Why WWII Still Matters for British Pianos Today

Macauley Sykes
Feb 26
10 min read

There was a time when Britain did not merely retail pianos. It built them.

Before 1939, the British piano trade was not a heritage niche. It was a living industry. London contained multiple serious manufacturers. Regional works in Surrey, Kent, Gloucestershire and the Midlands were turning out uprights and grands in real volume. Frames were cast in Britain. Actions, the internal mechanisms that connect keys to hammers, were built by dedicated British firms. Cabinetmaking, polishing and regulation were carried out by people who had learned at the bench over many years.

This article is written for people who care how those pianos were actually made. It looks at how the Second World War reshaped that landscape, and why that story still matters when we assess British instruments today.

Industrial and economic histories of the period make it clear that piano manufacture never sat in a bubble. Government controls, wartime contracts, shipping shortages and post war taxation all left their mark on the instruments that survived. What follows is our reading of that history from the workshop floor, informed both by that published work and by the many pianos we have opened and rebuilt.

Before The War: A Narrowed but Complete Ecosystem

By the 1930s, the Victorian piano boom was long past. Cheap imported instruments, radio, the gramophone and the cinema had all reduced the piano’s dominance in the front room. Some factories had already closed. Others had consolidated.

Even so, there was still a recognisable British piano-making ecosystem.

Frame foundries produced cast iron plates for multiple makers
Action makers supplied well-developed mechanisms to both large and small firms
Cabinet shops and case makers produced veneered and solid timbers in a huge variety of styles
Specialist suppliers provided strings, tuning pins, felts, cloths and key coverings

A pre-war British upright of quality is a product of that complete chain. The fallboard name is only the final label on a wider network of skills and suppliers that were still intact.

That is the world that went to war in 1939.

Britain At War: Priorities and Arithmetic

When Britain entered the Second World War, it did so as a trading nation that relied heavily on imported raw materials. Spruce for soundboards, high-quality beech and maple, wool for felt, copper for bass strings, specialist steels, as well as food and fuel, all depended on shipping.

The Battle of the Atlantic turned merchant shipping into a bottleneck. Every cargo became a choice. Grain and oil, guns and tanks, aircraft and ammunition simply had to move. Piano components did not.

Under emergency powers, the state reorganised production around that reality. Industries were divided into those essential to survival and those classed as non-essential. Labour could be redirected. Materials could be reserved for priority uses. Licences replaced normal commercial orders.

Piano manufacture fell on the non-essential side of that line. It was not because music was considered unimportant. It was because there were only so many ships, only so much steel and wool, and an entire country to feed and defend.

Materials Under Control

Timber, iron and steel were moved under strict controls as production was pushed toward ships, armour and aircraft. Frame casting, wire drawing and even the manufacture of tuning pins shifted from normal trade into controlled allocation.

Wool, which in a piano becomes hammer felt, damper felt, and long runs of cloth, was brought under particularly tight management. The Government made itself the sole legal buyer of raw wool within the Empire and limited civilian wool goods to a small fraction of pre-war output. All of that took place before clothing coupons ever reached ordinary households.

For a piano maker that once ordered hammer felt and baize as routine items, this created a hard stop. Only firms with licences for specific models could apply for an allocation of wool felt and cloth. Even then, the quantities were tightly limited.

The same pattern applied to other materials. Firms used up pre-war stocks of seasoned timber, wire and fittings. Once those stocks were gone, there was no guarantee that replacements would be permitted.

A British piano produced in the early 1940s is therefore not a normal commercial product. It exists because somewhere a licence was granted, materials were allocated, and someone judged that this particular instrument was an acceptable use of rationed resources.

Licensing and Concentration

The curtailment of piano production arrived in stages, on paper.

First, manufacturers needed licences to build pianos at all. Limited runs were authorised, often for NAAFI canteens, forces clubs and other organisations providing instruments for service personnel. Quantities were specified. When the run was complete, further applications could be refused.

Next came the formal limitation of supplies. Orders restricted the output of many goods to a percentage of 1939 levels. Excess Profits Tax pushed firms toward government work. Purchase Tax, a kind of sales tax on consumer goods, made any piano sold for domestic use significantly more expensive.

Then the Concentration of Industry Scheme arrived. The principle was simple. Rather than allow many small firms to struggle on half idle, the state identified certain factories as nucleus producers and required others to close and transfer their workers.

