The Annual Report for 1927 stated that ‘the reorganization of the Department of Music was a marked success, as the increase in students shows. So successful was it that Dr. Markham Lee felt that his services, secured for the initial stages of the scheme, could now be dispensed with and he left at the end of the session with the sincere appreciation of the College for his services. The Board would record its sense of the generosity of the gift of an excellent gramophone to the department by Godfrey de Solla, Esq.’- listed elsewhere as a ‘modern HMV cabinet gramophone’. De Solla came from a prominent Leicester Jewish family and ran a thriving music and gramophone record shop on London Road, that boasted having ‘Every Columbia Record in Stock’.
Other names included Godfrey de Solla, of London Road (“Every Columbia record in stock”),
“Purchase Your RECORDS From Godfrey de Solla, THE GRAMOPHONE SPECIALIST, 16, LONDON RD., (Opposite Y.M.C.A.) Leicester. Phone 4789.”