THE EDWARD HERON-ALLEN COLLECTION IN THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC LIBRARY

THE EDWARD HERON-ALLEN COLLECTION IN THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC LIBRARYAuthor(s): Pamela ThompsonSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 55, No. 3 (July-September 2008), pp. 474-483Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512498 .

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THE EDWARD HERON ALLEN COLLECTION IN THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC LIBRARY

Pamela Thompson1

English Abstract The collection of writings on stringed instruments amassed by Edward Heron-Allen came to the

Royal College of Music Library in 1943. This article gives an overview of its history and content and an outline of Heron-Allen's aims and achievements.

French Abstract

La collection d'écrits sur les instruments à cordes réunis par Edward Heron-Allen fait partie de la

bibliothèque du Royal College of Music depuis 1943. Cet article donne une vue d'ensemble de son histoire et de son contenu, et dresse une ébauche des desseins de Heron-Allen.

German Abstract

Die von Edward Heron-Allen zusammengetragene Literatursammlung über Streichinstrumente

kam im Jahr 1943 in den Bestand der Bibliothek des Royal College of Music. Der Artikel bietet einen Uberblick über Geschichte und Inhalt der Sammlung sowie einen Abriss der Ziele und

Leistungen Heron-Allens.

Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943) is now mainly remembered for his book on the violin, Violin Making, As It Was and Is1, despite the fact that this volume represents but one of his extraordinary achievements in the field of the literature of stringed instruments. While some may know of the Edward Heron-Allen collection in the Royal College of Music

(RCM) Library, where it has resided for over 50 years, it is probable that few researchers have studied the collection's contents in any detail. Some libraries may have his bibliog raphy of writings on stringed instruments, De Fidiculis Bibliographia: Being an Attempt Towards a Bibliography of the Violin3, a work remarkable in scope for its time and still well

1. Pamela Thompson is head of the Royal College of Music Library. This paper emanated from an exhibition

and talk in July 2005 to the Heron-Allen Society which was subsequently published in their Opusculum series.

Volume IX. The current article is substantially enlarged and re-worked. I am grateful to my colleague Peter Horton for his contributions, particularly the exhibition labels which informed this text.

2. Edward Heron-Allen, Violin-Making, As It Was and Is: Being a Historical, Theoretical, and Practical

Treatise on the Science and Art of Violin-Making, For the Use of Violin Makers and Players, Amateur and Pro

fessional, London: Ward, Lock, 1884.

3. De Fidiculis Bibliographia: Being an Attempt Towards a Bibliography of the Violin and All Other Instru

ments Played with a Bow in Ancient and Modern Times, London: Griffith, Farran & Co., Limited, 1890-94;

reprinted in London: Holland Press, 1961.

474



THE EDWARD HERON-ALLEN COLLECTION 475

respected for-its comprehensiveness, but relatively few may know the sheer scale of his musical addictions. Heron-Allen was a collector, a bibliographer, and a violin-maker. He was much more besides, as will be related.

Writing in November 1890 an introductory note to the first volume of his great bibli

ography of the violin, De Fidiculis Bibliographia, Heron-Allen describes how the process of researching and checking the entries in that work led to the development of his collec tion. Whether the process of collecting had always been as important to him as the infor mation which the collection provided is a debatable point, but the results were indis

putably important, as he acknowledges:

The result of these labours has been that I find myself the possessor of a library relating to the

violin, larger, I believe, than any in the whole world—the British Museum Library, the Conserva toire Library of Brussels, the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris not excepted—and I am conse

quently today in possession of the sources of more varied and exact information relating to the

instrument than are to be found in any private or public institution at the present time4.

