Of the Organ at St. James’ Parish Church
A Personal Perspective
The William Hill pipe organ at St. James Parish Church was built in the mid-1800s, when British organ building was arguably the finest in the world. Indeed, Hill was the firm which was commissioned to build most of the organs in the Royal chapels and palaces.
Unfortunately, not much of the original organ that came to Barbados remains. Several rebuilds and improvements have taken place and a close review reveals that only the façade display pipes and two and a half of eleven ranks remain. The original great organ had five stops, five ranks on the swell and one pedal stop - a total of five hundred and seventy pipes.
I first saw the organ in the mid-nineteen fifties when I came to help my father, the late Samuel D Burke, remove it from the chamber in the Chancel (which is now the Lady Chapel), to the Gallery where it remained until 1985. I helped my father service the organ regularly until I moved to live in England in 1962. In 1967, my father completed some major work on the organ (Reverend Dickenson was the Rector at the time). The old mechanical actions were replaced with electric actions and a chancel organ was installed. Some of the pedal pipes, which can be seen standing against the wall, were also added. I was informed that a Canadian visitor who was attending service at the church, heard the Rector’s appeal for funds, and gave the Church some ranks of pipes which he had in his basement. Additionally, he personally paid to ship them to Barbados. These pipes formed the foundation of the Chancel organ.
In 1985, the Canadian firm Keates Geissler was invited to do another rebuild on the organ. It was at that time that the rather unwise decision was made to hang the organ from the rafters. This idea, I am told was to let light in through the window. Since I have been Curator of the organ I have seen dozens of bats (dead and alive) in delicate parts of the organ. Additionally, we have cleaned other insects such as flies and bees from the pipes. Some of the most damaging elements however, are the salt air which rusts anything that is metallic and, because of the close proximity of trees, termites invade the wood work. Apart from all this, there is no acoustical advantage to be gained from the organ being placed in this position.
I took over the care of the organ in 1996 when I returned from England. After eight years of small additions, the Rev. Canon Layne, (who always thought that St. James had the potential to become the center for music in this part of the island), spoke with the Parochial Church Council (PCC) regarding an instrument that would attract the finest organists from anywhere in the world. He then acquired the services of Dr. Philip Forde, FRCO, who was highly capable of drawing up the specifications and the technical aspects of such a venture.
This project has produced one of the finest organs in the Caribbean. It is a three manual and pedal organ, with fifty nine stops, forty ranks of pipes and two thousand, four hundred and ninety- three pipes. St. James’ Church organ has the most sophisticated switching system in use today, with a playback system and a classical console built to American Guild of Organists’ standards. This project was completed in 2007 and recent renovations have further improved the total output with the re-siting of the pedal bourdon pipes.
The horizontal Trumpet (En Chamade) is the first one in the Island and is a favourite with tourists and other visitors. It is photographed dozens of times on a daily basis.
David A Burke, Organ Curator
Organ pipes are physically organized within the organ into sets according to note and timbre. A set of pipes producing the same timbre for each note is called a rank, while each key on a pipe organ controls a note which may be sounded by different ranks of pipes, alone or in combination.
En chamade (French: "to sound a parley") refers to powerfully voiced reed stops in a pipe organ that have been mounted horizontally, rather than vertically, in the front of the organ case, projecting out into the church or concert hall. They produce a commanding, loud trumpet-like tone, used for fanfares and solos.