refugees in the family

In my Every Picture series, we met Luise Faust from the East Prussian patchwork family as a young woman in 1925 and then later in life meeting up with her sisters Auguste and Hanna in Luise's garden at Lippstadt. We didn't know anything about her life other than that she had a husband and three children.

Looking up an address book of Lippstadt from 1951, we now found out that we had Luise's married name wrong, it was Hieske (not Hießke). The addressbook lists her husband Adolf Hieske as a pensioner.

With this additional information, some googling revealed that the Hieske family did not move westwards in the 1920s like the other two sisters did. They stayed in East Prussia and had to flee from there at the end of the war, which is why we find them in a refugee camp in Copenhagen in 1946. This lovely handwritten list notes that their son, Herbert Otto Hieske was born 15.4.1932 in Klein-Nuhr, Kr. Wehlau, Ostpreussen, baptised at an unknown date in the same place, and received confirmation 10.11.1946 in the refugee camp. There is a whole database of names of refugees in Denmark here.

Reading up on the little-known history of these refugee camps (eg here), we found out that at the time of Germany's capitulation there were some 250,000 refugees (plus 300,000 soldiers) in Denmark. The Allies allowed the soldiers to return to Germany but not the refugees - they were detained in camps and many of them remained stuck for several years, with the last ones returning in February 1949.

From 1946, the British Occupation Zone in Germany allowed refugees from Denmark in if they had family members livingin the zone already, which was the case for Luise (as both her sisters lived in Duisburg-Hamborn, having migrated westwards in the 1920s). Still, it appears she and her son (and possibly her husband too) were still in Denmark in November 1946. According to her nephew, Luise also had another son and a daughter, but we know nothing else about them.

I think we don't have any other photos of Luise apart from the three I've already used in the blog entries linked above, but I've made a new edit of the portrait of young Luise, improving the contrast and the crop:

30 years of climate failure

I get a bit of an anger management problem around the time of year when another COP climate summit confirms that humanity has spent another year not doing anything to stop the climate catastrophe. Even worse when it's a round number, like this year's COP30 marking three decades of failure to even stop emissions from rising, never mind reducing them. I think my first COP-related article was this one on the preparations for COP15 in Copenhagen (2009). We still had hope back then.

By way of therapy, I channel that anger into a vaguely climate-related feature. This year's climate-rage writeup is about the Lancet climate report on the health impacts of the climate catastrophe. Obviously depressing, but then again it is also refreshing that the Lancet authors name the acute dangers we're facing loud and clear whereas the normal media coverage has all but given up on this emergency.

So, well, I've calmed down and my feature is out now:

An unhealthy climate

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 23, 1 December 2025, Pages R1127-R1129

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The city of Belém, shown in this satellite view, is surrounded by Amazonian rainforest. (Photo: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

a fiddle with a whistle

Pirate Luthier update

An old violin came in for some TLC and a new set of strings, after decades spent in decorative service on a wall. It carries the label of a luthier called E.R. Pfretzschner in Mittenwald, which got me all excited because that is the most famous place in Germany for good violins.

However, if you look through the other f-hole, it also has a label from Scherl & Roth in Cleveland Ohio, stating that the instrument was "constructed and shop adjusted to MENC specifications" in August 1964. They were a major supplier of instruments for educational settings in the 1960s and 70s.

Looking for Pfretzschner, that doesn't seem to be a famous Mittenwald name and all mentions I can find are relating to instruments handled by Scherl & Roth. Which kind of begs the question how much of the manufacturing was made in Mittenwald and how much in Cleveland. Forum posts about the Pfretzschner violins note that they are heavy built. I popped this one on the kitchen scales and confirmed that it is 35g heavier than eg my favourite violin 22). That's 7% (523 vs 487g).

Speaking of US-German cooperation, it is also interesting that Scherl & Roth was apparently a spin-off from the German violin maker family of Ernst Heinrich Roth, originally from Markneukirchen (a historic hotspot for more affordable violins) but after 1945 translocated to Bubenreuth. See their history page here.

