The Organ of St Matthew's

The Organ of St Matthew's: Restoration 2026 and a 180-Year-Old Surprise

In July 2026 St Matthew's organ had its most thorough overhaul in three decades. The work was carried out by organ restorer Martin Renshaw, who first brought the instrument to Warehorne in the 1980s, with help from his partner Dr Vicki Harding. Inside the pipes they found something nobody expected: pieces of a London theatre poster dating from around 1842, which has helped to date the organ itself.

Below is Martin's own account of the organ's history and of this summer's work, lightly edited for the website.

A Theodore Bates organ

According to the plaque on the casework above the keys, the organ was made by Theodore Bates of 6 Ludgate Hill, London. It is not dated, either on the plaque or anywhere else in the instrument.

A list of organs made by Bates and his son survives from about 1855. It seems possible that our organ was first made for somewhere in London, but it has not yet been possible to find out where. The list suggests a number of possibilities, but because it gives no indication of the size of the organs on it, it would be very difficult to tell whether this one is among them.

From Minster-in-Thanet to Warehorne

"I first saw the organ in about 1973–74, when I was asked to tune it. It was then in the Methodist church at Minster-in-Thanet. I was told that it had come from London, and I seem to remember being told that the firm of Noterman, of Shepherd's Bush, did the work.

"If so, they replaced the original keyboard with a 'modern' one with rounded sharps and longer naturals than the original would have had. I know this from restoring another Bates organ at Stathern in Leicestershire in the 1980s, which still has its original keyboard. They also raised the keyboard to give more knee-room above the original pedalboard. This suggests the organ may originally have stood on a substantial plinth, or in a gallery with the pedalboard set into the floor, to keep the distance between keys and pedals comfortable for the player.

"Although the organ is quite small, with six ranks of pipes, it is fully scaled and voiced. It could have been a gallery organ in a fairly large church, its sound amplified and spread by a flat ceiling close above it.

"When the organ was moved to Minster-in-Thanet, or perhaps before, its original Twelfth rank of pipes was altered into a sort of 'Gamba' at unison pitch, by moving the pipes and cutting long slots near their tops. When I moved the organ to Warehorne in about 1983–84, I restored the Twelfth by filling in the slots. My colleague Karl-Friedrich Wienke made new pipes for the treble end, and Keith Raes re-engraved the ivory insert of the stop-knob in Bates's original style. Once restored, these pipes gave a valuable clue to the organ's original pitch. The other ranks had already been fitted with tuning slides, which meant trimming the tops of the pipes and losing their original pitch.

"For a short time, while a permanent home was being sought, the organ stood at Saltby in Leicestershire. There new tuning slides were fitted, the back panels of the case were restored, and a plinth was made for it by Gary Hills, a joiner of Eastwell in Leicestershire."

Its home at St Matthew's

Once purchased, the organ was brought to Warehorne and set up in the south aisle between the two windows, facing the pews. In 1996, when it was decided to tidy up the vestry in the south-west corner of the church, the organ was moved there to form part of the enclosure of the refurbished vestry. During that move Martin re-leathered the main pallet valves in the original style, with two layers of fine sheepskin.

Since then the vestry has been rebuilt, the church repainted, and a kitchen and toilet installed. Although the organ was protected from the worst of it, a good deal of dust inevitably found its way inside. The church was also very damp in those days, and by around 15 years ago the tin-plate tuning slides were rusting and stiffening, which made it much harder to tune the organ properly.

The 2026 restoration

The work carried out in July 2026 included:

