Harmoniums in Caithness

The wonderfully cheerful men featured in this photograph are chemist Edgar Munroe Fisher and two friends, fiddler Willie Gibson and Frank (“Buzz”) Busby, working on a harmonium-type reed organ originally built by John Holt of Cheshire. This was, thinks his son-in-law Jack Sinclair, in Berriedale Church, Caithness, identified as such thanks to a reference in the Reed Organ Society Bulletin about their work in August 1998, some years after the fact (R. J. Allan, n.d.)

The photo was provided by Jack Sinclair, son in law to Willie Gibson (right), a Thurso-based fiddler and violin maker. Jack told me that Willie “repaired almost anything including pianos, accordions and violins”. He still has a letter from an Irishman whose fiddle had been trodden upon; said fiddle was taken to Aberdeen, thence to Gibson’s workshed in Thurso, and by the time he had fixed it, its grateful owner said you would never know it had been damaged.  Gibson was clearly good with wood in other ways, with a local reputation for repairing the woodwork in vintage cars. Jack recalls him making fiddles in his shed and having pianos sitting in the living room awaiting surgery. He also remembers making sticky labels on an early computer, marked in italic font ‘Stradivarius’. By a coincidence, my own family has one of these instruments, the joke given away by the label also saying ‘made in Germany’ rather than in Italy. As well as making fiddles, Gibson also played in the Dounreay Strathspey and Reel society and competed in the Caithness Music Festival. Jack still treasures a reel tune dedicated ‘To Mr and Mrs Willie Gibson’, a gift on his retirement, and this, below, a lament written by Caithness composer David Rosie in 1991, to the Willie Gibson’s memory.

With Willie is Dounreay nuclear power station chemist Edgar Monroe Fisher, who was a great reciter of Burns poems, and friend Frank Busby (‘Buzz’). None are trained organ builders but have clearly worked out how to fix this one. I was reminded of a similar venture, for St Peter and the Holy Rude Episcopal Church in Thurso, which involved my engineer father Don Ryan, Peter Higginson, John Gray and Alan Jones, all employees of the Dounreay nuclear power station, finding and rebuilding a small pipe organ. What these anecdotes show is a) how popular small organs were throughout Scotland and b) how ingenious craftsmen were in working out how to build and fix their local instruments.

The particular reed organ in the photograph seems to have been for Berriedale Church; it is mentioned in a book by R. J. Allan which surveys the 19^th and 20^th century spread of harmoniums throughout the UK (see Further Reading). Compared with pipe organs, reed organs (also widely called harmoniums) were cheaper, more portable, and easier to maintain, and were found in both private houses and in many smaller churches throughout the British Isles and north America. Britain had a particular concentration of makers in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. The Berriedale instrument that Fisher, Gibson and Busby are standing around seems likely to have been made by John Holt in Manchester.

I always assumed that all small organs with pedal bellows systems were called harmoniums. This is not the case: ‘pump organ’ or ‘reed organ’ is the more expert name for a variety of ‘reed’ instruments, related distantly to accordions and melodions; in fact, the portable dance band accordion seems to have been developed after the reed organ, which first appeared in the later 18^th century. The ‘reed’ for all these instruments is a vibrating metal strip, . In harmoniums, air is blown past the reeds; in ‘reed organs’, particularly those from the USA, the air system sucks the air inward past the reeds.  Both varieties have a piano keyboard and usually foot bellows, and were widely found both in churches and private homes. Unlike pipe organs, they were transportable, and compared with pianos, more stable in their tuning. Sensitive use of the pedals can achieve expressive louder and softer dynamics; combining reeds of different lengths and thicknesses created different registration effects and timbres. For a demonstration of different designs see the Reed Organ Society’s webpages.

Reed organs were mass produced in America, and by sheer coincidence, after speaking to Jack Sinclair this summer I found myself visiting the enormous site that was formerly the factory of one such makers, the Estey Organ Museum in Vermont (they have a big room full of organs which visitors can play, which is gloriously noisy). In Scotland, the popularity of reed organs really took off in the wake of the tours of American evangelists Moody and Sankey in the 1870s and 1880s (Thomson, 2006). These carried a reed organ with them to encourage hymn singing. Electronics gradually replaced the foot pump from the 1930s, but many older mechanical instruments lived on.  I remember in my teens, c.1980, being asked to play at a church service for the visiting Queen Mother at Canisbay church, Caithness. I was used to a small pipe organ in Thurso with fairly consistent air pressure, and it took me a bit of time and practice to match the speed of my foot pumping to achieve a smooth flow of notes. Canisbay – the most northerly church on the Scottish mainland – turned out to be where Jack Sinclair was married, a wee bit before my time. Jack remembered a Bella Louttit played in Canisbay for his father – before his time!

This post is a genuine ‘conversation’ piece, with grateful thanks to Jack Sinclair for his reminiscences of the north.

Further Reading and Listening

• Anon, ‘Berriedale Church of Scotland and Burial Ground’ LB7926, Historic Environment Scotland.
• J. Allan, Reed Organs in England: a Comprehensive Study of Reed Organs in England, Scotland and Wales (CC-BY-NC-SA, 12/1/26).
• The Reed Organ Society https://www.reedsoc.org/
• Elizabeth P Thomson, ‘The Impetus given to the use of instrumental music in Scottish churches by the visit of Moody and Sankey to Scotland in 1873-4’ in Scottish Church History 36(1), (2006):175-194. DOI: 10.3366/sch.2006.36.1.10