leaderboard1 -

Reminiscences of Henry Willis 4

September 25, 2003
Default

The factory

He inherited a factory with a great many organ builders in
it, all beautifully trained, all thoroughly disciplined, possibly partially by
the circumstances of the time, possibly partially by the fact that when my
great uncle Vincent wanted to reprimand anybody, he'd used to say "You
wait until the winter and I'll sack you!" because anybody that was sacked
at the beginning of the winter suffered more than somebody who was sacked in
the spring (it's colder in the winter, and if you haven't got enough to eat,
you suffer more).

The men were treated abominably, but they were treated
better at Willis's than at most other organ builders' shops. They had to bring
their own coal in a bucket to work if they wanted to warm themselves; they had
to bring their own candles to see by. Yes, it sounds like Dickens, but it's
not, it's true! They were paid by results: piecework. And if the work wasn't
good enough, you smashed it and sent it back and said, "There you are, fix
it on your own time. There you are . . . you haven't done your work properly,
your work is rejected, bang! Make another, and you won't get paid while you do
that!"

My granduncle Vincent used to cut up a pipe and nick it. If
it didn't speak without any further adjustment, he used to get hold of the top
end of it and smash it on the bench so that the body collapsed each side of the
languid (I spell it "langward"), and sent it back to the metal shop
to have a different one made. He expected his pipes to come up perfect, cut
them, nick them: finished! And no little naughties like punching languids up or
down.

The factory ran like clockwork.  The orders were still coming in, well enough and fast enough
for him to still build organs in spite of the fact that he was spending many
hours a week in or out of court fighting his relatives, determined to pay off
his father's debt. Which is why my father, when he was an old man, was able so
easily to leave people the impression that as a young man he was in charge of
the business. The fact was that my grandfather, Henry Willis II was well in
charge of the business until the end of the 14-18 war (WWI), the difficulties
with his father's debt, and with his relatives having been settled about the
time of the Great War.

By the time my father took over the firm, after the 14-18
War, Henry Willis II was not only old enough, but suffered from senile dementia
to the point where he used to get up in the night, go down and open the back
door and look in the dust bin for burglars. My aunt says this was partly due to
the strain of having to fight his relatives for about 10 years or so from the
time of his father's death, and responsibilities that he bore beforehand as a
very loyal son and servant without any complaint.

Henry Willis III

My father was very pleased to leave people the impression
that Divine Right passed from "Father" Willis directly to him. Most people
know nothing about Henry Willis II because when my father wrote the book:
Father Willis, His Heir and Successors, by William Leslie Sumner, he was
careful to write the truth as he saw it, in which God created the world,
"Father" Willis created organs, and this ability was passed down
directly to Henry Willis III.

When my father's eldest sister read the book, and read the
bit where it said: "My first work was the design and building of the organ
at the Liverpool Cathedral Lady Chapel . . . " she cried, "I drew
that organ on the drawing boards to my father's instructions, and my little
brother had nothing to do with it at all! 
My little brother only went there as a kind of juvenile laborer to help
put it up!"

 His early works
started when he was a young lad. He left school as a brilliant young man
earlier than most, partly because he was required to come into the family firm,
but partly because he was a brilliant student. He was in a class two years
ahead of his age group. This had other difficulties because they did their
sports together, and as he was two years younger and was never a big man
(5'3”), he had a really strong inferiority complex based on his physical
size. Also, having been brought up in Liverpool, he hadn't been able to
overcome his accent, and in those days any kind of that dialect meant you
weren't a gentleman. 

This he overcame by suppressing his natural sympathies and
his natural affections, and putting on a domineering, dominating, hard-hearted
veneer. He wore it like a well-fitting glove, and he enjoyed it. And he got
away with it. He always remained sitting, and had others stand so that the
difference between their heights should not show as a disparagement. Failing
that, in his office he had an armchair, the wooden legs and the casters of
which were cut off, so that if anyone sat down in it, my father could then
stand, assured that he'd be well above their head and shoulder level.

