Extracts from booklet for Friends Recital 13th November 2021
Some years ago, St Laurence Church was offered the gift of an organ by Summerfields School in Oxford provided it was dismantled and removed to store with four days! There is a surmise that the organ air pressure had been increased to increase the volume when the pupil numbers increased to over 500. Further increases in school numbers led the school to install a modern even bigger electronic organ. The Father Willis had retained its tracker action – a purely mechanical system. Being mechanical it does not suffer from rusting that follows the installation of electro-mechanical control gear such as used in St Laurence in an ancient unheated church in the 1970s.
There was also the problem of where to site the new organ within the church as the
redevelopment of the vestry where the existing organ sits was a larger project and would take time and money to achieve. However, we knew that what we were being offered was something exceptional and a compromise was reached. Three years later a team was formed to rebuild and restore the organ. It took about 6 months with 6 volunteers working about 3 days a week.
Of the great names in British organ building from the latter half of the 19tth century, it is Henry Willis (1821-1901) who stands out most in the minds of those interested in the organ and its music. He is now generally known as Father Willis, an honour bestowed on him by the Musical Times in 1898, placing him with two other greats of the organ craft; Father Howe (died 1571) and Father Smith (died 1708).
Willis was born the son and grandson of a carpenter in Spitalfields in London’s east end. In 1835, he was apprenticed for seven years to the noted London builder, John Grey. More than this mechanical improvement, Willis, made the organ more useful for music and congregational accompaniment by strong and cohesive voicing of the pipes. The early Victorians prized ‘delicacy’ and ‘sweetness’, but delicacy and sweetness were of little use in accompanying the growing congregations. Willis saw this early on and made his instruments, no matter what their size, suitable for the job. His detractors, and there were many in his early years, thought his work was, like him, brash and vulgar. There was some truth in this as he was a bumptious upstart from the East End with a surfeit of self-confidence. Had he been, otherwise, he could not have advanced his cause so effectively.
His success with the Great Exhibition organ secured him the contract for the organ in the St George’s Hall, Liverpool (100 stops, completed 1854). The Exhibition organ was sold to Winchester Cathedral and thereafter, he was awarded the contracts for Carlisle Cathedral (1856) and Wells Cathedral (1857), and in 1872, effectively a new organ for St Paul’s, dividing the organ either side of the choir in the process; another first. At this point, Willis was the leading organ builder in the country. His work was sought out by the smart, the fashionable and the discerning.
In 1851, Willis burst upon an astonished public with the organ he built for the Great Exhibition. The instrument was sensationally large (70 stops), but more importantly, it was playable. Two earlier attempts by William Hill at very large organs, York Minster (1832) and Birmingham Town Hall (1835), both were more or less unplayable because the mechanical technology of the time did not match the demands made by so great a number of pipes; organists did not have the strength to press down the keys in a musical fashion. Willis overcame these problems by using and improving a pneumatic device first used in France. By the same system he introduced the method by which the organist could change the stop combinations by pressing a button (a piston), doing away with the necessity of having assistants to pull out and push in the stops during a performance. It was he who devised the piston system as used all over the world.
Willis died in February 1901, in his eightieth year. He caught a cold finishing an organ in Suffolk in January. It turned to bronchitis, and he was sent unwillingly to bed. He collapsed and died at the foot of his stairs attempting to go to his office to deal with some business that only he could do. It was the best way for him to go, in harness and still with all his formidable faculties. His best monument is his surviving output. More than with any other British organ builder, he infused his organs with his character. There are no bad Father Willis organs (but some have been made bad by others). His organs are all superb and some are sublime. To possess one is to possess a piece of Heaven.
The Summerfield School organ was ordered in October 1899. It was a standard No. 7 model with ten stops. The work was invoiced on 31 December 1899 for £350. Summerfields was one of ten organs built by Willis that year, five of which were for educational establishments including the Royal Academy of Music and Malvern College. The original stop-list was typical of Willis’s small instruments, providing a complete and strong Great Diapason chorus, a reduced chorus in the Swell, open and stopped Flutes and a general-purpose Dulciana. The voicing would have been set by Father Willis who, most likely, would have visited the site and assessed the needs of the instrument for the building.
