Tulse Hill Methodist Church

I am Samzu and am the organist at the Tulse Hill Methodist Church

At first glance, the church looks like a recently built church. The present building itself was opened in 1910 however there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Prior to 2002, the name of the church was Roupel Park Methodist Church. It can be said that a church is not made of a building but the people it comprises and this image is clearly presented here. The present building is the 3^rd to be created by the church at this location.

• The first was a small Iron Church founded in 1870 but destroyed by fire in 1877.
• The second was a fine Gothic style Weslyan Church opened in 1880 but destroyed in 1944 during the Second World War.

Organ

This organ was installed when the church was re-opened in 1970; that makes it 45 years old. It is a two manual electronic Miller Organ.

45 years for a pipe organ is a relatively small length of time but for an electronic organ, 45 years means the organ is at the dusk of its time.

Nevertheless the organ still manages to produce it’s electronic sounds to good effect in the church with 16 stops and 1 crescendo pedal for the swell manual.

Hear and see me playing this organ by clicking on the photo of the church and see something of the history of the church by clicking here

Samzu Agbaje

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Harry Bramma at All Saints, Tooting

I am Woolf van Silver, a long standing member of the congregation at All Saints, and am running the project to raise and spend money on our Historic Harrison organ: to preserve it physically and to use modern media to record and broadcast its beautiful sounds   It is a honour to be involved with such an instrument — and a very great privilege to have Harry as a mainstay to our efforts, and such a virtuoso in demonstrating and explaining its capabilities

I am Harry Bramma and have had a long term connection with All Saints – in fact from 1976. The present Organist of the Church – Alun Barlett – has kindly given permission for me to do a short demonstration of the organ for The Southwark and South London Society of Organists website since I am the Honorary President.

I became Organist of Southwark Cathedral in 1976 after twelve and a half years as Assistant Organist at Worcester Cathedral. Since then I have been closely associatated with the diocese of Southwark as an Organ Adviser and a member of the Diocesan Advisory Committee. I have over 40 years gained a great deal of information about South London instruments as a result of this work. On leaving Southwark Cathedral in 1989, I was Director of the Royal School of Church Music for 10 years and Organist of All Saints, Margaret Street, W1 from 1989 to 2004. I    now play regularly as an itinerant deputy in South London.

The Organ

The Harrison and Harrison organ at All Saints‘ is an outstanding example of the firm’s work dating from 1907, standing in its fine case by Walter Tapper, later knighted and elected President of the R.I.B.A. in the 20’s.

This notable building by Temple Moore has remarkable acoustics and has been much used as a recording venue.

The organ is particularly significant because tonally it is totally unaltered from the day Arthur Harrison finished work on it. It’s one of a series of organs built between 1904 and 1914 which established Harrison’s as a leading organ builder of the day. It followed Durham cathedral of 1905 and came before Ely Cathedral (1908). All Saints, Margaret Street (1910) and St Mary, Redcliffe, Bristol (1912) were some of a fine collection of instruments dating from the Edwardian era.

The instrument at Tooting is a large three manual with 45 speaking stops. It is really a cathedral organ without the fourth manual.

The tutti of the organ is majestic and very powerful, topped by the Great Trombas, 8 and 4 foot, very fine heavy pressure ranks which have to be used occasionally and with discretion!

Click the photo of All Saints to hear my improvisation in the form of a Gavotte highlighting the louder features of the organ which give the tutti of the Instrument its particular and magnificent personality (3 mins) or use this link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/K8o6cEZdw7Y

The organ also has a wide rage of softer registers, many of which are to be found on the large Choir organ.

