The first superstar DJ

Lyndon Pike profiles William Grimshaw

In 1909, an event took place in Manchester’s Heaton Park heralding the first open air festival put on by what we would now consider a superstar DJ. William Grimshaw was a local Manchester store owner who ran a gramophone shop, which also sold bicycles, located on Bury New Road in Prestwich. After attending a performance by the mighty Enrico Caruso at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, Grimshaw decided it was his calling to share the experience with those who could not be there in person.

He took his massive gramophone with a giant horn to Heaton Park and played the Caruso in the open air. In the words of William Grimshaw’s great granddaughter, Susan Cahal, “The concerts gave the public the experience of listening to a variety of classical music in a relaxed and informal setting which demonstrated that the music was available for everyone to enjoy and not just those who could afford to pay to listen. For many people it would have been the first opportunity to appreciate being able to listen to the music.”

Susan Cahal went on to explain “To transport the gramophone to the park on a Sunday afternoon he hired a horse drawn milk float from the Co-op, but he had to wait until the milk round had been completed on a Sunday morning before he could use the float. He told Manchester Corporation in 1907 that an extra-large horn would enable crowds of people who could not afford a machine of their own to hear in the open air a wide range of music which was becoming available on records.” She adds: “The Parks Committee paid him the equivalent of £1.15 in today’s terms for each concert. They were delighted to discover that the concerts were attracting listeners in exceptionally large numbers.” “In the concert season of 1909 he held 37 concerts,” she says. “His greatest success was on Sunday 19th September of that year. The concert on that date drew crowds of 40,000 and included in the crowd was Enrico Caruso who had travelled from Manchester, where he was staying at the Midland Hotel, to hear the concert. He was so pleased with the concert that he wrote to William saying he had been in the audience and sent him a signed caricature of himself.”

The papers at the time wrote that it was the ‘largest concert in the world’, with the Prestwich and Heaton Park Guardian reporting that the audience “remained as if spellbound from the moment of arrival to the close of the programme, which, it is hardly necessary to say, was intensely enjoyed.”

Once Grimshaw, aka the ‘Gramophone King’, cleared the idea of playing his music with the council, he set about finding the best way to allow the sound to travel from the bandstand.

“Grimshaw managed to get a modifier horn so that people could hear the music further away, and it worked well,” said Dr Carole O’Reilly, senior lecturer in media and cultural studies on the University of Salford. “Figures estimate that around 40,000 people came to listen to it. The trains were in chaos because so many people went to use public transport at the same time.”

In 2018 The BBC’s Great British Railway Journeys, hosted by Michael Portillo visited the park and met with Dr Carole O’Reilly to discuss the cultural phenomenon that William Grimshaw created. You can view that chat here via SBS On-Demand.