John Crabb learned at Wheatstone.

The Crabb family were concertina makers in London for well over a century. According to Roger Digby’s 1978 article in Folk News, the brothers John Crabb, a cabinet maker, and Charles Crabb worked for Wheatstone from the 1830s. John left Wheatstone in 1848, after years there, to join Nickolds, Crabb & Co., which “claimed to be the inventor of the Anglo concertina” — a claim, which we do not repeat as fact.

In 1860 John set up on his own in Spring Street, Clerkenwell — the first business to carry his name alone — and in 1891 the business moved to 158 Liverpool Road, Islington. It passed down the family through five generations: to John’s son Harry, Harry’s son Henry, and Henry’s sons Neville and Geoff. The family traded as H. Crabb & Son, and dated its concertina-making to 1831; Digby wrote that 1981 would mark “150 years of concertina making.” That date is the family’s.

Family tradition also says the business bought the patent for the Crane duet system. We report that as tradition.

A waiting list, and a closure.

The business, like the instrument itself, had hard times and good ones. Neville Crabb told Digby: “In 1960 we had no work and no money.” By 1973, Digby reported, it had four full-time workers and a three-year waiting list, and Digby later described Crabb as “the only maker of quality concertinas in the world” — his opinion, at the time.

It ended within a single generation of that 1973 boom. Digby says Geoff Crabb left soon after 1978, that Neville “died a few years later,” and that the next generation did not take the business on; Islington Council preserved and restored the shop’s facade. The Islington shop finally closed in 1989, after the death of the last working member of the family.

Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: H. Crabb & Son closed in 1989, and we found no business continuing the name. The modern maker Colin Dipper says he began making his own Anglos because Crabb’s would not build one to his specification.

One factory’s alumni.

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.” The Crabb brothers were part of that diaspora too.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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. 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.

Among modern makers, Colin Dipper has restored and made concertinas in Wiltshire since the mid-1960s, Jürgen Suttner in Siegen says he has made about 1,100, and The Button Box in Massachusetts made R. Morse & Co. concertinas from 1999 until about 2022.

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. A Charles Crabb appears among Lachenal’s owners in 1883.

A family name over a shopfront.

Crabb’s brand was the family name on a shopfront in Liverpool Road — a facade the local council thought worth preserving and restoring — and a waiting list that, at its peak, ran to three years.

For a design guide, Crabb shows a family workshop’s brand ending with the family, and a shopfront becoming its memorial. The name stood for five generations of skill, and when no one took over, it stopped. Compare Lachenal, which passed to its employees, and Jeffries, whose early instruments Neville Crabb believed his own family may have made.

Its record is also a record of London’s concertina trade: Wheatstone-trained founders, a breakaway partnership, and a family business that kept going until 1989, long after Lachenal and Jeffries had stopped making.

For this guide we use a damson and a pale pink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, shopfront or mark is reproduced.

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