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 taxation, logistics, and one incredibly tenacious London businessman. Before the decade even started, the Wurlitzer Organ Company in Tonawanda, New York, had already taken over American picture palaces.
When import taxes and transatlantic shipping expenses were added to the price, they were more costly than domestic alternatives and mainly unknown in Britain. The odds weren’t exactly in their favor.
Walter Pearce can help with that. As Wurlitzer’s European representative, Pearce operated out of 33 King Street in London and appeared to view every financial challenge as a puzzle worth solving rather than a barrier. He saved a significant amount of shipping weight by sourcing blowers made in England from Watkins & Watson in Islington.
He offered slightly reduced versions of standard models. For example, the Style-DA reduced the price by about 20% by eliminating the twelve heavy metal pipes of the 16-foot Diaphone from the well-liked Style-D. It seems that Pearce had a deeper understanding of British cinema owners than Wurlitzer did, based on the methodical way he worked.
He sold twelve organs by the end of 1926. Not a deluge, but sufficient to establish the existence of the market. Fourteen of the Style-F’s eight-rank instruments were installed in British theaters alone, making it the most popular stock model.
In the meantime, the instruments continued to arrive, each one crated and transported across the Atlantic, unpacked in a small-town picture house tuned to life by engineers who had to constantly improvise because no two movie theaters were exactly alike.
The organs were dynamic products in and of themselves. Many were “special” versions of standard models, sometimes drastically modified to meet the demands of specific organists or movie chains.
Originally placed in the Almira Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, one Style-E organ was eventually repossessed, returned to the Tonawanda factory, then shipped to England in 1934 for the Rex Cinema in Stratford, East London. For a musical instrument, it’s an odd biography.
Presumably worn out from the continuous struggle with import duties, Pearce took a more extreme step in 1933 and established a factory on Kentish Town’s Charlton Kings Road. Tonawanda continued to produce the most technically complex parts that needed American calibration and craftsmanship.
Console cases, swell shades reservoirs were now constructed in north London. Although it’s still unclear if the arrangement fully met Wurlitzer’s quality standards, it kept prices competitive enough to be significant.
Inadvertently, the BBC also had a role to play. According to legend, Reginald Foort, who was sitting at the organ in the New Gallery Cinema, just began playing when a scheduled broadcast orchestra ended early one evening, leaving dead air on the schedule. The microphones were kept operational by the technicians.
What transpired was unplanned, but it altered Britain’s perception of the theater organ forever. The image of a tuxedoed organist rising from the stage floor on a hydraulic lift became one of the defining visual spectacles of the era by the late 1930s, when Wurlitzers were regularly broadcast on the BBC. It was so iconic that Monty Python parodied it decades later.
The Trocadero at Elephant and Castle, a 3,400-seat theater that apparently needed something appropriately massive, received the largest organ ever shipped to the United Kingdom in 1930. In 1939, right before everything changed due to the war, Britain saw the last new Wurlitzer installation.
Many of these instruments survived and were moved to concert halls, ballrooms, town halls, and private residences. The original organ, a small six-rank organ from Walsall, eventually made its way to a Congregational Church in Beer, Devon, where it is still in use today. It traveled across a sea. It outlived the film industry that introduced it. In a sense, that is not a terrible conclusion.
FAQs
1. Where was the first Wurlitzer theater organ installed in Britain?
The Picture House in Walsall, Staffordshire, received it on January 26, 1925.
2. Who was responsible for bringing Wurlitzer organs to the UK?
Walter Pearce, Wurlitzer’s London-based European representative, drove all British sales.
3. How did Pearce make the organs more affordable for British buyers?
He sourced English-made blowers and offered stripped-down models at lower prices.
4. What role did the BBC play in popularizing the theater organ?
An accidental live broadcast from the New Gallery Cinema made them a national sensation.
5. What happened to Britain’s very first Wurlitzer organ?
It ended up in a Congregational Church in Beer, Devon, still in use today.