The Walnut Piano
In June 1996 the IRA did most people in Manchester a bit of a favour. They detonated a bomb, the biggest in peace time history, on Corporation Street, near to the junction with Market Street. The bomb caused that much damage, it advanced the development of Manchester city centre by about 30 years, leaving us with a city centre today that anybody would be proud of.
The damage was so great in relation to the infrastructure that most buildings within a few hundred yards had either to be demolished or had to have fundamental demolition to large parts of its structure. This led the movers and shakers to think that while we are doing this we might as well do that as well. Insurance and investment money came pouring in from all angles and kept the construction industry in business for many a year. No wonder that although the authorities knew who the culprits were they did not have them arrested. Had they not done Manchester and the North of England a great service?
The only building within the bomb’s vicinity that did not get demolished was the Royal Exchange, a massive Victorian monolith which had experienced Hitler’s bombs in 1940 and stood to tell the tale. It was formerly the heartbeat of the textile industry which conducted world wide trade within its porticos, but was now offices, shopping centre and avant-garde theatre. We, as demolition contractors, were lucky enough to win the contract for the complete internal demolition and clean up of this building and so we embarked on two years of hard, busy and lucrative work.
Back at home my fifth child, Paddy Jo or on formal occasions Patricia Josephine, with one eye on her fast approaching second level education, was expressing a wish to learn to play the piano. She was just over eight years old when the bomb inadvertently did her a favour and well into her tenth year by the time the favour was realised.
The Royal Exchange, as I have explained, was high, deep and massive. Nine floors above the ground, four floors below and all sat on a footprint of 60,000sq. ft. As each floor was handed over by loss adjustors and insurance men, we moved in and cleared everything back to structure. Hard and difficult work in the confined spaces in which we were asked to work. We literally shifted several thousand tonnes of debris in our time there.
Some time in late 1997 we were given the undercroft to clear. The undercroft was the lowest floor of four basement floors, accessed by street traffic from a vehicle lift situated on its southern elevation, opposite Half Moon Street. It was a warren of storerooms and service equipment rooms housing heating and ventilating and electrical equipment. The tenants of these storerooms and there was several dozen of them had been permitted entry and had taken out what was considered valuable. Any item they could not remove because of its size had to be bubble-wrapped and it was part of our responsibility to recover the said bubble-wrapped items and place same onto the tenants’ transport. Everything not bubble-wrapped had to be removed to tip.
One day in the first week of this operation, we were given the keys to a long tunnel-like room, full of point of sale advertising boards for a shop upstairs that had once sold cosmetics and beauty products. Struggling through this dusty and out of date paraphenalia and right at the end of the tunnel was a piano with no bubble-wrap around it. I called the Project Manager on the radio, pointed out the instument to him and asked him the obvious question. He turned to our job description and said “if it is not double-wrapped, tip it” Although Paddy Jo did not know it then, her constant pleadings had been answered.
Within an hour of our meeting, the not bubble-wrapped piano was on the back of one of our pick-ups and making its way to our house in Heaton Moor. With a little effort, four of us lifted it off the pick-up and safely installed it in our front room. Helen set to work with damp cloths and polish and when I returned that evening there was this wonderfully manufactured upright piano dressed in the most beautifully coloured walnut cladding, a most desirable object.
A piano tuner was called and enquiries made for a piano teacher. Within 24 hours we had both. The piano tuner said it was a great example of a horizontally strung piano dating to about the 1870-1880 period. The piano teacher said Paddy was approaching her lessons with great enthusiasm. All our hopes and dreams were answered.
A couple of weeks later I received a message from the Project Manager asking me to come up to his office. I entered and there sat a very irate looking matronly figure, who turned out to be the one-time manageress of the previously mentioned beauty parlour. “Where is my piano, I did not think I had to bubble-wrap it” she squawked. It seems, to ease the tensions of the day that rapidly build up in beauty emporia, madame used to visit her dungeoned piano and knock hell out of the ivories until her stress levels decreased. The Project Manager winked at me and enquired as to where we had stored it. I was nonplussed for a second but thought for the sake of everybody, I had better be straight. I explained to the rapidly quietening lady that we had to remove it from its position in order to keep the work moving but we realised that it had value to someone and that we had it in safe storage at our depot. I received a delivery address but no thanks and the following day Paddy Jo was heart broken, the lady was happy and the piano teacher was out of work. However the Project Manager was very pleased at the way he had been extricated from a very tricky situation. But I had a problem how to placate my darling Paddy Jo and how to keep the piano teacher in business.
Longsight, in Manchester, where I spent my formative first 20 years, is a market for anything. If you want it, Longsight has got it. Within hours of me sending out distress signals I was informed of this piano showroom situated in an old mill in Hamilton Road, where I used to play as a kid, climbing its sheer vertical sides and generally doing anything that was just one step from death. This showroom specialised in refurbished pianos and it was from there, having handed over a pocketful of spondulicks, Paddy’s refurbished Walberg piano was delivered next day. Paddy and the piano teacher happy, me teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Paddy grateful to her splendid father, attacked the piano with all the vim, vigour and verve she could muster and 18 months later won the Music Scholarship to St. Bede’s College, in Whalley Range, my old alma mater. This Scholarship payed 50% of the fees during her stay at College. With about £3,000 of a saving a year over her seven years at school that piano owed me nothing. Paddy continued learning and finished up passing her Grade 8 examination which is as good as the normal piano player wants. Mrs Rosamund Meehan, Deputy head of the school and Head of Music considered Paddy to be an excellent musician That piano, the mahogany one, mentioned in my blog posting of 13 January 2012 entitled A Man With A Van, after crossing the Irish Sea the other day is hopefully going to earn some other deserving kid’s parents a few quid as well but it is all down to that beautifully clad walnut piano that we borrowed from that lovely lady.
Tags: Half Moon Street, Horizontally Strung Pianos, Longsight in Manchester, Mrs Rosamund Meehan, Paddy Jo Malpas, St. Bede's College in Manchester, The IRA, The Manchester Bomb, The Royal Exchange, Waldberg pianos, Walnut Pianos