A pipe organ has a subtle stubbornness to it. It’s not streaming. It is not very good at compressing. The BBC Theater Organ was the beating heart of British radio for more than 50 years, surviving bomb damage and changing tastes during at least one wartime evacuation before its last notes echoed out of a Manchester playhouse in 1990. It takes up enormous physical space, requires skilled hands to play sounds nothing like the pop music that eventually crowded it off the airwaves. Like many BBC stories, this one begins with a real-world issue. Early organ broadcasts in Britain in…
Author: Karl Shane Karl
A crate carrying something most British movie theater owners had never heard of literally departed for Southampton Docks on December 1, 1924. It was intended for the Picture House in Walsall, Staffordshire, a modest six-rank Wurlitzer theater organ by American standards. It would open on January 26, 1925, to an audience that had no real frame of reference for what they were about to experience. It was small enough to seem almost apologetic. They might not have known how to interpret it. Something clicked. The tale of how American film equipment arrived in Britain during the 1920s is fundamentally about…
A pipe organ placed inside a Congregational church in Beer, Devon, has a subtle allure. Not because of the church itself, which is a fairly modest structure, but rather because of the origin of that organ. The first Wurlitzer theater organ ever sent to the United Kingdom, it was shipped into Southampton Docks in December 1924. A few weeks later, it was installed in a picture house in Walsall, Staffordshire. After a brief stay in a private residence in Sedgley, it eventually found its way to a small Devon congregation that most likely didn’t fully understand what they were getting.…
The picture has an almost cinematic quality. In a ballroom on the Lancashire coast, a young organist from Sheffield, who is only twenty-five years old, sits down at a 2/10 Wurlitzer and is told quite bluntly that both he and the organ are out if he can’t get people to dance in a strict tempo. He gets them to dance. For forty years, he continues to make them dance. In March 1930, Reginald Dixon, not a well-known figure, arrived at the Tower Ballroom Blackpool as a workable solution to an issue that two other organists had been unable to resolve.…