Listen, Listen, Listen /
Professional piano tuner Stuart Croft
Stuart Croft shares fascinating stories of his long and successful career as a professional piano tuner.
that was instilled in 16-year-old Stuart Croft as he started his piano tuner/repairer apprenticeship with Newmans Music in Timaru in 1954. Stuart has taken the mantra to heart and still adheres to it even today, aged 82. It has not only served him well in his long and successful career, but it has meant he has kept a close ear to the ground and enabled him to seize new opportunities as they have arisen.
Stuart could just as well have been a farmer, having spent a lot of time at his grandparents’ Mid Canterbury farm as a boy. When his parents took up farming at St Andrews after several years’ running Timaru’s Gleniti store, Stuart again revelled in farm life, even doing shearing and wool classing courses at Lincoln College, gathering skills in case a farming career eventuated. It was not to be, however. His parents’ farm could not support another worker, so the day after he finished fifth form at Timaru Boys’ High school, he walked through the door of Newmans Music store to start his piano tuner and repairer apprenticeship.
It wasn’t such an odd match – music was a large part of Stuart’s life. Piano lessons had started in primary school; in high school he learned the saxophone and played percussion in school productions, as well as being the drum major in the school band. While Stuart gained pleasure from his musical pursuits his preference was for making things, so to learn to dismantle and repair pianos was just the ticket. ‘It was working with my hands that was the big thing that really intrigued me.’
He had already worked at Newmans during school holidays so had some insight into what he was taking on.
Quite early on in Stuart’s apprenticeship there was a move to Beggs Music Store in Christchurch. While the reason for the shift is hazy, Stuart is adamant, ‘I can honestly say it was best thing that ever happened to me because I was taken under the control of three of the best tutors you could ever, ever strike.’ Jack Salt, Jim Scholes and Ernie Malley all imparted their knowledge.
Jack Salt, the head tuner, drummed into Stuart from the outset, ‘listen, listen, listen’. He could do little else when sent into a room to play and listen to one note over and over. He chuckles, ‘Drive you bloody batty… all the listening to 4ths and 5ths and paying attention to when an individual note was struck how it vibrated.’ Stuart’s real fascination though was working with all the mechanical parts of a piano and as we sit and chat, he shows me some of the intricacies of the piano’s internals. There are hammers, shanks, butts, axle flanges, centre pins, wippens and repetition springs, and numerous other parts of tiny dimensions. With some 6,000 parts to any piano you soon realise there is a lot for a young apprentice to learn.
It was Ernie who specifically took Stuart under his wing. It was Ernie who gave him the task of rebuilding several pianos that had been damaged in a fire at the Beggs Invercargill store on just his second day there! It was Ernie also who sent him to the Beggs factory in Dundas Street to help make ukuleles and guitars. Stuart laughs as he recalls
Stuart’s occupation is probably not one that would immediately be associated with a high degree of danger, yet Stuart delights in telling me stories where his life seemed somewhat precarious.
that at one stage the ukuleles were actually bought by an Australian company who on-sold them in Fiji, where New Zealand tourists would then buy them and bring them back to New Zealand.
Stuart also recalls a particularly memorable trip to Hokitika with Ernie to install an organ in the Catholic basilica. The size of the organ created problems, but a bit of Kiwi ingenuity came to the fore when a bush crane used for logging was located and used to lift the organ off a train on to a truck for transport to the church. As for the logistics of lifting the organ on to the church’s mezzanine – suffice to say there was a great deal of dismantling and a good deal of praying. Prayers were again said when Stuart, with the enthusiasm of youth, assured Mother Mercedes of the Sisters of Mercy that Ernie and he could shift a grand piano from the upstairs of the convent into an assembly hall. Mother
Mercedes had been advised it would take a crane and the removal of a window. With the appropriate preparation, a small team managed to successfully coax the piano down the stairs with less than a centimetre to spare. Again Stuart laughs with the memory of his surprise that Mother Mercedes had let the nuns come out of seclusion for the occasion; they had lined up, bowed their heads, and prayed while the piano came down the stairs.
