-- non-subscriber, please reply to sender and MMD --

Thank you to William McKeown and Julian Dyer for their informative
posts.  The catalogues for the Triumph & Kastner pianos are on the
Themodist web site:-

http://www.themodist.com/texts.htm 
http://www.themodist.com/t1.pdf -- the Kastner catalogue
http://www.themodist.com/t2.pdf -- the Triumph catalogue

They were put there by Adam G. Ramet.  His post on this forum led me
to place my first message.

Both books are PDF files, so your computer will need Adobe Acrobat
reader installed in order to view them.  Also, they are quite large
files consisting of scanned pages so this could cause them to download
slowly, depending on the speed of your Internet connection.

I do not doubt Julian's comment that the player mechanisms were
American and were fitted into British piano cases, but assuming this
to be true I do cast doubt on the Triumph catalogues words "the first
British complete player piano."

The book also raises a question about the ethnic origins of the player
actions with a caption alongside the picture of the London factory
calling it "TriumphAuto Action Factory No 1".  Was this a bit of
patriotic advertising in the post WW1 years, or were the actions built
perhaps under licence in the UK?

Stephen McVicar