LANGLEY reader George Webb dropped by our office recently with a selection of items of local interest, and here is just one of them.
No prizes for working out that it's a Jew's harp, that peculiar little instrument that you clamp in your mouth and pluck with a finger to make a 'poinging' sound. But this one is evidently of some age — George has had it for over fifty years, and he thinks it had been around for a while before he came by it.
The only marking on it is the stamp 'England', which appears twice, but this could well date back to the time when parts of the Black Country were turning out Jew's harps by the hundreds of thousands.
Small firms in Netherton, Dudley, Rowley and round about had turned their metalworking skills to this little instrument by the early 1800s, and turned the Black Country into the capital of English Jew's harp making.
