In the late 1950s, before restrictions on imports were lifted, London-based Emile Grimshaw made some of the highest-quality guitars available to British players. Grimshaw and his father, Emile Sr. (who died in 1943), had been making banjos and guitars since 1934, and his electrics combined quality with unique designs.

The deep cutaway of this Electric Deluxe model stood out like a sore thumb, but its most unusual feature was it’s electronic configuration: the controls were housed in the pickguard (which had it’s own unusual, meandering shape), but the pickups were not the “floating” type that were typically found with pickguard-mounted controls. The humbucking pickup in the bridge position was clearly mounted in the top, and there was a second pickup concealed in the fingerboard extension – a concept borrowed from Gibson’s J-160E electric flat-top model.

Grimshaw found some success in the 1960s making copies of Gibson Les Pauls at a time when Gibson did not offer the model, but ultimately, Japanese makers did it at a lower cost and drove Grimshaw out of business by the end of the decade.