This was—and may well still be—the significance of the Heron-Allen Collection. The collection came to the Royal College of Music in 1943, although we have been un

able to find the precise date of its arrival, an omission which is perhaps understandable if

one considers the disruptions to normal life in wartime London. One can guess that the

collection would not have come to us before probate had been obtained in October 1943. Edward Heron-Allen had died on March 28, and had already stipulated that his works on the violin should come to the RCM in the tenth (of eleven) codicils to his will, made in

19405. It instructed, with the sort of detail on locations that only a born cataloguer might include:

... I give and bequeath the two violins made by me and described in my book "Violin Making as

it was and is" to the Royal College of Music in London for preservation in their museum, and I

give and bequeath the whole of the works relating to the violin and all other books and other doc

uments in print or in manuscript relating to the history and practice of music in general which

are contained in the bookcases numbers thirty and thirty one and also in bookcase number six

teen, in my library at Selsey, and also the autographs and other documents relating to the violins

and Viotti in bookcase number nine (lower part) to the Library of the Royal College of Music

We must assume that the collection came to us complete, although Heron-Allen's orig inal will had appointed Sydney Hewitt-Pitt and Vyvyan Beresford Holland 'to examine all

my private letters, papers and books ... and at their absolute independent discretion de

stroy or otherwise dispose of them ... as they shall think fit'. We can be fairly certain that

they did not exercise their discretion so far as the collection on the violin is concerned, as

we have Heron-Allen's catalogue, which lists everything in full, and little is missing— losses which could be due to later events.

While the collection was certainly accepted by the College, we can only speculate as to

why, barely two years later, the Heron-Allen Collection, together with the C. S. Terry col

lection of works relating to J. S. Bach, was dispatched to the Library of the Faculty of

Music in Oxford, not to return to the College until the early 1960s. One could certainly surmise that the collections would be more easily accessible to scholars in Oxford and

4. De Fidiculis Bibliographia: London, 1890, introductory note, p. viii.

5. I ara grateful to Celia Clarke for obtaining copies of the will and codicils.



476 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 55/3

that they returned when the College felt more confident that it too could provide the ap

propriate facilities for their study. The loan to Oxford did, however, result in some longer term difficulties, as the collection's residence in Oxford resulted in the Faculty of Music

Library including in contributions to RISM some Heron-Allen items. As a result, the

printed volumes of RISM still to this day list Oxford as the location of some of the works, Oxford reports them to scholars as now missing, and only by chance are they subse

quently traced to the Royal College of Music. There was another somewhat unfortunate outcome to the sojourn in Oxford: when the collection was checked upon its return, eight items were missing. A search of the Oxford Faculty of Music and Bodleian Library cata

logues does not reveal them, so they have probably not resurfaced there, but in fact we

have no way of knowing whether they were missing before their loan to Oxford. A note in

the Heron-Allen catalogue does, however, reveal that the Royal College of Music Library had earlier received eight (different) items relating to Heron-Allen, outside his own col

lection, and presented to the RCM at an earlier date, probably when the College's new

building opened in 1894. While the collection, as will be revealed, is extraordinary in both volume and range,

perhaps even more extraordinary is the age at which its precocious collector began his

encyclopaedic work, while also committing himself to learning the craft of violin making. His interest must have begun while he was still a schoolboy at Harrow School, for by 1878, when only 17, he had begun collecting, and by 1879, when only 18, he was already em

barking on his great work: a gargantuan bibliography of works on the violin, a list of any thing ever written on the subject. Despite that, he also found time to publish by 1885 various shorter works, such as The Ancestry of the Violin in 18826, as well as by 1885, at the age of 24, the book for which he is most widely known: Violin Making, As It Was and

Is, itself 366 pages of detailed instruction, commentary, information and illustration. What led him to these interests is not known. Born on 17 December 1861, he came

from a family of solicitors, Allen & Son of Soho in London, in whose firm he was also to

practise for some time. Whether there was any musical talent or interest in his family is

similarly unknown7. But his determination was such that while employed at the solicitor's offices he also apprenticed himself privately to the violin maker, Georges Chanot, in Wardour Street in Soho, in a building which still exists, albeit not as a violin-making busi ness8. The apprenticeship was not in vain, for he made at least two violins which he left in his will to the RCM Museum. Neither remains in the College's collections, although they have survived in private collections and their whereabouts are known.

