Marged Rees
Head voicer & proprietorTrained at Harrison & Harrison, then twelve years on the road before she came here. Voices everything that leaves the shop, and will not delegate it.
The workshop
Fourteen Bridge Street, since 1897.
Three floors, one goods hoist that predates the electricity, and a stack of quarter-sawn oak that has been drying since 2009. Everything below happens in this building except the last fortnight of every job, which happens in yours.
How we got here
One organ, then another, for a hundred and twenty-nine years
Josiah Perrin took the lease in 1897 to build a single instrument for the Congregational chapel two doors down. He never left. The chapel organ is still on its original mechanism, and Ivo tunes it every March and October.
The firm nearly went in 2007, when the Frome came up through the ground floor and took four chests, the drawing archive and most of the pattern stock with it. What survived was the metal shop on the first floor. Marged Rees, who had been head voicer since 2011, bought the name and the building in 2016 and rebuilt the rest around that one surviving room.
There are four of us. We take between two and three new instruments a decade and we say no to more than we accept, which is the only honest way to keep a tuning round of a hundred and four.
How a job runs
Five stages, and the last one is the long one
Every rank rises from its longest pipe to its shortest. Our work goes the other way — it gets slower, quieter and more particular the closer it comes to done.
I
II
III
IV
V
Stage I
Survey
A day in the building with a torch and a decibel meter. You get the report whether or not you use us.
Stage II
Drawings
Scale elevations, the specification, and a costed schedule your faculty committee can put to a vote.
Stage III
Bench work
Metal cast and planed upstairs, cases cut downstairs. The longest and least visible stage.
Stage IV
Erection
Two to six weeks on site. We build scaffolding, not goodwill — the goodwill comes later.
Stage V
Voicing
Every pipe, in the room, at night when the building is quiet. Roughly one week per hundred pipes.
Four of us
Three at the bench, one on the road
Tomás Vane
Case-makerA cabinetmaker before he was an organ builder. Cuts every mitre by hand, and will explain at length why the machine version is worse.
Ivo Pellett
Tuner & surveyorCovers Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and the Marches. A hundred and four instruments on his round, and he knows which pew each one goes flat under.
A pipe that sounds right on the bench is a guess. It is only right in the room it will stand in, at the temperature that room actually reaches on a Sunday.
Plainly
What we will not do
Digital voices in a pipe case
If the budget only reaches an electronic instrument, buy a good electronic instrument. Hiding one behind our casework helps nobody and we will say so in writing.
Tuning around a fault
If a chest is splitting, tuning it is billing you to postpone the problem. We would rather lose the visit than take the fee.
Quoting from photographs
Nobody can cost a rebuild from a phone picture of the console. We survey first, every time, and the survey fee comes off the job if you proceed.
Come and see the metal shop.
We cast on Thursdays. If you are on our round, or thinking of asking us to be, you are welcome to stand at the back and watch it happen.
Ask about a visit