Last updated 19:32, Thursday, 23 October 2008

REMEMBER cinema organs? Most big cinemas had one. Some time during the evening one of these musical juggernauts would rise from its pit and the resident cinema organist would do his stuff, invariably playing at least one show-off piece which involved using most of its special effects.

Some cinema organists could be heard on the radio, as I remember, in regular 15-minute programmes. They became minor media celebrities.

Back in November 1938, one young Workingtonian was all set to make it in the cinema organist fame game. That’s the rosy future a local journalist predicted for 21-year-old Gerald Mulvaney – then “Workington United Kingdom Gold Medallist and one of the youngest cinema organists in the country”.

After spending some of his earlier years entertaining fans at the Neath Empire Theatre, he was due to take up a new post in London, as assistant cinema organist at the Tottenham Dominion Theatre. Fred Boyco, probably a media celebrity of the day, was their number one organist.

And this is where I ask for your assistance? How young was he when he moved to Neath? And what became of young Gerald Mulvaney? War was but a year away – not the best of times for a young musician to advance his career.

Church organs have often been mentioned in the local press over the years, especially when congregations were looking to raise money – either to renovate an existing instrument – or to buy a new one. It’s a sad fact that, impressive as church organs are, they are horrendously expensive to buy or to repair.

It’s probably too late now to turn back the clock, but using a fiddle as accompaniment would be a much cheaper option.

Lorton Church members must have been quite content to have a fiddler lead the singing in the early and mid-19th century. It was back in 1943 that John Tyson, while going through old family papers, unearthed three manuscript books of sacred music which, dating back to the 1840s, had belonged to Joseph Tyson, his father and Richard and Harry Tyson, his uncles. He also had in his possession a pitch pipe which presumably had been used to ensure that musicians and/or singers all sang in the right key. His father led the singing with his fiddle at that time. So he tells us in his July 1943 letter to the West Cumberland Times.

In Distington Church they had another solution to hymn accompaniment in the olden days – a barrel organ. We know that this unlikely instrument had fallen out of favour by November 1885 as that was the year in which Billie Glenn, aged only 12, first played the organ there, transferring to the new church, which opened in November 26 of that year. He subsequently played at Cleator Moor, Holy Trinity and, from 1907, Hensingham Parish Church, Whitehaven.

He stopped playing in church in 1947 – after 62 years. It would probably have been longer had it not been, reportedly, for the rheumatism in his hands.

Cockermouth Wesleyan Chapel acquired a new organ in 1888, selling off the old instrument for the paltry sum of £1. It wasn’t that old, only built in 1847, although it was a rather antique contraption.

That we know something of its history is down to its first organist, Joseph Sanderson. He tells us that it was built in the back of the shop belonging to Billy Graves, the saddler. The unnamed builder “fell into financial difficulties” and the organ was sold by the sheriff for a knockdown price.

Joseph Tickle was given the job of finishing building the organ and installing it in the chapel. Things did not go well. The wood of the organ started to swell because it had been placed against a damp wall. The bellows were also inclined to topple over. The latter fault was cured by attaching a couple of rollers.

The damp, at Sanderson’s suggestion, was cured by “carrying a gas jet inside the instrument” which was lit on Saturday nights when it was wet.

What would Health & Safety have to say about that nowadays?

Just in passing, Joseph Sanderson had written in from Mooroopua, Victoria, having left Cockermouth in 1850.

So was organ music popular in West Cumbria? Not if you believe 1899 press comment: “Musical Workington may have to bow her head in shame.” Workington church organist E.A. Sobey’s recitals had been so badly attended that the organisers felt “that they were casting pearls of music before unappreciative people.”