This page of notes, from a section on bell harps, is quite revealing of Baines’s research process. The top half of the page lists his ‘Dead-ends (so far)’ in his investigation into the owners of bell-harps, while the bottom contains notes on the Doppler effect with reference to the bell-harp, concluding ‘?hardly likely to captivate an audience?’
This instrument piqued Baines’s attention to such an extent that he spent time reconstructing from eighteenth-century records the family tree of George Ward, whose nameplate appeared on a bell-harp in Burford, and attempting to track down a Mr Herbert of North Oxfordshire, the owner of a bell-harp (or fairy bell) mentioned in English Dance and Song in 1975, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (formerly the Folk-Song Society).
