In a letter to the Musical Herald in 1912, Matthew Kingston recalled his first experiences of learning the violin at the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1882 – in particular, the teaching methods and materials used and the progress gradually made – and mused:

What Kingston was describing were group lessons on the violin – a form of pedagogy familiar today, not least through the Suzuki method, but also, in the British context, the influential Tower Hamlets Project, a group violin teaching initiative led by Sheila Nelson (and sponsored by the Inner London Education Authority) in a deprived area of the East End of London in the 1980s. A century earlier, such group instruction was an innovation and one of several paths that men, women, and children in Britain took to acquire the basic skills on the instrument, the most prevalent path being one-to-one instruction.

Not everyone had much choice about how, where, or with whom they learned, since opportunities were almost always shaped by the social and economic constraints of geography, class, and gender. Group teaching was relatively inexpensive and consequently found its first successes in large cities, in districts where lower middle- and working-class populations were concentrated. But in such cities, too, wealthy middle- and upper-class learners were accessing individual lessons with the most accomplished and expensive teachers. The regions were not as well supplied with instructors, yet over time, and certainly by the early 1900s, residents of smaller towns and villages in many rural areas of the country could find local teachers with professional qualifications and/or teaching experience. By way of example, in 1912 Bertha Treweeke of Falmouth (Cornwall) advertised as a teacher of the violin, viola, and cello, parading her ex-students’ successes at major London conservatoires and indicating that her services extended to visiting the small cathedral city of Truro (11 miles away) and the seaside resort of Newquay (26 miles away), both reachable by train.Footnote ² Further, in 1924 Travis Cole of Brinscombe (near Stroud, Gloucestershire), whose letterhead announced his specialisms as “Instructor of String Classes” and provider of “Group Method for Violin Viola and Cello,” was establishing group teaching in the nearby villages of Amberley and Hardwicke.Footnote ³

This chapter examines the varied paths that people like the students of Rickard, Treweeke, and Cole took to gain skills on stringed instruments, and some of the ways in which violin culture’s all-important infrastructure developed. It considers both the growth of the violin trade and the types of instruction that were available across the country, drawing attention to the activities and experiences of a range of individuals.

Acquiring an Instrument

Then, as now, taking up a stringed instrument and learning the basics of how to play it necessitated not only the identification of a form of instruction but also the acquisition of an instrument, and not necessarily in that order. Sometimes, especially in families of musicians or those with a strong desire to see a child pursue music, the instrument (and bow) was a gift. Max Jaffa (b. 1911), who would later become one of the most celebrated violinists in British light entertainment, remembered receiving his first violin on his sixth birthday from his father, who subsequently set about finding a teacher. Like several other men in his East European immigrant community in London, Jaffa senior, who worked in the tailoring industry, harbored musical ambitions for his child and hoped the violin would serve as a route out of the family’s poverty. A middling local instructor took the boy through the elementary steps.Footnote ⁴ In other scenarios, a family-owned instrument no longer in use might be appropriated by anyone who wanted to try playing, even shared with other family members. Or families might purchase an instrument in advance of a child starting lessons and without consulting the teacher.

It was common, and often more advisable, for the teacher to supply the pupil (whether child or adult) with an appropriate beginner’s instrument and require reimbursement. This practice constituted an important service in communities that lacked access to well-stocked music shops. In 1924, Travis Cole drove to London to obtain a batch of novice instruments, purchased them with loans obtained from local benefactors, and took them back to Gloucestershire for his students, who were permitted to pay for them through an installment plan.Footnote ⁵ Alternatively, teachers might advise their beginner students (or students’ families) on the most suitable instrument to purchase independently. Later in the learning process, as students improved or, in the case of children, outgrew smaller violins, the teacher became a crucial advisor and conduit for obtaining a better instrument. One of the most celebrated teachers of children in what is now called West Yorkshire, Arthur Kaye, acquired violins from London when students needed better instruments.Footnote ⁶ Former pupil Reginald Stead, who went on to a career in one of the BBC orchestras, recalled his first encounter with Kaye (c. 1918): “[A] batch of violins had just arrived from London, and I remember quite clearly how Kaye played on them each in turn in the next room, thus introducing me at an early stage to the practice of testing the carrying power of instruments.”Footnote ⁷

As noted in Chapter 1, it was the availability of affordable instruments from the 1870s that caused large numbers of would-be players to gravitate towards the string family; in turn, the expansion of stringed-instrument retailing across Britain was integral to violin culture’s growth. Catalyzing these developments was the removal of tariffs on imported “fancy” goods (the definition of which included musical instruments) – charges that had depressed trade, raised prices, and encouraged illegal transactions.Footnote ⁸ Significant here was the signing of the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 between Britain and France, which, in Brian Harvey’s words, “swept away” a “10 per cent ad valorem duty on stringed instruments.”Footnote ⁹ Britain then extended this trading system to all countries,Footnote ¹⁰ which heralded a new era of international free trade (in place until 1931) that saw the importation of inexpensive stringed instruments – highly suitable for novice learners – and growing competition between Britain’s retailers. The imported instruments were made in areas of Europe that had developed industrial methods of low-cost mass production, fueled by the division of labor and the use of machinery. The main centers were Mirecourt in France and Mittenwald and Markneukirchen in Germany, places that had hitherto been purely hubs of handcraftsmanship. Many of the Mirecourt instruments were made by the firm of Thibouville-Lamy, which by 1891 was manufacturing “more than 35,000 violins, tenors, violoncellos, double basses, guitars and mandolins,” and keeping the costs of its raw materials low due to economies of scale.Footnote ¹¹ German production, meanwhile, surpassed that of France; an American-owned factory in Leipzig boasted machines that were each capable of producing the fronts and backs for 150 violins daily (c. 1873).Footnote ¹²

Factory instruments were sold for relatively small sums – as little as 4s. 6d., according to a credible source of 1885Footnote ¹³ – rendering violins affordable for many working-class families insofar that the purchase price represented roughly 0.25 percent of a skilled laborer’s nominal annual earnings (in 1891, these were around £92) and 0.36 percent of those of a general laborer (around £63).Footnote ¹⁴ When set up well, such instruments were considered capable of producing tolerable sounds.Footnote ¹⁵ Bows were needed too; also factory products, they required a smaller outlay. In addition, “[v]ast numbers” of better-quality factory violins could be purchased for between £1 and £2 10s., still fairly modest amounts.Footnote ¹⁶ By comparison, in 1884 pianos “for the Million” were retailing for £10 10s.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, even when acquisitions were facilitated by hire-purchase (installment) plans or secondhand deals, a piano represented a far heftier financial investment than a low-priced violin. Brass instruments, which are traditionally associated with working-class musical culture, could not compete, either; in 1889, the cheapest of Joseph Higham’s newly manufactured brass instruments (cornets) were priced £2 12s.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1897, Stainer Manufacturing Co. advertised starter violin outfits (typically violin, bow, and case) from 6s. 6d., and cornets in cases at a discounted price of £1 3s. 9d.Footnote ¹⁹

Into the twentieth century, trade violins remained inexpensive instruments that fed violin culture, especially once group instruction started being offered extensively in adult education institutions and elementary schools. Speaking to an oral historian in the early 1970s, May Blight Pemberthy (b. 1899), the daughter of a postman-cum-shoe repairer in Pool, Cornwall, remembered the violin she had played in her school orchestra: “lots of the children had them. Believe we paid a pound each for them”Footnote ²⁰ – a cost in line with prices advertised by retailers at the time. William Haynes (in London) was one of several firms advertising school violin outfits in 1903. Each kit was named after a prestigious fee-paying school (Marlborough, Harrow, or Eton) – a blatant appeal to purchasers’ social aspirations through the time-honored trick of quality by association – and prices (postage included) started at 15s., rising to 25s. for somewhat better instruments. Haynes also offered smaller instruments (including half and three-quarter sizes), more appropriate for the arms of young children.Footnote ²¹ Even so, many youngsters were given full-size instruments, as photos of the time indicate.Footnote ²² Clearly, too, lower sums were often paid, since firms undercut one another, sometimes advertising discounted prices aggressively, and teachers were offered special terms.Footnote ²³ Two decades later, retail prices for trade violins had risen somewhat courtesy of inflation, but remained affordable.Footnote ²⁴ Hawkes & Son (London) peddled a range of “good” beginner outfits (in half, three-quarter, and full sizes) from £2 to £4 10s. – amounts commensurate with what Travis Cole’s pupils paid in 1924 for basic instruments.Footnote ²⁵

