SENTINEL

 

A Cornish independent company.  Sentinel was owned and run by Job Morris.  It had a studio in the old school house in the village of Paul, and it specialised in recording local artists - Choirs, Brass or Silver Bands, and Folk singers such as Brenda Wootton.  It also issued a couple of LPs featuring a mixture of sound effects, songs and speech, which proved popular with Cornish expatriates.  Sentinel operated from at least 1970 to at least 1985, and possibly longer.  It managed around fifty albums, which were numbered in two different series, SENS-1000 and SENLPP-500, the latter being of Scottish material, and it also issued cassette tapes.  It output of EPs and singles was less prolific; those that googling has revealed are listed below.  Seven-inch issues used two different prefixes, SENM and SEMS; the numbering which followed the prefix also varied.  Sentinel also made custom recordings; these were numbered in the SENP-000s, and had a somewhat different label layout - the EP by Cedar shown above (3) is an example.  As can be seen, the colour schemes of the labels varied: in addition to the two shown mid-blue-on-white and black-on-orange examples can be found.  A company called Brio Music took over Sentinel after the death of Mr. Morris; many of its albums have been reissued on CD and are still (2008) available from the Brio Music website.  An enthusiast's website dedicated to the label can be found at Harvey W's Blogspot .

Copyright 2008 Robert Lyons.