Charles Jeffries and his sons, Praed Street.

Jeffries is a name modern concertina makers still cite, and the man behind it left almost no paperwork. Charles Jeffries — born Jacob Charles Jeffries in 1841, died 1906 — began as a brushmaker, then became a repairer and maker, according to a detailed study in the Concertina Journal by Algar, Chambers, Gaskins, Lee, Merris and Williams. He had no formal technical training and never worked for an established maker of any kind, concertina.com says.

His workshops can be traced by address through the decades: White Lion Passage from about 1868 to 1878; 102 Praed Street, near Paddington, from about 1878 to 1891; 23 Praed Street from about 1893 to 1908; then, as “Jeffries Bros.,” the same address until about 1923; and Charles junior at 12 Aldershot Road until about 1930. His son Thomas later worked at Craven Park, Harlesden, into the 1960s, and died in 1966.

His four sons all carried the family name on after him: Charles junior (1862–1953), William (1866–1954), George Frederick (1879–1965) and Thomas (1883–1966). The Jeffries duet system dates from around 1900; the exact date is uncertain.

No records, no adverts — and a reputation.

What makes Jeffries unusual as a brand is the absence of marketing. concertina.com notes that no manufacturing or sales records survive, and that not one Jeffries price list, brochure or advertisement has been found. The name travelled on the instruments and by word of mouth, from player to player and from one generation of instruments to the next.

Some of the story, inevitably, is family tradition rather than record. An oral account that Charles began as a tinker with a barrow comes from family testimony, and the Islington maker Neville Crabb believed that early concertinas stamped only “C. Jeffries” were in fact made by John Crabb — a theory he admitted was unlikely to be provable, according to Roger Digby’s 1978 article. We report both as claims.

Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: the Jeffries family stopped making concertinas around 1930, and Thomas Jeffries repaired them into the 1960s. No firm trades under the name today, as far as we found. Modern makers still invoke it: the German maker Suttner says it designs “according to the historical models of Wheatstone and Jeffries.”

Anglos, patents and a factory’s ledgers.

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.” Jeffries built Anglo concertinas, and its duet system followed around 1900.

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.” Jeffries, notably, is not among the names recorded there; he never worked for Wheatstone.

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.

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.

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.” No such ledgers exist for Jeffries.

Crabb, the Islington family firm founded by another Wheatstone employee, traded from 1860 until its shop closed in 1989.

A name stamped on a box with no catalogue.

Jeffries’ brand is the stamp on the instrument and the reputation of the instrument itself. There was no slogan, no catalogue and no advertisement that anyone has found. Its influence shows in later makers. The modern maker Colin Dipper says he started at fourteen by buying “a couple of crashed Jeffries concertinas.”

For a design guide, Jeffries is a reminder that a brand can be built entirely by product and word of mouth — and that such a brand can survive long after the business. Compare Wheatstone, which left ledgers, patents and a living owner.

For this guide we use an ebony brown and a bone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, stamp or mark is reproduced.

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