REPAIR & REFURBISHMENT
“When restoring an old pipe organ,
we can replace worn-out leather and
damaged timber without a ecting
the integrity of instrument”
Andrew Scott
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specialist builders and
restorers, he says, with
notable examples in
the UK being Harrison &
Harrison (of Durham), and
Henry Willis and David Wells
(both of Liverpool) and Nicholson & Co
(Malvern). “‘Father’ Henry Willis himself
was a world-famous organ builder, with
organs made for Blenheim Palace, St
Paul’s Cathedral and Liverpool Cathedral
of St James, the largest in the UK.”
The 1851 Great Exhibition was itself
a ‘shop window’ for pipe organs, with
the largest on display there purchased
and installed, with some modi cations,
in Winchester Cathedral in 1854. It was
Harrison & Harrison that embarked on
a major rebuilding in 1937 to give the
organ a more romantic sound, with
stops imitating orchestral instruments.
Between 1986 and 1988, the same
company completely rebuilt the organ
to give it its present form of 79 stops.
It contains some 5,500 pipes and costs
around £7,000 a year to maintain.
ACHIEVING A DELICATE BALANCE
Organ building has been described as
‘engineering in wood and metal’, requiring
skill and artistry in equal measure,
although leather, glue, low-voltage
electrics and the metal for new pipework
also gure prominently. However, getting
this right is a delicate balance. “When
restoring an old pipe organ, we can
replace worn-out leather and damaged
timber without a ecting the integrity of
instrument,” says Harrison & Harrison
deputy managing director Andrew
Scott, pictured above, “but the musical
personality and character comes from the
pipework, so our aim is always to restore
existing pipes with traditional methods,
using cast alloy metal of the same type.”
In a project where this approach isn’t
possible or desirable, old pipes of good
quality can be rescaled or ‘revoiced’ to t
into a new tonal aesthetic. Pipework of
poor musical quality can be melted down
to make new ones.
The company has recently done this to
great e ect at York Minster (main image,
and p38), where renovations to the 1903
J W Walker organ, enlarged by Harrison
& Harrison in 1917, had altered work
undertaken in the 1960s and 90s that
took the organ in a very di erent musical
direction. “The organ had been rebuilt to
a lighter and more classical speci cation,
which tted the musical tastes of the
time. In the recent work, we’ve turned the
clock back by removing the incompatible
stops and have put back the lost voices
by making new pipes to traditional scales
and voicing style, recreating the musical
architecture of the 1930s,” adds Scott.
Harrison & Harrison is also carrying
out the rst signi cant renovation of the
Grand Organ of Liverpool Metropolitan
Cathedral (pictured, top). Completed in
1967 by JW Walker and Sons of Ruislip, the
Grand Organ is recognised as one of the
nest examples of classical organ building
of the period, and is listed Grade I in the
British Institute of Organ Studies listing
scheme. The renovation is anticipated for
completion in autumn next year.
Each one of the 4,565 pipes is being
removed, cleaned and restored, and
the revered Walker tonal architecture is
being preserved. The wind system and
mechanism, which has been slowly failing,
will be renewed in a traditional manner and
the aged electrical components of the
organ updated to meet current regulatory
requirements. “The electric centrifugal
fans, which provide the static wind
pressure, will be retained and overhauled,
but the wind system inside the organ will
be renewed,” states Scott. “The organ
was originally built with a space-saving
regulator-type wind system, which has
proven unreliable. It is being replaced with
a more robust and traditional weighted
reservoir-based wind system.”
Across the Channel and against all
player sits and operates ‘stops’ to choose
which ‘ranks’ of pipes should sound,
and where the notes are input through a
keyboard (or ‘manual’). “Some of the air
pressures in the UK range from about 2.5
inches of water pressure to a top limit
of around 50 inches,” adds Newby. This
continuous supply of wind allows a pipe
organ to hold notes for much longer than
a piano, with most organs having multiple
ranks of pipes of di ering tone, pitch and
loudness that the player can employ singly
or in combination by using controls (that
is, stops).
Keeping pipe organs in top condition
is a major undertaking, one that is now
in the hands of a diminishing number of
Winter 2021 www.operationsengineer.org.uk 37
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