Yorkshire Piano Makers (2): Waddington and Sons

Here's Stonegate - one of York's most picturesque ancient streets and a popular destination for visitors; but I wonder how many of the people walking past these picturesque shops realize that they were once the site of one of the largest piano factories outside London?

Below is a picture of Stonegate, from nearly the same place, some time around 1890. Across the street is the sign for "Boddy's Star Inn", now known as the "Olde Starre Inne" (there is still a sign in just the same place), but above and to the left of it, there is a sign saying "Waddington". In the 1901 edition of Kelly's directory for York, we find that Nos. 43, 44 and 45 Stonegate were occupied by "Waddington and Son, Pianoforte Manufacturer."

There was a varied list of other activities going on in Stonegate at the time including a cycle maker's, a wire worker, a dancing academy, an electrical engineer, a taxidermist, an antique dealer (then as now!), a fancy repository (roughly a high-class gift shop), a baker, a tailor, a dressmaker, a coal merchant, a watchmaker, a solicitor.... it seems you could get just about anything you might have wanted here at the time. However, such was the popularity of the piano in the period, apart from Waddington's there were two other shops in the street selling them as well - a Mr H Fordham and a Mrs E Bell, both on the opposite side. Both are described as "piano warehouses" so presumably they weren't actually making instruments, though they might well have been doing repairing and tuning work. York was certainly "piano city" at the time because Noyes and Son, piano dealers, could be found in Tower Street, and in Coney Street there was Gray and Sons piano warehouse, as well as a "pianoforte saloon" run by A Ramsden Ltd - though whether of the Wild West variety I cannot tell! (Ramsden crops up a little later in our story, as well).

York in fact has a history of strong connections with keyboard instrument manufacture dating back to the eighteenth century - Thomas Haxby of York (1729-1796) based at 28 Blake Street, produced organs, spinets, and latterly square pianos, which are considered some of the best made during the period. He even merits his own entry in Wikipedia.

It took a bit more work to unearth details about the business of Waddington and Sons, but "The History of Stonegate", by John Ward Knowles, from the York City Archives, offers some interesting insights. An earlier nineteenth-century piano maker in York was a Mr Marsh of Coney Street, who had been a former employee of the famous firm of Broadwood and Sons, but later took to becoming a dealer. Knowles says that "in 1838, William Alfred Waddington came to York and commenced in a small way to manufacture pianos, occupying some workshops behind the Star Inn." From this it can be gathered that he wasn't originally from York - in fact it appears from fragments of information on the internet that he was a native of Everton (Liverpool). Knowles tells us that he died in 1896 at the age of 79, which would put his year of birth as 1816 or 1817.

He was married to Mary Ann Waddington (nee Hunt) who was born in York - but intriguingly she again has a connection to the piano industry. According to Knowles, her (older) brother, Richard Hunt, was working as a hairdresser at No.2 Stonegate in 1840, but by 1843 he had adopted music as a profession and had moved just around the corner to 23 Blake Street, "where he had opened out a musical instrument department and commenced the manufacture of pianos." Whether it was Waddington who inspired Hunt to start off in the piano trade or vice versa is unclear. Apparently in 1851, Hunt produced a "new shaped instrument which appeared externally to resemble a centre table  for a drawing room with  pedestal feet and which he had exhibited at the Great Exhibition of that year." However, by the 1860s he had moved to Scarborough as a hotel owner and was the founder in 1873 of the Scarborough South Cliff Tramway Company, which built the first ever funicular railway in Britain (it still operates today). Possibly he may have handed his residual piano business over to his brother-in-law.

Some more information appears in "A musical place of the first quality - a history of institutional music-making in York, 1550 - 1989", by David Griffiths. He notes that Waddington's took out an advertisement in the York Herald in 1862 thanking patrons for their business over the last fourteen years (implying establishment in 1848) but in the 1920s the firm claimed to have been established in 1838. Whatever the truth of the matter, the firm was reported as employing 135 to 150 people by the 1860s and by 1876 said in an advertisement that it had sold 10,000 instruments. Clearly if these statements are anything like correct then the firm must have been significant within the piano industry - for comparison, the famous London firm of Broadwood and Sons was employing perhaps 500 people at its peak during the late Victorian period. Thus, the claim to have been the "largest piano manufactory outside of London" in 1871 may not have been an enormous exaggeration. Despite this, the firm seems to have attracted very little attention from piano historians - it does not even merit a mention in the list in Alfred Dolge's "Pianos and their Makers" from 1910.

