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RELF CLARK _________________________________________
WINDSOR CASTLE FIRE
Even in dull weather, my fifth-floor office, in Maidenhead, commands a good view of Windsor Castle, some four miles away, and around noon on Friday 20 November it was clear that all was not well at the Castle, and that the smoke towering into the air was not the work of an over-zealous gardener disposing of leaves. The rest, as they say, is history.
'There's a Father Willis up the road', Sidney Campbell once said to me after a lesson in St George's Chapel, but he never took me to see it, and it was not until the 1980s that I first heard the four-manual Willis in St George's Hall, Windsor Castle. For some years it featured in the Windsor Festival, and many will have memories of recitals given on it by Jennifer Bate, Margaret Phillips, Christopher Robinson, Ian Tracey, Jane Watts and others. I kept my fingers crossed, naturally, but learned the following Sunday that the organ had been entirely destroyed.
There is a handwritten stop-list in the Willis envelope in the British Organ archive, and readers may be surprised by the synopsis which follows;
C-f'-a''
Pedal 16 16 8 16
An account of the instrument was given by Clifford Armitage in The Organ XXVI, 103, 136, and by a curious coincidence there was an article about it in the December edition of Organists' Review, by Hugh Macpherson. Readers are referred to both, for information about this unusual, octopod-ish creation (pace Mr Macpherson, there was no Clarion on the Swell).
By great good fortune, the instrument was recorded by Jonathan Rees-Williams, whose tape (available commercially) is now a unique document (so to speak). Over the years many organs have been destroyed by fire, but it is sad, in these days of Fire Regulations when there is apparently little that push-button technology cannot achieve, that we have to re-learn what terrible devastation a straightforward, old-fashioned fire can bring about. |