My route into harpsichord making was a fairly conventional one for a harpsichord maker – that is to say circuitous! Like most of my colleagues, I think, I did other things first and there were several changes of direction, but one thing that seems to have been consistent was an unstoppable desire to make things.

The plain details are that I did science A levels and then went to Liverpool University to study marine biology. After a year I gave that up to go to music college to study the horn, and after three years of that left with a graduate diploma as a mediocre player with no prospects of playing professionally and no desire to teach. I was lucky after that to get a job with EMI at the cassette factory in Hayes as a transfer engineer – an unglamorous job, copying studio masters on ¼ inch tape onto duplication masters on 1 inch tape. At first there was a lot of classical music to listen to but that gradually disappeared. After eleven years of that I became the supervisor of the quality department, but by then the cassette was dying a well-deserved death and CDs were being produced elsewhere without any help from me. They kindly offered me a nice redundancy package which I used to finance a course at the London Guildhall University studying early keyboard making with Andrew Wooderson. After one year of that two year course I left as I felt I was not learning enough to justify the fees I was paying, and I finished my first big harpsichord at home in the following year. I gradually turned myself into a one-man business which I combined with my other role of being a “GP's wife”. I made several instruments to sell and said “yes” to any work that came my way, some of which was rather dispiriting. However, it was all valuable learning experience and eventually I sold all the instruments I had made, and each one was better than the one before.

To read a longer and, hopefully, more interesting story click here.

Since 2017 Huw has been involved in making a film about his work. You can read more about it here.