The instrument is ok overall and in good condition, but the neck is curved upwards more than it should be, meaning that even though the strings are at the right height at both ends, they are too high above the finger board in first to third position, so it is harder to play than it should be.

I guess a professional luthier would take the neck apart and straighten it out, but that would be expensive and might exceed the value of the restored instrument. Come to think of it, maybe scraping off a couple of millimetres at the top end of the fingerboard and lowering the nut might also do the trick.

Photo before I replaced all the strings:

When taking the photos I noticed it has a weird metal thing in the tailpin but I couldn't think what it might be.

When I took off all the strings and pulled out the tailpin and looked at it from both ends, I realised it houses an A440 tuning whistle, which was a new concept to me. Apparently it was common practice at Scherl & Roth though, according to this forum discussion. Given the prominent role of that company in supplying violins for education, I now imagine unruly school orchestras with random toots coming from the violin section.

 

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 10) is the 3/4 sized one with a broken neck and traces of multiple repair attempts, which I've now repaired. I kept it for a couple of months to check the neck stays in place, then gave it away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 13) is still broken

violin 14) is a half-size Lark which I gave away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 15) is a 3/4 size Stentor student 2, which I gave away to a local school in October 2024

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. I have labelled this one as an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy, still my favourite, although I'll have to fix that crack at some point. Because of the crack I play it only at home and take number 24 to sessions.

violin 23) is a nameless student violin I bought from a charity shop. It looks unused but had no strings, so I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with another violin. It turned out to be no trouble at all and sounds ok for an instrument that looks really cheap (with the purfling painted on). It now lives with a young cellist in my neighbourhood who is keen to learn the violin as a second instrument.

violin 24) is the densely cratered one I found lying on a chair at Oxfam, and which I currently play at sessions.

violin 25) is the fleamarket find from Neuss

violin 26) is the lady in red, which has now rejoined its family.

violin 27) is the Czechoslovakian student model

violin 28) is the black one I found three minutes before number 29), so they're basically twins. It has now found a new home.

violin 29) is the odd-size one with the lovely rosewood tailpiece

violin 30) is the one with the lovely case which still awaits repair

violin 31) is the one with the whistle shown above

Balance of violins as of 29.11.2025:
Of the 31 violins listed above, 8 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 16 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, flea markets, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 3 taken in for repair only and returned to their families, one taken in for repair but not done yet.
Of the 27 acquired, 8 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 1 given away via a neighbourhood mailing list, 1 given to a folkie friend, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 11 currently in house and ready to play, 2 in house and still broken.

List of other instruments in the pirate luthier series:

cello 1) is the one I bought for my own use when old Heinrich moved out. As I changed the setup quite a bit, it does get a number.

cello 2) is a 3/4 instrument with a serious crack which I received via freegle, still awaiting repair.

cello 3) is the old German cello that I rescued and repaired. I'm now playing this daily at home while keeping number 1) in the bag for weekly orchestra use.

an old Irish banjo

guitar 1) is the 100 year-old one from Valencia which I set up with frets and strings and handed back to its owner.

guitar 2) is one I spotted in a charity shop "sold as seen" for a very affordable price with nothing more than a broken string, and I bought and repaired it because I knew the owner of the next one needed one while their guitar was out of service.

guitar 3) had a broken neck which I glued back on with hide glue at the same time when I repaired violin 10). It has now returned to its family.

the zither I found at the flea market in Dusseldorf.

and finally a shout-out to our family-built hammered dulcimer, which dates from 2016, long before I got any ideas about violins.

thinking about AI

I'm torn between thinking that generative AI (in the shape of ChatGTP and such like) is a fundamentally bad idea that will accelerate our demise and, alternatively, that it is just a silly hype that will pass. It was therefore really instructive to read this book which offers background on the history of AI and a balanced view of the present overhyped situation. Turns out that the author, with decades of experience in this field, is also unsure as to whether AI will be our ruin. Oh well. Still worth reading though.