In practice, that meant independent piano works being “concentrated under” larger plants. Polishing rooms and case shops shut. Production lines were dismantled or repurposed. Apprenticeships were interrupted. Skilled workers moved into larger, more heavily controlled factories.

Factories did not disappear. They changed what they did.

From the point of view of craft continuity, that distinction matters. A factory that is destroyed and rebuilt with the same people can, in time, pick up its craft lines again. A factory that survives but stops making pianos for six years, while its people and processes move on to other work, cannot.

Piano Factories in Wartime

Piano manufacture requires heavy castings, accurate machining, complex woodworking and careful finishing. Those same capabilities are very useful in wartime.

Machine shops that had once bored through wrestplanks, the dense planks that hold the tuning pins, and machined cast brackets turned to aircraft and munitions parts. Woodworking departments that had built veneered cases and solid frames began to laminate and glue structural sections for military contracts. Case fitters who were used to working by eye and hand were now working to engineering drawings and inspection routines from the aircraft industry.

One of the clearest examples was the de Havilland Mosquito. This was a fast twin-engine aircraft built largely of wood, with a balsa core and thin birch skins. It was designed to use abundant timber and to draw on the skills of cabinetmakers and furniture workers who did not normally build aircraft.

To produce the Mosquito in quantity, de Havilland placed work with hundreds of small and medium-sized woodworking firms. Among these were piano makers such as Stroud, Alfred Knight, Barratt & Robinson and Kemble. They produced laminated fuselage shells, wing ribs, bulkheads and other wooden parts in large numbers, often on presses and jigs far removed from traditional piano bench work.

In some cases, wartime accounts show a striking contrast. Piano sales for a year might sit in the tens of thousands of pounds, while aircraft components from the same factory were worth several times that. Stocks of unfinished aircraft parts on the floor were themselves valued in five figures.

The machinery stayed. The processes and priorities did not.

Labour and the Broken Line of Craft

Materials are only part of the story. Labour is the other.

Under wartime controls, skilled workers could be reassigned to more urgent production. Cabinetmakers went into aircraft and shipbuilding. Machinists moved into armaments factories. Technicians who had regulated actions, balancing hammers and adjusting key travel, found themselves building radio and radar assemblies. In some piano works, whole benches were moved onto war contracts so that the people who had been fitting wrestplanks, setting key height and voicing hammers one month were producing aircraft sub assemblies the next.

At the same time, factories that kept some piano-related work going became more reliant on women. In the early war years, women represented only a small fraction of the workforce in reporting piano firms. Within a short period, that proportion rose sharply as men were called up or redirected and women were trained to run glue presses, assemble cases and carry out inspection work.

From the point of view of national survival, this made sense. From the point of view of a craft trade, it had a cost.

Piano making depends on repetition and on long apprenticeships. The skills needed to fit a wrestplank, crown and notch a soundboard, or regulate a complex action are not learned quickly. They are passed down at the bench from one generation to the next.

Six years is not a pause. It is a generational interruption.

When peace came, not everyone went back to pianos. Aircraft and engineering firms could be more attractive employers. Some piano factories had already been closed permanently under concentration. Others had adopted new products and did not simply abandon them.

The damage was not a lack of goodwill. It was a break in the line of transmission.

After 1945: No Simple Return

The end of the war did not restore the world of 1938.

Britain emerged heavily indebted and physically damaged. Rationing of key goods continued well into the 1950s. Timber and metals were still tightly controlled. The abrupt end of wartime support from abroad left the country short of foreign currency, and exports became a national priority.

Piano manufacturers that restarted production were encouraged, and in practice required, to focus on export markets where their instruments could earn valuable income. At the same time, Purchase Tax on pianos made new instruments for the home market far more expensive than they had been before the war.

During the war years and the difficult period immediately afterwards, much of the “piano trade” in Britain consisted of the movement and repair of existing instruments. Pre-war pianos were bought, sold and reconditioned to varying standards. When new domestic production resumed, it did so into a market where buyers had become used to second-hand prices, and where household budgets were under strain.

Even after the Purchase Tax was removed in the early 1950s, the industry faced new competition for people’s time and money. Radio and the record player had already changed listening habits. Television ownership expanded rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s. The piano was no longer the automatic centre of home entertainment.