My father's early tonal work was standard. The work he loved
to do was that which he could take over from somebody else and leave his
imprint upon. The work that you can do that with most conveniently was to
accept a voiced reed and then take the tongues out and alter the curve of them,
because he was a superb reed voicer, to give that little extra edge, what other
people might have well called a great clarity, a greater clang. Some, unkindly
perhaps, a harder tone. But he would take this and do it extremely well. But he
didn't wish to spend time cutting the reeds out and putting the initial curve
on them. He was prepared to put his imprimatur on anything--whether he'd done
it or not! On the grounds that as he was the managing director and a majority
share-holder, he could do what he liked.

He started to develop a new fashionable (or unfashionable)
type of Willis tone whereby he started to make stringier strings. He made
string pipes of zinc right through to the top note, which some people
erroneously believe was for economy, although I can assure that certainly from
one foot up they're so much harder to make than spotted metal or pure tin. They
were by no means economical. He did it on purpose because that was what he
wanted to do. You should remember that, as a matter of his personal attitude to
life in general and himself in particular, whatever he wanted to do was
right.  The fact that he wanted to
do it made it right, and if everybody else thought it was wrong, it didn't
matter because it was still right. And that applied to everything.

But this was part of the man, and it was therefore part of
the voicing. You need to understand that my grandfather was a gentleman and a
gentle man, I hope you took the inference, and this shows in his organs--they
were lovely!  They were more near
to the Harrisons' style than they were to the fiercer Willis style, because he
himself was an affectionate, loving, gentle man. He wasn't doing it to appease
people who wanted gentler organs--it was in his style. And my father: his
personal character comes through in his organs, where you have the firmer,
harder, domineering tone. Dictatorial tutti, the awesome clang of the full
organ reeds, which was not outside the Willis style, but was toward the edge of
that golden-mean path which is a Willis term.

I don't know what he thought of Ernest Skinner. But I know
what he said about Skinner to me. 
Same as he said about almost everybody else: "bloody old
fool!" That was my father's general attitude to almost everybody. But at
the same time he came back having seen and heard what Skinner and others were
doing. This affected his willingness to take after his uncle Vincent by
experimenting: "Well, I'll try a stringy string," and so forth. He
held Skinner in higher regard than most because Skinner was wise enough to ask
him to come as a consultant. And that deserved his high esteem. I've tried to
get you to understand the man, because the man helps understand the tone. The
tone must also come from the man. The big change came really, after the 39-45
war, maybe even the slump, 1929, Wall Street and all that.

The Depression

 This period:
work at a premium. In fact, my father stole his wife's money, which was got
from plantations in India where they grew tea and coffee and rubber. My mother
had inherited wealth, which she brought over here, which she kept quietly to
herself until such time as her husband came to her and said, "Times is
hard, and we must sell you some shares in the firm otherwise we won't be able
to carry on and we'll have to put men off."

Very few men were put off. Other organ builders put lots of
men off; we put off very few. My father didn't need to, because he'd stolen his
wife's money. I say stole because she was never issued with shares of stock,
and she never got the money back. But it didn't worry her very much because she
was a loving wife; she was a domesticated woman and loved her children.

This period is more difficult. My father was more amenable
to the suggestions of anybody who could give the firm an order. This will show
in the specifications; you'll see funny little aberrations creeping in. My
father had always been willing to compensate people in the position to give him
work. Although by this time the question of bribery was illegal, if some
organist was able to persuade the church that it should be replaced by a Willis
organ, was going to suffer loss while the old organ was taken out and the new
put in, because he wasn't able to teach on it or give recitals, then my father
was prepared to compensate him for it.

I have never done this, and I have lost a lot of work.
People have come to me, three of whom stupidly in writing, and have asked
what's it worth to me. Then I was told "I am sorry to hear that, because I
would really like you to do it, but if you aren't prepared to cover my
out-of-pocket losses, then I'm afraid someone else will have to get it instead." style="mso-spacerun: yes">  They've wanted 12.5%, and I have never
done it. And I've lost a great deal of work.

