Duck, Son and Pinker Pianos

Duck Son & Pinker was founded in 1948. William Duck had his first Piano shop at 2 Pulteney Bridge but grew to occupy the whole of one side of the bridge. In 1878, William's son George became a partner in the firm and in 1884 Thomas Pinker joined the firm - thus the name: Duck, Son & Pinker. 

Thomas Pinker was originally employed as a piano tuner but being a man with a talent for business, he was a valued member of the firm. Out of hours he played the organ at a local church and was a member of the Bath Rowing Club.

There are many pianos that bear the Duck, Son & Pinker name and it is difficult to pinpoint where they were made. Some models were made by Skerrett, a better quality model was made by Brasted. Others, from the look of the insides, might have been made by Bentley. Their earlier, straight-strung pianos, may well have been made at the premises in Bath or in Bristol.

The decline of the piano side of the business reflected the widespread downturn in acoustic piano sales across the industry over many years. Today, it is hard to imagine any piano business tuning 5,000 pianos every month but at their height, D.S.&P. really did achieve an astonishing 65,000 piano tunings in a year! They had an army of tuners working from Bath down to Cornwall and into Wales. They had branches in Swindon, Swansea, Bristol, Gloucester and for a while, Weston Super Mare.

I remember tales from the old tuners when I was an apprentice: they were given a bicycle, put on a train to South Wales, and told to go up and down the valleys going door to door for piano tuning work! Those really were the golden days!

Duck son and Pinker was the classic local, music 'institution'. Entering the shop was like stepping into a bygone era. Vacating its traditional Pulteney Bridge premises during the 1980s, the business continued to survive up until 1 April 2011.

Duck Son & Pinker Serial Nos.

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© Steve Burden

Memoirs of an Apprentice Piano Tuner

At the start of my apprenticeship - back in 1973, pianos were still being made in the UK. In those early days I was bewildered by the sheer number of piano names. When the older apprentices talked about these obscure and odd-sounding names, it was almost like listening to a foreign language. Strange how quickly one makes sense of these things. Very soon I was spouting the same in-house piano-speak and relishing the idea of confusing any unfortunate outsider in ear shot.

There was an unofficial rating system of the pianos in the shop - rated by the accumulated experience of young apprentices! From memory, the order from the preferred to the unfavoured was something like: Welmar,  Knight, Kemble, Monnington & Weston, Eavestaffe, Barrett & Robinson, Zender, Bentley. (This order might be disputed by others.)  

I do not remember seeing new European pianos in the shop other than the occasional Zimmerman - but down in the workshop among the apprentices, these were not liked at all. 

The nearest piano factory to where I lived was Bentley's at Stroud. We occasionally passed it while en route to Cheltenham on the A46 but because the Bentley pianos of the 70s were never well thought of, their factory at Woodchester did not particularly capture my interest.

Our workshop was beneath the grand Georgian streets of Bath. We sometimes referred to it as the crypt. The workshop itself had plenty of daylight - about half the area of roof/ceiling was of glass which was likely to leak when the weather was bad. On summer afternoons, while still working, we would gently cook in the sun's heat which was magnified through the glass.

The warehouse/store next to the workshop had no natural light at all and was poorly lit, dusty and full of old pianos in for storage or repair. The air was thick with the smell of bone glue, piano felt and dust - a unique blend of aromas which belongs only in piano workshops.

On my very first day, I was given a job cleaning action parts. The foreman was an older local guy who talked with the broadest Somerset accent I'd ever heard. He asked me a question which even in my extreme effort to be polite I could not decipher, so I had to say "Pardon?" Clearly annoyed, he looked at me suspiciously and said very slowly and deliberately, "So you think you've got good ears then?" I gave the only answer a young boy who wanted to be a piano tuner could give: "Yes!"  

© Steve Burden
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