People who could afford a better instrument (advanced students, prosperous amateurs, or professional teachers and players) turned towards handcrafted models. Here, a distinction must be drawn between old instruments and those produced by living makers, which were in greater supply. Prices, which varied according to the perceived quality of the instrument among other things, are notoriously difficult to generalize, partly because of a vibrant secondhand market and discounting practices that enabled cheaper purchasing, and partly because of a lack of consensus on value within the violin trade at the time.Footnote ²⁶ Harvey reports that in the late nineteenth century a good (French) violin could be bought for between £5 and £15, and cellos for between £9 and £27.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, according to a source published c. 1893, the “ordinary” orchestral violinist could afford to pay no more than £10.Footnote ²⁸ For players on limited budgets, especially working musicians who needed a reasonable instrument but earned woefully little, financing plans emerged. Thus in 1900, Haynes & Co. announced a hire-purchase scheme for “really High-class Instruments” worth £5 or more, and touted “Easy Terms of Purchase” for expensive instruments by French makers Georges Lotte and Georges Charles Fillion (£8 8s. to £18 18s.).Footnote ²⁹

Over time, some instruments became more expensive. The violin aficionado Edward Heron-Allen, in the first revised edition of George Grove’s Dictionary of Music (vol. 5, 1910), elucidated this trend in compelling detail. Whereas in 1885 French violins and violas (which he generally considered the best options for new instruments) by the esteemed firm of Gand & Bernardel had been selling for £16 and around £18, in 1910 they cost between £20 and £24; its cellos, hitherto sold for a little over £26, now reached £32 to £40.Footnote ³⁰ However, not all price hikes were of this order. Thibouville-Lamy’s better-quality instruments had seen less drastic increases (£8 for a violin or viola in 1885, £10–£12 in 1910), and Heron-Allen acknowledged that old instruments of fair quality by French, German, and English makers could be obtained for £10 to £20 – which was certainly within reach of most professional players and teachers, as well as committed middle-class amateurs.Footnote ³¹ Also in the early twentieth century, as the cost of living rose and the job market became oversupplied, “special terms” gathered increased importance for players who sought professional-grade instruments on limited budgets.

Even in the 1870s, old Italian instruments (especially seventeenth-century ones) were considered the acme of violin technology, outstripping those of living makers or older French, German, and English craftsmen in terms of both price and desirability. But in the early 1900s, violins, violas, and cellos from the workshops of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri – the apex of this market – were especially impacted by inflation. Heron-Allen reported a range of market values in 1910 and registered shock at their having so “enormously increased” since the 1880s.Footnote ³² Price tags now reached £1,000–£2,000 or more for the best specimens, he noted, citing lower amounts for less exceptional models (£600–£1000 for “average” Strads; £50–£500 for nonexceptional Amatis; and £100–£450 for instruments by Maggini, Serafino, etc.).Footnote ³³ The prices cited for those most expensive Strads correlate to around £109,000–£217,000 in 2022 terms,Footnote ³⁴ and a fraction of what such instruments now sell for at auction. At the time, elite instruments were viable purchases for only the most affluent amateur players and collectorsFootnote ³⁵ or top-earning virtuosi.Footnote ³⁶ For musicians on smaller budgets, what Heron-Allen described as “[o]ld Italian fiddles of the commonest description” were said to be priced between £30 and £60.Footnote ³⁷

Because old instruments had acquired high cultural value for their tone and beauty, the traditional methods of Italian making were closely studied by makers, some of whom, such as George Hart and W. E. Hill, openly acknowledged their debt to the original.Footnote ³⁸ In stark contrast, several less scrupulous makers produced copies, built instruments using a mix of parts (only some of which came from old instruments), or varnished and fitted up unfinished factory instruments, passing off their work as authentic “old” instruments by placing fake labels inside them and selling them at high prices. Such activities are exemplified by much of the output of the Voller brothers, who were among the best pasticheurs and assemblers of composite instruments in late Victorian London.Footnote ³⁹ Consumer awareness was fed by the press, which buzzed with discussion, particularly about the occasional legal cases that were brought against fraudsters.Footnote ⁴⁰ Given the vitality of the secondhand market and difficulty of knowing who or what to trust, many buyers were fearful, while private sellers could be overly optimistic that theirs was a genuine fine instrument.

Since only a few British makers were able to carve out a complete living from their craft, most of them also operated as dealers and carried out repairs. Some became known for restoration work. London, the hub of the violin trade in Britain, was known for its long-established community of violin makers in Soho, which formed a “lively mix of rivalry and mutual interest,”Footnote ⁴¹ but makers and dealers were scattered across many inner districts and outer suburbs as well. Businesses were also established in many regional towns, with concentrations of traders evident in a few larger cities. A snapshot of industrial Leeds between 1880 and 1929 shows a procession of eleven violin makers/dealers advertising in Kelly’s and other trade directories, with a high point in the 1890s boom, when at least seven shops operated simultaneously.Footnote ⁴² Somewhat exceptionally, a cluster of Leeds makers and dealers – Leonard P. Balmforth, Joseph Dearlove, John W. Owen, and Albert E. Warwick – developed top-drawer reputations nationally. Others listed appear to have been less distinguished craftsmen and/or dealers in inexpensive inventory, who further serviced the lower end of the market with repair services.

Many shops carried a range of violins to suit different-sized wallets; this was true of some that specialized in superior instruments. In central London, Beare, Goodwin & Co. (later John & Arthur Beare) was one of the leading dealers for old, high-class violins, but they also sold good modern ones and for a short spell between 1895 and 1897 – presumably in response to a spike in trading amid the violin craze – ran additional premises, opposite their Wardour Street shop, for the sale of new violins, violas, cellos, bows, and accessories (also mandolins, then enjoying a burst of fashionability).Footnote ⁴³ The targeted clientele was the respectable middle-class amateur (or those who aspired to such social status), as an advertisement depicting a young child and her presumed mama looking at the crowded window display suggests (Fig. 2.1). Even more renowned in the London fine-violin market were W. E. Hill & Sons, who not only made their own sought-after violins but also built up a significant business in restoration work and buying and selling. A peek at their carefully copied sales ledgers for 1870–1930 reveals, alongside occasional sales of old Italian instruments (some to well-known professional European players), hundreds of transactions at relatively modest prices and often to well-born amateurs such as Lady Galway, who paid £5 for a violin in 1884. In addition, a considerable number of customers purchased expensive instruments: Captain [William] Evans[-]Gordon paid £525 for a Ruggieri cello in 1893; a Miss E. E. Gidley of Hoopern House, Exeter, paid £1,200 for a Strad in 1896.Footnote ⁴⁴ Beyond their value for illuminating the socioeconomic profile of high-end consumption, the Hill records provide a tangible trace of violin culture’s growth and vitality, with a noticeable uptick in sales from the early 1880s, first peaking in the 1890s, but remaining especially robust until 1914, after which a gradual slowdown begins.

Figure 2.1 Advertisement for Beare, Goodwin & Co.’s London violin shop, c. 1895–1897. Cutting in Edward Heron-Allen scrapbook, Royal College of Music Library.

Reproduced with permission of the Royal College of Music, London.

Violin shops were not alone in selling stringed instruments: student and less expensive instruments were available from general music retailers, who became important suppliers in towns where there was no specialist violin maker or dealer.Footnote ⁴⁵ In such situations, violins could constitute a significant segment of a shop’s merchandise, to judge from a full-page advertisement placed by Sydney Acott & Co. of Oxford in the 1913 program booklet of the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Competitive Musical Festival. The ad presented the store’s most important wares as pianos, music, violins, and gramophones, and touted the “best selected Stock in the Provinces.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Players also regularly sought repair or maintenance work and accessories such as chin-rests, rosin, bridges, pegs, and especially strings, which violin dealers typically carried and sold using mail order. Guivier’s specialist string business in Golden Square, London, was well positioned to service emergency needs in the entertainment district around Piccadilly, even running to harp, guitar, zither, and banjo strings.Footnote ⁴⁷ Violin strings might also be found at stationers’ and ironmongers’ shops, where, in the 1890s apparently (and to the irritation of William Honeyman, violinist and authority on violins), they were “often put into the window or a glass case to tempt buyers, as a grocer would display sugar, till all the soul is sunned out of them.”Footnote ⁴⁸ If such an observation surprises us today, it reinforces violin culture’s pervasiveness at the time.