 

World War II

My father was in the army during the War, and lied about his
age to get in, as I did later . . . got himself invalided out. style="mso-spacerun: yes">  Some people get a story of armed combat
and purple hearts. This was never the case. My father's stomach problem was not
due to hard-tack (biscuits) and bully beef (corned beef) eaten in the trenches
in some place in France (because he didn't go), but alcohol and other poisons,
consumed as a member of the Honorable Artillery Company in London. They were
digging trenches in Hyde Park lest the Germans invade by being dropped from
zeppelins, which had bombed London then and were responsible for the damage to
the early Willis records from 1845-1873.

I myself was in the Home Guard because residential private
school boys had a special dispensation to join at the age of 16 instead of 18;
they were already disciplined and probably in Officer's Training Corps or
something. Their training was in fact probably far better than most of
established Home Guards. When I went to join the army, having been a Company
Sergeant Major in the Officer's Training Corps and having been a Lance Corporal
in the Home Guard, without looking at the documents in great detail, they
assumed I was two years older than I was.

My father's post-war period began mostly with the rebuilding
and restoration of organs, because we were rationed. A lot of organs were built
up from selected second-hand components. Occasionally my father was able to
imprint his artistic opinions on existing second-hand organs, which he did
notably, to my knowledge, from 1948 onwards when I came out of the army,
somewhat against my will. He wrote and ordered me back home, and I didn't
respond. He wrote again, pleading, and I immediately returned.

He became very good at rebuilding and revoicing. The Willis
voicing techniques are there to control the scaling, because it's standard.
Therefore we are perhaps better trained by ourselves and circumstances to
revoice selected second-hand stock than others; we're used to being given
something and saying, "Right! Do what you will with that!"

I'm restoring the organ in the Alexandra Palace, not
improving it. Successfully, so I'm told, and I believe it. I remember hiding under
the seats there when I was small, before the war, when Marcel Dupré was
playing. He always finished his reputed last encore, which never was his last
encore, with full full full full organ, and if you had double super-octave
couplers and double sub-octave couplers, he would've used them. And as Virgil
Fox said when he finally pushed the Swell unison coupler on at the very end,
looked down at me and grinned, and said, "I like to see 'em all
down!"

My father took to his deathbed in early 1966--died at Easter. style="mso-spacerun: yes">  During the preceding several years, he
was distracted by the fact that by 1966, he was in his 76th year and he married
the widow of G. Donald Harrison. She had suffered a hard life, and she received
treatment for her personal nervous disabilities. These worried my father
intensely. Especially since they to some extent reminded him of the troubles
he'd had with his father toward the end of the 14-18 war. These sorts of things
effect the nervous system, and therefore the artistic deposition of a man. One
of the things I've been grateful for is that I've been blessed with a loving
wife and what I understand is an abnormally serene and happy home background.
For my own artistic side, if I have one, that is essential.

So you come up to the time of my father's death, and that's
the end of the Willis era. Everybody knows that I died.

Henry Willis 4

I was brought up in the fear of God--that's an old fashioned
English expression, and it's in our prayer books. In that language, it means
the love of God. Although my father was a Christian agnostic, if there is such
a thing, my mother was a devout
bent-Christian-oblique-infiltrated-partial-Sikh-Hindu-Buddhist. I was brought
up in the agnostic fear of God, and in the very real fear of my father,
including in the word fear that respectful love that any well brought-up
Victorian child would have had for his father.

My father was often not at home. He was a hard working, hard
drinking, hard romancing active organbuilder who delighted in entertaining organists,
particularly influential organists who could bring him work and adoration
because one without the other was of no use to him. He came home and spent his
Saturday nights there, probably from 2 am onwards, the butler having rescued
him from the car. He could always drive home, but couldn't always switch the
ignition off and get out of the car. The relief of having arrived home and
driven up the drive was sufficient to enable him to relax, and immediately he
was asleep. The butler used to go down and switch the ignition off if the car
hadn't already stalled, because he had been known to take his foot off the
clutch.

On Sunday mornings we were wise to keep quiet as children
and not disturb him. About 9:30 he'd be taken his tray of tea. When I or the butler
had run his bath, we'd inform him it was ready, and it was 108° F. And the
correct amount of bath salts was in, and the towels were on the hot radiator.
My father was not somebody that you tangled with as a child. I was brought up
to know that I had been born to take over the firm. Otherwise I would have
willingly been a farmer, and would have equally willingly stayed in the army,
in which I had already done extremely well.

