David Coram

And probably in any state.

Transmission doesn't really make that much odds. Rusty, underpowered, low-budget lever magnets driving no fewer than seven different types and designs of action; leatherwork which in places dates back to 1914 (and in several places has been replaced with tosh, and in several more places has been replaced really quite badly). No amount of computing is going to overcome that.

Hello PV and welcome. I am afraid you will find Bournemouth a very different place. The road on which St Peter's is situated is now end-to-end nightclubs, some open, some closed. Nightlife has completely taken over the area, and the churchyard is frequently host to rapes and acts of violence and at least one stabbing in the past three years. It is now sealed off at night. The Harmonics were removed in 1976, along with the fine console (replaced with an upended fruit crate stained and varnished) and most of the reeds were revoiced. I fear you would be well advised to spend your train fare on some other location! The Wimborne instrument is the only one of those which you mention to have survived more-or-less unchanged in its original form.

Absolutely agreed. But a couple of ill-conceived jobs do not an entire reputation make. A certain very particular organ builder once presented me with a CD of fairly obscure music by a fairly obscure player, on the basis that he admired the (Marcussen) instrument tremendously and wished it to form a part of my education in voicing. Anyone who has first-hand knowledge of the person I am referring to will realise at once that there is, quite simply, no higher accolade.

Out of curiosity I've been trying to find out about this. Any info?

And for a further five points, the wood of the stop jambs is a lot more characterful than I remember it being. Actually, I'll just shut up generally.

OK, I was completely wrong - they're stylistically appropriate remakes of the originals, far more artistic than the KA stuff I claimed they were. Ten points to PCND.

Aren't both they and the stop heads original material? I thought they were older than 1963, actually.

It's hotting up in here already! I've had a look too - recitals, a week of services, and several weekends. Perhaps my memory is deceiving me, and I'm imagining things which aren't there, but you can clearly see the collar of the pistons (equal in size to the head) in several photographs online, as well as some of my own. The standard Willis items don't have this collar - the necks pass straight through the keyslip (as at Hereford at Southampton St Mary), sometimes with a much smaller collar (as at Salisbury). I'm very happy to be authoritatively told I'm wrong, but do please at least permit me to express as a possibility that these are replacement items. Whatever they are, I didn't like them and that's about all I was hoping to get across in this entirely subjective thread. You're dead right about the Ophicleide, by the way.

Go and have a look - I'm pretty certain they're plastic. Well, the topic says let's have a riot!

I was just pootling along on flutes 8+4 in some verse anthem or other and as I did a scale in the bass the sustained chord in the middle octave was wobbling about like jelly, probably getting on for a minor third. It was the year of the rebuild so it is possible that the concussion or its spring had not been got quite right yet. I seem to recall a rather brittle attack to the Swell reeds - certainly the 16' - which I put down to winding rather than voicing.

Have a look on Google Images for Truro cathedral organ console and you'll find pictures which appear to support that they're the standard KA jobs, as at St Peter's. I'm referring to the whole of the console - stop jambs, music desks, the side returns next to the music desk.

Winchester is terribly dull. I found (in a residential week) that I really didn't enjoy Exeter. The winding (esp to the Choir) I found just too flaky. The rest of it, for me, failed to deliver the character which the case promised, and left me disappointed.

Totally agreed - I don't miss it one bit. Believe it or not, the manual actions were releathered less than five years ago by our mutual Cornish friend, and the Swell (particularly the mechanical link between the flue and reed chests) has never been the same since. The piston action is fed by a 35 year old rectifier which doesn't compensate for demand. Pull out one stop and press general cancel, and that one solenoid gets the full wallop of however many amps it is; pull out full organ and it can barely cope. I took a conscious decision not to repair anything to do with the console unless it catastrophically prevented the organ being used, in the hope that a case could be made for a replacement. I hope you found the Pedal Bourdon unit much better - it was releathered and given new magnets earlier this year - when I arrived there in 2008 there were five notes not working at all and most of the top octave of the 8' were hanging on forever and a day. Oh, and the Choir stop action now works, too. This state of decline is arguably inevitable when an instrument is made of components of such vastly differing life expectancies. The soundboards will go on forever; the leatherwork has nearly had it (the Choir reservoir only has two corners left); most of the magnets in the basement are rusting and seizing. Unfortunately prior to my arrival a make-do-and-mend approach was taken, in that a soundboard would be stripped down and the motors releathered - but the magnets were not changed at the same time, and as a consequence the same soundboard has to be revisited again five years later. My approach was to go through soundboard by soundboard (and if you include pedal chests there are no fewer than 23) and fully overhaul each; magnets, leatherwork, concussions, joints, the lot. Painting the Forth bridge is a big enough job as it is, but if you only daub paint on the bits where the rust is showing through, you will be there for a thousand years and still won't keep on top of it.

The Truro pistons appeared to me to be pretty much the standard KA fayre of the era. To me, quarter sawn timber looks vastly better - or plain sawn in very small planks, as at Salisbury. Plain sawn in very wide planks looks to me like cladding rather than furniture and I dislike its utilitarian appearance. Go to Google Images and compare a few console grains if you don't see what I mean.

Romsey should occupy at least two of the top three spots. Whatever has changed mechanically, it remains a musical instrument of the absolute utmost musical beauty and tonal integrity.

Now that's the bit I've been secretly waiting for. I didn't find Norwich so very terrible - Aston in F has never sounded finer, and it did a mean Elgar Spirit of the Lord. You absolutely must try St Albans post-revamp if you haven't already because I think you will find it a very considerably different instrument. In its new form it was a contender for my top five.

Well if Germany is involved, I knew the instrument in Clifton Cathedral, Bristol some years before I knew Christchurch, Oxford and I can well recall my profound disappointment on meeting the latter.

We could all pick at grammar and spelling, and it's frequently tempting to do just that. Life's too short. But MM is right that there's nothing wrong with beginning sentences with 'and'. And that's all there is to it, as Bill Bryson summarised in his authoritative book on English usage, Troublesome Words.

For a moment I entertained the notion that the topic hadn't strayed at all and we were still in the hearty English world of... well, pork pies, say, and other products from that locality. But I can't think of anything which would qualify as being good.

In terms of being unsound, maybe. But what about banality?

Well, you could always add a Digital Rank Or just pay a lorry driver to sit outside with his engine at 1,496.3 revs on receipt of a text message.

If you think they're ghastly, you're obviously doing them too fast and too loud! And what about the major ones, like... um, Penlan, the most unjustly neglected Welsh tune I know. And Cwm Rhondda. I mean, how many more do you want.

Because the only logical thing to do would be to extend it from the Ophicleide, and that kind of rules out "quiet"...

Before we're all too rude about Jerusalem, see what words of wisdom are proffered in this absolutely marvellous film. I'm making a record with him, you know