Quarterly 116 Preview: The BVMA's Publishing Legacy
John Milnes reflects on the BVMA's publishing journey since 2000, from the landmark The British Violin to upcoming titles, highlighting the association's dedication to preserving and sharing the rich history of violin and bow making in Britain
The following article appears in the winter 2024/25 edition of the printed BVMA Quarterly magazine, you can receive editions of the magazine by joining the BVMA today. Membership is £65 or £35 if you are a student or still within two years since the end of your training
The BVMA was founded to promote networking, education, and professional development among violin and bow makers. In recent years this has become a busy programme of training courses, conferences to discuss the crafts, and this excellent Quarterly magazine.
Thirty years ago, we decided the new association (BVMA) needed to be launched with a bang – a major exhibition celebrating 400 years of violin and bow making in Britain.
The third issue of our newsletter (March 1996) proposed an exhibition of British makers within two years. What enthusiasm and confidence that this could be achieved! What a clever policy to announce the plan so that it would be embarrassing to back out of it. We’d have to make it happen, whatever the difficulties.
Members volunteered without fearing the consequences. The exhibition opening was fixed for Easter 1998 and a subcommittee set about raising the all-important funds: £80,000 from a standing start (in an association of about 200 members).
Of course, exhibitions open for a couple of months and then are gone. To preserve the information that had been assembled, we decided to publish (gulp!) a lavish 400-page retrospective catalogue: The British Violin. This was ambitious. How to pay for design and printing? Our first decision: we would all be volunteers and donate any profit to the BVMA. The cost of production would be raised from selling subscriptions in advance.
A second decision, and far-sighted as it turns out, was that any profits from sales would be ring-fenced in a separate fund and used for future publishing and educational projects. And that is pretty much how it has worked out.
Our first publication came out soon after the exhibition, in January 1999. A slim, 50-page booklet with the contributions to the symposium held during the exhibition.
Then the big project – The British Violin – in 2000. It not only covered its production costs but made a steady profit to fill our coffers and fund future projects. We learned an important lesson from this publication: don’t print too many copies. The market for these specialist books is around 1,000 copies. Print much more and you end up warehousing a lot of wastepaper.
The British Violin was a cooperative venture. There were three principal writers, several more contributors and an editor. The next venture was very much a solo project. David Rattray from Scotland spent 25 years as instrument curator at London’s Royal Academy of Music and at the same time had accumulated a great deal of knowledge on the history of violin making in Scotland. The BVMA published his definitive account, Violin Making in Scotland, in 2006.
In the same year, The Voller Brothers: Victorian Violin Makers presented the lives and work of three London-based brothers who showed great craft skills and sometimes rather less skill in avoiding the murkier side of the profession: fakes and fraud. Many professional players benefit from the well-crafted instruments produced by the Vollers and, as their reputation spreads, so do the opportunities for misrepresenting other instruments as ‘made by the Vollers’. Publishing a detailed study of what is know about them and their work helps to keep the record straight.
After the Voller project came a ten-year gap. Bill Watson provided the nudge to get us working on the next book. Bill was the last apprentice trained by Bill Retford in the classical bow tradition from W.E. Hill & Sons. In 2010 he was elderly and living in retirement in Cornwall. He would soon take with him a lifetime of knowledge of the firm and its skilled employees. So, Derek Wilson, Tim Baker and I spent many hours with Bill and in the archives putting together a definitive account of Hill bow making. The Hill Bow Makers was published in 2016.
And so, we return to the present day when a new enthusiast for history and publication emerges from the BVMA membership: Stephen Thomson. (Note to members: this could be you. Put pen to paper on what fascinates you.) Stephen trained initially in violin work but developed a passion for bows from 2000 onwards. In 2019 he realized he was having trouble identifying Dodd bows and distinguishing all the members of the family. As a purely personal project he visited a dozen archives looking for original documents. A chance conversation with myself at a BVMA event in 2022 persuaded him that his work could and should be published.
Plans are under way for The Dodd Bow Makers as a companion volume to the Hill book. Add a book on the Tubbs family and their bows, and eventually the BVMA can provide a neat three-volume history of the first two centuries of bow making in Britain.
Watch this space for your invitation to subscribe.