Just as extraordinary as the fact that he managed to learn violin-making and produce some instruments is the fact that by the age of 24 he felt confident enough to write and have published his book Violin Making, As It Was and Is. Even those who know nothing of violin-making can imagine that it must have had some importance as a contribution to

6. The Ancestry of the Violin: Being a Discourse Delivered at the Freemasons' Tavern on Friday, June the

Second, 1882, to the Sette of Odd Volumes: London, 1882. (The Sette of Odd Volumes was a curious literary din

ing club in London). 7. For further information on Heron-Allen's early life, see Brian W. Harvey, 'Edward Heron-Allen - Violin

Historian and Maker Extraordinary', Heron-Allen Society Opusculum IX, 2006.

8. I am grateful to Joan Navarre, who is working on a biography of Heron-Allen, for this information. See: 'An Afternoon with Chanot: Remembering Georges Chanot, Edward Heron-Allen and 157 Wardour Street', Heron-Allen Society Opusculum IX, 2006.




the science, not just because it was published, but, more tellingly, because it has never been out of print since 1885.

Given what he had achieved by the age of 24, it is hardly surprising that his research and writing did not stop there. His 'attempt towards a bibliography of the violin', as he sub titled the two-volume work De Fidiculis Bibliographia contains a lengthy dedication, nine

pages long, to His Royal Highness, the (then) Duke of Edinburgh, and is highly revealing of Heron-Allen, the young man, his painstaking efforts and obsessive nature. The entire

work, completed in 1894, was fifteen years in the making, by the end of which he still con sidered it 'an incomplete and imperfect whole' and felt a 'full sense of the inadequacy of the result of my labours, and of the many faults, both of commission and omission, that are to be found in every part of it'9.

He goes on to describe the process of its compilation, which is indeed also the process by which the collection was built up:

It is hardly necessary to say that the compilation of this work has been a labour of love, and a

labour of a very arduous character, the most unremitting attention to the book market, and the

most persistent endeavour to track down certain books, having been the first essential towards

a fortunate issue. When in the new year of 18791 first entered upon my task I thought that in a

year or two at the outside I should have reached the ultimate goal of my ambition, and that a

twenty-page pamphlet would represent all the possible effort in this branch of Bibliography.

Today I have before me a quarto of over five-hundred pages, containing over fourteen hundred

items, and I know that I am practically as far from the end of my labours as I was when I wrote

the first sheet of my manuscript10.

He goes on to explain that it is the renaissance of interest in the subject of the violin, amid increased interest in music in general, which has led him to this conclusion. But, he is also enlightening on the process of works slowly becoming collectors' items and on the

process of acquisition itself:

... in Germany the works of Bachmann and Wettengel stood practically alone—and forgotten on

the top shelves of their publishers' store-rooms ... Today these volumes command enhanced

prices, and when a work published prior to 1800 reaches the hands of a bookseller, if it ever gets

into his catalogue, it must be ordered by telegraph by the would-be purchaser, and even then it

is only the constant and favoured customer who can hope to obtain it".

It seems fairly certain that Heron-Allen must have risen to the ranks of the constant and

favoured, as the sheer volume of materials he acquired provides evidence of his determi nation and others' willingness to beguile and satisfy him. As librarians will confirm, it is still the case that you have to move fast if you want to buy anything from an antiquarian or second-hand catalogue.

If Heron-Allen's own words testily to the growth of the collection as a response to

his needs as a bibliographer, then the collection itself is equally revelatory of his all

encompassing treatment of his subject matter. Anything and everything with any connec

tion to the violin or other instruments of the string family is there: instrument making,

history, instructional and illustrative material, sale catalogues, patents, cuttings, the most

academic, the most practical—and the most ephemeral of ephemera. But, apart from

9. De Fidiculis Bibliographia, London, 1984, Epistle Dedicatory, pp. xiii-xv.

10. op.cit., pp. xv-xvi.

11. De Fidiculis Bibliographia, London, 1894, Epistle Dedicatory, pp. xv-xvi.




instructional material, what is not there is the music itself, which is actually very curious.

