The early stone of Birmingham Town Hall

Apr 30 2010 By Chris Upton

Chris Upton examines the charming story of Messrs Till and Sons – a trueVictorian ‘rock band’.

In the later years of the 19th Century the Birmingham Musical Association used to stage popular concerts on Saturday nights in the Town Hall. The repertoire was designed to sit alongside the more highbrow offerings of the Triennial Festivals. The standard diet of such occasions was the popular song – but by no means the kind of down-market stuff on offer at the music halls – interspersed with a little light orchestral.

I have in front of me the programme from one such Saturday night in February 1882. Cherry Ripe is there, and Queen of the Night, and a curious ditty called Nickar the Soulless:

“Where by the marshes boometh the bittern,

Nickar the soulless sits with his ghittern...”

Bear in mind the date for this – it’s 1882. According to the programme, the headline act for that particular February night was The Celebrated Rock Band, Messrs Till and Sons.

The 19th century has never ceased to amaze me. There I was, imagining that rock bands emerged in the late 1960s, and I discover that Victorian lead guitarists were laying down riffs 80 years earlier. “Good evening, Birmingham!” the lead singer intones, and blasts into a heavy metal version of Come into the Garden, Maud. The hall erupts; the kids go wild.

Sadly this is not the case. The rock band was indeed invented in the 1880s, but with a crucial difference. Messrs Till and Sons were a rock band because they played rocks. Imagine a line of pieces of stone, arranged like a xylophone. Behind it stand two young men and two young women, each with a pair of sticks. That was Messrs Till and Sons (and Daughters).

It was back in the 18th century that an amateur geologist by the name of Robert Crosthwaite discovered that the Palaeozoic rocks of Cumbria – and particularly those around Skiddaw – had interesting acoustic properties. (Actually this is likely to have been known by Stone Age Man too, but I don’t have their names and addresses.) If it helps – it didn’t help me – the most musical rocks are Gneiss and Hornblende Schist.

Different kinds of stone, he found, had a different pitch. For an age that loved musical glasses, it was not a million miles to travel to come up with rock music. With a judicious choice of stone Crosthwaite could produce about an octave and a half. What began as an amusing novelty for a geologist became, in the hands of the Till family, a musical career. Their career was on the rocks from the very beginning.