The economics of the violin trade in wartime Britain deserve a detailed study, but it may well be that purchases of inexpensive stringed instruments (especially those imported from French, as opposed to German, factories) increased in the first year of the War, thanks to the working classes’ greater disposable income arising from climbing wages and to the then absence of wartime controls making imports more expensive.Footnote ⁴⁹ In any event, buoyant times lay ahead for cheap violin retailing, especially for someone with commercial acumen. In Dublin, c. 1922, cinema violinist and teacher Martin Walton, whose unusual violin class is discussed in the section “Group Classes” below, weighed into this arena. Having already witnessed hot demand for basic instruments that he had on hand, Walton arranged for a batch of factory violins to be imported from Karl Braun in Germany, supplier to Boosey & Hawkes. The action marked the start of a retail business run initially from Walton’s home and later as a city shop. As he retold it: “The violins were shipped off to Dublin then and I put a small ad in the paper bringing the price down to thirty-five bob [£1 15s.; Boosey sold such instruments for £2]. I was soon selling the bloody things by the hundred.”Footnote ⁵⁰

For all that high-street sales were so central to the spread and vitality of violin playing, we should not overlook the less visible, private trading of previously owned instruments. The regular presence of an “exchange and mart” column in The Strad is testament to the practice of circulation, whereby instruments were recycled to new owners once outgrown or discarded; indeed, the ability to obtain a good instrument secondhand was important in times of hardship, as is evident from the column’s growth between 1900 and 1920, reflecting times when the cost of living rose. More generally, the secondhand sector was a crucial source of supply where budgets were tight, or where an appropriate instrument could not otherwise be found. In this, the accepted principle that violins improve with playing and age made such systems of exchange socially respectable, as did the backdrop of the growing popularity of household antiques.Footnote ⁵¹ On some occasions, too, unwanted instruments were undoubtedly gifted to players.

***

The growth and spread of the violin trade, along with its associated commerce – whether sundry supplies, repair work, or published music and tutor books – comprised a key component of violin culture’s emerging infrastructure. String magazines, the first of which appeared in the mid 1880s, carried a good deal of straightforward product advertising aimed at readers in the middle and at the upper end of the market, with The Strad eventually emerging as the favored publicity channel for traders who aimed to reach a national audience (for the magazine’s increased use of ads, see Chapter 1, Table 1.3b). London businesses were well represented in The Strad’s monthly issues, but so too were regional firms, some of them claiming regular, prominent spots on particular pages in an attempt to instill an awareness of their goods in the reader’s consciousness and thus grow their customer base: for instance, Walter H. Mayson’s instruments (Manchester), J. Edwin Bonn’s bridges (Isle of Wight), and in the 1920s Bernard Harrison’s “Cinema” brand of strings (Sheffield), aimed at working musicians. In the general press, by this time, illustration had entered the advertiser’s toolbox, and techniques had been developed to attract consumers and maintain their loyalties,Footnote ⁵² though in the 1920s violin press ads for most firms connected with the violin trade made only modest use of such methods and mostly experimented with logos and differentiated typefaces. The advertising for British Music Strings, the company that made Cathedral Strings, stands out in its use of up-to-date techniques.Footnote ⁵³ Across issues of The Strad, the reader now saw full-page, eye-catching ads for the company’s various products and was presented with a changing mix of slogans, fonts, images, and marketing strategies (such as endorsements by famous soloists) that reinforced brand identity.Footnote ⁵⁴

But not everyone read specialist violin magazines, and products aimed at less affluent or regional clienteles were advertised in papers that targeted those readerships. From the 1870s, the Tonic Sol-Fa Reporter (later the Musical Herald) ran typographically straightforward ads for inexpensive instruments sold by both the Tonic Sol-Fa Agency and J. Curwen & Sons (the music publishing business run by the men who were at the heart of the working-class singing movement and the Reporter). The ads pushed violins, violas, and cellos at amateur musicians in low-income brackets.Footnote ⁵⁵ School violins (especially outfits) and associated hire-purchase mechanisms were promoted in mass-circulation general newspapers.Footnote ⁵⁶ The “Maidstone” instruments distributed by Murdoch, in association with a national program of elementary instruction (discussed below in the section “State-School Instruction”), sold particularly well. Meanwhile, regional newspaper ads reminded readers of locally available goods and discounted items. In Dundee, Sharp & Co.’s music shop advertised violins from 4s. and bows from 1s. in a local paper in September 1890, along with the “Decided Bargain” of a “VIOLINIST’S OUTFIT” (instrument, case, bow, tutor, mute, pitch pipe – important in homes without a piano – and extra strings) for 16s. 6d.Footnote ⁵⁷ Shops like these also served as venues for teachers to advertise their services. This seems to have been how Ralph Vaughan Williams, for one, came to take up the violin – what he was to consider his “musical salvation” – in the late 1870s:

Individual Lessons and Self-Teaching

For most middle-class aspiring players and others seeking effective, focused instruction for themselves or their children, the mode for learning was regular – typically weekly – one-to-one lessons that required either a visit to a local music academy or a string teacher’s private studio, and it usually involved a financial payment. A further option, at least for wealthy families who sent their children to well-regarded public (i.e., fee-paying) schools, especially girls’ schools, was extracurricular lessons with a string teacher on site, usually a visiting mistress or master. Especially after 1900, as ever more string players gained advanced performance skills and qualifications in teaching, or proclaimed experience as instructors, the availability of lessons abounded, in urban areas in particular.

Even by the 1890s, music academies in many towns and cities were offering lessons on stringed instruments as part of a wider portfolio of instruction, and their fancy names gave a veneer of institutional permanence and credibility to their advertised services. Some of these institutions – in London, the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music, for instance – were elaborate setups where high-caliber players taught and activities extended to ensemble playing, lectures, and concerts. Others, such as the Belsize Music School (in close-by Belsize Park), were more modest endeavors.Footnote ⁵⁹ Adequate-sized premises were essential, though most such schools were unable to inhabit the sort of grandiose building that the Hampstead Conservatoire boasted. To this end, commerce could be a useful ally. Initiated in 1908, the Huddersfield School of Music ran its operations at J. Wood & Sons’ music shop; violin, viola, cello, and double bass lessons with reputable local teachers were available, as was preparation for proficiency examinations and diplomas. The possibility of the school’s pupils purchasing music, instruments, and supplies before or after lessons must have made the modus operandi especially attractive to Wood’s business.Footnote ⁶⁰ In smaller towns, “professional” lessons on various instruments, including the violin, were also often among the services offered by local music shops, as at Madame Costello’s Cheap Musical Instrument and Music Stores in Ulverston (Lancashire) in the 1890s.Footnote ⁶¹

Teachers who taught privately typically fitted up a room in their homes as a studio or they used someone else’s premises to receive students – the latter being important if the teacher did not live in a respectable neighborhood. In small communities, where demand was limited and diversification often the key to making a good living, giving lessons in more than one instrument was not unusual. In Ulverston, teachers competing with Madame Costello included a Dr. Margaret Speight, who offered lessons in piano and violin, and one Miss Hasler, who had studied at Trinity College, London, and taught not just violin and piano, but organ, guitar, and singing.Footnote ⁶² From the consumer’s perspective, especially among families with little knowledge of music, sorting through who to study with could be challenging, particularly once the market became oversupplied with teachers – not all of them competent – and a confusing variety of qualifications and experience was paraded with aplomb. In such situations, word of mouth or the recommendation of a discerning individual could become the all-important arbiter, and could also drum up welcome business for teachers. In the late 1890s, the family of Beatrice Harrison, who would later become a celebrated cello soloist, lived at Chatham Barracks in Kent, where her father was commander of a battalion of the Royal Engineers. In her autobiography she described how her mother, a professionally trained singer, identified a good violin teacher (a Signor Fasoli), thus starting a “fashion in the Station for every little girl, whether gifted or not, to play the violin.”Footnote ⁶³

Harrison herself was taken weekly into nearby Rochester to receive beginner lessons on the cello.Footnote ⁶⁴ For unless the teacher visited the pupil’s home, a private lesson necessitated some travel by the student, if only on foot. Children were usually escorted by mothers or nannies. Convention had long dictated that a young woman of good social standing be accompanied outdoors by a chaperone, but by the 1880s it was becoming more acceptable for women to walk alone in, or travel by public transport to, respectable neighborhoods, whether for shopping, education, or (increasingly) employment.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this regard, a woman journeying independently to her violin or cello lesson represented a double strike for emancipation. Later on, most probably because it procured market advantage for teachers and enabled them to accommodate clients’ busy lives, peripatetic teaching gathered momentum, and by the early 1900s many teachers – like Bertha Treweeke – advertised a willingness to visit pupils’ homes to give lessons.Footnote ⁶⁶

In large cities, where demand for lessons was extensive, it was more tenable for a teacher to specialize in one instrument than it was in nonurban areas. In London, the workforce included hundreds of teachers of high repute, some of whom taught youngsters who proceeded to distinguished careers. Aged eight, Max Jaffa moved on to a former student of Joseph Joachim’s, Wilhelm Sachse, who had a studio fairly near the family’s home in the West End tailoring district; Jaffa took lessons with him for five years, later crediting Sachse with getting him truly interested in the violin.Footnote ⁶⁷ In his family’s workaday community, it was not unusual for parents to look for a reputable teacher for their child: all the friends of Jaffa’s father – also Jewish immigrants – were serious about their sons becoming good violinists.Footnote ⁶⁸ Some years earlier, at the other end of the social scale, Margery Bentwich (b. 1887), who was born into an affluent Jewish family in the St. John’s Wood area and went on to be a prominent violin soloist, began learning with the much-respected August Wilhelmj at the age of ten, making such outstanding progress in four years that Fritz Kreisler was brought in to evaluate her potential.Footnote ⁶⁹ In any event, by the 1910s The Strad was regularly carrying small ads placed by London string players seeking advanced students. Many instructors flaunted their association with Otakar Ševčík, whose pupils included the acclaimed Jan Kubelík, and whose methods for improving intonation and bow control had recently become sought after by players and teachers. Some highlighted their readiness to travel to other major cities to give lessons; in the case of Ševčík acolyte Sarah Fennings, the weekly destinations from London were Harrogate, York, Doncaster, Leeds, Bradford, and Peterborough.Footnote ⁷⁰

