Hello All,

I´m hoping there might a whistle historian who can help here.

I have a couple of old whistles which come from my great grandfather. They look to be of the same make, one is roughly halfway between F and F# ( a small F whistle) and the other (according to my tuner app ) about a third of the way between Bb and B. They are made of what looks like brass (or perhaps brass-plated copper, if such a thing exists). The F has a sort of a stamped metal "badge" attached a couple of centimetres above the top hole which reads "Perfect Tune", where "Perfect" is stamped at the top and "Tune" underneath. In between these two words is stamped "M & Co." The "badge" wraps all the way around the whistle. The larger whistle has a solder mark on the back, where the badge, presumably, was attached. The blocks of both whistles look like pewter (at best) or lead!! I´d gladly attach a couple of photos but have no idea how to.

Does anyone out there have any idea about where these whistles were made and when? I imagine they date from the late 1800s or early 1900s and were made in England.

Cheers,
Tim

That's correct. Victorian and a bit after. I thought I had one or two of the M&co ones but can't immediately locate them. I have seen a few. With these whistles it is often hard to tell who made them, it was not uncommon for instrumetns, eg concertinas, at the time to be rebranded and labelled with a trader's name rather than a maker's name. There are a fair few whistles from the period that look identical but are labelled with different badges (or none at all).
It's not easy to find out much about these, I imagine they were not considered significant enough to document, often they may have been sidelines and part of a wider musical instrument manufacture. Some of the larger musical instrument traders can be traced though (Wallis in England or Mathieu in France, for example)

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My brain hurts

Thanks for the info, Mr.Gumby!

copenhagen,

I confess, my curiosity is aroused.

1) Is the tube tapered ? Straight ?

2) Is the tube drawn or rolled+soldered ?

3) to post pictures here, the image can be hosted elsewhere (e.g. DropBox, Google Sites, Google Drive, ...). To post the picture here, use the image-link inside the image demarcations (e.g. [img]...[/img]. (See the "Img" button in the message composition page).

trill

These would be examples of the generic type B and F of the time, the 'perfect tune ' ones I have seen were of this type.

Pitch conventions were different from today's A=440, most (though not all) of these are about a semitone off their indicated keys by today's standards.

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My brain hurts

Mr. Gumby´s photos resemble my whistles pretty accurately - except mine are not in as good condition. I can send photos to you trill, if you pm me your email address. The other stuff is too long-winded for me I´m afraid:-)