Lift hearts and voices
FOLLOWING on from your article about church organs being scrapped (December 15/22, 2021), might I suggest that country dwellers lucky enough to have a barn install a pipe organ? We rescued ours when Brailes Methodist Church closed about 10 years ago. We took it apart (all 450 pipes) and, after it had spent six months on the barn floor, managed to reassemble it on a stage, with the blower in the next-door lambing room. Amazingly, it worked and we have since had lots of lively parties with cocktail-fuelled singing. On one occasion, the wonderful tenor and composer Roderick Williams, who lives nearby, gave everyone a lesson on how to sing Rule Britannia (above), which he had sung magnificently at the Last Night of the Proms. We have never looked back.
Mark Roberts, Warwickshire