How to think about AI - a guide for the perplexed
Richard Susskind
OUP 2025
ISBN: 9780198941927

Alternatively, read my long essay review of the book which is out now in the November issue of C&I:

AI for the perplexed

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 11, November 2025, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

OUP

a chemist's art collection

On the second-last full day of my recent trip to Germany I accidentally discovered a catalogue of the Ziegler collection, a corpus of more than 100 20th century paintings collected by Nobel laureate Karl Ziegler (as in Ziegler Natta catalyst), his wife and their children. Ziegler held the patent for a process that is used globally to make plastics like polyethylene, so with the royalties from that, the Zieglers were able to decorate their home with original art.

I must have seen his name on labels back in the 1980s, when visiting exhibitions of painters like Karl Schmidt-Rotluff or Christian Rohlfs eg at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, and more recently at the big Marc/Macke exhibition at Bonn in 2014. But I completely missed the memo when the collection got its permanent home at the Kunstmuseum Mülheim, now housed in the former central post office of that city, where it can be seen in various reshuffles. The museum was closed for renovations for a few years until May 2024, but I also missed the memo when it reopened. So after finding out about it rather belatedly, I obviously had to visit on the following day.

Currently they are showing part 1 of a 2-part (or more?) exhibition showcasing the Ziegler collection, with Nolde, Klee and Feininger being the stars this time. The special exhibition is housed in a suite of six rooms, with three dedicated to Nolde, one each to Klee, Feininger and the Zieglers.

This exhibition runs until January 11, 2026. From February, part 2 will be focused on the works of Marc and Macke. One of my favourite works in the first exhibition is Lyonel Feininger's Roter Turm II:

Wikipedia

I also loved Klee's Seiltänzer, 1923 and Deutsche Stadt BR., 1928, along with most other things on show. I was a bit grumpy that they didn't show all of the 115 works at once, that would be quite spectacular (it's worth buying the catalogue to see them all at once!). I'm looking forward to seeing all of the 15 Macke paintings in the second exhibition, they make a very impressive set (wheras Franz Marc is less well represented in the collection and their fellow Blue Rider Kandinsky is surprisingly absent). The thing to remember about the collection is that the Zieglers very much chose pretty pictures to decorate their home. Luckily they had good taste (from my point of view) but when browsing the entire catalogue, the dominance of the decorative and the absence of challenging abstract art like, for instance, Kandinsky's are quite obvious. Also, the collection is very German, so no Chagall, van Gogh, Miro, Braque, Picasso, although some of these artists are represented elsewhere in the museum's collection. (I seem to remember from the history bits written on the staircase walls that the museum lost 90% of its collection to a fire during WW II, which would explain why their holdings outside the Ziegler collection are quite limited.)

PS there is a recent Chiuz article on chemists as art collectors which includes a short biography of Ziegler, but no more than you would find in his German Wikipedia entry as well. The other example that also occurred to me is also covered, namely Alfred Bader, of Aldrich chemicals, whose art works were featured on the covers of Aldrich catalogues back in the days (before they were swallowed by Sigma).

prehistoric women ruled

While reporting on the revolutionary findings coming out of the sequencing of ancient DNA in the last two decades, I have occasionally come across the cases of buried bodies assumed to be male because they were associated with insignia of a warrior or a ruler, but then proven to be female by their DNA analysis. Which is always heartwarming but doesn't necessarily provide enough material to base a feature on.

Now the field progresses from individual genomes to systematically sequencing entire cemeteries and compiling family trees of humans who lived many millennia ago. Therefore we can now move beyond the stage of identifying single ancient women in apparent positions of power to looking at networks, such as matrilinear families, where the association with land and property appears to have been passed on in the female line.

