wes williams

If you want to sell, you could always try the Buy & Sell forum here for some honest offers. Remember that most of the sites you'll find selling concertinas are fully restored items, so their price reflects the work needed to bring them up to standard.

Hi Nick, Gary's reply above more or less nails your instrument as a Crane & Sons Crane/Butterworth system concertina. Dating of these instruments is very speculative as we don't have many reports (~185) but currently we estimate #460 as 1904 and Gary's #55 as 1898. Crane's patent expired around 1910 and the Salvation Army took up the system in 1912. The Lachenal crane series numbers went up to around 1050, and when the SA took over the serials in the existing Maccann series were used. AFAIK nobody has published anything on C&S numbers and their related Lachenal serials, but it would be an interesting thing to study 🙂

You're welcome Nigel. But please post things like this to the Dating A Lachenal From The Serial Number thread in future, as it keeps everything together.

We'd estimate 192151 as circa 1874. Please post things like this to the Dating A Lachenal From The Serial Number thread in future, as it keeps everything together.

Alex - 201002 is estimated as circa 1930.

The estimate for 18198 is circa 1873.

Martyn - We'd estimate it as circa 1920, Lachenal closed down in 1933.

Lachenal introduced casein (plastic) buttons about 1928 . But check the number elsewhere on the instrument, as the range goes up to just over 200,000 and a preceding '1' on the end label can be hidden.

Gregor, We would estimate 76924 as circa 1883.

John, We don't have any Lachenals with a number that high, they only seem to go up to around 201500. More details and some photos please.

Hi Paul, Wrong thread? But to save you reposting dowright's estimate would have been circa 1922.

Model 20 - Baritone Aeola (see this price list). July 22nd 1926. See this page of the Wheatstone Ledgers at the Horniman Museum.

We would estimate 88626 as circa 1886.

Perhaps you could consider putting it on the Buy & Sell forum?

The highest number so far reported for an English system (ignoring one stamping mistake) is around 60,500 so I'd suggest that the first digit is 5. The second digit looks like a 2 to me (sorry Dave!). If its 52xxx we'd estimate it was made circa 1911, so would probably have steel reeds.

Most of the dates I circulated were produced a couple of years ago and were based on what Randy had passed on to me as his last estimates, so a few serious researchers had a guide to what Randy would have replied. Would you have had me keep silent and kept the ability to respond to this thread to myself alone? 'Your own tweaking' - as you put it - was to simply show that more work was needed, and in one case I simply changed all the anglo estimates by a fixed percentage so the maximum serial fitted better, and the other was based on a more recent date/number report. Both these 'tweaks' were 'what if?' suggestions, which I thought I'd made clear. That's why I always reply with 'circa year' dates, and don't try to interpolate any further. But in the case you are talking of here, there was an entry only around a few months different - which I hadn't noticed before - which showed that more work is needed in this particular date area. The fact that Randy's estimates provide us an good approximate year of manufacture, when almost nothing was known earlier, demonstrates that we aren't too far from the truth. Verifiable date/number reports are rare!

Thanks for the info, Rich. In the database we've got a handwritten note inside 104739 saying 'Bought in 1888 April 26' so you are probably on target at 1888. Stephen's reply above comes from the approximate estimates we've made, where we'd normally say 'circa 1889' for the date.

From your photo this concertina is a Maccann duet model, so we would estimate its date as circa 1923.

Hi Ian, Butler's were active 1826-1927, and at 29 Haymarket from around 1865. I think they became G Butler & Sons around 1898. Quite a few Lachenal made concertinas with a Butler label appear in our database.

We would estimate Edeophone English 57529 as circa 1920.

Hi Greg, Our estimate on 59798 is circa 1926. It seems Lachenal production had fallen throughout the 1920s, so thats how we came up with that date.

Steve - Go to http://www.concertina.com/crane-duet/index.htm for the Butterworth patent, and the Crane tutor of the same year.

David Giovannoni has recently created a new website https://i78s.org/ which contains over 46,000 early recordings 1890s-1930s, mainly from USA sources. Its free, but you will have to set up an account to access the recordings. Searching for 'concertina' gives you eleven cylinder recordings, nine from Alexander Prince (Maccann duet), and two from Isak Piroshnikoff (English). I think you will be surprised by the quality of these cylinder recordings compared to the more common 78rpm records. David was responsible for discovering, and transfering to audio for the first time, the earliest known recordings from the 1850s made in Paris by Leon Scott de Martinville on lampblack-sheets.

Thanks for the heads up Steve, That date is around 10 years later than our current estimate of circa 1859 for this instrument. Current research suggests that Lachenal started numbering his own make English concertinas starting at 5000 in 1858. The 1869 date is much nearer 1873 when Louis Lachenal became Lachenal & Co, and we have lots of evidence of the label changing around the serial number 18000 for English concertinas. So the inscription points to an acquisition date rather than a manufacturing date.

Stephen, Please allow a little thread creep - the MDRA 1862 price list shows "People's Concertina" with "riveted notes". I have often wondered if any of these have survived, and could they have been intended for a new line of manufacture for Wheatstone by Lachenal?