The fees charged for private lessons varied widely depending on location, level of the instruction, and the number of other teachers in the locality, as well as on students’ personal circumstances. For reasons of decorum, as well as pragmatism in a competitive marketplace, teachers rarely advertised their terms; instead, clients were to apply in writing for details. Inevitably, higher rates were charged by the more accomplished and renowned private teachers, who typically took on the most advanced pupils; in some situations, too, payment was waived or discounted. (Arthur Kaye, who had a reputation for running beyond his pupils’ allocated time slots, was said to have given thousands of free lessons during his career.Footnote ⁷¹) In Ulverston in 1893–1894, Margaret Speight’s terms for her lessons (presumably weekly) were 10s. a quarter, which worked out at around 8d. per lesson (of unknown duration); by comparison, advanced, thirty-minute violin lessons with Edgar Haddock – a significant name in the Yorkshire musical world – at the Leeds College of Music, which Kaye had once taken, cost £4 4s. a term and worked out at around 5s. 8d. per lesson (c. 1894).Footnote ⁷² Kaye later learned privately with the celebrated Adolf Brodsky at a guinea a lesson (c. 1902), a large sum for him at the time.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, in families of professional musicians, it was standard for elementary teaching to be given informally by a string playing relative: Alfredo Campoli, Arthur Catterall, and Marie Hall were among several high-ranking players who started thus, but many uncelebrated working musicians received similar training.Footnote ⁷⁴ In her memoir, Greta Kent (b. 1895), daughter of two freelance theater violinists, described being taught instruments in the family setting, admitting that she did not even remember learning how to read music (“it just had to come as I grew up”), and taking pride in this dynastic system of apprenticeship, noting musician grandparents, uncles, and aunts, some of whom had been string players.Footnote ⁷⁵

At a number of private day and boarding schools, lessons in violin and sometimes cello were available. Some prestigious institutions hired high-profile performers to teach, although, as David Golby points out, music had a far more prominent role in the education of girls than boys. There were exceptions. Golby’s study highlights the achievements at Uppingham School, where the appointment (1865–1908) of violinist Paul David, son of the virtuoso Ferdinand David, saw string playing develop considerably, with occasional assistance from the acclaimed Joachim (a close friend).Footnote ⁷⁶ Golby also notes violin teachers at Harrow School and Charterhouse and mentions orchestral activities at Marlborough and Radley during the same period,Footnote ⁷⁷ and there were surely others. Some younger children learned at preparatory schools, such as Rottingdean, where Vaughan Williams continued his violin studies with William Quirke, a “well-known Brighton teacher.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Quirke must have prepared him well enough to play Raff’s celebrated Cavatina at a school concert – Vaughan Williams later describing this moment as the “climax” of his time at the school.Footnote ⁷⁹ More research is needed, but it seems that most schools attended by sons from wealthy families avoided prioritizing music-making, which continued to be coded as effeminate in many well-heeled circles. Lord Berners remembered his public schooling in the late 1890s as a time when the pursuit of music was publicly scorned (“neither manly nor gentlemanly”).Footnote ⁸⁰ In 1910, the businessman, MP, and writer on music William Galloway complained about the marginalization of instrumental playing in boys’ schools, where private lessons, if held at all, took place “in the time set apart for rest and exercise.”Footnote ⁸¹ That said, by the 1920s many professional men in the London civil service, banking, and finance sectors were playing stringed instruments in amateur orchestras, which begs questions as to how and where they learned. Perhaps they took lessons outside school. Norman Bentwich, Margery’s brother, who became a barrister, learned the violin privately.Footnote ⁸²

The more serious commitment to string teaching in girls’ schools is exemplified by activities at the Mount School in York. Here, from the early 1900s a succession of high-caliber music teachers were appointed and a vibrant environment for string playing developed.Footnote ⁸³ Editha Knocker, a busy violinist who had taken lessons with Joachim, was one of four visiting music teachers in 1906. They supported a permanent music mistress, Edith M. Grubb, who also taught the piano and, from 1912, the cello.Footnote ⁸⁴ On Knocker’s departure (1917), George Ellenberger, another Joachim student,Footnote ⁸⁵ took over for a term and a half, but died in post and was followed by Edith Robinson, a Brodsky pupil with a strong performance career who was on the professoriate at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Robinson had charge of the violin teaching and the band, which performed when required and, like all school ensembles (including a string quartet that accompanied hymn-singing), was a foundational means to develop pupils’ broader musicianship. In addition, she established public subscription chamber concerts in the school gymnasium with performances by her own, all-women professional string quartet and guest appearances by the acclaimed pianist Fanny Davies.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bringing further educational and aspirational benefits to the girls who attended them, such performances must have also drawn the community’s attention to the seriousness of the school’s musical mission. The headmistress continued to make strong appointments: in the early 1920s, locally known cellist John Groves filled the gap left after Grubb’s departure; Hilda Lindsay (second violin in Robinson’s ensemble) subsequently replaced Robinson as the regular violin teacher, even while the quartet’s concerts continued.

Such privileged environments for learning contrast sharply with the circumstances in which working-class children took up stringed instruments. In poor families, self-teaching was common, as was guidance from anyone on hand with basic skills and knowledge in music or string playing.Footnote ⁸⁷ Oral history interviews conducted in the late twentieth century reveal the texture of many such experiences and the supportive environments surrounding them. Robert Jaggard, a thatcher (b. 1882) from Essex, whose father had played the clarinet and grandfather the bassoon, recounted how he and his brothers had learned instruments (cornet, flute, violins) from friends, or by helping each other. There had been no music teacher, but all four boys learned to read musical notation.Footnote ⁸⁸ Frances Harker (b. c. 1898), also from a music-loving family (in the Westmorland village of Kirkby Lonsdale), had learned the violin and won a first prize at school for her playing; she told how a friend’s encouragement and offer of a violin had led her disabled, bedridden brother Isaac to take up the instrument, too, albeit without learning to read music:

Although subjective judgments about skillfulness were self-evidently relative, levels of proficiency clearly varied. Laura Hughes (b. 1898), daughter of a quarry worker and farmhand in Wales, reported that her father had taught himself the violin but had been no “expert,” while Glennie Barretta (b. 1908) spoke of her little-mester razor-making father, Alfred Bentley, also self-taught, being accomplished enough to find part-time evening work playing the violin in a Sheffield theater.Footnote ⁹⁰

It would be wrong to assume, however, that all players from working-class backgrounds were self-taught. Some took private lessons and went on to earn their livelihoods through music, a pattern that Arthur Kaye’s life story – a classic example of late Victorian upward mobility – illustrates.Footnote ⁹¹ Kaye was born in Huddersfield in 1880. His mother, who loved to sing, was the daughter of an Irish tailor; his father worked all his life as a laborer in the iron-molding industry; and the family lived in a one-up, one-down terraced house in the poor end of town. Attending school, church, and chapel as a child enabled Kaye to become more oriented towards music, especially singing, and before he was eleven he developed the ambition to play the violin. Soon he was taking lessons from Tom Moore, who led the orchestra at the Huddersfield Theatre Royal. Leaving school at thirteen, Kaye worked as an errand boy at a haberdasher’s shop, then as its cashier, and subsequently as a clerk in the Poor Rate Office, scraping together enough money to pursue advanced studies with Haddock and eventually getting to the position where he could give violin lessons himself. This last achievement was the launchpad for a long teaching career, during which his own learning continued – through lessons with Auer as well as Brodsky – and his socioeconomic position in the locality grew.

