Fine rare and historically important Wheatstone English conc...

Hammer

£3,400

Fine rare and historically important Wheatstone English concertina, bearing the maker's trademark metal shaped plaque inscribed C. Wheatstone & Co Inventors, Patentees and Manufacturers, Concertinas & Aeolas, London, no. 34523 (1937), with forty-eight metal buttons on foliate pierced raised metal ends, six-fold bellows and gilded sides, case

*No. 34523 manufactured by C. Wheatstone & Co., in 1937. The instrument was specially made for the virtuoso player Mr Alf Edwards, who was influential in popularising the instrument during the post-war years. It was featured on the front cover of Wheatstone's Instructions For the English Concertina by Alfred Edwards [1960]

Alf Edwards died in 1985 at a nursing home in Worthing. The instrument was purchased locally some years later and acquired in 2007 by the present owner

This Wheatstone forty-eight key treble Æola has a number of unusual features, most notably, gold-coated bellows, chrome-plated ends (producing a strident tone), veneered fiddle-back maple frame. The instrument was restored to original playing condition by C. Wheatstone & Co., in 2009. The exterior of the instrument was left untouched. In excellent playing condition

Mr Edwards played the instrument in BBC recordings, live recitals, dance bands of the 50s, numerous folk music albums and in the 1956 John Huston film Moby Dick. He is regarded as the leading light of the concertina revival