Cyril Loynes (1920-1984) and Lucy Ann Grimes (1858-1941)
In 2005, we were put in touch with Jennie Roche, the daughter of Cyril Loynes who had a dulcimer which her father had inherited from his grandmother, Mrs Grimes, from Cley-next-the-Sea on the north Norfolk coast.
Cyril’s daughter remembered him playing the dulcimer in the early 1950s when she was a little girl, but not after that. In 1921 Cyril, then aged one, was living with his grandparents in Cley, as his mother was in London. In later life he lived in the Dereham area, around North Elmham.
His grandmother was Lucy Ann Grimes, who bore nineteen children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood, so it’s hard to imagine how she would have had time to play the dulcimer, or indeed where she would even have kept one in the small cottage where the family lived, in a yard off the High Street in Cley. . In later life she moved to Wymondham to live with one of her daughters.
THe Grimes/Loynes family dulcimer
A diagram of this instrument may be seen on the Dimensions page.
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