'Beautiful creatures with distinct personalities'

The Temple organ then (almost a century ago)...

...and now (or at least very recently)

On Easter Sunday 2013, the Temple Church in London’s Fleet Street (one of the oldest foundations in the City, and the seat of the London element of the Da Vinci Code) will resound with one of the great English Cathedral-style organs, newly restored, cleaned, tonally reset and balanced, and generally brand-spanking new. This great instrument was built in 1924, donated to the church by Lord Glentannar in 1954 (it was a too big for the ballroom at Glentannar House and, besides, it was a bit damp in there and Lord Glentannar was keen to see it housed somewhere that it might fulfil some use) and has been variously maintained and overhauled every few decades since then.

Now, though, it really does need some proper attention: the pipes are filthy and, in some cases, dented or collapsed, all of the action and soundboards are in need of renovation and the leather which holds together the bellows and forms small pockets under the pipes has dried out, cracked and disintegrated. And so, the Temple Church has asked the organ builders Harrison and Harrison – probably the most famous and certainly the most respected organ builders in the world, responsible for the instruments of the Royal Festival Hall, Westminster Abbey and King’s College Cambridge, among others – to meticulously deconstruct their four-manual, 62-stop (at the moment: it’ll have 66 when it comes back) organ and take it away to rebuild it. 

It has taken years to raise the eye-watering sum of £750,000 that it will take to put this organ back on the instrument map, and they’re not there yet. But as they are confident and hopeful that they will be – the army of fundraisers, loyal supporters and even lawyers from the Temple, who appreciate the unique environment and tradition within which they work needs time and insight to preserve – they have cracked on and let the organ be wrenched from its case to start the process. The case is the shopfront of any organ and in many examples is enormously intricate and decorative (Harrison and Harrison are also responsible for a relatively small organ in the Hampshire church of Twyford, near Winchester, which boasts one of the most beautiful organ cases imaginable, despite its size). The Temple’s is no exception and now that the business part of the instrument has been removed, it looks like a tooth that has lost its filling and James Vivian and Greg Morris (the Organist and Director of Music, and his assistant organist) both say independently of each other that they feel like they have temporarily lost a member of their family (‘as if they’re going to hospital,’ says James. ‘Not for anything too awful, but enough to make you worry about them.’).  

So, for the moment its innards are scattered across two ends of the country. Harrison and Harrison has the worst of it – the wind system, reeds, soundboards, action and console; the most minor casualties of the past 50 years have repaired to the Triforium (the arched gallery that stands above the nave). By and large what will happen on site in the church will be the cleaning of the pipes, although if any of them are structurally impeded by dents (which can generally be eased out by hand) they may need closer attention. Going up for a quiet nose around, it’s clear someone has definitely been there: there is a box of pristine claribel flutes lying neatly next to an open bottle of Fairy Liquid and three extra-small bottle brushes. 

On first sight, up here it looks a bit like someone exploded the organ in a small space, but on closer inspection there is a beautifully English, comforting order to the chaos. Everything is collected together and carefully labelled (whether with felt pen on strips of masking tape, on the side of an old baker’s tray lined with back-copies of the Daily Star, or tied up in a knotted Asda carrier bag): if you look closely, you can see that everything has been organised to allow a single person to quietly get on with lovingly cleaning every individual part that will be squatting up in the eaves of the church for the next couple of years. The pipe stays (which hold the upper part of the pipe in place) lie around like firewood along with the ribbons which hold them together, surrounded by bag after bag of the wooden screws which connect the soundboard to the pipe rack – all of which will go back into place to preserve the organ’s historical integrity, despite the fact that there are now modern equivalents for these parts - and the tiny multi-partite mixture pipes (wrapped in newspaper to keep them together, like pass-the-parcel).

In many ways, the organ world gets a bad press (I’ve often heard the word ‘nerd’ bandied about in relation to it) but, really, it’s hard to understand that once you have engaged in the life cycle of an individual instrument. They are beautiful creatures with distinct personalities and a unique repertoire of associated music, which form the absolute epicentre of any community lucky enough to have a functioning one. Looking at the journey that the Harrison organ of the Temple Church is embarking on, it’s impossible not to be excited for it, for the community it serves and which is already starting to notice its absence, and for English church music as a whole, which, when the organ returns home, will have shored up another element of its vital existence.  

Next time: I visit the Harrison and Harrison workshop in Durham to visit the Temple organ, and see the organ of the Royal Festival Hall.