Click the photo of the organ pipes to hear me demonstrating the softer stops and beautiful combinations of them (6 mins), or use this link: https://www.youtube.com/embed/SLvrcF4cL0U

A description of the stops is given on the npor link http://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=N17304

Harry Bramma

Previous My Churches

St Clement and St Paul, Dulwich

I am Chris Caine, Organist and choirmaster here at St Clement with St Peter Church with John King our Emeritus organist. Click on the picture of John and me to hear a little more about the church, or click on this link. The United Church of Clement with St Peter’s, Dulwich and was established in November 1986. There had previously been two separate parishes. The parish of St Peter’s was founded in 1865 and it initially used temporary buildings until a dedicated church was finally built in 1874. The parish of St Clement began life as a mission church in Hindmans Road. It became a separate parish in 1883 and by 1885 a large new church had been built on Friern Road and a vicar was appointed. It was destroyed by bomb damage in 1940 and the new church was subsequently consecrated in September 1957. Worship at Church of Clement with St Peter’s, Dulwich is in the anglo-catholic tradition. It is an inclusive church with regular sung services each Sunday morning at 10.00am and said services on Thursday mornings at the same time. Services consist of parish communion with Sunday School and once a month there is a shorter All Age Worship service. There is a small but flourishing choir to support the worship of the parish with hymn and psalm singing and regular anthems.

The organ

The original 3 manual organ of St Clement’s Church (as it was at the time and now St Clement with St Peter) was by Normal Beard. It survived the bomb damaged suffered by the church in 1940 and was stored in the church hall during the remaining war years. The church was re-built after the war but the new build did not allow sufficient space for the organ to be re-instated. It was therefore sold and its current whereabouts are not known. It was replaced with a small, far from new two manual instrument by Henry Jones which was installed in the West Gallery. It was deemed to be just adequate for the liturgical needs of the church but its incomplete pedal compass and meagre range of speaking stops imposed severe limitations upon serious organ playing. Some of the shortcomings were rectified by work carried out by Vincent Coggin in the early 1990s but a few years later the opportunity arose to secure a superior instrument from a redundant church – St George’s Battersea. The former organ was eventually installed in choir auditorium of the Russian Musical Academy at St. Petersburg in 1996. This instrument was built by J. W. Walker & Sons in 1897 and incorporated the pipework from the company’s earlier instrument of 1837. It was installed in St Peter’s for first use on Ascension Day 1995 with an additional clarinet stop obtained from St George’s Perry Hill Forest Hill. Some of the pipework is of interest. It includes 16 of the original 21 gilded case pipes, which though still in use, are not visible. The Swell Gamba is a Bell Gamba stop, a tapered body with flared tops originally with ear tuning. Click here  to download the specification.

Click on the photograph of John to hear him playing the Fantasia in F minor by Mozart, or click on this link.                                                                

 https://www.youtube.com/embed/OupVcwgphtc

Text written by Chris Caine
Previous My Churches 

A story of three organs

I am Robert Bowles, Director of Music at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Clapham, and Chairman, St Paul’s Cathedral Chorus and Guild of the Companions of St Paul.

I want to tell you the story of our organ.

 So, firstly tell me about the history of the church

It was dedicated 102 years ago.  There was no church in this part of Clapham because the area was undeveloped.  Just a few large houses with vast gardens.  From about 1870 they were sold off and the grid of streets with terraced houses took the population from 500 to 8000.  The church was designed to accommodate 600! 

 And the organ?

This was built by Alfred Hunter and Son, whose works were nearby in Clapham High Street, in 1921.  When the church was dedicated there were plans to fit out the interior quite quickly, including building an organ.   The First World War disrupted those plans, and inflation eroded the value of the money that had been collected. Even with a significant grant from Andrew Carnegie, lots of the organ was “prepared for” but not installed.  Behind the three manual console was a two manual instrument with space to install what was missing! Our predecessors were wise and realistic.  Everything they did was to a high standard of design, materials and workmanship.  If there wasn’t enough money to do something properly, they didn’t try and do it on the cheap – they just didn’t do it.  We have the original contract for building the organ which describes very clearly what was in the first phase, and what was to happen later.  After the first phase was complete further fundraising allowed three of the missing ranks to be installed, but by the mid-1980s the 60-year-old leatherwork was starting to disintegrate, so the focus was on restoring the instrument that we had got, not completing it.   

