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Honorary Fellow: Association For Scottish Literary Studies

“If we investigate only by physical and chemical means, we can only get physical and chemical answers.”

Sir Alister Hardy, FRS

Samples of maple, finished with most of the methods then available, were tested for lightfastness using some high-tech apparatus at Galashiels College of Textile Technology. Only those samples finished with techniques based on classical Artists’ materials proved to have the “permanent” quality that would suggest they might survive some centuries.

Later, researchers at Cambridge University offered to compare samples with fragments taken from known classical instruments.

[The Strad, March & April 1989]

Some of my own samples that had been classed “permanent” at Galashiels were sent to Cambridge, where one was judged to be “presumably authentically Cremonese in appearance”.