PREFACE
It was while tuning an elderly upright piano that the possibility of electing piano tuners as a theme for academic study suggested itself to me: I noticed, scrawled on the hammer rest rail of the piano action, the initials and tuning dates of about twenty piano tuners who had worked on this piano over its long life. There was nothing unusual in finding such a date – they are commonly found when tuning and over the course of fifteen years as a professional tuner I had seen plenty of them. What had engaged my attention was the fact that I was tuning this piano one hundred years to the very day in 1892 that ‘R.W.F.’ had carried out that same task. This set me thinking about R.W.F. Who had he been? Where had he lived? How had he obtained that job? How had he travelled around? Why had he become a tuner? Had he even been a ‘he’?
My curiosity piqued, I went home to look up information on piano tuners’ lives in the 1890s … and found nothing. I transferred my search to local libraries and the Internet, still to no avail. Whilst there was plenty of information on the design, construction, tuning, sale and playing of pianos, there was little on the people behind the instrument. More painstaking research revealed information on piano designers, builders, salesmen and pianists, but there was still little to be found on the tuners, and this made me determined to find out what I could about the ‘missing persons’ of piano history. E.P. Thompson, the social historian, has written of the:
orthodoxy of the empirical economic historians in which working people are seen as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series: [The historians] tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts, to the making of history … Only the successful … are remembered.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped me in my research: Professor Cyril Ehrlich; Dr Alastair Laurence; Mr John Collard; Mr Martin Heckscher of Heckscher and Co. Ltd.; Mr Steve and Mr Chris Cook of Fletcher and Newman Ltd.; Ms Elizabeth Dawson, consultant archivist to the Royal National Institute for the Blind; Mr John Morley of Morley’s of Lewisham, Mrs Esmé Haily; Mr Ian Pleeth; Mrs Valerie Addis and the Piano Tuners Association; Mr Blaise Compton; Mrs Senior; Mr Bill Kibby; Mrs Wells; Mr Paul Tucker; the Surrey Local History Centre; Mr Gifford, Ms Lucy Coad; Mr Martin Ness; Mr Mel Smith of the Music Trades Benevolent Fund, Ms E Parsons; Mr G Carter and, of course, Mr E Green.
I have concentrated on the period 1837-1913 as it covers the ‘boom’ in piano ownership and development, while the First World War’s consequent loss of life meant the closure of many hitherto successful piano firms. Also, the founding of the Piano Tuners Association in 1913 meant that a hitherto disparate and isolated group of people suddenly had some organisation and cohesion, and their years of being ‘invisible’ had come to an end.
CONTENT
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PIANO
A NEED FOR TUNERS
SOCIAL STANDING
TRAINING AND APPRENTICESHIPS
BUSINESS AND EMPLOYMENT
THE TRAINED TUNER’S WORK
DEMAND AND DO-IT-YOURSELF
THE PIANO TUNER’S JOB
TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT
PITCH
TUNING MONOPOLIES AND REGULATION
TUNER’S ASSOCIATIONS
TUNING AND THE BLIND
WOMEN TUNERS
CONCLUSION
When I first broached the subject of piano tuners with Professor Cyril Ehrlich, his reply was that ‘mostly they were not the sort of articulate, or self-important, people who have documentation … [they] were unlike all sorts of people whose legacy of words influences historians (or at least antiquarians), regardless of their importance. So the historian must somehow contrive to catch the unspoken, on the run, so to speak’.
Sighted tuners from the Victorian age have left us with a little codification in the shape of the odd treatise or pamphlet on tuning, but other than that the reliance is upon firms’ records. The majority of piano firms were concentrated in the London area, particularly after World War I, and most of their records were lost in the Blitz of World War II. Chappell’s were one of the exceptions to this, but then had a major fire in the 1960s and lost their piano factory records and a large proportion of their sheet music archive at the same time.
Events have therefore conspired to keep the world of the piano tuner a faintly mysterious one, but I hope this work has done a little towards redressing the lack of information on the subject of piano tuners, and that I have in a small way ‘caught the unspoken, on the run’.
From: Gill Green MA
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