Archived report · 3 min read · Set in St. Brannoc's Hill ·
The Inspection of the Wet Organ
The autumn inspection of the hill organ finds water in the wind trunk with no source to be heard of, and a flatness in the speech that keeps the tide's own figures.
- filed: "at the autumn visit"
- reference: "SB/OG/05"
1. Instructions. The undersigned attended St Brannoc's on the Hill for the annual inspection of the organ, on the Wednesday appointment of the autumn round. The instrument is by the old firm of the Grieve partnership, dated 1901, two manuals and pedals, tracker action, the reeds under expression. The church stands at the head of the hill town, 140 feet vertical above the harbour, with clay and chalk between the floor and the sea, and its floor has been dry within living memory and the memory of the floor before that.
2. The finding of water was made in the usual order of opening, from the treble end of the Great along the wind trunk, and the trunk was found carrying standing water, clear and faintly brackish, to a depth measured by the pocket gauge at half an inch at the trough ends and 9 inches at the low point above the reservoir. The trunk was opened, drained by syphon into the buckets brought for the purpose, dried with the cloths and by lamplight, and sounded along its bed by the feel of the rod through the hour that drying takes. No source was found. The reservoir leather is whole. The trunk joints are whole. The cellar beneath the north aisle was opened, swept, and stood in overnight, and took on no damp from below. The water came from nowhere that the building keeps.
3. The speech of the instrument was attended to because the verger, Mr Hedley Curnow, holds that the organ has leaned since the spring, and leaned with the water. The claim was tested on the Solo reed, the only stop raised for the visit, against the visiting fork and against the harmonium, which is tuned twice a year and spare of surprises. At the morning test the reed stood flat by the thirty-second part. At the predicted turn of the afternoon tide, taken from the harbourmaster's board which is pinned in the vestry by the parish for its own reasons, the reed stood flat by a full twenty-ninth, and at the first of the ebb it came back up the same way it had gone, in the same time and by the same degrees.
4. The observation the undersigned cannot carry past this point is the arithmetic. The day's tide, as the board gives it, rose 9 feet. The water in the trunk stood 9 inches deep. The flatness of the reed between low water and high was measured, on the tuning gauge that converts nothing, at the fraction the board's rise bears to the church's height above the sea. Three separate figures, none of them mine, and all three of them the same figure in different clothes. The undersigned has checked the dividing against the builder's specification, checked the board against the harbourmaster's own slip, checked the height against the ordnance mark on the pier, and the three figures agree with one another and with nothing else in the visit.
5. The trunk was proven against the tide-time itself on the second day, the inspection being the sort that runs to two days. The rise in the trunk began within the minutes of the predicted hour given in the printed tables, and stood at its top within the minutes of the predicted top, an organ in a dry church at 140 feet keeping a schedule it is not wired to. The figures are entered in the visit book to the minute, because they could be.
6. No drying-out was ordered, and blowing the instrument for service was left as the parish finds it. The question this report leaves standing for the visit book, and it is the question the undersigned is instructed to close by signature and cannot, is directed at the tuning: whether the instrument is to be brought to truth as rooms are, by the fork and the gauge, or tuned to the sea as it is evidently being kept, since the one work will not hold against the other, and the winter tides are larger by a figure than the autumn ones, and nobody's tables run far enough ahead to say by how much.