Striking a Chord

15092779

Striking A Chord

1 | STRIKING A CHORD

INSTG066

Permissions

Images associated with Pull and Field reproduced by kind permission of the Field family estate Chocolate Heart Free font © dafont.com Smoke vector © freepiks.com Tinsley Towers © Tim Herrick via Flickr Creative Commons

Word count: 2736

15092779 | INSTG066

In the beginning...

2 | STRIKING A CHORD

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Camden Town established itself as a major player in world piano manufacture, managing to steal the spotlight from other musical enclaves such as Vienna and Dresden.

Between 1870 and 1914, Camden was the epicentre of the global piano making trade and it was said that every street in north London contained a piano works – indeed there were over one hundred in total. The tinkling of ivories could be heard from Chalk Farm down to Mornington Crescent, and trade was drawn away from other areas of London (in particular Fitzrovia) due to the ease of transporting timber by the canals, railways and roads that criss-crossed through NW1. The relocation of firms such as Collard & Collard, Brinsmead, and Challen (who made the world’s largest grand pianos, at twelve feet long) to Camden, also helped to lead the charge to making Camden the capital of cacophony.

Among these dark satanic mills

As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the green pastures that nestled around the City of London gave way to the inner city Boroughs that we see today. In the 1840s, Agar Town was an area of cheap houses cobbled together to house the workers and apprentices of the many carpentry and furniture-making workshops dominating Kentish Town and Camden.

Yet as those craft industries died out and the new railroads leading in and around Kings Cross, St Pancras and Euston began to bring in piano keys, strings and other musical necessities to Camden town, Agar Town was wiped out as the newly-rich railway companies purchased massive swathes of land earmarked for the piano industry. This resulted in many of the labourers who lived there crowding into new abodes in Kentish Town, turning what was a genteel suburb into a far less reputable neighbourhood, overflowing with craftsmen and labourers looking for work.

Other factories that thrived: • False teeth (Angler’s Lane) • Wallpaper (Highgate Road) • Artists’ Materials (Malden Crescent and Spring Place) • Coal Depot (Holmes Road)

15092779 | INSTG066

A family-run pianoforte business One of the first to flourish in this new music scene was Pull and Field.

A reputable piano maker based in Camden for several generations, they eventually fell victim to the changing tastes, demographics and competition that was thrown at the piano industry particularly in the decades after WWI.

3 | STRIKING A CHORD

Pull and Field

The Field family had been in Camden and Kentish town since at least 1851. Before that they were mainly in West Ham and Plaistow, where the family had a house painting business, but they relocated to Agar Town, to take advantage of the cheap houses, which were thrown up by speculators in the 1840s. Here Frederick Joseph Field served an apprenticeship as a carpenter, a common profession of the time, and the business he worked for jostled for position amongst the dozens of furniture making workshops off Kentish Town Road, Leighton Road and Fortess Road.

By the late 1870s, Frederick Field had established a modestly successful carpentry and joinery business in Leighton Road, where he employed three skilled men, an apprentice and two labourers. He lived over the shop with his eight children and ageing mother in law, and was in demand as a furniture maker and shop fitter. Business, like all small traders during the period, had its ups and downs. Raw materials soared and sunk in price and availability, customers came and went as fashions changed, and life could be very hard indeed. In fact, his mother-in-law had a couple of spells in the workhouse near St Pancras, Joseph Field shown as a pianoforte maker in the 1911 Family Census 15092779 | INSTG066

4 | STRIKING A CHORD

and the family were not above pawning their effects as money became ever tighter.

As mentioned previously, pubs were often a hot bed for head hunting new talent, and it was a chance encounter in the tap room of the Belmont, Camden Town in the late 1870s that saw Joseph, the elder son, taking in work for William Pull, a man of his own age who had inherited his pianoforte making business from his wife’s father earlier that year. Pull was an entrepreneur, but lacked the craft skills to develop his company. Joseph joined William to set up a new business, Pull and Field, in the early 1880s.

To be in the mix, they rented a workshop in the heart of Camden Town and in the building (which still stands – now the Family Alcohol Service of the NSPCC – an irony not lost on the Field family, whose folk memory recalls Joseph as a harddrinking man in his early days) – there was one other piano making business. This was the much larger firm of Montplisser, a French polisher, a brass finisher and metal turner, an upholsterer and a sign writer. A small sales office was shared between all tenants. All along Greenland Place were workshops making pianos, parts for pianos’ finishing and tuning pianos, shipping pianos and selling pianos. The workshops are still there, now bars, flats and derelict.

It’s doubtful that many current residents know of its history, or the endeavour that went on there for fifty years.

