Affectionately known as "the girls", Edith Emma and Minnie Laurel Pardey were duo pianists. Both girls received an effective musical grounding at the convent at Katoomba in New South Wales, Australia. They also studied in Sydney for examinations of the Associated Board of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. Each of them gained medals. Their father, Edmund, was a coach builder and their mother Minnie, nee Cooper, was a seamstress. The family ran a guest-house for people holidaying in Katoomba at the Blue Mountains. The Pardey guest-house was very popular because the Saturday night dancing was accompanied by the two Pardey girls playing as duets all the popular hits of the day. Edith was also the organist at St Hilda's Church, while Laurel was the dinner-music pianist at the prestigious Hotel Carrington.

It was at the Carrington and subsequently at the Pardey guest-house that George Horton heard Laurel play. He was so impressed that he asked her to come to the City Road premises of E.F.Wilks to play the "recording" pianola which he had invented. This event occurred sometime in 1917 - the date is vague - and the tune recorded is now subject to some dispute. Laurel always maintained that it was a popular song of the day, "Yarrawonga", which, however, when roll manufacture began, appeared as the thirteenth roll released on the then "Duo" label. George Horton in his reminiscences claimed that had he taken a shot-gun and fired it through the paper he would have achieved the same effect as his recording machine, for as it was, it worked too slowly to record the correct timing of this dance tune. Nevertheless the results of this first recording session were sufficiently attractive to encourage Eric Howes of Howes & Howes Ltd - Gentlemen's Outfitters - of Pitt Street Sydney, to put up the capital for the establishment of G.H.Horton & Co Ltd and to send George Horton to America to buy the necessary machinery to manufacture piano rolls at E.F.Wilks' City Road factory.

Edith and Laurel Pardey, together with the Ludermanns, became George Horton's first employees in his piano roll manufacturing venture, which eventually became known as the Mastertouch Piano Roll Co.

                                                     

Edith (left) and Laurel Pardey - from an early Mastertouch advertising poster.

Unlike the popular recording artists of today, Edith and Laurel were "nine-to-fivers", that is they commenced work at nine o'clock on Monday morning and finished the five day week at five o'clock on Friday evening. Initially they were kept very busy "churning out the pops" to build up a supply of masters which could become the basis of a catalogue in continuity. Laurel was interested in foxtrots; Edith specialized in waltzes. Eventually, as more and more "named" artists were called in to record, Edith, especially, was expected to edit their work - that is, these artists simply played their work on the keyboard and went home, Edith did the rest. This apprenticeship was to serve her in good stead later in her life, when the Horton recording machine had broken down and she was expected to sit down and simply graph out the music roll arrangement on blank paper, which she subsequently turned into a master roll by cutting it out, hole by hole, on the hand cutter.

On 5 November 1924, Edith married Frank Baker Murn (1895-1957), the Director of Post and Telegraph in New South Wales. Frank was an extremely sentimental man and outside of his official work he gave his time to writing poetry. This came as a great boon to the roll industry, because, when George Horton gave the edict that piano rolls wherever possible should have printed words, Frank Baker Murn obliged by writing lyrics where there were none! Edith continued on as recording artist until her son, Pardey Murn, was born in 1933. Laurel then continued on through the difficult days of the Second World War. To maintain the illusion that a number of artists were recording, the names Edith & Laurel Pardey, Laurel Pardey and E. Murn were alternated on the new releases. It's also possible that in the 1928-1935 period, Edith and Laurel adopted the peudonyms Cecil de Vrey and Fred Jacobs respectively, as the styles are similar and no biographical information can be found on anyone existing with these names in the area.

Laurel, who drove a flashy Chrysler 770 coupé, married the 28 year old John O'Sullivan on 16 August 1941. No doubt to conceal the considerable age difference between them, she gave her age as 35! In the later years of World War II, so onerous was the task of recording and keeping to production dead-lines, while worrying about her husband, who was away at the front, Laurel had a nervous breakdown and retired (this may have occurred in 1948). So that roll manufacture could be sustained through this critical time, Edith returned as recording artist and began cutting the masters on the hand-cutter - from 1950 she was paid an allowance dependent on the length of the roll. She kept on recording until her death from cancer in 1961, although her task became exceedingly difficult as more and more of the ancillary machinery fell into disrepair.

                                                                                                                                                       A later photograph of Laurel Pardey

Current owner of Mastertouch, Barclay Wright, has memories of Edith, when she was recording for The Mastertouch Piano Roll Company (1961), sitting at a little wicker table, graphing out the master-roll by hand. The most astounding thing about this was that the music-rule she used as a scale had been used so often that all the engraved coding on it had worn off and she was virtually doing it from memory! Key-changes, introductions and endings were traced from old rolls just as you would trace through a stencil. So onerous was this activity that no repeat passages would be "recorded" and the roll was joined much as editors now join films, by utilising alphabetical phrasing - that is; A-B, C-D, A-B, E-F etc until the complete arrangement had been "recorded". One other interesting short-cut Edith used in her hand-cutting was to record the melody in the right-hand, or treble, as a double-octave chord, through which she would draw a blue line. As a musical variation, on one passage, the master-worker, when joining Edith's hand-cut master for a final, was required to leave all the holes above the blue line open, "masking off" those below with little pieces of paper as the Edith's master passed over the "reading" bar on the master machine. On another passage the master-worker might be required to leave those below the line open, and to block off those above. It was a little like the children's game "Fly Away, Peter Fly Away, Paul" with embarrassing results if the master-worker became confused so that on the final roll the melody jumped up then down an octave in the middle of a phrase.

Over the years Edith and Laurel built up the huge repertoire of waltzes and foxtrots which to this day remain the "evergreens" for piano-roll playing enthusiasts, who sentimentally yearn for the good old days of the family sing-song around the pianola. "The Girls" in their four-handed arrangements became masters at converting marches and even sentimental old ballads such as "Moonlight and Roses" into their now familiar "pianola-style" - a style which produced the sound now synonymous for most Australians today with the very word pianola!

This information was sourced from the Mastertouch Piano Roll Company.