Recent research into ancient genalogies has revealed several examples of such matrilinear groups (which may or may not have been matriarchies too), enough to base a feature on, which also highlights some of the unique women in roles previously assumed to be reserved to males.

My feature is out now:

Recognition for prehistoric women

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 22, 17 November 2025, Pages R1065-R1067

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

If I have crunched my numbers correctly, this is the 350th feature in this format, since I accepted the challenge to provide a feature for every issue, back in February 2011. I missed a couple of issues in the first few months, then one in 2014 and one in 2017.

The widespread use of ancient DNA sequencing to archaeological finds is now showing that women may have been more influential in some societies than hitherto appreciated. The photo shows excavation work at a burial site attributed to the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe in southern Britain.
(Photo courtesy of The Durotriges Project and © Bournemouth University.)

becoming Franz K

Some thoughts on

Franz
by Agnieska Holland
Czech Republic 2025

We know Franz Kafka through so many reflections and distortions that the cultural phenomenon has long outgrown the real life writer and his work. Everything imaginable and its opposite has already been written about him so I don't need to feed the AI bots with more of that. Like everybody else on the planet, I have read more words about him than by him. Agnieszka Holland's film is also about the cultural phenomenon at least as much as about the person.

What I find really interesting is the reflected light falling on the other people in his life. I've always been a huge fan of Milena Jesenská, who only turns up quite late in this movie, and not quite like I had imagined her. I do recommend her journalism work,a selection of which I read a couple of years ago and forgot to review. I just saw that a new German version has been published (after the copyright expired) with a hefty 400 pages and a new title (see the cover below) - my copy only had 300. It's such a shame her letters to Kafka went missing. After seeing the movie, I've started reading his letters to her (in an edition I remember seeing on my parents' shelves when I was a child).

It was interesting to discover Felice Bauer, of whom I only knew the name, as well as Kafka's favourite sister, Ottla, who steals the show throughout the movie. The last lover, Dora Diamant is missing here, but she had a whole movie for herself (Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens (The glory of life)), which I sadly missed when it came out last year.

The other fascinating character in this story is the city of Prague. Luckily the city hasn't changed much since he was alive. All the important buildings in Kafka's life are still standing, enabling the director to jump back and forth in time effortlessly. Interestingly, the small and isolated German language community of Prague had an amazing run at producing writers in that generation, including Rilke, born 1875, Kafka, 1883, Egon Erwin Kisch, 1885 and Franz Werfel, 1890.

The movie poster used in Germany. Is the hand-written K part of the title or just a decorative element? Some sources cite the title as Franz, others as Franz K. Note that the sliced head echoes a metal sculpture of his head on display in Prague outside one of the (at least two) Kafka museums there. That sculpture also makes a brief appearance in the film.

The other important question is: will it get a UK release? Given Kafka's unbeatable brand recognition, I would expect it does, but I'll slap on my "films not shown" tag until that release is confirmed. Come to think of it, The glory of life, which came out in time for the centenary of Kafka's death, hasn't had a UK release yet. So maybe even the name Kafka doesn't guarantee a release these days ...

Heck, I even have a kafka tag, due to the fact that I visited Prague a couple of times when this blog was young and still had illusions ...

Review in epd-film

The new(ish) edition of Milena's journalism work (from 2020). I'm finding it rather hard not to buy the book when she looks at me like that, but I'm trying to establish whether there is anything in there that I don't have in my older collection of her writings (Alles ist Leben, published 1984 and republished several times with the same photo on the cover).

an oud from Syria

A few years ago, before I got obsessed with fixing fiddles, I found a lovely oud on gumtree. I was told it was made in Syria by a well-known maker around 2000. Back then, I didn't quite get my head round to learning to play it but I reckon now that I have figured out how to play folk tunes on the fiddle I should try again. It also helped that I saw a very inspiring oud recital by Wassim Mukdad (also from Syria) at the JDP in October. If in doubt, I could always tune it as a fiddle ...

