This is an alphabetical list of the known historical dulcimer players in Essex.
Names highlighted in yellow will lead you to individual pages with portraits, biographies and photos of their instruments.
The best-known player from Essex was Oswald Stammers from Saffron Walden.
ARNOLD, Reg – Manningtree
David Kettlewell mentioned a dulcimer player by this name from Manningtree, on the Stour estuary in Essex, very close to the Suffolk border.
Reginald John Arnold (1900-1989)was born in Colchester. His father was a shopkeeper and Reg himself ran a pawnbroker’s shop in Manningtree from 1924, which may well be how he came to own a dulcimer. He would have been in his early seventies when David Kettlewell mentioned him, some fifty years later, still in Manningtree. He later later moved to the small coastal resort of Dovercourt, where he died in 1989, just before his 89th birthday.
Nothing is known about his instrument or his playing, or whether Kettlewell ever visited him.
FROST, Edmund or HARRIS, Charles – Brightlingsea
Dulcimer player Oswald Stammers (see below), in correspondence to Russell Wortley, mentioned that his wife’s grandfather had left some diaries mentioning that ‘dulcimer strings could be obtained from the address in Norwich which you gave me.’ The address he refers to is Woods Music Shop, which closed in the mid 1960s.
Oswald Stammers’ wife was Marjorie, born Marjorie Alice Frost (1905-1992). She was the daughter of Arthur Frost who lived all his life in Brightlingsea, the last 50 years at 52 Silcott Street, and Emily Maria Harris, also from a seafaring family. Marjorie’s two grandfathers both lived in Brightlingsea, on the Essex coast a few miles out of Colchester on the River Colne estuary.
- Edmund Frost (1849-1921) lived all his life at different addresses in Brightlingsea, but all in the same small area of streets near the harbour (new Street / Nelson Street). He worked as a mariner and so has been a bit difficult to trace, as he would often have been on board a vessel on census night. By 1915 he had moved to 56 Silcott Street, where he died in 1921.
- Charles Henry Harris (1855-1943) was born in Colchester and by the age of 15 was apprenticed to his stepfather, a master mariner on Hythe Hill, Colchester. He married and moved to Brightlingsea by 1881, where he was employed as a Customs and Excise officer. By 1901, when his eldest daughter Emily was just married, the family were living at 56 Silcott Street and his two other daughters were both music teachers: Alice, 21, piano and Ada, 19, violin. Charles’ work took him to Gravesend by 1911, where both Alice and Ada then found work as book-keepers. By 1921 he had retired and sometime afterwards he moved back to Brightlingsea, where in 1939 he and his wife were living with their daughter Alice and her husband at 25 Silcott Street. He died there in 1943.
There’s no real clue as to which grandfather was the one who knew about the dulcimer parts – and presumably played the dulcimer himself. Two of Charles Harris’ daughters were known to be musical, so perhaps it was him, but there’s really not enough to go on at the moment!
STAMMERS, Oswald – Saffron Walden
STAMMERS, William James – Colchester / Thorington
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