In the early 1900s, Pull and Field had carved out a reputation as a good maker of relatively inexpensive instruments. Piano retailers across the country stocked Pull and Field; they had agents in Australia and Rhodesia. It was a company on the up, in an area that by then dominated the trade. They moved into larger premises just off Fortress Road, and at their peak in 1900, they employed twenty men directly in making pianos.

Both William Pull and Joseph Field bought or rented grand houses in Highgate (Joseph moved from a relatively modest cottage on Vicars Road

15092779 | INSTG066

Yet in a few short years the great piano making industry was on the wane.

The number of firms fell from almost three hundred to less than half this number in the four years before the war broke out in 1914. Oversupply and rising costs fatally damaged the trade. The bigger firms – like Collard and Collard – soldiered on, but it was the end for the smaller manufacturers like Pull and Field. Joseph and William called it a day.

William retired to the Essex countryside and turned his attentions to piano regulation, whilst Joseph began to sell off his possessions and returned to being a jobbing carpenter. The grand house on Dartmouth Park Road was finally sold. Joseph gave away the piano he specially made for his family – he couldn’t bear to see it sold.

5 | STRIKING A CHORD

to a more impressive abode in Dartmouth Park). They indulged in the fashionable hobbies of the day – William in the opera, and Joseph kept a boat at Margate. Their children learned the trade. The future looked rosy.

Joseph’s sons turned their skills to the emerging coach making trade, using their talents to produce fine veneer inlays, exquisite dovetail joints and intricate carvings to adorn the bodies of coachbuilt cars and buses.

The war came, and went. The four Field boys joined up together in September 1914. They all came home, but for two the battlefield was too much and were invalided out, shell-shocked. None returned to piano making – there was by then no future in it. For them, the irony how Steinway rose from the ashes of a bombed Hamburg through the generosity of our American allies, at the very time when the other victors were beginning to break up British instruments, was not lost.

15092779 | INSTG066

Trade Exchange

6 | STRIKING A CHORD

The World’s End

Now called The World’s End pub, standing on the corner next to Underworld (a live music venue) and opposite Camden Town tube station, this is the site of the informal labour exchange that operated in and around NW1 during the Victorian period.

In the mid 1800s to early 1900s, this pub was known as Mother Red Cap - after the fortuneteller Jinney Bingham who used to live on the site and who was accused of being a witch after many of her lovers died in extroadinary circumstances - it was often crowded full of workmen looking for jobs and offering trade gossip over a pint. This unconventional labour exchange point had those from the industry using Mother Red Cap as their local watering hole (piano warehouses were a mere 200m away) and thus skilled and unskilled workmen gathered there in the hope of picking up work.

The Belmont

Located at 78-79 Chalk Farm Road, this public house was known as the Belmont from the mid 1800s until the 1980s when it closed down and was replaced with a lounge bar. Handily located next to Chapells piano factory, this was yet another drinking spot where potential piano factory workers could meet their (perhaps inebriated) boss for the first time and begin work with them the following day.

15092779 | INSTG066

Oval Road

In 1852, Collard & Collard constructed their magnificent circular factory at number 12 Oval Road. They were the oldest piano manufacturing firm in the St Pancras area, having patented a form of upright ‘square’ piano in 1811. The workshop’s distinctive circular shape gave the maximum floor space and the maximum amount of natural light for the minimum number of bricks, and the fifty-two bays and twenty-two windows also encouraged masses of natural lighting. This workshop had one job: to make entire pianos on mass and in record time.

The pianos were created via an assembly line and integral to this work model was the central lift that literally heaved grand pianos up and down the various floors, to be easily tinkered by the specialist workers in each department. The lower floors were for drying, the next for upright pianos, the third for polishing and up and up it went the floors filled with labourers finally tuning their beloved Joannas.

7 | STRIKING A CHORD

The Workshops

Once the crème de la crème of piano construction, the illustrious Collard & Collard was hit hard by the fall in public demand for pianos caused by the booming wireless, cinema and televison industries. In 1929, the firm was sold to the Chappell Piano Company of London, and by 1960, the last Collard piano had been produced. A mere thirty-odd years later, the Grade II factory became the Rotunda, housing designer labels and low-rent housing.

The highly-ornate, baroque style grand pianos, once much sought after, can now be found on eBay for next to nothing.

15092779 | INSTG066

8 | STRIKING A CHORD

Perren Street

The Imperial Piano and Organ Company set up shop here in the late Victorian period, as the hub of their international piano manufacture and export business. Pianos and organs would have been lowered onto trolleys, from the workshops above to the cobbled streets below and rolled on the custom steel tracks that cross-crossed the alleyway joining onto Ryland Road. From there the pianos could begin their journey to pride of place in sitting-rooms up and down the country, ready for Victorian and Edwardian children to practice Chopsticks, and on which Granny could be coerced (after a milk stout or two) to bash out a boozy rendition of Auld Lang Syne.

