1. Christopher J Eccleshall was an English luthier, guitar designer, guitar dealer and authorised repairer of Martin, Gibson and Guild guitars, and received the blessing of Mario Maccaferri to make reproductions of his Selmer-Maccaferri jazz guitars.
Chris Eccleshall was an engineer in the Fleet Air Arm.
British guitar makers were virtually unheard of at the time, but Chris Eccleshall was one of the first to win recognition, along with Tony Zemaitis and John Birch.
Chris Eccleshall was married to Antonia Del Mar from 1977 to 1991.
Chris Eccleshall died on 13 August 2020, at the age of 72.
Chris Eccleshall's survivors include his two children, a grandson, and his sister.
Chris Eccleshall travelled to the Japanese factory to supervise the setup and was very pleased with Japanese engineering standards.
In 1986 Chris Eccleshall uprooted from his native Ealing to move to Dartington and a few years later moved his workshop again to Buckfastleigh.
Chris Eccleshall worked with many apprentices and assistants, and trained and advised other luthiers including George Lowden and Kevin Chilcott throughout his career.
Chris Eccleshall was responsible for several inventions for which he never received the credit.
Chris Eccleshall built a solid body electric sitar, not a sitar guitar but a real sitar, for the late John Perkins.
Chris Eccleshall was responsible for rebuilding Pete Townshend's smashed guitars until he found it too upsetting to continue.
Chris Eccleshall was Rory Gallagher's favoured guitar technician from 1971 to 1985, rebuilding and re-fretting his battered Fender Stratocaster 18 times, and was responsible for disabling the Strat's vibrato mechanism using a wooden block, a modification he was later commissioned to apply to Eric Clapton's "Blackie".
Chris Eccleshall's "Special" is a slightly larger variant of this.