Whilst work continues on walls, floors and the roof at the chapel more investigation work has been carried out at David Wood Organs, Huddersfield. David and his team continue to clean, repair and rebuild the pipe organ, but this week further work has been carried out to reveal the decorations on the facade pipes.
Sabina van de Bruck, or Hirst Conservation, carried out further cleaning of pipes not looked at last year. We need to identify the full decoration in order to make decisions about how to conserve them. Part of the work was to trial different paint strippers and solvents to see if it might be possible to remove the over painting that is hiding the original paint work, and to record the full designs so that they might be reconstructed over the top of the over painting. The odd and even pipes each have a different design which are also scaled in size as the pipes reduce in diameter from the largest centre pipes.
The work will allow an informed decision about whether it is possible, and/or economic to uncover the full design or if the best option is to record the pattern and then reconstruct it on top of the over painting - preserving the original design underneath.
Thanks to Roy Lees re-photographing an archive photo of the organ that had been taken in 1895, we know that this early decoration was seen by the congregation at that time. Perhaps as we continue researching the documents we will discover when these were overpainted and lost to view.
We shall post a reconstruction of how the original design looked soon.
A photograph of 1895 shows the original decorations still on view five years after the organ was installed in George Street Chapel.
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