Cleaning the pipes. All but the very largest interior pipes were removed and cleaned individually.
Cleaning the interior. All internal surfaces were cleaned down to the level of the reservoir, and lower where possible.
Repairing the wooden pipes. All 58 wooden pipes of the Stopped Diapason were repaired as needed, with their stopper leathers re-glued or replaced, using natural, organic glues like those the original makers used.
New tuning slides. New slides, made by Kevin Rutterford of Finchingfield in Essex, were measured, ordered and fitted to all the interior open metal pipes, with minor repairs to those pipes. For the first time, slides were also fitted inside the front pipes.
Replacing the action 'eyes'. For a year or so, the original iron 'eyes' connecting the key action to the pallets had been showing signs of fatigue, and some had broken. On close inspection Martin found they had been fixed into the wood of the pallets with a single point, rather than the usual two staple-like points, which makes it surprising they lasted so long. Replacing them in the usual way would have meant removing the whole soundboard and the pallets, stripping off their perfectly good 30-year-old leather, re-fixing the eyes, re-leathering the valves and refitting everything, at least doubling the time and cost. Instead, a method was tried and adopted using small chrome-plated screw eyes of the same size, fitted with the pallets left in place. The old eyes were removed as far as possible, holes were formed using a 16-gauge phosphor-bronze wire as a drill, and the new eyes were inserted at an angle with a little modern glue to strengthen the wood. "One hopes these will prove successful over the long term."
A lighter touch. The steel 'scissor' springs that return the pallets and action to the keyboard were removed, cleaned and carefully readjusted, making the keys considerably lighter to play. This work coincided with another heatwave: even with both north and south doors open, the church reached 29°C inside. The extreme dryness made a few of the pallet valves 'whimper' slightly as their leather shrank across the long, thin valves. This was eased as far as possible, but some further adjustment may be needed when the organ is checked and tuned in late November or early December 2026.
The Fifteenth rank. When the organ was tuned to what should be very near its original low 'English Classical' pitch, one small pipe in the Fifteenth rank turned out to be too short. It will be replaced with an equivalent pipe at the next tuning. This rank has clearly been altered slightly in the distant past: some pipes are marked as though they came from another organ, although they are very similar to the originals.

The surprise: an 1842 theatre poster

The great surprise of the work was finding substantial remains of a poster inside the stoppers of two of the largest Stopped Diapason pipes. How they had not been noticed before is a mystery. They lay beneath a layer of brown paper that had been placed over the underside of the stoppers, under their leather. The paper was probably added because the wood of the stoppers shrank during the organ's early summers, or the sides of the pipes swelled during its first winters. Either way, the stoppers would have become loose and the pipes would not have spoken properly. The poster survives as four large pieces with very little discolouration, plus some smaller fragments that had come away from them.

It is a full-size theatre poster announcing a forthcoming concert performance of Rossini's Stabat Mater at The King's Theatre, London, also known at the time as The Italian Opera. The performance was to be given under the patronage of Prince Albert, with a stellar cast of conductor, players and singers, many of them named on the poster. The ticket and box prices show it was aimed at wealthy music-lovers. Rossini's setting of the Stabat Mater had been premiered in Paris in 1841 and went on to take northern Europe by storm.

The part of the poster that would have shown the date is missing, but advertisements in contemporary newspapers suggest the performance took place in June or July 1842. Curiously, a full newspaper report and review survives of another, apparently less star-studded, performance given only a short time before at another London theatre.

How the poster ended up inside the organ is a mystery. Perhaps Mr Bates tuned the organ in the theatre for the performance? Or perhaps he supplied an organ for it, even this one? The church hopes to have the poster conserved and, if possible, put on display.

How old is our organ?

The poster's likely 1842 date suggests the organ was made closer to that year than previous estimates of around 1849. That means Warehorne's organ has now passed its 180th year and may be 185 years old next year.

There is a second clue. The organ still contains a considerable number of hand-made, lathe-turned screws. Because they were turned on a lathe, the ends of their threads have no points: they were snapped off where they were held in the lathe's chuck. Screws like these were being phased out in favour of machine-pressed screws with pointed ends during the 1840s, so their presence suggests the organ belongs to the early 1840s, which fits with the evidence of the poster.

"Let's wish it many more decades of useful and musical life."

Watch Martin at work

Martin's work rescuing and restoring historic organs features in the documentary Organ Stops: Saving the King of Instruments, first shown on BBC Four. You can watch the full-length version below, or on YouTube: Organ Stops: Saving the King of Instruments.

Martin is co-founder of Pipe Up, a charity that rescues and revives historic pipe organs across the country.