Was he not interested in what the violin could do, in the end-product of all that crafts

manship and historical and technical development? His interest extended to the perform ers and performance in the biographical and technical senses, but very little to what they

performed. Was it something to which he intended to turn later, after collecting materials and accumulating data for his magnum opus of bibliography? Or did that prove to be more

than enough? Or was he simply side-tracked (as seems so often to be the case with him)

by new, quite different interests and pursuits? Whatever the case, what is missing is the music itself, and there is no evidence of a collection of music and little if any evidence that his musical interests as a listener were in any way exclusively confined to string music.

In fact, the bibliography's publication in 1894 by no means marked the end of his work in the field of the violin, as he still had the catalogue of the collection to complete, a work which he reveals in the dedication in the catalogue also took 15 years of his life. It was

completed in typescript in 1900, but even that did not mark the end of the work or the col

lecting, as there are additions in manuscript which reveal that he added at last 58 items, some published in the nineteenth century, one as far back as 1659, but the majority new

publications which arrived after the catalogue had been completed. The last date of pub lication recorded is 1906. It must be at that point that we can assume that his attention was

finally diverted elsewhere—in just what directions will be revealed later. The detailed records preserved in the bibliography and in the catalogue give clear in

dications of Heron-Allen's meticulous nature and encyclopaedic tendencies. The bibliog raphy, in particular, is remarkable for its time in providing abstracts (often highly de

scriptive, sometimes acerbic and frequently far from objective) for every work recorded.

But, more of the man is revealed in his dedications and prefaces. Both the bibliography and Violin Making, As It Was and Is have dedications to the Duke of Edinburgh. By the time of the catalogue's completion in 1900, the dedication takes on a far more international character. He had by then been made an honorary member (socio benemerito) of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and it is to that august body that he dedicates the cat

alogue, in Italian: 'I dedicate this work, the result of more than 15 years' work, to the Chairman and the Board of Directors and to the members of the Royal Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, as a small token of the great pleasure I had when they asked my to be

part of this illustrious historical society'12. He was still only 39 and understandably proud of the honour.

A simple glance at the number of entries in the catalogue can be misleading. It contains records for 659 items, but this is no way reflects the true quantity of materials collected. In the volumes catalogued as Miscellanea, for example, there are eighteen volumes which contain at least 258 items, as well as 10 volumes of cuttings from newspapers, journals and other sources which amount to 1,598 separate items. We are actually talking about a collection of at least 2,500 items—hardly the 20-page pamphlet which Heron-Allen had

envisaged. Heron-Allen himself described the collection as one containing works relating to the vi

olin. It does, however, encompass much more. While the focus is firmly on the violin, other stringed instruments, and indeed other families of instruments, not forgetting even the concertina, are represented, as is to a certain extent music in the broadest sense. So

12. Edward Heron-Allen, A Catalogue of Books, Pamphlets and Miscellanea relating to the Violin: London, 1900, typescript and manuscript. I am grateful to Giuseppina Mazzella of the RCM Library for this translation.




very varied within these parameters is the collection that it might well defeat description, were we not fortunate enough to have the categorisations which Heron-Allen himself

made in De Fidiculis Bibliographia. These were:

1 Books and pamphlets wholly devoted to the violin:

Its construction

Biographical works and biographical advertisements

Works on varnish and varnishing The history of the violin

The guild of musicians Works on violin music and violin playing Theoretical works, including bibliographies of, treatises on, or music for, bow

instruments 2 Sections and extracts from books on the same subjects 3 Periodical publications—musical and miscellaneous—again, on the same subjects 4 Belles lettres: romances, short stories, poems, dramas, chap-books, children's

books, tracts

5 Methods and instruction books for stringed instruments

6 Miscellanea—catalogues of violin collections, trade catalogues, patent specifica

tions, and many other extracts and miscellaneous items.