So how did you deal with that?

That’s when I was appointed organist.  The layout of the organ within the gallery is excellent, and if you know where to crawl you can get to any of the pneumatic machines without dismantling anything.  That makes ordinary maintenance quite straightforward, individual components can be removed if they need work in the workshop.  I inherited a scheme to re-leather everything gradually whilst never taking the whole instrument out of action.   Then William McVicker, one of our Diocesan Organ Advisors and a SSLSO member, suggested we should apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant.  He thought that although incomplete, the organ was an excellent example of its age and type, largely because it had not been altered in the 1960s.   Our bid for grant-aid was successful, and we got further grants from the ON organ Fund and the Council for the Care of Churches. So once we had raised the rest we were able to restore the whole of the original instrument in one go.  So it is now in perfect working order.  Our organ builder and SSLSO member Vincent Coggin did an amazing job. 

 But the instrument looks pretty complete now – how did that come about?

Our discussions with the HLF included a proposal to complete the organ.  They were supportive of the idea, but funding it fell outside their terms of reference (“We are able to fund the restoration of existing heritage but not to buy new heritage”).  They imposed an interesting but understandable condition, which was that it had to be completed to the original design, using second hand material known to have originated in Hunter’s works, or new material copied from a Hunter original.

We did some further fundraising and started a Hunter hunt.  Paul Joslin of BIOS led me  on a treasure trail which finished in the loft space of the garage of the Vicarage in Catherington, near Portsmouth.  There I found all the Hunter pipes from an organ removed from the church some 10 years previously with the intention of re-installing them in a new action.  That scheme had been abandoned as there was no prospect of raising the money.  We got consent to buy these pipes. Click the photo or link to see 13 more photos of the Catherinton effort. http://slickpic.us/768866yjOO?play

Michael Toll led me to the United Congregational Church in Lee-on-Sea, near Southend.  They had a project to re-develop their church and hall to provide residential accommodation and a smaller worship space into which their two-manual Hunter organ would not fit.   So we bought the complete instrument. Click the photo or link to see 8 photos of the dismantling of the organ at Leigh-on-Sea. http://slickpic.us/768874mNA1?play

With the aid of voluntary labour we brought everything back to Clapham and sorted out what was needed for the church organ, disposing of the rest.   We had almost everything that was missing, including a soundboard, reservoirs and a swell box for the choir organ.  Click the picture or the link to see 6 photos of the first stage of the work at the Church of the Holy spirit. http://slickpic.us/7688804MkN?play

Vincent Coggin re-leathered and restored everything that needed it, and we re-erected it in the space prepared for it all those years ago.  We used more volunteer labour, mostly graduate structural engineers from my office.  Click on the photo or link to see 12 photos of the installation of the organ in the Church of the Holy Spirit. http://slickpic.us/768878Q2j1?play

All that is missing now are the 16ft Trombone on the pedal and the 16ft Contra Fagotto on the swell.  I can’t find them anywhere! 

The end result is a huge success, and the whole instrument has great integrity despite the  various routes that components have taken to get here from the factory only a mile away.

 Can you demonstrate this?

There are two video for you to see.

The first starts with me playing a quiet piece ending with a louder piece. I also give a short commentary . Click on the picture or the link to see the video which last just over 4 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/embed/2CvqPf82nCI

The second is a recording of 17 separate stops or stop combinations. Click here  to hear the individual and combination pipe sounds. 

And how is the organ used now?

Click here to download the full current specification.

 Well, we use it every Sunday for our main service, and we are gradually introducing evening prayer on Sundays.

We have three organ students who regularly use it for private practice, and three more who come occasionally.

The PCC is keen for it to be used, so we’d welcome any approaches from students of any age.  We are developing links with the RCO organ academy.   The organ is also available to any of the other musical groups which are starting to use the church for rehearsal, recording and for concerts.

  Any other  thoughts?

If anyone knows where I can get a Hunter Trombone and Contra Fagotto – get in touch!

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