man of independent means from Walton-on-Thames, Albert Lucas Fransella, a teacher of music from East Sheen to the south-west of London, Richard Henry Walthew, a teacher and composer from Highbury in North London, George Francis Geaussant, a professor of music living in West Kensington, and his wife Isabel Gertrude, and George Riley, a businessman also from Walton-on-Thames.

There was neither a Mr Stainer nor a Mr Bell. Tradition has it that the partners chose the firm’s name because it had a creditworthy ring to it, and a grandson of George Riley reports that this was just the sort of proposal his grandfather would have put forward.

Riley became the company’s first Chairman. He apparently had no interest in music, but his wife was passionate about it and encouraged both his initial and continuing involvement. Riley had made his money in the laundry business and later was involved in the Belle paddle steamers which served Britain’s resorts and in numerous property interests. Geaussant had been the partners’ manager and he was appointed Managing Director for life on a profit-sharing basis. Five days before the fledgling’s first birthday, he was sacked following an audit of the company’s books. Fransella resigned from the Board within six months of the company’s formation.

Harry Plunket Greene, the Irish bass singer, replaced Fransella and, with Walthew, formed the music selection committee which established the initial range of the Stainer & Bell catalogue. The new enterprise received great support in musical circles from Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who placed most of his own work with the company thereafter.

The chosen method of publishing was to issue works in series which were to include well over five hundred titles by the end of 1911, with a particular emphasis on choral music, both sacred and secular, music for the organ and solo songs. Besides Stanford himself, the composers represented included Percy Buck, Harold Darke, Thomas Dunhill, James Friskin, Alan Gray, Reginald Goss Custard, Gustav Holst, James Lyon, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Wood and Haydn Wood. The company had also entered into a co-publishing agreement with the house of Macmillan to issue a series of educational primers, the first of which was Stanford’s Composition.

This activity led, not surprisingly, to continuous cash flow problems. Sir Charles encouraged investment in the firm and contributions were made by Mr Robert McEwen and Sir Gerald Chadwyck-Healey. Cash shortage also prompted the firm to use a debt-collecting agency to chase overdue accounts and this led to a bitter complaint in 1911 from the London Choral Society.

From the beginning, Stainer & Bell was willing to offer a royalty basis to those composers not wishing to sell their compositions outright, and although it did from time to time publish items at the expense of an author when the publishing budget was overspent, it ruled that such works must be no less worthy of publication than those it funded itself. It also made a stand against fees for song-plugging, with the minutes constantly resisting such requests. Madame Clara Butt was especially persistent in seeking these handouts.