The musical literature included in the collection is as varied and extensive as the list above

implies and far too dazzling in its breadth to outline in any detail. What follows is a mere

outline of some of the more interesting items, to give an idea of their variety. There are

works from the sixteenth century onwards, with barely a decade not represented. One of

the earliest volumes in the collection is a treatise largely concerning tuning and especially ratios in intervals in music by Nicola Vicentino and published in Rome in 1555.13 It is a

fairly rare text, not published in facsimile until after the mid-twentieth century, and is

really something of an anomaly in Heron-Allen's collection, although he by no means con

fined himself to stringed instruments per se. One could hazard a guess that he might have

bought it solely for the representation of a string player on the title page, which depicts

Orpheus, charming the animals with his performance on an early violin-like instrument, the lyra da braccio.

For a conservatoire library, the range of early instrumental tutors and instructional

works is a rare blessing, giving a fine overview of the hazards and pleasures of violin play

ing. There is much from the eighteenth century. Hubert le Blanc's Defense de la basse de

viole contre les enterprises du violon et les pretensions du violoncell was published in

Amsterdam by Pierre Mortier in 1740. In this little book, the author defends the viol, then

going out of fashion, against what he refers to as the 'encroachments of the violin and the

pretensions of the cello'.

One of the beauties of Heron-Allen's collection is that he was never satisfied with ac

quiring just one edition of a work if more than one, possibly with slight differences, could

be obtained. Thus it was with Leopold Mozart's violin school, Versuch einer grundlichen

Violinschule, first published in 1756. He acquired copies of all the first five editions. Nor

13. Nicola Vicentino, L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, Rome: Antonio Barré, 1555; facsimile,

Documenta musicologica 1/17: Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959.




did he confine himself to works in only their original language. Translations and edited versions attracted him equally.

Another fine volume from the mid-eighteenth century is a work by Robert Crome: The Fiddle new Model'd or a useful introduction for the violin exemplify'd with familiar dialogues, a fine treatise on the problems of playing with good intonation and the problems brought about by playing in a variety of positions with no fixed places to stop the fingers. The whole book is a plea to violinists not to give up: 'as most Gentlemen are very fond of it. A Great many have endeavoured to learn it, but to very little purpose, for they generally lay it aside. The complaint is the difficulty of learning'.14

Much better known is Geminiani's The Art of Playing on the Violin. A shorter and sim

plified edition of it in English, published in London and dating from aboutl790, The

Compleat Tutor for the Violin, has a rather sad engraving of a lonesome violinist, perhaps experiencing some of those difficulties which Robert Crome highlighted.15

The collection of treatises continues into the nineteenth century with an 1803 treatise

published in Halle. Johann August Fentner's Anweisung zum Violinspielen is another vol ume which seems to concentrate on the problems rather than the joys of playing the vio lin, with its introduction which repeats the words 'Fehler' (error) and 'Schwierigkeiten' (difficulties) so often, that all but the brave would give up before they started.

These serious treatises and accounts of established violinists did not deter Heron-Allen in his bid for total comprehensiveness. He certainly did not eschew the more down market side of fiddling, as is shown in a tiny book dating from 1880 which tells of the

Singular Life and Surprising Adventures of Joseph Thompson, Known by the Name of Fiddler

Thompson of Halifax, who died in 1812 after a life of drink, cruelty to his wife, horse rid ing, and juggling—and not a little fiddling amongst what he describes as 'the wicked nesses of common fiddlers and fiddling'. Eventually persuaded by his wife to stop both the drinking and the fiddling, he embraced Methodism and devoted himself to God16.

Within the Miscellanea volumes there are numerous representations of violinists to supplement the major monographs in the collection. One, the programme for a reception, which Heron-Allen attended, to mark the 50th anniversary of Joachim and Piatti's first ap pearance in England has particular appeal for the RCM as it contains a newspaper cutting with the text of Sir George Grove's speech on the occasion17. Other illustrated pro grammes reveal artists performing in London: Tivadar Nachèz in 1893, 'Senor' Sarasate in 1890, and 'Master Jean Gerardy aged 12V2 years. The celebrated young Belgian Violoncellist' in 1891.

