Piano 26

A second piano from the church of St. Mary's, Pixham. According to the chap who is holding up the pad that protects the polish from the music holder, and whose arm can be seen in possibly double reflection in the snap left, the pair had, at least once, been used for a two piano concert. And this in a small church in a very small village.

However, according to reference 1: '... Gough & Davy used the name “Keska”, but what's in a name?  Not much when it comes to the average piano.  Some names were used for such a long period that they give no clue to the nature of the individual piano, and very few of these labels can pin down the age of the piano.  A fairly typical scenario is that a wholesaler (such as Bansall) would supply a piano to a retailer (such as Barnes) who would then sell it with one of several fictitious names, such as Barnes, or Adlon, D'Allinson, Gebruder Sohne, Harcourt, Karl Lange, Kirkwood, Osbert, Paul Gerard, Romberg, Stahl, etc..  Barnes routinely used all these names.  Some “musical instrument sellers” had no expertise or experience with pianos, they simply sold them, in the same way that any junk dealer might do now.  Years later, the piano is stripped and repolished, so the original name transfer is lost, and replaced by one that is more-or-less picked out of a hat, and has no relevance to the original manufacturer, so your best hope is that you may find some clues hidden inside the piano, to trace it back to the manufacturer...'. And as it happens, a bit to the right we have the respectable sounding name of W.H. Barnes of Oxford Street.

But not even Wikipedia could help me with this last.

And asking Google for Gebrüder Söhne (spot the difference) gets me to reference 2, which appears to be a German version of B&Q or somewhere like that. And now getting a bit pushy, I find that the German appears to be, translated literally anyway, 'brothers sons'. So perhaps the man knocking up the labels for Barnes had a sense of humour. Perhaps my informant did not speak German.

Reference 1: http://pianohistory.info/names.html.

Reference 2: https://www.tischlerei-schaaf.de/.

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