H. Edwards
In 2018 we were contacted by someone who had bought a dulcimer in a saleroom and wanted to sell it on. On this dulcimer is a brass plaque with the inscription ‘H. Edwards maker 1891’. This could possibly be the same Henry Edwards whose dulcimer was already well-known to us, but the case is not proven – we don’t know this maker’s full name or where he lived.
However this instrument is stylistically very similar to that belonging to “our” Henry Edwards – which is known to have been made by the renowned Norwich maker Mark Widdows.
The most obvious difference is that the Widdows-made one has a unique decorative pattern around the sound-holes, whereas the Edwards-made one has the standard stencilled patterns, but in every other respect it looks almost identical.
It is therefore tempting to construct a scenario in which the owner of the Widdows no. 1 dulcimer (we know of four others), Henry Edwards from Norwich, acquired a dulcimer from Mark Widdows and then set about building what amounts to a replica. Edwards was a skilled craftsman, but he worked in the Norwich shoe industry, and his skills lay with leather rather than wood, so maybe he worked alongside Mark Widdows with his proven instrument-making skills and finished the dulcimer after his mentor died in 1889, adding ready-made stencil patterns made for the purpose, bought from Woods’ music shop in Lower Goat Lane.
However, I must stress this is all conjecture with no concrete evidence!!
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