HN&B 3 manual at All Souls Hastings in danger on account of Health and Safety

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

I have just been talking with someone with personal knowledge of All Souls, Altheston Road Hastings which I assume is
http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=N15689

Redundant church - water coming through the roof with slipped tiles etc. Apparently the roof used to be maintained by a skilled roofer working with ladders and movable platforms. Now, of course nothing less than full scaffolding is good enough putting maintenance costs through the roof, 'scuse the pun.

Anyway the result is an unloved instrument in an unloved unmaintainable building with water ingress . . .

Best wishes

David P

[Barrie Davis]

This is a similar situation to St Edmunds Dudley, the whole organ has had to be replaced, Trevor Tipple is putting in a 2 manual Binns rescued from a church in Staffordshire.

I only hope the organ mentioned by David is saved.

Barrie

[KB7DQH]

My first reaction to this is... "Not another organ lost to a failing roof :o"  Could the case and pipework be reasonably protected with sheet plastic until a new home is found?  This would be an inexpensive
"stop-gap" measure (dear me... another bad pun ;D until it could be rehoused or salvaged...

Eric
KB7DQH

[Jonathan Lane]

Like all these redundant organs we are happy to rescue pipework, but much else is often impossible due to lack of storage.  I am still working on a much better storage deal so we can rescue whole organs and store them until new homes can be found, whole, or in parts, if anyone knows of anything (very cheap) near Poole, please let me know.  In the meantime, we will continue to rescue pipework!
Jonathan (organbuilder@jonathan-lane.org.uk)

[revtonynewnham]

Hi

I'm sorry to hear of the Hasting situation.  My step-uncle was parish priest their at one time - VERY high church!

The organ is in effect a Hope-Jones (built by Norman & Beard)  - when I last saw it (over 20 years ago) it was unplayable.  The H-J console remained - if it's still there, that would be worth saving, and N&B pipework is usually high quality, but the H-J scales might make reuse in anything else a challenge.

I don't think this has been altered too much from its HJ roots, so might be worth saving as an increasingly rare example of his work.

Every Blessing

Tony