In that environment, not every maker could afford to restore their pre-war way of working.

Different Paths for Different Makers

The post war years did not treat every firm in the same way.

Some makers found a clear path. W. Danemann & Co. concentrated on robust uprights for schools and institutions, instruments that needed to withstand heavy use rather than sit in drawing rooms.

Kemble used its wartime experience of laminated structures and large-scale production to build stable, export-friendly uprights that found markets both at home and abroad. Other manufacturers reworked their ranges, introducing smaller pianos for tighter homes and budgets.

Other famous names found the ground shifting under their feet. Some had struggled to secure enough war work to keep their factories open at full strength. Others saw their traditional markets eroded by changing tastes and by cheaper imported pianos. For a number of historic firms, the long-term result was closure, merger, or a shift from building pianos to having them built elsewhere under licence.

Over time, brand identities began to outlive the factories and supply chains that had originally given them meaning. A name that had once stood for a complete London works, with its own casting, action fitting and finishing, might later be found on an instrument built in a different town or a different country, even if the badge remained the same.

By the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese manufacturers such as Yamaha and Kawai were building pianos in modern factories designed from the ground up for the post war era.

They invested heavily in tooling, process control and quality management. Their instruments were consistent, reliable and competitively priced.

British factories working in older buildings, often with less access to new capital, found it difficult to match that combination. Some continued to produce fine pianos. Others entered long periods of underinvestment. One by one, the larger plants closed, and large-scale domestic manufacture faded.

What This Means for the Pianos We See Today

For us, as a modern workshop and retailer, this history is not background colour. It is part of how we assess every British instrument that comes in.

There are broad phases that matter.

Pre-war instruments belong to a complete domestic ecosystem, with stable supplier networks and long, unbroken lines of craftsmanship
Wartime and immediate post war instruments sit in a period of constraint, when materials were rationed, skills were displaced, and factories were still working out how to make pianos at all, alongside or after war contracts
Later post war instruments reflect a mix of recovery, new materials, cost pressures and, eventually, the slow unravelling of large-scale British manufacture

Within those phases, each maker has its own story. Some returned to strong, consistent production relatively quickly. Others took longer to regain their footing. Some brands kept standards high in certain ranges while cutting corners elsewhere. Over time, string wire changed, hammer felts changed, veneers and finishes changed, action designs were revised, and sometimes simplified.

Two pianos that carry the same name and model badge but are separated by twenty years can be very different under the lid. On paper, the scale may be the same. In practice, the frame alloy, the wire, the hammers, the action parts and the casework may all reflect a different industrial moment.

It is therefore not enough to say “pre-war good, later bad” or to apply any other simple rule. The right instrument from the right maker in the right year can be a superb proposition. A superficially similar example from a different phase in the same company’s life can be underwhelming.

The name on the fallboard and the model designation are important. So are the date, the factory that built it, the phase that factory was in and the materials it had to work with at that time.

These are not matters of sentiment. They are structural.

How we work with this at Sykes & Sons Pianos

When we decide which British pianos to buy, restore and stand behind, this history is not an afterthought. It is part of the checklist.

We are not only asking what name is on the fallboard. We are asking when the instrument was built, what phase the maker was in at the time, which factory or workshop actually produced it, and what that era usually looks like once the panels are off. Over the many years of handling hundreds of British pianos from many different decades, you start to recognise patterns. Certain details on the case, the frame or the fittings tell you more or less where you are in a maker’s story before you have even lifted the lid.

We do not publish a chart of favoured and avoided years for each brand.

The judgment about periods, factories and models is part of the value customers come to us for. What we can say is that not every phase of every maker is represented here.

Some periods we pursue actively, others we pass over, and that varies by brand and model.

For customers, the reassurance is simple.

If a British piano appears on our website or in our workshop, it has already been filtered through that knowledge. Decisions about era, construction and long-term behaviour have been made carefully at our end, drawing on workbench experience that is specific to Sykes & Sons and to the instruments we see every day.

It is easy to sell a piano.

It is harder to understand it.

The Second World War and its aftermath not only reduced the number of British makers. They changed what those makers could put into their instruments, and how long it took them to rebuild what had been lost. Understanding that context is one of the reasons we are trusted as a specialist workshop for British pianos, and it continues to shape every instrument we are prepared to offer.