RESEARCH NOTES
PAUL TINDALL
BEDFORDSHIRE
The publication of a new archival study is generally something which is of permanent value, however abstruse the subject. Sir Stephen Glynne (1807-74), Gladstone's brother-in-law, was a country gentleman whose passion, as for so many, was church visiting.. Such were his industry and leisure that there survive more than 5,000 detailed descriptions of English and Welsh churches in 106 manuscript volumes at St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, Flintshire.1 The entries for many counties have been published sporadically in one form or another during the last century, but unfortunately Sir Stephen, though thorough, is a dull read. Various attempts have been made to flesh out his descriptions for publication, but we should now applaud Chris Pickford, formerly County Archivist of Bedfordshire, whose recently completed edition2 for that county is a model of its kind. He has not only added suitable contemporary illustrations, but also ICBS and diocesan records, the visitation reports of the archdeacon and all conceivable local newspaper and magazine references, including the splendidly vituperative series of articles published between 1845 and 1854 by John Martin, librarian of Woburn Abbey. Most valuable of all, Mr Pickford has trawled meticulously through the surviving records of every Bedfordshire parish, and as a result has packed up and stored every reference to work on the fabric in each parish. The more important of these are published in his edition of the notes.
Small celebration, one might say. However, unlike most architectural historians and archivists, who tend to find the organ entirely invisible when they go into a church or into its records, Chris Pickford has been equally careful to record and reference all the organ material.
Obviously, in many churches this is not the whole story, but it is surely the essential beginning which could be repeated with profit in other counties. The addition of a relatively modest amount of field work and a good search through the BOA would allow someone to compile a proper survey of the organ history of a county, something which has never yet been done in the UK, I believe.
Bedfordshire is a small and comparatively simple area in organ terms, but one intriguing instrument is that at Harlington until, apparently, 1879.3 J.D. Parry describes it in a letter: 4
On account of a window at Harlington Church being blocked up, I believe before the donation of an organ, W.A. calls the latter a 'poor looking' instrument. Now I appeal to any one living, who has seen or will look at it, whether it be not a large and handsome one, formerly belonging to some town, and I believe 20 years ago, the best in the county after St. Paul's. [i.e. Bedford, Gerard Smith 1715]. It has three turrets, and carved work, besides gilt pipes, and was given by the Lord of the Manor, Mr. Cooper, at a cost of about £350, besides other ornaments, amounting, I believe, to about £1,000 in the whole; all carped at by W.A., with not a syllable of praise for the liberality, and an unfounded sneer at the organ.
'W.A.' was John Martin, mentioned above. The organ was evidently in situ in 1827, an early date for a substantial organ in a country church, and was tuned by an obscure local, A.W. Puddephatt, two years later. This instrument seems not to appear in the usual sources, and it would be interesting to know where it came from. The Coopers were Lords of the Manor at Toddington, where W.D.C. Cooper gave a 'large and beautifully toned organ' in 1856, but although an account of 1898 says that the organ there came from Harlington the records of both churches are silent. Elucidation required. It is tempting to suggest that the town mentioned by J.D. Parry might be nearby Luton where St Mary's church acquired a new organ by Lincoln in 1822, but there is no evidence that it had a predecessor.
GESELLSCHAFT DER ORGELFREUNDE
While we continue, to a large extent, to ignore our organ heritage, it is notable that the GDO's forthcoming conference in the Rühr includes visits to organs by Postill and Bryceson, presumably brought in recently. A larger organ by Holdich has just been restored for a church in Krefeld.
JOHN AVERY
John Avery has two known addresses, St Margaret's Churchyard, Westminster (1794), and 16 Queen Square (1804-). Joan Jeffery has recently pointed out, privately and in print, that several eighteenth-century organ-builders can be shown to have possessed a variety of different properties, and our understanding of how they were used is still unclear.
Avery's 'organ manufactory' was 'near the Assylum' in 1800 when John Marsh visited;5 this must have been on the South Bank, since Marsh returned to town via London Bridge, and on a previous visit in 1797 via Blackfriars Bridge.6 Robins identifies it as the Bethlehem Hospital, but that was not moved from Moorfields to its present site in Lambeth until c.1812. I think that it might be the chapel of the Female Orphan Asylum, Lambeth, founded in 1758. Elvin7 mentions that it had a fine reputation for music in the early nineteenth century, though he does not say where he came upon this information.