The countless press-cuttings in the collection are far too numerous to recount, but one small tome is devoted almost wholly to cuttings from a range of newspapers from 1890 about the 'Glasgow Fiddle Case'. There is The North British Daily Mail, The Glasgow Herald, The British Leader, The Scotsman, The Scottish Leader, The Glasgow Weekly Mail, The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, The Dundee Advertiser and then, as the infamy of the case spread, a range of national newspapers: The Sunday Times, The Daily News, Musical Opinion, and The Daily Free Press. The legal case is almost too intricate to follow, but the range of cuttings preserved is almost as big a mystery. How did he track them down?

14. Robert Crome, The Fiddle New Model'd, London, n.d. [c.1730], p. 1. 15. For more information on Heron-Allen's treatment of Geminiani, see Robert Donington, 'Geminiani and

the Gremlins', Music & Letters, vol. 51, no. 2, 1970, pp. 151-152.

16. Published in Wakefield, 1880.

17. Sir George Grove was Director of the RCM from 1882 to 1894.




How, resident in London, did he even know that the Dundee Advertiser was publishing ar ticles on the case? He acknowledges a wide range of correspondents and agents working to inform him, but it is difficult to imagine them travelling around the British Isles on his behalf. It is another example of his determination to miss nothing.

The volumes of Miscellanea are inevitably amongst the most diverting and diverse. There is a plethora of unusual and undoubtedly rare ephemera, emanating from far be

yond Europe, as we see from a notice of the Nashville Exhibition of Two Violins by John Coombs in Brooklyn, New York. The juxtapositions in the volumes are fascinating, so be low Brooklyn we have an unattributed illustration of Neil Gow, 'a Scotch Fiddler'. A sam

ple from one volume contains the prospectus of the Tavistock Violin Academy between

Royal Oak and Westbourne Park in London, where, to judge by the illustration, the pupils were principally young ladies. There are trade magazines such as a Bulletin de la Société

d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale, Paris 1824, with a solid tract within on violin

making. It is hard to imagine that particular trade being viewed now as of national impor tance. Then there are advertisements from exhibitions, including an 1885 inventions ex

hibition, which demonstrated a combination violin case and music stand—all for 20

shillings (£1.00). Then there is a whole range of other magazine and periodical articles, some from mu

sical magazines, such as Boll's Musikalischer Familienalmanach 1890, whose rather for

bidding young woman on the cover gives no clue as to the innards which include one ar ticle on the Stradivarius violin and another on Frederick the Great's musical interests. That one volume of Miscellanea includes pages from magazines as diverse as Le petit jour nal pour rire, The Ecelectic Magazine, The Galaxy, The Saturday Magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, Scribner's Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, The

Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, The People's Magazine, Music and School, Good

Words, The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée, The Leisure Hour, and Figaro. Even more intriguing really is the vast number of magazines of more general interest

which, amazingly, covered quite abstruse musical topics. It is hard to imagine a popular woman's magazine today delving far into the mysteries of Louis Spohr, as did an 1884 is

sue of Cassell's Family Magazine. Nor would they necessarily accept, as did the People's Magazine of 1860, full-page illustrations of Lully, with accompanying article. Even more

touching, perhaps, is the inclusion in the Girl's Own Paper of 1887 of six pages of advice on how to care for your violin, surely hardly the stuff of contemporary teenage writings.

There are a host of journals included which claim to take themselves more seriously, in some cases, perhaps, ill-advisedly. Who would think that The Eclectic Magazine in 1866 could seriously devote six pages to an article called 'A Freak on the Violin' on none

other than Paganini. But how splendid that the august Westminster Review in 1833 should

include a lengthy review of a book on the harmonics of the violin. Who would have

thought it? Heron-Allen's devilish appetite refused to limit itself to the adult or the factual. Hence

we have an array of novels and a selection of children's books, including the charming Hey Diddle Diddle and Baby Bunting by Randolph Caldecott, published by Routledge in 1882, with a colourful cover depicting both the cat and the fiddle and Baby Bunting looking more than a little bemused. There are also simple greetings cards, depicting musicians and music.

