Some years back, Kate and I were in Morden for the Corn and Apple Festival. We happened to wander into a combined antique store and cafe, where Kate spotted this little ukulele on a shelf. It didn’t quite look like the ukes we mostly see these days, and it only had two strings on it; but the strings were gut – also something we don’t often see any more. The bridge had apparently come off at some point, and been replaced crooked, so when I took it up to the counter and showed that to them, I was able to talk them down to a very good price.

My new treasure had a lot of features which suggested that it was quite old, and Hawaiian-built. First, the body was very slender and deep-waisted, more like the machete that was the ukulele’s forebear than like later ukes. Also, it didn’t have a separate fingerboard; the frets were set directly into the top of the neck, which was flush with the soundboard. And the back continued out over the heel rather than being flush with the sides at that point. This style of construction lends itself more to hand building rather than machine work. “Rope” style purfling was used for the rosette, binding, and a double row down the centre of the neck top. The tuners were simple wooden friction pegs. These are all features of ukuleles built in Hawaii during the last years of the nineteenth century and the first year of the twentieth.

 But there were other features that didn’t fit with this picture. for one thing, Hawaiian-built instruments of this period were almost without exception built of koa wood. In Hawaii, koa was the domestic wood, easily available and affordable in those days. This uke was made of mahogany, which would have had to be imported. Also, the label inside says “Genuine Conservatory Quality” – not at all the sort of label you’d expect to find in a Hawaiian-built uke.

I did some hunting on line, and found that the “Genuine Conservatory Quality” brand was used by the Samuel Osborn Company, which existed between There was an enormous demand for ukuleles,1916 and 1922. This time period coincided with the first great ukulele wave, following the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, when Hawaiian music became a huge fad in the United States. There was an enormous demand for ukuleles, and musical instrument companies would have been scrambling to fill that demand. At the same time, many Hawaiian people were emigrating to the mainland looking for job opportunities. So it seems to me that this ukulele may have been built in the mainland states, by a Hawaiian luthier contracted by the Osborn company to fill the gap until Osborn had their factory set up to mass-produce ukes. Seems a reasonable guess to me, anyway.

In any case, for some reason I fell in love with this little uke. It doesn’t often get played, but when I look over and see it hanging on the wall, it always brings a smile to my face.