Avery rebuilt the organ at 'The Assylum', but Marsh was not greatly impressed in November 1797, returning 'by way of Black Fryar's Bridge'. He says:7
Mr Avery having told me of having much improved & enlarged the organ at the Assylum, I on the next morning walked there ...The touch was also very stiff & deep & the keys plac'd in an unusual manner, those of the choir organ being in the middle & the great organ keys at the bottom; so that if I wanted to play the cho'r org. bass to the Swell, my left hand was sure to come down with a crash upon the full organ bass instead ... a very compleat one, but too powerful, I thought, for the building... 6
Evidently the organ had three manuals.
Avery perhaps worked for Longman & Broderip at some time, to judge from their response to Marsh's enquiries as to his bona fides in 1781: 'the answer I there receiv'd was that they neither knew where he liv'd or wish'd to know'.8 George King and Alexander Buckingham appear to have worked with or for him, since the memorandum inside the organ at St Michael's Mount Castle (built for Colonel Lemon of Bryanston Street in 1782), is signed 'John Avery, George King, Alex. Buckingham'.9
CARL SCHULTZ AND CHRISTIAN OTTO
Carl Schultz (often misread as Schulze) is said to have worked for the more famous firm, but not to have been a relation. I have received information (2001) from Miss Jane Otto of Isleworth, who is E.R. Otto's granddaughter. Carl was the son of Friedrich Schultz and Sophie Heerwagen, and had two brothers, Louis and August, and three sisters. He and Christian Rudolf Otto left Paulinzella together for Hull in February 1865 (perhaps to work for Forster & Andrews). Miss Otto has a transcription of a travel pass with these details. Schultz's sister, Johanna Emmeline, came to England to keep house for her brother, and married C.R. Otto on 5 March 1866 at the German Lutheran Church in Hull. Carl Schultz married a widow and had two children, Frederick and Clara.
Christian Rudolf Otto was born 7 January 1836 in Horla, Prussia, the son of Friedrich Otto and Marie Dorothea Borman, of a family of horse-breeders who came from Sangerhausen via Blankenburg. Presumably he worked for Forster & Andrews at least 1865-6, since his daughter Sophia was born in Hull in 1866 while his son Frederick was born in Sheffield in 1870 (in Brindley's house?). Otto and Carl Schultz's sister, Johanna Emmeline, had five children, Sophia (born 17 November 1866), Frederick, Lily (18 January-28 July 1878), Percy (born c.1881) and Ernest. He died 4 January 1908 in Wakefield, described as a house furnisher; a business (Otto & Howe) in Sheffield survived until recently, and in which Ernest and Frederick worked. In the census there is also a certain Otto P. Rudolph in St Pancras,10 organ-builder, born in Hull c.1861. This is curious, and Miss Otto's family knows nothing of him.
C. Rudolf Otto married in 1866, and had four children. Perhaps he fathered a child on an earlier visit to England in 1861 (to work on the Doncaster organ?) and the names were subsequently reversed to avoid opprobrium. Forster & Andrews had made visits to Germany in the 1850s, and were evidently employing C.R. Otto and Schultz from 1865, so perhaps Schulze & Söhne rented factory space or spare capacity from them in 1860-2 for the monumental work of setting up the Doncaster instrument.
CORRECTION
David Wood informs me that the Snetzler organ at St Peter's Convent, Horbury (BIOSRep, XXVI, 4, 17) is still in situ, though in poor condition. The convent has been sold, but the remaining nuns, who occupy a smaller building on the site, retain the use of the chapel and its contents.
STATISTICS
There are 48 Anglican cathedrals in England and Wales. Since 1945, 26 substantially new organs have been built in them, and there have been a further 47 major interventionist rebuilds. Since 1990, 34 of the 48 cathedrals have had at least one change of organist.
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1. For a comprehensive discussion of Glynne and his notes, see McGarvie,
Michael (ed.),'Sir Stephen Glynne's Church Notes for Somerset',
Somerset Record Society, 82 (Taunton, 1994), vi-xxi.
2. Pickford, Chris, (ed.), 'Bedfordshire Churches in the Nineteenth Century',
Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 73,77,79,80 (Bedford, 1994-2001).
3. All from op. cit. Part 2, 323-4, Part 3, 772, and Chris Pickford's
unpublished references.
4. Bedford Times, 14 February 1846.
5. Robins, Brian (ed.), 'The John Marsh Journals. The Life and Times of a
Gentleman Composer', Sociology of Music, 9 (Stuyvesant, New York,
1998), 71.
6. op. cit., 679 .
7. Elvin, Laurence, Bishop and Son (Lincoln, 1984), 35.
8. Robins, op. cit., 248.
9. Clark, Geoffrey C., 'Organ in the Chapel of St. Michael's Mount,
Cornwall', The Organ, 146, (October 1957), 72.
10. Freeman-Edmonds Directory of British Organ-Builders
(Oxford, 2002), lxxxvi.
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