In a culture that prized autodidacticism, self-teaching developed a fairly wide social reach. This is evident from the teach-yourself manuals and correspondence courses that were pitched at middle-class consumers in the 1910s. Most of these initiatives seem to have been directed at students with existing competencies, not those starting from scratch.Footnote ⁹² A 171-page book issued by the Strad office in 1914 for 2s. 9d. (postage included), A Scheme of Study for Country Violin Students, emphasized its aptness for people faced with geographical isolation and lack of time for lessons, as much as financial constraints. The preface determined its readership as the “many would-be violinists, scattered thinly in remote and inaccessible places, who are unable[,] for lack of money, opportunity, or leisure, to obtain teaching,” also addressing “those who are entirely self-taught, [and] players who manage to get a few good lessons during holidays, or at other infrequent intervals.”Footnote ⁹³ Its points of departure were the left-hand exercises in Schradieck’s Technical Violin School and Kreutzer’s studies, and it aimed to remedy the problems of unguided progress that had been evident ever since string playing had started booming. In 1894, for instance, an essay in the Cheltenham-based magazine The Minim had drawn attention to the low quality of teaching in rural areas. It advised watching the “average country orchestra” to see poor violin and bow holds, as well as the difficulties violinists had in shifting beyond third position and their tendency to find higher notes with the fourth finger. The piece further recommended that country pupils visit London or provincial cities to take even just a few lessons with a “competent artist,” though it failed to acknowledge that such possibilities were outside some families’ budgets.Footnote ⁹⁴ How often learners travelled to cities for instruction is an open question. Still, some students in rural communities – including some from poor backgrounds – succeeded with the instrument, albeit for reasons that are not always recorded.

Not everyone was able to keep up their learning beyond childhood, even if they wanted to. Some working adults probably experienced difficulties finding a teacher because opportunities for lessons were mutually constrained by the demands of their jobs and concomitant limits on free time. A frustrated theater violinist and teacher in Euston – one of the witnesses called in the arbitration that sought to break the notorious music-hall musicians’ strike in 1907 – reported that although lessons could be had for as little as 3d., people in working-class districts of London wanted them only in the evenings (when he needed to be in the orchestra pit).Footnote ⁹⁵ Still, some teachers were available at night, and in many urban centers alternatives to individual lessons emerged in the form of violin classes that met for group instruction on weekday evenings.

Group Classes

The phenomenon of group instruction ignited in the 1880s, when educational institutes (including mechanics’ institutes) in several industrial cities and towns began offering relatively inexpensive classes in the violin. Efficient and cost-effective from the provider’s perspective, this teaching method was aimed at adults or older children (some of whom were already in the workforceFootnote ⁹⁶), and it flourished in municipal institutions in the late Victorian era, as Keith Adams’s valuable documentary survey of violin classes, published in the 1960s, shows.Footnote ⁹⁷ Spreading gradually to other settings, these classes were matched and extended by group instruction in state elementary schools, which gave thousands of children from modest or poor backgrounds the opportunity of learning to play, and continued doing so into the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, class teaching quickly became the crucible for the development of working-class and lower-middle-class participation in violin culture. A comprehensive survey of group classes is beyond the scope of this study, but most of the initiatives highlighted below are emblematic of a trend that originated in top-down moralistic Victorian beliefs in the value of disciplined musical recreation as a means of effecting self-improvement and encouraging good citizenship among less privileged populations.

Adults could obtain group instruction in two main settings. The first – popular in the 1880s and 1890s – was in urban institutions with a broad educational purview and social mission, where subjects as diverse as bookkeeping, chess, French, botany, mathematics, drawing, or joinery might be taken for payment of a small fee.Footnote ⁹⁸ Classes at the Birmingham and Midland Institute fall into this category, as do those at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution in central London. Group violin instruction also took root in the capital’s working-class districts in the East End, where liberal agendas for social reform were strong: at the Science Schools in Old Ford Road in Bow, the Great Eastern Railway Institute in Stratford, and the imposing People’s Palace in Mile End, for instance.Footnote ⁹⁹ Most classes were taught by experienced teachers, albeit not high-profile violinists. The second setting for violin classes, especially in London, was private music academies with an extensive teaching staff and a broad curriculum. Some, such as the Walthamstow and Leyton School of Music, clearly courted middle-class customers.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But others, especially in more workaday districts, had different aspirations: for example, the Forest Gate School of Music (in east London), which reported 122 violin students across fourteen classes paying “very modest” fees in 1894.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The South London Institute of Music, conveniently situated next to Camberwell New Road railway station and sandwiched between middle-class and more “ordinary” neighborhoods, occupied a middle ground.Footnote ¹⁰² It enrolled 171 students in its classes in 1890.Footnote ¹⁰³

An important precursor for class teaching in poor urban areas was the voluntary work of William McNaught (1849–1918) and his friend Alexander Kennedy (1847–1928). McNaught, a grainer’s son from Mile End, was a self-taught violinist; later a student at the Royal Academy of Music, he went on to become the government’s assistant inspector of music in schools. Kennedy was from Stepney; a Congregational minister’s son who became an eminent electrical engineer and active amateur musician, he was also initially self-taught on the violin.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Around 1865, the pair set up violin classes in several London districts, including Shadwell, charging nothing for the instruction. According to a contemporary biography of McNaught, the men paid “four or five shillings a week for the rent of any odd workshop they could hire … [T]he rough music-stands and paraffin-oil lamps were quite in harmony with their limited means.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the mid 1870s, McNaught ran string-band classes under the auspices of the Tonic Sol-Fa College in east London. His initiative, which offered, for £1, twenty lessons “in the use of stringed instruments” from tonic sol-fa notation, would have appealed to amateurs already versed in Curwen’s system, perhaps also to the uninitiated.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The required text was the String Band Book (published by Curwen), a tutor notated in tonic sol-fa.

Whether in educational institutes or music academies, inexpensive group lessons on the violin, and in some cases the cello or the viola, were part of a wider sociomusical mission that included the teaching of the piano and singing (including tonic sol-fa singing) and encouraged participation in ensembles, usually choirs. String instructors were sometimes explicit about their goal of ultimately forming an instrumental ensemble (an “orchestra”), and most institutions put on public concerts to showcase students’ efforts. Some – maybe all – of the classes admitted youngsters, though typical ratios of adults to children are not established.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Invariably offered to beginners, the more successful violin programs were able to extend instruction to students with higher levels of skill. The South London Institute offered additional classes at elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels; the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution had six levels of instruction.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Expanding to cello (and, in south London, viola), these string classes were scheduled for weekday evenings, effectively the only times when working people were free to join organized recreation; Birkbeck used Saturday evenings, too.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Sundays were off-limits, despite the growing success of campaigns for public leisure activities on the Sabbath.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The cost of most classes was relatively modest, albeit not low enough for the extremely poor to easily afford them. In the 1880s and 1890s, a standard price for a term’s worth of (usually twelve) weekly classes in London was 5s. – effectively, 5d. per lesson. Instruments were sometimes available for rent; at Birkbeck, cellos were provided, violins too, “at a nominal charge.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Whether termly fees could be paid in installments is unclear. Some institutions set higher rates (South London Institute of Music: 7s. 6d. or 10s. 6d. depending on level, instrument, and constituency; Birkbeck charged 7s. for violin to nonmembers), indicating better-off clienteles.Footnote ¹¹² Others offered beginners’ instruction for less; the Great Eastern Railway Institute charged 2s. 6d. per quarter.Footnote ¹¹³ To attend the class at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, an unusually low fee of 1d. per class was levied (effectively, 1s. per term) – an economic decision that seemed vindicated by what was recorded as a high, if somewhat chaotic, turnout on the first night. “[S]ome 200 embryo Paganinis presented themselves for instruction with only forty instruments among them” was how a haughty reporter for the Musical Times described the occasion.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Precedent had been set in 1863, when Rickard had persuaded the Institute to run a 1d. class in elementary singing; its popularity almost certainly shaped decisions to extend cheap instruction to the violin.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Stories – some probably embellished – circulated regarding the Birmingham initiative, suggesting that it caused quite a stir. In 1883, one source recalled that, given the greater-than-expected take-up, ad hoc measures had been necessary: “there were not music desks enough for a quarter of the pupils. The expedient was devised of placing the students in single file, and pinning on to the back of each one the music for the student next behind him.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Institute’s official history reports early registrations as high as 408, rising to 525 (by the third night in 1882), and notes that although “the first enthusiasm died away,” the class settled at around 200.Footnote ¹¹⁷ A class for more advanced students under another teacher was also formed.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In turn, these classes had a significant and positive effect on the Birmingham music trade, causing factory violins to be bought in large numbers and “the warehouses of most of the local instrument dealers” to be “fairly cleared of resin.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The account of how music stands were improvised at Birmingham implies that, at the outset at least, its classes were attended by boys and men only – which stands to reason given the alignment of the new women violinists with middle- or upper-class living and the broader constraints affecting working-class women’s leisure activities. As Jonathan Rose has discerned, although conservative attitudes towards working-class women’s access to adult education were dissolving (including in mechanics’ institutes), they did so slowly, especially outside the south of England.Footnote ¹²⁰ Besides, there is supporting commentary from other locales that violin classes were gendered male: for instance, Charles Hallé’s observation (1890) that over 500 working men were learning the violin in Sheffield.Footnote ¹²¹ Certainly, women seem to have needed special encouragement to enroll in classes that men attended. Advertising its Saturday group lessons in 1884, the Great Eastern Railway Institute made such a gesture: “Ladies can join. Twenty-one joined last quarter.”Footnote ¹²² Moreover, the majority of the responses to the oral history investigation into music in family life before 1914 depict fathers, uncles, and brothers as the people who played strings. All of which suggests that the shift in acceptability for women to play the violin for leisure (let alone professional ambition) trickled into the working classes fairly slowly.