I started as a general laborer, then a laborer in the metal
shop. Once, for some weeks my father sent me home early (early being after the
men had finished) so he could teach himself again how to make pipes without
admitting to me that he'd forgotten, and then turn 'round to me one day and
say, "You'd be going home, my boy? I thought you wanted me to show you how
to make pipes?" I knew damn well what he'd been doing evenings, even
though he'd tidied most carefully after himself for the last ten weeks. He then
showed me how to make pipes. Then I taught myself. 

The foreman was determined that I shouldn't learn to make
pipes. When he caught on, he took one foot out and put it in the wrong place in
the pile. He shaved a foot so that it didn't fit the body. And he scraped a
body too thin at the node, then re-sized the sides, so that when I put it
together, soon as anybody touched it, it collapsed in the middle. style="mso-spacerun: yes">  All sorts of friendly little tricks.

When my father took me out of the metal shop he said,
"It's time you started voicing, my boy. And here is a second-hand Dulciana
which is going back into some organ we're overhauling and it has to be
revoiced. I will set the 2' C, and I've got another  2' C here which I'm going to voice, and I'm going take the
original away from you and leave you with the sample. I don't want you alter
it. The rest of the stop should be voiced to that. Get on with it."

And I said, "But I don't know how to style="mso-spacerun: yes">  voice." He said, "Here's your
opportunity. You just regulate them at the tip, and if they're not speaking
properly you get the mouths in the right place like you do in the metal shop;
check the cut-ups, and if they're too high you can take it apart and lower it,
but not too much. Take more than a saw cut out of it and you might make it
short. Make sure they're not over-nicked or under-nicked. Just go from one to
another, it's very simple, you won't find any difficulty."

At the end of about three days--and he left me strictly
alone contrary to his normal habit of calling in and seeing everybody in the
shop twice a day--he always walked past my voicing shop. style="mso-spacerun: yes">  After three days he came in the evening
on his last round and went--blupblupblupblup (trying the stop on the voicing
soundboard) and said "Bloody awful," and walked out!

When I'd dried my tears and mopped up the floor, I went to
Mr. Piper, of whom you may have heard. Richard Piper went to Austin in America,
a well respected, competent, loyal servant, who became well loved at Austin,
and did some excellent, straight-forward work. I said, "Please, Mr. Piper,
my father's just come in and blupblupblupblup, and said 'bloody awful,' and
walked out. Will you please advise me?" And he said, "No, Mr. Henry,
I've been forbidden to tell you or show you anything or help you in any way.
I've been absolutely forbidden to advise you."

I went back in and spent another day or so, and my father
called in again, and blupblupblupblup and said "bloody awful," and
walked out.

So I'd been working on it for over a week. And next time he
came in, I rounded on him, and I seldom rounded on my father because I held him
in that awe and respect which Victorians used to keep for God alone and their
fathers, and I had been brought up in a semi-Victorian aura (not era), treated
my father with very great care. I said, "Will you tell me what's the
matter with it, or tell me what to do?" He said, "blupblupblupblup,
well, you can hear, it's uneven." And he walked out.

After some further time he came back, and I actually lost my
temper a bit, very respectfully and carefully, I may say. And he said, "No
need to get irritable, my boy, I'm just tryin' to teach ya somethin'. Now,
here's the pipe. I told you you weren't to alter the substitute which you've
put in, which you have done, haven't you?"

I said yes, because I had to because . . . style="mso-spacerun: yes">  He said, "Um, I knew it, I knew
it." He took the 2' C from its wrapping, having put a stamp paper over
with initials on it, and put it on the voicing soundboard, and says, "Now,
what do you notice?"

"Oh, you've come back and loudened it up."
"No I haven't, I assure you I haven't," he said. This is what happens
when you spend too long regulating a stop. The human ear, and the human emotion
always picks out the loud, or what seems loud, and softens it. And rarely picks
out the soft, or what seems soft, and loudens it. So the more somebody tells
you to regulate a stop, the softer it becomes, particularly with a soft stop.
And you will regulate it and regulate it until there's nothing left.