The former Brinsmeades Factory can also be seen on Perren Street. This was the largest ever piano factory in London.

Bayham Place

Another, enclave of the piano industry was on Bayham Place, close to the canal and where music workshops were nestled alongside Gilbey’s the wine and gin merchants, Oetzmann’s cabinet factory and Goodall’s who were the world’s largest manufacturer of playing cards.

Mornington & Weston was one of the piano manufacturers who built their workshop here and who were in business for over 110 years, until 1975.

In the nearby Bayham Street, is the shop exterior of the last of the remaining North London piano makers - Heckscher & Co. This is truly the last vestige of the NW1 piano industry, only having played its final note a couple of years ago. It now runs as an online-only piano piece supply company.

15092779 | INSTG066

Greenland Place is a street just at the back of Camden High Street, only noticed by those that are looking for it. Nowadays mostly a back street for the collection of bins from the trendy bars and pubs that have sprung up in the wake of the gentrification of the warehouses that used to dominate this space.

It is here, at number 8, that the nowforgotten pianoforte makers Pull and Field had their workshop. The piano manufacturing origins of these industrial buildings can be seen from the cranes and doorways which are tall enough and strong enough to support even a grand piano moving from the upper echelons of the workshop down to found level to be transported to the river and then to Europe and beyond.

9 | STRIKING A CHORD

Greenland Place

It is a shame that although Camden is internationally recognised for its incredible music scene, none of the bars and gig venues that line this street make any reference to the area’s place in the history of the piano.

Not even a pun or reference to the band The Black Keys can be found on this street.

Tailored to fit

These larger firms, were constructing pianos on a massive scale and as such the buildings in the area grew to reflect the trade, red brick workshops with many windows (to allow as much natural light in as possible) and exceedingly tall doorways with cranes affixed above them.

The infrastructure of Camden has been remarkably changed by this single industry.

15092779 | INSTG066

The rise and fall 10 | STRIKING A CHORD

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, the piano was the preserve of the upper and middle classes but by the end of the 1800s, pianos had infiltrated the hearths and hearts of the working classes. Designed to be sold on installment plans, pianos were now found in railway worker’s living rooms as well as aristocratic drawing rooms.

However, by 1910, German imports had largely monopolised the piano industry, and had driven many of the local London firms out of business.

This combined with the First World War and the proliferation of radios and gramaphones in the majority of people’s houses, meant that people were reluctant to part with cash to make the music themselves. Yet the industry was tough and, indeed, continued to grow until 1920 where the 100-odd factories employed over 6000 people and churned out affordable pianos to the masses. However this was to be the last peak in this industry, the Great Depression, World War II as well as the arrival of cheap mass-market piano exports from China effectively killed off the piano industry as supply started to far exceed demand.

The twenty-first century

Today, Camden is still internationally known for its thriving music scene, yet for the manufacture of bands and singers, not instruments. Indeed few know this hidden side of NW1, pop-up bars, real ale pubs and swanky warehouse apartments have hidden from view the melancholic end of the piano industry here.

15092779 | INSTG066

In 2016, there isn’t much call for British made pianos, in all honesty there isn’t much call for pianos full stop. With the exceptions of children learning to play on electric keyboards or the lucky few learning on German designed baby grands, the piano has lost much of its cultural capital in modern day England, and is seen more as a decorative object reminiscent of past times.

This is what makes Heckscher & Co’s longevity all the more remarkable. The store at number 75 Bayham Street, Camden Town, was opened in 1883

by Siegmund Heckscher who had arrived in London from Hamburg and the company has managed to retain its physical presence in Camden until 2014.

11 | STRIKING A CHORD

Epitaph: The Final Note

Despite attempts from jazz pianist Jamie Cullum and the BBC - who featured the company on their documentary on piano makers that same year, due to the lack of demand for piano restoration, the business has had to move online and has become a mail-order operation for piano parts running from Buckinghamshire rather than its north London home.

Now that the piano industry in London is out of tune with what consumers look for in an instrument, companies like Heckscher have been driven out from the city and the emphasis is now on supplying parts, materials and tools for piano restoration, and piano stools to the piano retailers, rather than the creation of the piano itself. Cheap imports from China, the immense improvement (aesthetically and technologically) of electronic pianos as well as the fundamental lack of space in most twenty-first century houses - front rooms can no longer accommodate a grand piano - has basically dealt the final blow on an industry that was already on its last legs.

FIN. 15092779 | INSTG066