Piano 85

Piano 85 was captured in use near the entrance to Ealing Broadway Station, a large, flashy and handsome construction just off the High Street. Or perhaps the Broadway. Presumably as in the Broad, in Oxford.

From Parker of Bishopsgate, seemingly the first piano of this name.

Search for Parker turns up the oddly truncated image left above. Not at all clear what if any relation there is to the right hand Parker. Or, indeed, whether my Parker was just a shop who put his stickers on the pianos he sold, or whether he actually made them, perhaps in some factory further east than Bishopsgate.

Sadly, it is clear from reference 2, that I am very much a beginner in the matter of piano names. Perhaps I had better stick to trolleys, where one serious manufacturer - Wanzl - seems to have a very large chunk of the market. While for the really serious reader, there is reference 3. From the body of which I turn up just 8 mentions of Parker, mostly to do with a piano maker called Thomas Parker, possibly once a Broadwood man, who appears to have died in 1830.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/piano-84.html.

Reference 2: https://www.pianohistory.info/.

Reference 3: Exposing the London piano industry workforce (c. 1765-1914) - Kent, Marie E - 2013. To be found at https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/7399/. With the appendices, weighing in at more than 600 pages.

Group search key: pianosk.