It's partly the imperfections that make the character, make
the artistry. The most beautiful, the most artistic, the most musically useful,
loveliest, emotional organs are those which are made to the best of the ability
of a craftsman working to a reasonable commercial outline. Because if you have
too much money, and too much time and somebody says "carte blanch,"
you can spend 500 hours voicing a Dulciana. By the time you've spent more than
10 or 15 hours, you are only spoiling it. And you will end up with something
which is useless.

One of the great managerial arts is the art of knowing when
you've done enough work, when the responsibilities of management are beginning
to become overbearing, where you could loose your patience or your sanity or
your judgment--that's when you say "good-bye" and take a walk around
the block or go home or get drunk or whatever.

I developed some knowledge of scaling and rebuilding. While
my father was away, an order came in for an organ. I scaled, designed, and
voiced it in my father's style; it was the quickest organ we'd built since my
grandfather's time. When my father came back, I held him in the office until he
refused to stay any longer. I said, "Just before you go out, have a look
at this inquiry that's come in. How does this scaling snatch you?" style="mso-spacerun: yes">  He went into the drawing office to look
at what I'd done. I then took him to all the places except for the building
hall (erecting room), which I saved till last. When we got there he said,
"What's this!"

"This is the organ." "All right--I'll set the
C's." "Wait, try it first."

He went in and tried the job, right through. He didn't play,
but he knew how to try an organ. He could do it better than I, because I'd been
taught how to play piano at the age of three with a sharp pencil sticking in my
ribs. He said, "The 17th's too soft" and got up and walked off. style="mso-spacerun: yes">  And that was it. After that, after
having always been told I was too soft or too stupid, I was sent up to
Liverpool to restore the organ at St. George's Hall and to rebuild the organ in
the Anglican Cathedral.

I said to my wife, "As long as my father lives, I'll
always stand the likely possibility of being fired if I don't do what he says,
when he says, how he says, quickly without arguing. I would like now, in 1955,
to do something of my own, and I propose to start offering to rebuild organs
without bothering my father." And I did several.

I started to offer the Willis Junior Development Plan, in an
attempt to persuade people of the type of specification I would like. The
Development of an Organ From a One-Manual, Two Stops, No Pedals, Up To a
Moderately Well-Developed Two-Manual--a complete plan, with prices. I started
to build the very first one; it was a two-stop, one-manual organ, on which I
made 50% net profit on the gross. On the other hand, I didn't charge for my
time: about three-million man-hours!

I've got nothing to say about my own work, with the possible
exception of when the International Society of Organbuilders came to London on
their previous English congress about 30 years ago. I managed to get them to
stop to see a one-manual, 4-stop instrument I had built a couple of hundred
yards away from my father's old Kent Road factory.

Dr. Martin Vente, the Secretary of the ISO, and several
others were interested because several people had said that it sounded like
Silbermann's work. They were astounded when they went up the ladders, because
the thing is a box nailed on the wall, 20-30' in the air. They looked at the
pipework and saw how the Gedeckt was very small-scaled and cut up 2/3rd its
mouth width. Perhaps 10-12 nicks in it. The Dulciana (tenor c, common bass) was
also voiced totally incorrectly. The Gemshorn was cut up with an arch, 5 in 2,
16 nicks.  The 15th Diapason was
far too small in scale and cut up far too high.  The way the pipework looked didn't match the sound--like a
musician reading a score, expecting Bach and the noise in his head being Gershwin. style="mso-spacerun: yes"> 

Nevertheless, I accepted all that as a compliment, although
I don't think my stuff sounds like Silbermann.  Certainly those people who are sympathetic with the
gentility of Henry Willis II might be forgiven for thinking that I had cribbed
his style. I must say that I hadn't, because I hadn't been familiar--hadn't
been allowed to become familiar--with Willis II's work whilst I was still under
control of my father in London. Because Henry Willis II didn't exist! It wasn't
until I went up to Lancashire and met several examples that I found what he'd
done.