G'day Bob the Postman,

    From: Bob the Postman - PM
    Date: 18 Nov 06 - 11:10 AM

    We would all be poorer if we lived in a world devoid
    of lagerphones.

Well, we might even clear the Poms of the suggestion that they dumped the lagerphone onto us ... and then retreated. The tendency, in "explaining" the lagerphone has been to write about its ancestry from the "Jingling Johnnie" / "Turkish Crescent" or "Chinese Pavillion" rattle sticks popular with European (but read "English") military bands of the late 19th century.

However, a few things I've unearthed (a replica of a wartime example, with Dutch-Australian connections, via a WW2 Japanese prison camp in Indonesia - some photos of interesting rattler / tambourine combinations in German immigrant bands on the Goldfields / the fact that Holbrook, where Claude & John Meredith met the prototypes of the "Bush Band Revival model, was first called "Germantown" ... until 1915!) now suggest that its direct parent, in Australia, was a German instrument, combing rattles, notched striker stick, grotesque decorations on the post ... plus a resonating tambourine - and, sometimes, a single crude violin-type string, called the Teufelsgeige (Devil's fiddle) in Germany - or the Stumphfiddle in Easter Europe.

I hope that all makes our English contributors feel a little easier!

Regard(les)s,

Bob