Out with the old

Hot on the heels of the re-opening of St George’s after the current repair and refurbishment is completed will come the installation of the new organ. Indeed work on the instrument is already under way at Richards Fowkes and Company of Ooltewah, Tennessee. More of that in later posts.

However to prepare for the new instrument, clearly the old one has had to be removed and it was decided that this should be done before the current work started. This was to avoid having to take out unavoidably dusty organ components in a newly repainted church but it also affords us the opportunity of carrying out restoration work on the organ case while the church is scaffolded for refurbishment. Considerable effort was made late last year to find a buyer for the 1970s Harrison organ but to no avail until at the eleventh hour contact was made with the German organ builders Krawinkel, part of whose business is the refurbishment of redundant instruments.

Herr Krawinkel and his team arrived at 3.00pm on Monday 8^th February. By midday on Thursday 11th the entire instrument had been dismantled and the following day it was loaded up into a truck and on its way to Germany. We are fortunate that Malcolm Crowthers was able to come into the church to photograph this operation. The picture shown here is but one of many he took.