So it looks like this:

And here's the label - a helpful facebook friend kindly translated it for me:

Oud Al-Sharq Al-Asil (which means “The Authentic Eastern Oud”)
Made by Mohammad Sobhi & Sons
Damascus – Jobar
Hammama Jadbani Awwal (a local area or landmark name)

A practical consideration: it came in a very heavy hard case, additionally protected by a soft bag inside the case. I now worked out that the oud with the soft bag fits inside my cello bag, so it is actually transportable. Which means I might try it in the slow session ...

ants in the anthropocene

We know that various groups of insects are declining, and we tend to worry about them if they are beautiful butterflies or busy bees, but we wouldn't normally think of ants as being at risk. A recent paper has shown, however, that the diversity of ant species in island habitats is declining, which may be a warning sign for ant biodiversity everywhere. A big part of the problem is that those ant species that are best adapted to cope with human-made disruptions are spreading everywhere and displacing the ones that are less robust to the impacts of the anthropocene.

So this has been a good reason to look at those disappearing ants and the kind of ecosystem functions that we may lose when they go.

My feature is out now:

Ant diversity at risk

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 21, 3 November 2025, Pages R1029-R1031

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The study of ant biodiversity and population declines in Fiji made use of museum specimens like these.
(Photo: Peter Ginter (CC BY).)

origins of Summertown

Some thoughts on:

The Butcher, The Tailor, The Picture-Frame Maker...
Stories of Middle Way
Gareth Winrow
The Book Guild 2023

The author investigates the history of the house he lives in and the land it stands on, which is interesting to me because it happens to be in Oxford, and it offers an unusual angle on the history of our city. As a family history researcher, I am also interested in how such projects work for others and how they translate into books. (I've actually used the butcher et al line for a blog entry myself.)

There are some challenges inherent to Winrow's project: His house is only less than a century old. It was built after 1928 on the land of the former Summerhill estate which was auctioned off in 1925. Summertown as a village is only two centuries old and doesn't have a wildly interesting history.

Winrow found the stories he connects to his address not in the actual house nor on the plot it stands on. He looked more widely into the lives of the people who happened to own the land over the last few centuries, along with their ancestry and business connections, making for a vast cast of characters most of whom have only a tenuous connection to the place of interest. The main characters and land-owners are (note that the first four died before the house was built):

• Elizabeth Buswell (1725-1815) who was sentenced to death for poisoning her housemaid and pardoned at the last minute by King George II.
• Henry John North (1756-1831), a lawyer, town clerk and land speculator based in Woodstock;
• John Brain (1798-1855), a butcher who mysteriously disappeared after the death of his young wife;
• James Ryman (c.1795-1880), a picture-frame maker and art dealer who befriended luminaries of the Victorian art world such as Turner and Ruskin (no indication whether he's related to Henry Ryman, founder of the stationery business);
• Florence Bocker (1909-2001), the widow of a colonial officer in Burma, actually lived at the address in question for several decades.

All of these stories are interesting in their own way, but I'm coming away with the impression that the house in question is getting overlooked. We learn virtually nothing about it from the lives of these landowners, and it just serves as an excuse to snoop into these past lives. We don't even get a description of the premises or an insight into the original shape and size, before the recent owners built their extensions.

The exciting things mostly happen in central Oxford (eg the picture frame maker's connection to Turner's famous views of Oxford), sometimes further afield, even as far as India and Burma, but rarely in Summertown. Thus, cycling through Summertown after reading the book

To me as a fellow family history researcher it is interesting that all of these characters come with a well-researched family history, but I feel for the general reader this is just a bit too nerdy and burdened with detail. Which explains the publishing format.

My house is a bit older and I have looked into its history only very fleetingly, but I wouldn't quite dare trying to make a book out of it ...