William Alfred Waddington, the firm's founder, seems to have been responsible for at least two patents: No.972 from 1st May, 1854, described as "Improvements in the construction of sounding-boards for pianofortes and other like stringed instruments", and No.3187 of 28th November 1862 "for an invention for Improvements in machinery for cutting wood." However, he also seems to have seen his fair share of legal actions of one kind or another; for example on 19th May 1862 he was granted a "deed of arrangement and composition" - which means an arrangement by a debtor to pay creditors a percentage of the money owed to them (7s 6d in the pound, in this particular case). The main creditor seems to have been the York Union Banking Company respresented by George Dodsworth - this company was established in 1833 (the "Railway King", George Hudson, was one of the original directors) and was eventually absorbed by Barclays in 1902.

Another intriguing snippet of information from the internet concerns a legal dispute in 1879 between William Alfred Waddington and Archibald Ramsden the same who had a "piano saloon" in Coney Street. Unfortunately the details of this action are not available online (only by ordering from the National Archives). However, the said Archibald Ramsden was a performer and impresario, born in 1835, who returned to his native city of Leeds in 1864 to open a shop selling pianos, harmoniums and sheet music (later there was also a shop in London). In fact, there is even a picture of his main showroom in Park Row, Leeds in an advert from the 1870s. Unfortunately this building (a stone's throw from City Square) is now demolished.

Some pianos were manufactured with the name "Archibald Ramsden", but as far as I can determine there is no record of Ramsden's having their own factory. This would not have been unusual at the time - in fact it was commonplace for music shops to have pianos made for sale under their own name by other manufacturers, rather like an "own brand" product. These were known as "stencil" pianos, a system that remained commonplace probably at least until the 1930s. It seems possible that Waddington's were supplying Ramsden with pianos, possibly under the Waddington name or possibly Ramsden's. Whatever the cause of the argument in 1879, it seems at least a distinct possibility that it was piano-related.

I decided to pop into York city centre on a Saturday afternoon to investigate the site of the Stonegate factory. The buildings in Stonegate were subsequently renumbered - I'm not sure exactly when this happened - but 43 and 44 Stonegate are now number 34, whilst 45 Stonegate is now number 32. These buildings are now occupied by the the "White Stuff" clothes shop and by Cath Kidston. The staff in both shops were kind enough to allow me to take photos inside the buildings.

Here's a picture of the front of the two buildings as seen from Stonegate. According to the register of historic buildings in York Library, the property on the right (No.34) was built around 1730; it was originally two houses (hence it originally had two numbers). No.32 on the left was built somewhat later, in the early part of the 19th Century. These two buildings housed the warehouse and shop of Waddington's, and upstairs were music rooms (and presumably also offices).

This is a picture of the tiled staircase in No.32, leading up to the first floor - whether it was the same back when the building was a piano warehouse I don't know, but the tiles certainly look fairly old.

Here's a picture of the first-floor front room at No.34 - possibly this was once used for musical soirees?

This is a picture taken from the rear window of No.32, now Cath Kidston's. The building at the very top right of the photo is the rear extension to the Masonic Hall in Duncombe Place, built in the 1930s and which backs on to the Olde Starre Inne (therefore very likely the site of the original workshop used by Waddington's). There were more buildings over what is now the grassed area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so this area was very likely part of the factory at that time.

J. W. Knowles gives us some further information on the history of the firm. He says: "In 1920 the removal of the manufacturing part of the business was considered to be necessary, the premises in Stonegate being old and much cut up into small sections. Therefore a new and up to date factory was planned and commenced at Scarborough and in 1922 the whole of the Stonegate premises were cleared and the two warehouses fronting Stonegate converted into shops, which are to be made into show rooms for the sale of their pianos, and on August 17th two large and artistic posters were affixed to the plate glass windows which had been fixed the previous week."

Until recently, a 36-minute film from the Yorkshire film archive showing operations at the Waddington factory in Scarborough in 1928 was available online (you may still be able to access a copy by contacting them). This factory became part of, or at least was very near, the site of Plaxton's Coachworks in Seamer Road. Part of the building survived in the form of the Mere Social Club (originally the Waddington Works Club); however, this too was demolished in 2012. The Coachworks itself happily survives as a local business, though now it has moved to more modern premises just down the road in Seamer.

Unfortunately, if the directors of Waddington's back in 1920 had had a crystal ball, they might have thought twice about their investment in new manufacturing premises, because the firm succumbed to the onslaught of the wireless, the gramophone and the Great Depression as did most other British piano manufacturers in the early 1930s, and just like Pohlmann's, the subject of my last post. In fact, information on their time in Scarborough is relatively thin, perhaps because they were only based there for a little over 10 years.

The Herne Hill Piano

There is an interesting addendum to this story. Later on, the Waddington factory made pianos under the name "Bremar", and one of these later became something of a celebrity in its own right. Here's a film about it:

Judging by appearance, the piano probably dates from around the 1920s, so it could have been made in either York or Scarborough. Apparently the original Herne Hill piano was retired in late 2016 - however the crowdfunding project for a replacement was so successful that some money has also been raised to help pay for piano lessons for children whose parents can't afford piano lessons.