The piano industry in late Victorian and Edwardian England consisted
of three disparate and unrelated groups of firms. First there were three
old-established, high quality manufacturers, self-conscious guardians of
a fine but obsolete technology who tended to live in the past and faced
dwindling sales with varying degrees of equanimity. They are listed in
Section 1 of Table IX. Poles asunder were some two to three hundred
garret masters who do not appear in Table IX. Each produced alone, or
with a handful of men, a supply of cheap and mostly shoddy pianos and
'dovetailed' their highly seasonal activities with summer work in cabinet
making, hop picking or even professional cricket. ¹ Although every
year brought its crop of failures, and the slightest recession could be
disastrous, this pool of small makers was constantly replenished by
workers from the larger factories tempted by independence, ease of entry
into the industry and a pervasive system of subcontracting by larger
masters.

Between these two incongruent sectors a third set of middle-sized,
'medium class' manufacturers, as they were called in the trade, grew to
increasing importance. Unhampered and unassisted by such legacies of
the past as an ageing skilled-labour force, commitment to old designs and
techniques, superfluous capital or a famous name, this group, most of
whom started as garret masters, eventually built up a steady trade in modern
upright instruments. Before the onset of war and protection, several of
them had succeeded in meeting German competition in the home market,
at least in the medium grades of piano, while some had higher aspira-
tions, and a few were even reviving export markets. Exports, which
had been virtually dormant for thirty years, doubled in quantity
between 1895 and 1905, and then doubled again during the following
decade. This still represented only about ten per cent of aggregate
production, but in value terms it was probably over twenty per cent,
for few shoddy instruments were now exported. While preferential duties
in Australia and New Zealand doubtless assisted this success, it was
a genuine revival which occasioned comment even outside the trade
press.

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