What we do in St Austell

For two weeeks at Christmas we roll out the old barrel piano for our annual collection. Members of the public often comment on seeing the barrel piano collection in their youth and are glad to see it is still continuing.

Barrel Piano History 

Bulit in the early 1900 by Italian craftsmen working in the Clerkinwell Road area of London Itinerant musicians played the instruments in streets and pubs to earn a living. Some time around 1919/20 Keith Prowse and Co (now famous for theatre ticket sales) announced that it was moving out of the business of selling and hiring barrel pianos. A person called Canon Wintle of Lawshall, Bury St Edmunds saw an opprtunity to buy the machines (about 200) and re-build them. They beacme hand turned, put in carts and pushed around the streets providing employment for ex-servicemen after the Frst World War.

Our instrument had a wooden barrel, pinned with ten tunes, including ' Some Enchanted Evening','Sometheing About A Salior' and 'Blaze Away'. It was spotted for sale in a London newspaper advertisment by a St Austell Rotarian, Bernard Probert in the early sixties. A group of senior members of the Club, now sadely all deceased, raised the necessary cash of £100 and arranged purchase and transport to Cornwall. 

The piano became a feature in Fore Street leading up to Christmas each year with the original tunes. It was cranked by hand for up to eight hours a day by a rota of Rotarians and sometimes other volunteers, including Pensioners fro Sedgemoor Priory.

In 1975/76 the Club was very fortunate in finding Harry Woodhouse who was willing to rebuild the barrel to play Christmas tunes and maintain this fragile instrument.

Harry in his workshop setting up the barrel and adding around two thousand pins!

Harry, a dedicated musician and Cornish Bard, carried out the painstaking regular repair work on this instrument for most of the next twenty three years untill 1997.

After a few challenging years following Harry's retirement, we had two strokes of good fortune:

A substantial anonymous legacy for restoration work from someone who had benefited from our Christmas Parcels for many years and the discoving another 'Harry' in the person of Clive Ellison who over two years totally rebuilt the whole machine.

What you now see is the restored Piano in a new trailer, with electric drive and interlock to better perserve the mechanism.

Since that time we have now fitted  it with a CD player, the tunes recorded from the original in a barn, also we have some similar music that can be played as well to increase the repertoire.

With your help we look to many more years of Christmas cheer, raising funds for good cause.