Piping up for church organs

IT’S all too easy to destroy a heritage that has taken centuries to build. In the case of Britain’s parish-church pipe organs—a rich and glorious element of our history, both musical and artistic—the statistics are stark. ‘About one organ per week is being thrown into a skip,’ says Martin Renshaw, organ-rescuer and unwilling expert on the Church-sponsored vandalism going on across the country.

‘Organs are far from worthless boxes of pipes. They are objects of beauty’

The matter was much publicised this summer when BBC presenter Huw Edwards wrote an impassioned piece in calling for a halt to the casual destruction of pipe organs, particularly in Wales, where he learned the organ in his teens. The chapel in Llanelli in which he played, and its ‘lovely two-manual