13. The Chapel Organs
This section is mainly for readers with a specialized knowledge of organs.
Our Chapel had two organs. Two sources of information on Internet help to fill in the picture of the old Snetzler pipe organ of 1754. I would reproduce their photos here but I am not sure about copyright issues, so I will just give the link. Goetze & Gwynne, who restored it in 2015, show a very different organ from the one I remember. Betty Rayment was certainly aware that the organ had been altered over the years, before reaching Caldecott. No doubt the restoration is the closest reconstruction possible of its original state. A 1968 report by the National Pipe Organ Register photographs and describes the instrument as I remember it. There are discrepancies between the accounts. Both agree that it was given to Caldecott by a collector called Captain Lane, and that Andrew Freeman, a historian of English organs, photographed it in Lane’s house in 1944. This photograph is reproduced in Bob Lawton’s article about the organ on this site. It would be interesting if any photograph of it in the Community Chapel were to emerge. Goetze & Gwynne state that a pedal board and a free reed were added by C.R. Oliver of Plymouth in 1975, and Lawton repeats this, but it had a pedal board (an octave or so of short pedals) and a reed box (which was disconnected) when I knew it and these are described in the 1968 report. Maybe 1975 is a typo for 1875. The 1968 report unkindly describes the organ as “unusable”, which was not entirely true. It was little used after an electronic organ had been gifted to the Community, just slightly after I arrived, but it stood in when the electronic organ had a short circuit and was taken away for repairs, and Betty sometimes used it for opening voluntaries. I understand it was moved out to the store room at the bottom of the main stairs at some stage after I left. An attempt was made to find a buyer, but it was finally removed by an auctioneer when Caldecott handed Mersham le Hatch back to the Brabournes. It was sold by the hammer in 2006. I will describe the organ as I remember it.
The bellows were operated by two alternative pedal-pumps, one that could be used by the organist’s own right foot, the other on the right side, operated by an assistant. The bellows should have filled an air-reservoir, which would release the air into the pipes at an even pressure. The reservoir was out of use and the bellows blew directly into the pipes. This meant that, if you pumped too energetically, the tuning went sharp while, if you got tired and slackened off, the organ made a sound like a vacuum cleaner being switched off. We knew that the original pump-pedal was the one for the organist himself. The other was added at the same time as the pedal board, allowing the organist to free his right foot for the pedals and leave the pumping to the assistant. The pedals were pull-downs, that is to say they did not have an independent stop but pulled down the notes of the lower octave. There was an 8’ diapason with wooden pipes, which made a very sweet sound, and another 8’ diapason with lead pipes, which made a more piquant sound, and a 4’ stop. Theoretically there was a 2’ stop, but it was disconnected. The lower octave had separate stops. The 1968 photo shows four draw stops each side but I think one of those on the left was a false stop, put there to avoid the visual asymmetry of having more stops on the right than on the left. The three operative ones were the two 8’ ones and the pedal coupler.
I seem to recall that, the very first time I attended Chapel, Betty was playing the Snetzler with a senior boy pumping beside her, but the electronic organ must have arrived soon afterwards. A purist will say that a dilapidated pipe organ is still better than a pristine electronic one, but the Snetzler simply did not have the power to support our lusty young voices. The new instrument had as much power as necessary, maybe more, and if you wanted to study the organ, at least it had two manuals and a proper pedal board. This Jennings organ would be of historical interest itself today if anything remains of it. A photograph on Internet of a Jennings Model B looks very much like the organ I remember. Jennings were pioneers of electronic organs and this model was produced from 1956 to 1961. It was given to the Community by a lady benefactor, I believe the name was Madam Besse. Modern digital organs manage a better imitation of a real pipe organ – this one always sounded rather synthetic. If any like Caldecott’s are still around, restoration might be almost harder than with a pipe organ, since the technology, similar to that of the old valve radios, was superseded long ago.