There is a clue in the cover as well, which shows the Radcliffe Camera rather than a view of Summertown.

a lovely case

Pirate Luthier update

This month I rescued an old cello, gave away a violin (number 23), and received one to repair and return, which is number 30 on my books. I also sorted out a lovely old violin that just needed a new string and tuning up, so it only spent 15 minutes on the premises and didn't get inventorised. And I took charge of an Appalachian dulcimer which will need new strings, and about which I'll make a post once I've got a better idea about how to play it.

Violin number 30 came with a stunningly beautiful wooden case, so it's time for another reveal:

It has a massive crack in the front requiring an intervention I will need to practice on a less beautiful violin first (number 13) and possibly also on the 3/4 cello. So it may still take a few months to build up the courage and energy for that, and I'll probably make another post about this one when it's happening.

 

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 10) is the 3/4 sized one with a broken neck and traces of multiple repair attempts, which I've now repaired. I kept it for a couple of months to check the neck stays in place, then gave it away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 13) is still broken

violin 14) is a half-size Lark which I gave away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 15) is a 3/4 size Stentor student 2, which I gave away to a local school in October 2024

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. I have labelled this one as an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy, still my favourite, although I'll have to fix that crack at some point. Because of the crack I play it only at home and take number 24 to sessions.

violin 23) is a nameless student violin I bought from a charity shop. It looks unused but had no strings, so I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with another violin. It turned out to be no trouble at all and sounds ok for an instrument that looks really cheap (with the purfling painted on). It now lives with a young cellist in my neighbourhood who is keen to learn the violin as a second instrument.

violin 24) is the densely cratered one I found lying on a chair at Oxfam, and which I currently play at sessions.

violin 25) is the fleamarket find from Neuss

violin 26) is the lady in red, which has now rejoined its family.

violin 27) is the Czechoslovakian student model

violin 28) is the black one I found three minutes before number 29), so they're basically twins.

violin 29) is the odd-size one with the lovely rosewood tailpiece

violin 30) is the one with the lovely case shown above

Balance 27.10.2025:
Of the 30 violins listed above, 8 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 16 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, flea markets, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 2 taken in for repair only and returned to their families, one taken in for repair but not done yet.
Of the 27 acquired, 8 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 1 given away via a neighbourhood mailing list, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 11 currently in house and ready to play, 2 in house and still broken.

List of other instruments in the pirate luthier series:

cello 1) is the one I bought for my own use when old Heinrich moved out. As I changed the setup quite a bit, it does get a number.

cello 2) is a 3/4 instrument with a serious crack which I received via freegle, still awaiting repair.

cello 3) is the old German cello that I rescued and repaired. I'm now playing this daily at home while keeping number 1) in the bag for weekly orchestra use.

an old Irish banjo

guitar 1) is the 100 year-old one from Valencia which I set up with frets and strings and handed back to its owner.

guitar 2) is one I spotted in a charity shop "sold as seen" for a very affordable price with nothing more than a broken string, and I bought and repaired it because I knew the owner of the next one needed one while their guitar was out of service.

guitar 3) had a broken neck which I glued back on with hide glue at the same time when I repaired violin 10). It has now returned to its family.

the zither I found at the flea market in Dusseldorf.

and finally a shout-out to our family-built hammered dulcimer, which dates from 2016, long before I got any ideas about violins.

where our waste ends up

We do like to think that the stuff we put into recycling bins or return to shops will be neatly disassembled and reconfigured into new products. Unfortunately, a lot of it ends up creating an unsavoury mess in less fortunate countries like Turkey, Ghana or Indonesia, as Alexander Clapp reports in harrowing detail here. Many of the things going wrong with the global waste flows have also been reported elsewhere, but it is shocking to see them all in one place:

Waste wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish
Alexander Clapp
John Murray 2025

For a first impression, read my long essay review of the book which is out now in the October issue of C&I:

What a waste

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 10, October 2025, Page 36

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

Blackwell's