Foreign Free Reeds Threaten Blighty!

[wes williams]

Although we know that the German concertina was popular in the mid 19th century, its difficult to assess how popular. This little snippet from 1853 tells us a bit about the current situation then.

 

The old British monetary system may be unfamiliar to some of you, so I'll quantify it. £1 (pound) =20 shillings, and 1 shilling= 12 pence. So £1 = 240 pence. The columns are pounds, shillings, and pence. To make things a bit easier, I'll just use pence.

 

The normal duty on musical instruments is 10%, but musical boxes, pianos, free reeds, and brass are treated differently. In particular, standard accordions pay a duty of £0-1-0 per hundred notes, so assuming a note is a button ( but it might be twice this) about 1.5 pence for a single row 10 button, and 3 pence for a double row. Square German concertinas and flutinas attract five times as much duty per note (12 pence for a twenty button) - and interestingly the concertinas are described as 'common', so this tends to confirm suggestions that shapes other than square didn't start to be made until the 1850s, possibly after the 1851 Great Exhibition. The real killer is the octagon concertina at 48 pence per instrument. But why octagon and not hexagon? Does this suggest that the German makers initial change of shape was to eight sides rather than six?

 

How high was this duty? The 'Concertina on the Steamboats' article from 1856 suggests that a common 20K German concertina was about 30 pence and a high-end model about 190 pence, so the duty could be as high as 40% of the price of the cheapest 20K.