
On the trail of Olga Nethersole's Harpsichord
2025-07-20 by Peter Bavington
While I was attempting last year to revise and update the BMO records of the instruments at Fenton House, London, I came across an anomaly: a harpsichord (BMO-1688) that was recorded as being at the House, but is certainly not there now. According to the record—taken over from Boalch 3—it was a single-manual Ruckers harpsichord, acquired by Roger Warner of Burford for only four pounds in June 1952 at the sale of the effects of Olga Mothersole [sic], a ‘Victorian music-hall artiste’.
Of course, there is a Ruckers harpsichord at Fenton House: BMO-1628, a splendid double-manual instrument of 1612; but the history of that one is well established: it is on loan from the UK Royal Collection, and has long belonged to the Royal family. This, if it existed, would be a different Ruckers.
The BMO-1688 record included the comment: ‘Further information is required’. Taking up this implied challenge, I set about trying to trace the mystery Ruckers. My first line of attack was to identify the earlier owner. It soon became clear that her name was Olga Nethersole: she was a famous actress in her day, a contemporary of Sarah Bernhardt and Henry Irving.
Mistress of her own company, producer and set designer as well as lead actress, she undertook eleven extensive tours in the USA between 1894 and 1914, travelling from town to town in her own railway coach. Wherever she went, she made an impact. In 1900, her production of Sapho by Clyde Fitch was closed down by the police for allegedly outraging public morals: fortunately, in the subsequent trial Olga was found not guilty, and the result was, of course, that the play reopened to even bigger audiences than before.
As a result of this and other successes, Olga became hugely wealthy. Why she owned a harpsichord is unclear. I can find no reference to her having any particular interest in music, or to her singing or playing an instrument on or off the stage. However, like most middle-class girls at the time, she had probably been taught to play the piano. Moreover, she was a close contemporary of Arnold Dolmetsch and may have known about his work, particularly as Arnold himself was active in the London theatre in the 1890s and provided on-stage music for some plays. Some of her later USA tours took place at the time when Dolmetsch was making harpsichords and clavichords in Boston at Chickering & Sons.
Having established the identity of the former owner of the mystery harpsichord, I turned my attention to the informant, Roger Warner, who claimed to have bought it at the auction of Olga Nethersole’s effects in 1952 for only four pounds. He was, for some 50 years, an antique dealer, based in Burford, some 18 miles west of Oxford. Among his customers were members of the Royal family and national museums; he became known to a wider public when he appeared on television in the 1960s in programmes about antique furniture.
Warner’s archive has been deposited at Leeds University, so I went to look at it. Unfortunately much of the archive is closed to researchers, but from the rest I established that he had indeed been present at the estate sale, and bought a ‘green painted case Harpsicord [sic]’—not described as a Ruckers—which was said to be ‘now at Fenton House’. This was presumably the mystery harpsichord.
Warner wrote a memoir of his time in the antiques trade, which was published in 2003 by the Regional Furniture Society as Vol. 17 (2003) of the Society’s Journal Regional Furniture, available online. In it, Warner described the acquisition of the harpsichord:
The painted case harpsichord, wanted by no-one, I was able to buy at a cost of a mere four pounds (although it was made by the firm of Ruckers of Amsterdam). On my return to Burford, I sold it to Legge of Cirencester […] He paid me seventy five pounds for it, and managed to get it back into something like its original state, as, over the years, the keyboard had been increased in size by almost a third […] This can now be seen at Fenton House Musical Museum in Hampstead.
It is clear that Warner compiled this memoir in his old age after closing his shop and retiring. He seems to be writing from memory, and he is far from precise in details: for example, placing the Ruckers family in Amsterdam instead of Antwerp is an obvious howler. Nonetheless, the tremendous coup he performed by buying the harpsichord for four pounds and selling it for seventy-five may have helped it to stick in his memory.
He describes an instrument that had had its compass enlarged—something frequently done to Ruckers harpsichords in the eighteenth century. Legg had apparently reversed this enlargement, restoring something like the original compass. Unfortunately attempts to contact E. C. Legg and Son met with no reply. But here BMO came to my aid: a search for ‘Legg’ threw up records for some of the many instruments that they had worked on. One, in particular, caught my attention: BMO-301, a 1645 single-manual harpsichord by Ioannes Couchet, now in the Edinburgh University collection.
This had undergone an enlargement in the eighteenth century, and was reduced to its present compass around 1955: exactly what Roger Warner reported had happened to Miss Nethersole’s Ruckers. Like that instrument, it has a green painted exterior. Legg and Son sold it in the 1950s to Raymond Russell, and it had been given after his death to Edinburgh University, along with other instruments from his collection.
Could this be Miss Nethersole’s harpsichord? True, it was not strictly speaking a Ruckers, but Ioannes Couchet was the grandson of Hans Ruckers and could perhaps be considered part of the Ruckers family firm. But had this harpsichord ever been on show at Fenton House, as Roger Warner claimed? I was aware of the possibility that from time to time instruments had been loaned and exhibited alongside the permanent collection there. Raymond Russell in the 1950s was well known as an expert on historical keyboard instruments, and he had connections with Fenton House, having compiled the first catalogue of the keyboard instruments there. Could he have loaned this Couchet harpsichord to the House?
To try and establish the truth, I visited Fenton House in October last year and examined the relevant documents from the 1950s. I did not find any evidence that BMO-301 had ever been on display there. But Raymond Russell did loan a harpsichord to the house, in 1956–7. It was BMO-175, a French instrument, made by Nicolas and François-Étienne Blanchet in 1730. A postcard issued at the time (image on left) shows the instrument in one of the attic rooms.
Could it be that Roger Warner, knowing that Raymond Russell had bought the Nethersole harpsichord from Legg and Son, and hearing that Russell had lent a harpsichord to Fenton House, simply assumed that the two instruments were one and the same? As we have seen, he was not always very precise about detail.
At any rate, that’s the best explanation I can think of for Miss Nethersole’s alleged Ruckers harpsichord – for now!
This blog is based on an illustrated talk given at a meeting of Friends of Square Pianos, Chelveston, Northamptonshire, UK on 26 April 2025.