Extracts from "The Beacon", July 2008

Poem: "The Sea"
The Guild of Friends of St. Lawrence's
St. Mary's Organ

Poem: "The Sea"

What a pleasure to go to the coast
To watch and enjoy the sea,
Maybe walk on the beach in Summer sun
And see the families having fun,
It's a special place to be.

Children with toys and buckets and spades
Are happily occupied
Building channels for little boats
Or sand-castles with towers and moats,
Later swept away by the tide.

The restless sea has many moods,
Sometimes it likes to play,
Up the beach the waves come dashing
With a tumbling and a splashing,
Wetting us with spray.

At times the sea can be at peace,
And waves are barely seen,
Forward and back, to and fro
The water ripples in rhythmic flow
To wash the pebbles clean.

But when the winds are blowing hard,
The sea shows more emotion,
Against the pier the waves are lashing
With a roaring and a crashing,
There's anger in the ocean.

For leisure hours at any time,
What better place to be,
Where air is clean and gulls are soaring,
The changing sea is never boring,
Yes, that's the place for me.

Irene Schofield

The Guild of Friends of St. Lawrence's

With the arrival of the month of July comes our summer season of Guided Tours of St. Lawrence's church. As usual they will start at 3pm and the dates are as follows:
Sunday 27 July,
Sunday 17 August
Monday 25 August (Bank Holiday),
Sunday 14 September
The charge for a tour is: Adults £2, children free.

Next month we celebrate St. Lawrencetide with our annual ecumenical service on Sunday 10th August, at 6pm in the ancient church.

Elaine Williams
Hon.Sec.

St. Mary's Organ

Would you enjoy the services as much at St. Mary's if there was no music?
Is the organ really necessary?
Do you know how it works?

A church organ is a complex piece of equipment, and ours is 100 years old this year: the wonder is that it still works as well as it does, even though it was the 'Rolls-Royce' of organs in its day. Of course, there have been problems and about twenty years ago a lot of the leather operating parts were replaced. Also, recently, for several years the organ was almost unusable for a large part of spring, due to the central heating drying out the operating parts. However, the addition of a humidifier (two years ago now) has overcome that difficulty.

St. Mary's organ consists of four keyboards, (great, swell and choir manuals and a pedalboard), 26 speaking stops with about 1500 pipes (each has to be individually tuned), and nine couplers. The swell and choir pipes are enclosed in separate chambers, and each has a foot pedal to control the volume by opening and closing louvres in one side. There are also several combination buttons for each keyboard, that are used to select a pre-selected combination of stops.

But how does it work?

Basically, the pipes are a set of whistles, but the sound each makes is dependent on the material it is made of, the size, and the way in which the air is vibrated. The largest pipe in our organ is wood, 16 feet long and about 10 inches square: the smallest is metal, about 3 inches long and a quarter inch diameter.

There are four main types of pipe: the diapasons made of metal, the flutes made of wood, strings (so-called) also made of metal, and the reeds, which are wood or metal with a vibrating reed (like an oboe). The pipes are organised in "ranks", each rank having one pipe for each key on the keyboard with which it is associated (except the mixture on the Swell, which has three pipes per key).

Two actions are required to cause a pipe to sound:
1: a stop is pulled, which opens a hole under each pipe in one rank,
2: a key is pressed, which opens a hole under one pipe in each rank of pipes for that keyboard.
When both holes under a pipe are open the pipe sounds.

There are basically three types of organ mechanism:
1: tracker - where all connections between the keys and the pipes are mechanical, using wooden rods;
2: pneumatic - where these connections are achieved by the flow of air through tubes, to operate pneumatic valves;
3: electric - which uses low voltage wiring and solenoids.
The organ in St. Mary's is mainly pneumatic, but some pedal stops use the electric method.

The air pressure required for the pipes and the pneumatic controls is provided by two blower fans located in a chamber at the back of church. The pressure is regulated by three large reservoir bellows, with heavy weights on them and release valves to prevent over-pressure. While the organ is not played loudly, the blowers can provide all the airflow required; but when "all the stops are out", the bellows help maintain the steady air-flow needed.

The organ is tuned regularly and maintained in good repair by an organ tuner who visits four times a year. He ensures the pipes are kept in tune, and corrects any minor problems that may have occurred. It was on his advice that the humidifier was installed - instead of carrying out major repair work. However, the organ may sometimes sound out of tune after a rapid change in climate and temperature: this is because the materials of the pipes expand and contract with temperature at different rates.

Next time you are at church when the organ is used, listen to the different sounds it makes during a hymn, and think of the organist. He has his hands possibly on different manuals, his feet dancing on the pedal board, thinking about which stops to use for the next verse (and which keyboard), controlling the volume of the swell and choir organs with the two foot pedals - and still (hopefully) playing the right notes.

Chris Buck