Four Generations of Harpmakers

This anecdotal extract was, for a long time, all that had been published about the Haarnack family of harp makers.Whilst it captures the Dickensian atmoshere of the shop as it must have appeared to a young girl in the early part of the last century, it is inaccurate on several counts.
I am sure it is exactly the impression they would have given but subsequent research has proved it to be misleading.

We now think that the two older men were Henry David and his brother George Christian who may have appeared to be father and son as there was an age gap of some 15 years between them.

Their father,old Henry Haarnack died in 1890,so he could not have been in the shop at the time Marie Goossens visited it.

The young boy was probably one of Henry David's sons. George and Harry were both trained in the family business and often helped out in busy periods. However neither of them followed their father into the family business. They were both violinists and they chose to pursue their careers elsewhere as professional musiciansin theatres and concert halls.

The Haarnacks had been making harps in their own right since the 1830s. In first quarter of the twentieth century the Haarnacks probably did concentrate on repairs, but they had been taught by their father and grandfather who were making harps in their own right for a hundred years before that.The business premises were in Berners Street, then Newman Street and finally, from the 1860s until 1927, in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square.