Colin Dipper started with two crashed Jeffries.

Dipper concertinas are made, by hand, in the attic of an old house in Heytesbury, a village in Wiltshire, which Colin Dipper says was built “in about 1790, after the great fire of Heytsbury” (his spelling). He told the music retailer Lark in the Morning, in an interview posted in 2017, how he began: “I bought a couple of crashed Jeffries concertinas when I was 14.”

He wanted an Anglo built exactly to his own specification, and when Crabb’s, the Islington makers, would not build it, he made his own. He “left work as an industrial designer and design engineer, left London” to set up the workshop. His son John’s website says: “Since the mid 1960’s Colin Dipper has been restoring and making new instruments.”

It is, above all, a family firm, and a small one by any reasonable measure of size. Colin’s wife, Rosalie, he says, “does most of the woodwork and the fretted metal ends,” and the workshop is named on John Dipper’s site as C & R Dipper & Son; John “now designs and makes his own concertinas” there. The Irish concertina player Cormac Begley, in a testimonial, speaks of “Colin, Rosalie and John’s concertinas.”

The Franglo, and a label from West End House.

Dipper is known mainly for Anglo concertinas, the very type its founder first wanted to build, and for a system of its own: the Franglo, a name from “French Anglo,” suggested by a French melodeon player. A photograph on the Concertina FAQ shows Colin Dipper playing one at the Chippenham Folk Festival in 1995. Customers mention model names in testimonials and reviews, including the Merlin and the Cotswold, along with miniatures and bass instruments.

The instruments carry a simple label. An auction listing describes one as “by and labelled Colin Dipper, West End House, Heytesbury” — a maker’s name and a house name, not a company name at all.

We found no official Dipper website of its own, no prices and no current waiting list, and no dated evidence of its status in 2026; we do not guess. We also did not check any company register. What the sources document is a family workshop, active for decades, whose instruments players name by their makers.

A trade with a long memory.

There are three main systems. The International Concertina Association explains that on the English concertina “Each button plays one note – the same whether pulling or pushing the button,” while “Anglos are bisonoric: each button sounds two different notes, depending on whether the bellows are compressed (pushed) or opened (pulled),” and duets play the same note in both directions with higher notes on the right. The Anglo, it says, “is popular for Irish traditional music and for Morris and other traditional dance forms”; the historian Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin writes that “the Anglo-German concertina arrived in Clare during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.” Dipper’s instruments sit squarely in the Anglo tradition, and its Franglo adapts it.

The concertina’s paper trail starts with patents. Charles Wheatstone’s British Patent No. 5803 of 1829, “Improvements in the Construction of Wind Musical Instruments,” covered the symphonium — which the Whipple Museum in Cambridge calls “the precursor to his better known invention, the English concertina” — and the reference site concertina.com notes it is “The first of the Wheatstone patents to show a concertina, even though the word is not used.” His Patent No. 10041 of 1844, “Improvements in the Action of the Concertina, &c. by Vibrating Springs,” was, the same site says, “The most important of the concertina patents, establishing the characteristic features of the English concertina.”

Much of what we know about the London trade comes from one firm’s books. In 1996 the Horniman Museum in London bought “almost all the contents of the Concertina Museum in Belper, Derbyshire,” more than six hundred free-reed instruments, its keeper of musical instruments, Margaret Birley, writes. “Among the highlights are twelve ledgers from the C. Wheatstone & Co. concertina factory dating from 1834 to 1891,” saved from destruction by a manager, Henry Minting. The ledgers “chart the weekly wages paid to employees such as Messrs Lachenal, Dove, Chidley and Nickolds, all of whom later left the Wheatstone factory to set up their own concertina workshops, in competition with the parent company.” Dipper’s own starting point was a pair of damaged instruments by Jeffries, a maker who left no records at all.

Of the London names, only Wheatstone still has a working owner: Steve Dickinson, a concertina maker who bought it in 1975 and trades as C. Wheatstone & Co. from Stowmarket in Suffolk. Lachenal, founded under his own name in 1858 by a Swiss former Wheatstone employee, made by one estimate about 250,000 instruments before closing in the 1930s.

Crabb, the Islington family firm founded by another Wheatstone employee, traded from 1860 until its shop closed in 1989. Dipper’s founder asked Crabb’s for an Anglo before deciding to build his own.

The Horniman also holds later Wheatstone ledgers, covering 1910 to 1974, lent by the present owner of the name, Steve Dickinson; together, the museum says, the notebooks chronicle production “from 1834 to 1974 — albeit with some gaps.”

Jeffries, the Praed Street family firm, left no price list, brochure or advertisement that anyone has found, yet modern makers still cite its Anglos as their models.

A family name over a village workshop.

Dipper’s brand is a family and a village: Colin, Rosalie and John; Heytesbury; a house built after a fire. There is no slogan, and the instruments are named by their makers rather than their models. The workshop’s own name, C & R Dipper & Son, names all three of them.

For a design guide, Dipper shows how a workshop of three can build a name that travels — into the hands of players such as Cormac Begley — without a website of its own. Compare Suttner in Germany, a one-man maker with a clear online catalogue, and Wheatstone, the oldest name.

For this guide we use a green and a sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, label or mark is reproduced.

Keep Dipper Concertinas’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.