January 2026 news
January has been a refreshingly quiet month. Anne’s choir (St Peter’s Nottingham) sang Evensong at Southwell on Saturday 3rd; I joined them in the congregation. This photo was taken at the head of Southwell’s beautiful nave, just before the service, held in the nave as the Quire organ had just blown a fuse. Nave organ to the rescue! So glad they allowed me to install two large organs, back in 1992-4. Lovely to be back and hard to believe nearly a decade has passed since I retired as cathedral organist and Rector Chori at Southwell, after 27 very fulfilling years.
On the 8th-9th I surveyed the organ in the fine chapel of Blundell’s School (Tiverton, founded in 1604). To be honest, the organ itself is not (yet!) worth writing about, but the chapel’s beautiful altar, the front carved by Eric Gill, certainly is. The stone altar, and its surrounding sanctuary setting, were created by pupils in 1937, under the direction of the Art Master, Mr Phillips. It is called the ‘Gorton’ altar to celebrate the Headmaster of the time, Neville Gorton, who had been determined to create a really fine Sanctuary in the early Victorian chapel and make the Eucharist more central to chapel life. Unbelievably, a later Headmaster disliked it so much that it was removed in 1947, being reinstalled only in 1993, after having been bought back at auction from a mother and baby home in Coventry!
Peter Hurford was a pupil at Blundell’s, and the School continues to maintain a particularly high standard of music, instrumental, choral and academic. We need to return the organ to a standard and musical quality of which he would have approved.
Recently I’ve been helping Chetham’s Music School in Manchester look for a compact, high-quality, vertically-arranged, small modern pipe organ, to replace that lost in a 2021 fire in their main hall. To be honest, I thought there was only the slimmest of chances that anything suitable would turn up, when, to our delight, St Swithun’s church, Bathford, advertised their 1971 Hill, Norman & Beard organ for disposal. This is a bright and articulate little thing with 17 speaking stops (the same size as the burnt Nigel Church organ), contained in a fine case by Alan Rome (he who, at much the same time, transformed the cases at Bath Abbey and Wells Cathedral). The plan is to build lower casework (matching, of course) beneath the Alan Rome case (repainted in a lighter colour scheme) so that it stands on the floor where the previous Chetham’s organ stood, with an attached console, new electrics and no tonal changes save the addition of a Tierce to the Swell to complete the cornet décomposé. Details of the Bathford organ are on the NPOR. Fingers crossed that this comes to pass.
The final two images are close-ups of carved and painted elements on the 1666 Thomas Harris organ case at Gloucester Cathedral, which is being conserved (along with its painted front pipes) by Michelle Pepper, as Nicholsons begin to install the new organ. I visit them monthly to look at progress and advise the cathedral; it’s good to note that all is on track.
