When 14-year-old Bert Smith went to a concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall he was so inspired by the tone of the string instruments he decided to make his own.
It was truly music to his ears and little did he know that in years to come he would be regarded by many as one of, if not the, greatest of contemporary violin-makers and revered by many, including Yehudi Menuhin.
Bert was born in Sale, Cheshire, but moved to the Lakes in his youth where he became an apprentice motor engineer.
He pored over library books on violin-making and, after four years beavering away in a small workshop in his mother’s house, his first fiddle materialised.
Bert married Winifred Kemp and they moved to Coniston, where he started work as a maintenance engineer at the power plant for Coniston Old Man slate quarries.
What spare time he had was taken up by making and repairing violins until 1958, when he left engineering and devoted his life to creating musical instruments.
He died in 1973 and soon after Winifred donated items of his work to Kendal’s Abbot Hall, which (under Lakeland Arts Trust) has now loaned the collection to Coniston’s Ruskin Museum.
To celebrate its return to home turf, one of the region’s top players - Kendal’s Carol Davies - led a special event of music making at the museum.
An instrument maker herself, Carol is a friend of Winifred’s and has owned a Bert Smith violin for 15 years.
Carol – along with her Sinfonia orchestra colleague Martin Yule and Lakes School student Holly Clothier - gave a recital of traditional English tunes demonstrating the whole range of violin playing.
Carol told me she was keen to keep up the momentum, staging more workshops and recitals at the museum: “The craft of violin making should live on and Bert’s instruments should be played.” The museum display includes one of Bert’s violins, plus the tools and materials he used.
Bert made his own tools and with these he fashioned Italian maple for the backs and ribs of his instruments, Italian spruce for the fronts, French willow for the linings, rosewood for chin rests and African ebony for the fingerboard and purlins, and varnished with his own secret formula.
With a background like Bert’s his instruments were precision-made and he stamped his name underneath the button of the instrument, labelling them as Antonuis Stradivarius or Joseph Guarnerious models acknowledging the perfect outline he had ‘borrowed’.
Bert didn’t advertise his wares, but the beautiful sounds of his string instruments reverberated through musical circles far and wide and his reputation as a master craftsman soared.
Musicians relished the tonal quality of his violins and violas and beat a path to his attic workshop door - a creative place for Bert that was in harmony with the surrounding landscape and just a stone’s throw from Coniston Old Man. Many eminent figures of the musical world dropped in, such as Halle orchestra leader Martin Milner and the doyen of violinists Yehudi Menuhin, whose meeting with Bert was televised by the BBC.
The Ruskin Museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10.30am-3.30pm.
For further details contact 015394-41164.
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