Laying the foundations
The Walton music firm had been founded in the early 1920s by Martin Walton, a Dubliner born in 1901. A Feis Ceoil prizewinner on the violin, he became involved as a teenager in the movement for independence, and at fifteen took part in the Easter Rising of 1916. He was interned in Ballykinlar Camp in Co. Down, and formed and taught the camp orchestra there. During his imprisonment he was involved in discussions about setting up an Irish School of Music under an Irish Government with such fellow-internees as the fiddle player Frank O'Higgins, the historian Dr Richard Hayes, and Peadar Kearney, co-author of the National Anthem.
On his release Walton worked as secretary to Senator Martin Fitzgerald, but he never lost sight of his musical ambitions. He also worked as a violinist and musical arranger for cinemas, and with a combination of musical knowledge and business acumen began laying the foundations of what would become, and still remains, a successful and extensive range of commercial music activities. In 1924 he established the Dublin College of Music in North Frederick Street, and began a retail music business there.
He imported violins directly from inflation-racked Germany, and began to publish every year the sheet music of two or three songs (usually in English, occasionally in Irish; arranged for piano)
by such historic writers as John Keegan Casey or Edward Walsh, and such contemporary writers as the circus artist T.P. Keenan and the singer Joseph Crofts, who had earlier had a music shop on North Frederick Street. The Walton firm was successful from the beginning. As business grew during the 1920s and 1930s, it also began to manufacture musical instruments and republished classic collections of Irish instrumental music, such as those of R.M. Leavy, Francis O'Neill and Edward Bunting. But the publications for which Walton's was best known were its songsters, threepenny or sixpenny booklets with titles such as 'Sing an Irish Song' and 'Fireside Songs', which found their way to every corner of Ireland. The North Frederick Street shop became a mecca for visiting emigrants who would buy all the new music publications and carry them to areas of Irish settlement throughout the world, and especially to Britain and the United States. From the late 1940s the little songsters were amalgamated into larger anthologies such as Walton's Treasury of Irish Songs and Ballads. In 1952 Martin Walton branched out into the world of broadcasting and record manufacture. He was allocated a sponsored programme by Radio Eireann, and began recording singers on his new Glenside label to fill the 15-minute Saturday afternoon time-slot. The radio programme soon became a fixed part of the round of the week in pre-television Ireland, embedded in the national conscious.
