Hi - I may be able to help you here. John H Cowin ('Bert', from his middle name) was based in Lark Lane, Liverpool. He had been with Willis but then struck out on his own in the late 1950's. His nephew, Keith Edwards (also an organ builder) was alive until, I think, last year. Bert Cowin did a lot of cut-price work around Liverpool and North Wales, which was never good, but did receive a slightly undeserved bad press. Keith had worked for his uncle Bert and once told me that his mission was to keep pipe organs in churches which would otherwise have moved over to electronics, hence the cut-price nature of the jobs. One of his trade marks was that of using round, illuminated stop-heads, to control the couplers on his standard 2-man consoles. These used 16v MES bulbs which, ultimately, became almost impossible to obtain. The result was that there was a choice; 24V bulbs which could hardly be seen or 12V bulbs which then overheated and set fire to the fronts; hence the multitude of stories about Cowin consoles getting on fire! His largest works were Chorley St George, which was a combination of two redundant organs, and Blackburn Cathedral, which was an electrification of the Cavaille-Coll already there. He died some time in the mid 1960's and the firm passed to one of his employees, Jim Cundle, before ceasing trading altogether. He didn't ever build anything original; all his work involved second-hand pipework and much was simply electrification of old tracker instruments. He had little regard for tonal integrity and would add incongruous pipework to existing instruments, but they generally worked, provided they received enough TLC to keep them going. If anyone wishes to email me, I can send them an article I wrote for the Liverpool Organists' Association Newsletter on his work. Most was incredibly Heath-Robinson in construction but was an essay in ingenuity, if nothing else!