Has anyone ever heard this before ? I was trying to find a link to the Dorset County Museum, Thomas Hardy MS
(unsuccessfully as it turns out.........if you have a link ,I'd be grateful................I'm looking for his family tune book) and found the above quote on the Mellstock Band Home-page.
Robin

A person who probably knows is, the one and only, Colin Dipper. He lives not far from Stonehenge (as featured in 'Tess'), and in the heart of Hardy country. Hardy is one of my favourite authors - one of the few who produced more than one 'classic' novel + of course the poems. I think Hardy wrote the tune 'Haste to the Wedding' but I could be wrong there. That tune is a good example of a tune changing key when it crossed the Irish sea.

Alan Caffrey.

I've never heard that Hardy played the concertina. I recently read Claire Tomalin's biography of him, 'The Time-torn Man' which I enjoyed very much. There is no reference to the concertina but a number of references to his and his father's fiddle playing.
There is an oft-told story that Hardy was not recorded by the EFDSS because his style was considered too rough but I've never seen it confirmed.
His descriptions of rural activities are very authoritative. I think it was Hardy who pointed out the distinction between revivalist and traditional Morris dancing: something along the lines that the revivalists look as if they're enjoying themselves, while the traditional dancers are doing it because they have to.
I think 'The Man He Killed' (1902) is one of the great War Poems, but it tends to be overlooked in the genre because it isn't 1914-1918.
Best wishes,
Roger

Can't answer the question, but nice coincidence in timing; I'm halfway thru Tess.

Oddly enough, we've been wandering around Dorset the last couple of days, including a visit to Dorchester - a town with more than its fair share of statues of Mr Hardy. I've an idea from somewhere that he played melodeon as well as violin, but I hadn't heard of him playing concertina.

Chris

I also had heard that he played the melodeon as well as the violin but not the concertina. Since the quote came from The Melstock band homepage and one of the band members is Dave Townsend, a well-known player of the English concertina, perhaps there is some truth in it. I'll ask Dave next time I see him.
Chris

From Michael Millgate's 2004 biography, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, p.40:

He is said to have been given a toy concertina at the age of 4; not long afterwards he was introduced to a toy violin; a little later still he went with his father to local dances and festivities and even performed himself from time to time with an energy perceived as sorting oddly with the delicacy of his physique at the time.

Cheers,
Dan

That's curious, as he would have been 4 in 1844 and I've not seen any evidence of such things as "toy" concertinas existing until much later in the century, though I have seen a "toy" French accordeon ("flutina") that might have been that old...

surely the Thomas Hardy society,would be the authoratitve source.Personally I am doubtful that he played the concertina.

Well, if he ever did play the concertina, he played it Far From The Madding Crowd.

Chris

Stephen,

Indeed, another bio account I have seen used the term 'accordion'...but then folks used that term for everything, including Uhlig-type concertinas, at the time. Whoever was the original source for this story may have meant 'toy' in comparison to English concertinas of the time....who knows? If this were a bet, I'd give it even odds to be one or the other. The first Uhlig boxes were very toy-like...just 10 keys...and some of the early distributors were toy vendors. Your Eulenstein instrument of the early 1930s shows that these boxes could show up early and in surprising places, wherever people of means played music. But as you note, we are a bit early for the big mass merchandising push for Uhlig boxes, which was to come late in the 1840s and in the 1850s.