Tony Mullins asked in 990813 MMDigest:

> Do you have any information about a barrel piano player
> from Keith Prowse and Company, Ltd., London?

Keith Prowse are a large theatre and concert ticket agency in London.
They started life in the 1890s renting out barrel pianos to be played
in the street (always called "barrel organs" by the public) and didn't
actually stop until 1952, whereupon barrel pianos vanished from the
streets.  They never made any.

I am told their remaining stock of pianos, five or six of them, were
auctioned off in 1953.  All were at least 50 years old at the time.  At
least one KP-labelled piano (though maybe sold earlier) has turned up
in Spain.  The pianos were otherwise anonymous but were mostly made by
small piano workshops in the Clerkenwell (north central) area of
London, the tradition of barrel pinning having been inherited from the
small barrel church organs made in the same area from 1860 onwards.

A curiosity of the business is that hirers could make as much money
from people asking them to move away as from people who liked the
sound, which was in eternally jangling "mandolin arrangement" style.
Latterly, of course, for most people this took on a "authentic
Victorian London" aspect and became marginally less unpopular.

Some barrel pianos (KP-labelled or not, I don't know) ended up in the
hands of an ordained minister who repaired them and continued to rent
out a couple until the 1970s.  One of these is now in the County Museum
in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk where it is played occasionally.  I don't
think I ever knew his name.  Maybe someone else can tell this part of
the story ?

Dan Wilson, London