A few institutions restricted classes to women. In 1883, the South London Institute of Music advertised ladies’ violin classes on Monday evenings.Footnote ¹²³ The cost of twelve sessions was 10s. 6d. (a third more than the regular elementary classes), implying smaller class sizes and intentions to appeal to better-off families in the working community.Footnote ¹²⁴ Older schoolgirls may have been an important constituency.Footnote ¹²⁵ In 1884, the Birmingham and Midland Institute established Thursday-morning violin classes for ladies, likewise at a considerable termly cost (10s. 6d.) and courting a leisured demographic by dint of daytime sessions.Footnote ¹²⁶ Within a year, however, its advertising was distinguishing these weekday ladies’ events from what it termed “mixed” classes, which were less expensive options (most were tariffed at 5s. per term) on Saturday evenings.Footnote ¹²⁷ The advertised listings for the mixed-gender classes included the 1d. class for beginners, which would have opened cheap beginner instruction to working-class girls and women. We do not know how many of them took advantage of the opportunity, but, as we shall see, twenty years later, when affordable violin playing became available to many state-school children, some girls from working-class backgrounds started learning.

What motivated people of limited financial means to persist with a violin class is an important question. Some boys and young men probably hoped to develop a skill that might eventually lead to paid work as a musician, if only part-time. The majority, however, probably wanted to learn for recreation, inspired by what the Tonic Sol-Fa Reporter, in 1884, had described as the “positive rage just now for learning the violin,” and by the connotations of middle-class respectability that went along with it.Footnote ¹²⁸ Many working-class Victorians came to regard classical music as a meaningful way of demonstrating what Alan Bartley calls their “intrinsic virtue and social value” (i.e., respectability) within their community and thus an implicit superiority within it.Footnote ¹²⁹ As a constructive pastime for children, a violin class was an inexpensive choice. Among adults, social music-making with friends was a likely goal, whether in the domestic context or a more public local setting – in church or chapel, at dances, or with a local amateur “orchestra.” Salvation Army bands often incorporated a violinist or two; some of them were wholly strings.Footnote ¹³⁰ Whatever the reasons, the relatively low cost of group instruction enabled people from modest backgrounds to take up an instrument in an atmosphere of mutual encouragement – with perhaps a dash of competitiveness – which the classroom setting provided. For anyone who might have balked at the thought of investing in individual lessons – by definition, a more psychologically intensive, upmarket proposition – group classes offered the chance of trying out an instrument in a low-pressure learning situation.

Some group teaching was lower-profile in that it lacked the aura of authority and physical permanence offered by the large bricks-and-mortar institutions discussed above, and it operated on a more limited scale. Typically driven by individuals (with motivations running the gamut from income generation to social “good works”), administrative bodies, or small commercial enterprises, these initiatives might also call themselves “schools” or “academies.” Pricing and target audiences varied according to locale and date, though caution is needed when interpreting financial data in periods of inflation.Footnote ¹³¹ The extent of these violin classes has yet to be reckoned, but they are richly documented in regional newspapers and archives, and they clearly constituted an important cog in violin culture’s wheel, being found in most towns and cities well into the 1920s. Examples abound. An announcement in the Dundee Advertiser in 1883 drew attention to “evening classes for the violin, &c.” (cello was included) by the Misses and Mr. W. Wallace, for which financial terms were obtainable from the Music Classroom on the city’s Commercial Street.Footnote ¹³² In 1891, the Manchester Times announced that the Manchester School Board was instituting an inexpensive evening violin class on the premises of the Roby Schools, under the direction of Carl Courvoisier (a former Joachim pupil);Footnote ¹³³ instruction was limited to students under fifteen years of age, who were expected to purchase their own instruments and Courvoisier’s own method book, which retailed for 5s. – a substantial outlay if it could not be obtained secondhand.Footnote ¹³⁴ Additional evening classes for “deaf mutes,” endorsed by the Manchester Schools for the Deaf and Dumb, were offered at another location in the city: a progressive initiative that must have recognized the body’s ability to feel the vibrations from the instrument.Footnote ¹³⁵ Testimony from or about pupils who attended violin classes is frustratingly rare, but Londoner David John Williamson (a watchmaker, b. 1884) recalled in old age the evening classes established by the local council in Shoreditch, probably during the first decade of the twentieth century, and the opportunities they offered. His sister (Beatrice, b. c. 1892) had “joined the class for violin playing,” and had benefited from the two teachers organizing a “little society” for the students “to play music … on their own[,] and so they interested the different students that were learning – violin, piccolo, flute and that sort of things [sic].”Footnote ¹³⁶

Travis Cole’s village initiative in 1924, mentioned at the opening of this chapter, provides a glimpse of how affordable class teaching developed in a rural area, in that case made possible by philanthropic actions. Administrative documents show that local worthies (one a vicar) put up the capital for the instruments, which were then made available for purchase through an installment scheme; the hourly classes were affordable at 6d. each.Footnote ¹³⁷ The paperwork also reveals that Cole wanted to produce a string band that could give performances in local churches or schoolrooms, because “[t]o work towards an event is always helpful.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Cole expected to teach the violin, viola, and cello students in the same class. Such a teaching method was not unique – possibly pioneered by McNaught in the 1870s – but it was potentially problematic in terms of how much instrument-specific attention was practicable in the communal setting. Cole had at least twenty-four students (one of whom was a child) in one of his classes, though most were violinists and there was only one cellist.Footnote ¹³⁹ In larger communities, where student pools were bigger, many teachers were able to uncouple technical group instruction from ensemble work; an ad in the Western Daily Press in 1910 reveals a Mr. Crichton of Bristol offering Saturday evening classes in both violin and orchestra at his “Conservatoire” (a.k.a. the Music Warehouse).Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Even after World War I, Victorian values continued to motivate many activities. One of the most unusual examples of group teaching was a class for beginner violin/fiddle at the Ballykinlar Internment Camp in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921. In this harsh situation of detention, the British authorities permitted a program of purposeful recreation, in the spirit of Victorian paternalism, that encouraged self-improvement. Instructed by two of the prisoners, Martin Walton (the cinema violinist who later moved into violin selling) and Frank O’Higgins (an Irish fiddler), the students played factory instruments imported from London and paid for by the Irish White Cross. For the men who learned the violin this way, the class seems to have functioned as a constructive means of coping with the boredom of internment, as well as providing psychological connection to home life and contemporary culture.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As one of the students, ardent nationalist Peadar Kearney, wrote to his wife: “I build great castles as to what I[’]ll teach the lads if God wills I see them again.”Footnote ¹⁴² Another, John Condon, told his musically inclined mother that he hoped to be able to play some airs for her when he got home.Footnote ¹⁴³

Back in the 1880s and 1890s, group teaching had met with a good deal of opposition, particularly from members of the music profession who feared it was drawing students away from private one-to-one instruction. A paper delivered at the Musical Association (later, Royal Musical Association) in 1889 generated a strong reaction from the floor after the speaker highlighted possibilities for inexpensive group music teaching in institutions supported by municipal rates. A male respondent named Hopper opined:

Objections were also made on pedagogical grounds, and they resurfaced in relation to violin classes in elementary schools. The Fiddler considered violin classes “a huge blunder” and detrimental to technical progress, arguing that “[i]n no artistic work does individuality want more careful watching and nursing than in playing the violin.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ One solution was to reduce group sizes, though that required higher pricing: at the Huddersfield Technical School and Mechanics’ Institute in 1889, hour-long classes of “4 to about 6” students with roughly “the same degree of proficiency” were scheduled for Friday evenings at a cost of 10s. 6d. a term.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ That said, class teaching had its advocates, who argued that much depended on the quality of the instruction;Footnote ¹⁴⁷ tutor books were specially adapted.