As Stuart became more proficient with piano tuning, he was able to bike around Christchurch to people’s homes to tune. He reckons he knew every street in Christchurch at one time. The home visits were an eye-opener, he was never sure just what he would be facing. Whether it be the home down the long driveway where the butler met him at the door, the housekeeper checked on him, the cook provided him with refreshments and he drank sherry and cake with
the lady of the house after tuning the Bechstein grand piano on Christmas eve, or something at the opposite end of the spectrum. Stuart still remembers one house in particular.
‘Here are the mice running across the floor and I walked in and here was this magnificent Brinsmead piano, you’d have thought they had just taken it out of the box ’cos she had polished it and only three notes on the whole piano played because the mice had got into it and had absolutely ruined it.’
Having received his ‘piece of paper’ after the requisite training, Stuart continued to apply his mantra and kept his ear to the ground, listening out for any new opportunities. This led to him taking a post at the Beggs store in Greymouth for five years. His territory covered from Karamea to Franz Josef. A shift to Timaru was the next and only other move when Stuart got wind of an opening at the Beggs store there.
It was to be in Timaru that Stuart started a new chapter in his career, going out on his own as a piano tuner and repairer and sound technician. The 1970s saw an upsurge in bands playing at every hotel and advances were being made in sound systems. Stuart had been selling guitars and sound equipment at the Beggs store when at a function in Timaru’s
Caroline Bay Hall he noticed the ‘sound system was rubbish’. There and then he decided that he would strike out in this new direction. He laughs now at the sound gear he started with, but he reckons it was still better than he had heard at the Bay Hall. Of course, once again his mantra came to the fore as he filtered and controlled the sound for all the different people speaking. Stuart gradually built up a base of regular conferences and events and travelled anywhere from Invercargill to Hamilton. A particular highlight was the 454 concerts he did down at Caroline Bay Soundshell for the Caroline Bay Carnivals. Rain or shine he was there, although he laughs when he considers how much time he spent
standing in puddles. ‘I’m buggered if I know how I didn’t end up electrocuted.’
Actually, Stuart’s occupation is probably not one that would immediately be associated with a high degree of danger, yet Stuart delights in telling me stories where his life seemed somewhat precarious. One instance was when in the midst of an aftershock following the Inangahua earthquake he found himself amongst the dancing pipes of an organ in the Greymouth Catholic church. According to Stuart, ‘there’s not a lot to hang on to in the middle of a pipe organ’. There’s also the time returning late one night from Franz Josef, caught in a storm, he urged his car on over the Whataroa bridge that was shaking and swirling with floodwaters; he later learned the bridge was swept away only a short time after he had driven across it. Another tale is of him and his wife, Margaret, coming very close to being wiped out in an avalanche on the Milford Track while on their regular hike to tune pianos at the track huts.
Despite the various risks to life and limb, Stuart has quite a long highlight reel; there’s working on the acoustics of piano soundboards with Dr Vernon Griffith in the music department at the University of Canterbury, tuning the grand piano on the royal yacht Britannia on one of the royal visits to Timaru. Prince Philip even chatted to him as they walked along the wharf together after Stuart had tuned the piano. There’s also all the people of note he has met when doing sound – entertainers such as Billy T James, Patsy Rigger and the Topp Twins; politicians such as Sir Robert Muldoon and David Lange; and Governor General Sir Paul Reeves. There were the three-monthly trips up to the Hermitage at Mt Cook; tuning the piano there was a plum job both Margaret and Stuart enjoyed. There are strange incidences too – Stuart watching a man taking a chainsaw to the wall of his house to extract a grand piano being just one of them. The prize for the most unusual place he’s tuned a piano and set up a sound system has to be the Naturist Club outside of Rolleston.
As Stuart talks there is a sense of the joy he gets from his work and the pleasure that he gains from working with his wife, who has always been actively engaged in the business. He is quick to acknowledge the part she has played, including not only taking pianos apart but even shifting them. When their three children, Nicola, Michelle and Paul were young, they often joined them on their trips too. Stuart retired from the sound business 10 years ago, but he still tunes, repairs and sells pianos, albeit at a slightly slower pace. He sees no reason to stop doing something that he enjoys. After all these years the one lesson that remains with him to this day and one that he exhorts others to take to heart is to listen, listen, listen.
Stuart retired from the sound business 10 years ago, but he still tunes, repairs and sells pianos, albeit at a slightly slower pace.