History:

In December 13, 1927, the Clou Concert Hall in Berlin ordered a pipe organ from Hill Norman & Beard in England. It was installed & officially opened on June 14, 1928. No longer than 12 months later the organ was removed & sent back to the manufacturers in England because the Concert Hall in Berlin was unable to meet the repayments. About this time, an order was placed for a similar organ for the Civic Theatre in Auckland, so the instrument from Germany was overhauled & dispatched to Sydney ready to be shipped to New Zealand. The order from New Zealand was subsequently cancelled, & in 1932 the organ was installed in the Burwood Palatial Theatre.

In the early 1950’s when consideration was being given to building this Church, Franklin & Maurice Baldwin as well as Lyn Knight were asked to go & look at two organs which were for sale, one of them being the organ in the Palatial Theatre in Burwood. The asking price was 4,400 pounds. Based on the recommendations of these three people, the organ in the Palatial theatre was bought by this Church. There had been no provision for an organ in the plans, but it was decided to strengthen the floor behind each of these two arches, & use this area for the organ chambers, as no specific plans were in place for using this area.

In 1954, Franklin & Maurice began the task of removing the organ from the Palatial Theatre & installing it in this Church. The organ pipes were transported on the top of Franklin’s car which had a flat tray on the roof. The installation took 3 years, working after work & at night & weekends, & Franklin said he thought at the time it had taken 3 years off his life because of the difficulty & length of time this took. The console had a thick coat of white paint on it, & this had to be removed & the console repolished. This was done by Sam McPharlane & Les Englebretch after work. The organ was ready for the opening of this Church in November 1958, & Franklin played at the service & also at the dedication the next day & at a concert the same night, & he is still playing today, 45 years later. I guess most people in the Church have never seen what is behind those arches on each side of the pulpit. I would like to show you what is in there to give you some appreciation of the enormity of the task that was undertaken at this time. On this side of the rostrum you would see this if you were to go in there. Notice that because of lack of ceiling height, the longer pipes had to be cut & rejoined on a mitre.

Then if you were to look on this side, you would see another set of pipes, each group giving a different sound. As well as pipes there are chimes, & here you can see the chrysoglott which is like a large xylophone. This is at Franklin’s workshop being rebuilt at the moment. Here you can see all the leather bellows which operate the hammers. There were 37 small & 37 large leather bellows which Franklin has releathered.

Some time after the organ was installed, Franklin decided that many of the pipes needed to be overhauled, so he again removed these, put them on top of his Holden station waggon & took them to Melbourne, at no cost to the Church.

Franklin & Maurice have maintained the organ for the past 45 years, but there have been many problems due to particularly the age of the wiring & the air operated relays & switches. Here you can see some of these wiring currently in use. The wires are silk covered copper wire which are very brittle due to their age. It was decided about 20 years ago that it would be a good idea to change the organ to digital control to do away with the troublesome components. It was at this time that Geoff Batchelor, Marge’s husband became involved. Geoff Batchelor designed the pipe control system & had the circuit boards made. Together with Alan Masters he also put in place all the new cables to be connected to the pipes. Geoff also developed the wiring protocol so that every one of the about 2500 wires are numbered & colour coded. This was later typed up into a manual by John Duffy. Around this time, Colin Waters from Newcastle University began work on the organ to write the computer programme to control the organ. This work is still continuing but is getting close to completion. Geoff used to let Marge off at work at the hospital at 7am, & come & spend an hour working on the organ before he stared work at the media centre at 8:15am. This would often be repeated after work if Marge was running late. Marge said that if it was a wet Sunday when she could think of heaps of jobs Geoff needed to do around the house, Geoff would often say, I want to just pop over to the organ for half an hour, & Marge would know it would end up being most of the day. Geoff was an electronics engineer, & his expertise was irreplaceable in this project. He spent around 10 years working on the organ electronics. The whole progress of this project was suddenly stopped when tragically, Geoff became ill & died in 1993. No further work in upgrading the control system was done until around 2001. The current console was also not suitable for computer control & in need of major repairs, so Franklin designed a new console & had it made by one of his workers named Charlie Ward. This new console is stored behind the shutters you see behind the choir seats. Every pipe is controlled by a small electromagnet & a leather bellows. Here you see an electromagnet. If you look under the pipe chests you can see all the magnets. Each of these magnets has to be wired to the computer, or the current organ. The task of connecting these wires took about 6 months in 2001, & was done by a few volunteers including Max Ward & Helen Smith. This wiring is close to being completed, but cannot be finished until the computer programming is completed & working on the new console.

Around 18 years ago Franklin was offered the pipe organ from the St Marks Church at Darling Point for $1500. Franklin purchased this again at no cost to the Church & is using this as the basis for extending the current organ by about 800 pipes. Here is a photo of the painting of this done by Pastor Silver. It is envisaged that there will be a set of polished face pipes, with other pipes behind, supported on a floor above the pulpit, weighing about 3 tonnes in total. Although Franklin has the pipes to install, there are no suitable chests to house the pipes. This is a picture of Franklin working in his workshop making the pipe chests. This is a very large job, & takes probably thousands of hours of work. For each of the 800 pipes he also needs to make the 800 leather control valves, which are in 3 or 4 sizes, as well as all the holes in the chests to house the pipes & magnets. Here are some photos of the completed chests for the face pipes that will be in the front of the pulpit. Most of this work has been carried out at no cost to the Church.

I make no apology for presenting this in Sabbath School because I believe this shows us the dedication of Franklin, Maurice, Geoff Batchelor, Colin Waters, & all the other volunteers. What I have presented is not to glorify any person but to encourage each of us to be faithful to God in whatever task he has trusted us to carry out. This has been mission work carried out for God over a 50 year period, & still continuing. I pray that each of us can show the same dedication & tenacity in finishing the work that God has left us to do & that is our mission of bringing the message of salvation & the soon coming of Jesus to those around us here in Sydney. I thank the Lord today for giving these quiet achievers the ability to do this work that has so blessed this Church & brought us all closer to God through the quality music that has been such an important part of our worship here at Wahroonga.