These miscellanea are described by Heron-Allen himself in the introduction to Section 2 of his catalogue of the collection:




anything that has ever been printed concerning the violin, which is not either a book or a pam phlet with pretensions to literary or artistic merit as a separate and independent bibliographical item. It has been my object ever since 1878 when I began this collection, to preserve and bind

into volumes every scrap of printed matter I could find concerning the violin without any regard

for its literary or artistic merit. Thus I have amassed a quantity of newspaper cuttings, pictorial

and other scraps and advertisements, trade catalogues and leaflets, articles from magazines (in

cluding short stories and poems), programmes of interesting performances, collections of "opin

ions of the Press", in short, everything connected to the violin. The way in which these elements

have been coordinated can only be described by the classic expression: "higgledy-piggledy", it

having been my practice to amass for a year or two and then have my amassment bound in vol

umes according to the sizes of its component parts.. ,18.

It might well seem that all these disparate resources are of only minor passing, and sometimes trivial and humorous interest. But, what gives substance is the fact that they are all collected together in one place. The potential for researchers is enormous, as so

many of these unusual items would be so very difficult to track down individually. So, all this amassing went on for some thirty years and, then abruptly, in 1906, it

stopped. That such an obsession should end so suddenly is indeed curious. But Heron Allen was not a man with a single interest and, it would seem, he simply moved on to other

things. The list of those other things is perhaps even more extraordinary than the tale so

far, and might well lead one to imagine that his pursuits were essentially dilettante. Some were a little unusual in a man of learning, it is true, but he nonetheless pursued most of them obsessively and as far as publication, writing a book on palmistry in 1883, and one on cheirosophy (a type of palmistry) in 1885, and lecturing on the subject in America. He was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

While in America, he also began to turn his hand to writing fiction, somewhat later pro ducing works of some notoriety, one (The Cheetah-girl, written under the pseudonym of

Christopher Blayre) allegedly suppressed for its description of sexual taboos. But, he was also a gifted linguist, and made translations both of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from

Persian, and of an 11th-century work called The Lament of Baba Tahir from an almost unknown Persian dialect. Literary activities apart, he also devoted himself with his cus

tomary single-mindedness to a number of scientific interests—to some acclaim. These in cluded meteorology, auricula and asparagus culture, marine zoology (his collection of

foraminifera, now in the Natural History Museum where he worked, included 25 million

specimens), archaeology, and local history, particularly of the Selsey area in the south of

England area where he lived. The depth in which he studied was far beyond that of the

dilettante, and he is often and rightly described as a polymath. Heron-Allen's own words on his collection and his bibliographical work provide a fitting

endnote:

To bibliographers, historians, collectors and others who it may concern I offer—in perfect con

fidence that they will understand me—this apology: If anyone had done this a hundred years ago, his collection would have been of surpassing interest today. I commend my volumes of

"Miscellanea" to the musical collector and historian of the year 2000 AD".

18. Edward Heron-Allen, A Catalogue of Books, Pamphlets and Miscellanea relating to the Violin London, 1890, p. 162.

19. op. cit., p. 163.




Looking more closely at this collection of late has convinced us that now in 2008 AD we

should ensure that its significance should be communicated and underlined to every

string player, every string teacher—and, indeed, any serious researcher of music and mu

sical instruments. It may well still be the best collection of writings on the violin the world.

The question we now ask ourselves is: why did we not try to continue his work, to keep the collection growing, making it as comprehensive for the last 100 years, as he had made

it for the previous 300? Of course, in some ways we have—books, journals, programmes have all been acquired by the College in staggering numbers. But to have undertaken

what he achieved alone would have needed not only the money he clearly possessed, but

also a whole host of librarians with his single-mindedness, determination, obstinacy, ob

sessiveness and time. It is a pity that we could not have achieved aims as high as Heron

Allen's, but there is much consolation in now publicising more broadly a collection of one

of the most remarkable, eccentric and scientifically learned men of his day. Occasionally, a tendency to the encyclopaedic may justify a lack of formal learning in that in can lead to

the most indiscriminately broad collation of knowledge. Heron-Allen's youthful exuber

ance undoubtedly led him to extremes which now provide a major benefit.



Documents

THE EDWARD HERON-ALLEN COLLECTION IN THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF MUSIC LIBRARY