18th January 2020

Speaking at the annual lunch of the Coventry & Warwickshire Organists Association today took me right back to my earliest days learning to play the organ, as a Music Scholar at Solihull School. Watching Nicholsons build and install the Chapel organ during 1965-1966 inspired my love of organ design and construction, which has gone hand in hand with playing ever since. Members of the Coventry & Warwickshire Organists Association (including the late Stephen Ridgley-Whitehouse, then the same age as me — 16) visited the new organ in 1968, an event I clearly recall. Speaking at their annual lunch I discovered that one member at the lunch had also been present in 1968. The intervening 52 years seemed to fall away!