According to Keith Adams, the heyday of cheap institutional classes for adults fell in the 1880s and early 1890s and was quickly followed by a quantifiable falloff in student demand, which Adams partially attributes to rising living costs in the late 1890s.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Certainly, the sector contracted, as several civic institutions closed their violin classes or restructured their programs. To cite one example, the music section of the Birmingham and Midland Institute turned itself, somewhat controversially, into a conservatoire for professional training, and in 1891 it dropped its 1d. classes.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Whether economic pressures were a significant cause of the wider downturn is unproven; leisure patterns were also changing, and there were new, more passive modes of cheap (youth and adult) recreation in the air, including football matches and silent cinema, with which educational activities now competed. Yet not all places for social learning terminated their violin classes: the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London apparently attracted healthy enrollments in the postwar era, closing only in 1929, and Birkbeck, after transferring its operations to the Northampton Polytechnic Institute in Finsbury in 1904, continued classes until they were deemed uneconomic in 1931.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Adams’s study was of its time. Built on what scholars would now, with access to digitized resources, consider a limited range of sources, it was chiefly concerned with metropolitan adult education institutions and schools of music in London. By unearthing many regional or low-profile group-learning initiatives, of which there appears to have been a continuing proliferation well into the 1920s, we may usefully complicate his picture and realize that many private teachers and small-town music academies introduced group lessons into their portfolios, albeit with smaller class sizes than those reported in some urban institutions at the height of the late Victorian boom and, importantly, that they sustained them. In other words, group teaching in the early twentieth century seems to have shifted its sites of activity, becoming more geographically spread and functioning in alternative milieus and formats. One of these was instruction in state schools.Footnote ¹⁵¹

State-School Instruction

Violin classes within elementary schools – where, increasingly, most working-class children received their basic general education – proved a significant counterpoint to the developments outlined above, and they contributed to the eventual normalization and cultural acceptance of the group-teaching phenomenon, especially for beginner students.Footnote ¹⁵² According to an article in Teachers’ Aid (1892), the concept of the violin class began to attract attention around 1890, and in schools where such classes had been implemented, instructors had built on existing achievements in the teaching of singing. Proselytizing for take-up in London schools, the magazine gave practical advice for would-be teachers: how to build a makeshift music stand; the importance of carrying both a pitch pipe for tuning and a supply of spare strings; class sizes (no more than ten pupils); and scheduling. Since instrumental instruction always supplemented regular schooling, “the dinner [i.e., lunch] hour or immediately after school in the afternoon” were considered the best time slots.Footnote ¹⁵³ The article proceeded to outline the musical limitations of the teaching method, but considered that the benefits of communal activity and socialization outweighed them:

How a school might have gone about procuring a violin teacher is not revealed, but the article gives the impression that individuals, quite possibly existing staff with only minimal skills on the violin, were encouraged to propose classes. Even then, permission from the local school board was required.

A description of an 1894 initiative in Dundee demonstrates that such permission could not be taken for granted and persistence might be necessary, for boards differed politically and philosophically in the policies they upheld (London and Birmingham were especially progressive).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Henry Williamson, a clergyman who served on the Dundee School Board, approached H. Everitt Loseby, the musical director of the local theater, about the possibility of teaching violin classes in schools. Loseby’s account of the episode depicts a man with an urgent, paternalistic desire to improve social-emotional well-being in the town’s working-class community. Williamson was, he wrote:

Loseby, who had taught what he called “permanent pitch instruments in groups,” but never strings, agreed to participate.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The project foundered initially when the full board declined to support it, but the determined Williamson proceeded with it privately, so that Loseby was soon teaching fourteen boys, seven girls, and “a number of very young children” in classes on Saturdays in the Unitarian Church Hall.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ A credible public concert given by the pupils after six months of learning swung the opinion of the board’s school committee, which subsequently appointed Loseby to teach group classes in local schools.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Looking back from the vantage point of 1921, Loseby considered the Dundee initiatives pioneering, because “[a]fter a year or two the system … travelled through Britain like wildfire.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ This claim to influence is bold and highly questionable; as will become evident, the roots of the efflorescence lay elsewhere. On the other hand, the Dundee experiments did attract national attention, offering evidence of their opportuneness.Footnote ¹⁶¹

The audience for state-school violin classes is worth pondering because instruction was not free, and families not only had to be willing and able to pay for it, but they had to obtain an instrument too. The Teachers’ Aid article noted that most children were in a position to “beg or borrow a violin good enough to start upon among their own relations and friends,” which may have been how Williamson furnished some instruments for the Dundee classes, but its writer advised against the practice on account of such instruments frequently being in inadequate condition. Rather, since “[v]iolins have never been so cheap as they are now,” he/she recommended the purchase of a new factory instrument, singling out the London firm of Haynes as an excellent supplier.Footnote ¹⁶² In addition, the writer recommended rates of 5s. per quarter for group lessons (5d. per lesson – the amount subsequently charged in Dundee).Footnote ¹⁶³ These may have been relatively modest prices, enabling Williamson to boast that “many working people can afford to send their children,” but the charges nevertheless served to exclude.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ As Dave Russell has observed, the expense of a class was still too great for some working-class families, and it kept out children from the poorest homes.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ (The same constraints would have been true for lower-working-class adults who wanted to learn in other settings.) Russell’s reasoning is shaped by McNaught’s data on students receiving instrumental instruction by staff notation in 1897 in four Bradford board schools – places where both working-class and lower-middle-class children would have been educated.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The numbers reveal that an average of 46 percent of them were learning an instrument (individual schools ranging between 39 percent and 67 percent of pupils), and more girls than boys (overall, 381 to 224). McNaught did not specify which instruments were taught, but in all probability it was the violin, which was the usual offering. Not all schools achieved strong participation; McNaught noted that in Bradford schools attended by children from poorer families interest could be extremely low, in boys’ schools as low as 1 percent.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Meanwhile, a photograph of violin pupils playing at morning assembly in a London board school for boys (1896; Fig. 2.2) shows an ensemble of apparently some sixty children, 12 percent of the school’s population.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Figure 2.2 Morning assembly at Kilburn Lane Higher Grade School (The Queen’s London [London: Cassell, 1896], 317).

Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

If poverty prevented many children from accessing instruction, it did not mean the world of the violin was entirely closed to them. As indicated earlier, some youngsters picked up the instrument informally and taught themselves to play by ear where a violin resided in the home – a notable phenomenon, even if technical progress was compromised in the process – or they learned to read notation where someone was on hand to help with that. However, it is possible that within a few years of McNaught’s report some children from poorer families were enrolled in state-school violin classes, courtesy of a successful commercial initiative that offered still more affordable instruction on an unprecedented national scale.

This important program, sometimes designated the Maidstone scheme, was established in 1897 and has been closely documented by music educator Robin Deverich.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Fronted by the music publisher and instrument dealer J. G. Murdoch & Co., it was the brainchild of the firm’s musical advisor, Thomas Mee Pattison, who sensed a gap in the market on account of his daughter’s experience in a violin class and proposed that the company create and sell a paced instruction package for schoolchildren. The firm rolled out the program as the Maidstone School Orchestra Association, named after the town in Kent where the class was first tried,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ and set about developing a necessary infrastructure, responding to the program’s initially mixed reception by forming a committee of experienced violin teachers to create a violin method appropriate for children – one that would also provide a solid instructional system for less experienced teachers.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The method, published as The Maidstone Violin Tutor, became part of the Maidstone-branded kit of instrument, bow, case, and learning material at an inclusive price of around £1 10s. and was also offered for hire purchase through weekly payments of 1s.Footnote ¹⁷² The lessons themselves, at 3d. per week, aimed to be affordable; even so, very poor families would have struggled with such costs, especially if multiple offspring wanted to learn.Footnote ¹⁷³

Like most rudimentary instruction books, the Tutor introduced Maidstone pupils to a succession of short, easy-to-play pieces, including specially composed melodies and traditional folk tunes (the latter discussed in Chapter 9). It culminated in short numbers extracted from popular classical works, adapted for two violin lines – a foray into the challenges of ensemble playing and “good” music, using pieces that were readily disseminated in domestic arrangements and may well have been familiar to children from homes with pianos. The “Soldier’s Chorus” from Gounod’s Faust, the “Emperor’s Hymn” (slow movement theme and two variations) from Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 76 No. 3, and Mendelssohn’s part-song “O Hills, O Vales of Pleasure” were among the materials. Of note here is that while elementary schools shied away from teaching children to sing from standard music notation, thus de-emphasizing a value system associated with classical music and middle-class settings, Murdoch’s commercial initiative was developing both musical literacy and an internalized awareness of classical “favorites” in thousands of state-school pupils.

