ORGANS IN & AROUND CHESTERFIELD
INTRODUCTION
ORGANS IN & AROUND CHESTERFIELD: AN OVERVIEW
When the first recorded organ was installed in Chesterfield in 1756, the town was much as it had been for several hundreds of years: a modestly prosperous provincial town, handsome but unremarkable, its most noteworthy feature the twice-weekly market which drew traders from the "strange, mountainous, misty, moreish, rocky country" of north-east Derbyshire. Traces of industrialisation were already apparent: "Coale pitts and quaraes of stone are all about even just at the towne end".
With the 19th-century came the mills and factories and mines, the railways, the terraces of workers' cottages, the smudge of industrial smoke. This was the great age of church and chapel building, and, for Chesterfield, of organs too. Instruments were ordered mainly from northern provincial builders - Brindley & Foster, Abbott & Smith; P. Conacher; Albert Keates; Bower & Dunn. As church buildings were enlarged, or as musical aspirations grew, instruments were rebuilt or replaced, sometimes finding new homes locally.
During the last fifty years church attendance has waned; the continuity of the tradition of
classical
music has been broken, and many of the organs which were purchased with such pride by church
congregations a century ago have suffered from neglect. Many were allowed to deteriorate to
the point at which church councils could safely decide that restoration costs were
prohibitive; they were removed, often for scrap. Others soldier valiantly on week by week,
their role in the wider musical scene ever more marginalised. Having failed in the duty
of effective stewardship of their property, churches have for decades been tempted by the
lure of inexpensive electronic organ-substitutes: cheap in price, cheap in maintenance,
cheap in musical quality.
Such is the pattern of the rise and fall of the organ in north-east Derbyshire. It is a familiar story, of course, a mirror of trends in every part of England. Sometimes I think we are lucky to have any organs remaining at all.
THE MAKING OF THESE PAGES Much of the information in these pages is the result of research undertaken by Nigel Tilley and myself during the summer of 1991. We visited, examined and played the organs; where access was not possible many organists sent detailed information by mail. We gathered historical material from the local studies section of Chesterfield Library. Other information was taken from musical periodicals such as 'Organist and Choirmaster' and 'Musical Opinion', which published stoplists of new and rebuilt organs. In addition, both N.T. and I have intermittently collected information about Chesterfield organs since the 1970s.
The initial result of our research was Nigel Tilley's book 'Organs In & Around Chesterfield' (1991), which has been out of print for several years. My research has continued, and some particularly valuable information has come from the archives of Henry Willis & Sons. Ltd., which I examined in 1992 by courtesy of Henry Willis IV. The company had a substantial tuning round in the Chesterfield area, and its archives contain details of several organs which were removed many years ago. These pages are therefore an expanded and revised version of N.T.'s book, on which I have, with permission, freely drawn.
There are, nonetheless, many gaps in this material, particularly when compared with some of the very thoroughly researched publications of recent years. I have not yet been able to systematically search through church records, or through back-issues of the local newspapers. Neither do these pages include technical description of the organs from a builder's point of view. Nonetheless, here is a snapshot of organs in north-east Derbyshire for your enjoyment.
Julian Rhodes
September 1999
Chesterfield Market Place c.1859: detail from a painting by H. Smyth
Chesterfield c.1930: old postcard
Notes on local organ builders
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