John Scarpe (1882-1970)
In 1981 the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, Suffolk was donated a dulcimer by John D. Scarpe from Ipswich. As luck would have it, at the time, the conservator at the Museum was George Monger, a dulcimer player himself with a keen interest in the history of the instrument.
Through correspondence with the donor’s mother, George discovered that the dulcimer had actually belonged to another John Scarpe, the donor’s great uncle, born on 12th January 1882.
The Scarpe family’s roots were on the Shotley peninsula in south east Suffolk, with John having been born in Chelmondiston. His father Abraham seemed to have a variety of employment but there was certainly a strong link with the milling and baking trades, which both John and his brother Bertram were involved in for a while.
John’s working life took a very different direction when he learned to drive, and by the age of 30 he was working as a chauffeur in Walton, near Felixstowe – apparently there were only two cars in the town when he started to drive! During the First World War he was seconded to the Admiralty in London due to his driving skills. He was chauffeur for Sir Frederick Wilson, the founder of the East Anglian Daily Times newspaper and drove all over England, Wales, Scotland and France in the early twentieth century.
Sometime before 1961, when his wife died, they had moved into Ipswich, where John himself died in 1970.
Correspondence with the family indicates that John Scarpe was not known to be musical at all – in the thirty-two diaries he left, there was no mention of playing music, and there are no family memories of him doing so. It’s not known if anyone in the family played the dulcimer after John, but his son William John (1908-1993) played the ‘squeezebox’ – probably a melodeon.
John Scarpe’s dulcimer
More photos and information about John Scarpe’s dulcimer.
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