1 - Beginnings

Summary

A modern historian has described eighteenth-century London as ‘England's … greatest manufacturing town’. Despite the introduction of steam power and factory production in other parts of the country during the second half of the century, London, with its vast population, its position as the world's leading money market, and its expanding middle-class whose increasing prosperity created demand for goods and services, remained a vital engine in England's economic growth. Further stimulus (especially for manufacturers of luxury items) was delivered by the London ‘season’, when aristocratic households migrated from their country estates to grand houses in the west end of the town for the annual round of parliamentary sittings, court presentations, balls, concerts and marriage negotiations. The diversity of London's workshops was a direct consequence of this complex social and commercial environment. By the middle of the century, an observer could list more than two hundred distinct manufacturing occupations, most carried on in small workshops by a master with a handful of journeymen and apprentices. It is no coincidence that many trades established their workshops outside the City boundaries where they were freer from regulation by the livery companies.

Among these craftsmen were organ-builders. Organs were made in one or two provincial centres at the time (Bristol, for example, and York) but most organ-builders had workshops in the capital. Like other crafts, organ-building was a family trade, maintained by succession and marriage. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the London trade was dominated by the Harris and Byfield families, Jordans, Smiths and Shriders, and (later) Bridges and Englands. Some of these, and the craftsmen they employed, lived and worked in the parish of St Andrew Holborn, and the neighbouring parishes of St George the Martyr, St James Clerkenwell, and St Giles-in-the-Fields to the west of the City. Later they would be joined by newcomers: Samuel Green became John Byfield's business partner c1768 at his workshop in Red Lion Street, eventually establishing his own business nearby (c1772) and going on to become the king's organ-maker; Hugh Russell joined John England in Theobalds Road c1778; John Lincoln, who was living in Fisher Street in 1773, moved a short distance to the west and set up his own workshop in High Holborn c1786. Unsurprisingly, incomers tended to settle elsewhere.