The Adies realized "We were very lucky at the auction and bloody unlucky at the unloading" as John and Penny watched in horror when the movers dropped their long awaited Bösendorfer.

But as the piano was being unloaded from the lorry fate intervened! Mr. Haigh, the G&R Removals foreman on the scene explained how the accident happened: "I was trying to put the piano on to the tail lift, going through the normal process for pianos, the next thing I know it's in the ditch." He said the usual way to remove a piano is to put it in a transport shoe or shoey, a frame that fits along the length of the piano's body but "As we lowered the tail lift, it must have just clipped what we call the shoey and sent it over to one side. I don't understand why it happened."

For some months after raising the funds the Adies travelled to a specialist piano auctioneer in London with the hope of buying a Bösendorfer Concert Grand Piano. But the tragedy is all the more galling since the Musikmess Frankfurt held on 12-15 March 2007 distracted many resellers away from the London auction. The Musikmess is an international trade fair for musical instruments, music software and computer hardware, sheet music and accessories. By both events coinciding, Musikmess lowered attendance and diminished the pool of potential bidders at the auction thereby moderating the final selling price of the ten year young Bösendorfer Model 275 Concert Grand Piano: the Music Gods smiled on the Two Moors Festival if only briefly. Sean McIlvoy, the auctioneer explained "this was a charity with limited funds and for them it was a great buy."

Right: The more typical presentation of a Bösendorfer Model 275 Concert Grand Piano with Artists Bench (25,772 bytes). Click on image to see enlarged view (46,993 bytes).

The Bösendorfer Model 275 is a Concert Grand piano that when in production sold for about £45,000 ($90,000 US), and was later replaced by the Bösendorfer Model 280. This particular Model 275 had already been the subject of struggle even before setting off from London for the Two Moors Festival in Devon. John and Penny Adie, organizers of the Two Moors Festival, determined to avoid the expenses of renting a piano periodically for their event. And so they and their fellow organizers worked for two years to raise the money needed to buy this piano. The piano was recently acquired at an auction in London and was to have been the centrepiece of the festival that originated in 2001 as an event to boost morale and help the local communities after the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 damaged tourism. But its popularity persuaded organizers to host it as an annual event with a diverse range of concerts staged at venues across Dartmoor and Exmoor, usually in front of packed audiences. The Festival covers a larger area of the UK than any other, with the aim of bringing live classical music to the countryside.

G&R Removals is a family run business established in 1968 making them the longest established piano carriers in the UK. In April 2007 they were hired to transport a Bösendorfer Concert Grand piano for the Two Moors Festival Spring Concert Series 2007, Chamber Recitals. Being nine (9) foot long and weighing in at over a thousand pounds, moving such a hand crafted instrument demands highly skilled movers with specialized equipment and techniques.