The Murdoch business operation was slick. Representatives canvassed schools for interest and encouraged their participation, providing publicity material for parents. State schools seem to have been the principal target, but private schools were not excluded from the marketing. Willing to help headteachers identify instructors if desired, the firm supplied classroom charts to support learning; created medals and certificates to recognize levels of student proficiency; and published easy repertoire, notably the Maidstone Music Library series of pieces scored for one or two violin parts. Teachers were responsible for ordering violin outfits from Murdoch, collecting money from the children at each lesson, and dispatching the proceeds to Murdoch once a month.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Nellie Purkiss, who began learning in a class at a church school in Upper Tooting, south London, in 1901, was one of a number of former students who held warm memories of instruction and had gone on to a lifetime of playing. More than fifty years later, she recalled having “worried” her parents into allowing her to join a class, and went on to capture the joy her first instrument brought her:

From the parental viewpoint, the hire-purchase option removed what could have been a large, prohibitive expense of up-front investment in equipment – risky if the child did not take to the violin and money was tight. Many families obtained instruments in this manner, presumably paying somewhat more than they would have if buying them outright. The outfits minus the tutor book were also marketed independently. In 1906, Answers, a penny publication with previously reported weekly sales of 900,000, was carrying adverts for such kits direct from Murdoch for 21s.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

As a form of consumer credit, the hire-purchase system was controversial, already well known for its application to the sale of pianos, sewing machines, bicycles, and furniture. This awareness included the legal battles around the Helby v. Matthews lawsuit (1895) that arose after a piano that had been acquired on hire purchase was pledged to a pawnbroker before the payments were completed. Despite a drawn-out judicial process, the case left the legal status of hire purchase “reasonably assured,”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ and two years later Murdoch stepped into the market. Characterized by Cyril Ehrlich as “an amalgam of snobbery, ignorance and genuine concern at its misuse,” the objections to hire purchase rumbled on in many quarters.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Murdoch’s violin-selling was not exempt from criticism, despite the fact that, at 30 s., the outfits were drastically less expensive than the “£20 or so” pianos that were being sold on a three-year purchase plan to many working-class consumers.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In 1907, the School Music Review voiced wider concerns over the potential of Murdoch’s installment plan for encouraging debt, describing it as “not good object-lessons to children in economy.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The magazine also questioned the propriety of Murdoch’s practice of offering teachers a “substantial commission” on the violins sold to pupils, even while it admitted that teachers frequently used the money to defray out-of-pocket expenses.Footnote ¹⁸¹ This was a timely contribution to the debate, since similar issues were being discussed by local education committees, at least one of which (Newcastle-on-Tyne) was looking unfavorably at local schools where violin teaching was making use of the hire-purchase system.Footnote ¹⁸²

Musically, the Murdoch scheme – like most group teaching – engendered criticisms, the most typical of which, as expressed by the Musical Times in 1905, held that the violin was too difficult an instrument to teach in groups.Footnote ¹⁸³ It also became evident that the scheme was delivering uneven results, some excellent (“when the teaching has been skilful,” said the School Music Review, 1907Footnote ¹⁸⁴), others less so. This is hardly surprising since, despite the widespread use of the Maidstone method book, there was no stated pedagogic philosophy, no unified training in how to instruct, nor any published guidance for the teachers, who ranged from professional players to amateurs with limited skills and teaching experience.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ One of the latter was R. E. Sayle, who started a class in Douglas (Isle of Man) c. 1911; he had previously received only two or three lessons from a professional teacher, working thereafter on his own with the aid of Spohr’s Violin School.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Conversely, the headmaster of an elementary school in Tiverton (Devon) appointed a “thoroughly qualified” teacher with a TCL diploma, W. Anstey Dyer.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ After 1905, efforts were made to monitor the teaching of some of the classes, notably those affiliated with the National Union of School Orchestras (NUSO), a related project discussed below. Pattison served as the official inspector until at least 1921; one student who took classes between 1916 and 1920 remembered him making three or four visits per year.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In Pattison’s view, “[e]xperience” was “the best of all teachers,” and “[i]f a class plays correctly, intonation, time, and expression all good, the method of instruction cannot be wrong.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Support on this point and the “[v]iolin-class movement” in general came from Percy Scholes – a former music teacher experienced in group instruction and a champion of autodidacticism – who had conducted an official inspection of violin classes in local elementary schools while working for the city of Leeds. His position, articulated before the American Music Teachers’ National Association (MTNA) in 1914, was that it was “better to take school-teachers who are already doing good class singing work, and give them the necessary special violin-knowledge, than to employ good violinists who have never faced a class in their lives.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰ He argued that classes should not exceed 20 students, that 15 was an ideal size, and that only children with a good ear should be admitted in the first place. In truth, class sizes varied; some reports indicate groups of 10 or 12; others indicate 40–50, even 120, students. A group of 25 was said to be average.Footnote ¹⁹¹

For all its limitations, the Maidstone project achieved remarkable popularity, especially in England and Wales.Footnote ¹⁹² Although estimates vary, after ten years pupil numbers were clearly in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps as high as 400,000 (effectively 10 percent of all children in England and Wales).Footnote ¹⁹³ One source estimated that nearly 500,000 Maidstone violins had been sold by 1908 and that some 5,000 schools were using the method.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Large classes were reported in Rhyl, Llandudno, Wrexham, Festiniog, Cardiff, and other Welsh towns; Wrexham alone was said to have more than 400 “juvenile violinists.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Visibility was enhanced considerably towards the end of the decade as a result of some Maidstone classes affiliating with the NUSO, another Pattison-inspired initiative. The NUSO had been established in 1905 to promote the formation of school orchestras; schools in the same locality drew together for this purpose, aided by the knowledge that children were learning the same music. NUSO inspections of affiliated classes aimed to ensure that similar standards were being reached. Its principal goal was to develop pupils’ musicianship and encourage skills in ensemble performance that could be taken into social music-making in adulthood, but there were other ambitious agendas (including scholarships to the Guildhall School of Music and its own journal, the Young Musician, discussed in Chapter 9), which were fed by its deeper, quintessentially Victorian, ambition to “elevate the musical taste of the nation as a whole.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶

The NUSO’s shopwindow was an annual competitive festival in London, with performances of massed violin orchestras in a carefully choreographed concert at a major venue (initially, Crystal Palace). Active into the 1920s, following a hiatus during World War I, the event drew press attention, especially in relation to the number of children apparently involved: from 700 in 1905, it reached a staggering 6,650 in 1914; participation in 1923, though lower but still striking, was an estimated 3,500.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Paul Stoeving, in his address to the MTNA in 1914, captured the atmosphere:

Stoeving was not alone in promoting the annual concerts as representative of the success of Murdoch’s project. However, the children performing in 1914 constituted only a fraction of the violinists involved in the Maidstone scheme, and most of them were probably from the London area or drawn from schools with more middle-class pupils.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ In 1911, less than 9 percent of “Maidstone” schools belonged to the NUSO;Footnote ²⁰⁰ membership required a fee. Inevitably, too, the cost of traveling to London would have been prohibitive for many teachers and pupils, especially any from working-class communities far from the capital. Even so, and despite reservations about hire purchase, the School Music Review came out repeatedly in favor of the Maidstone project, admitting that it had delivered excellent results, wishing only that Murdoch would start classes in viola and cello.Footnote ²⁰¹ William Galloway (1910) argued strongly for the broader benefits, citing playing as a “valuable mental gymnastic [that] trains eye, hand and ear as well as brain” and reporting that orchestras, where they were introduced, had invigorated school life.Footnote ²⁰² The Violin Times pointed to pupils’ greater interest in their regular studies in schools where the program had been enthusiastically implemented.Footnote ²⁰³

By 1939, Maidstone classes had apparently all but ceased.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Yet when and why a significant downturn occurred is unclear. Many periodicals, including the School Music Review, were silent about the project in the 1920s, suggesting decline had begun. Certainly, World War I diminished the workforce of teachers; rebuilding may have proven difficult.Footnote ²⁰⁵ But, as noted above, NUSO performances continued postwar, albeit not with the massive participant numbers of 1914. The Young Musician magazine may have persisted until 1928.Footnote ²⁰⁶ In 1933, Murdoch republished its method book as The New “Maidstone” Violin Tutor Specially Arranged for School Violin Classes, revised and edited by an NUSO committee. While this move suggests some Maidstone classes survived into the 1930s, it may equally indicate that the firm sensed independent market demand for Maidstone pedagogy. (Similarly, in 1933 Murdoch reprinted the Maidstone Music Library series and issued additional repertoire for ensembles in the series Murdoch’s Orchestral Library; both series were issued with ad-lib parts for viola, cello, and other instruments.)

By the 1920s, group instruction had become an accepted means of teaching beginners, particularly in elementary schools. Loseby, writing in 1921, observed that class teaching was “to-day as virile as ever.”Footnote ²⁰⁷ In The Strad, an advice column for violinists thinking of developing a teaching practice encouraged them to approach local schools with a view to setting up classes; this, the writer argued, was especially important if the teacher was living “in a poor district where money for luxuries and leisure for art is a rare possession.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ The piece further provided practical advice, much of which reads like a paraphrase of the Maidstone scheme. The School Music Review (1927) continued to show considerable interest in group instruction, running features on new developments, such as the “Manby” system, and advice on how to manage classes effectively.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Moreover, impacts were far-reaching. As Deverich shows, the Maidstone project was the inspiration for group music classes in American public schools, implemented initially in Boston in 1911 and soon extended beyond the violin to other instruments.Footnote ²¹⁰ Back home in 1923, the scheme was vaunted as having created conditions that had already spawned “thousands of good amateur players.”Footnote ²¹¹ This was indeed the project’s immediate legacy, and one that would endure. But there were additional and broader ramifications, because the Maidstone scheme introduced many children to the possibility of a lifetime of enjoying music. Indeed, the impact of learning an instrument – regardless of standards achieved – on the growth and sustainment of listening audiences in twentieth-century Britain is something that has largely gone unnoticed.